“I want to come with you to France,” she told him, eventually.
“Things may be hard, at the beginning,” he said; how to confess that he might not live to enjoy his exile?
“No harder than what you must do here in England,” she said, with peculiar certitude.
“What is that?” he asked, unnerved.
Hopping naked from the bed, she crouched to drag out from underneath a large, flat object. “Will brought it for us from my father’s house. Should we take it on our voyage?”
Laurence glanced down at the portrait of Isabella as Aphrodite. Then he looked up at Catherine. Her certitude had vanished and he witnessed in her face a struggle as naked as her body, between yearning and despair, as when they had examined the magpie’s injured wing, on the day he had proposed to her. Could she have guessed from his reticence in the courtyard that he had been unfaithful to her with Isabella, and that in quitting England he must bid goodbye to the woman he loved? “No, Catherine,” he said. “We’ll leave it behind.”
II.
Lady Beaumont extinguished her candle, and rested her head back on her pillow. Three generations of Beaumonts were gathered beneath this one roof; and soon, God willing, there would be more children to assure the future of a line unbroken through the centuries since William the Conqueror bestowed lands in Gloucestershire upon his loyal henchman, Laurent de Beaumont. Despite Laurence’s news, she felt an inner peace that had not graced her for longer than she could recall.
“God moves in mysterious ways, dearest wife,” her husband said, surprising her; she had thought him asleep. “Although we could have wished for it to happen otherwise, both Laurence and Thomas may be spared from death in this dreadful war.” His hand searched out hers, under the bedclothes. “And, my Elena, I have been meaning to tell you: I know you believe me rather obtuse, with my nose in my books and my head in the clouds. Yet my ears were not deaf to the hints dropped by Don Antonio.”
“What manner of hints?” she asked sharply.
“You are and always shall be the love of my life, and you command my unconditional trust. But I would not love you and Laurence any the less, or be any less proud of you, were Don Antonio his true father.” Lord Beaumont yawned, and snuggled up to her. “There! I have said my piece, and can sleep contented.”
“I shall not sleep a wink,” she rejoined, “while you persist in your absurd misapprehension. Antonio is one of the blackest liars in Christendom, and it offends me that you should be deceived by his wicked insinuations.”
“Please, take no offence. As a young man, when I courted you in Seville, I did not understand him. Now I do. He was in love with you, and, if I am not mistaken, you with him. I was the interloper. Perhaps he journeyed to England at his ripe age to find out whether I had made you happy.”
“You have. And Laurence is without a doubt your son.”
“I know he is,” said Lord Beaumont, “in all that most matters to me. But I do confess,” he went on, less gravely, “I liked Antonio. There is something to be said for a bit of wickedness. And we are not so old,” he added, easing his body closer to hers, “that we cannot be a bit wicked ourselves.”
Regular as a clock, he slumbered afterwards. Lady Beaumont smiled, listening to his snores. He had always been an attentive partner, though in their early years of marriage, she could have no joy of him. She had been spoilt by a far more experienced lover.
Elena’s two brothers were still in skirts and she, the eldest, had been a month shy of sixteen when the family learnt that her father had died of ague in the Spanish Indies. His estates there had been mortgaged against his borrowings. Her mother could spare a small dowry for Elena, but the three other girls would have to choose between the convent and marriage to suitors of inferior blood.
Doña Cecilia had reluctantly admitted Antonio again to the house, in the absence of his hostile uncle, and while convalescing from a wound to his leg incurred in a cavalry charge, he became a frequent visitor. She blamed his unruliness on the fact that he had been orphaned as a babe, and had grown up unsupervised in the crumbling castle of his forebears; and he had enlisted in the Imperial army at the age of fifteen, which was no education in morals. Antonio’s cousins adored him, as did Doña Cecilia’s youngest and prettiest gentlewoman, Beatriz, who was Elena’s special confidante. Antonio would dazzle them with conjuring tricks, spin tales of his campaigns, and sing to them in his seductive tenor. And when Doña Cecilia’s more censorious ladies were temporarily distracted, he would remind Elena that she was his favourite. “To look at you,” he would declare, “is like gazing into a mirror.” She took this as a compliment, for she thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen. And she was not alone in wanting his attentions: Beatriz tormented her with gossip about how many hearts he had captured in Seville. But in a stolen moment, he said to Elena, “I love you above all others. Will you be mine?” And she answered immediately: “Yes.”
She was waiting for Antonio to open the subject of marriage with her mother when an Englishman arrived in town on the final stage of his continental tour. Heir to a rich estate and a title, James Beaumont had a letter of introduction to the de Capdavilas from John Digby, the English ambassador in Madrid, who evidently knew of the distinguished family, though not of their penurious circumstances. Doña Cecilia was thrilled to receive him. Blond and blue-eyed, Beaumont had a gentle smile, impeccable manners, and a solid grasp of Spanish, but no sense of pride: when the girls poked fun at his appalling accent and his English clothes, he laughed along with them. Antonio would not have borne such an insult.
One night Elena’s mother hurried into the girls’ bedchamber. “My darlings, Don James has asked for Elena’s hand! After I confessed to him our terrible straits, he made me an offer that will save us from ruin. Although he is not of the true faith, Fray Luis says that God will absolve me if I accept it, since I am acting for the good of our house.”
“Don James is too late,” announced Elena. “I have already promised myself to Antonio.”
Her mother stared at her as though she had proposed marrying the boy who scrubbed out their chamber pots. “He has no fortune, and he is your … your cousin!”
“I don’t care if he is poor, and there have been marriages between cousins in our family for centuries.”
“I ought never to have let him back into our house,” moaned Doña Cecilia. “But that settles it: you shall leave for England with Don James as quickly as possible.”
The next morning, James Beaumont began his courtship. Elena was furious, and would not say a word. “She is shy,” Doña Cecilia apologised, though she more often complained that Elena was incorrigibly headstrong and outspoken. Beaumont returned to his inn, and not a half hour later, Antonio marched over demanding to know the truth about this rumoured betrothal. Doña Cecilia addressed him privately, and Beatriz reported to Elena that he had walked out looking thunderstruck. The following day, Beaumont informed Doña Cecilia that Antonio had stopped at the inn to congratulate him and invite him as a guest to the house of de Zamora. “What a splendid fellow your cousin is,” he told Elena, “and unusually broad in his understanding, to welcome a foreigner and a Protestant to his home.” Elena was mute, this time from shock: she could not believe how easily her passionate lover had capitulated. “How silly could you be, to take Antonio’s flirtations seriously,” chided Doña Cecilia. “He will marry into wealth, Elena: I’ve heard he has his eye on young Teresa de Salves.”
Elena sank into despond, unreconciled to Don James; and Antonio stayed conspicuously away from the house. Then on the eve of her departure from Seville, Beatriz drew her aside. “All is not lost: once your sisters are asleep, tiptoe to my bedchamber, where I’ve arranged for Don Antonio to meet you.”
“He’s come to rescue me,” gasped Elena. “God bless you for this, Beatriz!”
Like a hero from Elena’s romances, Antonio clambered in through the window and swept her to bed. His increasingly intimate embraces drove her into a volup
tuous frenzy, and without a struggle she surrendered to him the prize that should have been James Beaumont’s. “For a convent-bred virgin, you learn fast – although you do have the best of teachers,” Antonio observed, reclining on the bloodstained sheets. “It’s a pity we have only one night with each other.”
“One night without the Holy Church’s blessing,” she corrected him. “We’ll find a priest, Antonio, and be wed before sunrise. Then my mother will be powerless to undo the bond between us.”
“The tragic fact is that we cannot marry,” sighed Antonio, “because of your father Don Giraldo’s improvident lust.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Elena, bolting upright in bed.
“Let me explain. He courted my mother before yours, and became mad with envy when Doña Elena was married off to the ancient fellow whose name I bear. Don Antonio de Zamora couldn’t raise his prick to save his life! And since Don Giraldo couldn’t have the woman he desired, he took her sister for his wife and her for his willing lover. I am the fruit of their adultery. As she was dying, just after she brought me into the world, my mother confessed this to Fray Luis and to her beloved sister, whom she asked always to be kind to her poor ill-gotten child.” He smiled at Elena. “You and I are both cousins and brother and sister.”
Elena was at first speechless. Then she cried out, “Who told you such a despicable lie?”
“It’s no lie. Doña Cecilia told me, the day I learnt of your betrothal. She would have kept everything secret, had I not professed my affections for you and commanded her to dismiss that milksop Beaumont. I can see why your father abhorred me – the hypocrite, condemning me for my dissolute ways. I also see why, when she begrudgingly let me back in, Doña Cecilia made me swear that I wouldn’t touch so much as a hair on her daughters’ heads. And I thought it was because of my famous reputation with women.” Antonio’s fingers wandered to the moist cleft between Elena’s thighs. “If she knew what hair I am stroking now! I hope Don Giraldo is turning in his grave, don’t you? Our sin is sweet revenge, on him and on the Englishman who is robbing me so unfairly of you.”
Elena at last comprehended Doña Cecilia’s haste in packing her off to England. Yet as she gazed upon Antonio in his naked glory, she wanted him, even at the price of eternal damnation. “Antonio, we are twin souls who belong together. What our father and your mother did is not our fault, so why should we suffer for it? And if we’re married, my mother will have to keep the secret, for the reputation of our house. No one else need know.”
Antonio removed his hand. “There is a tiny problem, my dear Elena: our marriage would be unholy, and forever cursed by God. You and I are like beautiful twins, but our common blood would produce monsters of nature – and everyone would know.” He started to pull on his clothes. “We inherited our sinfulness, from our father’s line. The blood of Moors ran in Don Giraldo’s veins, from a coupling as illegitimate as his with my mother, and as ours.” Out of his doublet he plucked a rosewood box and laid it beside her. “Open this when I’m gone, and wear what’s inside, in memory of tonight. As a small boy, I found it hidden among my mother’s belongings, and stole it as a keepsake. I never understood its full significance until my talk with Doña Cecilia: it must have been Don Giraldo’s secret gift to his lover. How ironic, and how appropriate, that I should pass it on to you! Our bad blood seems destined to surface in each generation. Still, you shouldn’t be too sorry for yourself, mi hermosa,” he laughed. “Count yourself lucky that I was your first taste of a man. On your wedding night, you can close your eyes and dream of my hands and my lips on your body, and the thrust of my virile sex within you. I really must be off or Beatriz will scold me,” he added, sauntering to the window. “She’s in the courtyard, watching out for us.”
Elena had been listening in stunned silence, but when he threw a leg over the sill, she rushed to stop him. There was her faithful Beatriz below, beckoning urgently to Antonio; and on his face she saw a cool complacency that mortified her. He kissed her on the cheek, swung down from the ledge, jumped and landed agile as a cat, and vanished with Beatriz into the shadows.
In the morning he did not come to say farewell, and James Beaumont interpreted Elena’s anguish as normal for a girl parting from her family and homeland. While their cavalcade travelled the hundreds of miles to Bordeaux, where they would board ship for England, he tried to console her, with the help of her two Spanish maids. It was Beatriz she missed most, especially when, less than a month after her incestuous night, she knew enough to recognise the consequences. She steeled herself, behaved lovingly to Beaumont, and raised a thorny issue. What if his parents opposed the betrothal, and threatened to disinherit him if he did not break it? “You are of an age to choose your wife, so why should we wait? Let me convert to your church in Bordeaux, and we can marry there – then the match cannot be undone,” she urged, almost as she had implored Antonio. Beaumont agreed, ecstatic, and when they arrived at Chipping Campden, Lord and Lady Beaumont were scandalised, but had to accept. James was their heir and sole son, and his now-Protestant bride was big with child.
Over the next months, Elena dreaded what was ripening within her, to burst from her loins ghastly and deformed, like a demon in her illustrated prayer-book. By some miracle, however, she produced a healthy boy; and while disappointed that he did not resemble his father, the elder Beaumonts overlooked this flaw in their delight at a grandson. Still she longed for Antonio and thought guiltily of his keepsake in her lacquered cabinet. Yet Antonio had been wrong about her husband. James Beaumont was no milksop, but her brave champion in an otherwise inhospitable world. She bore him two sons who died in their infancy: God’s judgement. Laurence, in contrast, had barely a day’s illness, as though his thick de Capdavila y Fuentes blood rendered him immune; and he was sunny-tempered, precocious, and naughty. Her husband doted on him, as did her Spanish maids, who taught him fluent Castilian.
On his fourth birthday, Elena caught one of them whispering, “The older he gets, the more I see his father in him. God knows how the rascal found an opportunity to seduce her!”
“Donde hay ganas, hay maña,” chimed in the other. “Or as the English put it, where there’s a will there’s a way. After all, Don Antonio was screwing Beatriz under Doña Cecilia’s very nose. I wouldn’t be surprised if that minx acted as his bawd. And he was no better than a spiteful valet pissing in his master’s soup. What he couldn’t have for himself, he had to spoil for Don James.”
The discovery of this double betrayal and of her own naïveté horrified Elena as much as fear of the truth spreading, and it killed her love for Antonio. She promptly told her husband and his parents that her gentlewomen were instructing Laurence in the Catholic faith and must be sent back to Spain. Lord and Lady Beaumont rejoiced that the papists were going home, warmed a little towards their daughter-in-law, and then died in quick succession while she was pregnant with her fourth son, Thomas. Although Thomas survived his dangerous early years, her guilty fear remained; and just once she had let a hint of her secret slip out, to Dr. Seward. For as Laurence grew from boy to youth, he was to her a monster of nature, transforming before her eyes into a second Antonio: beguiling, provoking, lazy, irresponsible, and sensually disposed; though like James Beaumont, he was not proud, and he lacked Antonio’s vanity. In defence, she had blinded herself to everything else about him that was not Antonio. She had done her best not to love him. Praise heaven she had failed, as signally as Antonio had failed to tear her family apart.
Now she remembered Laurence’s words to her, in the dovecote: I thought that if the story was true, it would explain why you and I have always been at odds. How her heart had melted, and how much it had cost her to hide her remorse. She had lied to him, and again tonight to her husband, not because she was afraid that they would stop loving her if she told the truth, but to ensure peace between Laurence and Thomas, so the bad blood in their generation would end. Too quietly to rouse her sleeping husband, she murmured, “Mea culpa, mea maxima cu
lpa.” As for the sin of Don Giraldo and her aunt Elena, which Antonio had apparently kept to himself while in England, she would take it with her to the grave.
III.
Governor Aston greeted Laurence with cold contempt. “His Majesty has written to me of your and Lord Wilmot’s late disgrace, Mr. Beaumont. He further informs me you are on a hunt for a man obnoxious to his cause, and has instructed me to assist you however I can.”
This last part surprised Laurence, until he divined Prince Charles’ influence at work. “I thank His Majesty and you, sir, in advance. I brought with me some articles that Lord Digby gave me to return to Lady Hallam, if I may.”
Aston guided him into the reception room where Isabella sat, her hair elegantly dressed and her boy’s clothes switched for a satin gown. His love for her flooded back with painful vengeance, and it worried him that a month in Oxford had not restored her vitality. While her face and shoulders were not as thin, her skin was still unhealthily pale.
“Mr. Beaumont, how are you?” she asked. By her concerned expression, she had also heard of his disgrace. “But … what have you there?” Laurence handed her two books that made her frown and bite her lip, a diamond ring that she accepted with a faint smile, and a woven basket that she opened with an exclamation of joy. “Niger!”
“He’s a well-travelled cat, and far better behaved than Seward’s, though he did puke once or twice on the way.”
She picked Niger out and kissed his sleek head. “Thank you. He is the most precious to me of all.”
“Surely not more than the ring, my lady,” commented Aston, as if to a child.
“Oh yes, Sir Arthur,” she said; and Laurence knew at once from her tone that she disliked the Governor as much as he did. “The ring I shall sell, to buy myself something new. I had to leave the rest of my jewellery in London, including a necklace of which I was particularly fond. I can’t replace it, but I might find a poor substitute. I shan’t sell the books, however,” she concluded, regarding Laurence wistfully. “They both contain very sage advice.”
The Licence of War Page 56
