“That is why I thought of it. I have asked the price. It is six thousand pistoles.”
“Dear Anne, would you indeed do this?”
“Guessing that you would like it, I had already decided on it.”
I felt happier than I had for a long time and the Queen and I forgot our troubles in planning our convent. We should both use it as a retreat, and then I looked over the place with her and chose the apartments we should have when we came to the convent. The windows overlooked the Seine and the Avenue of the Cours La Reine.
I think Anne was as happy as I was planning it.
It was nearly two years since Charles had left France, and I was dreadfully worried. Rumors were coming across the Channel. Some reported that he was sick; others that he was dead. I refused to believe them. Something within me told me that Charles would survive. He had had to swear what the Scots wished him to and this he had done in order to gain their support, and for this he had been crowned at Scone but if ever he was victorious over the Parliamentarians he would be a Presbyterian King on both sides of the border.
Cromwell was marching to Scotland and soon we had news of the royalist defeat at Dunbar and the capture of Edinburgh by the Roundheads.
Charles then marched south into England. It was a desperate move but I could see it was the only one to take in the circumstances. I hoped and prayed that there were some loyal Englishmen left in England to join him. Alas, he was disappointed in this and few came to augment the ten thousand men who constituted his army. Charles had impressed all with his bravery and his excellence in the field. He was always calm and serene and seemed not in the least perturbed by danger and disaster. It was a wonderful gift to have. I could admire it although it certainly had not come through me.
Battle took place at Worcester and when the news came to us it was the old story. Disaster for the royalists. Success for Cromwell. And what had happened to Charles? He had disappeared. It was then that the rumors started to come, thick and fast.
Most people thought he was dead.
My nights were haunted by evil dreams. Where was my son? What other and greater evils had Fate in store for me?
I was seated in my apartments in the Louvre sunk in the deepest despair when a man burst unceremoniously in. I stared at him, a little alarmed and then incensed by the intrusion. He was well over six feet tall, gaunt, and his hair was cut in the manner I loathed—that of the Roundheads.
He cried out: “Mam. It is I.”
Then I flew to him, tears streaming down my face. “It is you. Am I dreaming…” I stammered.
“No, Mam. I am indeed here…and the first thing I did was to come to you.”
“Oh Charles…Charles my son. You are safe then. Oh thanks be to God.”
“I come to you defeated, Mam. But it will not always be thus.”
“No…no. Oh, Charles, I have had such fears…such dreams. I will send for your sister. She has been sunk in melancholy. First she must know that you are here. Then you can tell me all that happened.”
I shouted for attendants and sent them running to the Princess Henriette.
While I waited I took his hands…I kissed them. I pressed him to me. He smiled in his rather sardonic way, but there was tenderness in him.
My little seven-year-old daughter ran into the room and into his arms. He picked her up and danced round the room with her.
“I knew you would come. I knew you would come,” she kept chanting. “They couldn’t kill you… not even wicked Old Cromwell.”
“No,” he said, “not even wicked Old Cromwell. I am indestructible, Minette. You will see.”
“And when you have won the crown you will take me to England with you. We shall be together forever and ever….”
“When I win the crown miracles will happen.”
I loved to see them together and wished fleetingly that Charles had the same affection for me that he had for his sister. But of course she was a child and children showed only adoration. I had a duty to perform and that sometimes made one displease those whom one loved most.
He must tell us of his adventures, I said. I could not wait to hear.
“You have been away a long time,” Henriette accused him.
“The absence was forced on me. I would rather have been in Paris than in Scotland with those Presbyterians. They are a grim crowd, dear Minette. You would not like them. It is a sin, they consider, to laugh on a Sunday.”
“Do they save up their jokes for other days?”
“Why, bless you, jokes are sin too. Think of the things you like doing best and I’ll be ready to wager that all would be a sin in the eyes of the Presbyterians.”
“Then I am glad you are back. Will it be like that in England?”
“Not while I am King. For that life is not for a gentleman of my tastes.”
He talked of his escape after Worcester and the terrible defeat his forces had suffered there. He had his faithful friends though and chief among them were Derby, Lauderdale, Wilmot and Buckingham. Yes, the son of that evil genius of my youth was one of Charles’s closest associates. He was about three years older than Charles and I hoped he was not going to exert a similar influence over my son as that which his father had held over my husband. But I fancied my son was not the sort to be influenced. I was eager to hear more. Charles had escaped from Worcester—a man with a price on his head. He told us how the Earl of Derby had produced a certain gentleman—a Catholic at that—Charles Giffard, to guide him through unknown country to Whiteladies and Boscobel; how he, the King of England, had paused at an inn for food and afraid to stay there and eat it had ridden away with bread and meat in his hands.
I had never seen Charles so moved as he was when he told us of his first glimpse of Whiteladies, the farmhouse which had once been a convent. It was the place he had come to for shelter, and the two brothers who were living there—the Penderels—were staunch royalists.
“There was I,” said Charles, “seated in this humble farmhouse surrounded by my friends, Derby, Shrewsbury, Cleveland, Wilmot and Buckingham with Giffard and the Penderels…planning what we should do next. The Penderels sent a message to Boscobel where more Penderels lived. You should have seen the clothes they gave me! A green jerkin and doublet of doeskin and a hat with a steeple crown. I looked like a country yokel. You would never have recognized me.”
“I think I should have recognized you anywhere,” I told him fondly.
“Wilmot had sheared my hair to this offensive cut. You know Wilmot. He made a joke of it—and a bad job, I must say. The Penderels trimmed me up afterward, for as they wisely said, it must not look like a job that had been hastily done. I had to try to walk as a yokel would, and to talk like one. They were hard lessons, Mam.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” I told him. “But you managed well enough I have no doubt.”
“No, indeed not. I made a poor rustic. Wilmot said his lord the King kept peering out from under my Roundhead haircut. I walked so far that my feet were bleeding and Joan Penderel, the wife of one of the brothers, washed my feet and put pads of paper between my toes where the skin was rubbed. I can tell you I was in a sorry state. Then news came that the neighborhood was full of Roundhead soldiers…all bent on one thing. To find me and put me where they had put my father.”
I shivered and touched his hand gently.
“I’m sorry, Mam,” he murmured.
I nodded and he went on: “A very good friend came to Boscobel to warn me. He was Colonel Carlis, a man I greatly trusted. He told me I was most unsafe. The soldiers were searching every house and could not fail to come to Boscobel. What could we do? He went out of the house and saw nearby an enormous oak tree in full leaf. The Colonel said ‘That is our only hope.’ So he and I climbed the tree and hid ourselves among the leaves. The Penderels said we were quite invisible and unless the soldiers decided to climb the tree, they would never see us. And, Mam, there is my little miracle. From the tree we could see the soldiers searching the wood and the houses…and they never thought to look up into the oak tree.”