The King's Women

by Deryn Lake

  For the weakness of his position made him vulnerable to hidden enemies, Charles knew it, surrounded by ambitious men as he was. Above all he must survive to be the ultimate winner and in order to do that he had to be one step ahead of everyone else. The manipulation of his courtiers had become more than a game; these days, Charles played chess with real people as the pieces.

  With the loss of Guy, one of the only two men he could trust at court was gone. The other, of course, was the Bastard, now married to Louvet’s daughter Marie. And it was Louvet, rich as Croesus on other people’s money, and pack leader of the most powerful faction at court, who was currently giving the Dauphin cause for concern. Charles had been forced to put a man of his own in to clip the wings of the Chancellor of the chambre de comptes. His choice had been Pierre Frotier, a handsome young equerry, now Grand Master of the Equerries, and stylishly clad in furs and gold chains. Louvet, believing the Dauphin to be in love with this dashing creature, had not dared stand in his path, instead inviting the newcomer to join his group. Charles had chuckled to himself and thanked his Italian great-grandfather, Bamabo Visconti, the Tyrant of Milan, for his well-developed streak of cunning.

  The ploy, however, had had somewhat unfortunate repercussions. Bonne de Giac, furious as a little wasp, had accused her lover of being bisexual.

  “You are as bad as he is, who would scruple at nothing.”

  The Dauphin had pulled her into his lap, laughing till the tears ran.

  “Yes, you’re right, I am,” and he had smothered her with kisses, imitating a monkey.

  “Don’t, Charles, stop it, I say! What do you mean, you are as bad?”

  He had wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “I mean that I will do anything — and I mean anything, Bonne — to keep the wolves from closing in. They all believe they have me in their tutelage but the fact is, they don’t, none of them. I am playing them at their own game and the weapon I intend to employ is the perpetual setting of a newly found favourite against those already in power.”

  “So you are not in love with Frotier?”

  “I am in love with you and because of that I have revealed to you my secret. Now it is up to you to prove your love by telling no one what I have said.”

  His mistress had looked thoughtful. “What a plotter you are, to be sure. I would never have guessed it. But then, again, perhaps I might have done. You are so different these days, so taut, so blazing. Yes, the more I think about it the more you look an arch-intriguer.”

  “There is, however,” said Charles, almost casually, “one who is in love with Frotier.”

  Bonne had been genuinely surprised. “Oh? Who might that be?”

  “De Giac,” answered the Dauphin, and had almost fallen out of his chair he had laughed so much.

  “No wonder he hardly ever sees me! What a blessed, blessed relief.”

  “Everyone thinks that all the furs and jewels and horses are given by me. But no such thing. Your hideous husband is besotted with my protégé. They’re probably drinking cockerel’s blood together at this very moment.”

  Bonne shook her head in wonderment. “If Henry of England were engaged with you in a battle of wits the future of France would be safe and secure.”

  Charles had looked suddenly gloomy. “Unfortunately, it is force and force alone that will rid us of the English curse.”

  “Then let us seek help from others of like mind. Why don’t you appeal to the Scots for men?”

  “To Scotland,” the Dauphin had repeated thoughtfully. “To France’s old allies against the English? Henry V holds James of Scotland prisoner, does he not?”

  “He most certainly does,” Bonne answered with a smile.

  “Then,” Charles had said, laughing again, “it is high time something was done about it.”

  Henry of Lancaster had married Catherine of France in June and by high summer, having conquered Sens and wiped out Montereau, he was laying siege to Melun, an Armagnac stronghold if ever there was one, and it was here that two surprises awaited him. Firstly, the location of the town, an island fortress linked by bridges to two walled suburbs lying on either side of the river, made its terrain difficult to say the least.

  But the second shock was far worse, for from the flagpoles of the town flew not only the white banners and Porcupine device of the Armagnacs but the Bleeding Heart of Douglas as well. The Scots had risen to defend their old ally, the two nations joined together by their hatred of the English. The Earl of Douglas had sent his army across the sea to aid the Dauphin. Yet the English King only smiled, drawing his blood-red lips up to show long hard teeth.

  “It will fall by winter,” he had said. “I shall keep my Christmas in Paris.”

  It would seem he was invincible, it would seem that the destroyer of France could never be beaten — and yet the mills of God were slowly beginning to grind out their inescapable justice. As the King of England’s men went down with an epidemic of dysentery, so did he. Nature was doing what the French could not, gnawing out his bowels, but still, and against all the odds, Henry of Lancaster went on, defying even disease in his mania to be master of Paris by the end of 1420.

  Now he looked a ghost of what he once had been, thin as a stick through fasting — the only way in his mind to conquer the searing pain — his face white as swan’s feathers, the molten eyes and rosy lips set in them, shocking to see. He was ghastly, an upright skeleton, and still the Englishman fought on.

  As it must to such an agonised persistence, Melun fell after a siege as terrible and long as that of Rouen, the number of English and French dead shocking to reckon up. Then, in personal agony, only his fanatical zeal keeping him on his feet, Henry V marched the fifty-five miles that lay between him and Paris.

  There could be no joy in this victory, for France was destroyed. Without people, without crops, the land barren, still smoking from recent fires, it was not worth the taking, yet that relentless man, that war machine, that King who by now had become slightly deranged, went on to keep his word. He would celebrate Christmas in Paris with his new Queen beside him, his French and English families gathered round. And by this time next year and before death claimed him, he would have sired an heir to succeed to the joint kingdoms for which he had so painfully fought.

  It was the fall of Paris that finally brought the Duchess Yolande from her haven in Provence. With the autumn sea pounding the sands of the bay and its bitter wind whipping her skirts about her legs, she took her last walk on the terrace and bade farewell to that most beautiful of castles, the Chateau de la Napoule. Messengers had brought her news that Melun was on the point of capitulating and that the capital now lay within the sights of Henry of Lancaster. The time had come for a tremendous effort, she could delay no longer, what was left of the Dauphin’s kingdom must be put on full alert.

  The Regent and her retinue reached Angers in the second week of December and barely had time to organise their own affairs before they set off again to join the Dauphin who, never settling very long in any of his castles, had finally decided to keep his Christmas at Bourges. So it was that they were all together, Charles and his court, the Regent and hers, when the long-awaited news came from Paris. On 23rd December in the Hotel St. Pol, ironically the house in which Charles had been born, his father had held a lit-de-justice and formally disinherited his son, naming Henry V, who had sat beside him during the ceremony, as heir and Regent of France.

  “So it is done,” said Charles bravely, his skin drawn tight over his cheekbones as he attempted a smile. “I cannot think for the life of me why they took so long about it.”

  “The widow of the late Duke of Burgundy was also present, Monsieur. Through her representative, Nicolas Rolin, she asked that you and your accomplices in her husband’s murder be put in tumbrils and drawn through Paris bearing lighted tapers, saying that you had wickedly, treacherously and damnably murdered the Duke of Burgundy through hatred and without any reasonable cause whatever.”

  A muscle twitched in the Dauphin’s eyelid
but he said nothing.

  “There was cause,” growled Tanneguy de Chastel. “There was cause and plenty.”

  As if he had uncorked a bottle, everyone began to speak at once and the air was full of the high loud sound of indignation. Into the babble, Charles spoke.

  “We must fight them head on,” he shouted. “We must go forth to meet them and engage the Englishman’s troops. That must be our answer to charges of wilful murder, that must be the reply to my disinheritance. All-out war!”

  Yolande could not believe that she was on her feet cheering, that everyone in the room, including poor insipid Marie was shouting, ‘Oui, oui’. The battlecry was up and with it French blood. The Dauphin of France — and there was no one present who at that moment did not believe he was such — was going to lead his men into battle,

  the ugly faun shimmered before them, ready to die if necessary.

  “Kill, kill!” they shouted.

  “Yes,” said Charles of France, “kill or be killed. That is all that is left for us now.”

  In March 1421, with Henry and his bride returned to England to beg subsidies from the clergy in order to continue the war, Charles rode out at the head of his army. Dressed in full armour and carrying his personal device of a gauntleted hand grasping a naked sword, his squire riding just behind bearing the banner of St. Michael slaying a serpent, the Dauphin looked ready to take on the world and on the 22nd of that month engaged fiercely with the English army, led by Henry V’s younger brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence.

  The French military might was formidable; the clansmen of Buchan, led by their Earl, had joined with those of Douglas. Thousands strong they marched, playing their bagpipes, the air full of their fearsome skirl. Charles’s personal bodyguard was formed by a company of archers led by John Stewart of Damley, and surrounded by these formidable Scotsmen he charged into battle just outside the town of Baugé.

  It was an incredible victory! By midnight Clarence was dead, his standard and those of the other slaughtered consecrated to Notre-Dame-du-Puy, the black madonna to whom Charles had earlier made a pilgrimage. The Earl of Buchan was rewarded for his tremendous part in the affray with the post of Constable of France and a personal gift from Charles, Dr. Germain de Thibouville, the Dauphin’s best astrologer now that Guy had left his court.

  The triumph tasted like wine and there was no stopping the youthful warrior. With his trusty clansmen surrounding him, Charles besieged and took Chartres, and then marched on towards Paris. But it was here that his luck ran out. Henry of Lancaster, breathing hellfire over the death of his brother, had returned to France, leaving behind in England a pregnant Catherine. With his usual lack of humanity, the English King hanged every Scot he took prisoner and heaped indignation on the hapless James, King of Scotland, whom Henry had recently released from captivity, compelling him to follow the English army as a private knight.

  In July, with Henry’s troops marching towards them, the sheer weight of numbers of which would most certainly secure them a victory, Charles and his men were forced to withdraw to their own territories. The brief spell of being on the winning side was over.

  It was dispiriting for them all, and the birth of a son to Henry V at the end of the year seemed the final bitter pill the Dauphinists must swallow. The Christmas of 1421 was kept quietly with none of the blaze of splendour of the previous occasion, everyone quiet and sad, wondering what the next twelve months could possibly bring them.

  With winter past and the green buds of spring bursting forth — the good earth still bravely renewing itself, tormented by warring mankind though it was — destiny once more caught up with the English warlord. The dysentery contracted by Henry V at the siege of Melun had never really been cured, leaving the King in constant pain unless he fasted rigorously. And now at another difficult siege, that of Meaux, where the Bastard of Vaurus, a great bandit of a man flying the banner of the Dauphin, fought tooth and nail to keep the usurper from his gates, Henry was struck down again.

  How ironic that it should be when he was stuck in the muds of Meaux, fighting agony at every step, that the English King should hear of the arrival of his son. And what particular act of God decided that Catherine, disobeying Henry’s strict instructions, should give birth at Windsor castle, a well-known omen of ill luck for the unfortunate infant? It was at that particular moment, racked with pain and hardly knowing how to conduct himself, that the victor of Azincourt felt for the first time that events were finally turning against him.

  Twenty-Three

  He had resisted marriage to Marie as long as he possibly could but now the Dauphin was cornered. With the arrival of spring, living in as much luxury as the war would allow him, Charles suddenly had no further excuses left.

  “The time has come,” Yolande had announced firmly, and the Dauphin had known that at long last his freedom was over.

  Having arrived with her mother to celebrate the Christmas of 1420, Marie had remained with Charles when the Regent had finally departed for home, leaving a far from easy situation behind her. Naive and retiring as she might be, the Princess of Anjou was certainly not stupid, and her dislike of Madame de Giac had in its quiet way made life very difficult for the young lovers.

  “I know she watches when I come to you,” Bonne had whispered in the darkness, guilty for the first time about sinfully sharing Charles’s bed.

  “I’m sure you are mistaken. Marie retires early. She must be fast asleep by now.”

  But the young woman knew that her lover was wrong, that a solitary candle burned in the girl’s apartments, that there was a rustling behind the door as Bonne, silent and small as a cat, walked past on her way to her paramour’s bedroom.

  The situation between the two young people had settled into something almost like a marriage, de Giac long since passing up any claim to his wife in return for his high position at court. Added to this, of course, Pierre demanded complete privacy to practise his satanic rites and no questions asked about those who joined him in his unsavoury rituals. It did not seem a very high price to pay, and a relationship of live and let live had developed between the cuckolded husband and his wife’s royal lover.

  Yet now there were other people playing this adulterous game. As Charles grew older and more poised, many young women cast their eyes on him, and he had several times allowed himself to be seduced by Eleanor de Paul of Anjou, a girl so stunningly beautiful that men actually wept in her presence. It had been a weakness of the flesh, no more, for his heart was set on Bonne, but Eleanor kept a voluptuary’s bed and the Dauphin had hot blood in his veins, a direct legacy from his lascivious mother.

  If his mistress had ever discovered the truth about Madame de Paul, Charles never found out. But something around that time caused Madame de Giac to initiate a new routine, refusing to say when she was coming to visit him, thus making him careful about receiving Eleanor or even being absent. In the midnight darkness Bonne would creep along the corridor, pass by his bodyguards who, to a man, turned a blind eye, and get into bed beside the sleeping Dauphin. Thus he would wake to lovemaking, exciting and excited. As a result Eleanor’s nose had been put firmly out of joint, though very occasionally, in the greatest secrecy, she and Charles still shared an illicit night.

  But with the arrival of Marie everything had become more difficult to manage and now, with an April marriage looming ahead of him, the Dauphin thought gloomily of the marital duties that he must perform and wondered how he could cut them to the minimum. A plan to make his wife pregnant as often as possible seemed the only solution and Charles, with a certain gritting of his teeth, prepared to make the best of something he had dreaded for years.

  The fact that he looked on his betrothed as a sister did not help the situation at all. For the Princess, who had fallen in love with him when she had been little more than a child, now adored him with the ardour often associated with rather plain young women.

  “Look at the way Marie is gazing at the Dauphin,” whispered Pierre Frotier to de Giac. “
I swear if a female could contemplate rape, she’s doing so.”

  “Rubbish,” answered the older man. “Such a thought would never enter the head of that little simpleton.”

  “She’s Yolande d’Anjou’s daughter, remember. The girl can’t be utterly devoid of spirit.”

  “Mark my words, she’s a dunderhead, a perfect partner for a prince. Intelligent women are a bore at the best of times but in a position of power they are even worse.”

  Frotier giggled audibly and Marie, certain they were talking about her, grew pink with confusion, keenly aware of her lack of physical beauty, devoted to Charles with a child’s steadfast loyalty and racked with painful jealousy that he could even countenance affairs with other women.

  ‘If I could only prove to him I am actually and finally grown up, that I could love him as well as any of the rest,’ she thought miserably as one of the many damoiselles in Marie’s suite brushed out her hair that night.

  And then a plan came, daring and outrageous.

  “Tell me,” the Princess asked casually, “whereabouts are Madame de Giac’s apartments?”

  “In the west turret, Madame. Why?”

  “I thought I might call on her tomorrow, perhaps play chess.”

  “But you don’t like chess.”

  “Ah, but I intend to improve my game,” Marie answered enigmatically.

  And as the castle of Chinon rustled into final sleeping silence, the only sounds the stamp of the watch, the creak of the wicket gate as it cautiously opened for those on late business, the occasional sad moan of a distant hound, the Princess of Anjou rose from her bed and pulled a blue silk robe over her shift. Then, with feet bare on the freezing flagstones, the strewn rushes sharp against her naked toes, Marie made her way to the west turret and threw shut the great bolt that many of the chambers carried on their outside doors. Having done this, pale but very determined, frightened by her own daring and breathing much faster than usual, the Princess stole through the shimmering torchlight to the chamber of the Dauphin of France.