Blood Royal

by Vanora Bennett

  He only looked back at her, then smiled a pleading smile. ‘You’ll bring the boy next time?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I will,’ she promised, softening, lingering in his arms, touched by the idea that he was longing to meet little Harry and hold his grandson in his arms.

  She had to go. But she stole a last look at her father from the doorway. He was staring at the clouds again, and his lips were moving. ‘Poor Charles,’ he was saying. ‘Poor Charles.’

  Isabeau came out, with Anastaise attending her, to settle her in the litter and bless her for the journey. Catherine watched them fuss around, tucking in her robes. They all knew it was unlikely she would be back – unlikely they’d meet again on this earth. ‘I will come back,’ she said anyway. ‘God willing. I will bring Harry.’

  She had to lie. They all did. She couldn’t cry for this farewell. There were so many other tears to be shed; and once she started, would she stop? Catherine turned away from her mother’s eyes, which weren’t tearful either but haunted, as soon as her litter started shuddering off down Saint Anthony’s Road to the Louvre. She felt frozen; hardly able to move, weighed down with a fear that went beyond tears.

  No one seemed to mind if she did very little or excused herself very early or appeared at dinner – at every improvised banquet of kings and dukes – without a word, without eating. She was supposed to be heartbroken. It was in the order of things. The great machine of statehood was built to cope with her grief and move on.

  She didn’t know what had become of Owain. She didn’t dare ask where he had been sent; whether he was in the cortege somewhere, avoiding her, or at the front, or back in England. There was no point in thinking about Owain, who didn’t want to know her, when everything was lost. She tried to make her thoughts of the husband she’d lost. She tried to pray.

  Owain would have done anything to get away from Paris after letting his body betray him into that mortifying kiss. He’d done everything since that other return from France, two years earlier, to make sure he would never get caught in this trap again. At least he thought he had. But here he was.

  Back then, his plan had seemed so clear: forget poetry, a young man’s rash self-indulgence, and follow Christine’s ascetic example instead, devoting himself to learning; taking himself, step by step, through the great classics of history, philosophy, science and devotion, so that sooner or later the furious anguish in his heart would fade, and he would gain wisdom and peace of mind. Then, when he fully knew himself, he would take his eternal vows.

  But now? Every one of those hundreds of days at Saint Mary’s – in the honey-stone cell, in the library, in the chapel – wasted. All those resolutions made after all those endless hours on his knees, staring into candle flames – broken.

  She’d seen him, and thought, like a cat noticing a mouse, that she’d like to call him back to play with. She’d broken his composure. He’d let her. What a fool he was. And she: so cruel, so cruel.

  He’d been so sure he’d mastered himself.

  He crossed the Channel in a wool packboat, sitting in the hold on stinking, greasy bales of wool, muttering rosary after rosary in a frenzy of self-reproach that seemed to get worse, not better, with every exhausting hour. He hated himself, and her, even, for the way this turmoil was getting in the way of what should be all he could think about – his grief for his lost master.

  Even when he fell asleep, it was not to memories of Henry but to wild dreams of galloping all the way to Jerusalem, in a pilgrimage that would at last rip the sin from out of his heart.

  If not Jerusalem, he thought, waking up under grey skies to see white cliffs looming up ahead – the southern English chalk faces that now signified home – he would lock himself away in some great act of penance, a mortification of the flesh. A hair shirt; lashings; forty days of hunger. He’d ask the Bishop to set him the penance, he thought heatedly.

  Then he imagined the Bishop’s clever, worldly face with its wide mouth – a mouth that often quivered on the brink of unkind laughter – looking back at him as he made that request. Unlike the other royal brothers and uncles, who’d been irritated by Owain’s wish to leave the war and return to Oxford, the more sophisticated Bishop had been interested in the young Welshman’s self-questioning, his yearning to find the most honourable way to live his life (or perhaps the Bishop had just wanted to further irritate his kinsmen by taking Owain up). Yet Owain could suddenly imagine the Bishop’s amused, nasal reply if he now requested that dreadful penances be imposed on him: ‘Too much mortification, surely … what can you possibly have done that is bad enough to justify all this punishment … are you by any chance taking yourself too seriously … indulging in the sin of pride, dear boy?’

  Cringing at the thought of the humiliation he would bring on himself, he shook his head. He’d have to think of another way. He’d have to wait till he’d delivered his message to Westminster, and prayed, and rewarded himself with a full night’s blessed sleep. There must be a way out of this pain; a way forward. Perhaps once his head had stopped whirling with sleeplessness and sorrow at the loss of his master, and shock at the memory of her, the one he refused to call up but couldn’t let go of either, it would be easier to see where that path lay.

  FOUR

  The bells were already clanging at Saint-Denis long before the procession reached the abbey gates. Catherine, whose head ached from the stuffiness of the closed litter, opened the curtains and felt she could almost see the deafening waves of gloom buckling and bending the trees. But it was only the wind.

  There was a knot of peasants standing at the roadside. Weeping. There were more coming from the muddy fields, with hay in their hair and their pitchforks still in their hands. They weren’t coming to stare at the King of England’s image, a mile ahead. They were staring straight at her: and those who weren’t sobbing and keening had haunted eyes.

  Catherine sat up straighter. ‘God rest his soul,’ she heard one female voice sniffle.

  God rest his soul.

  There’d been no tears till now. Who in France would truly mourn the passing of the King of England? There’d been just awe at the passing of life, the stillness of death. She’d seen fear of change in some of the faces that had passed before her, anxious eyes, but no grief. She began to listen properly. The litter-bearers too. The litter bucked and heaved as they craned their necks.

  The main cortege was already at the abbey gate. Far ahead, she could see Duke John riding back down the road towards her from the centre of that procession, at a stately canter, followed by three knights. She stared dully at them, in case one might be … But none of them were Owain.

  She watched Duke John’s face coming up, turning from a blur to a gooseberry-eyed whole. He looked worried; worse. She leaned forward, pushing the curtains away. He swept his hat off.

  ‘Your Highness’s father, His Majesty of France,’ Duke John said without preamble. But she knew by then that her father was dead. She knew because she’d opened the curtains so wide she could see three of the litter-bearers, and they all had silent tears streaming down their cheeks.

  No one could have expected two kings to die.

  Duke John spent less than an hour at Saint-Denis before riding off to supervise the other funeral preparations now starting in Paris. He and Catherine’s mother would be the chief mourners at the King of France’s funeral.

  Catherine said: ‘May I come? May I attend to my father? Mourn with my mother?’

  But he shook his head. There was no time for girlish feelings in all this. ‘Your place is here with your husband. You were his Queen. Take him home. Your son needs you.’

  She began, ‘But …’

  Duke John said warningly: ‘… Your son, Harry, King of England, is now King of France too.’

  Titles no man had held together before, she realised: the most powerful titles in the world. Held by a child of nine months old, she thought, dazed. No wonder the peasants had frightened eyes.

  ‘But you won’t know how t
o bury my father,’ she insisted. She was surprised to hear her voice trembling. All her childish fear of the English, with their casual, improvised beliefs, was rushing back. The English here had no possibility of understanding how sacred were the rituals the French lived and died by. She could guess why Duke John might not want her to stay. He wouldn’t want much made of the King of France’s death. There would be no coronations in either country until after Henry had survived infancy. Meanwhile, Duke John would almost certainly want to stress the continuity in power, rather than any unsettling change. But, however important he said it was for her to take Henry’s body home, however important it was to go home to Harry, she couldn’t leave Papa’s mortal remains in this man’s amateurish charge.

  ‘Papa was old,’ she quavered. ‘And he was King from the cradle. And so many of the – of our – great French nobility have died. There may not be anyone left who remembers how to bury a king … in the proper way …’

  Duke John shrugged, at first with infuriating English carelessness, as if that sort of thing didn’t matter in the least; as if you could just make up some sort of solemnity and it would be all right, more or less, and God would excuse it, and no one would much care. But he stopped when he saw her face crumple. He was a kind man, deep down, even if he didn’t understand how a ritual could be so important. He put an awkward arm around her as her body curled up on herself – as her eyes at last filled with tears; as her chest heaved and jerked and hiccupped with misery. He wasn’t altogether without imagination, Duke John. He had an idea of how to comfort her, at least.

  He walked her through the crowd in the courtyard. It was like a beehive with a stick in it out there. The Duke of Exeter was shouting for calm; rushing the lords to their quarters to stop the hum and buzz of panicky talk. But the English earls, all the same, were eluding him, pacing up and down in twos and threes, muttering. Half the earls and dukes of England were here, and all of them were on high alert, nostrils flared like warhorses, sniffing danger in the air.

  Now Catherine had started crying, it was just as she’d feared: she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t look up. She couldn’t open her eyes. She was choking; she couldn’t get it out fast enough.

  ‘Losing a parent … nothing quite like it. Especially when you’ve just lost a husband,’ she heard Duke John’s voice say with rough embarrassment from somewhere far above. ‘Here we are … you’ll feel at home here. Go into the abbey, say a prayer for your father. It’ll calm you down.’

  ‘I should stay and bury him,’ she said again, but so tearfully now that it no longer counted as an argument. ‘My own father.’

  ‘No,’ Duke John said back, kindly but very firmly. ‘Your place is with the next generation. You can come back to France when it’s time to crown the child; not before. So say your prayers for the old man now; this is your chance. It’ll be my job after that to clear up the past.’

  Catherine shrank into the familiar dusk of the abbey, away from the sounds of English, into the scented air of a place that represented everything sacred about France and its royalty. She sank into a corner, far from any of the chapels, and sobbed her heart out.

  She was safe here, at least, among her own. There were no hostile eyes; no don’t-give-a-damn shrugs; no need to explain. Gradually the awe that always filled her here stopped her tears. She bent her head in prayer.

  Three of her brothers were buried in these walls, and all her kingly ancestors. The same family had always been kings of France, and always would be. God had blessed the dynasty for all eternity. The sacred blood of Charlemagne and his descendants ran in her veins and Harry’s: purus and clarissimus, they said, a darker, richer, purpler colour than ordinary people’s blood. And all future kings for the rest of time would come here, just as she was doing now, to seek protection from Saint Denis, who interceded for the princes of that sacred bloodline with God.

  ‘God preserve them all,’ she muttered. He would. She knew that He would.

  Saint Denis – converted to Christianity long ago by Saint Paul himself, later Bishop of Athens, who’d evangelised the French, and became in his saintly afterlife the patron saint and guardian of the kings of France – was the most powerful saint in the French canon. He protected France’s kings bodily from wounds and sickness. He shielded every King’s soul from evil and ministered to him at the hour of his death. With Denis’ help, the kings of France escaped Hell and Purgatory at death, and were guaranteed entry into Heaven.

  Every sacred French symbol was here at the abbey. The abbey’s banner, the Oriflamme – scarlet silk on a cedarwood pole – was the flag the French had always carried into important battles, to ensure they were blessed with God’s grace. The holy crown of Saint Louis was preserved here – a tall circlet of a single piece of gold, with a large central stone and deeply cut metallic foliage containing thorns and hair from Christ’s Holy Crown of Thorns. So was the crown of Charlemagne, with its four hinged sections and its lilies. So was the emperor’s great jewelled sword, Joyeuse. This was where the heart of France beat strongest; this was its home, with Saint Denis.

  Humbly, she asked Saint Denis to save the soul of her father, and to protect her poor mother, left alone in Paris, and to intercede for her own soul, when her time came, and, most important of all, to protect her son, whose future, since he was now King of France, also depended on the saint’s goodwill. Only after that, with a slight sense of shame, did Catherine offer a mumbled prayer for the saint to bless the soul of her departed husband. She wasn’t sure in her heart of hearts that, even now the abbey was in English hands, Saint Denis would take kindly to Henry – not just because Henry had invaded France, the Most Christian Kingdom, but generally because he’d been the ruler of an irreverent nation whose people had a habit of sloughing off inconvenient kings whenever it suited them and ignoring the sacred pact made between God and King. The English, coarse and cold-blooded, only snickered at the most glorious traditions and holy beliefs. They didn’t understand or respect the Word of God, or the sacredness of the blood of kings.

  It was different if you were French. The gist of every sermon she’d heard here was that royal blood was blessed. ‘The lords of the blood are members of and belong to your body,’ every abbé had told the King her father at every ceremony she’d attended here throughout her childhood. ‘The lords of the blood are the eyes of the body of the state, watching over it continually. They have a singular affection for it, and a nobility, and a special perfection.’

  How she’d revered that belief as a child … how awed she’d been, gazing up at the blue and gold-starred vaults, at the idea of being the eyes and the limbs of the body of the state. She’d loved the idea that the sanctity of the blood royal and the sanctity of France itself were intermingled. The kings of France ruled the Most Christian Kingdom by virtue of their pure, purple, sacred blood – a land where faith was illuminated; where, as Saint Jerome said, no snakes or Jews or pagans lived; a place where royal blood was only ever spilled in defence of France and its faith.

  But then everything changed – in her lifetime – when the lords of the blood royal of France had started to destroy each other, shedding each other’s blood for no purpose.

  Perhaps it was those two royal murders in her lifetime – both the terrible acts of lèse-majesté and high sacrilege – which had made Saint Denis’ power start to fade. The saint had not cured her father’s madness. The Oriflamme had not protected the French army at Azincourt. Her brothers Louis and Jean were not buried in these walls, not protected by Denis; France had been too troubled by the time of their deaths to bring them here.

  Her living brother Charles would not be buried at Saint-Denis either, Catherine thought. He had shed royal blood. He no longer belonged to this sacred land.

  She crossed herself one final time and got to her feet. Even remembering those disconcerting years when Saint Denis’ protection had seemed to stop working, she felt calmed by being in this ancient refuge where it was known that her existence was part of the gre
at sacred order of things; where saints and archangels would protect her and her kind.

  She thought: Charles’ impure blood … Charles’ unroyal brutality … there had been good reason for him to be cast out. But Saint Denis would protect her, Catherine, and those she cherished. Saint Denis would surely protect her father in death; help him to Heaven.

  Even if Duke John didn’t know anything else about how to bury a King of France with proper honours, she thought, composing herself and moving back to the shouting crowd of Englishmen outside, she could at least make sure that he brought Papa’s body to its eternal rest here.

  With his duty done, Owain took a boat back from Westminster to Bishop Beaufort’s house at Southwark, where his two modest rooms had been kept during his absence. It counted as home.

  Fatigue had stopped his mind racing at last. He was so dirty, and every muscle ached. He had no energy left for thinking. In a daze he watched the river water flow by. The clangour of mourning was already beginning: church bells booming out their one harsh note of grief. He could see wherry-men and their passengers, on his craft and all the others jostling down the waterway, turning, listening, and starting to talk, very fast and anxiously. You couldn’t hear much of what they were saying for the bells, but you could guess, or read their lips. The words ‘dead’ and ‘King’ and ‘infant’ and ‘What will become of us?’ and ‘God help us all’ were easy enough to make out. He shut his mind to them. Even at high summer, and it was a hot afternoon, the river water was grey. It stank. He needed to sleep.

  Perhaps, he thought – and in his tired daze the thought no longer had the power to cause pain – Catherine hadn’t meant to be cruel. Perhaps she had just been scared: clutching at a familiar face, a familiar pair of arms, because, unlike these worried-looking Londoners, trying to guess at their future, Catherine knew exactly what lay ahead for herself now she was a widow.