Authors: Vanora Bennett
The King of England must have appreciated Catherine’s likeness. At any rate, a meeting of monarchs was arranged within days.
Isabeau looked disgruntled with the arrangements as soon as she saw the field at Meulan. She whisked with surprising speed round the conference tent in the middle of the field, with its twin gold thrones for her and the King of England, and its tapestries, prodding at things and frowning. She walked across the boards the full hundred paces to the French encampment at one side of the field. Shading her eyes in the May sunshine, and staring at the other side’s encampment, she said grumpily, ‘It’s just as far to the English tents, the other way. Impossible. Quite impossible.’
The Duke of Burgundy had done all he could to ensure that quarrels couldn’t arise between the negotiators, or fights between men-at-arms. Nothing was to poison the atmosphere. The English party was lodged overnight at Mantes; the French and Burgundians nearby at Pontoise. Each delegation was to arrive at first light, at its end of the field at Meulan, to the sound of music; then, at an agreed time, to the tooting of horns, they’d enter the conference tent in the centre of the field.
But Catherine could see that all this caution and display didn’t please her mother.
Hesitantly, she said: ‘Maman, what’s the matter?’ Her mother had been so excited when the Duke had told them the talks would take place that she’d packed Catherine off for a long series of fittings with vestment-makers and embroiderers and
jewellers. Where the money for it all had come from so suddenly Catherine couldn’t imagine. Christine, who’d understood at once that all this display and finery was intended to trap Henry of England into a marriage that would cement a peace agreement and alliance with the House of Lancaster, had been tight-lipped and disapproving through the entire fitting process. Catherine had been glad to leave her behind in Paris. At least Christine believed Catherine was being bullied into a match she didn’t want; at least she didn’t realise the extent to which Catherine herself was nudging her mother forward with this plan. Christine’s parting words had been, ‘Be careful’, and then, with an anxious look Catherine had been obscurely grateful for, despite her irritation, ‘Don’t let them push you into anything you aren’t sure is right.’
Catherine, meanwhile, had been more flustered every day with her own quiet mixture of excitement and fear – with the knowledge that she had to use these talks herself, and make the King of England fall in love with her, if she was to break the deadlock and move the marriage and peace negotiations forward. She knew so little about what made life a delight. She didn’t know what would please him.
She’d become so anxious about the problem of how best to charm the King she hadn’t met – which soft looks or breathy laughs or clouds of satin and sparkles of diamonds or flashes of wit she should employ – that she couldn’t imagine what might trouble anyone else on the eve of these talks. She certainly couldn’t understand what it was about a gold throne draped in cloth of gold, here, at this luxuriously kitted-out meeting site, that would make her mother look so annoyed. Isabeau didn’t even seem to like the special little tent for the Queen, over on the French encampment side, flanked by a smaller tent for the Princess, flanked by a still smaller tent for a lady-in-waiting.
Isabeau, not her husband, would sit in the throne at the talks. The King had reacted badly to the travelling. In his rooms, over Catherine’s at Pontoise, he was hovering between weak sanity and one of his mad times; and no one wanted
him to suddenly start screeching like an eagle or running around the room tearing off his clothes in the presence of Henry of England. So Burgundy had ruled that it would be better if he and the Queen represented France in the King’s place. But Burgundy had done as much as was possible to make sure the Queen’s taste for luxury was respected; to lavish visible honours on her. ‘It’s all just right, isn’t it?’ Catherine went nervously on. ‘Don’t you like it?’
Isabeau only squinted malevolently at her, as if she’d said something very stupid, and grunted.
Henry of England looked round the room. There were half a dozen secretaries to hand, but no one he trusted like Tudor. He beckoned. He pulled a ring off his finger and held it out to the young Welshman: the rubies set in it glittered.
So did Owain Tudor’s eyes. ‘I’ve got a job for you and your cloak of invisibility, Tudor,’ Henry said easily. ‘Take this to the Princess at Pontoise, and tell her thank you for the pretty portrait, and, mm, anything else that strikes you as right … love talk. Only don’t tell the whole world, all right?’
The Welshman nodded. But he didn’t enter into the spirit of the thing. His face was set.
Henry went on whistling under his breath as he watched Tudor go out to his horse. But he didn’t altogether like that look. He liked his men to be enthusiastic.
Tudor hadn’t wanted to come to these talks, he recalled. He’d been asking all winter to go back to England. Perhaps that was what the smouldering look was about. He’d been useful in France; and he’d done too well with that first negotiation with Burgundy to be sent away yet. But it would be time, soon, to let him go. He wasn’t a boy any more. He was big and strapping; old enough for a wife and children.
Henry of England turned back to the portrait, forgot Owain Tudor, and grinned. The French Princess with the pushy mother really was a very pretty girl. He couldn’t believe his luck.
Owain rode as far as the inn, got down from his horse with a face like thunder, went in, and wrote a brief note from Henry to go with the ring. He’d asked the King seriously enough and often enough for permission to go home. It hadn’t been granted. Loyalty and obedience were one thing; but he couldn’t run lover’s errands to Catherine.
He put everything back in his saddlebag. He looked around. He breathed relief. There was his old comrade Owain Dwn, drinking in a corner. Thank God for Welshmen, he thought.
‘Dwn,’ he said. ‘Do me a favour. Take this to the Princess at Pontoise for me, and I’ll buy you all the drink you can swallow for the rest of the talks.’
Dwn gave him a sceptical look. ‘Why?’ he said.
‘
Cer i’r diawl
, man, don’t ask stupid questions. I don’t have to explain a favour. Just take the bag.’
Dwn shrugged. ‘More fool you,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We could be here for weeks. Do you know how much I can drink in weeks, if someone else is paying?’
Owain passed him the saddlebag. ‘There’s a ring in there, and a letter,’ he said shortly. He didn’t want drinkers’ camaraderie. ‘From the King. Give them to her, personally.’
It was only when Dwn had already cantered off down the Pontoise road that Owain realised he’d been so eager to get shot of the ring that he’d handed over the whole saddlebag, containing most of his own possessions too – his knife and spoon, his little box of poems, and a change of linen. He hoped Dwn wouldn’t get drunk over there and forget it somewhere.
Catherine stared. The King of England was slightly built and not very tall, with rat-coloured hair, a long, thin, pale face and pop eyes set very wide, like his brothers’. He had grey at his temples. He had lines running from nose to mouth, where his too-red, too-full lips were fixed in a determinedly cheerful grin. She rather liked the grin. But he was nothing like the prince she’d been expecting.
She had to call consciously to mind that this man represented England, and England represented everything she should want
for herself – calm and order, dignity and decorum, in a place where she’d never need to be frightened – and very likely also peace for France.
She tried to make her eyes lose their focus and swim and be dazzled in the sunlight and glitter of cloth of gold outside the tent. She wanted to feel that her heart was stopping and her breath was coming fast and shallow. She’d felt that before; once. But now she felt nothing. He was here, the man she was going to try and marry, and all she felt was desperately uncomfortable in her gold and red gown, with the ruby ring he’d sent her scratching away at her finger, and awkward at the knowledge that, by her side, her uncle of Burgundy’s grim face would be split apart by the rictus he wore for a smile.
In her mind, she was reviewing all the scenes she’d ever imagined with her future husband as Queen of England – redrawing the wedding scene, which still took place in a Westminster Abbey that looked exactly like Notre Dame Cathedral – so that the groom at her side no longer had the black hair and height and grace she couldn’t quite scrub out of her heart, but was this odd-looking rat of a man with the awkward eyes. Redrawing what followed. The dinner. The disrobing. She was a fool to feel so disappointed. What had she expected?
At some point in the morning’s negotiations – long speeches of formal praise which Catherine couldn’t pay proper attention to – Catherine became aware of her mother. Isabeau was busy. She’d called a lady-in-waiting to her other side and was whispering instructions. Catherine felt uneasy when the woman left the tent a few minutes later and headed for the French side of the field. Her mother sat on, looking smug.
Isabeau had musicians playing in her tent after the single combat that ended the morning’s events.
Catherine didn’t know whether it was a put-up job that the King of England had won his sword-fight with his brother, the grizzled Duke of Bedford, in the open centre
of the field, but she certainly admired his skill. He fought with concentration. He was utterly still; then struck like a snake when he saw his opportunity. He was far more impressive when he was with men than Catherine had found him in conversation.
When it was over, and the King and his brother were sweating and laughing and putting away their swords and clapping each other on the back, Catherine walked towards them to try her luck at flirting. She let her eyes go wide and her voice husky with appreciation, and told him, ‘I’ve never seen such skill as yours.’ She was pleased to see his already glistening skin go a touch pinker with pleasure.
It was Isabeau who slyly invited the King and his brother to her tent for refreshments, going against Burgundy’s strict rule that no one, under any circumstances, was to cross the field. The Duke of Bedford looked dubious and excused himself, heading off with the tight-lipped Duke of Burgundy to the table on which a restrained meal for the negotiators had been set out. But Henry, flushed and victorious, bowed with more confidence than before and replied, too loudly, ‘With great pleasure!’
Isabeau’s tent contained a great many cushions and embroideries, as well as a small table on which wines and meats and, of course, many bowls of sweets were set out. She made a point of showing the King of England the embroideries and plying him with wine and food, cackling cheerfully, and explaining that the finest cushions of all were in her daughter’s tent.
With a blush so hot she thought it might take her face off, Catherine realised what the lady-in-waiting had been ordered to do that morning – take cushions and rugs out of the main tent, which still seemed overstuffed and wadded to anyone not used to the preferences of the Queen, but which an expert in the ways of Isabeau might guess had been denuded of several hundredweight of luxury goods. The cushions must have gone to Catherine’s tent.
‘Stay, listen to the music,’ Isabeau ordered Henry breezily. ‘You will be tired. So much talking. Have a rest. Sleep if you
like. The tent flaps shut. My daughter will attend to you personally.’
It was too late to protest. Blowing her daughter a merry kiss, Isabeau was already wafting fatly away with her servants, over the walkway boards set across the field, back to the conference tent. She and the King of England were alone, in the Queen’s tent, with its flaps up; looking out at the musicians.
Henry stayed a few feet away, staring at Catherine with a mixture of intense delight and alarm. He couldn’t have expected this any more than she had. But she’d been willing enough to go up and shamelessly flatter him after he’d displayed his fencing skills; and this was just one step further down the same road; and she probably should have expected it of her mother.
Henry of England grinned again. There was panic rising inside her, but it was hard to be afraid of that grin. ‘Well,’ he said awkwardly, ‘aren’t you tired after all that talk?’
She smiled and moved closer, thinking, very coolly,
This is one way forward, I suppose,
with one part of her head, while, in another part of it, all she could hear was the whoosh and rush of blood and breath.
He patted the nearest cushions. ‘Let’s sit down here,’ he said, and she could hear he was trying to seductively soften his tone. Perhaps he was feeling as scared as she was. ‘Get to know each other a bit better.’
The smaller tent was a love nest. They’d thought it all out. It wasn’t just cushions and strategically placed wine behind the closed flaps. There was a basin of water, too, and towels; and someone had set out a table with pins and brushes to repair her hair and torn linen with.
He kissed her before he went, an hour or so later. Held her close – quietly, with none of the wild urgency that had been in him before, but very tight – so tight she could hardly breathe. The musicians were still playing outside.
All he said was one awkward phrase: ‘I had no idea you’d be such a pretty girl.’
Yet she liked the soft look she surprised in his eyes as he said those uninspiring words: the kind of look that made her think that she might, when she stopped hurting, and dripping, and discovering new bruises and bite marks every time she moved a muscle, want to come back into his arms. She’d had to shut her eyes at first and imagine him looking different; she’d been surprised and disappointed every time she’d touched that stringy hair; but now, afterwards, when she’d learned what it felt like to be in this man’s embrace, she didn’t like to remember any more that she’d started by wanting to imagine black hair and blue eyes and youth.
There’d been a fierceness in her own body’s response to this stranger that she hadn’t expected. There was a slack, unquestioning wonder in her now at the fact that she knew where the veins rose in his flesh; how his muscles felt under her hands; how his hairs curled on his skin; what made him sigh and tense and cry out. He had a mole on his left shoulder. She’d kissed it. She glowed at the memory of his skin. She was too confused to be sure, but she thought she felt proud. She’d done it. She’d tasted sin, and power. She’d become one flesh with Henry of England. She was beginning to see that that would change everything. Her mother had been right to push her into this. The Queen was no fool. There was no way back now. There’d have to be a deal … a marriage and a peace. All of France would be grateful when the marriage ended the war, Catherine told herself, wondering why she had to persuade herself of this. She was doing something better than just helping herself.