‘Well, what am I to reply?’ King Charles said helplessly, and the ambassadors shook their heads and murmured. The King’s hands were shaking; the letter was fluttering, ready to drop from them.
Jean de Castel spoke up from the back. His heart was racing.
‘Don’t trust a word he says, my lord,’ he said, and the King’s eyes fixed beseechingly on him. ‘He doesn’t want to marry your daughter. He wants to conquer your country. He is not a man of peace.’
The King of France’s reply to Henry of England was as gentle as ever, agreeing on the need for peace. But Jean de Castel was pleased to see that the final draft of the letter, sent only after the distressed King had briefly fallen ill again, still contained one drop of acid he hoped his words had inspired. Where the King had addressed Henry of England’s demand for the Princess, he had written: ‘It does not appear that the means you have adopted are proper, honourable or usual in such a case.’
Catherine’s mother organised a ball to celebrate the return to court of the noblemen united under the Count of Armagnac – the Orleans faction – after their summer campaigning to contain the Duke of Burgundy. There would be no more festivities: after this one ball, the princes would be off to defend France against the English invader. So Isabeau threw herself into the evening with gusto, having more peacocks killed for the feast than had ever graced a single table before, and more musicians, jugglers, acrobats, candles and jewels gathered together too. Catherine counted as an adult now; her mother had had new dresses sewn for her. She was allowed to attend; to fan herself behind her feathers; to try her hand at worldly whispering with dance partners.
The first person she spoke to was her cousin, Charles, the younger Duke of Orleans; a fair-haired, weak-mouthed, charming young man with a gift for poetry. ‘You look beautiful … very elegant … but thin,’ he said solicitously as they left the dance floor together. He looked much older than he had before the summer’s fighting, too, she thought; but she was wiser now, so she kept her peace.
‘You must have been worried for months,’ he went on. He fixed kindly eyes on her. He was trying to reassure her, she saw. He said: ‘The English marriage will never happen, you know.’
‘I do know,’ she replied wearily, and then she suddenly felt so soiled, so humiliated by remembering her moments of past excitement at the prospect of that marriage, and everything that went with the memory of it – the other, forbidden memories, of the beauty of Owain’s face swimming down from above, and the heat of his skin on hers, and the touch of mouths and tongues – that she blushed a fierce, hot red, and burst into tears.
Charles of Orleans patted worriedly at her, dreadfully embarrassed, turning her towards a shadowy corner of the hall so no one could see her loss of control, not knowing what else to do. She took a corner of her skirts and dried her own eyes. Then she managed a watery smile, and the determinedly brave words that were what her cousin wanted to hear.
‘I never wanted it anyway,’ she said.
PART TWO
The Book of Deeds of
Arms and Chivalry
ONE
It was raining: a thin, hard drizzle that drilled into your skin and hurt your eyes. Owain, wet to the bones, was blinking it away. His legs, exhausted from the long day of riding, were still mechanically clamped to his horse’s sides; but the English advance had slowed to a painful walk and he didn’t think he could have stirred the horse, or himself, to do more, even if he’d heard the trumpets order a charge. His body was so tired he was in danger of letting the desolation of this autumn evening enter his heart. The other horsemen riding uncomplainingly beside and behind and ahead of him were dark shadows, slumped into their saddles, as overwhelmed as he was by the shadowy flatness all around and the impossibility of their mission. There was no talk, just endurance. There was nowhere to pitch camp. There had been French fires burning across the river at the Blanchetache ford. The plan to cross there had had to be dropped. His aching hands were slipping on his reins.
From somewhere up ahead, in a gap in the wind, he heard, with dread, a burst of music. The horns. It took him a moment to understand that they weren’t signalling an advance. There were drum-beats too; and a thin wail of fifes. With relief, and astonishment, he thought: it’s music. He stretched in the saddle, peered through the gathering dark; willed his eyes and ears to make sense of it. But even before he did he found his horse stepping forward with new vigour in its stride, as hundreds of others all around speeded up their pace too, and squared their shoulders. He heard marching songs; and a drift of suddenly cheerful deep voices, and the quicker, louder tempo of the archers’ heavy footsteps, coming back to the riders over the insistent drum-beats. The wet no longer seemed so daunting. Owain even found himself whistling. The music would be an order from the King himself, he knew, and he found himself lost in admiration, as he’d so often been during the three months of this campaign, at the King’s instinct for drooping spirits; the deft ways he knew to raise morale.
When Owain recognised the leader of the group of horsemen he now made out trotting back down the English line, against the flow of soldiery, his heart filled with a joy as intense as that of a child seeing its father. Henry, the King, his master, was coming, with his body as jaunty in the saddle as if he hadn’t been riding for ten hours. His face was glistening with water under his raised visor, but he had fire still in his eyes and a face full of smiling understanding as he stopped here and there to clap one soldier on the back or shout a word of encouragement to another.
The King reined in his shining black palfrey as Owain, tall and proud in the saddle, trotted past, feeling the energy of those big, intelligent royal eyes like heat. ‘Tudor!’ he heard; and he bobbed his head manfully, trying to restrain the beaming smile he wanted to give at being singled out. ‘Good man; we’ll be pitching camp just up ahead,’ the King said briskly. His voice was deep and confident. ‘There’s a wood. You’ll see. Get a dozen of your men into it for kindling. The rest can do tents for everyone. We need good big fires. Get everyone dry. Cheer us all up.’
‘Sir!’ Owain said, and, as the horsemen spurred on back down the line, he let the smile out onto his face, and set himself to imagining the big blaze of a fire he was going to organise.
He’d been called back from the studies the King had permitted him to begin at Oxford, to join the King’s French campaign, setting off from Southampton in the summer in the fleet of ships that had assembled to fight at an undisclosed location across the Channel. He hadn’t wanted to come; hadn’t wanted to fight; above all, hadn’t wanted to fight Catherine’s father’s forces. But there was no disobeying orders. When John of Bedford had said his brother the King wanted Owain on hand, in case the need arose during the campaign for negotiations with the French King (since his previous trip to Paris, Owain was deemed to know the French court), he’d dared to ask, with a hint of sullenness: ‘But can I come back afterwards and continue my studies?’ Now, three months on, he could hardly remember the boy who could have felt aggrieved at commonsense Duke John’s mild answer: ‘It all depends on the King. Duty comes first. You know that.’ He did, now. He knew about combat: the fear, the euphoria, and the need to obey orders. He’d been put to fight in the siege of Harfleur; he’d thought it would be a life of sneers at the Welshman, and he’d hate it. But he’d quickly found he was considered as much a part of the force as any real Englishman as long as he did his best; and by the time the dignitaries of Harfleur came out through the shattered walls to surrender to the King he’d been cheering as loud and as joyfully as any of Henry’s English knights. These days, he never even thought about following orders, or about whether he felt it morally justified to make war in France. He’d been swept away by the logic of where he was and who he was with. He’d stopped caring about anything else. What drove him to ride until his limbs felt they might fall off his body was no longer obedience, or thought, or principle. He just wanted Henry’s eyes approvingly on his. He craved that lopsided, energetic grin; the
clap on the back. Like every other soldier in the force, he took orders now out of sheer love.
The French army was waiting for them beyond the woods where they camped. In the last of the luminous grey light, Owain could see the rooftops and drifting smoke of the villages of Rousseauville and Azincourt. ‘They’re behind there,’ his subaltern said, careful to keep fear out of his voice. ‘And over there. And there.’
No one knew how they knew it; no one would say such a thing to his fellows; but it didn’t take long for the knowledge to spread that there were at least three times as many French soldiers over there as there were English over here. And horsemen; hundreds upon hundreds of powerful horsemen; while this little English force was mostly made up of yeomen archers in ordinary leather jerkins, who, apart from their bows, had only the most basic of equipment – axes at their girdles and pikes to force their way into the thickest fighting.
But as the darkness hemmed in the English troops, in the exposed, perilous fields and copses that God and the King had chosen for them, Owain and dozens of other English knights – and Owain Dwn, another Welshman of his own age, the sparkling-eyed grandson of Henry Dwn, a fighter who’d taken Henry of England’s peace – brought forth fire from great steaming bonfires. Owain leaned as close as he dared to the flames, watching the merry orange crackle and spit of them, observing his men stretch arms and rub feeling back into their legs; feeling the despair lift from his own flesh like the damp evaporating from his skin. The earth smelled fresh and full of life underfoot. His subaltern was already supervising the first batch of men who were cleaning and greasing and sharpening blades for the morning. There would be time for everything: time to prepare; to rest; to eat; and to pray, just as there always was with Henry. The smell of sizzling rabbits and game birds rose through the smoke. Priests were passing from encampment to encampment, blessing men in batches. The air was alive with expectant talk and the neighing of horses scenting battle; and everywhere you looked men were singing and stamping their feet to the music. There was no reason to lose hope.
Owain reached into his bag for his box – with pens and ink inside; with pieces of parchment cut small for this life on the move. His other love. The finished poems lay under a cloth; the untouched sheets lay above. He couldn’t write here. It was too muddy, too uncertain. But he’d be comforted, at least, by reading some of the thousands of words he’d penned, in quieter times, about the Rose. He leafed through the sheets.
‘The Lover rides through the darkness,’ he read, ‘in wind, and rain, and pain. But wherever he goes he carries the memory of the Rose in his heart.’
‘We beat them at Crecy, we beat them at Poitiers,’ his subaltern was carolling from the weapons tent; and the men greasing his saddle bawled back, ‘We’ll beat them todaaaay!’ Owain crossed himself at that. But there was a smile on his face. Even that brief glimpse of the inexpert words he’d struggled so hard to compose – and so often got into trouble for wasting his time on – reminded him of the true purpose of his life, even beyond this. ‘Amen,’ he murmured, and, putting the box away, strode into the tent to join in the singing.
Charles, Duke of Orleans, walking into the blackness outside the French commander’s tent to consider the order he’d just been given, wondered how the English managed to make so much noise. They were thundering away over there, singing, eating, drinking, belching, farting, shouting. As far as his eye could guess at shapes, there were French horses tethered by French tents stretched out all the way to the horizon. He knew there must be many, many more French soldiers in these fields than the English could possibly have mustered. But the men he could make out closest at hand – silhouettes gathered round their smoking mounds of embers – were hunched and miserable. There were no musical instruments playing here. (Perhaps the Constable should have let the six thousand men offered by the burghers of Paris come; they might not have known how to fight but they’d probably have been a dab hand at picking out a tune on a pipe. Then again, you couldn’t have city people in a battle; what did commoners know of war?) The French cavalry horses were all but silent. So were the men; though in two or three groups he passed as he wondered what to do he heard gruff voices muttering, ‘bygones be bygones’ and ‘water under the bridge’, and saw stiff, awkward embraces, and understood that old enemies, right across this black field, must be making peace among themselves, before facing death together at daylight.
Although he knew with utter certainty that the flower of French chivalry, assembled here, must beat the English, the Duke of Orleans was surprised, when he looked at his own long, thin fingers – a poet’s hands, his wife called them; war wasn’t his calling – to see they were trembling.
Right is on our side, he reminded himself, reaching for the rosary around his neck. Right is on our side. The flower of French chivalry has assembled to do God’s will.
The Duke of Orleans was a man of simple, straightforward beliefs, or he wanted to be, if his treacherous hands would not betray him. A usurper had come to French shores with a wrongful claim to French lands. God, and the French nobility, under the Oriflamme, would smite him down.
But as his fingers touched the beads, and his lips danced through Ave Marias and Pater Nosters, he found himself trying not to remember all those long-ago battles when the French nobility had been destroyed by a cruel God’s favour for the English armies of earlier kings.
And when he thought of his order for tomorrow – the order just given him by the Constable of Albret, who was to be commander for the day, because the King himself couldn’t be on this battlefield – he couldn’t help the prickling of his scalp that he couldn’t believe was fear.
He wasn’t going to obey that order, of course. No one but a king had the right to order a prince of the blood royal to do anything less than heroic in battle.
He wasn’t going to stay at the back with his men.
He was going to join the charge.
Charles of Orleans had allowed two grooms into his tent at dawn to put on his armour. Once mounted, he’d cantered down from the royal enclosure to the encampment where his own troop had spent the night. No fires; it was too far from the woods; the men’s faces were as grey as the skies. Their leather sallets were soaking and looked as heavy as his glittering breastplate. He thought: The subaltern’s not up to it. He should have found them better shelter. But he contained his irritation and politely told the subaltern to take charge of the men on his behalf during the battle. ‘I will be in the charge,’ he said impassively; choosing not to see the man’s look of fear.
Now, with a gauntleted hand over his eyes to keep the day’s early drizzle out, he was standing in the shelter of an outcrop of trees on a slight swell of land, watching the other army rouse itself below. His spirits were higher than they’d been all night. The English force moving around like ants in the mud was much smaller than all that noise in the night had suggested. He could hardly see any horses. The English were encircled; in visible danger; they must be discouraged at the sea of French soldiery facing them. And their tents were grey and brown with mud; none of the magnificence there of the French equipment. He doubted their weapons and their tired campaign horses were much good either.
Owain was part of the group of knights called to the King’s tent at break of day to hear Mass. Owain had dozed a little by the dying fire – he half-remembered being happy in the dream, and feeling the butterfly kiss of eyelashes on his skin and yielding female flesh in his arms – but the damp streaks of colourless light that he’d seen on the horizon as he startled back into wakefulness, signalling time running out before it all began, filled him with dread. He was grateful for the armour that hid his pale face and racing heart. But, standing in front of the King’s stained tent, he was heartened by the sight of Henry, looking far younger than his twenty-eight years, with every sinew of him hard and ready, pulling on his metal plates, cursing ruefully – ‘bloody hands shaking; it’s the excitement, always like this’ – then devoutly bowing his head in prayer and taking t
he Sacrament in his mouth.
We’re all afraid, Owain thought, reassured. He knows that. Even he is. Fear is natural. Nothing to reproach myself with.
Yet Henry showed no more signs of fear. He got up calmly on his grey charger and gave orders to each of the knights. Owain’s troop was to be in the rear of the charge. Infantry to take the lead; follow up the arrows. Archers in flanks to left and right.
Then the King rode off among the men saddling horses or strapping quivers and axes on themselves, stretching bowstrings taut, restringing them, testing the blades of weapons wrapped in old rags to keep out the damp, binding up their feet. Every few minutes he stopped to talk, leaning down over his horse’s great thick powerful neck, and what he said, in that brisk, no-nonsense, calm voice, with a hint of a laugh in it, was the same for every group of soldiers he addressed. You can see the danger we’re in; the only way out is to win. Owain, back with his own men, making sure they were properly armed and ready before mounting his own dappled horse, strained to hear that beloved voice as hard as every other knight and footsoldier. And, in his heart, he joined their nervous cheers at that first mention of victory. The cheers got louder and more confident when Henry said, in a rhythmic, swinging echo of the song they’d been singing in the night: ‘Don’t forget – we beat them at Crecy! We beat them at Poitiers!’ Every now and again, some bright spark would yell back, ‘We’ll beat them todaaaay!’ And the King would clap him appreciatively on the back, and move on.
But Owain’s heart, like that of every other English soldier, almost burst with devotion and breathless pride when Henry, having reached the front of the camp, first pointed out the jostling mass of French horsemen, ready to be off over there, yelled a few more words of encouragement to the entire English force, then swung off his horse.
On foot, with his sword held high in front of him, he roared to the joyful infantrymen crowding behind him, ‘Henry! Henry!’, and, without Owain quite having understood that the battle was beginning, led them in a surging charge over the soggy ground towards the French.
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