Richmond gave an unhappy apologetic little laugh. “Heh! I’m paying Mrs. Stewart a visit.”
“So I see! And by what right, pray, do you visit her when she’s too sick to see her other friends?”
Richmond, suddenly aware that he was being made to appear a helpless fool before the woman he loved, answered stoutly: “At least, Sire, I am prepared to marry her. Which is more than your Majesty can do.”
Charles’s eyes blazed in sudden rage and he started toward the Duke with clenched fists. One hand went to Frances’s mouth and she gave a piercing scream as Richmond, who did not want a beating at the competent hands of his sovereign, turned suddenly and leaped out the window. Charles, who had already reached it, saw him land awkwardly not far below in the low-tide river mud, and then scramble to his feet, give one terrified backward glance and rush off into the fog. For a long moment he stood there and stared after him, contempt and hatred on his face; then he turned to Frances.
“I never expected anything like this from you.”
Frances stared at him defiantly. “I’m sure I don’t understand you, Sire! If I can’t receive visits from a man whose intentions toward me are wholly honourable—then I am indeed a slave in a free country!” She passed one tired nervous hand quickly across her throbbing forehead, and without waiting for him to speak again she cried passionately: “If you don’t want me to marry, Sire, it’s your privilege to refuse me permission! But at least you can’t prevent me from crossing to France and entering a nunnery!”
Charles stared at her with sick incredulity. What had happened to the Frances Stewart he had known and loved for four years? What had happened to turn her into this cold brazen woman who flaunted her faithlessness, daring him to object to it, as though pleased to have made him a fool in the eyes of his friends? He found himself learning again at thirty-six what he thought he had learned well enough twenty years ago.
Now he spoke to her slowly, with sadness coming through his anger. “I wouldn’t have believed this of you, Frances, no matter who had told me.”
Frances stared at him defiantly, enraged at his cynicism which drew conclusions out of a refuse heap of past experience. “Your Majesty is very quick to suspect the worst!”
“But not quick enough, it seems! I think I’ve known since the day I was born that only a fool would trust a woman—and yet I’ve trusted you against everything!” He paused a moment, his dark face sardonic. “I’d rather have found out any way but this—”
Frances was close to hysteria, and now she cried in a high trembling voice: “Your Majesty had best go before the person who brought you here begins to suspect the worst of your stay!”
He gave her a long incredulous look and then, without another word, spun about on his heel and left the room. In the hall-way outside her door he met Lawrence Hyde, Clarendon’s son, and shouted at him: “So you were in the plot too! By God, I won’t forget it!” Hyde stared after him, bewildered, but the King rounded the next corner and was gone. Charles the urbane, the easy-humoured, the self-possessed and amiable, was in such a rage as no one had imagined him capable of.
The next day Frances returned to him by messenger every gift she had ever received—the strand of pearls he had given her on St. Valentine’s day three years before, the wonderful bracelets and ear-rings and necklaces which had marked her birthdays and the Christmases or New Years. All of them came back, without even a note. Charles flung them into the fireplace.
That same morning Frances appeared unexpectedly in her Majesty’s apartments. She was covered from head to foot in a black-velvet cloak and she wore a vizard. Catherine and all her ladies looked toward the door in surprise as Frances removed the mask. For a moment she hesitated there and then all at once she ran forward, dropped to her knees, and taking up the hem of Catherine’s garment touched it to her lips. Catherine spoke quickly to her women, asking them to leave. They withdrew, to listen at the keyhole.
Then she reached down to touch the crown of Frances’s gleaming head and unexpectedly Frances burst into tears. She covered her face with her hands. “Oh, your Majesty! You must hate me! Can you ever forgive me?”
“Frances, my dear—you mustn’t cry so—you’ll make your head ache—Here, please—Look at me, poor child—” Catherine’s warm, soft voice still carried a trace of its Portuguese accent, which gave it an even greater tenderness, and now she placed one hand gently beneath Frances’s chin to raise her head.
Reluctantly Frances obeyed and for a moment they looked silently at each other. Then her sobs began again.
“I’m sorry, Frances,” said Catherine. “I’m sorry, for your sake.”
“Oh, it’s not for myself I’m crying!” protested Frances. “It’s for you! It’s for the unhappiness I’ve seen in your eyes sometimes when—” She stopped suddenly, shocked at her boldness, and then the words tumbled on hastily, as though she could undo in two minutes the wrongs her vanity had committed for years against this patient little woman.
“Oh, you must believe me, your Majesty! The only reason I’m going to get married is so that I may leave the Court! I’ve never meant to hurt you—never for a moment! But I’ve been vain and silly and thoughtless! I’ve made a fool of myself—but I’ve never wronged you, I swear I haven’t! He’s never been my lover—Oh, say you believe me—please say you believe me!”
She was holding Catherine’s hand hard against the beating pulse in her throat, and her head was thrown back as her eyes looked up with passionate, begging intensity. She had always liked Catherine, but she had never realized until now how deeply and humbly she admired her, nor how shameful her own behaviour had been. She had considered the Queen’s feelings no more than the crassest of Charles’s mistresses—no more than Barbara Palmer herself.
“I believe you, Frances. Any young girl would have been flattered. And you’ve always been kind and generous. You never used your power as a weapon to hurt others.”
“Oh, your Majesty! I didn’t! Truly I didn’t! I’ve never meant to hurt anyone! And your Majesty—I want you to know—I know you’ll believe me: Richmond had just come in. We were sitting talking. There’s never been anything indecent between us!”
“Of course there hasn’t, my dear.”
Frances slumped suddenly, her head dropped. “He’ll never believe me,” she said softly. “He has no faith—he doesn’t believe in anything.”
There were tears now in Catherine’s eyes and she shook her head slowly. “Perhaps he does, Frances. Perhaps he does, more than we think.”
Frances was tired now and despondent. She pressed her lips to the back of Catherine’s hand once more and got slowly to her feet. “I must go now, your Majesty.” They stood looking at each other, real tenderness and affection on both their faces. “I may never see you again—” Quickly and impulsively she kissed Catherine on the cheek, and then swirling about she rushed from the room. Catherine stood and watched her go, smiling a little, one hand lightly touching her face; the tears spilled off onto her bosom. Three days later Frances had left Whitehall—she eloped with the Duke of Richmond.
CHAPTER FORTY–EIGHT
IT WAS ON one cold rainy windy night in February that Buckingham, disguised in a black wig with his blonde eyebrows and mustache blackened, sat across the table from Dr. Heydon and watched the astrologer’s face as he consulted his charts of stars and moon, intersecting lines and geometrical figures. The room was lighted dimly by smoking tallow candles that smelt of frying fat, and the wind blew in gusts down the chimney, making their eyes burn and sending them into coughing fits.