The Queen's Lover (74 page)

She looked down at her son, so innocent and fresh-faced and babyish. She didn't want this moment to end. Owain stood beside her, looking too. Then his hand found hers. He drew her close.

"They're just next door," she muttered, raising her face to his. But she was smiling, at least. She seemed almost normal again, Owain thought, almost fully alive, ever since her mother
had started gossiping and piling up the warmth in the other room. After all, what did anything else matter but the moments they still had together, now that they'd done what they'd set out to; now Harry was truly King of France as well as England; now their time was running out?

"Never mind them," Owain said recklessly, turning his back on the door and the people behind it. "There's just us." And then they kissed.

Until the door opened, very quietly, then, in a rush of thundering footsteps and dark air, hands seized Owain, twisted one arm behind his back, and dragged him out, blinking and bewildered, into the hot, light room beyond. Following, stumbling, heart racing, aware that her cap was askew and her hair tumbling down, Catherine looked over the top of Owain's head at the pale, triumphant eyes of the Earl of Warwick.

Warwick's face was full of gloating disgust.
"Lese-majeste,"
he snarled, staring round at his appalled audience, shaking his captive prey. Owain didn't lift his pale face. It had the utter misery of a person who sees the end approaching. "Debauchery. An outrage against the Queen Mother's person. Here, in the King's own chamber."

Catherine faltered. "You misunderstand. He was just helping me put Harry to bed." But she felt her weakness. Her cheeks were flaming, her hair everywhere. She knew she must look the picture of guilt.

She didn't know what the penalty might be for Owain if Warwick were to punish him for having or seeking carnal knowledge of the Queen Mother of England. But she could see in Warwick's eyes that Owain's life was in danger.

"Are you saying, Madam," Warwick asked, stepping up to her, his eyes devouring her, "that you were a willing partner in the obscene...
spectacle
...that I just saw?"

There was a still more profound silence. Catherine couldn't speak. She knew, with a terrible, cringing fear, a black weariness that went to the depths of her soul, that she was in mortal danger too.

"I knew he hadn't spent a night in his own bed at Rouen,"
the Earl shouted, and Catherine could hear the delight mixed up with his rage. "I knew he had the morals of an animal. But
this. This
I didn't imagine. Corruption, filth; and so close to the throne..."

The shout brought men to the door. They could hear the clatter and tramp of feet. The Earl had had his knights waiting outside. He must have come looking for trouble.

The Cardinal looked dumbfounded. He was staring from Warwick, to Owain, to Catherine. It was a scene of rapidly shifting eyes. Owain kept his white, appalled face down, while Catherine was too shamed to meet the Cardinal's gaze. But she let her eyes rest on her mother. The old Queen of France was staring up at Warwick, twice as lively as before, looking at the malice contorting this newcomer's face, assessing his stringy strength. Her mouth was still chomping consideringly on one of her sweets. Isabeau had seen nothing of him, knew nothing of him beyond a bow and a name announced to the blowing of horns. But she'd never been shy of a good row.

The Earl turned to Catherine. His face was blazing. Owain was just an entertainment--a nobody. It was the Queen Mother who was his real target--the woman who'd defied him at Rouen. "And you--Madam--must consider your position; entertaining lovers in your son's bed..." he said, drawling the words pleasurably out, permitting himself to sneer openly at her now she was brought so low.

But he had to finish with his first victim before he could really concentrate on her. Over his shoulder he snapped at the men: "Take him away. Deal with him."

He pushed Owain out into the doorway. Hands took him. Before the men could move off with their prisoner, however, there was a rustle at the other door. Harry's bedroom.

Everyone froze.

"What's happening?" said a voice: a sleepy, alarmed little treble voice, followed by a shock of very straight dark blond hair and round eyes peeping round the door. "Why are you all shouting?" He looked round. He stepped out. His nightshirt was striped. His thin legs stuck out underneath. Catherine
ached with love for him; with fear for the vulnerability of him; with hopelessness.

Of all the people now crowding into the overheated little room, it was only Owain who found the presence of mind to speak. Raising his head, he summoned up the strength to banish the dread from his face. Looking very tenderly at the little King, whom he'd spent the last years helping to raise, whose father he'd loved, he said gently, "Go to sleep, Harry. It's all right. Go back to bed."

Catherine's heart overflowed. But Harry didn't move. And the men-at-arms, knowing themselves to be in the presence of the King of England and France, waited.

Warwick shifted. Scowled. "Take him away," he repeated.

Harry turned toward the sound of that voice. He looked horrified to see Warwick's face. "What are
you
doing here?" he said. Then, with rising panic: "What are you doing to Owain? Let go of Owain. Tell your men to let go."

The Earl signaled again for the men to go with their prisoner, but no one stirred. They were watching Harry as his face twisted; as the hot, angry tears came to his eyes.

"No!" he shouted. They'd all seen it forming on his lips, but the high-pitched yell still came as a surprise. They all watched, slack with shock, as Harry rushed out of his doorway to pummel the Earl. He only reached up to Warwick's midriff, but he still whacked the commander with all the viciousness and strength he could muster. "Let him go! Let him go!" he shouted, as Warwick took a half-step back, parrying the blows with his forearms. Even when the Earl had pinioned Harry's hands, they went on flailing uselessly, and the voice went on hysterically shrilling, "I command you! I am your King!"

The men looked at Harry's arms pinned in the Earl's big fists. It was the signal they needed. They knew who was in charge now. They rushed off, bundling Owain away, clattering down the stairs.

They'll kill him, Catherine thought. They'll kill him, or worse. And what will happen to me? Everything seemed to be happening so slowly that she had endless time to think those
thoughts; to look round; to see the stares, and dropped jaws, and clenched fists. But suddenly there was no time for thinking. Suddenly there was only time for a new kind of panic, even worse than before.

Harry's head dropped in defeat. And Catherine heard the lowing, keening animal noises she dreaded most coming out of his chest: the howling. She was aware of Isabeau's head snapping round; of her mother's quick look at the child. Isabeau turned back toward her with a quick, quiet exchange of understanding. Catherine could see her mother recognized those noises, too, from old King Charles' time: the sounds of the beginning of madness.

Wheezing, with difficulty, Isabeau stood up. Agonizingly slowly, wielding her walking stick like a weapon, she stomped across the room to Warwick. "Young man, I don't know who you think you are, barging into the royal chambers like this, but you're making a mistake you will regret," she said, puffing her self up to her terrifying snake-self, the rage-filled monster Catherine had dreaded most when she was a child, and hissing at the intruder.

It must have been years since anyone had called Warwick a young man. The battle-hardened old warhorse flared his nostrils and narrowed his eyes. So did Catherine. She couldn't take her eyes off her mother.

"It will be the worse for you if you don't heed the command of your King," Isabeau grated, getting closer, with her deep-set dark eyes fixed on Warwick as if she were about to swallow her prey.

The Earl just sneered. His mouth curled up with it: a display of hostile indifference that he must have known would only infuriate her further. He didn't care if it did. He said: "The boy is in my charge. The Council of England has entrusted him to me. With the greatest of respect, Madame, it's a long time since you've known anything of affairs of state; and you never knew England. So don't meddle in what you don't understand."

But Isabeau was right up against Warwick now, with her chin jutting out and her eyes glowering at him, and the hand
with no stick in it hovering protectively over the little boy he had hanging from his fists.

"The
boy,
" she said, and she sneered in her turn at his disrespect, "is the King of France too now. I don't see what the Council of England has to do with commands that the crowned King of France makes to his subjects in France. The King of France gave you a command. To disobey him outright would be treason." She stuck her face right in his, so close that he stepped back looking startled. "I don't think you'll be safe on the streets for long if you try to commit treason in the capital of France."

It would have been the perfect signal for someone else born to browbeating and furious family rows to join the attack she was mounting. But Harry had been brought up to quietness; and he was too young and too distressed to take his cue from her. He just went on howling like a lunatic. And Catherine was struck as dumb as she ever had been in childhood by the sight of her mother's anger. She couldn't speak. She couldn't move.

Warwick stepped back another pace. Ignoring Isabeau, he shook the boy. "Be quiet," he said with quiet savagery. He shook him harder. "Stop that nonsense."

Undaunted, Isabeau joined in the shaking, only the shoulders she put her hands on and began shaking for all she was worth were Warwick's. "Stop...that...at...once," she grunted in rhythm, refusing to let him shake her off, hanging on for grim death. "Didn't...you...hear...me. I said...
stop.
"

Warwick was so astonished at being so stubbornly assaulted by a fat old woman with a stick that he released Harry. Harry ran to his mother, still howling.

Isabeau stopped shaking her prey, but went on standing too close to Warwick, holding his shoulders in her hands, hypnotizing him with her basilisk eyes. When he took another step back, trying to shake her off, she lumbered heavily forward.

"Now," she said, with grim satisfaction. "Give the order. Release the other young man too. Or you'll be sorry. You'll see."

Silence from Warwick. The Cardinal, who was beginning to
come to from his amazement, was raising his arms in his corner, making calming noises. Little sounds, the beginnings of words of remonstration, began coming through his nose.

"Don't ignore me." Isabeau shook Warwick again, like a hound with a giant rat. Savagely, she added: "Have you no manners? I said, give the order--set free..." She turned to Catherine for guidance. "I'm not good with names," she added, with superb self-possession.

"...Owain," Catherine stuttered back. "Tudor."

Warwick couldn't quite bring himself to strike this unexpected protagonist, however much the look on his face suggested he wanted to. But he was willing enough to go on offering verbal resistance. "I don't think so. What for?" he replied viciously, giving Isabeau a stare so full of violent hate that Catherine was terrified for her mother. "So the Queen Mother of England can debauch our court like her mother did the court of France?"

Isabeau slapped him. Loudly. The stinging sound echoed round the room.

Harry stopped howling and looked up with saucer eyes. The Earl put a hand to his cheek. It didn't cover the red handprint the old woman had left on it. It didn't cover the trickle of blood where her enormous ring had broken the skin.

The Cardinal stepped forward with his hands patting the air, as if he were about to intervene. But he seemed to be able to say nothing more coherent than "Nh...mnhhh." All the eyes in the room shifted briefly to look at him, but then shifted away again.

It was left to Isabeau to speak. "Why, you ask?" she said softly, cruelly; pursuing her advantage. "Why, because that young man and the Queen Mother of England are man and wife, of course."

There was a complete hush suddenly; even from the Cardinal. Those words were so startling that even Warwick stood utterly still, for a moment that lasted an eternity, pondering them. Then, with a hand still clamped to his cheek, he opened his mouth again, snarling like a wounded tiger.

"What do you mean, man and wife?" he growled uncer
tainly. He turned to Catherine. Catherine was aware that, below her, Harry was wriggling round to see her face; that he couldn't believe his ears either.

"You're not telling me that you..." Warwick said, taking a step away from the termagant Dowager Queen of France toward Catherine.

"Yes," Isabeau said, stepping deftly between him and Catherine and answering for her daughter with tremendous certainty. "And make no mistake about it, if your men lay a finger on the stepfather of your King, I expect you can imagine what will happen to you."

Catherine couldn't possibly have answered for herself. She had never been so astonished. Her heart was thudding through her body so she could scarcely hear.

For a long, long moment there was only shame: the abject shame of dishonor. She was the Queen Mother of England; a Princess of France; the blood of Charlemagne ran in her veins. How could her mother have so disgraced her as to suggest publicly to this man, her enemy--someone who wouldn't hesitate to bruit it around the world--that she might have run off and married away from her blood...?

Then, thickly, through the pounding, she started to understand her mother's strategy. If Warwick believed she'd married Owain, he and the rest of the world might be able to despise her utterly forever, and without hope of redemption, for forgetting her pride and the glory of her birth, for contracting a
mesalliance
that shamed her blood and lowered her in the eyes of mankind--but Warwick wouldn't, at least, be able to find her or Owain, who was at more immediate risk, guilty of a sin against God that might justify him in taking either of their lives. She could save Owain. She could live to see her son grow up. But she'd have to sacrifice her reputation.