The grand master of the French king’s household came to protest that King Henry was only the Heir of France and should place King Charles or Queen Isabeau at the head of all court ceremony but Henry dismissed the idea outright.
‘Let King Charles hold his own court as he has always done and I will hold mine, as I have always done,’ he declared.
‘But no one attends his court, sire,’ complained the grand master. ‘They all flock to yours.’
‘If that is what they choose to do, I cannot deny them,’ Henry shrugged. ‘Let the King of France call them back to him and see if they will come.’
Of course they did not, for it was Christmas, a time of giving, and King Henry was in a mood to be generous, handing out rewards of conquered titles and estates to all who had helped him attain his victories, while the King of France had none to give. I noticed too that Catherine made no effort to visit her mother at the Hôtel de St Pol and Queen Isabeau could not bring herself to come to Catherine’s court. The old queen must have been lonely but I could not feel sorry for her. After Catherine’s neglected childhood and abused girlhood, she deserved her days of glory. Let her display her undoubted beauty, wear her glorious gowns and sparkle with precious jewels, just as her mother had once done as the young bride of King Charles.
Catherine had bidden me spend the first two days of Christmas with my family, promising that she would not forget to take her herbal drinks and would not stay up too late at the court festivities. So I planned to celebrate the birth of Christ with Alys and Jacques, taking little Catrine to visit the crib at Nôtre Dame and listening to the choirs singing carols in the cathedral square. But before that I walked once more to the bakery under the Grand Pont where my tenant had promised to make me a special pastry of the Virgin and Christ Child as a Christmas subtlety.
It was a fine afternoon, crisp and cold under a clear sky and the river sparkled with reflected winter light as I walked along the old familiar path carrying my basket. With a lump in my throat I recalled my trips to visit Jean-Michel in the royal stables, in the days when I had been a carefree fourteen-year-old with not a thought for the future. Then I had worn my brown homespun kirtle and wooden-soled shoes and been proud that I had neat clothes and could read and write when so many around me could not. Now I wore a gown of blue Flanders wool, warded off the winter chill with a coney-lined heuque and had exchanged letters with princes. Yet although I mingled with kings and queens, inside I still felt like the rebellious baker’s daughter who had thrown away her maidenhead on a handsome young groom with twinkling eyes.
The memories seemed so vivid and the surge of energy that accompanied them so sudden and uplifting that I gave a skip and a twirl of my skirts out of the sheer joy of being alive. Then I stopped dead in my tracks, pulled up short by the sight of a ghost. Ahead of me on the path, where the little gate opened from the back of the bakery yard stood Jean-Michel. My heart began to pound with excitement and disbelief, as if it would burst from my chest. There he was! Not dead but come to the bakery to find me and here I was skipping towards him as if I was still that fourteen-year-old-girl with tumbling brown curls and rosy cheeks.
Then I looked more closely and of course it was not Jean-Michel at all, it was Luc, looking so like his father it was uncanny. It was more than a year since I had last seen him and my son had filled out into a broad-shouldered youth, with Jean-Michel’s dark complexion and his swinging, loping stride. Tears filled my eyes, tears of joy at the sight of my son and, I confess it, a few tears of disappointment that it was not his father.
‘Luc!’ I shouted, ashamed at even momentarily wishing him to be another. ‘You have come!’ So much had he matured in mind as well as body that he did not protest when I ran up and hugged him, planting excited kisses on both his cheeks.
‘I got your message,’ he said when he could speak, ‘but the courier found the dauphin in the middle of a hunt and my lord heard what the man said to me.’ Luc looked a little sheepish as he said this. ‘I know that if I had learned to read you could have sent me a private letter.’
‘Never mind that!’ I exclaimed. ‘He found you and you found me and it is Christmas! What could be better? And it is pure chance that I came to the bakery to fetch a pastry for little Catrine. Did you expect to find me here?’
He shook his head. ‘No. I came to see the tenant because I thought he would know where you were. But the point is that the dauphin himself sent me to Paris because he wanted me to carry a letter secretly for him to his sister, the princess.’
‘The queen. She is Queen of England now,’ I reminded him. ‘The dauphin sent her a letter, you say?’
‘Yes. He gave me leave to come and even let me take a horse so I rode back with the courier. I left the horse at the bakery and walked down the towpath because the baker said you would be coming.’ He looked wonderingly around him. ‘I remember playing on this path when I was a boy.’
‘Oh, so at fourteen you are a man, are you?’ I teased him. ‘Not quite yet, I think.’
‘I do a man’s job!’ he retorted. ‘The dauphin thinks so anyway, or he would not have trusted me with the letter.’
‘That is true,’ I agreed, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Can I see it?’
‘You can take it,’ Luc said, pulling a folded paper square out of the front of his jacket. It was sealed with a blob of wax on which a fleur-de-lis was boldly imprinted. Luc looked relieved to be rid of it and I noted that, wisely, he was not wearing any sign of his affinity to the dauphin.
‘I cannot go to the palace, Ma!’ he exclaimed. ‘Can I stay with Alys? Does she have a place?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, tucking the letter safely away. ‘We will go there as soon as I have seen the baker. You can meet your new niece. Catrine is a little beauty.’
‘Catrine? Is she named after
her
?’ Luc’s mouth twisted.
‘After Queen Catherine yes – who else?’ I answered, frowning. ‘She stood godmother to the child, Jesu bless her. Have you forgotten how much we owe her?’
He scowled and turned away. ‘No,’ he muttered. ‘But things have changed. There was that treaty. I do not think the dauphin’s letter will be a friendly one.’
I caught his sleeve, stopping him as he opened the gate into the bakery yard. ‘Do not tell anyone about the letter,’ I warned, ‘and I beg you, do not speak of the dauphin, even to the family. It is Christmas. Let us celebrate in peace together.’
Luc nodded. ‘You are right. After all, who knows if we will ever celebrate Christmas together again?’
His last words sent a chill through me and I wished he had not said them, for we cannot read the future but sometimes premonition strikes out of an empty sky.
So even now, as I write this nearly twenty years later, I treasure the happy hours we spent together as a family in the little house behind the old royal palace. Alys and Jacques had cleared the workshop and hung it with evergreens and ribbons and we had our own little feast of pies and puddings and roasted fowl washed down with a cask of wine sent by Catherine as a Christmas gift. We even had music because Jacques had clubbed together with other local craftsmen to share the cost of paying a little troupe of minstrels, who moved down the street from house to house singing carols and playing reels and jigs for dancing. Flushed with wine and mirth, I danced with Jacques and I danced with Luc and we all twirled baby Catrine until she shrieked with delight. Flopping breathless onto a bench and taking her on my knee, I sat and watched the young people kicking up their heels arm in arm, elated with the fellowship of laughter and the joy of the season. I was in the company of those I loved and the world seemed peaceful and in harmony. I could not remember being as happy as we were that night since Agincourt had wrought its terrible legacy.
Through all the days of Christmas the dauphin’s letter to Catherine weighed heavy on my mind, exacerbated by the sadness of bidding farewell to Luc, when he rode off from Alys’ house, with ten crowns of rent money under his belt, to return to the dauphin’s court. Later, back at the Louvre, I locked the letter away in my private coffer, awaiting a suitable moment to deliver it to Catherine. She was by turns so elated by the excitement of the extended festivities and exhausted by the strains of her condition that I kept putting it off until she seemed ready to deal with its contents. Of course I did not know what the contents were, but Luc’s warning had been enough to raise my fears.
Then, just after Epiphany, our worst fears were realised. Catherine began to bleed and although at first I hoped it might just be one of those peccadilloes of pregnancy, the bleeding persisted and grew more serious until we knew for sure that there would be no baby in the following summer, no heir yet for the Heir of France. While Catherine wept and railed at her bad fortune, I concentrated on making sure that the flow of blood was staunched and her condition stabilised. Above all, I wanted no repetition of the sad case of Bonne of Orleans who had bled to death.
I sent a message to King Henry who came to her chamber straight from one of his council meetings, still wearing his boots and fur-lined riding cloak. I sank to my knees as he strode through the door, fully expecting an explosion of anger and an outburst of blame, but he seemed quite resigned when I gave him the woeful news. In fact, surprisingly, he ended up reassuring me.
‘Do not berate yourself, Madame, it is no one’s fault,’ he said. ‘All that matters is that the queen recovers. She will recover, will she not?’ There was a faint sign of tremor in his voice when he asked this and I realised for the first time that he genuinely regarded Catherine as much more than the bearer of his children.
‘I am certain she will, your grace,’ I replied earnestly, still on my knees, having expected to plead for his forgiveness for allowing this disaster to happen. ‘She is mourning her loss but she is strong and healthy. There will be other children I am sure.’
‘And so am I,’ he said, nodding solemnly, ‘for it is God’s will that I shall have a son.’
His absolute certainty took my breath away. It was the same total confidence that had propelled him from near annihilation before Agincourt to his present state of glorious supremacy. And it was catching. The way he said it also made me completely sure that there would be another child on the way before too long and when he went in to speak to Catherine he conveyed the same sense of assurance to her. I began to understand what the Earl of Warwick had meant when he told Catherine that great leaders create leaders, for it takes supreme confidence to imbue others with self-belief and that was what King Henry did.
However I plucked up my courage and dared to warn him to exercise patience. ‘I am not a midwife, your grace,’ I said when he was leaving, having coaxed a weeping Catherine into healing slumber, ‘but I do know it would not be advisable to get the queen with child too soon. Her body needs a few weeks to heal.’
He regarded me steadily with his tawny eagle eyes and then nodded curtly. ‘I understand what you mean, Madame. My mother died from breeding – too young, too many and too soon after each other. I rely on you to nurse the queen back to health as quickly as possible. No, not for the reason you may be thinking,’ he cast me a brief and rueful smile, ‘but because we will be travelling to England soon for Catherine’s coronation. I want her to be my true anointed consort before any son is born to us.’
At least my decisions were made for me. I could not leave Catherine while she was recovering from her miscarriage, nor could I show her the letter from the dauphin. And I could not bring myself to leave her while she was still anxiously waiting to become pregnant; waiting to display the fertility which was so important to the long-term success of the Treaty of Troyes. So I decided that I would have to leave Alys and Catrine instead. Jacques was happy working in Paris among the cream of Europe’s designers and tailors and Alys did not want her children to grow up in a strange country across the sea.
‘It will not be for ever, Ma,’ she said when we discussed my leaving for England. ‘People travel across the Sleeve frequently and I am sure you will be back in Paris before too long. I have always known that the princess would need you, wherever she went, and you can make sure she does not forget her god-daughter!’
I laughed at that. She was not without a good bourgeois eye to the future, my canny daughter! I did not believe that she and Jacques and Catrine would do anything but thrive together in Paris.
I had said I would follow Catherine anywhere, but that was before I saw the sea and the ship we were to sail in, bumping up against the harbour wall in Calais six weeks later. Oh, it was a splendid ship, there was no denying that; the best in King Henry’s new royal fleet. It was sturdy and fat-bellied with bright-coloured pennons fluttering from every line and spa and it sat comfortably in the water like a prize hen on its nest, its three masts and upper decking painted royal blue and crimson and picked out in costly gold-leaf. But it was hardly as long as the great hall of the Louvre and it was supposed to carry two hundred people over a sea which looked grey and greedy and ready to swallow anything that ventured onto its restless, crested surface. However, when I whispered my fears to Catherine she just laughed and said, ‘Really, Mette! Do you think God would have granted King Henry a glorious victory at Agincourt and the crown of France if He intended him to drown on his way back to England?’
I might have pointed out that her father was still living and therefore the crown of France was not yet on her husband’s head, but I did not because she was by now totally persuaded of the fact that King Henry ruled England by divine right and that the Almighty also supported his claim to rule France. That was why he had won every battle and siege he had engaged in on French soil in the last six years and why there would be a son to inherit all that he had gained. In Catherine’s opinion you could not, and did not, argue with God and only rarely with King Henry. And it was this confidence, born of the newfound love that had blossomed between them, that had persuaded me it was time to show her the letter Luc had brought from the dauphin.