Blood Royal

by Vanora Bennett

  ‘Maybe he’ll never be a great hero,’ Owain went on. ‘I’ve watched the boys train; I don’t think he’s got warrior instincts any more than half the others; any more than I ever did, come to that. So he’ll probably never be the apple of Warwick’s eye. But does that really matter?’

  She began to smile. They turned the corner and watched the boys’ heels up ahead, flicking towards the doorway of the great hall.

  Owain went on: ‘England’s had its share of heroes. It would be no bad thing to have a wise and peaceable king either – a Solomon – someone who could teach his people to live gently, in grace. Harry might be that. You’ve already given him a great love of God; he’ll find solace in his faith all his life. When the time comes, he’ll probably take just as much pleasure in his books. Your father isn’t the only person whose blood runs in his veins, after all. Think of your grandfather: the wisest man in Christendom. No one ever criticised him for being a philosopher king.’ He stopped. Sketched a bow. ‘You go on. I’m not coming into supper,’ he said, more prosaically. ‘I have letters to write. But I’ll make sure Harry gets some food later. Don’t worry.’

  Gratefully, she nodded back. It would be less embarrassing for Owain to go to Harry at night, through the throng of other boys, than it would be for her. And, even if she wasn’t fully convinced about the rest of what he’d said, it was enough, at least, for the tight knot inside her to have loosened so she could breathe.

  He looked at her. It was that slow, expressionless stare that turned her heart over; that might mean, Come to me and be damned with everything. But it didn’t. As usual, it didn’t. When he finally spoke, what he said was: ‘I’m going to try to think of a way to help you get to France with Harry.’

  Harry was up and in the chapel early, long before Lauds. He’d got over yesterday’s distress. He was alone there, in a shaft of sunlight that gilded his hair and skin. He had a parchment in his hand. He was peering at it with tremendous concentration, with his lips moving. He was still an awkward reader.

  ‘Mama,’ he said excitedly when he saw her. ‘Look. Owain’s written me my own prayer.’

  Owain doesn’t write any more, she thought, wondering why she felt alarm mixed in with pleasure at Harry’s happiness. But she stepped into the light, kissed Harry’s head, and looked. There were only a few lines on the page; simple Latin words, elegantly penned in strong, clear letters without flourishes. ‘Domine, Jesu Christe, qui me creasti, redemisti, et preordinasti ad hoc quod sum, tu scis quid de me facere vis; fac de me secundum voluntatem tuam cum misericordia. Amen.’

  She smiled despite herself. It must be Owain’s response to their conversation after chapel yesterday, she saw. It must be what he’d done last night, instead of supper or writing letters.

  ‘Do you understand it?’ she asked.

  ‘Most of it,’ Harry said cautiously; then, darting a look at her that apparently convinced him she wouldn’t mind if he didn’t, ‘… but maybe you could help me with the words I don’t know?’

  She pointed out each word in turn, nodding appreciatively as he got the first ‘Jesus Christ, Lord Almighty’, prompting him when he struggled over ‘… who didst create me and redeem me and preordain me to that which I am …’, and, when Harry fell silent, gently supplying the last few phrases herself: ‘Thou knowest what Thou wilt have me to be; deal with me according to Thy loving-kindness, and show me Thy mercy. Amen.’

  How compassionate Owain is, how full of love, to have thought of giving Harry the words to accept whatever fate God has in store for him, she thought. She wished she didn’t feel so sad.

  Harry said, looking anxiously up at her: ‘Do you like it, Mama?’

  She said, ‘It’s lovely’, and, ‘He used to be a poet, you know; you can still tell, can’t you?’ And Harry’s face shone again.

  Holding her hand, he led her up to the altar. ‘Let’s pray together,’ he said, and made sure they were both kneeling to his satisfaction before folding his hands and, sneaking frequent looks at the parchment on the floor in front of him, slowly and proudly repeating the words of Owain’s prayer.

  He’ll be a poet again soon enough, Catherine thought desolately. She’d let herself forget how little time they had left; how Harry’s coronation robes were already being sewn, a little large. He’s waking up to it already. Beginning to write. Remembering his future. Getting ready to go.

  A horseman came from London the next morning. He had a parcel for Owain: a square package in a brown leather pouch. Catherine saw Owain bow, take it, glance at it, look more closely, raise an eyebrow, and then, with a busy air, leave the hall where the clerks were going over the accounts, to deal with the package in private. She passed by the window several times on her solitary walk, so she knew he was gone with it for more than an hour. At dinner she noticed Owain’s preoccupied look as he leaned over her, serving sorrel and salads. He was clearly thinking about something that was taking most of his attention and was clearly not unpleasant. He was humming under his breath. She wished he would look sadder; as churned-up as she felt. She wished he looked as though he were afraid of the unknown looming up ahead.

  Owain’s parcel was a thin book, bound carelessly in anonymous calfskin, with stitching that was already coming undone. It was the hand on the letter tucked inside that tattered cover that caught his attention: a sloping script, scribe-like in its neat elegance. He recognised it at once. Bishop Beaufort’s writing – or Cardinal Beaufort, as he was now.

  ‘You’ve ridden from overseas?’ he asked the messenger in surprise. He’d lost track of where Cardinal Beaufort was on his foreign travels. But this man looked as fresh as a daisy.

  ‘No,’ the man replied, sounding equally surprised. ‘Only Southwark.’

  The letter confirmed it. The Cardinal was back in England. Various matters here required his attention, he wrote vaguely. He’d decided to attend the coronation. He wanted to meet Owain. Of course, Owain thought, enjoying the idea of this wily old schemer’s return to politics: the Cardinal will need all the information he can get, about every flicker of everything that’s gone on anywhere, if he’s to take on Humphrey again now he’s back. He’ll be out talking, walking in gardens, chatting, glad-handing …

  That mental picture made Owain smile. And then it made him thoughtful. Tapping his fingers on the table, he read on.

  The Cardinal had a small gift for his former secretary: the book he’d sent. ‘Perhaps you have already seen this curiosity,’ the letter finished. ‘New verses by your old friend Madame de Pizan. I picked up a copy on the road to Calais. You can buy it everywhere. It’s being copied at lightning speed, and recited in taverns, even in areas under English rule. I thought the sentiments expressed in it might interest you. You might also judge it appropriate to show this book to the Queen Mother. I doubt my dear nephew John will be fully aware of the antagonism his armies have aroused among the French; so I doubt any proper briefing will be available to His Majesty if there is to be a second coronation in France. But it is my view that it would be realistic to prepare His Majesty for some of the challenges he is likely to face on the ground. It might be foolhardy not to.’

  Owain put down the letter and picked up the little book. There was nothing much to it, it seemed: ten pages or so of hastily transcribed verse. But the title was arresting. He whistled when he saw that.

  Christine’s poem – written, what, a decade after she’d left the world of wars and politics for what was supposed to be the quiet routine of prayers and fasts of the nunnery – was called ‘The Song of Jehanne of Arc’. You couldn’t get much more political than that.

  Abruptly, as if the force and muscle had gone out of his legs, he sat down on the bench and started to read. It wasn’t more than ten minutes later that he put it down again, shaking his head. Oh, Christine, he was thinking ruefully, transported back in time by the familiar music of her turns of phrase, echoing in his ears again. Christine was still too frank and forthright, but she was so well-known for her honesty and
virtue that her opinions would carry weight all over France. And, if the Cardinal was right, a lot of people already believed the kind of thing she was writing here.

  It was bad. It was worse than he’d expected. The poem was an open call to rebellion against the English, as much as it was a love poem to the Maid of Orleans – who, in Christine’s view, had been sent by God to restore the French throne to Charles.

  ‘A young girl of sixteen years to whom weapons seem weightless, she seems to have been raised for this, she is so strong and hardy. Enemies flee before her; not one can resist. Oh, what an honour to the female sex! That God loves her is clear, with all these wretches and traitors, who had laid waste the whole kingdom, now cast out, and the realm elevated and restored by a woman – something a hundred thousand men could not have done! Before this, who would have believed it possible? And so, you English, lower your horns … beat your drums elsewhere … or more of you will taste death like the companions you have left as corpses in the fields, waiting to be devoured by the wolves …’

  He wouldn’t show this to Catherine, he decided. It would only upset her. Not because of the praise for the peasant-girl warrior, but because too much of the poem was a wild, overwrought outpouring of love for Charles himself.

  Owain remembered only too well how Christine had refused to follow her son Jean to Charles’ court at Bourges years ago, while the old King of France was still alive, because it would have been against her principles to support Charles’ rebellion against his father. She’d stuck to her principles even though she’d known that doing so meant she would never see her own son and his family again. Owain had admired her courage for that, and pitied her. But now, apparently, Christine’s hatred of the English had altered her views. She seemed to have come to think of Charles as the one true King of France, standing firm against the English wolves destroying the land. She called him the ‘… cast-out child of the legitimate King of France, who for so long has suffered such great troubles but who now approaches, risen up like a man going to Mass, coming as a crowned king, in wonderful and great power, wearing spurs of gold….’ She called him, ‘You, Charles, French King, seventh of that noble name.’

  If everyone in France felt like that about the English, and about Charles, it would be more dangerous than he’d realised for Harry, and perhaps Catherine, to go to France.

  Owain sat and hummed and drummed his fingers on the table, thinking. Finally, he pulled a box of writing materials towards himself. The first glimmer of an idea was forming in his mind, and he needed to consult the Cardinal.

  Owain avoided Catherine until he had the Cardinal’s reply. He couldn’t talk to her unless he knew whether the idea might work. But there was no delay. The return message came the next day.

  At dinner, leaning over her with the silver platter, noticing her pallor, her fingers fiddling with the keys at her belt, yet trying to avoid gazing so attentively into her eyes that he aroused suspicion, he said quietly, ‘Cardinal Beaufort is back in England.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘Humphrey?’ she mouthed.

  ‘Furious, I think,’ Owain said. He permitted himself a small smile. ‘But even Humphrey can’t prevent his uncle from attending the coronation of the King of England.’

  ‘But it’s still three months away?’

  Owain shrugged. Whatever other trouble the Cardinal wanted to make while he was here was the Cardinal’s business, not Owain Tudor’s. He had something else to tell her. He raised a finger from the edge of the platter to draw her attention back to the here and now. He could hardly wipe the grin from his face at his next news. He had to struggle; draw in breath; keep his expression composed.

  ‘He wants me to stay with you till after the coronation,’ Owain said. ‘Here. He’s written to Saint Mary’s in Oxford to delay my return.’

  He allowed himself just a split second of enjoying the relief in her eyes; the colour coming back to her face and making it lovely. Suspended as he had always been between worlds, he’d never allowed himself ambitions, beyond the monastery or the King’s service. But looking at her expression now made him feel he’d realised one ambition, at least. He hurried off.

  The golden weather stretched on, past Michaelmas into October, as if God, like Catherine, was celebrating the borrowed time she’d been given. But the future couldn’t be kept at bay indefinitely. Henry’s coronation robes were ready; the elaborate choreography of the spectacle at Westminster was being drawn up.

  To Catherine’s worsening frustration, even at this late stage there was no face-to-face contact with Humphrey. The Duke of Gloucester sent substitutes to rehearsals at the castle and stayed away. In his absence, Catherine didn’t know how best to begin campaigning to be allowed to go to France. If the household was to remain as it was – just Warwick and boy warriors and tutors – she didn’t see how she or Owain could exert the least influence. She could hardly bear Harry’s trusting gaze on her whenever Warwick began lecturing him about his forthcoming expedition to France. If I don’t think of something soon, she kept catching herself thinking, they’ll all have gone and I’ll be left behind here alone.

  The leaves were turning. There were fogs in the morning and an urgent sharpness in the air. Owain kept himself to himself. He seemed to be always light of heart these days; always humming a bittersweet folk tune in his sweet, rich baritone. But he spent a lot of time alone in his room, and she saw with quiet dread that he’d found something new to interest him. Once, she caught up with him, overheard the murmured words, ‘pe cawn i hon’ – Welsh – and asked as boldly as she dared, ‘What are you singing?’ But he just shrugged, without giving anything away. ‘My old bad habit,’ he said apologetically, ‘mumbling away in Welsh.’ He didn’t seem to understand the misery enveloping her, as the stay of execution she’d hoped might be within her grasp through the French journey failed to materialise, and the days shortened. He didn’t seem aware of time slipping through their fingers.

  When, on All Hallows’ Eve, a week before the coronation, he waited until she’d settled Harry in her rooms with her, playing chess, before unexpectedly asking permission from the King and the Queen Mother to leave for Southwark to pay his respects to Cardinal Beaufort, Catherine couldn’t speak for shock.

  Just like that? her eyes said. There was a pain in her gut.

  ‘Will you come back tomorrow?’ Harry asked.

  Owain shook his head, softening the blow with a smile. ‘I expect he’ll want me with him till after the coronation,’ he told the boy kindly. ‘A week. But you’ll be too busy to notice. After that, we’ll see.’

  Catherine just nodded with a choke in her throat. This was the end, or the beginning of the end, she thought despairingly. She couldn’t believe he’d said nothing until there was Harry here to protect him from questions. He was trying to avoid the pain of farewells, perhaps. He wouldn’t be back.

  She didn’t respond to the final pressure of his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t understand when he met her last quiet, accusing look with a nod and a screwing-up of the eyes, which, to someone else, might have looked almost like a wink.

  TWO

  Catherine’s companion at the coronation was Queen Jeanne of Navarre again – up from her ramshackle manor house, half of which they said had recently burned down without the old lady even noticing the smoke and screams. The old Queen was utterly confused this time, white-haired and babbling. Being paired with her by Humphrey for a public ceremony no longer seemed a compliment.

  Nor did it seem a compliment that Warwick’s tight-lipped daughter, Margaret Talbot, the Countess of Shrewsbury, was chosen as the shared chief lady-in-waiting for both former queens. Catherine had been told that Lady Shrewsbury was twenty-five – close in age to Catherine – and the mother of three children already. Beforehand, Catherine had let herself hope that they might at least talk about their children together; draw comfort from that. But when she actually reached Westminster and said her farewells for the night to a round-eyed, nervous Harry (he was to go t
o his own apartments at Westminster and pray through the night with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and, to both Harry’s and Catherine’s relief, also with Cardinal Beaufort), reality dawned. Catherine immediately recognised the features of the young matron sweeping towards her with an unwelcoming gleam in her eyes as she dropped exactly the regulation depth, and no more, of obeisance. The daughter was a vindictive-mouthed, pale-eyed, thin-lipped, raw-boned double of Warwick. Catherine’s heart sank. But perhaps it was just the black misery that had filled her for all the past week that was making her gloomy and unforgiving now. The sleeplessness, the loss of appetite, the fears.

  She couldn’t get any conversation out the curt Countess. But she made a special effort, as she and the old Queen processed haltingly across the way to Westminster Abbey, in their matching gowns of red, gold and black, to keep the hopelessness at bay; to smile and stand tall for the crowd, at least. Still, she couldn’t help hearing the disappointed voice of one little street boy whose eye she’d caught, who was standing on someone’s shoulders so he could peer between the soldiers’ shoulders and report back to his comrades on who was passing and whether it was worth hopping up for a look too. ‘Only the old Queens. The mad one and the mum. Give it another minute.’ Her English was good enough for that now.

  The bells pealing overhead were so loud that they sucked the sound out of people’s mouths; made their moving lips appear silent. The air of the abbey was thick and gloomy with incense and thousands of beeswax candles making rich pools of light, and the rare, expensive scents of the bodies of the great, and the stink of the common people. In her furs, in the swaying press of the nobility on the scaffold between the great altar and the choir, Catherine was stiflingly hot.