Blood Royal (36 page)

They turned back the bed. They helped her in. They arranged her hair on the pillows. Then, gravely, they bowed and withdrew as Henry appeared in his doorway, also neat and spruce in night linens, with his retinue of advisers. Her husband. Her King.

‘You can go,’ he said gravely to his men. They too shuffled away in silence. He shut the door and came to the edge of the bed. He stood looking down at her, without expression. She hoped he would tell her how beautiful she looked; more beautiful than ever before on the day she’d become his Queen; that she was the jewel in his crown; that he would always love her. But what he did was scratch his head. Then he smiled at her, a little absent-mindedly, and she melted at the sight of those good-natured wrinkles in the corners of his eyes.

‘Well, thank God all that’s over,’ he said, puffing out his cheeks as he sighed. ‘I’ve had enough larks’ tongues in honey to last me a lifetime, haven’t you?’ Without waiting for an answer, he climbed into the bed and pulled the covers up. She didn’t wait for him to pull her to himself. She poured herself onto his body; let her hair hang heavy over his face and shoulders as she leaned down and kissed him. It was their wedding night. She didn’t think twice; she knew his body would respond.

But it didn’t. He shut his eyes; grinned, kindly enough, but without interest; lay inert under her; pushed a little at her shoulder as if to dislodge her, and mumbled, in French, as always, even though she was now supposed to speak English with her ladies, ‘Tired …’ Then, with a sleepy echo of what must be a crude English soldiers’ joke, ‘Can’t conquer France tonight …’

He didn’t even notice her flinch. He was already asleep.

Isabeau gave Henry a look in which natural suspicion tussled with the conscious determination to love. She leaned forward, scattering bonbons over her cards, wishing her son-in-law wasn’t lounging so insolently against the fireplace, yawning; wishing she still had the power to intimidate at a glance.

She hoped he wasn’t going to be as difficult about the wedding celebrations that Isabeau had planned for the next few days as he had been about negotiating in these last, extra six months, when every hour had seemed to bring some new, unreasonable additional demand, until the Queen of France, who’d never been a patient woman, had been ready to scream and slap his long, smug face.

In a minute, Catherine would be here, with Charles, and she’d have to stop hissing instructions at her new son-in-law. Best, she thought, to get it all worked out properly beforehand.

‘Now. The tournament this afternoon. You will carry dear Catherine’s colours, of course … and you will win,’ she said, in firm, chivvying tones, adding, as an afterthought, ‘my dearest son.’

Catherine sat with her father for an hour every morning, and walked with him in the gardens. Today was no exception. Why would it be? It wouldn’t be long before she set off for her new life in England. She wouldn’t have much longer with her father. She didn’t want to miss any of the precious moments she still had left. This morning, they were walking down a stone path; in dappled shade; between clouds of blue and yellow flowers. She was holding his arm,
and she was talking in her quietest, softest voice, as if she were gentling a horse. This was what they did now. They remembered things together. Sometimes, if lucid, he told her things he had done when he was a child. Once he’d told her how his own father had offered him the choice of a book or a tiny suit of armour, made in his own five-year-old size; and he’d asked for the suit of armour, and everyone in the ballroom had cheered. She’d laughed. He’d said, with regret: ‘I always wanted to be a hero. But I should have had the book.’

But today he didn’t want to remember happy moments.

‘Where’s Christine?’ he said mournfully. He hadn’t forgotten her.

Catherine said brightly: ‘She’s gone to Poissy, Papa – to the nunnery; to see her Marie; and our Marie.’

But her father ignored the brightness of her tone, and just echoed, ‘Gone … gone …’ and shook his head sadly with every melancholy word.

The little sprig of forget-me-nots Catherine had picked for him fell out of his collar. He didn’t notice.

‘You’re going too,’ he said, and there was nothing unclear in the heartbroken look he gave his daughter. ‘Aren’t you? You all go …’

She put her arms around him; stood there, feeling him tremble.

‘Papa, I’m going to be happy,’ she said, with all the courage she could muster; ‘and you’ll have a grandson who’ll be King of England one day, and of France too … and he’ll have a suit of armour when he’s five, just like you, and be a hero … and we’re all going to be a loving family forever.’

He nodded. She stared at the blinding freshness of the buttercups, wishing away his pain; wishing away his affliction; wishing him peace.

But there were tears on his cheeks. ‘They’re taking you away too,’ he whimpered.

‘Oh Papa, don’t,’ she begged. ‘Don’t cry.’

He bent his head to her shoulder and sobbed.

She whispered: ‘I’ll come back, I promise. You won’t lose me.’
Mostly she wanted to comfort him; but she thought it was true, too. Henry would often want to be in France.

‘They’re taking everything away….’ He broke through her thoughts, his voice a miserable, quavering treble. ‘And what about Charles? Where’s my little Charlot?’

She held him tighter. She couldn’t think about Charles. ‘Don’t think about Charles, Papa. Charles has been a bad boy,’ she murmured, stroking his shoulders; but that only made the King cry in earnest.

‘Poor Charles,’ he snuffled. ‘Poor Charles …’

Catherine didn’t know whether he was weeping for his son, or himself.

The King cheered up, or seemed to, when Catherine made him a chain of buttercups and hung them round his neck, and made one for her own wrist, too, and kissed his tears away. Then she led him in to Henry and her mother, and the knights’ dinner in the open air, which was to lead on to the jousting in the courtyard, where a platform had been erected for the ladies and hung with flags and draperies and flowers, and scattered with cushions.

‘Ach, what’s this nonsense?’ Isabeau said, but kindly, when she saw the buttercups as they sat down to table, taking away the hand she’d clamped to her own two-horned headdress to protect it against the breeze ruffling through every gauzy veil. She had a soft look about her today, too, Catherine saw. To marry your last child was, in itself, a milestone. Catherine realised that her mother would be sympathetic to her father’s wistfulness because she felt it too. The Queen of France fussed around her husband, tidying up his clothes; but she left the buttercup chain where it was.

The two kings sat on either side of Isabeau. Catherine was still astonished and grateful that she was allowed to sit at Henry’s left, in full view of everyone; that the lords who approached her bowed and called her the Queen of England, that there was sunlight and music playing.

Too dazed with heat and happiness to remember to eat the food being put on her platter, she sat, sipping from her jewelled
goblet, watching the courtly smiles. Suddenly she remembered. Her mother had given her a little yellow silk ribbon that she was to give Henry to wear at the joust. ‘He’ll want to carry his wife’s token,’ Isabeau had muttered persuasively; ‘he’ll be grateful.’

She wrapped the ribbon round the wilting buttercup bracelet at her wrist, and, touching her husband on his strong, lean arm, passed it to him with an expectant look.

He looked blankly at the little yellow scrap.

‘My token,’ she murmured – wondering, for a moment, whether she wasn’t saying the right thing – ‘for the jousting. For you to wear …’

He nodded, took the token, and put it in his purse. Then he cocked his head a little mischievously in Isabeau’s direction, on his other side, and said, under his breath: ‘Aha, I see … she’s been talking to you about the tournament, has she?’

And he patted her hand. Gently enough; but it was the dismissive kind of gentleness you might show a dog or a child. He wasn’t overwhelmed at all, as she’d hoped he might be; and there’d been no gallant lover’s words about how he would fight to the death for her honour, either. He just stretched out the same hand immediately afterwards, and touched a passing page’s arm to remind him that the King’s goblet needed filling. She fell silent – trying not to look wounded.

As soon as Henry’s cup was full, he stood up. For a second there was a little buzz of talk, then silence. The English lords and knights all looked at him with utter devotion; ready to do whatever he commanded. The sight of their adoring eyes filled Catherine with pride on her husband’s behalf. She thought, with relief: So he’s going to make a speech … and I interrupted him … it never occurred to me to think … He had something more important on his mind …

The memory of the wilting buttercups and the yellow ribbon made her blush; her girlish nonsense.

Henry cleared his throat.

‘We are summoned here to celebrate the union of our two countries with a joust,’ he cried, loud enough for everyone to
hear, bowing formally to Queen Isabeau and her husband as he spoke.

His face darkened. ‘But while we’re all here, enjoying ourselves, the enemy is massing more troops,’ he went on sombrely. ‘The siege at Sens is reaching a decisive stage.’

Sens, Catherine thought, confused – the town where Charles’ troops were walled in, surrounded by Henry’s men, hoping for reinforcements. Sens was just under forty miles away; but it was a million miles from her marriage celebrations. What did Sens have to do with today?

‘We, and our knights and soldiers, could make or break that siege,’ Henry’s voice continued. ‘If we were there.’

There was a ragged cheer from some of the Englishmen on the other side of the courtyard, preparing for the joust. Henry raised a calming hand. It wasn’t their time yet. He had formalities to get through first. They fell silent again, but Catherine realised every pair of English eyes was shining with hope and excitement.

‘With the permission of their Majesties of France,’ the King of England went on magnificently, sweeping another bow at Isabeau and Charles (and now, peeping sideways, Catherine could see her mother’s face contorted with a look of such utter, vindictive Gorgon fury that it made her wince and turn her own eyes hastily back down towards her plate), ‘… I would like to command my men, and beg those of the King of France, to make ready at once, to join the siege of Sens.’

There was a new quality to the silence now. Every French and Burgundian lord was visibly stunned. Some things were sacred. No one interrupted royal wedding feasts. No one changed the plans of the King of France. Not like this. Not for this. But the English didn’t know that. Every English lord was turning, shifting, drawing in breath, catching someone else’s eye and grinning; enjoying the change of pace; ready to be off as soon as they heard the word of command.

‘Better a real-life victory in the field than an idle demonstration of our skills in the courtyard!’ Henry almost shouted, firing them up so that the flickers of applause and roared
approval began, again, to eddy through the crowd of men drawing closer to the banqueting table. ‘There we may tilt and joust and prove our courage and daring! For there is no finer act of courage in the world than to punish evildoers – so that poor people can live!’

And now there was no holding them back, the English. In open defiance of every possible rule of French etiquette, they were standing up, raising goblets, banging on tables and trestles, laughing out loud and yelling, ‘Sens! Sens!’ and ‘Henry!’

‘Well, then. No time to waste. Let’s prepare ourselves,’ Henry finished very simply, sweeping the hundreds of men in the courtyard with an approving smile of his own.

Catherine felt his kiss, bewilderingly, on the top of her head. Then he was gone, walking very fast and determinedly back into the palace, and there was chaos everywhere. The English all began milling around the most senior commanders they could find, asking enthusiastically for instructions, or galumphing off towards stables and back quarters to pass on orders and prepare weapons and packs and food. The table was half-empty already. Within a few minutes the unruly crowd had moved off. There were just the French left at the table: still sitting in their finery, with long, appalled, desperately correct faces, not knowing what to do.

‘My lord?’ the young Duke of Burgundy said to the King of France.

But the King’s face was streaming with quiet tears again. He was murmuring, ‘Poor Charles, poor Charles,’ and, once again, Catherine didn’t know whether he was weeping for his son or himself.

It was Isabeau who took charge. Rising to her feet, all her bulk swollen and dark with frustrated anger, the Queen reluctantly grated out the command the French lords needed to hear. ‘The joust is cancelled. Follow the King of England.’

The afternoon sky was so low and threatening it looked as though you could touch its big grey wallows. There was mud everywhere: on every bedraggled soldier scurrying past, caked to every horse’s legs and belly, in the tents, in her boots,
smeared on her skirts up to the knee. She was alone, in the little house Henry had had built for her, on their third battlefield together: a miserable dwelling of mud and thatch that rattled and clanked with the noise of war.

‘Of course you’ll come – I want my bride with me,’ Henry had said simply. It was a declaration of love, as her husband understood it. He made love to her every night now. He’d lost his fatigue. But now she saw it was the battlefield that exhilarated him, not her. She understood, too late, that what she’d chosen, when she chose to become English, was to be a part of the King of War’s war machine.

Catherine had had no idea war was like this, when you were so close up.

Even when two kings, two queens, four dukes, and thousands of lesser men had set impetuously off for Sens, immediately after her wedding, there’d been something dashing and ceremonious about it, something close to the nobility of the jousting she’d grown up with. There’d been pennants and banners and the gleam of silver and iron. Sens had surrendered in a day or two, in sunlight. Living in tents had seemed an adventure; and even the sight of the prisoners trooping out in their chains, with their glum faces, hadn’t frightened her.