‘Are you sure? What would those two have to talk about?’ she said blankly. ‘They hate each other.’
She didn’t like the look Henry was giving her: calm, carefully assessing, and mildly amused, as you might be watching a cockfight or a peasant behaving uncouthly.
‘They’re cousins; they’re both of France. So they might have many things to talk about, no? They might want to join forces to stop me marrying you, for instance …’ he said, raising an eyebrow.
Alarmed, she breathed, ‘No!’ and ‘They couldn’t do that, could they?’ She so wanted the future she saw opening up for herself now. She was already enjoying the first feelings of safety and companionship that this new relationship with Henry would bring her more of. She wanted to get away into the warmth of a life where she and this man would know each other well enough to tell each other all their secrets, all their innermost thoughts; a life full of children talking and laughing; a future in which the walls wouldn’t look mockingly back at her in silence. She didn’t even want to hear the possibility that Charles – the hateful, violent person Charles had become – could cheat her of that future.
Henry only laughed. ‘One never knows,’ he replied lightly. ‘Does one?’
She could imagine – vaguely – what was worrying Henry. They always said he and his brothers and uncles, the Beauforts, ruled and conducted their war together, in perfect unison. He must find it almost impossible to understand the hatred between the French royals; in particular, the one he’d be most aware of, between her brother Charles and her cousin Burgundy.
She couldn’t begin to explain the ambivalence and suspicion that tainted every relationship in her own family, to someone who didn’t understand families being that way. She didn’t understand herself where all the complex feelings came from. She just knew they had always been there, and always would be; and, in her turn, she didn’t really believe the English royal family could be so perfectly united. Deep down, she thought, surely those English brothers and uncles must all harbour quiet hatreds for each other, too.
Henry’s face turned up in an enquiring, unemotional smile. ‘But don’t you worry about what Charles wants?’ he asked, quite kindly. ‘After all … he’s your brother. You grew up with him. And he’ll be King of France one day. If there’s to be a good, lasting peace between France and England, wouldn’t you say he should be part of making it?’
She shook her head fiercely. ‘Why should there be peace talks with Charles?’ she asked. She was reasoning with herself as her words rushed out. Of course she wanted a good, lasting peace between France and England; that was what she told herself every day. Seeking the blessing of peace for her country was the reason for seeking out this marriage. But why should Charles – the hateful, violent person her brother had become – get a chance to spoil everything now? ‘Charles isn’t the King – just a son. My father’s the only king you need to talk to,’ she went on hotly, ignoring what they both knew to be true – that the negotiations were being led, for the French, by the Queen and Burgundy, not the sick French King, who wasn’t, in reality, in any sort of state to conduct peace talks. ‘All Charles should do is come back to my father and ask his forgiveness for leading an army against his King. He should ask my mother’s forgiveness, too. For putting her in prison.’
Catherine paused. Assessing how she must look to her lover, she became aware that her face was flaming and her teeth had clamped tightly together. She must seem much too angry, she thought, making a conscious effort to smile and shrug and move her body languidly closer to Henry’s.
Then, letting herself trust that everyone, deep down, understood the quiet rivalries and hostilities that must seethe away at the heart of every family, she laughed a little and looked into Henry’s eyes. ‘Though my mother might not forgive Charles so easily,’ she added, with an attempt at merriment. ‘Naturally … after all those months in prison … he’s caused so much harm; though she too … it’s hard to explain. But she’s still so angry that she’s spent weeks saying that Charles is no son of hers, for doing what he did, and no son of our father’s either.’
She laughed again at her last line. She knew she meant partly to signify her own exasperation at the hugely exaggerated spite that was so typical of her mother. She waited for Henry to understand that and laugh too. But his eyes were gleaming. She’d got his serious attention now. He didn’t offer any comment on the motivation of a mother who would, out of sheer malice, question the legitimacy of her own son’s birth – and, by doing so, admit she must have been an adulterer. Henry was much too interested in what Isabeau had said to worry overmuch about why.
‘Is she saying that? Really?’ he asked intently. ‘The Queen of France, saying Charles is a bastard?’
Suddenly Catherine saw that statement through his eyes. If the only male heir to the French throne was a bastard, and his father’s royal blood didn’t run in his veins, there was no male heir to France. That left the way open to … anyone, really … to seize the French throne. No wonder the King of England, here to negotiate a peace settlement after winning most of northern France on the battlefield, had eyes that had started to gleam.
Her laugh faded a little. There’d never been any real talk about Charles being a bastard; that wasn’t the impression she’d given, was it? It had all just been Isabeau’s hyperbole, hadn’t it? ‘It’s just her way,’ she added faintly, feeling suddenly unpleasantly compromised; associated with her mother’s jibe and trying to shrug it off. Perhaps he really didn’t understand how unhappy families fought among themselves? Perhaps things really were different among the Lancasters? ‘We don’t pay any attention, really…. She often says things like that …’
Henry began to nod. He began to dress, too. ‘Quite, quite,’ he said, nodding a little too fast, looking both disappointed and, at the same time, slightly amused. ‘Just her little joke … I understand.’ Still, he went on grinning while he dressed.
He bowed as he prepared to leave the tent. ‘But still,’ he said, almost to himself, from by the flaps, ‘if only she’d meant what she said. About Charles. It would have made everything so much simpler.’ The grin – almost a smirk – that he couldn’t quite keep off his face broke out again. ‘Till tomorrow,’ he said, through lips trying hard not to open into a laugh, and was gone.
Catherine had spent her mornings in the tent dreaming of the meeting to come. She’d spent her afternoons in a new dream of sticky honey kisses and whispers.
And so, on the last afternoon of the week, she was surprised to find her mother, turning around at the talks to touch her arm and whisper a comment, not giving her the usual pleased, mischievous look Catherine had come to expect – the look of a sensualist who’d successfully introduced her child to the pleasures of the flesh – but muttering, with narrowed eyes and an angry quiver to her jowls, ‘What is the man thinking? Did you hear? They have to offer something. We can’t just …’
But Catherine hadn’t been paying attention. ‘What’s the matter?’ she whispered.
But her mother shrugged her off. She was staring balefully at the English speaker: Henry’s brother, John of Bedford. She was listening hard, and breathing hard. She didn’t want to be interrupted. After a few more bass phrases in Latin, which Catherine, despite Christine’s best attempts, wasn’t expert enough in to follow properly, Isabeau raised her hand.
The English delegation, sitting fanned out around Henry at the other end of the table, went quiet. Heads went forward; a couple of men leaned around Henry’s throne and whispered.
Miserably, Catherine realised something was going wrong.
‘My lords,’ Isabeau said, in formal, clipped, furious French. ‘I beg your forgiveness. But the Princess my daughter is indisposed and wishes to be excused. Perhaps, while she makes her departure, the rest of us might benefit from a short pause in which to gather our thoughts?’ She prodded Catherine, who, startled to be dismissed, but obedient, rose from her chair and eyed the French tent’s entrance. Isabeau fixed Henry wi
th a steely gaze. He stared coolly back down the table at her. She snapped out her final words: ‘An opportunity to meditate on the virtues of compromise?’
Henry nodded, but not in a way that suggested he was about to discover the virtues of compromise. He was drumming his fingers on the table. He didn’t look at Catherine as she began, very slowly, to make her way towards the daylight.
She was almost out when the Duke of Burgundy stood up. Under his hooded eyelids, her uncle’s eyes were the colour of flints. He stood very tall and straight. He, too, stared at Henry.
‘We can’t agree to what you w-w-want,’ he said, with ice in his voice. But he’d started stammering. ‘There’s no point in being here unless you agree to l-l-look for other ways. We can’t dismember France to satisfy y-y-you.’
There was an ominous silence. Catherine stopped in the doorway and looked back. She saw Henry sit up straighter too, and, very slightly, shake his head. But the men-at-arms, so close now that she could smell the wine and greasy meat on them, were already moving aside to let her out. She could do nothing but step, blinking, into the daylight.
She was already outside when she heard her uncle’s next words: still quiet, but trembling with pent-up anger. She could imagine his eyes now.
‘Change your demands, or there’ll be no point discussing a … m-m-marriage either,’ he grated.
And then there was chaos.
She heard a chair overturn, and a furious shout from the other end of the room – in French, not Latin, but she knew it was Henry’s voice. ‘Don’t try to dictate terms to me!’ it yelled, and she heard a fist bang on the table and the shuffle of paper falling. ‘You have no choice! You’ll do what I say, you bloody fool, or I’ll chase you out of France, and your King with you – and have the girl anyway!’ And now there were chairs bashing down on the carpets everywhere, and everyone was on their feet, shouting and jostling and pushing at the enemy, wherever they saw the enemy in the uproar, and Isabeau was struggling up from her throne, with a dreadful look on her face, and yelling, ‘Quiet! Quiet!’, but no one was listening.
The men-at-arms at the tent flap weren’t standing to attention any more; they were staring in with terror on their faces. Catherine stood behind them, thanking God her uncle of Burgundy had had the sense to make sure everyone was disarmed before they entered the conference tent.
Inside the tent, Henry of England was advancing on Burgundy down the side of the table, so fast and dangerous that he seemed to be about to hit him. Then, as if remembering himself, he raised his arms high in the air instead and walked on past. He stopped at Isabeau’s throne and bowed.
‘Madam,’ he said, through gritted teeth, before walking out through the French entrance, straight past Catherine, so close he could have touched her, so close she could almost feel the dark wind in his wake. He didn’t see her; or if he did it didn’t make him stop.
The uproar went on for a second more. Then the rest of the English delegation walked out too, through their own door, led by John of Bedford.
Burgundy closed his eyes and stood very still at his place, absorbing the humiliation. The rest of the French negotiators waited, hardly breathing. Isabeau sank back down on to her throne. Her face was red. She lifted a hand to fan herself. She rolled her eyes. ‘Well …’ she said. ‘After all that …’
Burgundy opened his eyes. ‘Have all this cleared up,’ he said. His voice was clipped, his stutter gone. ‘The talks are over.’ He didn’t look round as he walked out, past the men-at-arms, past Catherine. No one seemed to be seeing her any more today. But she could see him. His face was dead white.
Catherine sat in her litter, bolt upright. Every jolt, every stumble, made her wince.
It had ended so abruptly. It had been going well until today. What had gone wrong? This couldn’t really be the end of everything. Could it?
He’d said: ‘I’ll have the girl anyway!’ She clung to that. She repeated it to herself; her rosary. He’ll have me anyway; he’ll have me anyway. He’d made love to her. He couldn’t just walk away from the bed of a Princess of France. Could he?
But he’d pushed out past her without a word. Without a look. As if he hadn’t noticed her.
As if he wasn’t coming back.
‘He’ll be back,’ Isabeau said stoutly, as they began the miserable, bewildered trip back to Paris. ‘He’s just negotiating. Pushing for more. Nothing really changed – that’s the mystery of it – he just started demanding more, all of a sudden. But he’s a greedy man. Always has been. So don’t worry.’
Then the French Queen said, ‘He has to come back. He … you … after all …’
It was unheard-of. By making love to Catherine, Henry had signified that he intended to marry her. It was against every rule of honour for him to walk away.
Catherine nodded. Her lips were tight. She hadn’t cried. She felt cold; chilled to the bone. She didn’t want to think that her lover might just be using the fact of having deflowered her, dishonoured her blood, as part of some cynical campaign to get more for himself out of the French peace talks. But there was nothing else she could think.
Even if he did come back, Catherine would never feel safe with him in the way she’d hoped might be possible.
She lay quietly back in her litter, jiggling along beside her mother’s, marshalling her thoughts. She needed to marry Henry. So she needed to work out how she could bring him back. What extra reward might Henry be after, if he’d only stormed out as a way of negotiating for more?
Suddenly, she knew. ‘Maman,’ she muttered. ‘I told Henry what you said about Charles – that you didn’t consider him your son; and that he was certainly no son of Papa’s …’ She gulped. ‘And Henry was all ears. And when I said you didn’t really mean it … it was just a figure of speech, because Charles had been so cruel to you … he said’, she paused, ‘that that was a pity.’
She kept her eyes down. She stared at her hands. More than anything, she wanted to glance up at her mother’s face and assess whether Isabeau’s wish to make a success of the talks, make peace with Henry and marry her daughter to England, would be enough to persuade her to denounce her son and dishonour the royal house of France. But she didn’t dare.
After what seemed an endless pause, she heard a grunt from the other litter. Isabeau was shifting a little uncomfortably around, turning her back.
Gruffly, coldly, from over her shoulder, the Queen of France told her daughter: ‘I never said that. I never said anything of the kind. Charles a bastard – I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Catherine sighed. She knew there would be no point in reminding her mother that both the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy, along with dozens of servants, had heard the remarks, made in a piercing voice in the great hall at dinner. It was always like this: if Isabeau chose to forget something she’d done that subsequently embarrassed her, the memory had to be unmade – ripped from the minds of every witness. It was a shame, in a way, Catherine thought, knowing she was being cold-blooded but not caring: a public announcement that Charles was a bastard would certainly have brought Henry rushing back. But she could see why her mother wouldn’t want to make that announcement. Doing so would have shamed Isabeau in the eyes of the world, forever.
Isabeau lowered her head. ‘I’m exhausted,’ she said. ‘I’m going to try to sleep.’ And she shut the curtains of her litter, to keep her daughter’s assessing eyes out.
FOUR
The bag came to light when the servants were unpacking Catherine’s boxes and trunks.
Catherine nodded listlessly from her bed. ‘Leave it,’ she said. ‘I’ll look later.’
When she opened it up, she thought at first it had probably been packed in error. It must belong to the Pontoise merchant whose house they’d taken. It was a dirty leather pouch, the kind a man might put on a horse. There was nothing much in it – just a patched shirt, a spoon and knife, and a box.
There was nothing remarkable about the box either, when she got th
at out. She opened it. A bottle of ink. A few scratchy old quill pens. Some sheets of parchment, cut into small enough squares to fit inside.
Half-heartedly, she pulled the top few out. No clue. Blank pages. But there were more pages underneath, hundreds of them, and they were covered with writing. She picked one up. Scanned it. It wasn’t good writing. It was tiny and scratchy. She could hardly read it. She went to the window, in her nightgown. ‘The Lover …’ she made out. Then, ‘The Rose …’
She held it up against the light, briefly interested despite herself. It was a poem.
It was many poems, she realised a few moments later, when she’d picked up a few more. Poems written at different times, over months or maybe years, but all with the same theme of loss. A lover, forced to go on existing alone, while the object of his devotion, a Rose, was locked away, behind the high walls of the Palace, behind the glitter and bustle of the River, under the light of the Moon …
It was like the Romance of the Rose. A memory of reading that, long ago, with Owain Tudor came into her head; the giggles they’d suppressed as Christine came back into the library. She banished the thought.
It was the mention of lions that caught her attention … lions in cages, regretting their lost glory. Then a reference to the Rose, blushing outside the nunnery wall. She caught her breath. She knew this story. Any poet might write about lovers and roses, but only Owain Tudor would mention lions and nunneries too. If he was the languishing Lover of all those poems, then the unattainable Rose, she realised, with a sweet rush of astonished gratitude, must be herself.
She read them all, concentrating intently. She didn’t have the literary skills to know whether Christine might find these good poems. But the very fact that they’d been written to her kept her attention fixed on the words on the page – the fact that someone – that he – had been thinking of her, every time he sat down alone, so many times, for so many years.
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