are not pleased with you, James. You stand for popery and the people in these islands do not like it.”
“What am I to do?”
Charles lifted his shoulders. He too secretly stood for the Catholic Faith; he had even made a bargain with Louis to bring his country back to Catholicism—yet he dealt with these matters shrewdly, graciously, and secretly. Why could not James do the same?
“Act with caution, brother. Stand firm. Remain at Court. Honor your little bride. Let every man know that you realize he envies you the possession of such an exquisite young creature, which I am sure he does. Do your duty. Let the Court and the people know that while she be young and so beautiful and a Catholic she is also fertile. Do this, James, and do it boldly. And, would you like a further word of advice? Then get rid of the mother.”
“But my wife’s great consolation is her mother.”
Charles smiled shrewdly. “It is a fact, brother, that when a Princess comes to a strange land and is a little … recalcitrant, she changes when she is no longer surrounded by relations. The old lady reminds her daughter by her very presence of all that she has missed in her dreary convent. Get rid of the mother, and you will find the daughter becoming more and more reconciled to our merry ways. There is little room for vestal virgins and their dragons here at Whitehall.”
James was silent. Charles who had charmed Mary Beatrice, who conducted his affairs with skill, who was a Catholic at heart and kept the matter secret for the sake of expediency, who had dared make a treaty with France which could have cost him his throne, whose wife was as Catholic and as foreign to Whitehall as Mary Beatrice and yet was in love with him—must understand what was the best way to act.
It was six weeks since Mary Beatrice had arrived in England. Christmas was over and she was astonished at the extravagance with which it had been celebrated. She had discovered that her charming brother-in-law scarcely ever spent his nights with the Queen; that fidelity and chastity in this island were qualities which, among the King’s circle, were regarded with incredulous pity; she was surprised that Queen Catherine longed for her husband’s company almost as intensely as Mary Beatrice prayed she would not have to endure hers; this Court was gay and careless; it was immoral and irreligious. It was all that she had feared it would be and yet she was a little fascinated, if not by it, by certain personalities. The chief of these of course was the King. He was making her fascinated by his Court as she was a little by himself.
When, during the Christmas festivities, she heard her mother was to leave England, she wept bitterly.
Duchess Laura comforted her, pointing out that she could not leave Modena and her son, the young Duke, forever. She had done an unprecedented thing when she had come to England with her young daughter, but now Mary Beatrice was old enough to be left.
“I shall die of sorrow,” declared Mary Beatrice.
“You will do no such thing. You have your friends, and your husband is kind to you.”
Mary Beatrice shivered. Kind he was; but she wished there were no nights. If it were always daytime she could have endured him.
“When you leave me,” she told her mother, “my heart will be completely broken.”
“Extravagant talk,” said the Duchess, but she was worried.
When by the end of December the Duchess had left for Modena, James discovered his wife to be in such a state of melancholy that he wondered whether he should leave her to her Italian women attendants for a few days. It was disconcerting to know that he was almost as great a cause of her wretchedness as her mother’s departure.
A few nights after the Duchess had left, Mary Beatrice said to her husband: “When I am with child as I must soon be, then you need not share my bed.”
James looked at her sadly.
“Then,” he said slowly, “it shall be as you wish.”
Her ladies had prepared her for bed. She shivered as she did every night. Soon he would be there. She anticipated it with horror: his arrival, the departure of the attendants, the dousing of the candles.
He was late. They were chattering away, not noticing, but she did. She must be thankful, she told herself, if the dreaded moments were delayed even for a short while.
They