Crown in Candlelight (31 page)

By St Denis! she thought. How many dead! Even Jean sans Peur now, and men had judged him immortal. Struck down at a meeting with the new Dauphin, Charles, on the bridge of Montereau. Before this event, further towns had fallen to the English: Lavilleterte and Bouconvillers, Gisors, Meulan, Montjoie and St Germain, Château-Gaillard. News of Burgundy’s death had come back to Isabeau in garbled versions. He and the Dauphin had met in a small barricaded square east of the river on the periphery of the bridge. Jean sans Peur had disliked the venue but had finally acquiesced, saying that something must be risked in the cause of peace.

Although Burgundy, to the rage of the Dauphin Charles, had long been intriguing with Henry, giving and receiving promises, they had quarrelled after the terrible siege and fall of Rouen, and Jean sans Peur had dismissed as null all the tentative negotiations that had gone before. So he had agreed to meet the Dauphin for exploratory talks. He was annoyed with Henry, and toyed for once with the idea of the factions healed and a united front presented to the conqueror. Learning of this proposal, Henry, who had been keeping truce, launched an offensive on Pontoise, and then reached the gates of Paris, from which Isabeau and Jean sans Peur were forced to run by night.

It had been early September (less than a year ago, she mused) that Burgundy, accompanied by seven hundred armed men, arrived at the Montereau bridge and entered the enclosure with a small entourage. One of the Dauphin’s chief officers, Tanneguy du Chatel, greeted him there. Jean embraced him, praising his fidelity, then knelt to the Dauphin who was leaning, fully armed, upon a wooden frontier set up on the bridge. What then ensued had never been clear. A few insults of no real weight had been uttered by the Dauphin to the Duke. Jean sans Peur, rising to his feet, found his sword caught up in his velvet mantle. In order to untangle it, he took the sword by the hilt. There were shouts of outrage from the Dauphin’s party—he draws a weapon before our lord!—and Tanneguy du Chatel whirled his axe across the Duke’s throat. Then all the Dauphin’s men fell on him, stabbing and gouging him to death, while the heir of France, still leaning on the barrier, watched without a sign or a word.

It was so sudden that the seven hundred fighting men drawn up outside remained uninvolved. Perhaps, she thought, they saw only a distant scuffle. Perhaps they were traitors – who could tell? The Dauphin Charles was later helped by his friends into the castle at Montereau. Was he appalled by the savage finality of it all? Although he was Armagnac through and through and that day two murders had been avenged; Louis of Orléans, and Count Bernard. He was only sixteen years old, and perhaps confused by inexperience …

Whatever the truth, Jean sans Peur was dead. Of all Isabeau’s paramours he had been the most useful, the most likeable. There would be none to match him, with his ruthless wit. His long heavy face returned to her sometimes in stabs of regret. And now there was only Henry of England, the symbol of survival, the prime concept by which she and Katherine stood alone to gain. For in her heart Isabeau knew the Dauphin to be merely the tool of strong conspirators, and his father was continually quaking-mad.

‘Sit straight!’ she said suddenly, although Katherine was sitting as if she had a rod against her spine. ‘The gown looks well. Would to God you had more jewels. I could hang those marauders with my own hands.’

Henry, after his first meeting with Katherine almost a year ago, had sent her a gift of gems worth one hundred thousand crowns (unfortunately they had been stolen in transit by robbers, Frenchmen for all that, on the road to Troyes.) He must therefore have admired her. Did he carry her face in his thoughts, like a troubadour? Unlikely, from what Isabeau knew of Henry. Was the portrait an uninspired reminder, with its manufactured smile? None could persuade Katherine to smile, the week of the painting. She had murmured that she was mourning the anniversary of a death. Whose? when there were so many dead, and who knew who was loved or hated?

Katherine now listened to the sporadic conversation of her mother as to the rumblings of a far-off battle, dangerous but too distant to be of account. They were waiting; they would eternally be waiting, for news of a second chance to meet Henry of England, for a messenger to slide through the studded oak door and possibly be harangued by Isabeau for not bringing the desired words. Katherine was accustomed to waiting. Her mind was trained to drift from poignant memory to curious recollection—from a little white dog now dead to the willow tree at Poissy—to Belle, whose remembrance no longer hurt, being welded to her own spirit. Constant within that private dominion, a silent counsellor whose essence was truer than a memory and more potent than a ghost.

Nearby stood a harp, its woodwork carved with roses and acorns. At her mother’s bidding she had become adept upon it. Henry loved the harp. That was one of the subjects that had arisen in their brief conversation. And near the harp was a caged nightingale, an insignificant brown bird who would go for weeks without singing and then burst into a desperate abandon of melody. Silently Katherine rehearsed a
chanson
newly learned, thinking without understanding of the love it celebrated.

J’ay prins amours a ma devise,

Pour conquérir joyeuseté,

Heureux seray en cet esté

Se puis venir a mon emprinse.

Such a happy, courtly song! And how hot it was in this room, in these clothes! The gown was pinned to her back by sweat. Scattered at random in her mind were courts and castles and dowries and stolen jewels and strange lands and somewhere love. She dreamed of open fields; meadows, and brisk trembling air, and mountains. And love? Why, Henry of England was her love. She had been rehearsed in this thought, yet her long glossy lips curved a little cynically and the black eyes came on fire with humour.

He and she had met at last nearly a year ago near the bridge at Pontoise. A high day in Katherine’s lifeless almanac. The first and possibly the last meeting. Perhaps she would die before they met again. Of longing for Henry? The smile turned to a chuckle. Isabeau looked up approvingly and the nightingale cocked its captive head, closed its pin-sized eyes and prepared itself for another recital, perhaps in about two months’ time.

It had been almost as hot as now, with May slipping into June, and she had been even more royally robed, as she sat in the barge with her mother, her trembling, glassy-eyed father, and Jean sans Peur, who had kept his hand on her shoulder as they approached the Île Belle in the Seine near where the rendezvous had been arranged. Noxious odours rose from the river and she was glad of the Duke’s proximity; his clothes were rich with Venetian perfumes. He murmured encouragement, his voice vibrant against her unbound hair: ‘When the King sees you,
ma belle
, he’ll forget all about his Aragon princess!’

She had scarcely been aware that Henry was contemplating an Aragonese liaison, nor that he was trying to bring all Europe to his side by arranging marriages for his brothers Bedford and Gloucester, wooing the German and Hainault courts. In between making diplomatic representations to Genoa, Flanders and the Archbishops of Treves and Mayence in aid of his proposed war against the Infidel. Treaties and abortive treaties, unfulfilled pledges and cancelled meetings came thick and fast without her knowledge. She was, however, aware that Rouen, its population vastly decimated by the siege, was being held to ransom for 300,000 crowns, and that Henry was building a palace among its ruins.

‘Smile,
Doucette
!’ the Duke of Burgundy whispered, and she obeyed, glancing back at her parents. Isabeau, fanned with peacock feathers by a page, was watching her as usual. The King of France closely surveyed his own hands and fingernails, his lips trembling. The barge, hung with cloth of gold, moved steadily on towards the meadow outside the west gate of Meulan, north of the river. Beribboned pavilions had been set up, and palisades ringed three enclosures; one for the French, one for the English, and one, holding the largest pavilion a neutral meeting-place dressed with the lilies and leopards of the two countries. Deep trenches had been dug to mark the territorial boundaries and for further defence, lines of stakes planted along their edge. Henry was bringing English bowmen. A small city had arisen in the Meulan field. Noblemen of both countries had erected smaller tents of rivalling magnificence, coloured and tasselled with gold and set in neat patterns, like jewelled streets.

There were as many of these tents on Henry’s side of the palisade as his most recently captured towns: Montivilliers, Lillebonne, Fécamp, Etrepagny, Tancarville, Dieppe, Gournay, Neufchâtel en Bray. La Roche Guyon (thought to be invincible but whose foundations had been undermined by Warwick); Eu (for the second time), Honfleur, and Ivry, taken by Humphrey of Gloucester.

The oaths of chivalry had been sworn, the terms offered. Katherine could hardly believe that she was the focus of their extravagance. Her dowry was named by Henry at 800,000 crowns. To this Isabeau objected, saying that 600,000 crowns was still owing as the sum taken to England by Isabelle for Richard. In response, Henry reminded them of the ransom for King John, captured by the Black Prince, and never fully reimbursed. Jean sans Peur mentioned Katherine’s jewellery, assets which would accompany her. The answer was brisk: these jewels could not match even one bauble of Henry’s, for example the ‘Great Harry’, a crown pawned for his Agincourt campaign. He also demanded his own kingdom in France, including all the conquests of Edward III and his own gains in Normandy. Touraine, Anjou, Maine, Brittany, Flanders, Ponthieu and Montreuil were but a few of the claims he sought. Above all he must be regent and son-in-law to King Charles, and upon the sovereign’s demise, supreme ruler.

This sovereign, upon whom all such decisions should have fallen, swayed to his feet as the craft was moored and trumpeters played a fanfare. His face was milky-pale, his eyes withdrawn, He knew neither where nor what he was. Gently Jean sans Peur pressed him down into his red silk chair.

‘Stay! Rest,
grand seigneur
!’ he said, as if to a well-bred hound. And to Katherine: ‘You also, Madame.’ He stepped from the barge and joined Isabeau in a litter where boys dressed as angels were playing pipes and shawms and women fussed to arrange the Queen’s gold robes. Katherine waited for a further two days at the castle of Meulan, with her father, until she was escorted by the Count of St Pol into the great pavilion. She wore the most costly of her new dresses, green velvet panelled with intricate silver brocade, so heavy and hot she could scarcely walk, and adding to its weight a vast downfall of ermine attached to a high-arched coronet. When her women had placed the coronet on her head they had caught some of her fine hairs round a jewelled floret; this pained her. She was pale and her dark eyes immense.

It was dim in the pavilion after the brightness outside. A stake was planted in the middle of the cloth of gold carpet, a halfway mark between the nations, and there she knelt with her mother and Burgundy. She saw the shapes of noblemen, the transient brilliance of jewels in the gloom, a movement of dark robes and bright heraldry, and peering up, sought to tally the old description, given by Dame Alphonse.

‘His head was bare, his cheek florid. He has a scar on his face. Aged about three-and-twenty. He looks clever.’

Three men stepped forward, making deep obeisance, all tallish as they rose, but this must be Henry in the centre. He came to take her hands and lift her for a brief embrace. His full lips pursed to kiss her. Yes, he was florid, but patchily, over the weathered cheekbones. Steady eyes in a thin restless face. An old scar. But two-and-thirty now, to her eighteen. Clever, yes. A stubborn cleverness in face and body. His hands were strong, his mouth slightly moist. She thought, with an insight that amazed even herself: he is unwell. Devoured by something—what?

‘
La Belle Katherine
.’ A good, mature, mellow voice. ‘The portrait lied.’ He spoke good French too, nearly as perfect as the Earl of Warwick, whose long, welcoming address had lately finished.

She had known the painting was not good. She lifted her face and smiled her brilliant seductive smile.

‘He showed you to be fair. But you are lovely.
Comme une ange
.’

Then Henry had presented his brothers. Thomas, Duke of Clarence, capturer of castles. He looked war-weary. His breath none too sweet, he kissed her, as did Humphrey of Gloucester. This one was different. She looked up, startled, in to his eyes. Then away, quickly, back into that secret inner sanctum where dwelt Belle and her ghostly advisers. They were whispering, an instant chaos of warning.
Beware him! Beware!
then the moment snapped and she found herself murmuring the rehearsed greeting, though now avoiding the eyes in which she had seen an unmistakable evil.

That, in retrospect, was her clearest impression of the meeting. The rest, recalled in the stifling room at Troyes, was vague, not unpleasant. Henry had seated her at his right hand in the gorgeous pavilion, had studied her carefully but with courtesy and a severe clerkish charm. She had felt that no detail of her went unobserved—not the way she drank or took her food, and when she asked for water with her wine, she fancied a spark of approval gleamed in his eyes. Choristers sang a motet during the feast, and this was when they talked of music. The harp, said Henry, was his favourite instrument, and as if in illustration of his discourse, behind a screen a musician pulled down a pellucid fountain of bright notes, his light tenor voice winding a skein about their conversation. A strange voice; she heard it sometimes even now, on the edge of dreams.

‘That,’ explained Henry, ‘is the Welsh harp you hear. A difficult skill to master. The tuning …’ The music attracted her, overlaying Henry’s descriptions of technique—she feigned attention, nodding demurely. He had promised her a harp and here it now stood, beside the sulky nightingale.

Above his head a banner, held by two attendants and embroidered in blue and gold thread, had read: UNE SANS PLUS. She had forgotten then that he was dabbling with Aragon. Naively she had thought his attention, his desires, were hers. She had trusted the
raison
.