‘Let her go. The woman has been badly abused and her wits are addled. We will get no sense from her and we are wasting valuable time.’
Intent on fleeing, as much from myself as from the Burgundian knight, I blundered on, bumping into corners and tripping over uneven flagstones until, when I finally took my hands from my face, I found myself in the kitchen courtyard, without really knowing how I got there.
Returning awareness brought an agonising resurgence of pain, both physical and mental. My whole body throbbed and the flesh between my legs seemed to sizzle and burn. All I could think about was quenching the fire and with that in mind my eyes fixed on the huge stone cistern which collected the rainwater from the palace roof, where scullions dipped their pails to replenish the kitchen water-barrels. Whimpering, I hobbled across the yard and heaved myself recklessly over the edge of the tank, lowering my legs into its dark, blessed depths. My skirts blossomed around me, lifted by trapped air, and the cold water brought instant sweet relief to my burning private parts. For many minutes I stood waist deep, while the chill numbed my ravaged flesh until I could no longer feel any sensation. But it could not still the whirling of my mind. Fear and self-disgust spun into a maelstrom of rage and humiliation, crystallising as an all-consuming hatred. The identities of my individual attackers I might never know, but the core of my loathing centered not on them but on another; the man who had seared his name on my mind the day he scarred the flesh of my face and who I knew was truly responsible for the evil that had descended upon us. Jean the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy.
I
n the king’s great hall the royal party made its way onto the dais and a loud cheer rose up from the assembled crowd of onlookers. Standing silent among them, I felt my stomach clench; for the first time since his mailed fist had scarred my face fifteen years before, there before me stood the devil duke. He was garbed all in black as I remembered him but, instead of armour, he wore a magnificent flowing houppelande gown edged with sable and liberally patterned with the bizarre personal emblem that so eloquently declared his vaunting ambition – a carpenter’s plane. Here was a man determined to shape the world to his own design.
Working themselves up to a frenzy of excitement, the crowd began to chant his battle-cry –
‘Jean sans Peur! Jean sans Peur!’
– and he raised an arm in salute like a victorious general. An elaborate turban-hat added inches to his stature so that he dwarfed the shrunken figure of the king, who scuttled into the hall a fraction ahead of him wearing a gold coronet slightly askew and a blue ermine-trimmed gown, which seemed to have been made for someone much larger. I noticed the duke’s hand go to the king’s elbow, a gesture which appeared to offer deferential support, but actually ensured that the feeble-minded monarch did not stray from his new protector’s side. Behind this ill-matched pair came the queen, as flamboyant and glittering as ever, followed by Catherine, graceful but ghostly pale, swaying in her heavy court robes like a willow-wand hampered by the weight of its leaves.
As they took their seats at the board, the triumphant smiles of the queen and the duke reflected the brilliance of the gleaming gold plate displayed on the fine damask cloth. The King perched between them, corralled in his high-backed throne, twitching like a trapped coney and Catherine sat on the duke’s left, isolated at the end of the table where the resplendent new Burgundian grand master of the king’s household stood directing proceedings with his silver staff. For this was no ordin-ary repast. It was a public banquet, an occasion when the people of Paris were allowed into the king’s great hall to watch their monarch dine and, on this occasion, to witness the advent of a new regime.
I stood with Alys, jostled and pushed by the crowd, mostly of men who alternated between cheering their hero and quarrelling over the best vantage points. Judging by the roars of adulation, there were few among them whose skin crawled as mine did at the sight of the new regent of France, as Jean the Fearless now styled himself. To a man they welcomed him, hoping for the restoration of order and the end of anarchy and shortage.
I saw the duke incline his head towards Catherine to make a remark and noticed her flush deep red in response, but whether from anger or embarrassment I could not tell. Burgundy’s expression was unreadable.
‘Keep calm, my sweet girl, keep calm,’ I willed her silently.
I kept my own feelings well hidden these days. Inside I had become a wobbling mass of hatred and disgust but during the blood-soaked weeks since the palace gates had opened to Burgundy’s thugs, I had perfected the art of deception, had even managed to conceal all evidence of the bodily harm and the loathsome horror inflicted on me by the two predatory butchers. It was the only way I felt able to hold my head up and survive. It is a sad commentary on our skewed society that nothing but disdain and disparagement is offered a woman known to have been violated. I had been unlucky but I was not dead and I did not wish to be disparaged. I considered that my secret was safe with me and me alone. Anyway, to describe it to anyone would have been to release the dreadful demons that threatened to overcome me every time I had a flash of recall and I feared that if I let them loose I would succumb completely, like the poor, mad king. Mercifully, only a few days after the attack I was blessed with Eve’s curse, for I think to have found myself with child to a nameless thug would have been a burden impossible to bear.
At the time, after the freezing water in the kitchen cistern had sufficiently numbed my battered body, I had dragged myself to my quarters and made liberal applications of a witch-hazel salve and changed into dry clothes. Then, scared by the sudden and very raucous sounds of looting in Catherine’s apartments below, I had scurried out onto the wall-walk, praying it would be deserted, and forced myself to brave the perils of stairway and cloister, ducking out of sight from every possible encounter until I reached the king’s great hall. There, to my intense relief, I found Catherine and Alys huddled among a frightened group of court ladies on the steps of the royal dais, claiming whatever sanctuary was to be found in the shadow of the anointed monarch, who sat bewildered on his throne, uneasy but defiantly wearing his crown and court mantle. Whoever had dressed the king in these potent symbols of his sovereignty had shown great foresight for they gave him a much-needed air of regal authority over the Burgundian commander of the insurgency, who had placed hand-picked guards on the entrance to the great hall, insisting that the rabble be excluded and the king and his daughter be treated with due deference.
‘Thank God you are safe, Ma!’ Alys had exclaimed, hugging me fiercely and too overcome with joy at my arrival to notice me wince with pain. ‘Did you have any trouble?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘But there have been looters in your chambers, Mademoiselle. I heard noises there but I did not investigate.’
‘Nor should you have done!’ Catherine whispered indignantly. ‘May God reward you for your courage tonight, Mette. Were you successful in your chief endeavour?’
I nodded briefly but emphatically and was rewarded by a squeeze of the hand and a triumphant little smile. It was at that moment that I resolved to consign my own nightmare experience to the deep recesses of my mind, where it kept company with the faint hope that one day Jean-Michel would walk back into my life. Only later, when I woke from deep sleep, sweating and kicking and desperately gasping for breath was it brought forcibly home to me that I had as little hope of erasing those terrible memories as I had of celebrating the return of my husband.
The next day, God be thanked, Luc managed to make his way to my tower-top quarters and I quickly learned that his first concern had been for his canine charges.
‘Some weird guys came to the kennel waving meat cleavers but luckily they took no interest in the dogs,’ he recounted. ‘They only wanted their jewelled leashes and collars. I’m very worried about the dauphin’s deer-hounds though. They seem to have disappeared.’
I had no intention of revealing that I knew the fate of the deer-hounds. It would provoke too many questions that I had no wish to answer. ‘We heard that the dauphin managed to escape from Paris, so perhaps he took them with him,’ I said, quickly adding on a warning note, ‘And you, Luc? Are you keeping that loose tongue of yours under control? You do realise that now is not the time to start answering back or offering your opinion on anything? Just do your work and say nothing.’
He looked at me pityingly. ‘I know how to look after myself, Ma,’ he protested.
‘Perhaps you do, but these are exceptional times, Luc. We must all be extra careful,’ I insisted, inwardly affirming my own vow of silence because a boy only recently turned twelve should not have to deal with his mother’s rape.
My words of warning were timely, for in the following weeks Paris was subject to wholesale murder. Anyone who was known or discovered to oppose Burgundy, paid the penalty. One of the primary victims was the Count of Armagnac, betrayed by a member of his household as he was attempting to flee Paris. Along with the king’s grand master, chancellor and secretary, he was paraded in chains to a makeshift scaffold outside the Hôtel de Ville and, without charge or trial, unceremoniously hanged before a jeering and hate-filled mob. I took care not to venture out of the palace, but we were told that their bodies still dangled from the gibbet three months later, mutilated and raven-pecked. The Countess of Armagnac had also been arrested and questioned, and she remained under close confinement in the Louvre. Only after the riots and killings had died down and the streets had been cleaned up, did the Duke of Burgundy make a grand procession into the city with the queen at his side. The following day heralds proclaimed their joint regency at every market cross.
With both the king and the queen under Burgundy’s control, Catherine was completely at the mercy of the man we were now too frightened to call ‘the devil duke’, even in the privacy of her bedchamber. Immediately after her first encounter with him, I could see the change in her. She returned pale-faced and clearly troubled. She did not confide what had passed between them, but it was evident that even formal contact with such a master manipulator had begun to undermine her self-confidence.
Overnight all Catherine’s Armagnac-appointed ladies-in-waiting had vanished, either arrested or fled from Paris with their families. Only faithful Agnes de Blagny remained, having no connections and therefore judged to be no threat. The new sentries posted at Catherine’s tower were total strangers and unpleasant ones at that. Not only did they question every exit and entrance, but they spied on us blatantly and we knew that everything was relayed to Burgundy’s agents.
A word or a message from Charles might have boosted her morale, but there was none. After his disappearance over the roof-tops we heard nothing of him except that an attempt led by Tanneguy du Chastel to retake Paris through the Porte St Antoine had been swiftly repulsed.
Then the new joint regents issued an edict stripping Prince Charles of the dauphincy and declaring him an outlaw, a traitor and a bastard.
Having heard this edict read in the king’s hall, Catherine marched angrily into her bedchamber snatching pins from her elaborate court head-dress and scattering them wildly about, as if she couldn’t rid herself quickly enough of all connection with the court and its leaders.
‘The queen has gone mad!’ she exclaimed. ‘Does she not realise that in declaring her own son a bastard, she condemns
herself
as a traitor and an adulterer? No doubt Burgundy will soon be calling himself the heir of France. Who knows what he would have done to Charles had he not fled. I thank God and his angels that you and Alys warned us in time, Mette. At least there is one member of our family who is not caught in the devil’s thumbscrew.’
In the midst of this tirade I rushed to close the door. ‘Take care, Mademoiselle,’ I warned. ‘Ears are everywhere.’
‘All right, Mette, I will whisper,’ Catherine agreed, dropping her voice so that I had to strain to hear her. ‘Let me tell you the latest scheme at the court of double-dealing. My brother is betrayed utterly. Peace negotiations are to resume with King Henry of England – the queen and Burgundy will be looking to King Henry to destroy Charles, and I am crucial to their success!’
She sank her head in her hands and I thought the anger would turn to tears.
Instead, she said, ‘I am to have my portrait painted – again! An artist arrives tomorrow to begin the picture.’ To my surprise she looked almost pleased at the prospect.
Intrigued by the change in her, I murmured, ‘Is that so, Mademoiselle?’ and picked up the hairbrush, exchanging puzzled glances with Alys who was crawling around the floor retrieving the scattered hair-pins.
Catherine sat on her dressing stool and leaned her head back to let me run the brush down the full length of her pale-gold tresses in the way that always relieved her tensions. She closed her eyes but her murmured confidences continued. ‘I think it possible that if I marry Henry I might persuade him otherwise. Besides . . .’ her eyes opened and she raised a hand-glass to consider her reflection, ‘… I have decided that marriage may be my only way of thwarting the devil’s lechery. If I am being offered as the future Queen of England, surely even Burgundy will not dare to tamper with the goods.’
There was a short pause in my brush strokes as I caught my breath, confounded by this last remark. I looked down at the beautiful face in the glass and thought of the girl she had been at her fourteenth birthday banquet, before the battle of Agincourt had changed everything. Then she had been a young damsel, now she was truly a royal lady, with a guarded intelligence in her once-guileless blue eyes. It had been weeks since I had seen her smile and in that moment I knew that she had been keeping as much from me as I was keeping from her.
‘Are you telling me that he has propositioned you, Mademoiselle?’ I asked with deep concern.
Catherine shook her head. ‘Oh no, Mette, but his every glance is charged with a vile contempt for women. Poor little Marie of Anjou is brought down to dinner by an armed escort, otherwise she would not enter the duke’s presence. Of course she scarcely eats a thing. I know Charles could not take her with him, but what is to become of her? Today she begged the queen to be allowed to go to Charles in Bourges, but Burgundy said to her that the pope would not hold her to an unconsummated union with a bastard and that he would find her a real man to bed with. How could the queen let him speak like that?’