A Health Unto His Majesty

by Виктория Холт

  “Assuredly they did.”

  “Then I think mayhap I shall enjoy seeing you without your periwig.”

  He smiled, but the next time she saw him he was wearing it. He looked a young man with the luxuriant curls falling over his shoulders, although his face was lined and on his dark features there were signs of the merry life he lived. But he was tall and slender still and so agile. Then she remembered with horror that she had had all her beautiful hair cut off when the fever was on her, and that she must be plainer than she had ever been before.

  Yet he seemed determined to assure her of his devotion; and when she was told that she must impute her recovery to the precious relics which had been brought to her in her time of sickness, she answered: “No. I owe my recovery to the prayers of my husband, and the knowledge that he was beside me during my trial.”

  FIVE

  Alas, as Catherine’s health improved the King’s devotion waned. It was not that he was less affectionate when they were together; it was merely that they were less frequently together. Irresistible attractions drew him away from Catherine’s side.

  Barbara had been delivered of a fine son whom she called Henry. The King had refused to own him as his child, yet Catherine knew that he often visited Barbara’s nurseries to see those children whom he did accept, and it had been reported to her that he was mightily wistful when he regarded the new baby, and that Barbara was hopeful.

  What a cruel fate this was! Barbara had child after child; in fact it seemed that no sooner was one born than another was on the way; and yet Catherine, who so longed for a child, who so needed a child, had lost hers and she was so weak after her long illness that it was doubtful whether she would be fit to have another for some time.

  It was a source of grief and humiliation to her to know that Barbara championed her, so little did the woman regard her as a rival. She had heard that Barbara had prayed fervently for her recovery—not out of love for her, of course, but because as a Queen she was so ineffectual that there was not the slightest need to be jealous of her.

  The woman whom all were watching now, some with envy, some with speculation, was Frances Stuart. The King was becoming more and more enamored every day, and Frances’s determination not to become his mistress, while it might have seemed laudable to some, was ominous to others. The affair of the calash seemed significant.

  This beautiful glass coach, the first of its kind ever seen in England, was a French innovation which Louis’s ambassador, hoping to ingratiate himself and his country with the King, had presented to Charles. The entire Court was enchanted by the dazzling vehicle and, as Charles gave most of his presents to one of his mistresses—usually Barbara—it was Lady Castlemaine who immediately declared her intention of being the first to be seen in it.

  Barbara visualized the scene—herself ostentatiously cutting a fine figure in Hyde Park with the crowd looking on. They would have heard of the presentation of the calash, and they would realize when they saw her within it that her favor was as high as ever with the King.

  There had been a reconciliation between Charles and her, for, although the King was in love with Frances Stuart, he could not remain faithful to a woman who denied him her favors, and he was still supping now and then at Barbara’s house, although often it was necessary for her to have Frances as a guest in order to ensure the King’s attendance.

  Barbara was pregnant again, and although the King had not yet accepted Henry, she was certain that he would do so ere long, and she assured him that the child she now carried was undoubtedly his.

  It was evening of the day when Gramont had presented the glass coach, and the King and Barbara were at last alone. Barbara, remembering how soulful Charles had looked while he watched the simpering little Stuart building her card houses after she had insisted on the company’s joining her in a madcap and very childish game of blindman’s buff, had determined to show the Court and the world that her hold on the King was still firm.

  “Tomorrow,” she announced, “the calash should be shown to the people.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the King absently. He was wondering whether Frances had seemed a little more yielding this evening. When he had kissed her during the game of blindman’s bluff she had not turned away; she had just laughed on a note of shrill reproof which might not have been reproof after all.

  “You know how they hate things to be hidden from them, and they will have heard of the calash. They will expect to see it in Hyde Park as soon as the weather permits.”

  “’Tis true,” said the King.

  “I would wish to be the first to ride in it.”

  “I hardly think that would be meet,” said the King.

  “Not meet! In what way?”

  “The Queen has said that she would wish to ride in it with my brother’s wife. She says that is what the people will expect.”

  “The people will expect no such thing.”

  “You are right,” said the King ruefully. “And that points to our bad conduct in the past.”

  “Bad conduct!” snorted Barbara. “The people want to see the calash, not the Queen.”

  “Then since it is the calash they wish to see, and the purpose of the ride is to please them, it matters not who rides in it. Therefore the Queen and the Duchess of York should do so.”

  Barbara stood up, her eyes flashing. “Everything I ask is denied me. I wonder that you can treat me thus!”

  “I have always thought the truth much more interesting than falsehood,” said the King. “You know you have been denied very little, and it is tiring to hear you assert the contrary.”

  Barbara’s common sense warned her. Her position with the King was not what it had been. Her great sensuality could stand her in good stead only for the immediate future. She knew that Frances Stuart had first place in the King’s heart. But it maddened her now to think that it might have been Frances herself who had suggested that the Queen should be the first to ride in the calash. The sly creature was forever declaring her devotion to the Queen; it was part of her campaign, like as not.

  But Barbara was determined to ride in the calash.

  She cried: “So you are tired of me! You have taken my youth … all the best years of my life … and now that I have born so many children …”

  “Of whose parentage we must ever remain in doubt.”

  “They are your children. Yours … yours! It is no use denying your share in the making of them. I have devoted my life to you. You are the King, and I have sought to serve you …”

  “Barbara, I beg of you, make no scenes now. I have had enough of them.”

  “Do not think to silence me thus. I am to have our child … our child, sir. And if you do not let me ride first in the calash I shall miscarry this child. Aye, and all the world shall know it was through the ill treatment I received from its father.”

  “They would not be very impressed,” said Charles lightly.

  “Do not dare to laugh at me, or I shall kill myself … as well as the child.”

  “Nay, Barbara. You love yourself too well.”

  “Oh, will I not!” She looked about her and called wildly: “A knife! A knife! Bring me a knife. Mrs. Sarah! Do you hear me?”

  The King went to her swiftly and placed his hand over her mouth. “You will make it impossible for me to visit you,” he said.

  “If you did not, I should make you repent it!”

  “I shall repent nothing. It is only the righteous who repent.”

  “You will. I swear you will. All the world shall know of what has been between us.”

  “Calm yourself, Barbara. The world already knows half and the other half it will guess.”

  “Don’t dare talk to me thus.”

  “I am weary of quarrels.”

  “Yes, you are weary of everything but that smug-faced idiot. Do you imagine that she would interest you beyond a week? Even her simple mind realizes that. It is why she is so simperingly virtuous. She knows full well that once she gave way you’d
be sick to death of her simplemindedness. Simpleminded! She is half-witted. ‘Play a game of blindman’s buff, sire?’” squealed Barbara and curtsied, viciously demure. “‘I do like a nice game of blindman’s buff, because I can squeal so prettily, and say Nay, nay, nay when Your Majesty chases me!’ Bah!”

  In spite of his annoyance, Charles could not help laughing, for her mimicry, though cruelly exaggerated, had a certain element of truth in it.

  “Charles,” she wheedled, “what is it to you? Pray you let me ride in the calash … just once; and after that let the Queen and the Duchess take the air in Hyde Park. You know the people would rather see me than the Queen or the Duchess. Look at me….” She tossed back her hair and drew herself to her full magnificent height. “Would the calash not become me, think you? ’Twould be a pity to let it take its first airing in the Park without the most becoming cargo.”

  “Barbara, you would wheedle the crown off my head.”

  And I would, she thought, but for my cursed husband! And while I am fettered to him, Miss Stuart stays coy and hopeful; and doubtless, in spite of all her piety and friendship for the Queen, she prays for Catherine’s death.

  Still, the calash, not the crown, was the immediate problem, and she believed that Charles was about to give way. She knew the signs so well.

  Abruptly she stopped speaking of it and gave herself up to passion with such abandonment that she could not fail to win his response.

  But when he left her in the early morning his promises about the calash were vague, and she was faintly worried.

  Many heard the loud quarrels between Charles and Barbara. Now the Court was saying that Barbara had declared her intention of miscarrying the child—which she insisted was the King’s—providing she was not the first to ride in the calash.

  The Queen heard this and remembered with humiliation her request to the King that she and the Duchess should be the first to use it.

  What mattered it, thought Catherine, who rode in the coach? It was not the actual riding which was significant.

  The King put off the decision. He wanted to please the Queen, yet he was afraid of Barbara. He could not be sure what she would do. She made wild threats; she was always declaring that she would strangle this child, murder that servant, if her whims were not satisfied. So far as he knew, she had not carried out these threats to kill, but her temper was violent and he could not be sure to what madness it would lead her.

  The Court sniggered about the wrangle concerning the calash. The country heard and murmured about it. It was a great joke—the sort of joke with which the King so often amused his people. But the calash was not seen in the Park, simply because the King did not wish to offend the Queen and dared not offend Barbara.

  A few evenings later the King was supping in the apartments of Frances Stuart, and as she was sitting at the table—with him beside her—Frances’s beautiful blue eyes were fixed on the flimsy structure of cards before her, while the King’s passionate dark ones were on Frances. She turned to him suddenly and said: “Your Majesty has often declared that you would wish to give me something which I dearly desired.”

  “You have but to ask, as you know,” said the King, “and it is yours.”

  Everyone was listening. All were deciding: This is the end of her resistance. Frances has decided to become the King’s mistress.

  “I desire to be the first to ride in the calash,” said Frances.

  The King hesitated. This was unexpected. He was beginning to wish he had never been presented with the thing.

  He was aware of Barbara’s burning blue eyes on him; he saw the danger signals there.

  Frances continued to smile artlessly and continued: “Your Majesty, the coach should be seen. The people long to see it. It would greatly please me to be the first to ride in it.”

  Barbara stepped up to the table. With an impatient gesture she knocked down the house of cards. Frances gave a little cry of dismay, but the eyes which looked straight into Barbara’s were pert and defiant.

  Barbara said in a low voice: “I have told the King that if I am not the first to ride in the coach I shall miscarry his child.”

  Frances smiled. “It is a pity,” she said. “And if I am not the first to ride in the coach I shall never be with child.”

  It was a challenge. There were three contestants now. The Court laughed more merrily than before.

  They were sure it would be a battle between Barbara and Frances.

  The King, faintly exasperated by this public display of rivalry, said: “This calash seems to have turned all heads. Where is my lord Buckingham? Ah, my lord Duke, sing to us … sing, I pray you. Sing of love and hate, but sing not of coaches!”

  So Buckingham sang; and Barbara’s blazing eyes were fixed on the slender, youthful figure of Frances Stuart while he did so.

  The battle was over.

  The Queen sat sadly in her apartments. She almost wishes that she had not recovered from her illness. She mused: While I was ill he loved me. If I had died then I should have died happy. He wept for me; his hair turned gray for me; it was he who smoothed my pillows. I remember his remorse for all the jealousy I had been made to suffer on his account. He was truly sorry. Yet, now that I am well, I suffer as I ever did.

  Barbara’s jealousy took another form.

  She strode up and down her apartment, kicking everything in her path out of the way. No servants would come near her except Mrs. Sarah, and even she took good care to keep well out of reach.

  All thought Barbara might do herself some injury; many hoped she would.

  In her rage she tore her bodice into shreds; she pulled her hair; she called on God to witness her humiliation.

  Meanwhile Frances Stuart was riding serenely in Hyde Park, and the calash made a very pleasant setting for such a beautiful jewel.

  The people watched her go by and declared that never—even in those days when Lady Castlemaine had been at the height of her beauty—had there been such a lovely lady at the Court.

  Catherine, watching the game Charles played with the women of his Court, often wondered whether he were capable of any deep feeling. Barbara took lovers shamelessly yet remained the King’s mistress; in fact, he seemed quite indifferent to her amatory adventures which were the scandal of the Court. He seemed only to care that she received him whenever he was ready to visit her.

  Frances, after the affair of the calash, had continued to hold back. She had promised nothing, she declared; and her conscience would not allow her to become the King’s mistress.

  Catherine was unsure of Frances. The girl might be a skilful coquette—as Barbara insisted that she was, for Barbara made no secret of her enmity now—or she might indeed be a virtuous woman.

  Catherine believed her to be virtuous. It certainly seemed to her that Frances was sincere when she confided to the Queen that she wished to marry and settle down in peace away from the Court.

  “Your Majesty must understand,” she had said, “that the position in which I find myself is none of my making.”

  Catherine determined to believe her, and sought to help her on every occasion.

  She pondered often on the King’s devotion to women other than herself. She remembered too the case of Lady Chesterfield. The Chesterfields remained in the country, but news came that the Earl was as much in love with his wife as he had been at Court, and that she continued to scorn him.

  Catherine talked of this with Frances Stuart, and Frances answered: “It was only when he saw how others admired her that he began to do so. That is the way of men.”

  And I, thought Catherine, admired Charles wholeheartedly. I showed my admiration. I was without guile. He knew that no other man had ever loved me.

  Edward Montague was often in attendance. He would look at her sadly when such affairs as that of the calash took place; it was clear that he pitied her. He was invariably at her side at all gatherings; his position as master of her horse necessitated that, but she was sure his feelings for her were stron
ger than those of a servant.

  She often studied Edward Montague; he was a handsome young man and there was surely something of which to be proud in the devotion of such as he; so she smiled on him with affection, and it began to be noticed that the friendship between them was growing.

  Catherine knew this, but did nothing to prevent it; it was, after all, a situation she had striven to create.

  Montague’s enemies were quick to call the King’s attention to this friendship with the Queen; but Charles laughed lightly. He was glad that the Queen had an admirer. It showed the man’s sound good sense, he said, because the Queen was worthy to be admired.

  He was certainly not going to put a stop to the friendship; he would consider it extremely unfair to do so since he enjoyed so many friendships with the opposite sex.

  Catherine, seeing his indifference to her relationship with her handsome master of horse, made another of those mistakes which turned the King’s admiration for her to indifference.

  Catherine’s great tragedy was that she never understood Charles.

  It so happened that, when she alighted from her horse and he took her hand, Montague held it longer than was necessary and pressed it firmly. It was a gesture of assurance of his affection and sympathy for her, and Catherine knew this; but when, longing for Charles’ attention and desperately seeking to claim it, she artlessly asked what a gentleman meant when he held a lady’s hand and pressed it, she was feigning an innocence and ignorance of English customs which were not hers.

  “Who has done this?” asked the King.

  She answered: “It is my good master of horse, Montague.”

  The King looked at her with pity. Poor Catherine! Was she trying to be coy? How ill it became her!

  He said lightly: “It is an expression of devotion, but such expressions given to kings and queens may not indicate devotion but a desire for advancement. Yet it is an act of insolence for Your Majesty’s master of horse to behave thus to you, and I will take steps to see that it does not happen again.”