Lucy found they were out on the water, the warder still with them, moving swiftly down the river towards the waiting ship. Jackie was cuddled up against her with his puppy in his arms, and Anne and Mary held together for warmth under Anne’s cloak.
“Maman,” said Jackie suddenly, “what day is it?”
“It is Thursday, July the sixteenth,” said Lucy.
“Thursday July the sixteenth,” repeated Jackie thoughtfully. “I will not forget that date.”
Seventeen
1
Charles never saw Lucy again and he did not forgive her for taking Jackie to England. The letter she wrote him from London, trying to explain how it had happened, arrived not long after one in a similar vein from Smuts Harvey; but that letter came only one day after Charles had been told that Mr. Harvey, the nephew of his father’s doctor and a member of a loyal Royalist family, to whom he had gone in absolute trust when he arrived in Antwerp, was a Parliament man.
It was only one step from there to think he was a spy like Howard. And only one step further to think that Lucy herself was in the pay of Howard and Harvey and had been used by them to spy upon him. Her marvellous charm during the day and night in the peaceful house at Antwerp had had its purpose and he wished he could remember what he had been fool enough to say to her there. And he wished he knew what she had said about him in London. That it had been useful to Cromwell he did not doubt since she had so soon been set free. When, later, plans for an invasion once more went wrong and good men suffered torture and imprisonment he did not hold her guiltless.
And now it was not only men like Prodgers and O’Neil who implored him at all cost to get his son away from Mrs. Barlow. The Marquis of Ormonde and Sir Edward Hyde were doing the same thing. That the King should have gone to Antwerp with the express purpose of taking Jackie from his mother, and instead had spent the night with her, leaving her house without the boy and minus the diamond brooch which had been supplied for purposes of bribery, had shaken them. They had known their sovereign to be weak where women were concerned but that he could be quite as helpless as this they had not known. If only to part the King from Mrs. Barlow her son had better leave her and come to the King.
Charles now agreed with them. Because he believed she had betrayed him, and because this treachery was the bitterest of all, his thoughts of Lucy were equally bitter. They were to get the boy from her, he said, by whatever means they chose so long as they were not cruel. He took the initial step. He commanded Lucy, Anne and the two children to lodge in Brussels in the house of Sir Arthur and Lady Slingsby, loyal Royalists who were, he had been assured, kind as well as loyal, and then he washed his hands of the whole business.
Lucy obeyed his command. The house was a pleasant one adjoining the park but she found herself virtually in prison, and she did not find Sir Arthur and Lady Slingsby kindly people. The task of getting Jackie from her was their responsibility but they had the help of Edward Prodgers and Captain O’Neil. The royal command of no cruelty they interpreted as meaning that physical force must not be used. Lucy must consent to part with the boy. The winning of this consent by mental cruelty did not, to their way of thinking, come under the heading of cruelty at all, and Lucy was subjected to the whole range of its pressure.
She retained her courage but not her common sense. Her mind had become confused under the pressure of illness and anxiety and she could not see that Jackie’s only hope lay now, and not at some future date, with his father. She could only see that she must not give him into the hands of these evil men about her. She saw them now as wholly evil and Anne agreed with her and encouraged her in her refusal to part with her son.
Anne had broken free from Prodgers and would no longer speak to him. After a brief, bitter quarrel she had told him that unknown to Lucy she had written to the King and told His Majesty how he had been deceived. Prodgers had merely laughed. “I thought you might do that,” he had said. “You have much courage, my girl, and I admire you for it. His Majesty would not take your word against mine, I believe, but to be on the safe side I spoke a warning word to his secretary.”
Colonel Howard came to Brussels but Lucy refused to see him. Richard, because he worked with Tom, she would not see either. Dewi, who had found work as a groom at a big house in Brussels in order to be near her, she was allowed to see occasionally and his love was a comfort.
But poor Dewi found himself in a cleft stick. His loyalty to Lucy conflicted now with his loyalty to the King and his love for Charles was part of him. He could only live with his dilemma by refusing to think it out. As his intellectual powers were not great this was not too difficult, but the unresolved conflict made him irritable and his temper was in a permanently volcanic state. He had discovered now that Tom was a spy and he hated him for it but cautioned by Richard he kept out of his way. Then, one evening at dusk, they met in a lonely street. They quarrelled and Dewi went berserk and shot Tom, wounding him badly. Poor Tom took the calamity with humour and recovered. Richard, returning to England, forcibly took Dewi with him and handed him back to Justus, declining to accept future responsibility for him.
Lucy took the horrible business very much to heart and it only increased her mental confusion. One night when Sir Arthur lost his temper, and threatened to put her in prison while he took Jackie from her, she started screaming hysterically and ran out into the street with her son, trying to escape. The pitiful scandal of this was the talk of Brussels and she found that many were on her side. One of them was the Spanish Ambassador, Don Alfonso de Cardenas, and he wrote to Charles telling him of the treatment she had received. But the persecution continued. Some of Lucy’s papers were stolen from her and Prodgers, losing patience at last, made an abortive but terrifying attempt to kidnap Jackie. And then suddenly the unbelievable persecution came to an end, for Lucy yielded.
She was secretly visited by the Marquis of Ormonde. Dismayed by the revelations of the Spanish Ambassador he came himself to enquire into their truth. He talked first with Sir Arthur Slingsby, and heard what he had to say in the icy silence of instant and total dislike. Then he asked to see Mrs. Barlow, steeling himself for the interview with resolution but distaste. Cruelty to a woman must be stopped whatever her lack of moral fibre, but he was not himself attracted to women of her type.
He found the woman lying on a sofa, a typically fibreless position, endeavouring to educate her children with the help of an old hornbook, a bible and a ball of string. The last was perhaps for the making of cat’s-cradles but a little white dog was playing with it on the floor when he entered the room. Education was perhaps not progressing very fast, but he heard the children’s laughter before the door was opened and he was announced. “The Marquis of Ormonde.” There was a moment of shocked silence and then Lucy tried to get up. “Please do not rise, madam,” he said formally. But Lucy struggled up and stood clinging to the back of a chair, looking up at him with terrified eyes.
He looked at her and was conscious of a sudden sense of vertigo. Was this the notorious Mrs. Barlow? Had some appalling mistake been made? Was he in the right room? He must be for here were the two children. His monarch was less of a fool than he had thought. Taaffe also. For a moment his thoughts whirled as madly as a flock of disturbed birds, then suddenly settled as he took his habitual command of himself, the persons present and the situation. But even with the persons seated and the situation in perspective uneasiness remained. There was somewhere, concealed like a snake in the grass, an appalling mistake.
He talked gently for a few moments, admiring the children and the dog, and Lucy found her terror dying away. For this was Lord Ormonde, one of Charles’s greatest servants and Lord Taaffe’s hero, and like all the truly great he had a quality of courteous humility that gave ease to the heart. Presently Anne took the children away and they were alone.
“He is a very beautiful boy, madam,” said Lord Ormonde gravely.
He was so gentle that Lucy did no
t find it difficult to ask a direct question. “Has your lordship come to take him away from me?”
He was equally direct. “Not without your permission. I have come primarily because I have heard that too hard a pressure has been put upon you in this matter. It is undoubtedly urgent but no urgency justifies cruelty.”
“There has been no physical cruelty,” said Lucy, “and for the rest, I would rather not talk of it. But is it not always cruel to separate a child from his mother?”
“Against her wish, yes. With her understanding and co-operation, no.”
“You spoke of urgency. Do you think it an urgent matter that Jackie should be taken from me?”
“Yes, I do. The boy is a bundle of nerves. Do you not realize it? His father can give him a good education and a settled home. What can you offer him?”
Lucy evaded the question. “What education? What home?” she asked.
“The King has in mind a little school near Versailles where a group of children of noble rank are taught under the care of the Ecclesiastics of Port Royal. It is a good school and he would be with boys of his own age. And the home would be with his grandmother.”
“Would the Queen make him a Catholic?” asked Lucy.
A twinkle was seen in the Marquis’s kind eyes. “Not if Dr. Cosin could prevent it, madam. It would be a case of which of the two could move first and fastest.”
Lucy smiled and a small glow of happiness came to her, the first for months. It was the mention of Dr. Cosin. He had passed entirely from her life but now she remembered him sitting in his shabby study, with Jackie playing on the floor. And she saw Jackie running in the gardens of the Louvre that he had loved, and remembered how he had cried when they had left Paris. And he had loved his grandmother too, and his little Aunt Minette.
Her clouded mind had begun to clear a little. The struggle for Jackie had been between herself and men whom she thought of as wholly bad. It had seemed a struggle with evil. She had forgotten what might lie behind the evil facade; Dr. Cosin, gold leaves drifting in a garden, a kindly grandmother, a minute but motherly aunt, a good school. Phrases that people had used about her son stabbed her mind. “The little brat. Totally ignorant. A spoilt child. A bundle of nerves.” Her mind was clearing. The Marquis realized that change was in the air, one of those changes that shape history. Only a change of mind, a reorientation of a tortured human spirit, but who can tell where such a change will take many lives? He sat in silence and waited.
“Can you take him yourself?” she whispered.
“Hardly, for I must leave tomorrow. The boy needs assurance of the happiness to which he goes. At present he is terrified and it will not be easy to bring him from one frame of mind to another. Only you can do it.”
“I cannot hand him over to any of the men here.”
“Indeed, you cannot. I will talk to the King. We must send the right man to fetch the boy, someone who will inspire his love and confidence. And for yourself, madam, I can assure you that you will suffer no more persecution.” He paused and added grimly, “I shall take pleasure in making that absolutely certain.” He got up. “Do you wish to see me again?”
She shook her head and then asked, “Are you trusting me?”
“Absolutely. You have seen what is for the boy’s good and are a mother capable of sacrifice. And the boy is worth it. Your little daughter, madam, also commands my admiration. The eyes of a very wise woman look out from her child’s face. I congratulate you on your children, and your children on their mother.”
He bowed and left her, but not without a raft to cling to in the storm of misery breaking over her. She was trusted to be a good mother.
But the waiting time was hard, especially when news came of the death of Lord Wilmot. She mourned for her kind friend, and remembered the lament for Sion that Geraint the Harper had sung at Golden Grove:
Yesterday at home, proudly;
And today, under the shroud.
Men who are youthful and brave
Go early up to heaven . . .
That he should die so young, who might have lived had times been happier, seemed an epitome of the experience of them all. Their lives had gone awry because the times were twisted. And the times were twisted because men’s thoughts, that should have been lifting straight upwards to God like larks to the sun, moved only in evil spirals about themselves. Yet perhaps Lord Wilmot, set free, was more fortunate than poor Tom. Somehow because Lord Wilmot had died her heart began to soften towards Tom.
She prepared Jackie as well and selflessly as she could. Whether the King intended that she should be totally parted from him she did not know, but she let him think that they would see each other again. He could remember the Louvre, she found, and his grandmother and Minette, and they were happy memories because they were memories of safety. He had felt very secure in the big house that kept things out, and in the gardens where he played in a silence soft as a feather bed. He seemed to dread school only a little, for he wished to play with other boys. He was sorry he would see maman only occasionally but her spoiling had bred selfishness in him and he was getting fretted by her perpetual headaches, and Anne scolding him and telling him to be quiet.
He was in fact growing up and becoming conscious of his superior sex and there were times when females wearied him, and when a cheerful young man called Thomas Ross, a gentleman of the King’s bedchamber, arrived to take him to Shir Da he took an instant fancy to him. And so did Lucy. Charles and Lord Ormonde had chosen their man well. He had a kind, amused, sensible face and there was about him a feeling of wholesome strength and goodness that was balm after Prodgers and O’Neil. He stayed with them for a couple of nights and listened patiently to all Lucy’s pathetic instructions in regard to Jackie’s feeding, ailments, nightmares, sensitiveness, tastes and tempers.
The last night came and Lucy took her marriage certificate that Prodgers had looked for endlessly and never found, from the lining of her corsets and sewed it into the lining of Jackie’s new blue doublet, that he would not grow out of for some while because it was too large, and told him he must keep it secret for the present but never part with it.
He listened to her with great round eyes. By some alchemy of grief working upon the clouded mind of a sick woman she had come round in a circle to believe that the certificate recorded a real marriage. Jackie thought so too. He was very certain now of his own importance and it upheld him in the moment of parting from maman. For in spite of having Snowy in his arms and of knowing it was right that the King’s son, together with his dog, should enter now into a man’s world, and in spite of the fact that maman did not cry at all when she said goodbye, and that the last memory he had of her was her lovely smiling face, the blue eyes full of light, being taken from her was a dreadful moment. As the coach rattled away he gasped, but Thomas Ross’s strong arm came round him as he whispered in the boy’s ear, “The King said I was to buy you a little sword. Shall we go and choose it?”
Pushing Anne away Lucy went straight upstairs and fell on her bed. She lay there for days in a daze of grief and exhaustion and seemed hardly aware that Mary sat beside her all the time, trying to get the Lord’s prayer properly by heart from her hornbook. She was a poor scholar but she thought it would please maman, when she was better again, to find that her daughter could at last say it through correctly. Also she had an idea, never to leave her, that saying one’s prayers was the best thing to do in desolation.
At the end of four days Lucy sat up and said she was going to The Hague.
“Think of the journey, madam!” said Anne, aghast.
“If I stay longer in Brussels I shall go mad,” said Lucy. “I want the storks. There was a stork at Roch. A little one in the kitchen.”
She was unreasonable in her grief and poor Anne packed their belongings, hired a coach and they set forth. Lucy survived the journey with surprising resilience. Actually there was something abou
t a journey that always had a tonic effect upon her. The sense of movement, of road or river passing away behind her yet unrolling its newness like an unfolding map, always gave her a sense of hope. You suffer to the point of agony but you pass on. And still on. The lovely horizon recedes but a day will come when it will not do so. Time and space will be outdistanced and the road pass off the map.
They went to the farm at Scheveningen and it was spring. Lucy revived enough to go out on the dunes, where she would sit for hours watching the sea. They might have stayed all the summer but Vrouw Flinck and Betje still did not like Anne. She was patient under their dislike but she was not happy, and her happiness mattered supremely to Lucy.
They found a tiny house at The Hague beside a canal. It had windows that caught the sunlight and storks walked up and down outside the front door. Mrs. Barlow had been forgotten in a fresh crop of stories about someone else and no one realized Lucy’s identity. Anne was happy now with all the work of the house to do, and Lucy sat at the open window of her parlour and watched her daughter playing beside the canal with other children.
Mary loved helping Anne with the housework, and doing lessons with her mother, but she was friendly and she liked to have companions in her play. And she talked to all and sundry in a way that her mother found rather alarming. One day Lucy saw her in conversation with an old man who leaned upon a stick, and then she saw them walking away together hand in hand. In a panic she called Anne, who ran after them. She came back not having caught the truant but with reassuring information about the old man, gathered from neighbours.