As we watched, the guns fell silent and an eerie quietness descended on the valley, heralding the appearance of the French king, whose procession slowly snaked through the tents of the siege camp and headed for the new bridge. Two heralds in their brightly coloured tabards led the way carrying standards flying white flags, indicating their intention to parley. Having crossed the river they broke away to gallop up to the town gate, leaving the king and his entourage waiting at the bridge. The distance was too great for us to hear the words that were shouted up to the defenders on the walls, but there was a bustle of action visible on the battlements of the gatehouse.
In due course a knight, bare-headed but otherwise in full armour, appeared above the gate, his personal banner fluttering behind him in the hands of a bearer. From this Edmund Beaufort identified him as the renowned Seigneur de Barbasan, the garrison commander.
After a shouted exchange the heralds wheeled their horses and galloped back to the royal party on the bridge. Then a helmeted knight on a great black courser rode forward leading King Charles’ white pony at a gentle walk towards the gate. I realised from the golden-fleece emblem on the knight’s pennant that it was Philippe of Burgundy on the black horse, parading his liege lord and attempting to reinforce the symbolic supremacy of the pathetic, hunched figure at his side. My own opinion was that the contrast between the physical stature of the two riders and their beasts only served to underline the shrunken power of the French crown and the king’s inability to exert authority over any of his lieges.
Several minutes of further shouted exchanges ensued before the duke and the king turned and walked their mounts slowly back over the bridge, breaking into a trot to cover the mile-long track back to our little valley. The Seigneur de Barbasan disappeared from the gatehouse battlements and presently, as the sinking sun began to turn the western sky blood-red, the noise and dust of hostilities began again, taking advantage of the last hour of daylight.
We saw men begin to swarm over the new cannon battery, like ants on an anthill. It took a dozen to aim, load and fire each gun and one after another the monsters gradually began to spew out their stone-splintering missiles, subjecting their target to a steady bombardment. Watching ragged holes blossom like gaping wounds in the solid masonry of the town walls made dreadful but compulsive viewing.
Then, as we watched, one of the heavy iron cannons seemed to backfire, lifting several feet off the ground and suddenly disintegrating in clouds of smoke and bone-crushing shrapnel. In a dreadful human shower it sent the bodies of its attendants flying high into the air, limbs separating from torsos and spiralling gruesomely into the river which suddenly flowed red with blood below the battery. A ragged cheer rose from the invisible defenders behind the town battlements. I buried my face in my hands, and when I had collected my thoughts enough to look up I saw that Catherine had turned away and was being violently sick in the nearby bushes. Lady Joan was with her, but I hurried over and together we half-carried her to a clearing further back in the wood out of sight of the bloodbath below, where we propped her up against a fallen tree and I sent Edmund to wet my kerchief in the nearest stream.
She was distraught, as we all were and Edmund was horrified that his queen had witnessed such dreadful carnage. ‘Oh your grace, my lady, I am so sorry. I should have realised the risk and brought you back earlier,’ he wailed. ‘The king will be furious that I allowed you to be exposed to such a sight!’
He was right, I thought, echoing the squire’s despair in my own mind as I pressed the cool cloth to Catherine’s brow. Her face was chalk-white with shock and I prayed that such a close encounter with the full horror of war had not killed any spark of new life which might be growing within her. If such were the case King Henry would be justified in being extremely angry with those whom he had trusted with the care of his young wife.
I
stood in the steep lane leading down to the bakery. The cobbles were slippery with rain and I clutched at the rough stone pillar of the Grand Pont for support. Above me the roadway and shops on the bridge were busy but the lane was quiet, few people venturing out of their cramped little timbered homes in the wet weather. At the foot of the slope the big wooden gate was shut that led to the bakery yard where the ovens stood. To my surprise everything looked much the same as it had six years before, when I had reluctantly handed the keys to one of my late father’s former apprentices.
Beside me Jean-Michel’s brother Marc shot me a worried glance. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked gruffly.
I nodded. ‘It’s just the pattens,’ I said with a smile, hitching up my skirt to show him my feet in their clumsy iron over-shoes. ‘It was never easy walking down here in these.’
He glanced down at his own feet, more secure in boots. ‘It might not lift you out of the mire but you can rely on leather,’ he grinned. I shrugged. He was a saddler, he would say that. ‘Come on, give me your arm.’
I had walked to the Lanière workshop at midday and Marc had volunteered to accompany me to the bakery. He and his family had continued to collect the rent from the tenant during my extended absence and I considered myself very lucky that they had remained loyal to Jean-Michel’s memory and saved the money for me. The elder Lanières were dead and it cannot have been easy for the remaining brothers to support their families during recent years. In the desperate periods of scarcity and starvation that had struck the city of Paris latterly, it would have been understandable if they had used my rent money to feed themselves but they had not.
‘Mind you, it has not always been easy to collect,’ Marc had grumbled. ‘With the shortage of flour there were times when your tenant was on the breadline himself!’
The joke was typical of the black humour of those dark times. Paris had lost fifty thousand souls in the plague epidemic, which we in the royal household had avoided by moving to Pontoise, and more had succumbed in the famine that followed it. Also, despite the nobles’ reputation for not paying bills, many craftsmen had been forced to follow their patrons out of Paris, for want of customers. I had already noticed how many houses now lay empty and dilapidated in the city’s once-teeming streets.
‘I am very grateful for your kindness and good faith,’ I had responded with genuine warmth. ‘I intend to ensure that the money goes to your nephew Luc, for I think he, of all our family, will have most need.’
‘But how will you get it to him if he has thrown his lot in with the Pretender?’ Marc had asked. Luc’s move had been greeted with dismay by Jean-Michel’s family for the Lanières had always been Burgundian in their loyalties and had no time for the Dauphin or the Orleanist cause.
‘I will find a way,’ I assured him. ‘Envoys and couriers often cross the lines. I will get a message to him and if he needs the money, which I am sure he does, he will contrive to come and get it.’
The royal households of England and France had arrived in Paris in early December. After an unexpectedly long siege, King Henry had finally managed to starve the Melun garrison into surrender, demonstrating to the French and Burgundian armies that siege-warfare could be won by patience as much as by headlong assaults on well-defended walls. Philippe of Burgundy had watched two of the murderers of his father hanged in the town square but when, outside the gates of Melun, the defeated garrison captain had kneeled to offer his sword in surrender, much to Catherine’s relief King Henry had not condemned him to death but committed him as a prisoner until a heavy ransom was paid for his freedom. This had enraged Burgundy because Barbasan was also on the list of guilty men.
But the king was adamant. ‘The seigneur is too formidable a knight to go to the scaffold,’ he had declared. ‘He has sworn an oath that he played no part in Duke Jean’s murder and I believe him.’
Catherine experienced no physical ill effects as a result as a result of witnessing the gun explosion, but that had not lessened King Henry’s anger and all her attendants had felt the lashing of his tongue, but fortunately it had gone no further than that. Perhaps Catherine had persuaded him that she was the one who had suggested the expedition or perhaps it was simply that in the little green valley the great warrior king had mellowed. Remarkably, a dynastic marriage forged in the violence of war had brought solace to two lonely and damaged people, who had now had a taste of the happiness that shared experience and mutual affection can bring. Henry and Catherine had found delight in each other’s company and in the simple pleasures of conversation, laughter and music; especially music, for Henry’s harp was often to be heard through the open shutters of their chamber and Owen Tudor’s playing and singing had been a regular feature of their pavilion life. Owen’s troop captain, Sir Walter Hungerford, was also Steward of the Royal Household, so it had been an easy matter to arrange a transfer for the archer from his troop to King Henry’s retinue. Although, rather than issue an order, the king had cannily invited his steward to a slap-up dinner at the pavilion to make his request.
As a veteran of Agincourt and one of England’s most celebrated knights, Sir Walter had nonetheless dared to grumble to his king, ‘You are taking one of my best bowmen, sire!’
‘You can have your pick of my royal archers, Walter,’ King Henry had responded, signalling Edmund to pour more wine. ‘And you will be doing the queen a great favour.’
Sir Walter had bowed his head a little tipsily to Catherine. ‘God forbid that I, a humble knight, should refuse a great lady,’ he said gallantly. ‘But in future I must take care not to recruit any handsome, harp-playing Welshmen!’
The deal was done, as was inevitable.
While I was at Melun I had sorely missed my daily contact with Alys and Catrine, but once or twice they had managed to hitch a ride on a supply cart to visit me and it was a joy to see the baby squeal and laugh at the babbling stream and roll around in the soft grass on its banks. She was a pretty, merry little soul and Alys had made her beautiful chemises and kirtles out of remnants of fabric from Catherine’s summer wardrobe. On one occasion both child and queen had chanced to wear kirtles of the same pretty flower-patterned linen and Catherine had proudly dandled her ‘twin’ goddaughter on her knee, showing her off to Lady Joan.
‘If I were not a queen who must bear a son, I would pray for a beautiful little girl just like you!’ she cooed, hugging Catrine tight.
The fair weather held through September and into mid-October, when the autumn storms at last arrived and drove us back to Corbeil. Within a fortnight the failure of Catherine’s monthly course had us crossing our fingers and sending up pleas to St Monica and by the beginning of December we were certain she was pregnant. King Henry was understandably jubilant and would instantly have trumpeted the news to the world, but I urged Catherine to caution him to wait.
‘It would not be wise to announce it yet, Mademoiselle,’ I warned. ‘This is such an important child that it would be as well to wait until after Epiphany to make it known, just in case it slips. You must take extreme care of yourself for although in the early weeks there is no obvious sign of the baby, that is when it is at its most vulnerable.’
Catherine gave me a worried look and instinctively put her hands to her belly. ‘It may not be obvious to you, Mette, but it will not be easy to hide the sickness I feel every morning. I am sure that cannot be good for the child.’
‘It will pass, Mademoiselle’ I said sympathetically. ‘I will make a tisane that you should drink daily on waking and you must eat white food to calm your stomach – little and often.’
‘I hope it will pass
very
soon,’ she fretted. ‘How did my mother bear twelve children if she felt like this every time?’
‘Not all babies cause this problem. You must pray for patience, Mademoiselle.’
‘Pah! That is what a priest would say!’ she protested. ‘And what do they know about being
enceinte
? I do not expect you of all people to spout religion at me, Mette!’
Catherine had been so happy to leave Corbeil castle that she even consented to travel to Paris by barge with her mother, bowing to Henry’s stipulation that she should not ride on horseback in her condition. The barge was met at the Charenton Bridge and the two queens were carried shoulder-high by royal guards in gilded litters through the streets of a city that was
en fête
for the first time in years. After a Mass of thanksgiving at the cathedral of Nôtre Dame, the French king and queen were escorted to the Hôtel de St Pol, while King Henry and Queen Catherine set up their court in the fortress of the Louvre.
After my visit to the bakery I set myself the task of finding some way to contact Luc. I could not write to him, nor could I entrust any messenger with confidential information about money because that would be asking for trouble, so when I located a courier who carried official letters to the dauphin I simply asked him if he would seek out Luc and tell him that all his family, including his new niece, were now in Paris. I hoped the mere fact that I had bothered might indicate to Luc that he should respond.
It had not taken Jacques long to establish his credentials with the Paris guild of tailors and to rent a workshop and rooms in a narrow street between the Louvre and the Châtelet, where a number of other tailors had their premises, and close enough for me to visit them often. With the English queen as his patron he did not find himself short of work. In September King Henry had made Thomas of Clarence Constable of Paris, with the result that the warring factions within the city had been brought under control and it had become safe to walk the streets again, but the people were still hungry and when I visited the markets I noticed that, compared with Troyes, there was little fresh produce available. If the English court stayed for long there would be famine by spring.
Looked at it from the English point of view however, King Henry deserved his feasts and celebrations. In the five years since his extraordinary victory at Agincourt, he had established himself as the ruler of Northern France. Winter had brought an end to campaigning and he had an opportunity to sit back and count his triumphs, among them the tiny new life that he had not yet announced. No wonder he strode about Paris in his richest apparel and wore his crown at public banquets. He was and intended to remain, one of the most glorious monarchs in Europe, the focus of fame, fortune and fealty.