Reports of this comic baby reached the Queen Dowager and she paid her a visit. Lucy could hardly believe her eyes when she opened them one afternoon and saw the Queen standing beside her bed, for when she had told her of the coming baby Her Majesty had understandably not received the news with anything but anger and contempt. The girl had not for long maintained the faithfulness expected even of the King’s mistress, and yet she believed herself to be his wife. The Queen had dismissed the little jade from her presence with such curtness that Lucy had expected she would be turned out of the Palace, and wondered why she was allowed to stay. The reason was one she could not possibly have guessed; upon consideration the Queen found she was grateful to Lucy for now, when the right moment came, there would be no need to feel compunction in telling her the facts of her supposed marriage. The girl now deserved what was coming to her.
Yet when she heard how greatly Lucy had suffered her heart, rendered kinder by secret gratitude, softened. She had herself suffered much in childbirth and she was sorry for the poor girl, and one day when she was playing with Jackie in her boudoir she said upon impulse, “Jackie, we will go down and see your mama.” They went along the passage together and down the stairs, the Queen gliding along with no more sound than the autumn rustling of her skirts, Jackie stumping thunderously, for he was now so sure of his balance that he could concentrate upon the noises a boy can make with his feet when going about the world; and they were many.
“Be quiet Jackie,” said the Queen when they reached Lucy’s door. “Your mama is ill.”
“Shister,” said Jackie. “Not want.”
“You must not be jealous, Jackie,” said his grandmother, and receiving no reply to her gentle knock she opened the door and went in. The room was peaceful and full of sunshine that seemed concentrated on the miniature which hung on the wall beside the bed. The Queen saw the man in the picture very clearly. His head was turned to the right and he was looking down. Following his glance she saw that Lucy, the babe in the cradle beside her, was asleep.
The Queen stood and looked down at her daughter-in-law in her defencelessness and she was sorry. No doubt there had been extenuating circumstances. She turned to the cradle expecting to have her heart further wrung. Mary however was not asleep. Nor was she pathetic. Her round red head and her red face glowed cheerfully under the hood of the cradle, and her brilliant blue eyes seemed to the astonished Queen to be regarding her visitor with a very royal condescension. Suddenly, a spasm of wind attacking the baby, her face wrinkled into an expression of distaste and she waved a minute hand with what appeared to be a gesture of dismissal. Shaken, the Queen turned back to Lucy, who had awakened.
“What a very remarkable baby,” she said with awe.
“Shister,” said Jackie. “Not like.”
“Will Your Majesty be so good as to put him near me on my bed,” said Lucy. “I do not want him to be jealous. Will Your Majesty please be seated?”
The Queen placed her grandson beside his mother and sitting on the chair beside the bed talked for a few interesting moments about her own confinements, Lucy’s confinements, her babies, Lucy’s babies, their feeding and habits. Then she asked, “You have called her Mary, I believe? Is that your mother’s name?”
“No, Your Majesty. My baby is called after my great-grandmother Mary Rhys, who herself was great-granddaughter to Rhys ap Thomas, one of the noblest Welshmen who ever lived.”
Lucy spoke with pride and her blue eyes, looking up into the Queen’s, were as brilliant as her daughter’s. Her Majesty found herself humbly murmuring something about the aristocratic purity of Welsh blood, and then rising to her feet again she smiled kindly upon Lucy and went her delicate, rustling, autumnal way. Lucy lay in her bed astonished and happy. What had come over the Queen? Then she smiled. Mary had come over her. Throughout the interview Mary must have been in control of the circumstances. Happy in the thought that neither circumstance nor emotion would ever make havoc of her daughter’s life Lucy fell asleep again.
Into this nursery warmth and comfort came the news of the tragedy of the Battle of Worcester. All Europe thrilled to the stories of the young King’s gallantry, but that was small comfort to those who loved him, for where was he? Once more, as after her father’s death, Lucy was asking Lord Taaffe despairingly, “Where is he?”
“Safe in the woods,” he said cheerfully. “And Wilmot and Buckingham will be with him. They will travel by night and lie up by day and get safely to the coast.”
It was hard for Lord Taaffe to speak cheerfully for he was nearly out of his mind with rage. That he was not beside the King now was the bitterest thing that had ever happened to him. He did not doubt that the friends who were with His Majesty would give their lives to protect him but Buckingham was a dandy and Wilmot was not physically strong, and neither of them had the country lore that he possessed, who was cunning as a fox in the wilds.
He dreamed at night that he was with the King, the two of them winning through as men do who have trust in God and each other and bodies strong and sinewy as the bodies of beasts. Red fox and royal panther. The undergrowth closed behind them and they were neither seen nor heard; only smelt perhaps at farmsteads where food was taken; a slight aroma of fox.
But the dream turned to nightmare and he would be standing before a tall man with lightless eyes and a sagging mouth that had forgotten how to laugh, and saying, “Sir, I have seduced your girl.” Then he would wake up suddenly to the half-light of dawn and the sound of the vegetable carts rattling over the Paris cobbles, knowing where he was but still conscious of the black figure. It would grow like a wave and fall upon him, drowning him in ridiculous and useless despair. And all this because he could not endure Buckingham. If he had only taken the trouble to keep a cool head and get on with that pestiferous fellow he would have gone with the King to Scotland instead of the delicate Wilmot. It was the devil’s own work that one man’s hot temper could plunge many lives in sorrow.
Lucy was in better case for she had the children to look after. She must play with Jackie and sing to Mary and continue to comfort Betje in her grief. And she could pray, not as she would have liked to pray for Charles in his danger but sufficiently to be able to experience in some measure the eternal safety beyond time and place of those who are greatly loved.
Twelve
1
The weeks of anxiety dragged on. It was the end of October and golden weather. Frost at night was loosening the leaves on the trees and in the garden of the Louvre the gardeners swept them into heaps of treasure but always more came drifting down through misty sunshine on the stairways of the air. Jackie, taking his walks with his mother up and down the garden paths, laughed to see them and while they were in the air he thought they were red-yellow birds, but when he picked them up and looked at them he found that the big flat ones were painted pictures that showed a river with tributaries running through the fields of a strange country, and the fields, his mother told him, were full of poppies and corn.
But when with shouts of glee he was picking up handfuls of leaves from the heaps and letting them shower down again through his fingers, then he was a magician making gold to buy a new gown for his mother and a coach for Shir Da when he should come home. He was two years old now and could chatter to his mother of these things and she marvelled at the alchemy of his mind, for the leaves were whatever he liked to make of them.
Mary also took the air, carried in Betje’s arms, for her mother was not strong enough yet to carry her. She was nearly two months old, small for her age but preternaturally observant. Held up in her cocoon of wrappings to survey the world she did not seem unduly astonished at what she saw but gazed out at it with serenity, ready for anything.
But Lucy was not ready, for her tired mind had reflected the dreamlike quietness of the autumn weather and mediated it to an exhausted body. The visions of the night seemed a dreaming within a dream, and waking was not yet to realit
y but to a larger dream peopled indeed with dear images that came and went through veils of beauty, but images not completely possessed, for she was hardly alive again yet. But the news that Lord Taaffe brought on a day at the end of October stabbed her into sudden and agonized life. “The King is in France,” he said. “At Rouen. The Queen has just had a letter from him. He is safe at Rouen.”
She had been alone in her room when he entered like a sunburst with his news, too beside himself with joy to be careful with the sword he carried. For Lucy it was a two-edged sword, sharp with joy and a great shock of terror. She was standing at the edge of an abyss; yet all around her head the birds were singing and her mind was numbed by their tumultuous joy. She could not speak and Lord Taaffe could not speak either as he crossed the room in two strides, sat upon the couch with such suddenness that it shot back against the wall, and took her in his arms. Lucy gasped, caught at her breath and used the strength of his arms as a shield to ward off that shaming terror. He was ashamed too. In his joy that Charles was safe he had entirely forgotten the danger she was in. Was that how he loved the King? Yes, it was. He knew it now.
He took her hands, looking down at them, afraid to meet her eyes. “Tomorrow the Queen and the Duke of York and a company of his friends ride out to meet him. I go too but I have asked the Queen if I may ride on ahead today, and perhaps reach him at Fleury. Only Wilmot is with him and I can be an added protection on the road to Paris. She gave me leave.”
“I am glad,” said Lucy.
“Lucy, I will tell him. It is best that I should do it.”
“But you will take all the blame on yourself when the blame is equal.”
“I will tell him.”
She did not argue for she found she was thankful that she need not say the words. Putting a bad thing into words was always so hard; though afterwards there was relief because the sounds had been made, or the words set upon paper. There was a sort of catharsis in utterance. But she could not speak. She bent her head silently and in a hurry to be off he gripped her hands tightly for a moment and then left her.
2
Though the departure of a small company of people could make little difference to the life of the Palace yet the Louvre seemed to Lucy strangely quiet after they had gone. Waiting times are always quiet, she thought. Autumn is quiet with summer dying and winter not yet here. One is quiet, waiting for death. Am I waiting for death? She asked the question peacefully for her sharp joy that Charles was safe had turned to a quiet thankfulness that had banished fear. Charles was still on the same green star with her. The death, if there was to be a death, could not alter that fact, and for the moment it was enough.
She was sitting on a seat in the garden in the morning sunshine, watching Jackie at his game with the leaves, when she saw Lord Taaffe coming towards her at the end of the lime avenue where she was sitting. He was walking quickly and the sun shone down on his copper-coloured head and the tawny riding-coat he wore. He seemed all warmth and strength and she realized afresh how much she loved him and yet she was peacefully held in her deep thankfulness that Charles was with her still.
How was it that her love for the boy of her idyl had not passed away with the coming of this other union? Perhaps because there was nothing of an idyl about this later love. It had never seemed romantic; simply old and strong. Lord Taaffe passed out of the sunlight into the shade of the trees and his figure darkened; the warmth and glow were fading and it seemed for a moment that he was not coming towards her but going away, back again into the shadows of the past from which he had come. But she had no time to puzzle about it for the striding figure quickly became neither a young sun god nor a wraith, but simply a tired, worried, dusty man in a hurry, a living embodiment of life’s confusion. At sight of him her own peacefulness began to fade. He sat down beside her and dropped his clasped hands between his knees. It was the first time she had ever seen him look defeated. She saw he did not know where to begin and she had to help him.
“Where is Charles now?” she asked.
“He is with the Queen and the Duke of York and their company. They met in the woods just outside Paris. They will be here by afternoon. I did not wait for the greetings. With the King’s permission I rode straight on to you.”
“How did you find the King?”
“I hardly recognized him. His youth has gone. But he is I think in good health. That is not the case with poor Wilmot. I met them on the road between Rouen and Fleury. Buckingham was not with them for he went to Rotterdam. Last night, at the inn at Fleury, Wilmot had a room to himself to get some sleep and I kept guard over the King in his bedchamber. He did not want to sleep. We talked through the hours. He asked after you and Jackie.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Towards morning I told him.” He paused. “And it went the wrong way.”
He could not explain but Lucy understood. “You took the blame, trying to save me from his displeasure by bringing it upon yourself, but you did not succeed. He understood you but he did not understand me. That is natural since I do not understand myself. Is he angry with me? I want to hear what he said for I must know where I stand. I must know his exact words. Is he angry?”
“He did not seem so and for a while he was silent. He lay on his bed and he neither moved nor spoke, then he said, ‘What of it? I have more to think of now than the infidelity of a woman. Wilmot is finished. Will you take his place with me? I must have someone close to me whom I can trust.’ It was so extraordinary that at first I could not speak. Then I asked him how he could trust me after what I had just told him and he said, ‘She’s a pretty jade. One can trust no women and few men. I have always known you are one of the few.’ That was all he said.”
“And you said you would take Lord Wilmot’s place?”
“I said I would never leave him as long as he had need of me.”
“I am glad.”
“Do you realize what you are saying?” he asked.
“I know what I am saying,” she replied. “You are the King’s man now and so can no longer be my man in any sense that the world can recognize. And I am the King’s woman as long as my life lasts. He may not want me any longer but I shall be as much his as you are. He went away from us, as the sun goes down in the west, and in our night we found each other. Now he is back and I have no more to give to you or you to me.”
“That is not true,” he said.
She thought a moment and then replied, “No, it is not. Before our birth to this present life it is all darkness, we remember nothing, and beyond our death it is darkness again for we do not know where we go. It was in winter darkness that we loved each other and there is a thread that links the three darknesses together. I think that I shall go through what is left of my life feeling my way by that thread, knowing that somehow, somewhere, it will bring me back to you again. If you know about that thread too then that is what we give to each other, our knowledge that our hands are on the thread.”
“I know about it too,” he replied. “The link is very old and very strong.”
“And yet in the idyl I belong to Charles,” she insisted. “But it is a young love, as the idyl is young, young as Eden.”
“Eden is both old and young,” he told her. “And the idyl too. And the love of a man for his king is as old as either.”
She was silent, then she murmured, “It is cold and I must take Jackie indoors.” The sun was still shining warmly but she was shivering. She might speak bravely but in her physical weakness she was afraid. Would Charles forgive her? If he meant to forgive her and have her with him still would he have asked Lord Taaffe to take Lord Wilmot’s place? But he would forgive her for the idyl’s sake, and was she not his wife and Jackie’s mother?
They walked back along the lime avenue to the Palace, Jackie trotting after them kicking up his leaves, and Lucy asked about Lord Wilmot. Had he been with the King all through that dreadful journey?
br /> “They could not always keep together,” said Lord Taaffe. “At one time Buckingham had to go one way and Wilmot another while Loyal Royalists who knew the country had to guide and keep His Majesty. But Wilmot told me how at one point he and the King met again at Moseley Hall. I think he will never forget it. The King came in out of the darkness limping and leaning on a stick, an old greasy hat pulled down over his face that was lined and haggard as that of an old man. When Wilmot got him to his bedchamber he found him in a dreadful state. His feet blistered and bleeding, his shirt soaked with rain. He was so bewildered with exhaustion that he could not be persuaded to let go of the thorn stick that had been his best friend for so long. Yet when Wilmot knelt at his feet to help him he knew who he was and bent down and kissed his cheek.” He paused and burst out, “Would to God I had been with the King on that journey. Did no man of all the fools with him even know how to look after his feet?”
Lucy was crying silently, her Eden love welling up in her as she pictured the scene. She wanted to have her husband in her arms again to love him and look after him and heal his wounds of mind and soul and body. But would he want that? The Valley of Roses was a long time ago.