The Queen's Lover (7 page)

"I knew at once," Owain said warmly, "what a picture." But he was wondering as he spoke, and saw Anastaise dimpled with pleasure, whether she'd deliberately made the Queen seem younger and kinder--she didn't seem the type for flattery. Instead, he asked, "How do you get the gold so bright?"

Anastaise was breaking open one of Christine's packages to show him the wafer-thin sheet of beaten gold and beginning to explain that you took beaten egg white, without water, and painted it over the place the gold was to go, then, moisturizing the end of the same brush in your mouth, you touched it onto the corner of the leaf, ready cut, then lifted it very quickly, put it on the prepared place, and spread it out with a separate dry brush. "And whatever you do, don't breathe; or your piece of gold will fly off and you'll have the worst trouble finding it again. And then it's the same as the painting. You let it dry. You put another layer on. You let it dry. You put another layer on. It's all just patience." When the gold was ready, you polished it--with the tooth of a bear or a beaver; or with an agate, or an amethyst stone--first quite gently, then harder, then so hard that the sweat stood out on your forehead.

Christine slipped away. Owain was so enthralled he didn't notice.

Jehanette's maid was in the kitchen, preparing a meal. The children were playing with their grandmother upstairs; while
Jehanette was at the Halles market. "Take some meat and bread and wine out to Anastaise," Christine directed. "But tell the boy to come here and eat with me."

She didn't think why. It was an instinct: like warming yourself at the fire, or opening your shutters when the sun was bright. Usually she liked her quiet meals with Anastaise: everyone else out of the house; hearing the idle talk the beguine brought with her from the convent where the sisters worked in the cloth trade of Temple New Town, or tending the poor. The beguines knew everything; and no one more than Anastaise. But today she wanted some time alone with this boy with hope in his eyes and hunger in his mind. It was a waste of his intelligence to let him go back to soldiery.

He came quickly, eagerly, glowing as if someone had applied gold leaf to him.

He said, with genuine warmth: "I don't know how to thank you," and, taking a piece of bread and a slab of meat and a slice of onion on his knife, without waiting to be asked, as if he felt at home, while munching, "This has been the best day..." Then he paused, and she saw the thought he couldn't name begin to take form on his brow: "I only wish--"

She said, a little brusquely, cutting him off: "Eat up. I find I have some time today after all. When we're done, I'll take you over the river if you like. We could look at the University districts. I can see you're interested."

The look on his face was reward enough. It encouraged her to go on.

"Tell me," she said, leaning forward, supporting her little heart-shaped face with both her hands, and caressing the boy with the gentlest look imaginable, "you're a bright boy; I can see you want knowledge; and, as I understand it, your family history means you aren't encumbered by estates that would take up all your time either. So why haven't you thought of giving a bit of time to educating yourself?" She nodded hypnotically at him, willing him on. "You could, you know..."

She saw him stop looking happy. His face got a pinched, miserable expression she didn't like at all.

"What, go to the University, you mean?" he said in a small voice. "In England?"

He didn't know how to explain it to her. He didn't know how to summarize all those years of snubs and sneers from beefy English pageboys and knights and even servants--the jokes about being a wild man from Wales, an eternal outsider--in a voice that wouldn't betray his feelings. "I never thought about it, because I don't think I could. You see, I'm foreign..." He gave her a desperate look. "Welsh," he added.

She looked bewildered. "So?" she said; "I'm Venetian by birth; and Guillebert de...well, no point in making a list. But there's hardly a native-born Parisian at the University here, or in the world of letters at all. We're all some sort of foreigner. What difference would it make to you, being foreign?"

Owain tried to keep the memory of the sneers he was so used to out of his ears, the mocking of his singsong intonation in English. But he couldn't quite stop tears prickling behind his eyelids.

He took a moment to compose himself. He managed a smile. "In England," he explained, striving for a lightness that still somehow eluded him, "since the uprising in Wales, you can't even marry an Englishwoman if you're Welsh, not without a special dispensation allowing you to be considered an Englishman, which is impossible to get. We're a conquered race, you see..."

He looked warily at Christine from under his lashes. Once he'd believed there would be two Welsh universities; they'd been ordered into existence by Owain Glynd?r when he'd been crowned at Machynlleth ten years before. How could he explain all the details of that history? He thought she'd think he was making excuses. He thought she might get angry.

But Christine wasn't angry. To his surprise, he thought she looked strangely sympathetic. She was gently nodding her head. "So you'd have to teach yourself," she said slowly. "Like I did."

Then she laughed; and she was laughing with him, not at him, he could see. "My God," she said, with grim satisfaction,
as if she'd been proved right yet again, "I don't know what would become of our University if there were no foreigners! How provincial the English are..."

In this respect, at least, Owain found he was guiltily enjoying her contempt for his adopted country--so much he almost nodded.

She put a sympathetic hand on his, and looked deep into his eyes again. "Shall I tell you how things are here?" she went on. "Norman, Picard, English, German, Fleming, Provencal, Spaniard, Venetian, Roman, you name it, they're all here. The colleges have bursaries, too, so good students don't have to pay for their own studies. You just have to enroll at a college that deals with your nation--they count four nations, and the one that's called the English nation takes the English and the Germans and Flemings and Dutch too. Why ever wouldn't they take the Welsh? If you were ever to want to go to university in Paris, there would be no problem. And if they turned you down, it certainly wouldn't be because of your nationality."

There was a deliberately comical look of astonishment in her eyes at that outlandish notion. She was shaking her head.

"Eat up," she said, suddenly purposeful, and he let himself be drawn to his feet. "Let's go."

It was late when they came back from the University. But Owain's eyes were still shining.

She said: "I'll put another book out for you. For when you've finished this one. It's one of my early ones, something I wrote when Jean was going to go away to England. Advice to a young man; on how to learn to learn. I thought it might appeal."

His face lightened even more; then suddenly darkened with memory. He said: "But I'll have to go..."

She said: "How long can you stay?"

He fell silent. He scuffed one toe against the other foot. She could see him remembering his pointless existence; waiting in palace corridors; being left out by English pageboys and aides with a proper claim to their lords' time. "My lord of Clarence will be off in a day or two," he said eventually. He eyed her for a moment, as if thinking.

What Owain was fumbling toward articulating was that he wanted to find a way to stay on after Clarence left. These Parisians--fearful as they all seemed, with the memory of their conflict so recent on them that you could practically smell the blood on them, so fresh that they didn't yet have words to talk about it--were, at the same time, full of a joy he didn't know: the pleasure of being here, where they were, doing what they did. They knew something that made it almost irrelevant if the great men of the day destroyed each other over their heads. They might tremble at the profound crisis they were caught up in, and mourn the passing of the established order of the world they knew. But they believed in something universal that couldn't be destroyed. They were putting their hope in beauty. Owain had never had a day when so many enticing futures opened up before him. He didn't know whether he wanted to go and enroll at the University, or just stay in this house with these warm, kindly people and read himself into the life they lived. But he wanted to be here.

"Did Anastaise tell you?" she asked, as if she were changing the subject. "She took a poultice this morning to an old woman with sores under her arms that Anastaise said looked like plague sores."

She saw the flicker on his face; she didn't think it was fear. "I'm wondering," she went on. "Perhaps I should tell my lord of Clarence you've been exposed to the miasma, out here in the town. Perhaps I should suggest you stay on until a doctor gives you the all-clear." She poured him a cup of wine. "You could rejoin them at Calais later," she murmured; the voice of temptation. Then, realizing that the Duke of Clarence might well be heading straight back to Normandy to go on making war, she added, with asperity, "or wherever the Duke prefers." She put the jug down. There was a hint of mischievous laughter in her voice when she said: "After all, it would be a service to him to make sure his men didn't get ill." She could take Owain to meet a friend or two from the University in the next few days; set wheels in motion.

"But," Owain said, hesitating naively, "there wouldn't be a risk of illness. I haven't really been exposed to any miasma,
have I?" Hastily, he added: "Though I would love to stay..."

She caught his eye--a challenge. She raised her eyebrows. Cheerfully, she said: "Well then--lie! It would be in a good cause. I can't imagine God would mind." And when she saw the disbelieving grin spread over his face, she knew he would.

FIVE

The English hunted for a day with the Queen. The next day, they invited Catherine and her ladies to hunt with them. Queen Isabeau said no. Perhaps she didn't want to goad Louis anymore. Perhaps she just didn't want to be reminded that her daughter had no ladies to speak of--that the two youngest royal children, more or less forgotten on the edge of the court, lived the peculiar, twilight, scrounging existence they did. So the English left by dusk that night, in the purposeful flurry of green and brown that seemed to be their way. And, a day later, everything was back to normal--at least, back to the upside-down normal of the times of the King's illnesses.

Catherine and Charles sat idly in the garden together. It was too hot to be inside. Their mother's door was shut. The servants weren't there. There was no food. As usual, there was nothing to do.

Charles threw a pebble into the fountain, trying to make it skim and bounce. It went straight down. But he was whistling. She could see he was glad the English had gone, with their marriage proposal.

"I tell you what," he said, a few failed skims later. "I heard Mother and Marguerite whispering away together earlier. Planning something. Both looking really excited." He did an imitation of evil busily on the loose: hunching his shoulders forward in a one-man conspiracy, jokily narrowing his eyes into devil slits, darting them furtively from side to side, smacking his lips,
and leering. "Of course they shut up when they noticed I was listening. But I bet I know what they're up to. They're going to get their own back on Louis for being rude to the English Duke."

Catherine sighed. They were both scared of their mother's temper; and her plots.

But there was nothing else to look forward to. "I wonder what they'll do to him?" she said, a little apprehensively. Charles didn't reply. After a long moment's silence, she picked up a pebble herself.

They were lying under an apple tree in the orchard, flicking twigs up at the unripe fruit, when Christine appeared an hour later, calling for them.

She had a basket on her arm. She had a young man with her.

They hardly noticed him. They flew at her; two raggedy children, calling in thin, eager voices, "Christine! Christine!" and "What's in your basket?" and "I'm starving!" They dived at the basket and, with tremendous animation, began laying out the food she'd brought. Very ordinary food. Early strawberries. Some cheese in a cloth. Last night's beef leftovers. A couple of eggs. A hunk of bread.

"Can we eat now?" Charles was begging, hanging on Christine's arm. "Please?" A funny little thing, Owain thought: eleven or twelve, but undersized, like a much younger boy, with a white face and a rabbit's red eyes and a big, bulbous nose. His voice was squeaky and babyish. And why was a Prince of France dressed like that? In old rags that Owain would have been ashamed of wearing; dirty, too?

Then he turned to the little Princess, who was sitting on the long grass, unwrapping the cloth from round the cheese with the tender excitement of someone who'd never seen food before. Like her brother, she was also in plain, old, crumpled clothes, with her skirts so much too long for her that they seemed made for someone else. She'd tied a knot in one side, perhaps to let her run or climb trees without tripping up. Her hair was loose; he could see a kerchief lying on the ground not far away. It was pretty hair; long and thick. But it was all
tangles with bits of grass in it. She'd looked a young woman in the royal chambers, in her finery; but now she was nothing more than a scruffy child. Owain was wondering, rather disapprovingly, how these children came to look so neglected, when Catherine absentmindedly lifted one hand, twisted her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck, and turned to smile up at him.

And all at once Owain was lost for breath. How slim and long her neck was, how lovely the line of it, rising from her soft shoulders.

The sun was behind him. She was blinking a little, trying to focus her eyes on the tall shape before her; but he didn't think she could really see him. He didn't think she recognized him, or was remembering her own kindness in sparing his blushes at his Duke's audience with her mother. She was only smiling that blind, vulnerable, enchanting smile out of a child's pleasure at the presence of Christine, and the picnic, and something to do to relieve what he could see had been boredom.