Root of the Tudor Rose (15 page)

Henry smiled and put a gentle finger on her lips. ‘Hush, Catherine,' he said kindly. ‘Tell me about my clever son tomorrow. I am tired to my very bones, sweetheart, and I need to sleep. I wouldn't do justice to a woman tonight. Not even you.'

‘But, Henry …'

‘Tomorrow, my sweet. You can't possibly know how the prospect of a warm, dry, comfortable bed can beguile a soldier after months of damp and wretched discomfort. We endured incessant rain and very little food before Meaux surrendered. I lost many of my men to dysentery because of it. The flux. A horrible, stinking disease. And, believe me, it is no respecter of kings.'

‘Is that what troubles you, my Lord?'

‘It is, but at least I have a few days of warmth and rest to look forward to, and decent food to give my bowels something to grip. Anton is sure to know what is best for that.' He turned towards her, suddenly anxious. ‘He has come over from England with you, hasn't he?'

‘Yes, yes, he has,' said Catherine. ‘I made sure of that. I knew you would appreciate his cooking after months of soldiers' victuals.'

‘Then I'll eat whatever he suggests,' said Henry, pulling back the covers on the bed and climbing into it. ‘But let me sleep tonight, my sweet love, please. It's all I really need. Blessed, blessed sleep.'

Well, there was nothing for it, thought Catherine, but to accept the situation with good grace. She curled up against Henry's broad back and closed her eyes, willing herself to sleep.

She woke with beads of sweat on her forehead, her heart hammering. The room was as black as pitch and it took her a moment to realise where she was. She reached out a hand and felt the warmth of the mattress where Henry had been lying. She'd been dreaming again but it was not a pleasant dream. There were horses, several horses, going too fast, and there were men shouting. Children too, screaming in terror. She lay on her back, staring wide-eyed into nothingness until her heart resumed its normal beat. Then she heard the sound which must have awakened her, the piercingly beautiful and haunting sound of a blackbird singing in the darkness outside the window. But there was another sound too, ugly and disturbing. Catherine turned onto her side, pulled the bedclothes up over her shoulder for warmth, and listened to her husband groaning in the latrine.

She slid out of their warm bed early the next morning, taking the little bedside bell out into the corridor to summon Guillemote so that it wouldn't wake Henry. Guillemote, still barefoot, came running at her mistress' command.

‘The King is ill, Guillemote,' Catherine whispered. ‘He was up several times in the night.'

‘What ails him, Ma'am?'

‘The flux.'

Guillemote's eyes widened in alarm and she crossed herself swiftly. ‘The flux! Then we must pray for him, my Lady.'

‘Yes, yes, of course, but he seems to think that all he needs is some solid food to settle his stomach. Would you ask Anton's advice, please? He probably knows what's best.'

‘Certainly, Ma'am.'

Guillemote dropped the slippers she'd been carrying, pushed her feet into them, and bustled away towards the kitchen. Catherine returned to the bedchamber where Henry was still fast asleep. She looked down at him for a long moment then knelt at the side of the bed, studying his face. It was very drawn and there were more lines around his eyes than she remembered, more grey in his hair and in the stubble on his chin. His skin had taken on a translucent quality and the scar tissue below his right eye stood out lividly, knotted and tight. She wanted to reach out and touch it, make it whole again, make him better; but she was afraid of waking him. He needed all the rest he could get. Still kneeling, she crossed herself, closed her eyes and prayed for him.

Later that morning, Anton climbed the spiral stairs of the donjon and was shown into the royal solar. He was confident that he had the answer to the King's problem.

‘Hare,' he said, emphasising the aspirate.

‘Hair?'

‘
Oui
. Hare.' Anton, anxious that the King should understand his meaning, held up two fingers at either side of his head in imitation of a hare's long ears. ‘Jugged hare, Your ‘Ighness. And Anton will make a delicious sauce with ‘is insides and mix ‘is gall with pepper. And your pain – it will go. Phut!' He clicked his fingers.

‘You can rid me of the pain, Anton?' The King's face brightened.

‘I will try, Sire,' said the little Frenchman, bowing low again, ‘with some help from
Monsieur Lièvre
, the clever Mr Hare.'

‘Then get to your kitchen, man, and work miracles for me,' Henry said, smiling as he lay back on his pillows. He remained in bed that day and for the rest of the week, letting Catherine pamper him and eating as much of Anton's delicious jugged hare as he could force down his gullet.

While her husband remained confined to his sickbed at the Château de Vincennes, Catherine took the opportunity to visit her parents at St Pol and was shocked by the sight of Queen Isabeau, who had finally begun to look her age. She was now fifty-two years old and had grown very fat. Her skin had yellowed and all that remained of the once-handsome Queen's beauty was her remarkable eyes.

The King, her father, cried when he saw Catherine at his bedside but had no idea who she was. He spent most of his time in his bedchamber and his wife craved companionship and gossip.

Absently stroking the small white dog on her ample lap, Isabeau was greedy for information about her grandson and Catherine was only too pleased to boast to her mother about the baby, how handsome he was and how clever. She recounted the stories of her coronation, too, and her mother was much amused to hear of the miracles which Anton had wrought with the fish.

For her part, Catherine was keen to hear news of her siblings. The Dauphin Charles, Isabeau told her, had retreated to Bourges with his tail between his legs at around the time of the Treaty of Troyes. He had been there ever since.

‘And I hear he's about to be married,' she added.

‘Really? To whom?'

‘To Marie of Anjou,' said Isabeau. ‘No doubt her mother forced them into it. She's fearfully determined and she seems to have taken him over completely since he left here and fled south. I know her of old. Dreadful woman!'

Catherine suppressed a smile at the thought that there was another royal mother as domineering as her own. ‘And how is my dear sister Marie?' she asked.

‘She is so highly thought of at that convent in Poissy,' Isabeau said contemptuously, ‘that she will no doubt end her days there as Mother Superior.'

Catherine remembered how pleased Marie had been to be accepted as a postulant. ‘I'm sure that will make her very happy,' she said.

‘Michelle, on the other hand, is hardly likely to be a mother at all, superior or otherwise. She has still not presented her husband with the son and heir he expects of her.'

‘There's still plenty of time for that,' said Catherine from the lofty standpoint of a woman who had recently produced a healthy male child with little difficulty.

‘I don't think so,' said Isabeau. ‘Frankly, I don't think it will ever happen. She's getting old now and losing her looks. She's twenty-seven. Philip goes to her bed, of course, in the hope of getting a son, a legitimate one, that is. From what I hear, he's busy fathering brats from Dijon to Flanders but he still hasn't managed one with Michelle.'

‘But she is not without hope of a child, is she?'

‘Who knows? But she's such a sour-puss nowadays that I'm not surprised he goes elsewhere for his bed sports. And she's been like that for the last three years, ever since John the Fearless was murdered. For some reason, she seems to want to take the blame for it, as though it really was her own brother that killed him. She wears a face as long as a fiddle so it's no wonder Philip is behaving like a tom-cat. Who can blame him? She's brought it on herself.'

Barely a month later, Catherine remembered what her mother had said when news reached the Château de Vincennes that Michelle had died. At first, Catherine refused to believe what she'd heard. Michelle? Dead? Surely not. But, if so, why? And how? Henry, feeling better but not yet inclined to travel, urged her to return to St Pol with a small escort party, so that she could learn more about what had happened to her sister and comfort her parents in their distress.

The messenger who had first brought the news from Ghent was summoned to appear before both Isabeau and Catherine to give an exact account of what had happened but he seemed unable to tell them anything of any significance except that Michelle had appeared to be well and healthy until a day or two before her death. No, she had not had an accident and, as far as he knew, neither had she died from any complications arising from a possible pregnancy. There was no report of any sickness in Ghent and no one else seemed to be involved. She had just – and here the messenger shrugged – well, she had just died. He couldn't tell them any more except that the funeral had been well-attended. She had, after all, been a popular duchess.

Isabeau was stroking her lap dog's head so hard that the whites of its bulbous eyes were showing. She dismissed the messenger with an imperious wave of her hand. ‘Poison, do you think, Catherine?' she asked when they were alone. She wore a grim expression on her face.

‘Surely not, Maman!' Catherine was tearful and shocked by the suggestion. ‘Who would benefit from poisoning her?'

‘You never know,' said Isabeau darkly. ‘These days, you never know. And it's always notoriously difficult to prove.'

‘Then we must heed the words of Saint Augustine, my Lady. “
Nothing is more certain than death and nothing less so than the hour of its coming
”.'

The Queen cast her eyes to the ceiling, surprised that her daughter could still find solace in some of the more trite platitudes of the saints. Then she shook her head, her mouth a bitter downturned line as she pushed the small dog off her lap. It scurried for cover under her chair, away from the painful pressure of her stroking.

Philip of Burgundy seemed not to mourn his wife at all. Within an indecently short time after her death, he sent a messenger to Henry with a request for help in relieving the town of Cosne-sur-Loire.

Catherine was sitting with Henry in their solar at the Château de Vincennes when the message arrived.

‘My Lord, you mustn't even think of it!' she objected. ‘You're just beginning to get back on your feet and now you're proposing to go rushing off again, helping Philip with some stupid little siege that doesn't concern you.'

‘Everything that happens in France concerns me, Catherine,' said Henry, ‘and as it happens, the Dauphin himself is the cause of this particular problem. He has established his centre at Cosne, so it is hardly what you call a stupid little siege.'

‘That doesn't make me personally responsible for it! Charles may be my brother but he makes his own decisions. I don't want you to fight him, Henry! I don't want you to fight Charles!' Catherine was on her feet now, her voice rising, her fists clenched and her eyes brimming with tears, trying to make him listen to her, fearing that he would become very ill indeed if he went back into the field of battle too soon. She had so recently lost her sister that she couldn't bear the thought that she might lose her husband as well. And if she didn't lose her husband, then she would very probably lose her brother. Hysteria threatened to overwhelm her.

‘That's enough, Catherine,' Henry silenced her sternly. ‘This is not a matter of what you want or don't want. I'm going to Philip's aid and there's an end to it.' Catherine subsided, sobbing, into a chair.

But she was right. It was far too early for Henry to venture back into the fray. He had always been a man who drove himself too far too often but, this time, his sheer determination to confront the Dauphin was not enough to see him through. He set out from the Château de Vincennes on horseback but soon became too weak to ride. He never reached Cosne.

The physicians in attendance on the King were seriously worried about him. They set up a temporary field hospital and tried all the herbal remedies they knew, to no avail. No amount of bleeding seemed to make any difference whatsoever and they dared not try to purge him. The best idea seemed to be to take the King back to the Château de Vincennes and a messenger was sent on ahead to make sure that the Château would be ready to receive him. Another messenger was dispatched in haste to summon John of Bedford to attend his brother at the Château.

Catherine spent many anxious hours watching from a casement window high up in the donjon until she eventually saw a group of soldiers approaching the Château flanked by men of the royal guard and with the royal standard fluttering above a horse-drawn litter. She ran down the long spiral staircase and met the group at the door, trying not to get in the way as the King's stretcher was being man-handled into a room on the ground floor. As his body servants began to remove his stinking clothes, she tried to get Henry to speak to her.

He turned his face away from her and his voice was barely audible. ‘Catherine, grant me my dignity, please. This bloody flux is no sight for the eyes of a gentlewoman. Go. Leave me. I will send for you when I am clean.'

Catherine hovered nervously outside the makeshift sickroom as priests, doctors, scribes, and servants came and went. The urgent sound of footsteps running in corridors awakened a sudden dim memory for her and she felt real fear.

When he arrived, John of Bedford greeted her briefly before being ushered straight into the King's room. Sinking heavily onto the chair at the bedside, he was deeply troubled to see how emaciated and hollow-eyed his brother had become in such a short time. ‘Well, Henry,' he said as jovially as he could, forcing a broad smile, ‘what would you like to discuss? Are you sure you're feeling up to it or would you rather leave things until you're feeling a little better?'