Authors: Vanora Bennett
There was no hum and buzz of servants; no sweat and tinkle of harness and neighing horses. You couldn’t even hear the lions roaring.
‘They died,’ Anastaise said carelessly when asked. ‘Lions get old too.’
Isabeau was shrunken: her fat had turned to soft, trembling, chicken-neck folds, powdered pink. She didn’t get up when she saw her daughter, even the first time, but she held her arms wide, and clucked as Catherine came to her embrace, and, although her laughter was as rudely cheery as ever, there was a softness in her eyes. King Charles trembled too. He sat hunched in his cushions, skeletally thin, with his skin hanging off him. Catherine put her hands very gently on his shoulders, then eased herself into an embrace, feeling his brittle ribs and shoulder-blades and the knobs of his spine under her hands. He didn’t respond; just looked worried and shook, and wept, she realised as she drew gently back to see his wet
cheeks. ‘It’s me, Papa,’ she whispered. He nodded. She didn’t think he understood.
Isabeau dismissed the decay around her with a grand queenly gesture, saying splendidly: ‘You look beautiful. More beautiful than ever. Now tell me, at
once
, all about my darling grandson …’
At once, Catherine put everything out of her mind except Harry. When she’d finished describing him, some time later, she tried to make her account of her English life sound what her mother would have expected. She made the earthy dances into something more glittering; the thud and coarseness of the singing into English poetry; the dreary cold and damp-coloured clothes into a sparkling ice kingdom. But as she talked and smiled, overjoyed to have her family with her again, she couldn’t quite keep at bay the various painful small humiliations of the past few days.
One had come when the English arrived at the Louvre yesterday. There was no personal message for Catherine from her husband, still at Meaux. Just word via Duke John, after the Duke had finished a muttered conversation with a waiting military messenger. Henry would come to Paris only when Meaux had fallen, Duke John said; meanwhile, he sent his respects. Catherine knew no humiliation was intended. This was just how the English were.
The other burden she tried to bear quietly was her memory of Owain’s eyes. Hard on her when he thought she wasn’t looking, on board ship – unmoving stares full of blackness – but sliding away whenever she came near; retreating into bowed-head, veiled politeness. The eyes of an enemy. There’d been nothing she could do but sit on her cushions, watching the gulls circle and cry; feeling the anticipation with which she’d begun the journey sour and seep away; watching his back. She’d found a way to spend time with him, in her new English life; but she couldn’t force him to want to renew an old friendship. She couldn’t chase him round the ship. She’d briefly been hopeful again when Duke John invited Owain, her only acquaintance on board except her ladies, to dine with them. But Owain answered her questions at table as
minimally as he politely could. Yes, he’d slept. No, he seldom suffered from seasickness. Had he been to Paris on his previous French voyage? Alas, no. But he’d turned willingly enough to Duke John to discuss the siege at Meaux. He’d told Duke John, with considerably more passion than had gone into any of his replies to Catherine, that it could only be a question of time before Meaux fell to a soldier of King Henry’s calibre. He’d gone into details of men and machines deployed a month earlier; strategies and tactics.
‘You remember it very well …’ Duke John had said appreciatively.
‘Of course,’ Owain had replied, sounding every inch the military-minded Englishman he’d become; ‘because I love my King; and there’s nothing about him I admire more than his fighting skills,’ and he’d nodded coldly at Catherine. It had been the only time in the whole three-day journey that he had willingly met her eye.
Meaux had surrendered, but the town was still smoking. English soldiers were repairing the great holes they’d made in the walls.
‘No executions,’ Duke John was saying into the shimmer of heat. ‘They’ve suffered enough.’
Duke John was visiting from Paris with Owain and a troop at his side, ready to escort the King back to greet his wife now this long and exhausting siege was over. Duke John was eager to be off. He felt sorry for the young Queen, waiting so disconsolately in Paris for her husband, asking so politely if she could help plan the reunion ceremony. As a newcomer to the fighting, the Duke didn’t have the bitterness of battle in him; the desire to punish the losers that came on you after months of siege and risk and fatigue and smoke in your hair.
But Henry did. He’d spent all these months here; he’d missed seeing his newborn son for this victory. If they’d surrendered months ago, this could all have been avoided. He wanted the survivors from Meaux to remember him with dread.
‘Well … if we can’t execute them,’ he said brightly, brutally, ‘how about we dig up their saint, at least?’
He looked enquiringly round the circle of gaunt, tough, tired faces, as if ready to laugh.
‘Take him to England?’ he added.
No one laughed back. Owain thought he saw fear flickering on the other men’s faces.
The patron saint of the people of Meaux was Saint Fiacre. He was said to have been an Irishman who’d come to Gaul hundreds of years ago and set up a hermitage near the town. A village had grown up beside the hermitage. Saint Fiacre protected gardeners and the sick, especially those with haemorrhoids. In life, he was reputed to have been extremely bad-tempered. The locals said he would heap misfortune on anyone who profaned his sanctuary by moving his relics.
Even joking about digging up Saint Fiacre seemed foolhardy. The worst kind of dysentery was called Saint Fiacre’s flux – what if the peppery saint cursed you with a dose of that? Or any of the humiliating piles and pains and afflictions in his arsenal? Owain also thought this aggression was out of character for Henry. The English King’s most appealing characteristic had always been his moderation. There was no need to look for exotic ways to humiliate the people of Meaux. It was Henry’s moderation that had ended the Welsh troubles, after all, bringing even the most hardened rebels out of the hills in the end to ask for a royal pardon and permission to live at peace with the English. And it was Henry’s moderation that had persuaded Owain to start thinking of himself as – almost – English; or, at any rate, as someone who could find a future for himself among the English. Owain didn’t want to hear Henry sounding so harsh.
The King must be exhausted to be talking this way, Owain thought, pardoning his beloved master. It’s a good thing he’s got to take a break now; go to Paris. He’s overwrought. He’ll calm down once he’s rested.
Then, with disappointment, he also thought: Or perhaps everyone just gets crueller with age.
Very faintly, Duke John shook his head at his brother. But Henry seemed not to notice or be much discouraged by his brother’s distaste. He just grinned and swayed slightly. He was thinner than Owain had seen him. Stringier, too.
‘Well, perhaps you’re right. We won’t decide for now.
Let’s see what we think when we meet again,’ he said, as if reluctant to let go of his wish to dig up the saint and bring more sorrow on the people of Meaux. ‘We’ll talk again after Paris.’
It was the first time Catherine understood that, as Queen of England – even the quiet, awkward, tongue-tied, beginner Queen she felt herself to be – she did have some power.
When she returned to the Louvre after seeing her parents, she asked the Duke of Exeter if her parents could be supplied with new curtains. The old ones had fallen to pieces, she said. The Duke of Exeter – who was one of Henry’s uncles, and the brother of the sly, clever Bishop Beaufort – was too intelligent not to respond quickly. Men were at the Hotel Saint-Paul the next day, measuring the windows.
Catherine mentioned at the Louvre that her parents’ kitchen supplies were low. Hampers of chickens, hams, eggs, cream, flour, honey, jams and an entire wheel of cheese followed her back.
Anastaise supervised the unpacking. Her eyes were open wide. ‘I’d forgotten there could be so much … so much,’ she said incoherently. She snatched at another jar, undid the top and stuck a finger in. Licking it, she said happily: ‘We need never have gone hungry …’ and ‘Have they been eating like this all winter?’
Then she gathered Catherine impulsively in her arms, squeezing her so hard it hurt, and added: ‘You’re a good girl … even if you’ve turned English. Looking after us like this. Whatever … well, never mind whatever. You really are a good girl.’
Catherine wriggled out of the other woman’s embrace, laughing. But she wondered what Anastaise had meant to say, before changing her mind. ‘Whatever Christine said?’ Part of her wished she’d had the courage to ask after Christine. But, she told herself, what would be the point? Anastaise was unlikely to know. And it might only make awkwardness if Anastaise did know anything of the coldness that had crept into Catherine’s relationship with Christine at the end.
Anastaise had already let one monumentally tactless remark slip in front of Catherine: overhearing some passing servant’s muttered comment that Charles’ army would have to surrender at Meaux if they were commanded by a bastard, Anastaise had practically shouted back, ‘Ah, don’t call the boy a bastard until you know! Good blood tells; it will show itself; give him time!’ It had only been when she’d seen Catherine’s appalled eyes fix on her that she’d coloured up and said, with shame in her voice, and no trace of bluster for once, ‘Beg pardon, Madam.’
It wasn’t that Anastaise didn’t love Catherine. It wasn’t personal. But Catherine could see Anastaise wanted Charles to be the next King of France.
She tried not to think about it. Anastaise was old, and perhaps a bit wandering, and unimportant; and she did an excellent job of looking after the old King and Queen. And at least they had food now. Catherine thought with relief that she’d personally managed to make at least one thing better. If I stay for a month or two, she told herself, I can make sure they’re all right. If there was no other reason to come, it will have been worth it just to have done this.
When Catherine returned to the Louvre that evening, there was no more discussion of her parents’ plight. There was no time. The Duke of Exeter, Henry’s uncle, doffing his hat, smiling splendidly and smoothing back his mane of grey hair, told her that Henry was on his way to Paris with Duke John. She was to meet her husband at the Castle of Vincennes and process into Paris with him. There would be more pomp and magnificence than for their Christmas here together, the Duke said. Henry wanted to make the meeting one that all of Paris would remember. Pentecost would be celebrated in style. They hoped Catherine would help them design festivities suitable for France.
She could hardly believe it. They were going to meet at last; and, if the smooth Duke was to be believed, in a way that suggested her husband had been thinking how to please her, too.
She didn’t mind if there was no personal word for her from
Henry. There’d be time soon enough; they’d make up for everything they’d missed during this long year.
She gasped, ‘Thank you … and I don’t have any appetite for dinner,’ and rushed to her room to begin choosing what she would wear for the reunion, and thinking of what to say.
It would be Pentecost. She would wear green and gold. She’d learned last year that the English celebrated Pentecost, as they celebrated so much else, by drinking ale and racing their horses and performing mystery plays. This would be her chance to show Henry the beauty of the Pentecostal traditions of France. She’d take him to churches scented with the green boughs and fresh garlands of early summer. She’d show him how, during Divine service in France, the faithful were reminded of the mighty rushing wind – the spirit of God which filled Christ’s disciples – by the joyful blowing of trumpets. She hoped that by gently showing Henry some of the beauties of France, she might encourage him to cultivate and preserve the civilisation she’d grown up believing to be the greatest in the world, but which she now saw vanishing before her eyes. She knew she might not have another chance. This might be her last visit to her homeland.
Then she threw herself on her bed, put her chin in her hands and rocked from side to side, feeling love and excitement fill her, as ecstatic as the Holy Spirit.
She didn’t care about showing him things. She just wanted to see Henry. She’d been so lonely.
All the way to Vincennes, in the sunlight she let her mettlesome horse prance and kick up its heels. She and the Duke of Exeter, whose horse’s stride remained utterly precise, utterly rhythmic throughout the journey, rode in the middle of a hundred knights. She’d been busy. There hadn’t been time for all the ceremony she’d wanted, but green was the dominant colour: green belts; flowers woven into the horses’ manes and tails. And she, in gold and green, a vision.
She thought her heart would burst with joy when she saw
the white towers and ramparts at Vincennes. They looked even lovelier than she remembered them. She could see the other column of horsemen, and hear them: another gay blast of colour and trumpets coming out of the castle to meet them and escort them inside.
It felt strange to be part of a procession of people who still felt like strangers. There were so few familiar faces among the English: just the sleek Thomas of Exeter, another Beaufort uncle, at her side, and, somewhere in the middle of the throng in the packed courtyard ahead, John of Bedford and her other travelling companions. Owain Tudor, perhaps; she hadn’t asked what had become of him. And, waiting under the canopy that she made out as soon as they got through the gate, Henry.
Her heart beat louder than the drums and trumpets. Her eyes were seeking him out from the first moment she saw the canopy. She was smiling wider than ever before, so wide it hurt her face.
But when she finally saw him in the crowd and fixed her eyes on him, trying to stare him into finding her face too, his distant features seemed smaller and less imposing than she remembered.
There was a mighty drum-roll as she stepped under the canopy. Henry, close now, stepped forward from a phalanx of Englishmen and bowed. She raised him to his feet, laughing out loud from relief at being next to him, and with delight at seeing those familiar wide-set, prominent eyes, that long, thin face and those slightly over-full red lips – no one could hear a thing for the noise of the drums, so it didn’t matter how loudly she laughed. Then she stepped forward to give him the ceremonial public kiss and embrace expected of them both.