The Queen's Lover (17 page)

"Tell my mother," she said, covering her eyes with her hand as if shielding them from the wind. Guardsmen shouldn't see a princess of the blood royal lose her dignity.

She must have known, in a part of herself. But understanding it now was like feeling her own fabric being ripped agonizingly apart. No one was surprised except her, because they'd
all seen it before. This was what her father's illness was. He was mad.

Catherine was still sitting in her mother's private chapel, what might have been hours or moments later, when Christine found her. Christine had decided to come to her as soon as she'd heard the news of Azincourt. This was no time to remember past bitterness, Christine thought determinedly, rushing to the Hotel Saint-Paul; it was a time for old friends to come together. She'd been missing her visits for months. Catherine would need her.

The brazier seemed to give no warmth. There was a threat of early snow in the air. Christine was shivering under her furs with the shock of the news from the front; and even from here she could see Catherine shaking.

"My charge needs me," she said to the guard who automatically stepped forward to block the way of anyone trying to disturb the Princess's privacy. She turned tragic eyes on him.

"Seeing as it's you..." the guard said, perhaps seeing the red rims of those eyes. He let her through.

Catherine was on her knees, alone. She was looking at her hands. They were a bloodless, whitish blue. Christine didn't think she'd been praying.

She slipped down to her own knees beside the Princess.

When Christine opened her arms, Catherine let herself sink into them.

"I saw Father..." Catherine muttered, "...start...you know..."

Christine held her tighter. She hadn't known that. It took her breath away. She hadn't thought anything worse could happen today.

"He said he was Saint George of England. He tore the fleurs-de-lys off his own back. Called them spiders."

Christine smelled the Queen's overblown rose oil on the girl's hair; but she smelled the freshness of youth there too. Catherine should have had so much to hope for. But there was so much to fear as well. How sorry Christine felt for this girl, facing a hardship she couldn't yet begin to understand. The first of many, maybe.

"They should have told you before," she said, and by "they" she meant "the Queen." "You're not a child anymore."

"He's...mad," Catherine said, raising her eyes to Christine; and in those unfocused pupils Christine saw bottomless depths of horror; demons and crawling spiders. "Possessed. We're cursed. All of us. France is cursed."

It was so close to what Christine was thinking that she drew in breath. Catherine was being braver than she'd expected--naming her fears. Still, she shook her head.

Catherine said harshly: "But it was you who taught us. The King is the head of the body politic. The nobles its arms and hands. The peasants its legs and feet. You remember?"

Reluctantly, Christine nodded.

"Well, doesn't that mean that, if the head goes mad, the country goes mad with him?"

A pause.

"That's what's been happening all this time, isn't it?" Catherine said.

Christine couldn't bear to agree.

"They've always just shut him away," Christine said in the end, changing the subject, aware she sounded disjointed but unable to compose herself fully. "Whenever this happens. Everyone's scared to admit he's gone mad. He used to get violent. He's not violent anymore. I go to him sometimes. There are servants. We know. But he's afraid; always afraid. He never has anyone he loves with him."

"What about my mother?"

Christine shook her head. She knew it was disingenuous not to tell Catherine that whenever the King, in his madness, saw his wife, he attacked her. But years of dislike of everything about the Queen--a dislike she couldn't discuss with Catherine--stilled her tongue. She let the accusing silence deepen.

"But he loves
you,
" she said quietly. "If
you
went to him...if you weren't afraid...if you listened to the things he's afraid of...who knows what good that might do? It might help make him whole...it might even help heal him..."

Catherine drew in breath. She could hear that even Christine, who was suggesting it, thought it a faint hope. She bit
her lip. She said, with dread: "You mean...me...
go to him
?"

Christine nodded.

"When he's..."
Catherine muttered, looking down. Flexing her fingers.

Christine drew her closer; put her own hands over those fingers; let Catherine bury her head in her breast. The girl needed comfort; it would help her make her decision. Then, through their shared heartbeats, Christine murmured, with utter certainty, "Yes. Now."

He was in a white shift. He was in a white room she'd never seen before, with guards outside. Christine stayed behind with them; squeezed Catherine's arm as they opened the door.

He was up on the window ledge, with his feet drawn up from the floor, staring out at the white sky.

"I'm parched," he said, not looking at her, in a little-boy voice. But when Catherine poured him water from the jug on the table, he ignored it.

She waited. The voice began again; cunning this time. "You won't fool me. You're pretending to be my little Catherine. But I know who you really are and what you want. You want to steal my soul. And you're cruel, cruel...you know how thirsty I am...the thirst of the damned...my soul's so parched and desperate...you're just trying to trick me with your water...you know I can't drink."

Catherine sat very still, feeling the stool beneath her. She thought: I have to say something. She said: "Why?"

There was a strange cackle of laughter. "Because you'll steal my soul if I do, of course. Don't think I don't know. Let you in once and you'll take everything; leave me nothing. It's what you always do. You stole my sword, didn't you? You, or her, you're all the same...And now the sun's gone black and the world is ending you're going to steal my soul too." He stopped. Hummed to himself. Picked with one gnarly hand at his gnarly foot, keeping his head averted from Catherine all the time.

After a while, she heard his voice again; softer this time; pleading. "Don't look at me, though, will you?" it said. "It's
dangerous to look at someone who's made of glass. One look goes straight through, you know. Pierces me to the heart. One look and I'll splinter. You'd smash me to bits if you looked. And you don't want that, do you?"

She shook her head, feeling tears on her hand. Then she remembered he wouldn't see her movement. He wasn't looking. "No," she snuffled, wishing, impossibly, that he'd hear her distress and come to; come running over to comfort his little girl; that she'd be lost in his big embrace, smell the warmth of him, and forget all this. "No, Papa, I don't want that."

It felt an eternity before Catherine heard sounds at the door. Christine slipped in; looked alertly round at Catherine, giving her a look glowing with warmth and admiration and compassion. At last, Catherine thought, so wrung out with relief that she loved Christine unconditionally and forgot their past coldness in the warmth of this moment.

She noticed that Christine didn't even look at the King of France, clawing up there against the bars of his window with his feet off the ground. But she said "Good morning" to him, over her shoulder, in a brisk voice.

Christine sat with Catherine at the table and put a hand on hers. It was warm. It was blessedly normal. Catherine clung to it. But she kept her face brave.

"Have you been talking?" Christine said, raising her voice for the silent third person in the room. "You two?"

The voice began. Whining; singsong; tale-bearing; treacherous. Things Catherine's father would never be. She listened, hating it. "Oh, it's cunning," her non-father said to Christine (and Catherine thought suddenly: Perhaps he had a voice like that, long ago, when he and Louis and Christine were just three children playing together in the gardens?). "It's cunning all right. It's come here to the ghost of the weed garden...to the windy desert...so it can steal my soul. It says it doesn't want it but I know."

Christine tightened her grip on Catherine's hand, as if sensing her distress. "But you're here with us," she said matter-of-factly to the voice. "You're still here."

"No I'm not," it said quickly. "I'm not here. I've hidden
myself. There are wild beasts in the woods. I'm staying still. So still. They won't see me. I can be nothing. Quiet, quiet. Stop breathing. Nothing moves. Nothing is alive. Everything's outside. They can't see me here. I'm nothing. Nothing."

Despite herself, Catherine felt her face pucker. She concentrated on Christine's hand, feeling its strength.

But she couldn't bear it. A voice as strange to her as her father's singsong broke out of her own mouth: an angry, excruciating wail: "You're not! You're the King of France! You're my father!"

The voice stopped. Christine was shaking her head. It was clear Christine thought she'd done the wrong thing. But she could feel the man in the window thinking.

"No...that's what they say, but it's not me," it said in the end, very reasonably. "What's a king? It's a crown. A horn. A flag. That's what they want. A symbol. But that's not me. I'm not made of gold or scarlet, am I? I'm not made of metal. I'm not made of anything. I'm a ghost. I don't deserve to be anything else. Golden feet...it would be scary to have a golden belly."

Christine's tense hand relaxed. But then the voice screamed and the man in the window covered his head with his hands.

"I'm a good boy! I do what I'm told!" the voice said, then dropped to a whisper. "Look after him when I'm gone; he's my hope of eternity; and he's so young. Flighty. Make him serious and as wise as Solomon. Read him philosophy." Then it said brightly: "Make him strong and brave and bold." Shouted: "A soldier-king! Fight off the English! Give him armor! A sword! Let's go hunting! Let's fight! Let's love each other! No, let's fight! Save the blood royal! Shed the blood royal! Make love, not war! Love your wife! Have children! Perpetuate the blood royal! Have mistresses! Don't cry when the children die! The blood royal knows no grief! Don't cry, dance! Let's have a ball! The biggest you've ever seen! Fountains running with wine! Show them what you're made of! Cure the sick! Kings cure disease...Kings, and Jesus...Kings are God's anointed. Cure! Marry! Spend! Save! Fight! Love! Hate! Dance! Kill! Forgive!" Her father stopped screaming. He had tears running
down his cheeks. He sniveled, "He's gone to the bad, of course; doesn't think of anything except hunting and dancing all night. She doesn't love him. She loves his brother. He's not the man his father was, this one. No hope against the English. Not with this one." Plaintively, "I love my brother."

His energy was spent. He curled up into a ball, muttering words Catherine couldn't hear.

Regretfully but calmly, Christine was shaking her head.

Catherine was shaking. But she'd found pity somewhere deep inside herself. She shouldn't have said he was the King. That was what had started it. She could see that now.

"I'm sorry," she said, without looking at Christine for guidance. "I've upset you. And I only meant to say, I love you."

Christine patted her hand, then said: "She didn't understand. But she doesn't mean to hurt you. You know you can trust me, don't you? You can trust her too."

The muttering went on.

"I won't look. I won't steal your soul," Catherine said. She suddenly, desperately, wanted to do something to ease the desolation in the sick man's soul. She wanted to quench his thirst.

She got up and took the cup to him on the windowsill.

She kept her head turned away.

She put the cup down and walked away, with her head down.

Only when she'd sat down did she take courage to glance up at Christine's face. The older woman's eyes were alive with hope. She raised her eyebrows, nodded, and mouthed:
He drank it.

Catherine began to go to the white room every day.

It was the place where secrets were unraveled. Everything she hadn't understood became clear. What she didn't understand for herself, Christine explained. Christine was showing her the adult world--at last, the truth she'd only ever half seen. By turns, Catherine was horrified and grateful.

Christine said she believed that the King of France had taken refuge in madness because he was mortally afraid of facing the realities of his life.

He had been a child king--an orphan, with no one to guide him. His own father had wanted him to be brought up as a wise philosopher like himself. But, as it turned out, Charles' childhood passed very differently--being squabbled over by noblemen who all wanted to steal the absolute power that was his destiny, and then in a fast-moving, free-spending blur of entertainments and escapades with his wild, witty younger brother Louis of Orleans.

Then he'd married: and he'd thought for a while he'd found salvation in his wife's love. But that had been as much of an illusion as his father's love. Queen Isabeau had been a beauty, in her youth. King Charles fell completely under her spell as soon as he saw her. He did whatever she wanted. She was charismatic; loved parties; loved jewels; loved fun. And a girl who'd grown up quietly in Bavaria, never expecting to be Queen of the greatest court of Europe, couldn't believe her luck at being the most important woman in glorious France. It had gone to her head. The balls she'd held...the entertainments...the lovers she'd taken...the
havoc
she'd caused. The King had never questioned anything. He was her slave. She'd driven him wild.

"Lovers?" Catherine had questioned. Christine only raised her eyebrows and let the accusing silence thicken again. There was a lot of silent accusation in this account, Catherine was beginning to see. She sensed that the duty of explaining the Queen's shortcomings wasn't one Christine found altogether unpleasant.

Queen Isabeau's most scandalous affair had been with her husband's brother, Louis of Orleans, Christine said.

The brothers had gone to Provence together. For a bet, they'd raced each other back to Paris--on boats, horses, whatever they could find. Louis got there first--after five days. While Charles was still on the road home, his brother went straight to Isabeau.