Blood Royal (45 page)

‘But you won’t know how to bury my father,’ she insisted. She was surprised to hear her voice trembling. All her childish fear of the English, with their casual, improvised beliefs, was rushing back. The English here had no possibility of understanding how sacred were the rituals the French lived and died by. She could guess why Duke John might not want her to stay. He wouldn’t want much made of the King of France’s death. There would be no coronations in either country until after Henry had survived infancy. Meanwhile,
Duke John would almost certainly want to stress the continuity in power, rather than any unsettling change. But, however important he said it was for her to take Henry’s body home, however important it was to go home to Harry, she couldn’t leave Papa’s mortal remains in this man’s amateurish charge.

‘Papa was old,’ she quavered. ‘And he was King from the cradle. And so many of the – of
our –
great French nobility have died. There may not be anyone left who remembers how to bury a king … in the proper way …’

Duke John shrugged, at first with infuriating English carelessness, as if that sort of thing didn’t matter in the least; as if you could just make up some sort of solemnity and it would be all right, more or less, and God would excuse it, and no one would much care. But he stopped when he saw her face crumple. He was a kind man, deep down, even if he didn’t understand how a ritual could be so important. He put an awkward arm around her as her body curled up on herself – as her eyes at last filled with tears; as her chest heaved and jerked and hiccupped with misery. He wasn’t altogether without imagination, Duke John. He had an idea of how to comfort her, at least.

He walked her through the crowd in the courtyard. It was like a beehive with a stick in it out there. The Duke of Exeter was shouting for calm; rushing the lords to their quarters to stop the hum and buzz of panicky talk. But the English earls, all the same, were eluding him, pacing up and down in twos and threes, muttering. Half the earls and dukes of England were here, and all of them were on high alert, nostrils flared like warhorses, sniffing danger in the air.

Now Catherine had started crying, it was just as she’d feared: she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t look up. She couldn’t open her eyes. She was choking; she couldn’t get it out fast enough.

‘Losing a parent … nothing quite like it. Especially when you’ve just lost a husband,’ she heard Duke John’s voice say with rough embarrassment from somewhere far above. ‘Here we are … you’ll feel at home here. Go into the abbey, say a prayer for your father. It’ll calm you down.’

‘I should stay and bury him,’ she said again, but so tearfully now that it no longer counted as an argument. ‘My own father.’

‘No,’ Duke John said back, kindly but very firmly. ‘Your place is with the next generation. You can come back to France when it’s time to crown the child; not before. So say your prayers for the old man now; this is your chance. It’ll be my job after that to clear up the past.’

Catherine shrank into the familiar dusk of the abbey, away from the sounds of English, into the scented air of a place that represented everything sacred about France and its royalty. She sank into a corner, far from any of the chapels, and sobbed her heart out.

She was safe here, at least, among her own. There were no hostile eyes; no don’t-give-a-damn shrugs; no need to explain. Gradually the awe that always filled her here stopped her tears. She bent her head in prayer.

Three of her brothers were buried in these walls, and all her kingly ancestors. The same family had always been kings of France, and always would be. God had blessed the dynasty for all eternity. The sacred blood of Charlemagne and his descendants ran in her veins and Harry’s:
purus
and
clarissimus
, they said, a darker, richer, purpler colour than ordinary people’s blood. And all future kings for the rest of time would come here, just as she was doing now, to seek protection from Saint Denis, who interceded for the princes of that sacred bloodline with God.

‘God preserve them all,’ she muttered. He would. She knew that He would.

Saint Denis – converted to Christianity long ago by Saint Paul himself, later Bishop of Athens, who’d evangelised the French, and became in his saintly afterlife the patron saint and guardian of the kings of France – was the most powerful saint in the French canon. He protected France’s kings bodily from wounds and sickness. He shielded every King’s soul from evil and ministered to him at the hour of his death. With Denis’ help, the kings of France escaped Hell and Purgatory at death, and were guaranteed entry into Heaven.

Every sacred French symbol was here at the abbey. The abbey’s banner, the Oriflamme – scarlet silk on a cedarwood pole – was the flag the French had always carried into important battles, to ensure they were blessed with God’s grace. The holy crown of Saint Louis was preserved here – a tall circlet of a single piece of gold, with a large central stone and deeply cut metallic foliage containing thorns and hair from Christ’s Holy Crown of Thorns. So was the crown of Charlemagne, with its four hinged sections and its lilies. So was the emperor’s great jewelled sword,
Joyeuse
. This was where the heart of France beat strongest; this was its home, with Saint Denis.

Humbly, she asked Saint Denis to save the soul of her father, and to protect her poor mother, left alone in Paris, and to intercede for her own soul, when her time came, and, most important of all, to protect her son, whose future, since he was now King of France, also depended on the saint’s goodwill. Only after that, with a slight sense of shame, did Catherine offer a mumbled prayer for the saint to bless the soul of her departed husband. She wasn’t sure in her heart of hearts that, even now the abbey was in English hands, Saint Denis would take kindly to Henry – not just because Henry had invaded France, the Most Christian Kingdom, but generally because he’d been the ruler of an irreverent nation whose people had a habit of sloughing off inconvenient kings whenever it suited them and ignoring the sacred pact made between God and King. The English, coarse and cold-blooded, only snickered at the most glorious traditions and holy beliefs. They didn’t understand or respect the Word of God, or the sacredness of the blood of kings.

It was different if you were French. The gist of every sermon she’d heard here was that royal blood was blessed. ‘The lords of the blood are members of and belong to your body,’ every abbé had told the King her father at every ceremony she’d attended here throughout her childhood. ‘The lords of the blood are the eyes of the body of the state, watching over it continually. They have a singular affection for it, and a nobility, and a special perfection.’

How she’d revered that belief as a child … how awed she’d been, gazing up at the blue and gold-starred vaults, at the idea of being the eyes and the limbs of the body of the state. She’d loved the idea that the sanctity of the blood royal and the sanctity of France itself were intermingled. The kings of France ruled the Most Christian Kingdom by virtue of their pure, purple, sacred blood – a land where faith was illuminated; where, as Saint Jerome said, no snakes or Jews or pagans lived; a place where royal blood was only ever spilled in defence of France and its faith.

But then everything changed – in her lifetime – when the lords of the blood royal of France had started to destroy each other, shedding each other’s blood for no purpose.

Perhaps it was those two royal murders in her lifetime – both the terrible acts of
lèse-majesté
and high sacrilege – which had made Saint Denis’ power start to fade. The saint had not cured her father’s madness. The Oriflamme had not protected the French army at Azincourt. Her brothers Louis and Jean were not buried in these walls, not protected by Denis; France had been too troubled by the time of their deaths to bring them here.

Her living brother Charles would not be buried at Saint-Denis either, Catherine thought. He had shed royal blood. He no longer belonged to this sacred land.

She crossed herself one final time and got to her feet. Even remembering those disconcerting years when Saint Denis’ protection had seemed to stop working, she felt calmed by being in this ancient refuge where it was known that her existence was part of the great sacred order of things; where saints and archangels would protect her and her kind.

She thought: Charles’ impure blood … Charles’ unroyal brutality … there had been good reason for him to be cast out. But Saint Denis would protect her, Catherine, and those she cherished. Saint Denis would surely protect her father in death; help him to Heaven.

Even if Duke John didn’t know anything else about how to bury a King of France with proper honours, she thought, composing herself and moving back to the shouting crowd of
Englishmen outside, she could at least make sure that he brought Papa’s body to its eternal rest here.

With his duty done, Owain took a boat back from Westminster to Bishop Beaufort’s house at Southwark, where his two modest rooms had been kept during his absence. It counted as home.

Fatigue had stopped his mind racing at last. He was so dirty, and every muscle ached. He had no energy left for thinking. In a daze he watched the river water flow by. The clangour of mourning was already beginning: church bells booming out their one harsh note of grief. He could see wherry-men and their passengers, on his craft and all the others jostling down the waterway, turning, listening, and starting to talk, very fast and anxiously. You couldn’t hear much of what they were saying for the bells, but you could guess, or read their lips. The words ‘dead’ and ‘King’ and ‘infant’ and ‘What will become of us?’ and ‘God help us all’ were easy enough to make out. He shut his mind to them. Even at high summer, and it was a hot afternoon, the river water was grey. It stank. He needed to sleep.

Perhaps, he thought – and in his tired daze the thought no longer had the power to cause pain – Catherine hadn’t meant to be cruel. Perhaps she had just been scared: clutching at a familiar face, a familiar pair of arms, because, unlike these worried-looking Londoners, trying to guess at their future, Catherine knew exactly what lay ahead for herself now she was a widow.

Owain knew as precisely as Catherine. There was no need for either of them to guess. Christine had spelled out the misery of widowhood so precisely that nothing was left to the imagination: how from the moment you became a widow you also became suddenly invisible to all your former friends … and the only people who still seemed able to see you were those taking advantage of your defencelessness by making up claims that you owed them something. ‘
Problems sprang at me from everywhere; lawsuits and trials surrounded me as if this were the natural fate of widows,
’ Christine had written. ‘
The leech of Fortune did not stop sucking my blood for fourteen years, so that if one misfortune ceased, another ordeal happened, in so many different ways that it would be too long to tell even half of it. And the leech did not stop sucking my blood until I had nothing left
.’

Catherine, who knew so little about England, and who was so accustomed to the respect and deference of everyone she encountered, probably had no idea yet how pliable and willing to adapt she’d have to become to survive and prosper. Owain, who knew all about adapting and bending, masking his Welshness or brazening it out, could be sure of that … She’d be helpless, all right, without her husband’s protection. There’d be no one to knock all those headstrong dukes’ heads together for years.

Without intending it at all, Owain felt the pity seep into him, and with it he began to sense a new possibility. His desire might be a sin, a crime that needed to be punished, but his anger, his repentance, should be directed at himself, not at Catherine. She would have enough to contend with already.

He should direct his efforts at helping the needy. His punishment should fit his crime.

Owain would never have recognised his cousin. They were about the same age, which must mean that he’d last have seen Glynd?r’s one surviving son, oh, fifteen years ago, maybe; back in that time of smoke in the eyes and loyalty and hope and exhausting night rides, when everything still seemed real in a way it never had since. They’d been half children still, somewhere between five and ten, Owain thought vaguely – messengers at best, running or riding occasionally between men, then boasting about their errand to the other children for months afterwards, but usually only frightened observers of the fighting around them. There was nothing left now of the bright, brave boy Owain remembered his cousin having been in the grown-up Maredudd ap Owain Glynd?r he saw here at this Southwark inn, nursing his tankard of ale and
his grudge. This grown-up man who’d come slipping into the Bishop’s house on a tired old nag this afternoon, asking for Owain Tudor – and lucky to have found him just hours after he got back from France – was small and rat-like, with none of his father’s lordly charisma. Maredudd had watchful eyes and resentful lines branding his forehead and face, which were half hidden by an enormous, misshapen, provincial hat. He looked far older than twenty-two.

‘But why are you here?’ Owain asked again, trying not to let his disappointment show.

Maredudd and his father had vanished into the hills thirteen years before, after the fall of Harlech. The English had never caught them, although there was always an enormous bounty on Owain Glynd?r’s head. What had become of Glynd?r had, formally, remained a mystery. Owain chose to believe the story that most often circulated – that father and son had taken shelter with Maredudd’s sister Alys, over the border in English Herefordshire, and that she and her English husband had sheltered the rebels from her family with the connivance of almost everyone else in the border region. The story had it that Owain Glynd?r had ‘become’ the confessor of Alys’ family by marriage, the Scudamores of Monnington Stradel – pretended to be a Franciscan called Siôn Cent, who’d become known far and wide as a trickster as wily as any in the old Welsh tales. Owain Glynd?r’s son was always said to be masquerading as a lesser friar. The great charm of the story was that Alys Scudamore’s husband John was the Sheriff of Herefordshire, appointed by Henry of England himself. For Owain, a still greater charm was that Henry himself knew the story that his old enemy might have gone on living right under the nose of the English crown’s man on the Welsh Marches, and had been confident enough of his generous handling of Wales never to have tested the truth of it with searches and arrests.