With All My Heart by Margaret Campbell Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

stormed Charles.
    “And I am your wife and it is meet that you should not try to humiliate me,” cried Catherine.
    “No one is trying to humiliate you. But surely that pompous brother of yours taught you that a King must remember services rendered. I tell you Lady Castlemaine’s father was killed in my father’s defence.”
    “And I tell you your consideration for her has nothing to do with so respectable a service. It is because she is your mistress. And I will not have the woman in my household!”
    They stood facing each other across the great crimson bridal bed, resentfully conscious of how recently they had lain there enamoured in each other’s arms, and secretly shocked to find themselves hurting each other with bitter words. Quarrelling like any brow-beating City merchant and his shrewish wife.
    Charles’s face was white beneath his summer tan, and twin red spots of temper flamed on Catherine’s cheek-bones. His voice was blustering and hers was harsh. In a few brief hours the beauty of their honeymoon happiness had been torn to shreds and their raised voices carried through closed doors so that frightened Portuguese waiting women wrung their hands, and grooms-of-the-bedchamber, accustomed to the imperturbable good humour of their master, listened in excited groups. Already, although they could not hear their betters’ actual words, they had started the rumour of royal domestic strife which ran like wild-fire through the galleries and backstairs of the old Tudor palace, to be borne hotfoot along Surrey lanes and spilled before morning into the gossip loving streets of London and the astounded courts of Whitehall.
    As if aware of this, Charles, who loathed ill manners, took a belated grip upon his dignity. “So you know?” he said, more quietly.
    Catherine nodded, her mouth set in outraged self-righteousness. And the very fact that she had every reason to be both outraged and self-righteous made him all the angrier. “Surely you did not suppose that I waited like a monk until my Ministers saw fit to fix up some political marriage for me?” he demanded sulkily.
    Poor Catherine made a brief, infinitely pathetic gesture with her little hands. “I — scarcely understood enough — to suppose anything,” she murmured, great tears welling in her lovely eyes.
    Better than anyone in the world, Charles saw the truth of it. Her innocence had been his keen delight, and was now become in some sort his shame. Because it was not in his nature to be deliberately cruel, he went and sat upon her side of the bed and took her hands in his. “My poor child, I love you the better for it,” he assured her remorsefully. “But now that you have been out in the world a while surely you realize that I must have had other women before you came?”
    “Have I ever reproached you for that?” she asked, remembering her immature jealousy of Jane Lane and some Dutch princess he had wanted, and standing unresponsively before him.
    “You have been the very soul of tact and sweetness. But why this obstinate antagonism against one woman now?”
    “My mother told me that what was past is none of my business. And when donna Elvira called you profligate —”
    “The sex-dried old grimalkin!”
    “I pointed out that you had had an unfortunate life —”
    “You all appear to have discussed me very thoroughly — in spite of your need for my battleships!”
    “But I did not think that now , since you are married ... and, in any case, that type of woman one does not receive. ”
    Even Charles’s wrath and determination to get his own way had to melt into amusement at her stiff, disdainful dignity, which he guessed to be an exact replica of his mother-in-law’s. But what to do when his way of life and his wife’s were so incongruously opposed? Could. one ever hope to reconcile the strict chastity of a convent-bred girl with the easy morals of the French Court which had influenced his own adolescence? True, he, too, had been