I was far from happy to be back, but at least Burgundy was no longer in charge. By then the dauphin – little Prince Louis who had dropped the hairy caterpillar down my bodice – had turned sixteen and taken his seat on the Royal Council, aided and abetted by his much older cousin, the Duke of Anjou. Between them they managed to prevent Burgundy and his cohorts from making any successful moves on Paris, but it wasn’t all good because the queen had clung onto her position and she and the dauphin had to share the regency. It was a daily feature of life at St Pol to see red-faced emissaries scuttling between the Queen’s House and the dauphin’s apartments, making futile attempts at building bridges between a mother and son who were constantly at loggerheads.
Not that I was one to talk. I have to admit that it wasn’t all peace and harmony between me and Jean-Michel. After the death of my mother, I had grown used to being mistress of my own home and helping to run a business. Now I was once more on servant’s wages and living in one damp, dark chamber with no grate and no garderobe. We peed in pots and had to use the reeking latrine ditch behind the stables. I grumbled constantly about my reduced circumstances, so no wonder Jean-Michel was glad to have news to cheer me up.
‘Not news of what,’ he countered. ‘Of who. Of the Princess Catherine.’
I sat bolt upright, wide awake. ‘Catherine! What about her? Tell me!’
Until he said her name I had not realised how starved I had been of her, my longing raw and secret, like a concealed ulcer.
‘She is coming back to the Hôtel de St Pol.’
‘When?’ I nearly screeched, rearing round and shaking him by the shoulder. ‘
When
, Jean-Michel?’
‘Shh!’ I could not see him in the dark, but I could sense the admonitory finger on his lips. ‘Sweet Jesus! Simmer down, woman, and I will tell you. Quite soon, I think. One of the grand master’s clerks was down at the stables today, making arrangements for her travel from Poissy Abbey.’
My mind was doing somersaults, but I tried to steady myself so that I could ponder this development. ‘I wonder why she is coming back now. There must be a reason. My God, Jean-Michel, will you be involved?’ There were occasions when he was called on to ride in the teams which carried the royal horse-litters.
‘No, no. She is the king’s daughter. There is to be a full escort – twenty knights and two hundred men-at-arms – too grand a job for me.’ Jean-Michel reached out to pull me down beside him. ‘I must find more things to get you excited,’ he murmured, nuzzling my ear, and being by now full of pent-up feelings, I reciprocated. But after we had stoked the spark of passion to a blaze and zestfully quenched it, I lay wide-eyed, my mind spinning like a windmill in a gale.
A few weeks previously, an embassy from England had arrived at the French court. A cardinal and two bishops, no less, had ridden in with great pomp and show, parading through the city with banners flying, trailing a huge procession of knights and retainers eager to enjoy the sights and brothels of Paris. It was a surprise to see them come in peace, because up to then we had heard tell that the English king was mobilising to re-claim territories on this side of the Sleeve, which he considered belonged to England. Normandy, Poitou, Anjou, Guienne, Gascony, they were all on his list. I remember wondering why he did not just claim the whole of France, the way his great-grandfather had done. Being a staunch royalist, my mother had told me how seventy years ago King Edward III of England had tried to claim the French throne as the nearest male heir to his uncle, King Charles IV of France, who had been his mother’s brother. But thirty years before that, in their own male interests no doubt, the grandees of Church and State had decided that women in France could not inherit land – pots and pans yes, horses, houses and gold yes, land no. They could not even pass land through their own blood line to their sons, pardieu! They called it Salic law, but my mother never explained why. Perhaps she did not know. Anyway, this law nullified King Edward’s claim and put Catherine’s great-grandfather on the French throne instead. Arguments over sovereignty had been rumbling between France and England ever since.
However, the present argument was not about who sat on what throne. This high-powered English embassy was apparently only interested in settling the dispute over territories, and in sealing the deal by acquiring a French wife for King Henry V of England, who was the great-grandson of Edward III. Well, you didn’t have to be a genius to conclude that the return to court of our king’s youngest and only unmarried daughter might have something to do with this. I decided there and then that if my darling Catherine was coming back to St Pol to be dangled before the King of England as a prospective bride, then she was going to need help – and who better to help her than her faithful old nursemaid?
Gone were the days when everything closed down if King Charles had a bad turn. From a powerful man with periodic delusions, he had dwindled into a predominantly childlike creature, only occasionally violently mad; a puppet-king to be manipulated by whoever guided his hand to sign the edicts. As a consequence, the palace was brimming with courtiers on the make, all looking to fill any official posts that might put them within reach of the pot of gold that was the royal treasury, which meant that accommodation was at a premium. If you lived in servants’ quarters, you had to earn them and therefore our whole family was employed in the royal household, even Luc.
In fact, he was the happiest of all of us, for although he was only eight, he was in his element as a hound boy in the palace kennel. He had grown into a bony-kneed, cheeky-faced lad with an affinity for animals like his father and a stubborn streak like me. I had tried hard to teach him the rudiments of reading and writing, but with an ambition to be a huntsman, he could not see the point. Alys had taken to her letters easily, but now had little time to practice since she worked in the queen’s wardrobe, where she hemmed linen from dawn till dusk. How she bore the tedium, I’ll never know but she’d grown into a docile, long-suffering little maid and I consoled myself that seaming was better than steaming, which was my unhappy lot. Since females were banned from working in the bake house or kitchens, where I might have used my skills to their best advantage, I was forced to become an alewife – the lowest of the low. I was used to hard work and fermenting barley was no harder than baking bread, but it was different when it wasn’t your own business.
The worst thing for me, living in the palace, was being constantly reminded of Catherine. I saw her face at the windows of the nursery tower, heard her laughter in the old rose garden and her footsteps on the flagstones of the chapel cloister. Only her imminent return looked set to stir me out of the deep, persistent melancholy I had been feeling without admitting it to myself.
The day after Jean-Michel dropped his bombshell, I went to the grand master’s chamber in the King’s House and, mercifully, my powers of persuasion did not desert me. Within minutes, the clerk charged with assembling staff for Catherine’s new household had agreed that I was ideally suited for work as her tiring woman and arranged for my transfer from the palace brewery. I would be on familiar ground, for she had been allocated the very rooms in which she had spent the first years of her life. We were both going back to the nursery tower. My feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground as I sped to my new post, gloating over the fact that soon, very soon, I would once more be as close as any mother to the child of my breast.
The first-floor chamber of the tower, once Madame la Bonne’s bedchamber, had been turned into a salon where Catherine and her companions would be able to read and embroider and entertain themselves and her visitors. The former governess’ crimson-curtained bed had been long ago removed and the chamber walls were hung with rainbow silks and jewel-coloured tapestries. It was furnished with cushioned stools, polished chests and tables and a carved stone chimneypiece framing a deep hearth, where a blazing fire would keep the air a good deal warmer than it had ever been in the old days. It was while I was lighting this fire a few days later, that the door opened without warning and a young lady entered and stood staring at me.
Catherine! I sank to my knees, glad to do so as my legs had turned to jelly. Dumbstruck, I gazed up at a vision of loveliness, dressed in a cornflower-blue gown, her beautiful Madonna face framed by neat little horns of netted blond hair and a filmy white veil.
‘Do not look at me, woman!’ the vision snapped. ‘I will not be gawped at by a servant.’
I flinched and lowered my eyes. A thousand times I had imagined a reunion with Catherine, but this reality jarred alarmingly. Everything looked as it should – the stylish velvet gown neatly trimmed with fur, the small oval face, the royal-blue eyes and the creamy complexion – but the sweet nature I remembered seemed to have vanished, the vibrant, loving spirit of the child had apparently withered into brittle pride. With a sinking heart I was forced to conclude that my darling, winsome girl had become a haughty mademoiselle.
‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What is your name?’
‘Mette,’ I replied, struggling to control my shock.
‘Mette? Mette! That is not a name. What is your full name?’
I was prepared to forgive the fact that she had not known me by sight, but she had known my name as a toddling infant – surely she would not forget it. But I heard the cold scorn in her voice and I neither wanted nor dared to look up and see it in her eyes. Suddenly I was consumed with anger against the nuns of Poissy. What could they have done to destroy the gentle essence of my Catherine?
‘Guillaumette,’ I gulped and had to repeat the word to make it audible. ‘Guillaumette.’
I risked a fleeting glance. Not a flicker of recognition.
‘That is better. What you are doing here, Guillaumette?’ The lady began to patrol the room, peering at its hangings and furnishings, viewing them without any visible sign of approval.
‘I have been appointed your tiring woman, Mademoiselle. I thought you might need a fire after your journey,’ I said meekly.
‘In future, if you are needed you will be summoned,’ she declared, fingering the thick embroidered canopy of a high-backed chair as if assessing its market worth. ‘Servants should not loiter in royal apartments. Remember that. You may wait below in the ante-chamber.’
‘Yes, Mademoiselle,’ I murmured and scuttled for the door, as eager to leave as she clearly was to be rid of me.
I stumbled down the stairs in a state of disbelief. Of course I had considered it possible that Catherine might not remember me after such a long period of separation, bearing in mind how young she had been when we parted, but such an evident change in character was a tragedy. I felt as if my heart was being squeezed in a giant fist.
The ante-room where I had been ordered to wait was on the ground floor, off the main entrance. It had been a bare, cold room when Louis and Jean used to have their lessons there, but now there was a brazier to warm the draught from the door and a tapestry on one wall depicting a woodland scene, with benches arranged beneath. No candles had been lit however and only a few dusty beams of twilight slanted in through the narrow windows.
Such gloom echoed my mood. Angrily dashing tears from my eyes, I cursed myself for being so foolish as to believe that my former nursling would automatically greet me with warmth and joy. She had been sent to Poissy to be educated as a princess and royalty was used to receiving personal service from noble retainers. Courtiers fought amongst themselves for the honour of pulling on the sovereign’s hose or keeping the keys to his coffers. I knew that my duty as a menial servant was to be invisible, performing the grubbier tasks in my lady’s absence and, if caught in the act, turning my face to the wall and scuttling out of sight. To gaze directly at a princess and expect her to remember the affection she had shared with me as a child, had been to defy the social order. I might harbour a lifetime’s love for the tiny babe I had suckled, but there was no rule which said she must return the sentiment. Quite the reverse, in fact. She was far more likely to have closed her mind to her neglected past and embraced her glittering present. Downcast, I nursed my injured feelings and contemplated a future which seemed once more joyless and bleak.
‘M
ette? It is Mette, is it not?’
I’d been huddled on a bench in the far corner of the ante-room, too wrapped in misery to look up when I heard someone open the door. Then the low, sweet voice startled me to my feet with such an acute pang of recognition it made my very bones tingle. A hooded figure stood hesitating in the doorway, the face in shadow.
‘Yes, Mademoiselle. It is Mette,’ I whispered, my hands flying to my breast where my heart was leaping and fluttering like a caged finch.
I caught a faint hint of indignation as she eased back her hood and asked, ‘Do you not know me, Mette?’
‘Oh dear God! Catherine!’ Tears swamped my eyes and I must have swayed alarmingly, for she rushed across the room and I felt her arms go around me, supporting me as my knees buckled. We fell together onto the bench.
Even the smell of her was familiar; the soft, warm, delicate, rosy smell of her skin was like incense to me. How could I have mistaken another for her? Every inch of my body knew her without looking, like a ewe knows her lamb on a dark hillside or a hen knows her chick in a shuttered coop.
‘You are here,’ she crooned. ‘I felt sure you would be. Oh, Mette, I have longed for this day.’
We drew back from our close embrace to study each other. The curves of her brow and lips were like glowing reflections of my dreams and even the gloom of the chamber could not leech the colour from those brilliant blue eyes. I gazed into their sapphire depths and felt myself submerged in love.
‘I have crawled on my knees to St Jude,’ I cried, my voice breaking on a sob, ‘asking him to bring us back together, but I never thought it would happen.’
Catherine gave a little smile. ‘St Jude – patron of lost causes. That was a good idea. And, you see, it worked.’ She shook her head in wonder, her eyes still roaming my features. ‘I have seen your face in my dreams a thousand times, Mette. Other girls at the convent pined for their mothers, but I pined for my Mette. And now here you are.’ Her arms slid around my neck and her soft lips pressed my cheek. ‘We must never be parted again.’