5
Back again in Brussels Lucy found that Mary had been longing for her. When she arrived Mary ran to her and buried her face in her mother’s cloak. Lucy had to sit down and take the child on her lap before she could lift the small face and look at it. Tears were running down Mary’s face but she was making no sound. “Has she been well, Anne?” Lucy asked.
Anne looked round from her boisterous reunion with Jackie to say, “Quite well, and good and sensible, but very quiet. It has been her first parting from you, madam.”
Lucy was astonished. She had not known that Mary loved her so much. Then as the days passed, and Mary trotted after her wherever she went about their rooms, she began to understand from her daughter’s stumbling conversation that she and Anne had been entertaining a visitor in her absence, a man who had come with the other man in the coach but not gone away in it with maman and Jackie. He had given Mary sugar plums but Mary “not like.” It was plain that the little girl was disturbed and had feared this man. Yet unlike the highly-strung Jackie she was never afraid. “And I had a bad dream,” she whispered to her mother.
“What was it, my darling?”
But Mary once more hid her face against her mother, clinging like a bur, and she could not tell. Lucy asked Anne, “Who is this man Mary talks about?”
“Mr. Prodgers, madam,” said Anne cheerfully. “He came here with Captain O’Neil on some business for His Majesty and came in several times to see me and Mary.”
“Why did you not tell me before?”
“I would have told you in good time, madam.”
“And if he came with Captain O’Neil why did he not ask to see me before I left?”
“I do not know, madam.”
“Is he still in Brussels?”
“I do not know. I have not seen him again.”
“Did Captain O’Neil, after he brought me back here, go and see him before returning to the King?”
“Madam, how can I tell you when I do not even know if he stayed in Brussels?”
“Anne, what was this nightmare that frightened Mary?”
“Did she have a nightmare? Poor poppet, I did not know. It may have been because she missed you; that and too many sugar plums from Mr. Prodgers.”
Lucy told herself that she was a fool to be suddenly so suspicious of she knew not what. And why torment poor Anne about it? It was nothing to do with her.
Yet as autumn passed into winter Lucy found herself once more shunned by friends whom she had made; and Jackie and Mary were no longer welcome at their houses to play with their children. The rumours had begun again. Her sense of alienation and homelessness, rooted not only in the fact that her husband had repudiated her but perhaps even more in the fact that her husband was not her husband, deepened into a darkness of the mind that not even her children could alleviate.
At last one day she could not bear it and she went to see Sir Henry de Vic and told him about the rumours. He had of course heard them and had been distressed. When Lucy told him they were unfounded he believed her, for he knew her well enough now to trust as well as love her. His faith and affection were more to her that day than just a candleflame of kindness; it was as though from her own outer darkness she looked through a half-open door into a warm firelit home. Before she knew what she was doing she told him all her troubles; though not about her marriage to the King that was not a marriage, for Charles would not wish that. Sir Henry held her hand as they sat before the fire but was silent for a time. “These rumours must be stopped,” he said at last. “My dear, I must think. Come again tomorrow.” Then he sent her home in his coach and did his thinking.
When she came again he said, “Lucy, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?”
The room swam round Lucy. A voice hammered in her brain, “Charles, I belong to Charles,” and yet at the same time the door that had been half-open swung wide and the warmth that flooded out was hardly to be distinguished from the flood of warm tears that was rising in her. She could not speak and Sir Henry misconstrued her silence.
“I am an old man, I know, but I can protect you and the children whom I also love.”
Sir Henry was not a Welshman and was astonished to find Lucy sobbing on the floor at his feet, her head on the arms she had laid across his knees. He could not know it was the position she had taken up years ago in the harness room at Broad Clyst, with William when he had warned her that Charles would bring her only sorrow, but he sensed that she had come to him as a terrified child to its father and his hands were on her hair in the manner of a father. Yet he had no more parted her from Charles than William had done years ago.
“You are good,” she said when the tears were over, “and I want to marry you. It will be peace and safety for me and the children and I could make you happy. If I did not believe I could make you happy I could not do it.”
“You will make me happy,” he assured her.
“But Charles,” she said. “It seems as though I am still his property. I cannot do it without his permission.”
“It should be easy to come by. The King is my good friend and he has always shown me kindness. It is best, I think, that we should go ourselves to see him. Letters can be misconstrued. He is at Cologne now but you will not get my old bones on the road in this weather. As soon as it improves we will go. Meanwhile you and I and the children will be seen together as much as possible, and that will give you some protection from the rumours.”
Actually it only changed their tenor. Sir Henry’s kindliness had already won him the reputation of being a good-natured old fool, and the fact that Lucy was now obviously under his protection did not improve her reputation but merely worsened his. He was an old dotard. Could he not see what the girl was? Brussels hummed with gossip that spread to The Hague. The Queen of Bohemia heard it, and through her Princess Mary, and through her the King, who felt a bitter anger. The sadness of his parting with Lucy had made him miserable for days; yet she had gone straight back to de Vic. And de Vic was his friend, he had thought. Who else among his friends was going to grab his girl? The surface of his mind was so busy grappling with his many problems that he failed to notice the running to and fro of the thoughts below. The surface of his mind had repudiated Lucy. The thoughts below made possessive circles about her.
As soon as the weather improved Lucy and Sir Henry set out. Lucy would not leave Mary behind so Anne and both children travelled with them, and when Sir Henry and Lucy went to visit the King they took Jackie with them so that his father should see him again. It was Sir Henry’s kindly thought and not a very subtle one. When Charles saw his son come in holding the hands of his mother on one side and Sir Henry on the other jealousy boiled up in him. Jackie made it worse by not immediately running to his father. He was going through a period of shyness. He smiled at Shir Da, then finding that his mother had withdrawn her support to make her curtsey he clung with both hands to Sir Henry. It appeared that he had now found the father figure he had craved.
“Jackie, make your bow to His Majesty,” said Lucy, and Jackie came forward and bowed and then looked at his father with a face of delight. But the harm was done.
Charles might have been kinder had he been feeling less wretched, but his own life just now was a very fair imitation of hell. The young Duke of Gloucester, set free at last and returned to his mother, had been nearly torn in pieces as the focus of a great war of religion. Who was to have his soul, his mother or Dr. Cosin? Large forces had been embattled upon each side, no holds had been barred, and for the exiled King, only able to express himself upon paper, it had not been funny. Prince Henry was now safe from his Catholic mother in the care of his Protestant sister, but the King had other troubles. All his plans were turning to dust and ashes, all his hopes withering, and he could never forget day or night that in England men who worked for him were imprisoned, were tortured, and died. It was no moment for him to be confronted with Lucy
and Sir Henry and with anger and contempt he refused their request.
“Why have you left your post in Brussels without my permission?” he demanded of Sir Henry. “I ask that you will return there immediately.”
The terrible little interview lasted only ten minutes, then the King rang the silver bell and they were dismissed. He made no attempt to keep Jackie with him. He simply wanted the three of them out of his sight as quickly as possible.
At the inn, before they started their journey back to Brussels, Sir Henry was at first almost incoherent with anger. “What right has he to forbid us to marry?” he kept asking Lucy. “Is your happiness nothing to him? We will marry. We have a perfect right to do so.”
“Your career will be wrecked,” Lucy told him. “Charles is King and I discovered long ago that when he thinks of himself as King he deifies himself. In letting me keep Jackie he did not do that. He thought of himself then, I think, simply as a man who had done me wrong. Now he has acted as King.”
“We will marry,” repeated Sir Henry.
“No,” said Lucy, white-faced and obstinate. “I cannot do it.”
The door that had opened showing her warmth and light and safety was closing, yet she felt something almost like relief. Her hidden thoughts too, like those of Charles, made rings about him in the deep places of her mind. Down there he was her husband still.
Fifteen
1
After the return from Cologne Lucy found life in Brussels impossible. Sir Henry was perpetually worrying about her and begging her to reconsider her decision. For his sake chiefly she wanted to go, but she found she longed for The Hague again. It was the nearest thing to home and she was gasping for fresher air, Betje and the sight of the sea. The rumours, she was sure, would have died down by this time. Anne too was quite ready to leave Brussels, but she wanted to see Antwerp. “Perhaps one day,” said Lucy. “But now I believe I would feel better if I could go back to The Hague.”
Betje found them lodgings at the edge of the town, near the woods and not too far from the sea. The wind found them there. On stormy nights it roared through the trees and on still nights, if she leaned out of her window, Lucy could faintly hear the sound of the waves. She revived enough to take the children to visit Betje and Vrouw Flinck at Scheveningen, and to walk with them in the woods. Seeing their delight in sands and sea and trees she thought of herself and Justus and was back again in their childhood at Roch.
She was happy too because Charles had promised her a pension of four hundred pounds a year. She thought she knew why he had done it. He had refused her the security of marriage to Sir Henry de Vic and he wanted to make some reparation. She was touched and deeply grateful and with her thoughts circling back to Roch she relived the days of their idyl. When she could not sleep at night she would turn over the happy memories as though they were the pages of a missal, so often and so imaginatively that the boy Charles seemed to come alive again. “But he has never died,” she told herself. “If our life is the whole of our life, then the whole person is the child and the boy, and the young man growing into the old man, who gropes his way through the shadows of the last wood to find the child laughing on the sands.”
She was happy, as though spring were in the air, and she hoped that no one except Vrouw Flinck and Betje knew she had returned to The Hague. Anne seemed happy too. She enjoyed shopping at The Hague and visiting her friends there, and Lucy did not want her to be bored and gave her all the freedom she wanted. There was no boredom for Lucy in the quiet days but they were too good to last, for the fact that there are a few people in the world who enjoy being alone is not understood by the majority of the human race.
“Pray heaven that is no one to see me,” Lucy said to herself one sunny autumn afternoon. Anne was out and she was sitting at the edge of the woods with her sewing, with the children playing near her. They were seven and five years old now and they played well together. Jackie gave the orders and Mary obeyed with loving care. Jackie was good at giving orders. There was no need to guess which of Lucy’s two children was of royal blood.
“No one I know,” she decided with deep relief. From where she sat she could see through the trees the house where they lodged, a pleasant house with a pretty garden, and she could see the man who had just fastened his horse to the post beside the garden gate and was walking up the path between the autumn flowers, a tall well-dressed man whose imperious knock she could hear from where she sat. She did not know him and dropped her eyes thankfully to her work. He had probably come to ask for lodgings, which he could not have, for she, Anne and the children and the landlady and her husband filled the little house to capacity; and that also was a matter for satisfaction.
She had always liked men better than women, and she still did, but she did nowadays sometimes wonder whether they were worth the devastation they caused, and, surprised at herself, wonder also if she was about to join that large company of unmarried women who thank heaven fasting for the single state. Yet when she faced the question squarely she realized that the Queen of Bohemia had been right when she told her she would never regret Charles. He was a part of her and she had lived, and was living now, far more deeply because of him. And suffering was a part of deep living; living without suffering was like paddling in the shallows. Sometimes she wondered humbly how Charles felt about her now. Was she simply a little jade whom he regretted or was she a part of him still? She knew how Lord Taaffe felt about her. He had parted from her but he kept his hand upon the thread.
There was a crunching of dry autumn leaves beneath heavy boots and looking up she saw the tall man coming towards her through the trees. For a moment she was filled with dismay. Dear heaven, not another man! Not another! Then she took heart again. The landlady had perhaps gone out. Simply a stranger who had had no answer to his knock. Reassured, she smiled charmingly up at him as he stood before her, smiling charmingly down at her. It was no good. She did like men.
A dark handsome man, wearing a green coat and scarlet waistcoat, yaffingale colours, and carrying his large feathered hat in his hand, a man who would soon be too stout and too florid but was at the moment still keeping a firm hold of the splendour of his prime. His moustaches had a fine twirl to them and he wore a small pointed beard. Nothing was familiar about him except his merry dark eyes, his crooked smile and his bright clothes, but they were familiar and somewhere larks were singing, as they used to do in Seven Dials meadow that bordered the village of St. Giles. This man was not an unwanted intrusion from the future but, like Smuts, a messenger of spring coming to her from the past.
“Tom!” she cried. “Tom Howard.”
He sat down beside her and they both began to laugh, since the memories they shared were those of childhood and comedy. They remembered the coach in which Nan-Nan and Lucy and the three boys had driven from Covent Garden to St. Giles, with the coachman tied up in the boot, Tom on the box and Justus blowing the horn. They remembered watching Prince Charles come up the river in the royal barge, and the unicorn wood and its magic.
“And now here we are,” said Tom, “exiled in a foreign land, in another wood, with a whole waste of years and a fearful war between that wood and this.”
“Nevertheless we are still ourselves,” said Lucy. “That is what is so lovely about meeting old friends again. They may have put on weight, or lost it, they may have changed, but never out of recognition. They are their eternal selves.” She paused. “Do you know, meeting an old friend again makes me feel almost as though I had met God.”
Tom Howard had always patiently ignored Lucy’s flights of fancy and was himself still. “Yes, I have put on weight damnably,” he agreed, “and you will wonder how I have done it. I am now in the service of the Princess of Orange. I am Colonel Howard, her Master of the Horse. Amongst us, Lucy, you can always tell if a man is in the service of the King alone or of the Princess too. It is a matter of girth.”
“I have noticed that,” s
aid Lucy. “Tom, these are my children.”
Jackie and Mary had left their game to look at the gorgeous man in green and scarlet. They made their bow and wobbly curtsey. Tom was not very good with children. He poked Jackie in the chest and chucked Mary under the chin but did not know what else to do with them. They suffered this and then with dignity they withdrew. They knew the man meant well but they did not like being treated that way just because they were smaller than he was. It hurt their dignity. They were, whatever their size, themselves. And so, to keep those selves inviolate, they withdrew.
Presently Lucy and Tom strolled a little way through the woods, though Lucy cleverly directed their steps so that she always had the children in sight. Tom thought it was he who directed their steps. He had Lucy’s arm in his and kept it pressed hard against his side. “Do you remember how I used to call you my little wife?” he asked with melting tenderness.
Lucy came to a dead stop. “Now listen, Tom,” she said. “You will not, while we are together at The Hague, usurp any of the privileges of a husband.”
Tom laughed. His laugh, that once had been high and gay, had now, with growing weight, fallen to a lower register and become a subterranean rumble. “I have an excellent wife, and down in the town here there is a pretty little girl who—”
“Thank you, Tom,” Lucy interrupted. “Now that things are clear between us shall we walk on? How did you know I was living here?”
“People talk of you,” said Tom carefully. “Why do you live so far out from town?”