“You should not be here,” he said. “You should come to Whitehall at once.”
“Nay,” she said, smiling her indolent smile. “Mayhap later. If it could be arranged.”
“But it shall be arranged.”
She laughed. There was no pretence about her. She had been brought up at the French Court. She had all the graces of that Court and she had learned to be practical.
“I am very poor,” she said.
“I heard that you had inherited the whole of your uncle’s fortune.”
“’Twas so,” said Hortense. “Armand, my husband, quickly took possession of it.”
“What! All of it?”
“All of it. But what mattered that? I escaped.”
“We have heard of your adventures, Hortense. I wonder you did not visit me before.”
“Suffice it that I have come now.”
Charles was thinking quickly. She would ask for a pension, and if it were large enough she would move into Whitehall. He must see Danby quickly and something must be arranged. But he would not discuss that with her now. She was Italian, brought up in France, and therefore, indolent as she seemed, she would know how to drive her bargain. It was not that he was averse to discussing money with a woman; but he feared she would ask too much and he be unable to refuse her.
He satisfied himself with contemplating that incomparable beauty and telling himself that she would be his mistress all in good time.
“We should have married,” he said.
“Ah! How it reminds me. And what an enchanting husband you would have made! Far better than Armand who forced me to fly from him.”
“Your uncle would have none of me. He did not wish to give his niece to a wandering prince without a kingdom.”
“’Twas a sad thing that you did not regain your kingdom earlier.”
“I have often thought it … Now, having seen you, I regret it more than ever, since, had I been a King with a country when I asked for your hand, it would not have been refused me.”
“Marie, too, might have been a Queen,” said Hortense. “But our uncle would not let her be. Think of it! Marie might have been Queen of France and I Queen of England—but for Uncle Mazarin.”
Charles looked into her face, marveling at its perfections, but Hortense’s dreamy thoughts were far away. She was thinking of the French Court where she had been brought up with her four sisters, Laura, Olympia, Marie, Mariana. They had all joined in the ballets devised for the little King and his brother Philippe; and her uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, and Louis’ mother, Anne of Austria, had ruled France between them. All the Cardinal’s nieces had been noted for their beauty, but many said that little Hortense was the loveliest of them all. What graces they had learned in that most graceful Court!
She remembered that Louis—impressionable and idealistic—had fallen in love first with Olympia and then more passionately, more seriously with Marie. She remembered Marie’s unhappiness, the tears, the heartbreak. She remembered Louis, so young, so determined to have his own way and marry Marie. Poor Louis! And poor Marie!
It was the Cardinal who had ruined their hopes. Some men would have rejoiced to see a niece the Queen of France. Not Mazarin. He feared the French. They hated him and blamed him for all their misfortunes; he believed that if he allowed their King to marry his niece they would have risen against him, and there would have been revolution in France. He remembered the civil war of the Fronde. Perhaps he had been wise. But what misery the young people had suffered. Louis had married the plain little Infanta of Spain, Marie Thérèse, whom he would never love, and now his love affairs were the talk of the world. And poor Marie! She had been hastily married to Lorenzo Colonna who was the Grand Constable of Naples; and he had succeeded in making her as unhappy as she had made him and as, doubtless, Marie Thérèse, the meek and prim little Spaniard, had made Louis.
And Charles, seeing the young Hortense, and connoisseur of beauty that he was even in those days, had declared that he would be happy to make her his wife. He had urgent need of the money which would have helped him to regain his throne, and it was known that the Cardinal’s wealth would go to his nieces. To the penurious exile the exquisite and wealthy child had seemed an ideal match.
But the Cardinal had frowned on Charles’ offer. He saw the young man as a reckless profligate who would never regain his throne, and he did not wish his niece to link her fortunes with such a man.
So the Cardinal had prevented his two nieces from becoming queens. He had torn them from two charming people that they might make marriages with unhappy results to all concerned.
“Those days are long ago,” said Charles. “’Tis a sad habit to brood on what might have been. ’Tis a happier one to let the present make up for the disappointments of the past.”
“Which we should do?”
“Which we shall do,” said Charles vehemently.
“It is good of you to offer me refuge here,” said Hortense.
“Good! Nay, ’tis what all the world would expect of me.”
Hortense laughed that low and musical laugh of hers. “And of me,” she said.
“Od’s Fish! I wonder you did not come before.”
Hortense’s dreamy eyes looked back once more into the past. César Vicard had been an exciting lover. It had not been her wish to leave him. There had been others equally exciting, equally enthralling, and she would have been too indolent to leave any of them had circumstances not made it necessary for her to do so.
Yet she had left her husband and four children. So in a dire emergency she could rouse herself.
“It is an adventure,” she said, “to come to a new country.”
“And to an old friend?” he asked passionately.
“It was so long ago. So much has happened. You may have heard of the life I led with Armand.”
“Vague rumors reached me.”
“You wonder why my uncle arranged that marriage,” she said. “I might have had Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy. He would have made a better husband. At least he was called Charles. Then there was Pedro of Portugal, and the Maréchal Turenne.”
“The last would have been a little aged for you, I imagine.”
“Thirty-five years older. But life with him could not have been worse than it was with Armand. Even the Prince de Cortenay who, I knew, concerned himself with my uncle’s money rather than with myself …”
“The graceless fool!” said Charles softly.
“He could not have made my life more intolerable than did Armand.”
“Your uncle delayed marrying you so often that when he was on his deathbed he acted without due thought in that important matter.”
“To my cost.”
“It was so unsatisfactory?”
“I was fifteen, he was thirty. Some I could have understood. Some I could have excused. A libertine … yes; I have never pretended to be a saint. He had a fine title: Armand de la Porte Marquis de Meilleraye and Grand Master of the Artillery of France. Would you have expected such a one to be a bigot … a madman? But he was. We had not been married many months when he became obsessed with the idea that everyone about him was impure, and that it was his duty to purify them. He sought to purify statues, pictures …”
“Sacrilege!” said Charles.
“And myself.”
“Greater sacrilege!” murmured Charles.
Hortense laughed lightly. “Do you blame me for leaving him? How could I stay? I endured that life for seven wretched years. I saw my fortune being dissipated—and not in the way one would expect a husband to dissipate his wife’s fortune. He agreed to take my uncle’s name. Uncle thought he would be amenable. We became the Duc and Duchesse Mazarin. Uncle would not allow him to use the ‘de.’ He said: ‘Not Hortense, my fortune, and de Mazarin. That is too much. Hortense, yes. A fortune, yes. But you call yourself plain Duc Mazarin.’”