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

carefully brought up in youth, the cherished child of parents whom the breath of scandal had never touched. But his father’s murderers had changed all that. At sixteen he had lived with rough soldiers, then had been thrown upon a foreign world with nothing but his charm, a strong constitution and his nimble wits to help him. “When I first saw you I wrote to Ned Hyde, my Chancellor, that I must be the worst man living if I proved not a good husband to you; and I meant it,” was all he could think of to say in expiation.
    “But you will not keep your good resolution.” Suddenly, impulsively, Catherine was plucking with conjugal intimacy at the fine laces of his cravat. “Oh, Charles, how can you expect me to be civil to a woman whom you have had the same pleasures with — said the same things to?”
    “Not at all the same, I warrant you! And if you love me as you protest you do, how can you refuse the first distasteful thing I ask you to do? Barbara Castlemaine has promised that if you will take her into your household she will behave herself with every humility and do your bidding in all things.”
    “So she herself plagued you into making this shameful appointment. That night you left me alone to go to Westminster — on State business.”
    “There was neglected business enough!” protested Charles, surprised at her acumen.
    But, feeling herself to be grossly deceived, Catherine would believe him in nothing. “How could you go straight to her when we — had just been so happy?”
    He walked towards the window. So much had gone to the making of his complex character that good and bad now mingled in him beyond either his caring or his comprehension; but looking back to that hard struggle with Conscience he remembered how his whole nature had been torn. “She was about to be brought to bed of my child,” he said.
    Catherine’s hands flew to her breast. “Even that — before me ,” she moaned, almost inaudibly.
    He had lived according to his lights, taking it for granted that princes should enjoy traditional privileges, and it was not easy for him to express the contrition which he felt. For a long time there was silence in the pleasant room garnished with exquisite furnishings. And the little bride for whom he had so carefully selected them all sat rigid in a high backed chair beside a backgammon board where the flung dice still lay as he had left them when he had broken off a game to make love to her. “And as a reward for filching my right — for forestalling what might have been my supreme happiness — your trollop is to be brought here — where you can see her whenever it pleases you,” she was saying, fumbling exasperatingly for each word in slow, ill pronounced English.
    Charles knew that he was behaving like a brute, but the woman who had held him in thrall for so long had nagged him to it. “Barbara is in trouble —” he began.
    With a shrill spurt of laughter his wife swept the backgammon dice spinning to the floor. “One would imagine so!” she jeered, having, it would appear, learned more of the English idiom than he had supposed.
    “Her husband has left her and disowned the child,” he explained, reddening with annoyance.
    “One can but commend his sense of decency. Some of us are not of the stuff of which complaisant cuckolds are made. But you Stuarts seem to think you can buy anybody’s soul with a title!”
    “Hold your peace and do as you are bid!” Charles shouted back in execrable Spanish. “A public rebuff from you would leave Lady Castlemaine the butt of every cheap wit in the country, and she is a proud woman.”
    “So am I — and with more reason.”
    “But not over merciful.”
    “Is no mercy to be spared for me?”
    In her desperate fury Catherine had thrown discretion to the winds and Charles, who had expected nothing but gentle acquiescence from her, was amazed. “Have I ever been ungenerous to you? Can you not come down off your righteous pedestal and put