Authors: Vanora Bennett
‘No,’ the man replied, sounding equally surprised. ‘Only Southwark.’
The letter confirmed it. The Cardinal was back in England. Various matters here required his attention, he wrote vaguely. He’d decided to attend the coronation. He wanted to meet Owain. Of course, Owain thought, enjoying the idea of this wily old schemer’s return to politics: the Cardinal will need all the information he can get, about every flicker of everything that’s gone on anywhere, if he’s to take on Humphrey again now he’s back. He’ll be out talking, walking in gardens, chatting, glad-handing …
That mental picture made Owain smile. And then it made him thoughtful. Tapping his fingers on the table, he read on.
The Cardinal had a small gift for his former secretary: the book he’d sent. ‘
Perhaps you have already seen this curiosity
,’ the letter finished. ‘
New verses by your old friend Madame de Pizan. I picked up a copy on the road to Calais. You can buy it everywhere. It’s being copied at lightning speed, and recited in taverns, even in areas under English rule. I thought the sentiments expressed in it might interest you. You might also judge it appropriate to show this book to the Queen Mother. I doubt my dear nephew John will be fully aware of the antagonism his armies have aroused among the French; so I doubt any proper briefing will be available to His Majesty if there is to be a second coronation in France. But it is my view that it would be realistic to prepare His Majesty for some of the challenges he is likely to face on the ground. It might be foolhardy not to.
’
Owain put down the letter and picked up the little book. There was nothing much to it, it seemed: ten pages or so of hastily transcribed verse. But the title was arresting. He whistled when he saw that.
Christine’s poem – written, what, a decade after she’d left the world of wars and politics for what was supposed to be the quiet routine of prayers and fasts of the nunnery – was
called ‘The Song of Jehanne of Arc’. You couldn’t get much more political than that.
Abruptly, as if the force and muscle had gone out of his legs, he sat down on the bench and started to read. It wasn’t more than ten minutes later that he put it down again, shaking his head. Oh, Christine, he was thinking ruefully, transported back in time by the familiar music of her turns of phrase, echoing in his ears again. Christine was still too frank and forthright, but she was so well-known for her honesty and virtue that her opinions would carry weight all over France. And, if the Cardinal was right, a lot of people already believed the kind of thing she was writing here.
It was bad. It was worse than he’d expected. The poem was an open call to rebellion against the English, as much as it was a love poem to the Maid of Orleans – who, in Christine’s view, had been sent by God to restore the French throne to Charles.
‘A young girl of sixteen years to whom weapons seem weightless, she seems to have been raised for this, she is so strong and hardy. Enemies flee before her; not one can resist. Oh, what an honour to the female sex! That God loves her is clear, with all these wretches and traitors, who had laid waste the whole kingdom, now cast out, and the realm elevated and restored by a woman – something a hundred thousand men could not have done! Before this, who would have believed it possible? And so, you English, lower your horns … beat your drums elsewhere … or more of you will taste death like the companions you have left as corpses in the fields, waiting to be devoured by the wolves …’
He wouldn’t show this to Catherine, he decided. It would only upset her. Not because of the praise for the peasant-girl warrior, but because too much of the poem was a wild, overwrought outpouring of love for Charles himself.
Owain remembered only too well how Christine had refused to follow her son Jean to Charles’ court at Bourges years ago, while the old King of France was still alive, because it would have been against her principles to support Charles’ rebellion against his father. She’d stuck to her principles even though
she’d known that doing so meant she would never see her own son and his family again. Owain had admired her courage for that, and pitied her. But now, apparently, Christine’s hatred of the English had altered her views. She seemed to have come to think of Charles as the one true King of France, standing firm against the English wolves destroying the land. She called him the ‘…
cast-out child of the legitimate King of France, who for so long has suffered such great troubles but who now approaches, risen up like a man going to Mass, coming as a crowned king, in wonderful and great power, wearing spurs of gold….’
She called him,
‘You, Charles, French King, seventh of that noble name.’
If everyone in France felt like that about the English, and about Charles, it would be more dangerous than he’d realised for Harry, and perhaps Catherine, to go to France.
Owain sat and hummed and drummed his fingers on the table, thinking. Finally, he pulled a box of writing materials towards himself. The first glimmer of an idea was forming in his mind, and he needed to consult the Cardinal.
Owain avoided Catherine until he had the Cardinal’s reply. He couldn’t talk to her unless he knew whether the idea might work. But there was no delay. The return message came the next day.
At dinner, leaning over her with the silver platter, noticing her pallor, her fingers fiddling with the keys at her belt, yet trying to avoid gazing so attentively into her eyes that he aroused suspicion, he said quietly, ‘Cardinal Beaufort is back in England.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Humphrey?’ she mouthed.
‘Furious, I think,’ Owain said. He permitted himself a small smile. ‘But even Humphrey can’t prevent his uncle from attending the coronation of the King of England.’
‘But it’s still three months away?’
Owain shrugged. Whatever other trouble the Cardinal wanted to make while he was here was the Cardinal’s business, not Owain Tudor’s. He had something else to tell her. He raised a finger from the edge of the platter to draw her
attention back to the here and now. He could hardly wipe the grin from his face at his next news. He had to struggle; draw in breath; keep his expression composed.
‘He wants me to stay with you till after the coronation,’ Owain said. ‘Here. He’s written to Saint Mary’s in Oxford to delay my return.’
He allowed himself just a split second of enjoying the relief in her eyes; the colour coming back to her face and making it lovely. Suspended as he had always been between worlds, he’d never allowed himself ambitions, beyond the monastery or the King’s service. But looking at her expression now made him feel he’d realised one ambition, at least. He hurried off.
The golden weather stretched on, past Michaelmas into October, as if God, like Catherine, was celebrating the borrowed time she’d been given. But the future couldn’t be kept at bay indefinitely. Henry’s coronation robes were ready; the elaborate choreography of the spectacle at Westminster was being drawn up.
To Catherine’s worsening frustration, even at this late stage there was no face-to-face contact with Humphrey. The Duke of Gloucester sent substitutes to rehearsals at the castle and stayed away. In his absence, Catherine didn’t know how best to begin campaigning to be allowed to go to France. If the household was to remain as it was – just Warwick and boy warriors and tutors – she didn’t see how she or Owain could exert the least influence. She could hardly bear Harry’s trusting gaze on her whenever Warwick began lecturing him about his forthcoming expedition to France. If I don’t think of something soon, she kept catching herself thinking, they’ll all have gone and I’ll be left behind here alone.
The leaves were turning. There were fogs in the morning and an urgent sharpness in the air. Owain kept himself to himself. He seemed to be always light of heart these days; always humming a bittersweet folk tune in his sweet, rich baritone. But he spent a lot of time alone in his room, and she saw with quiet dread that he’d found something new to interest him. Once, she caught up with him, overheard the
murmured words, ‘
pe cawn i hon
’ – Welsh – and asked as boldly as she dared, ‘What are you singing?’ But he just shrugged, without giving anything away. ‘My old bad habit,’ he said apologetically, ‘mumbling away in Welsh.’ He didn’t seem to understand the misery enveloping her, as the stay of execution she’d hoped might be within her grasp through the French journey failed to materialise, and the days shortened. He didn’t seem aware of time slipping through their fingers.
When, on All Hallows’ Eve, a week before the coronation, he waited until she’d settled Harry in her rooms with her, playing chess, before unexpectedly asking permission from the King and the Queen Mother to leave for Southwark to pay his respects to Cardinal Beaufort, Catherine couldn’t speak for shock.
Just like that? her eyes said. There was a pain in her gut.
‘Will you come back tomorrow?’ Harry asked.
Owain shook his head, softening the blow with a smile. ‘I expect he’ll want me with him till after the coronation,’ he told the boy kindly. ‘A week. But you’ll be too busy to notice. After that, we’ll see.’
Catherine just nodded with a choke in her throat. This was the end, or the beginning of the end, she thought despairingly. She couldn’t believe he’d said nothing until there was Harry here to protect him from questions. He was trying to avoid the pain of farewells, perhaps. He wouldn’t be back.
She didn’t respond to the final pressure of his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t understand when he met her last quiet, accusing look with a nod and a screwing-up of the eyes, which, to someone else, might have looked almost like a wink.
Catherine’s companion at the coronation was Queen Jeanne of Navarre again – up from her ramshackle manor house, half of which they said had recently burned down without the old lady even noticing the smoke and screams. The old Queen was utterly confused this time, white-haired and babbling. Being paired with her by Humphrey for a public ceremony no longer seemed a compliment.
Nor did it seem a compliment that Warwick’s tight-lipped daughter, Margaret Talbot, the Countess of Shrewsbury, was chosen as the shared chief lady-in-waiting for both former queens. Catherine had been told that Lady Shrewsbury was twenty-five – close in age to Catherine – and the mother of three children already. Beforehand, Catherine had let herself hope that they might at least talk about their children together; draw comfort from that. But when she actually reached Westminster and said her farewells for the night to a round-eyed, nervous Harry (he was to go to his own apartments at Westminster and pray through the night with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and, to both Harry’s and Catherine’s relief, also with Cardinal Beaufort), reality dawned. Catherine immediately recognised the features of the young matron sweeping towards her with an unwelcoming gleam in her eyes as she dropped exactly the regulation depth, and no more, of obeisance. The daughter was a vindictive-mouthed, pale-eyed, thin-lipped, raw-boned double of Warwick. Catherine’s heart sank. But perhaps it
was just the black misery that had filled her for all the past week that was making her gloomy and unforgiving now. The sleeplessness, the loss of appetite, the fears.
She couldn’t get any conversation out the curt Countess. But she made a special effort, as she and the old Queen processed haltingly across the way to Westminster Abbey, in their matching gowns of red, gold and black, to keep the hopelessness at bay; to smile and stand tall for the crowd, at least. Still, she couldn’t help hearing the disappointed voice of one little street boy whose eye she’d caught, who was standing on someone’s shoulders so he could peer between the soldiers’ shoulders and report back to his comrades on who was passing and whether it was worth hopping up for a look too. ‘Only the old Queens. The mad one and the mum. Give it another minute.’ Her English was good enough for that now.
The bells pealing overhead were so loud that they sucked the sound out of people’s mouths; made their moving lips appear silent. The air of the abbey was thick and gloomy with incense and thousands of beeswax candles making rich pools of light, and the rare, expensive scents of the bodies of the great, and the stink of the common people. In her furs, in the swaying press of the nobility on the scaffold between the great altar and the choir, Catherine was stiflingly hot.
When the great doors opened, letting in the troubled grey light of morning, dancing uneasily with snowflakes and a blast of wind that made the candles shiver, she leaned gratefully forward, welcoming the cold. It was another moment before she made out the little silhouette in the distant doorway, huddled next to Warwick’s great bony frame, blinking at the size of the crowd packed into the church. Harry. Mesmerised. Big-eyed and baby-faced, clutching at his scarlet cloak.
Her heart moved, and her lips too, in a prayer for him to perform his task with the dignity expected of him. The bells changed their tune; rang out a glorious peal of triumph. But Catherine’s ears were ringing with the remembered sound of the formless groans and howls of anguish she most dreaded; like evil spirits, she thought, shaking her head as
if to get the memory of them out. Her great fear was that Harry would panic and start that howling, and prove himself mad, here, in front of his people. She folded her hands tighter, muttering.
It seemed an eternity before Harry began to move forward. When he did, putting each foot down with great care so he didn’t get tripped up by the great rich folds of fur-lined velvet; when, finally, he sat at his seat in the middle of the scaffold, looking solemnly round at his subjects as the unearthly beauty of the singing began, she felt her heart racing as if she’d been running for her life, and dampness at her temples.
But Harry was doing magnificently. He listened to the Archbishop’s proclamation. He walked with great dignity to the altar, and lay down flat on his face on the inlaid marble floor, as he’d practised, and didn’t move while the bishops read their exorcisms and chanted their anthems, and stripped him of the cloak and down to his plain white shirt, until they raised him up and dressed him again in the glittering garments of a King of England, until every inch of him winked and shone in the candlelight. He didn’t flinch when the crown of St Edward was set on his head, with bishops crowding him from every side, propping the great heavy thing up between their palms, sweating with the strain of making that act of levitation look easy as they walked him back to his seat.