Crown in Candlelight (5 page)

So Paris came to life in its three divisions the food markets of La Ville to the north; the artists and scholars in the Cité mingling with lords and dukes; and in the south, L’Université. Some students were in the street where Isabelle rode and gazed at her admiringly, dispersing under the warning looks of. her escort. She rode on, greeting people, courteous and correct.

To a priest she bowed. ‘
Dieu vous gart
.’

To a workman struggling with a ladder in her path: ‘
Dieu vous ait, mon amy
.’

And to the young Charles of Orléans, who came on her as if by chance:

‘
Dieu vous donne bone matin et bonne aventure!
’

‘May I accompany you?’ His eyes drank her up, from her cobweb coif to her little shoes of Cordovan morocco. He was tall and fair like his father, but without Louis’s vacillating eyes; his own were steady and clear. In his pocket he carried yet another excellent poem to ‘Madame’.

‘Not this day, my lord.’ She shook her horse’s belled bridle. ‘We go to the Sainte-Chapelle to pray, my sister and I.’

She smiled, leaving him; she knew him to be kind and unspoiled at fifteen years old, and how ardently he desired her. She recognized that his father was in thrall to Isabeau, but she remembered that while she, Isabelle, was a hostage in England, Louis had offered to meet the English king in single combat for her sake. And on her return three years earlier he had loaded her with presents, just as Jean sans Peur had ordered great celebrations which she, bereft and heartsick, could not enjoy. She trusted neither Burgundy nor Orléans. Her father she thought of with uneasy affection and pity, her mother with loathing. The one she could both love and trust was gone, his starved body smashed by Bolingbroke’s assassins in the dark of Pontefract, then lapped in lead so that his wounds were hidden, his heart rotting in England’s earth.

Now, dismounted, they were entering the Palais precincts under delicate ribbed arches, crossing the court to where the twin chapels of the Sainte-Chapelle rose one above the other like a stone flower stretching to heaven. The great upper window was dark, and gave no intimation of the beauty within. She thought: so is a soul concealed under flesh. Only when the flesh is shattered can the soul be seen. Dead, he must have been fairer even than in life.

Into her mind, clear as ever, came the face of King Richard of England, seen for the last time in the precinct of Windsor before his departure for Ireland. He was tall and, sitting on the roan Barbary, his head seemed to touch the sky. He had turned his face to her with a threefold look of love, father and priest and lover in one. They had made their farewells yet he had dismounted, like some royal and gentle bird, and come back to her, lifting her small figure against his breast.

‘Adieu, Madame, Adieu, until we meet again!’

She would have shed tears as he kissed her again and again, yet even at twelve years old, something told her: you are a woman, a wife and a queen. It was he who had wept. But now grief dragged at her, killing the sunlit grace of the Sainte-Chapelle; and because she was still and for ever ‘Madame’, with the vein of adamantine which had sustained her over the years, she composed herself; ascending the Palais staircase with Katherine, passing by the royal apartments. She could hear her father’s voice; he was conferring with his ministers, sounding entirely rational, strong. For how long would it last? She dared not think about it. The royal chapel was designed exclusively for those of the blood; Odette drew back. Two large figures, male and female, flanked the Chapel door; above them was a formidable angel with a book.

‘Who are they?’ said Katherine.

‘Adam and Eve, before their fall. Now, walk as the nuns taught you. Head held up, eyes downcast. My good girl! she said lovingly.

Doux Jésus
, the English shall not have her! Sooner my own heart’s blood … Fury stung her. Wrong to come to this most holy place with wrath and vengeance. She stood, letting the hatred burn and cleanse and evaporate.

Emissaries had come from England to Compiègne, daring to ask for her hand in marriage with the Prince of Wales, Bolingbroke’s son, and some of the French councillors had acceded, swayed by the thought of the lost dowry, but she had sworn in their hearing to destroy herself, for better the ultimate heresy than a union with the son of Richard’s murderer. And now it was Katherine whose life and fortunes were weighed in this alliance, whose destiny could be dictated … God send my father well for ever, for when he is himself, he must be totally against this vile design …

‘Belle, why can’t Jacquot come with us?’

The little dog was sitting at the foot of the monumental staircase.

‘Call him, then.’

Katherine clapped her hands and Jacquot came, scrambling, slipping upwards, like a ball of flax,

‘Dogs have souls,’ said Isabelle.

Mathe. She remembered him well; a stern wolfhound as big as a yearling calf. She and Richard had ridden in the forests of Windsor and Eltham with Mathe loping beside them. At night he would lie by the bed, watchful (although there was nothing to watch but affection), ready to tear the life from intruders. Would that Mathe had been at Pontefract! But then he was already forsworn.

‘Henry of Lancaster came into the chamber and desired the king’s abdication. Richard gave up the crown and took it back again, only to relinquish it again. You recall how the dog was wont to place his paws about King Richard’s neck then roll and bare his belly in subservience to the sovereign? When Bolingbroke came that last time, the dog rose and embraced
his
neck and abased himself. He knew.’

She had forgotten who had told her.

They thought I was too young to love him! they said he married me, a child, so that his body could ever be faithful to the beloved dead Anne of Bohemia. But my childish love encompassed Anne’s and drowned it as the sea drowns a river. No, my Dickon. Your murderers shall never have my sweet sister, not while I live.

Like its lower counterpart, the royal chapel comprised a single nave of four bays and a seven-sided apse. Light streamed through the rose window, striking the free-standing clusters of colonnettes with their statues of saints and the low wall with its three-cusped blind arcades. The figures of St Louis and Jeanne de Bourbon were frozenly forbidding, he with his orb and sceptre, she with stone blossoms on her marble gown. Yet when the light poured in they were redeemed by breathtaking colour that lay equally upon their rigid forms and those of Isabelle and Katherine; the brilliant apple-green of chrysoprase, the sober milk of chalcedony, the rich dried blood of sardonyx flushing to cardinal red, then mellowing to garnet and rose, and brightening in the crown of Christ to gold. As a cloud darkened the window, red dominated: blood, wine, cerise, filling the shapes of the robe, the crown, all the men and beasts lovingly limned within the glass. Then the sun came again to light not only the pigeon’s-breast texture of the opaline Caen stone but the primary colour of window and chapel in a final glory. Red, the red of sunsets and claret, a comforting, loving red, as if one stood inside a ruby. The upraised faces of the two princesses were rosy under it and the little dog’s fur warmed like a peach.

Isabelle pointed to the altar, where candles burned, lighting the gems on a square reliquary.

‘Look!’ The most holy things are here.’

The relics of the Passion, pledged to St Louis by Baldwin of Constantinople.

Katherine, totally happy, cuddled Jacquot under her arm. The chapel was almost deserted. Suddenly from the shadowed apse a voice arose, almost inhuman in its purity, joined by another, crisp as a tenor reed, followed by the fauxbourdon of deeper voices weaving a skein of praise.

Magnificat anima mea Dominum

Et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo …

King Charles’s singing-boys, thanking God for his sustained deliverance. Isabelle shivered under memory. At Windsor before that ill-starred Irish expedition, she and Richard had heard Mass together. The voices coiled and soared, a fount of pain and beauty. Adieu, Madame! Adieu, until we meet again!

She bent her head and wept, while a single treble wound upwards, seeking the apogee of glory. Again, memory racked her. Master Maudelyn, the chaplain who had so resembled Richard (some said he was a bastard son of the House), had been brought to her in the midst of her grief, dressed like Richard, a spur for a doomed rebellion. He had stood, his back to a sunlit window and she had run to him, finding a counterfeit Richard, strange flesh, an alien scent. Perhaps poor Mathe had been likewise confused when he embraced the murderer.

Weeping, she went to where the candles burned. She took the largest of the unlit candles and dipped it in the flame of another and set it burning with the rest. She knelt and Katherine pressed against her. From a stall behind, Charles of Orléans watched them. Disobedient, he had followed, now suffered and could not keep silent. Quietly he came to kneel beside Isabelle.

He said with difficulty: ‘There is still love, Madame.’

‘Is there?’ she whispered violently. ‘Do you love me, Charles of Orléans? Or do you merely follow your father’s grand design, that step nearer the throne of France?’

She had hurt him desperately, but he answered calmly enough. ‘If you only knew. My heart could swallow yours up.’ He caught her hand, holding it hard on his velvet doublet. ‘Feel it beat! For your peace I would have that heart brought bleeding from my body and laid before you.’

He had his arm about Katherine and the dog was licking his hand. Isabelle said suddenly: ‘Charles … I’m in your father’s debt.’ She looked at Katherine. ‘Louis of Orléans, for all his faults, saved my sister’s life.’

‘He’s loyal to you.’

She smiled bitterly ‘Did you know that he is with my mother again at Tours?’

He bowed his head, and she rose, drying her cheeks. ‘Come, Kéti. I cannot pray today.’

‘Is there hope?’ he said desperately, following her down the nave. She was encircled by the rosy light and he thought: I would pursue her to the earth’s end, even if it were not my father’s wish. For her I would give up all hope of heaven save that of being with her. He felt the male pride of his own flesh, little dreaming that that same flesh had power to wound and kill the most beloved. He looked at her sleek unbound maiden’s hair, and secretly praised King Richard’s death.

‘Come, Katherine,’ said Isabelle. ‘Bring Jacquot. He’s thirsty.’

‘Oh, Belle!’ said Katherine suddenly ‘I love you!’ Isabelle bent to hold her close.

‘Then love me, little one. For love is the only candle in this dark old world.’

She glanced up at Charles, who stood silent, daring to hope, while behind them the sunlit window made an endless permutation of colour, the blood-red, the garnet and the gold, and the sobbing anthem rose to find an end in peace.

Isabeau, at Tours, was uneasy. During the past two years her court had been much depleted; her finest hangings, plate and jewels had been removed to Paris at the King’s command. Even Colard de Laon’s paintings were now closely guarded in the Louvre, and the little artist had, most disloyally she thought, attached himself to the household of Jean sans Peur, and lived there in great estate.

Two of her adherents, however, were unfaltering. Louis of Orléans knelt beside her now with the flagon of Gascon wine ready and a familiar expression on his face that was compounded of disdain, lust, and abject loyalty that he was powerless to betray. She kept him dangling still, giving him half-promises of favours physical and political, allowing him a sight of her body when he came to bid goodnight, but as often taunting him, calling him weak, mad, like his brother—although Charles, to her chagrin, remained whole, with the kingdom firmly under his hand.

The other blood-servant she owned was Louis Bosredon, after whom the Dauphin had once named a rat. Bosredon’s love-making had a brutality that stirred her jaded palate, and she used him to drive the gentler Louis wild with jealousy. Once in mischief she had invited both of them to her bed.

She and her brother had spied on them from behind a screen. Keen sport; for she knew the predilection of Louis of Orléans. A little womanly, a little warped. Louis Bosredon was entirely man and tempered like one. His fury had excelled at Louis’s timid overtures. Only barely had she and her brother prevented outright murder that night.

It was useful to have them at one another’s throats. Each striving to outdo the other to her will. She pictured Bosredon’s sensual face, his wicked laughing eyes. Only he dared mock her with impunity. And now he had not returned from Paris. She had sent him there to learn what he could of the King’s affairs, and had expected him back at Tours days ago. She began angrily to think in terms of his disaffection. Also, she missed him. She took the refilled goblet impatiently from Orléans.

‘
You
would not care if he never returned!’

‘Who, highness?’ he said, too innocently.

She sighed furiously and rose to pace about, more anxious than she cared to reveal.

‘I would have trusted him with my life,’ she murmured. ‘Louis, Louis,’ striking her fists against the sides of the gown.

‘My queen?’

‘Ah, fool!’ She spoke so viciously that he wondered: why do I, a royal Duke, stay to suffer this abuse? Why did I rejoice when she finally forgave me for ruining her schemes for Milan and for condoning the match between Charles and Isabelle? Why do I neglect my own wife, my quiet Violante? In the hope that one day this wicked woman will be kind to me? His heart stirred, and with that unholy passion came again the old reasonless precognition of disaster.

‘It’s late,’ he said.

‘I shall not retire,’ she answered, still treading the tiles. ‘None of us will sleep tonight. He
will
come!’

She does the upstart honour. He bit his thumbnail savagely. Isabeau seated herself again.

‘Entertain me.’

A page brought Louis a gittern and he drew an elegant thread of music from the strings.

La plus belle et doulce figure,

La plus noble gente faiture,

C’est ma chiere dame et mestresse,