At the sound of my entrance Louis swung round, ready to spit out his fury at the unwanted intrusion, but his gaze fell on the contents of the dish. ‘Ah, food!’ he exclaimed, pouncing on a piece of meat pie and biting into it.
‘Blessed Virgin! How can you eat at such a time?’ demanded Catherine incredulously. ‘It is grotesque!’
‘How dare you!’ Her brother turned on her, pastry flakes falling like snow from his mouth. ‘I eat because I must. How else am I to fill the emptiness I feel? But you wouldn’t understand that, Catherine, standing there in your little pointed hat and your little pointed shoes.’ He sneered at her as he chewed. ‘I suppose you do not realise that all this death and destruction is down to you?’
‘Me?’ echoed Catherine, staring at him in astonishment. ‘Merciful God! How can you suggest that?’
‘Because you are a witch – an enchantress!’ Louis exclaimed, reaching for the cup of wine I had poured ready for him.
The only light in the room came from the flickering flames of the fire and a single candle on a buffet-board. Smothering a gasp of shock at the dauphin’s outburst, I laid the food and wine down beside the candle and crept into a dark corner. No one ever forgot the king’s dreadful malady or that Louis was his son. Judging by her expression, Catherine was as fearful as I that he, too, might lose control. He had certainly lost all awareness of my presence.
‘Have you no idea what beauty like yours does to men?’ he persisted between hectic gulps of wine. ‘That impious libertine Henry of Monmouth came lusting over to France, desperate to possess your soft, white virgin flesh – and now ten thousand Frenchmen lie dead … dead, at
your
little feet!’
‘Ten thousand – Jesu!’ Catherine whispered, half to herself. I saw the blood drain from her face at the scale of the losses and I prayed that the dauphin was exaggerating in his distress. ‘That is a terrible number. However you are wrong, Louis!’ she went on bravely, in a firmer tone. ‘King Henry does not lust after
me
, but after France. I am not the territory he wants, I am the wretched scapegoat who is tethered to it. I am glad you did not fight because at least you remain alive to lead us out of this mess. Without you, power might fall to his
dis
grace of Burgundy, which God forbid! His motive for not fighting is glaringly obvious, is it not? He is saving his men to move on Paris.’
‘Well!’ Louis paused between mouthfuls to glare at Catherine, fury replaced in his expression by grudging respect. ‘You are not just a pretty witch, are you, sister?’ he acknowledged. ‘But what you do not know is that our charming mother has already actually
sent
for Burgundy, promising him a hero’s welcome in Paris and a place at her right hand. My agents intercepted her messenger and I have ordered the gates closed against him.’
Catherine crossed herself, looking alarmed and distressed at this latest bombshell.
‘Holy Marie! I will never understand our mother! But who is to hold the gates?’ she demanded. ‘If the constable is dead and the army is scattered, what forces can you call on to hold the city?’
‘I have sent for the Count of Armagnac. He is on the way from Gascony.’
‘Which means he missed the battle also!’ Catherine made an exasperated noise. ‘You cannot trust him, Louis, any more than Burgundy.’
‘I have no choice,’ muttered the dauphin, draining his cup. ‘I need men; Armagnac has men. The king needs protection; Armagnac will protect him. It is Armagnac or Burgundy – the bandit or the devil – and of the two I prefer the bandit.’
‘But can you be sure he will come?’ pressed Catherine. ‘If he could not bring his men to Picardy in time to fight the English, why should he bring them to Paris in time to forestall Burgundy?’
‘Because I have promised to make him Constable of France if he does,’ said Louis.
‘Ah, yes. That should bring him. And what about King Henry? Will the English army not also march on Paris?’
‘Now there is one blessing.’ The dauphin poured himself another cup of wine. ‘The pernicious Monmouth is so short of men that he can do nothing but march post-haste to Calais!’ His voice cracked on a cry of indignation. ‘I ask you, how in Jesu’s name did he manage to win?’
‘Meanwhile, where is our own king?’ Catherine asked with sudden anxiety, ignoring the prince’s rhetoric. ‘Tell me our father is safe from Burgundy’s clutches!’
‘His litter was right behind me on the road with an escort of five hundred men. He should be here within the hour. But I have not told him about the battle. It would break his heart.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Catherine bleakly, her face expressionless as she watched her brother gulping down another cup of wine. ‘It has certainly broken mine.’
It was hours before I was able to share the fears and prayers of my own children, for when the flagon of wine was empty and the dauphin had departed, Catherine’s admirable self-control, which had remained so strong in Louis’ presence, broke down and she began to weep uncontrollably, her tears soaking the bodice of her birthday gown.
‘I d-did not want to cry in f-front of my br-brother,’ she hiccupped, doubled up on a stool in her grief, ‘but oh, Mette, – all those d-deaths! Ten thousand! What a w-waste! How could it happen? It is t-terrible. It hurts me here, l-like a knife in the stomach.’
I called her ladies in and we accompanied her, still choking back sobs, to her own apartment but it was not grief alone that caused her pain. After refusing any food and attending a special Mass in the royal chapel, she let me help her to bed, still red-eyed and complaining of stomach pain and we both immediately noticed bloodstains on her chemise.
‘Blessed Virgin!’ she whispered, staring at the marks in horror. ‘There must be demons gnawing at my belly, Mette! Louis said I was the cause of the battle and I am being punished for it.’
‘No, no, Mademoiselle!’ Impulsively I threw my arm around her shoulders, berating myself for failing to warn her of this mundane and inevitable development. I should have realised that, for their own very different reasons, neither the nuns nor her mother would have done so. ‘It is a terrible time for this to happen, but you are becoming a woman. All grown women bleed with the cycles of the moon. It is the curse of Eve.’
‘The curse of Eve? Then I
am
bewitched?’
‘No, Mademoiselle, not at all! I will explain – but first, a napkin to staunch the flow.’
Having hastened to supply the necessary item, I did my best to explain God’s punishment of Eve for giving Adam the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, but even in her despair at the carnage of Agincourt she found the Genesis story hard to believe. ‘Can that really be true?’ she asked. ‘God placed this curse on women so that they should all bear Eve’s shame?’
‘That is how the Church interprets it,’ I nodded.
She looked incredulous. ‘The nuns never taught us that. Did the Holy Mother suffer the curse of Eve?’
‘I suppose so. Perhaps you should ask a priest. I only know what my mother told me.’
‘That all women bleed for one woman’s misdeed? Surely God is not so unjust!’
I pursed my lips. She was not the first to question the Church’s teaching in this respect, but it was inviting a charge of heresy to do so. ‘I suppose it is not for us to question the Almighty,’ I said tactfully. ‘And the curse is not constant. It only comes once a month for a few days.’
‘And it had to start today!’ I saw Catherine shudder and close her eyes, clutching her belly. ‘France bleeds and so do I. God has cursed us both.’
When Montjoy Herald presented himself the next morning, Catherine’s salon was already shrouded and shuttered and she and her companions sat in semi-darkness, attired in sombre clothes and black veils like novice nuns. By candlelight, one of the king’s chaplains had been intoning a passage on sin and suffering from the book of Job, but he closed the book when the herald arrived. From somewhere, he had found a black surcôte and hose and came freshly shaven and bare-headed, bending his knee on entering. Rested after his hectic ride from Picardy, he looked younger than he had the previous day and I caught the two baronets’ daughters exchanging sidelong glances, apparently not so overwhelmed by grief that they did not coyly relish the presence of a handsome man.
The formalities of greeting over, Catherine bade her visitor sit and tell them in his own words what he could of the calamitous battle that had plunged France into deep mourning. His account was a harrowing one, and he gave it with due gravity. It is the job of a herald to observe the whole theatre of chivalry, but in my opinion at times he over-dramatised things.
‘Constable d’Albrêt had chosen to deploy the French force at one end of a shallow valley with thick woods on either side,’ he began, ‘and the English king drew up his army at the other end – if you could call it an army for it was a pitifully small band of men compared with our thirty thousand, maybe five or six thousand. It would not be overstating the case to compare the confrontation to that of David and Goliath.’
Agnes and the other two young ladies, who had not heard the dauphin’s agonised cries of incredulity at France’s losses as Catherine and I had, reacted with gasps of amazement at the enormous difference in numbers.
‘If you do not know the countryside of Picardy, Madame,’ the herald continued, spurred on by the audience reaction, ‘let me tell you that it is very lush and green, and there are few hills of any size, but we French held what high ground there was, beside the castle of Agincourt. Our cavalry was mustered across the whole valley, thirty companies of armoured knights mounted on caparisoned coursers with banners flying, packed spur to spur as thick as stitches in a tapestry and the scarlet Oriflamme raised high in the van, streaming in the breeze.’
Now he had the ladies’ full attention. They were all young girls after all, avid for stories of gallant knights and chivalry, their imaginations fired by the vivid picture Montjoy was painting, even though they already knew the appalling outcome. In truth, I could not blame the herald becoming infected with their excitement and warming to his descriptive task.
‘Mercifully, the rain had stopped overnight and we could see the English gathered below us, less than a mile distant. They were all on foot. They did not appear to have any horsemen, although it turned out there were a few hundred hidden in the woods. Their foot-soldiers were mostly armed with longbows, except for two companies of dismounted knights and men-at-arms deployed on either flank. In front of one of these a huge standard billowed, goading us, insolently emblazoned with the combined arms of England and France – the lions and the lilies. Beside it we made out the figure of the English king, wearing his crown over his helmet as if to say “Behold! Here I am, come and get me!” Well, Madame, I must tell you that in our ranks were eighteen hand-picked knights who had sworn a vow to do just that.’
‘Are you sure it was him?’ interrupted Catherine. ‘I have heard that kings have been known to confuse the enemy with doubles dressed like them and wearing crowns.’
Montjoy looked indignant that his word might be doubted, but was also anxious not to offend the daughter of the king. ‘I assure you, Madame, it was Henry of England. I had delivered a message to him from his grace the dauphin only the day before.’
Catherine leaned forward, fascinated despite her best efforts to display dispassionate calm. ‘So you spoke to King Henry! Pray, tell me how he looked. Was he anxious, frowning, fearful?’
The herald shook his head. ‘No, not at all, Madame. My task was to relay the dauphin’s invitation to surrender himself for ransom and thus save his army from destruction. But Henry of England smiled and shook his head. He declared that his cause was just and God would therefore favour it and that God’s will would be done. Then he bade me take that message back to the dauphin. He looked serene and untroubled, but as I rode away I could see that his men were without shelter, cold and wet. Yet none deserted or refused to fight.’
‘Perhaps because they had nowhere to go,’ remarked Catherine, ‘and nothing to lose.’
‘Nevertheless, at the start of the next day, as our forces mustered, I heard the constable say to the dauphin that he still believed there would be no battle and that the English king would surrender as soon as he saw the great might of the French host. That was when the dauphin rode away, telling Count d’Albrêt to bring him the son of the usurper in chains.’
I saw Catherine bite her lip at that and guessed she was remembering how loudly on the previous evening the dauphin had deplored his absence from the field of Agincourt. Watching the king of arms continue his narrative, I considered the job of a herald. He was not pledged to fight, but only to convey orders, note the activity of arms-bearers and, ultimately, to count and record the names of the dead. Just the noble dead of course – those permitted to bear arms and entered in the register of chivalry. Once again, as I had so many times already, I pondered the fate of my Jean-Michel, wondering where he was and if he was still alive. If he was not, would his name appear on any list? Meanwhile the herald’s story was reaching its climax and still commanding the ladies’ rapt attention.
‘For what seemed like hours, nothing happened,’ he went on. ‘Bread and ale was distributed to our men and the constable pointed out that the English had no supplies and would starve unless they either attacked or surrendered. And then a single knight strode out of the English ranks towards us, but he did not carry a white flag. He walked slowly to the centre of the valley, saluted each army with his warder and then hurled it high into the air. It was a signal for battle to begin and a ragged cheer went up from the English ranks. However, they did not move so our cavalry, which had been champing at the bit, launched the first charge and a great line of armoured horsemen thundered down the valley between the trees. To a man the English foot-soldiers turned and ran and all around me our soldiers laughed and jeered, jerking their first two fingers in the air, the same ones they had orders to hack from the English archers’ hands when France was victorious.
‘But the English did not run far; only far enough to reveal what their bodies had been hiding from us since dawn – a forest of sharpened stakes, which had been hammered into the ground at just the right angle to impale a galloping horse. Then, on a signal, the archers notched their arrows and began to fire. In seconds the air was thick with missiles falling like rain on our advancing horses. I watched with horror as, funnelled by the trees, our first charge had nowhere to go; they could not stop or turn back because, blind to the trap that loomed ahead, another charge was already galloping close behind, and another behind that. They had no choice but to ride on, into the hail of arrows and onto the bristling wall of stakes. Within minutes the lush green valley had become a quagmire, churned into deadly mud by ten thousand horses’ hooves with, at the English end, a screaming, bloodstained mound of mangled men and horseflesh growing ever higher with every charge.’