Blood Royal (37 page)
Authors: Vanora Bennett
But then the English army had marched on to Montereau, leaving Isabeau and the French army behind. The English ladies had been sent back to Calais – but not Catherine. And the terrible punishments had begun. Henry had a gibbet built under the walls. He had the townspeople dragged, one by one, to beg the lord of Guitry on their knees to give in, open the castle gate, and save their lives. Catherine would never forget the impassive look on Henry’s face when, after each silence from behind the walls, he’d raise his hand again and watch one grey-faced prisoner after another shiver in terror as the rope was put round his neck. She’d never forget the noises; the wriggling; the feet.
And now they were at Melun, where, despite the never-ending rain, the English soldiers were digging mines and trenches around the town. They were fighting in the trenches. Fighting in the mines. In the dark. And they were all mud. Everything was mud. Seas of it. Hells of it.
‘Once Melun is ours, we can go to Paris,’ Henry kept saying. ‘The hinterlands will be safe then. Paris will be safe.’
She nodded unhappily. She had to nod. But she didn’t believe he’d stop.
She could sense that, after Melun, after Paris, Henry would want to go on fighting; to move, town by town, village by village, fortress by fortress, south across France, until he’d driven Charles out of the south. He lived for this. He didn’t really want to go home to England. So she couldn’t meet his eyes, even when he came to her at night. She knew already that the next morning she’d wake up to find him gone – he always left before first light – and herself huddling under the covers, alone, with just the panicky voices outside, and the wind banging at the windows, and the boom and roar of cannon.
The Prison of Human Life
It took months more before Henry could be dragged away from the war for long enough to take his wife back to England. The subject of return wasn’t even raised until after their muted English military Christmas – in a Paris that was, although now a poor and ragged city, at least safe (or almost safe) from attack by the Armagnacs.
Her first queenly Christmas didn’t match up to Catherine’s expectations of her return to civilisation, although it was a pleasure of sorts to be able to walk along stone-walled corridors again, see tapestries on walls, and not touch mud from one entire day to the next. Yet there were none of the Christmastide rituals she’d grown up with: none of the dances, or songs, or Masses, or seasonal foods, or meetings with the people of Paris that she’d expected. English Christmas was functional: a table groaning with food; a few dances; a lot of ale; some inexpensive gifts at New Year. Her parents were holed up at the Hotel Saint-Paul, which, on the one occasion she went to see them there, seemed strangely quiet too. There were no courtiers, no balls, and Anastaise, who had accepted Catherine’s request to tend to the King’s daily needs, was as worried as Catherine’s mother about where the next bit of money was to come from. Although Catherine savoured – or at least noticed and found odd – being called ‘Majesty’ by the servants at the Louvre, where the English party was staying, she also saw it didn’t seem to be the
English way to bow and scrape and treat their Queen with the exaggerated respect that had always been accorded her mother. She accepted their quiet nods and minimal bows with something like bafflement. She did her best to take pleasure in the new order. And she smiled – only a little wanly – over Henry’s first gift to her, stingy though it seemed: the plainest gold bracelet with just one decoration, the entwined letters ‘H’ and ‘C’.
Even after making Paris secure against the Armagnacs, Henry didn’t really want to leave France. Catherine’s English was worse than hesitant – she couldn’t really imagine forming words in any language but French, even now – but even she was able to follow the slow, emphatic shouts of her husband’s brothers when they’d had too much to drink in the evenings and took, peasant style, to thumping their fists on the table and roaring at each other. She sat up in bed one night when the noises got especially loud, listening.
‘You have to go home. You’re out of money. You can’t afford another siege,’ she heard Thomas of Clarence bawl. They were always talking about money, these English dukes: as if they were clerks trying to balance their books. They had none of the magnificence, the
gloire
, she’d grown up expecting royalty to possess. She wrinkled her nose in distaste.
‘How, then?’ Henry, this time; sounding just as blurred as his brother after a pitcher or two of Ile-de-France red. ‘Because we have the advantage. Madness not to press on.’
‘I keep telling you how. Obvious. Take the girl home and put a crown on her head,’ Thomas shouted. ‘Then you’ll get the dowry. You have to make the time for that. It needn’t take long. That money would keep us going. I’ve told you a thousand times.’
Eagerly, she strained her ears to hear Henry’s reply. If only he would agree they could go to England … But the voices dropped to an inaudible murmur, and she felt her eyes closing.
When Henry came to bed, a good hour later, the heavy fall of his fully clothed body beside her woke her again. Her husband saw her open eyes and kissed her. He smelled of wine. He was drunkenly contrite.
‘I’ve kept you here too long,’ he muttered. ‘Haven’t I? Thomas been telling me off. Quite right. Neglected my duty … sorry. But it’s time you saw your new home … time we got you crowned … so … home to Westminster … soon.’
She didn’t mind knowing that Henry mostly wanted to take her to England only to get her dowry money for the war. She longed to go; to start her new life, not this garrison imitation of it. Her husband was doing the right thing by taking her to England at last, even if his reasons were not the ideal ones; he would always do the right thing in the end. Joyfully she put her arms around him and tried to marshal appropriately gracious words of gratitude. At least with Henry and his brothers, who’d been brought up speaking French with their own French mother, she didn’t have to struggle (at least while they were all still in France) to find the gracious words in a foreign language.
But there was no time. A gentle snore told her that Henry had fallen asleep in her arms.
England came swiftly on her, even before she’d forgotten the tears of her parting with her parents, even before she could quite smell the sea that would take her away forever.
The gateway to England came as you picked your way through the empty marshland outside Calais. Inside the town’s towering fortifications, Calais looked like any other settlement along the northern coast: wattle and daub, muddy inhabitants, the glint of salt water in the reeds. But the sounds were foreign. There wasn’t a French or a Flemish voice left. All the staring shopkeepers, wool merchants, innkeepers and market women were settlers, speaking English. The last English king to make war on the French, Edward III, had thrown out all the locals and colonised Calais with his own sort. She could hear a babble of foreign voices, whispering.
Catherine stared back down from her horse at them. She hardly listened to the military tattoo as their cavalcade made its way to the castle. She was straining to hear those voices beyond the fifes and drums – proof she was on the move at last: overseas, before she felt she’d really even left France. How strange it all was.
‘So – England at last!’ Henry said lightly, when the obligatory dinner with the Castle Keeper was over, and the King and Queen of England had retired. ‘Saw you take it all in as we came in – what do you think?’
Privately, she thought: Thank God it isn’t all going to be like this: sea air, garrison food and mud. She felt honoured to be asked. She said, ‘It’s a joy to be here,’ and the sincerity in her voice must have been audible. There was a cheerful light in his eyes as he pulled her close.
But there was a lot more mud. Her new home at Westminster Palace backed on to the Thames, a great swamp of a reed-fringed river, which they said would be alive with ducks and insects and fumes and agues and fevers when the heat began. The views across to the dubious pleasure places of Southwark to the east, and west to the more innocent Surrey woods, were pleasant enough. But in winter, under the jetties and ropes and boats used by the brown and grey local people to go after salmon and carp and perch, the nearside riverbank was all fierce-looking swans, with nicks on their beaks signifying who owned them, and rats scuttling through the brown rushes, and mist.
She couldn’t believe how small and provincial London was – a quarter the size of Paris: a walled market town a couple of miles upriver, dominated by the Tower, with a single bridge over to the wilderness of dock and hovel and wood and those prostitute-infested riverside walkways in the south. There was no great charm in the squat churches and religious establishments of the city itself, and certainly nowhere remotely like the colleges and spires of the Paris University. The bishops’ and noblemen’s palaces that lined the Strand connecting the City and Westminster were great hulking castles, gazing out over the water, built for defence, not beauty. One, known as the Savoy, was a blackened ruin, with trees growing between the stones. They said rioters had burned it down long ago, and it had been left like that: a warning of the mutability of fortune, the fragility of wealth. The thought of rioters made her shiver. So did the mud and mist.
The mist got everywhere; the biting winds too. She couldn’t get away from the smell of damp. The palace was a great draughty barracks with only the bare minimum of tapestries and screens to keep out the chill, set against walls that seemed to have soaked up centuries of coldness like frozen sponges. Catherine set herself and her ladies to sewing several new tapestries, to elaborate French designs of hunting scenes, which the English ladies professed, in their solemn way, to admire, but she shivered at the thought of how long it would take before they were completed. Meanwhile, however, many candles and tapers and torches bravely burned. However many fires were lit, it seemed impossible to get warm.
Catherine didn’t want to complain about anything, of course. Nor could she, even at the times when she felt most ill-at-ease and alone among strangers. A tacit rule seemed to have come into force, which no one had told her about, in which she was no longer supposed to speak French even with those she’d always spoken to in her own language. It was English only from now on; if she tried French on anyone from Henry down, they looked patient and answered in English. She wished she’d tried harder while still in France. Her English was still so bad, and she didn’t like to make a fool of herself by opening her mouth only to fail to make herself understood, so she felt herself shrink into a smiling, nodding, perpetually concentrating, perpetually surprised, perpetually over-polite simulacrum of herself. She’d seen her mother’s enjoyment of running things in France. But a foreign queen, who couldn’t properly make herself understood, didn’t seem to have much chance of any kind of power in England.
It wasn’t just queens, either. All English women seemed quieter and dowdier than their French counterparts, and certainly less powerful, both at home and at court. Love of women was not considered the high art it was in courtly France, or celebrated in poetry and song, arts that, as far as she could see, scarcely existed in English. This was a place where courtly festivities seemed to consist of little more than eating and drinking in silence for several hours at a stretch, dressed in simple fashions that followed the colours of the
English riverbanks – dank greens and drab browns and muddy mists – followed by the dancing of outlandish rustic dances to outlandish rustic music with men whose voices had gone slurred with ale or wine, and whose bodies lurched to and fro almost independently of the primitive banging of the rhythms.
But at least she had Henry often at her side now, organising their time in England as if it were another military campaign, and everyone obeyed Henry, so everyone she met was very respectful to her, and no one seemed to mind if she just nodded dumbly back, and bobbed her head, and felt a fool to be the one foreigner sticking out like a sore thumb in their dun-coloured English uniformity.
And Henry was a man of his word. He set his men immediately to preparing the coronation. It would take place before Lent was over, because they’d have to be quick. Once she was crowned, he wanted to take her around England to show her to his people, before getting back to Westminster for a Parliament in May.
She stifled questions as to what she would wear for all these ceremonial occasions. No one suggested she would have new English robes made. She felt she would probably be expected to use the French robes she had brought with her. She didn’t mind: the jewel-bright French robes, in velvet and silk, were more beautiful than anything she saw around her. But didn’t they prefer their English fashions? Didn’t they care if she wasn’t dressed in their style?
Apparently not. Perhaps the English dukes didn’t want to lay out more money on making their Queen’s clothes as English as her language was supposed to become. Perhaps they just hadn’t thought ahead to the travelling. The only discussion was about the coronation itself.