She lay without strength to move in the bed, save for the restless turning of her head upon the pillow. Her body, burned with fever, barely lifted the bedclothes. Her mouth was scorched as though with fire and bitter as gall. She was racked, every limb; her head was splitting as though the executioner stood by and hacked with a sword. Now and again her lids just lifted upon a room full of people; they were all in black; and the sound they made fell into a form she knew well... she knew then that she was dead and they mourning.
But for the most part she wandered in darkness, wailing weakly for home. And sometimes she would be home. She would be walking in the gardens of the Villa Viçosa. She walked up the garden path and came to the great door of the house. The door was shut. She was glad it was shut... behind that door—empty sockets, grinning jaw—Death waited. She turned; she ran. She chose a quite different path; it ran in the opposite direction. The path led her to that same door. Again she turned and ran; but whichever path she chose led her to the door.
The door began to open slowly. She turned about; this time she did not run, she flew; flew like an angel floating above the ground.
Her hair grew thick-tangled, matted with sweat; she could not endure its weight; still less the touch of the comb. The lightest touch, and she screamed with pain. Her hair. It troubled her. Between sleeping and waking she heard a voice. St. Catherine said, You are overproud of your one poor beauty. God will find you fairer without it. And though she tried to shut her ears, still the voice came clear. She was to offer her hair—a sacrifice.
The room bobbed up suddenly; she shut her eyes against the light. Her head felt strange... light... empty. She put up a hand. Her hair was gone. She let out a great cry. She opened her eyes again. Someone was sitting beside the bed. It was Charles. He said, ‘You begged us to cut your hair; you kept begging. But, indeed, we could do no other, so heavy it was and tangled. It has begun to grow already; soon it will be as pretty as ever; you will see!’
She did not believe that; she put up her hand again as though to comfort the poor head; now she felt the little lace cap through which the hair-stubble pricked.
‘A holy relic of St. Catherine, herself. The Pope sent it,’ Charles said.
The door opened gently; Penalva came into the room. She took Charles’ place by the bed. When he had gone Penalva said, ‘He has scarce left your bedside but for business of State. Here he stayed and here he prayed; and here he slept and here he wept.’
Catherine began to weep, herself, all weak as she was, that her gay King should weep for her. But it was wonderful, also. She began to wonder how he found her in looks, hair shaved and—she looked down upon her hands—bone-thin. She was shocked to find her thoughts upon her looks; they should be elsewhere. But all the same she asked for a looking-glass; and though Penalva was not willing, still she had her way.
The skin stretched tight across the bones was grey with angry blotches from unhealed scars. ‘Spotted fever,’ Penalva said. ‘Thank God you are well again.’ But when she saw herself, shaven head beneath the lace cap, the livid spots the only colour in her sick face, she felt herself a figure for laughter, for disgust. She wondered that he, who loved beauty, should endure the sight of her.
Penalva said, ‘The King did more than pray and weep. With his own hands he fed you. And, indeed, Madam my darling, though your wits wandered, you knew the touch of his hands; you would take no food save from him. Had it not been for him you must have died.’
She lay there, the slow tears running down her ruined face and thinking how much better for him had he let her die. So, when he came back she said in her slow English, ‘Never grieve for me. I shall die and it is best. Then you shall marry some other to give you children and bring you happiness.’ And then she said, ‘I would leave the whole world with joy, save for you, for you alone.’
‘I cannot live without you,’ he said; and, for the moment, believed it. And now there came crowding back into the room the priests and nuns, all in black. Charles said, very stern, ‘I have forbidden you this room. You burn up the air; you give Madam the Queen no peace with the noise of your praying and the noise of your weeping.’ He turned to Penalva. ‘Why have they come again?’
‘Sir, it is to say their Farewell; and to give Extreme Unction.’
‘Farewell? Extreme Unction? Madam the Queen is not going to die—not while I am here to keep her alive.’ And with his own hands pushed out those that did not move fast enough for his liking.
When all had gone save the surgeon Prujean and Penalva, he flung the window wide. And when those two remonstrated against the flow of air, ‘The room stinks of their bodies,’ he said. He took his place again in the great chair where, nights on end, he had slept; and, in the cool and the quiet, she fell asleep.
She took her slow way to recovery. When she was a little restored, though weak still, d’Aubigny said, ‘The Queen’s recovery is a miracle from God. Madam, do you return thanks to Him?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And to the King that under Him worked the miracle.’
She was out of danger and Charles might go about his business both lawful and unlawful. The King of England, the French ambassador wrote home, begins the day with tears for the Queen, and ends it laughing with Castlemaine and Stuart. And, certainly, he sickened of the sickroom where she slept for hours on end; sleeping she did not need him.
But, even in sleep, she missed him. She would sigh and wake and ask where he had gone; and, in the shifting glances, read her answer. Grief took her afresh; she had mistaken his pity for love. In her weakness the disappointment was too much. She had lost her child; hatred for the woman that had borne Charles two children, three, perhaps, overcame her. She turned her face to the wall; weeping, she felt life slip from her.
The country waited to hear of her death; but with curiosity rather than pity. Who would be the next Queen? Mr. Pepys, that dressy gentleman, stopped the making of a gay cloak—unwearable if the Queen should die.
Day by day nearer to death.
She asked Charles that her body be sent home. She asked him to stand by Portugal against Spain when she was gone; and, weeping, he promised. She received the last rites and now he did not forbid them.
All was done; she lay waiting for death.
‘She has no will to live,’ her physician told the King. Charles looked down into her unheeding face; already she had gone far from him. She had been sweet and loving and full of hope. And now? Shame and grief overthrew him. Kate... Kate! Her name burst from his lips.
Across the border-line of death she heard his voice. Her eyelids fluttered; she made the faintest movement of the hand towards him. He took it in his own; her eyelids dropped. For five long hours she slept. And all the time he sat unmoving by her bed. When she awoke her feet were set firm in life.
His grief had been deep; but still there were bets made as to its endurance.
She was sitting up in bed weak but clear in mind. She looked at him; for the first time she saw that his hair—the fine dark hair was now completely grey... and he but thirty-three! She put up a hand to touch the once-dark curls; tears of weakness ran down her face.
He guessed the cause—himself had had a pricking on that score; he was not without his vanities. Now he laughed. ‘A grey-haired husband! It will not do.’ He twisted that mobile underlip to a grin. ‘I have so longed to be a gentleman of fashion; but I have begrudged the money. Now with a good conscience I can get me a periwig!’
From that time he wore the fashionable wig and the court copied him—even James whose bright curls needed no addition; but for all that he had them cut. ‘It is as I did say; men do make more vanities than women!’ Catherine told Charles.
Her life was out of danger. The high fever was gone, the scarred face healed, the dark hair already ringing in tendrils. But she was more than ever a sick woman.
Always she had loved children. If a woman could not love her husband, she had thought, then marriage was worthwhile—so there were children. Now, loving her husband with so desperate a love, knowing what a child must mean to him and to England, knowing what the loss might mean to herself—divorce with all its griefs, all its humiliations, she could not endure to face what she had lost. And, it was the more unendurable that the same month of her loss, her enemy had borne a child that might well be the King’s. That woman dropped her bastards as easily as an animal; but for the Queen, difficulty and danger... and loss.
When her anguish was no more to be borne she would lie back in her bed and, this unkind world slipping away she was in another world, blessed as paradise, a world in which her child lay at her breast.
It was a boy strong and lusty and dark like his father. But soon, in this heavenly world, a thorn began to prick. She told Charles her trouble. ‘It is an ugly boy, not worth to be your son, dear love.’
He put his hand upon the small delicate curls of her head. He said, ‘It is a very pretty boy!’ And could not bring himself to look in her face childlike in her weakness. And she, seeing he could not look her in the face, never knowing how much she tormented him, persisted in self-torment. ‘Nay, it is an ugly boy... an ugly boy!’
‘Someone has been telling you the tale of Mam—how when I was born, she, being proud to death and not wishful to show it, wrote to her mother that she was ashamed of her little blackamoor. You have confused yourself in your poor head; ours is a pretty boy—he is like me.’ And he was ashamed of so deceiving her; but Prujean had advised him.
‘If he be like you then he is beautiful!’ She thought of Vandyke’s lovely picture of the little Charles with the dark eyes thoughtful and far-seeing, and the charming, graceful little body—promise of the man he was to be. She lifted his hand and kissed it.
And still she lived in her world of fantasy; it was her shield, lest, coming too soon into life, she died of grief. And, the fantasy strengthening, she believed she had borne yet another child; and another and another; three boys and a girl. ‘The boys are like their father—every one of them!’ she told Penalva happily. ‘And my daughter—’ she was tender over the word, ‘a true Stuart with bright hair and all the Stuart charm—like Madam Minette, the King says.’ And, always upon waking, her first words were, How do the children?
Now she had the will to get strong again. She submitted with patience to their hateful remedies—to the bloody pigeons still warm, applied to her feet, and the noxious physic so that she all-but heaved up her heart. But for the sake of the children she endured it all. In the joy of her children her body grew daily stronger; she did not know that, beyond her doors they whispered, nor that the whisper spread throughout the country, The Queen is mad.
Her sickness did not spare her the duties of a Queen. She was still confined to her bed; but she must receive a visitor new-come from France. She made no demur. She knew well that a prince must live and die in public; must dress and undress, eat and drink, sleep and wake beneath the public eye. The King of Spain, they said, could not ease himself unless two nobles held his chamber-pot.
Charles might not have asked it of her; but when a prince dies the first cry is poison. If she should die his enemies would be quick to say he had rid himself of a barren wife; he had not been—he was the first to admit it—a faithful husband.
Monsieur de Cateu knelt by the Queen’s bed; kissing her limp hand, he brought greetings from his King and Queen; and from Minette, Madame of France. But so weary she was that, before he was finished, she was back in her private heaven. So sick she seemed, so loud the gossip that Monsieur wrote home,
the meanest among the courtiers takes the liberty of marrying his royal master... each according to his own inclination...
These hopes she spoiled by getting well again.
In November, her birthday month, she was strong enough for truth to thrust away fantasy. Then, knowing her dreams for what they were, tears ran down her wasted cheeks; she would sit unmoving, melancholy, withdrawn. Her life was bitter as gall.
Gentle Penalva, brutal with need, goaded her into some sort of action. ‘You leave the King to that woman... and to any other that shall catch his wandering eye. And who shall blame him? He no longer has a wife!’
Even while the tears ran down her wasted cheeks she set her lips and called for her looking-glass. She was shocked by what she saw. Within the hour she had sent for her tailors, for her hair dressers, for her tiring-women and for the barber that concocted her lotions, her creams, her perfumes and her paints. She would welcome death... but she was not willing to die a fright!
She had taken her first steps about her room; she had left her bedchamber to pray in her chapel; she made her first appearance at the court. Everyone—with the exception of the lady and her friends—welcomed her with kindness. James’ wife overdoes her warmth, Catherine thought bitter; a barren Queen is no menace. But the rest pitied her frail air; she had been so near death. Waller, the court poet, made a verse for the occasion. It said how, in all his troubled life, Charles had never wept, save for her, alone.
He that was never known to mourn
So many kingdoms from him torn,
His tears reserved for you, more dear,
More prized than all his kingdoms were.
For when no healing art prevail’d
When cordials and elixirs fail’d,
On your pale cheeks he dropped the shower,
Revived you like a dying flower.
Rochester that was a poet himself did not think much of the verses. But Catherine thought them beautiful and they were true—his tears alone had brought her back to life! She kept them in her prayer-book along with her holy pictures.
On her birthday Charles gave a little ball in her private apartments so that she might sit and enjoy it. It was kindly meant; but there was small comfort in it. To look on while others danced! To know that neither paint nor powder could disguise her ravaged looks. And there they were, the beauties of the court—my lady Chesterfield, my lady Southesk; and that woman in all the splendour of motherhood. But, outshining them all, in her fresh youth, her untouched loveliness—Frances Stuart.
No, the ball was little comfort to a sick woman that had never been a beauty!
Charles tried to pleasure her in small ways. Minette, he wrote, was to send pictures of saints—the finest that might be got—to mark places in the Queen’s prayer-book; they were not to be found in London. She spent too long on her knees, he thought; and told her so roundly. But she was seeking peace and not even in prayer could she find it.
She grew stronger. The new year of ’sixty-four saw her full-recovered, mind and body both. She had faced the truth about the children but without accepting it; in private she still wept her hopeless tears.
‘You are young, Madam my darling,’ Penalva would say. ‘Madam Anne of Austria, when she was Queen of France, was full thirty-five before she was brought to bed of her first child. And, once, started—there was no stopping her.’ And, looking into that downcast face added, a little sharp, ‘However low your heart, show yourself cheerful. The whole world—and the King above all—loves a cheerful face!’
‘Yes,’ the Queen said, ‘yes... But—’ she flared into sudden anger, ‘How? How?’