The Queen's Lover (24 page)

She pursed her lips. Closed her eyes. Felt dizzy. For a terrifying second, she imagined men--not individual men, but a looming mass of leather jerkins and muscly thighs, and bold, sneering eyes and glittering blades--coming for her. Breath on her face; tearing at her.

But she couldn't think of that now. She had to stay calm. With Christine gone, it was more important than ever for her to be the capable one. She opened her eyes.

Perhaps sensing how close she'd come to panic, l'Isle Adam added, with something like threat in his elegant voice: "But I can't guarantee that the students won't wake up and want to come and join in too. So please hurry."

Owain had put on his clothes and sword and followed the innkeeper's son and all the other curious, wary, excited men--with sticks and poles and bits of wood and daggers out in their hands, and poachers' bags on their shoulders--to the Island; to the palace; and on. The bridges seemed to be unguarded. There were men pouring out of everywhere in the moonlight, and shutters opening on all sides so scared-looking women could peer out after them. To Owain's relief, they went right past the palace. At least, he thought, Catherine was safe inside. But where were they going?

It was only after they'd started streaming over the Exchange Bridge to the town on the Right Bank, behind the quiet soldiers, that the noise started. Owain strained his eyes ahead to see. Outside the Chatelet there were hundreds and hundreds of soldiers already waiting; one force meeting another on the
Square. And, as soon as they'd met, the air was rent with yells and curses, and the ghostly reds of fire and blood began to twitch Paris into murderous life.

Owain was swept along with the baying crowd, east toward the Hotel Saint-Paul and the Bastille Saint Anthony. But he was relieved to be out, in the madness, treading lightly, breathing shallowly, with his sword in his hand. The shouts were all about Armagnac and Burgundy, but he could see it was really a night for looters and private revenges. There were already men breaking into wine shops and taverns, under an unearthly flowering of flags bearing the red
X
of Saint Andrew's cross--Burgundy's emblem.

Greve Square was packed with men writhing against each other, gray and seething, like carp in a barrel. Glassmaking Street was full of broken glass and fighting. He had nowhere special to go; nowhere was particularly safe; he just needed to keep on his feet and watch his back. He kept his distance from the break-ins and gangs of thugs closing in on one victim or another with leering, drunken, sneering cries and eyes full of death. He let his feet guide him toward Old Temple Street. It was somewhere to head for.

It was heaving, even there. Someone had got a bonfire going on the burned-out site where a house had once stood. Owain could see silhouettes dancing around on either side of it, waving another red flag crossed with an
X.
The smoke caught his eyes.

Over the road, Christine's door was hanging from one hinge.

Owain edged closer, through the jostle of men; alarmed enough, suddenly, to have his hand on his sword, ready to draw.

He saw a rush of big thick men coming out through the broken door, roaring taunts. They were hustling three prisoners in nightclothes whose gray faces were full of dread. Owain didn't recognize the oldest of the men being manhandled; but a younger blond one seemed somehow familiar, though Owain couldn't remember from where. However, the dark one in his thirties, with the long Italian nose and the rumpled black hair, was definitely Jean de Castel, Christine's son.

He pushed and shoved with all his might, and managed to
get himself close enough that he was walking along in step with the men holding Jean de Castel. "What's going on here?" he yelled--you had to yell to be heard by now--and the nearest man, a thug with a butcher's apron and a broken nose, turned round and gave him a joyous, deranged look as he screeched back, "Bloody Armagnacs! Big cheeses too! This here"--and he jerked his head toward the oldest man--"is only the bloody Chancellor, isn't it!"

Owain felt sick as the dark tide of memory rushed through him. Jean de Castel's friend Jean de Marle, the handsome blond man who'd taken Christine's son off to work for his father, the Chancellor. That must be him. They'd been hiding at the de Pizan house. They'd been caught.

He had to do something.

He stopped as the next thought struck him. What if Christine was here too? And the young wife, Jehanette? The children? Servants? What would this mob do to them? Hardly knowing what he was saying, he yelled, "Any women in there?" and twisted his face into a leer. The thug grinned knowingly back at him. "Nah, mate. Not that we didn't look. This is it."

One less thing to worry about, then. Owain kept pace as the knot of men stumbled over the road toward the bonfire; but there were so many of them. They were closing in on the older de Marle now; but he was big and strong, despite his gray hair, and when the first one stepped inside the circle of legs and chests and landed a punch on his mouth he swayed but stayed upright, close to the leaping flames, with his lip coming up blue under the red and a mixture of shock and fury in his eyes. Then, with a howl, he flung himself at his attacker.

All hell broke loose. Suddenly there were men everywhere, fighting, rolling, snorting, grunting; teeth and eyes and snot and blood and sound; men on the ground; one screaming when he got too close to the fire and his sleeve caught alight. Owain couldn't even see either of the de Marles, the press was so thick; but all at once, as he was pushed out of one fight, then another, he found himself close enough to Jeande Castel to grab him by the arm, shout, "This one's mine," and pull him away.

He saw the other man's eyes fix on him; measuring the best
way to knock him down.
Don't fight me,
he mouthed; and Jean de Castel looked again, in a lightning flash of astonishment and recognition; and all at once they were out of it, and running as fast as their legs would take them, away from the bonfire, away from Old Temple Street, down the back alley Jean de Castel had dived into that, a moment later, brought them out into the narrow confines of Monkey Street, and quiet.

"Where...are...the...women?" Owain panted, as soon as he had enough breath back.

"...Poissy...safe..." Jean de Marle panted back, with shoulders and head heavy on the alleyway wall. "Seeing...Marie...Thank...God." He raised his head; grinned. Blew out breath. Added: "Thank
you.
"

They let themselves be carried along by the tide for the rest of the night. They didn't think of heroics. Whenever they saw a knot of people moving in on a victim, they slipped backward into the shadows and danced nervously on. As day broke, Owain and Jean de Castel made their exhausted way back south over the bridges, through the debris of the city, over the glass and charred wood and bodies and looted houses and strewn gold coins and trinkets and household goods and prone bodies, either dead or drunk, to the inn inside the Saint-Germain gate.

Now the danger that had kept them light on their toes and light-headed with sheer relief at being alive was passing, Jean had fallen grimly quiet. Owain knew Jean would be reproaching himself for leaving his friends to a lynch mob. It was very likely that the de Marles would both be dead. "There was nothing you could have done," he said sympathetically. Jean nodded. But if that thought brought him comfort, it didn't show on his ravaged face.

The inn was untouched except for a couple of broken shutters on the ground floor. The innkeeper's son had a stab wound to the arm, and was sprawled on a bench, being bandaged up by the old woman. But although he was pale with sleeplessness and blood loss, he looked happy.

He winked when he saw Owain. "Do all right, did you, mate?" he asked cheerfully. Owain nodded without speaking.
"Yeah," the youth went on, as if Owain had answered; "me too. We were in the goldsmiths'"--over the other side--went straight there--best place to be, my mate said--and you wouldn't believe what they've got in there, some of them..." He patted his pockets. They chinked. "Rich bastards," he said contemplatively. Then, as if remembering what the point of the night's violence was supposed to have been, he added, more fiercely: "Armagnacs, the bloody lot of them. Been stealing our money for years."

Owain was aware of Jean de Castel's quiet rage, and of the effort he was making not to take on exactly the kind of looter who might so easily have killed him in the night. Owain patted the wounded looter's good shoulder, turned away from his truculent, guilty eyes, and took his friend off to sit down.

Neither of them had much to say. They swapped stories in half-hearted whispers: brief accounts of their lives in the four years since they'd last met. Owain was relieved to realize that it didn't seem to give offense that he'd been a soldier in Henry of England's army; you had to do as you were ordered, after all; and he'd become Jean de Castel's comrade too during this last night. But their talk kept petering out. Jean de Castel clearly didn't want to talk about the de Marles--who'd genuinely been Armagnac supporters--and all his days had been spent with them recently. The Frenchman was embarrassed, too; his life had been saved by this semi-stranger, but he had no way of thanking him; not even the price of a glass of wine in his pockets. He was in Owain's charge, for the moment. Besides, they were too tired to talk much; too low in spirits. Still, the inn was a good place to gather news. They ate. And, as the crowds of pink-eyed rioters came in for a bite and a cup of red, they listened.

They heard that the Count of Armagnac was in prison--he'd thought he was being hidden from the mob, but he'd been betrayed. They heard that most of the Armagnac nobility were dead or on the run. They heard that the Provost of Paris, Tanneguy du Chastel, had whisked Prince Charles and his wife away to the Bastille; they were out now, and heading for Corbeil, or Melun, and safety. "Saved his own skin, that one,"
sneered one battered student. Everyone else laughed. The King and his daughter had been seized and taken to the other side--to the Duke of Burgundy at Troyes.

More and more often, as the morning yawned and stretched into day, they heard that the Duke of Burgundy and his royal pawns--the King, the Queen, and Princess Catherine--would almost certainly now make a triumphant re-entry into Paris. And every time the rumor was repeated, the rowdy cheers grew louder.

The civil war was taking an ominous new turn for the Armagnacs, now Burgundy held so many of the royals. Without Armagnac himself, the feeble, untested, near-child Charles, with his southern in-laws, wasn't up to much, every drinker in the tavern agreed. "Long live the Duke of Burgundy!" the old crone Owain had seen creeping the corridor at night, worrying about ghost armies, kept crowing now. There was a gloating smile on her face.

"What will you do now?" Owain asked Jean de Castel quietly, noticing that the Frenchman's hair, which he remembered as a luxuriant southern black, was silvered now; that there were lines round his eyes and mouth; that the other man no longer felt young, or lucky.

"I don't know," de Castel said in the end. "It wouldn't be wise to go back to the house. This isn't over yet. I need to find my family; I need to get them to safety. But where that is..." He paused.

Owain could see him run through the possibilities. Jean de Castel knew now that he was an Armagnac in the eyes of a mob turned Burgundian. His family was safely out of town, at least; but they'd be on the road home today, or tomorrow. And how would he find them? The rioting would start again as soon as the men thronging the taverns, shouting and laughing and yawning, got the energy back to go burgling again. No wonder Jean de Castel looked gray.

Someone needed to take control. "If I may make a suggestion," Owain said, feeling the benefit of his time in the army, dealing with apparently impossible situations every day, "you should take my horse, now. Ride toward Poissy and find your
family--they'll be somewhere on the road back. Take them to Anastaise's convent, not to your house. The beguines are safe enough; no one will give you away there. Once you're back in Paris, with them, we'll work out the next step."

Jean de Castel nodded.

"But your choices are limited. The mob has decided you're an Armagnac. So you count as one. You're going to need to take your family to wherever Prince Charles goes--leave Paris and start again."

De Castel nodded again. "We have some money with Anastaise's nuns," he said, turning to practicalities. "Enough to start again, maybe; if we're modest." But then he froze, as if the awfulness of what he was beginning had only just struck him. He said: "I can't just take your horse." And he hunched in on himself, looking ever more dazed. "I can't repay you. I can't..."

Owain stifled impatience. This wasn't the time for false pride or false starts. Surely Jean could see that. He pulled the older man's tense body up from the bench and began walking him to the back of the hall. "Look, I'm here on my King's business," Owain said, as they came out into the sharp daylight. "I'm well supplied. I won't need a horse for a couple of days. I was supposed to take letters to the King. But I need to see where he is; and whether he comes to Paris. So...take the horse, and this," he dug in his purse and found ten Tours livres, a substantial amount. Jean de Castel looked at the coins and shook his head. But he did transfer them to his purse.

There were no grooms today. Owain brought the horse out himself: found the saddle and bridle and packs and water bottles. Called for bread and cheese for the traveler. Jean stood, blinking, staring at something near, not at Owain.

When the horse was ready, Owain led the other man over with an arm round his shoulder. He had to nudge him up the mounting block; there was no question of Jean putting his own feet in his own stirrups. Jean stared down at him with a dull question in his eyes. Owain settled the reins in his unresponsive hands.

"I stayed with you for weeks," Owain said, addressing the
question Jean wasn't asking; "you felt like a family to me. You were kinder than you needed to be." He laughed; a short man-laugh, consigning the treasured memory that followed to history. "You even nearly sent me to the University of Paris, you and your mother, do you remember?" He didn't want to remember how angry he'd felt with Christine when he'd left. She'd been right, after all; he'd known it really. He couldn't aspire to love a Princess of France; that wasn't for the landless, status-less creature he'd become. That was the stuff of dreams. He'd have to make a real future for himself before even thinking again about love. He'd tried war, but fighting wasn't for him; he might have better fortune as a negotiator. Come what may, he had to stay in the realm of the practical; to keep his feelings for his poems. He led the horse out to the street, and whacked it firmly on the flank to set it walking. This was practical enough. "I owe you gratitude," he said firmly. "I want you to find your family."