Blood Royal

by Vanora Bennett

  Catherine’s mouth fell open as Duke John lifted out first a book, then, with a grunt, a crown. She recognised the enormous sapphire in it at once. Saint Edward the Confessor’s. Harry had worn it at Westminster Abbey.

  She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the deceit being uncovered. So the Cardinal really had gone off with the English crown jewels, after all. Duke Humphrey hadn’t been making the story up. For all his air of bewildered innocence, the churchman had been carting the most sacred of jewels around France with him for all this time. In a cheap old box.

  When she looked behind the Cardinal’s chair at Owain, she could see he was as dumbfounded as she was. His eyes were huge, his mouth open like hers. But when she looked at Duke John, she could see only that he was completely still; waiting. He couldn’t meet her eyes. He wasn’t half as good a liar as the Cardinal. It was obvious he’d known about the box.

  ‘But,’ she stammered, ‘why didn’t you say?’

  The Cardinal looked a little pained. ‘Well, my dear, if you recall, you were against the idea of anything but the proper jewels – the proper everything – until yesterday. I didn’t like to upset you, when you still had your heart set on perfection. But I thought we should perhaps have a little something in reserve, just in case.’

  He folded his hands together. He folded his lips together. He was trying to look modest, and almost succeeding.

  ‘But Uncle,’ Catherine said, feeling her heart melt, as it often did, when, after he’d pulled off a successful stratagem, the Cardinal got that smug look which he tried so hard to suppress, ‘I don’t mean why didn’t you tell me; I can see that. I mean Humphrey? He’s furious with you … out for your blood … calling you a thief … All you had to do was tell him in advance, surely?’

  Now it was Duke John’s turn to hang his head. Catherine softened further when she saw the misery on those straightforward soldier features.

  Gently, the Cardinal explained: ‘We didn’t want Humphrey to know the French sword and crown had gone. He’s been making enough trouble for John over his handling of the war as it is. I didn’t want to give him any more ammunition. Much better for everyone – for England – if we can all struggle on as we are, at least trying to pull together. I thought: Least said, soonest mended.’

  Catherine’s head was whirling with all the small deceits he’d perpetrated; layer upon layer of them. How could she ever fully trust him? For a moment she hovered on the edge of anger. But then she looked at Owain, and remembered all the ways in which she’d never taken the Cardinal fully into her trust either, and took pity on poor, honest, good-hearted Duke John, who was looking so agonised at her side, and let out her breath.

  The Cardinal sensed she’d accepted his manoeuvre. He spread his arms and said, as engagingly as ever: ‘Humphrey will thank me for it when he understands – as long as everything has worked out well and the coronation been a success. His heart’s in the right place, really.’

  She smiled back at him. He was so convincing. When he gazed at her so positively she almost believed that Humphrey would be grateful. It was even possible that the Cardinal could present the borrowing of the English crown in enough of a favourable light that he and Duke John would be thanked for it.

  ‘Dear Uncle,’ she said affectionately. ‘I just don’t want you to get into trouble – even for Harry’s sake. That’s all.’ But she could see, from the naked relief on both men’s faces, that they were satisfied – more than satisfied; grateful beyond words – with what she was now agreeing to. She was saving the situation for both of them. A coronation could go ahead.

  Duke John got out a cloth and mopped his forehead. To her astonishment she saw he’d been sweating. How frightened they must have been, she realised, of the kind of conflict among noblemen that had started the destruction of France long ago. If this coronation was only good enough to stop that, it was good enough. ‘Thank you, my dear,’ Duke John muttered, and she loved the softness in his tired eyes. ‘This makes things much easier. It does indeed.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘So,’ Duke John said, breaking the silence, ‘can we set a date?’

  Suddenly brisk, the Cardinal broke in: ‘Coronation on Harry’s tenth birthday?’

  The room suddenly felt cold. Catherine looked from one Englishman to the other, realising she was trapped. She hadn’t understood that they’d come so far, so fast. They’d agreed everything. December was no time at all. But all she could say was yes. Blankly, she nodded.

  TWO

  However happy Owain had been to be reunited with Catherine, he didn’t understand, or sympathise with, the dreamy tranquillity that had come on her in Paris. He was reacting to the end coming in quite another way – with increased urgency and an ever worsening sense of foreboding. More and more, he sensed it must be obvious to those around them, especially his master, who had been so close to Catherine and Owain himself for well over a year now, that he was Catherine’s lover. Even before the alarming hints that the Cardinal had started giving in conversation, there’d been the moment with the keys. The Cardinal had made a point of locking the door connecting his rooms at the Louvre to Owain’s, and giving Owain the key. ‘Here, my boy, you’re less likely to lose this than me.’ In response, Owain had felt his face grow hot.

  But perhaps he’d only started feeling this discomfort because of the manner of their leaving Rouen. It was haunting him. The Earl of Warwick had done nothing worse than purse his lips and bow, while the Cardinal had been wringing his hands, and bowing, and murmuring, ‘… a woman’s whim …’ and ‘… nothing I can do but follow the King …’ as he apologised for the hurried departure. Warwick clearly didn’t dare vent his rage on the Cardinal himself, but Owain shivered as he remembered the look of pure, vengeful enmity Warwick had given him when, plucking bonily at his shoulder, the Earl had held the Welshman back for a moment at the end of the interview. ‘And you …’ he’d hissed, with a malice that was no less frightening for being unspecific, ‘watch yourself. I know all about you. Don’t think servants don’t have eyes. Don’t think people don’t talk.’

  He felt much safer here, far from Warwick’s eyes. At least in Duke John’s Spartan man-world there would be no sheet-sniffing. But he was saddened, too; oppressed by the howling emptiness all around in the great wasteland that the war had made of Paris.

  He felt time rushing forward. Soon it would all be over. He’d be alone, in the twilight, with a future he’d mapped out for himself long ago, before he could have imagined this year and near-freedom with Catherine – a monkish future he hadn’t really wanted even back then, and certainly didn’t want now. He hated the idea of shutting himself away in the dark with a passionate intensity he’d also have found hard to imagine before. ‘With the eunuchs,’ he kept finding himself muttering – ‘shutting myself up in the dark with the eunuchs; and hating the good friars and their books, lovely as they are, full of knowledge as they are.’

  Catherine didn’t seem to understand how final their parting must be, or she was deliberately shutting her mind to it. When Harry gets a bit older, she kept starting to say, with a vague kind of hope … when Harry has a proper court … perhaps I will be called back … and perhaps you …

  She hardly seemed to be aware that Owain ignored those tentative half-offers of futures she had no control over. He knew them to be fantasies, and fantasies that would be unbearably painful to entertain. France was one thing – this strange, alternate life, where everything was possible, at least for a little while. But he couldn’t go back to a life in England as Catherine’s creature, even if it were offered. Not to serving her at dinner, or catching the occasional glance, or sneaking off to talk in gardens or chapels every now and then. He knew the future, and how it had to be, even though it made him dark with fury against his fate. When he went, it would be forever.

  Now it was so nearly upon him, he was wild with energy, with the need to fit as much in as possible before the day Catherine would go to her life and he to h
is. He found fleeting wisps of thought coming into his head. Alternatives to prayer; because even if he could bear the quiet of a life bent over books, he thought, he’d never be able to reconcile himself to accepting the fate God had given him, and even the idea of thanking Him for it made Owain want to scream with fury. He couldn’t even bear the notion of a long inactive lifetime of remembering. So perhaps instead he should go and hire himself as a mercenary; or go on a Crusade – die fighting somewhere. But nothing seemed quite real. He couldn’t yet bear to think seriously of any future without Catherine. Yet being with her, here, now, so close to the end, was a perpetual, tormenting reminder of what was to come; and the clinging, forgetful calm she’d found was, for him, a worse torment still.

  So he was almost relieved at Catherine’s sudden alarm after the coronation date was set – when, it seemed, she also began to realise how fragile and brief this bubble of happiness was. It will all be over so soon, she said under her breath, as he escorted her away from the meeting. She’d gone very pale.

  He was especially gentle with her when, that night, they were finally alone again. She’d understood at last, he thought; and there was gratitude and compassion all mixed up with his own grief. They’d be close again for these last days; at least they’d have that.

  But he’d reckoned without Jehanne. Jehanne, who was to be burned at Rouen two days after the coronation date was set. It seemed to be the thought of the execution that was troubling Catherine as much as her own future prospects. When, within seconds of making love, she started talking very anxiously about blood – about the importance of her royal blood – Owain found himself feeling more lost than before, and farther from her than he wanted to be.

  ‘Do you think I am damned because I’ve betrayed my blood?’ she asked into his ear. ‘Sometimes I think all this – the war, the troubles – might be because of me.’

  ‘No,’ he said the first night, kissing away her muttered words. ‘Of course not. Don’t even think that.’

  He said something similar the next night. But on the night after the burning, when she began the same conversation a third time, he didn’t try to kiss away her words any more. Instead, Owain recalled the way she’d knelt, with her eyes tight shut, alone in her private panic, all through the thanksgiving service for Jehanne’s death that that been held in the Louvre earlier that day (they’d decided against public thanksgivings in the churches of Paris; Duke John feared there might have been a hostile response from the citizens). When Harry had asked his mother, on the way out of the chapel, ‘So will she really burn in Hell for evermore?’ Catherine had replied, tight and loud, ‘No’, so that Owain, the Cardinal and Duke John, walking just behind, had had to cough and stare at their feet and pretend not to have heard.

  ‘No,’ Owain said now, holding her away from him so he could see into her anxious eyes in the last glow of the fire. ‘But why would you even think your actions had damned you, or any of us? For a while, back in Rouen, you seemed to be supporting Jehanne more than your son. But now you’re here and he’s here and all’s well, and she’s dead. You may have made an enemy of Warwick by walking away from the execution he wanted to turn into a big political show. But nothing worse than that, surely?’

  She turned a little away. He sensed disappointment in her that he hadn’t guessed right. ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘I don’t mean that … any of that.’ She ran her fingers through her long tawny hair. ‘I mean that I might have done wrong long ago – by turning on Charles as I did. As we all did. It strikes me now …’ Her voice trailed away.

  ‘Charles,’ Owain repeated blankly. ‘You mean your brother Charles?’

  He still had no idea why she would be blaming herself for what had happened to Charles, and what Jehanne had to do with it, or her blood.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, a touch impatiently. ‘Because I’ve gone on thinking about Jehanne, you know. She moved me. She still does. I don’t know why. All the way to Paris, I so regretted walking out and leaving you behind. I couldn’t think what had possessed me. I risked losing you for her; and nothing would have been worth that risk.’ She raised her eyes. ‘But still, I think about her. I’ve prayed for her these last few days. She was brave. She loved France. I’m French too. I can’t see her as an enemy.’

  ‘It was your brother’s France she loved,’ Owain said, feeling towards an understanding of whatever it was that was troubling Catherine, but still unable not to add harshly: ‘Not yours. Jehanne was fighting to destroy your son and drive his armies out of France.’

  ‘Yes,’ Catherine said. She was frowning. ‘And that’s exactly what worries me. Because Jehanne was a good woman – I could see that – and yet she was fighting for Charles. If she was really touched by God, if she was really sent holy visions by the saints – then why did she go to him? Does it mean God is with Charles? And if He is, doesn’t that mean that Charles isn’t a bastard after all? Even if we said he was? Even if we said there was no royal blood in his veins? There must be, after all. That’s what frightens me. That we chased him out; that we denied his blood; that we may have been wrong.’

  She’d talked before about French royal blood. It was the story she always told Harry: that the same family had ruled France for a thousand years and always would, because God had sanctioned them to; that their blood was protected by God and the saints; that in proof of this it even ran a special colour in their veins, extra purple and extra clear and pure. Harry had once even come to Owain, saying, ‘my blood looks different from yours. It’s purpler; it’s –’ he’d lisped, not knowing the English, ‘clarissimus.’ With mild exasperation at the naivety the story encouraged, Owain had laughed and said: ‘Ahhh, that’s just a story; a way of explaining who you are and where you come from. You mustn’t take it too literally. You probably know that if you actually cut yourself and so did I, our blood would look pretty much the same. Don’t forget that.’ Owain was glad he’d spoken his mind to the little boy. As someone cut off from his own blood kin, by both fate and choice, Owain had thought carefully about how to make a good life for himself; he’d decided he would not limit himself to being whatever was said to be in his blood, and what others decided he should be predisposed to; he would decide for himself what he loved and follow it to the end. Harry should feel some of that freedom, for even a child, even a king, could decide a lot for himself, he’d thought. Now, Owain realised uncomfortably that Catherine must still believe this child’s fancy about her blood and her kin, as literally as Harry had. More literally, even; perhaps it was the French way to be fanciful about these things.

  Catherine was twisting a long strand of hair between twitchy fingers. Her eyes were fixed down and sideways, watching the movement. In a chastened little-girl voice, like a child at confession, she said: ‘I took my mother’s word for it, that Charles was illegitimate. I never asked more. We all assumed the father must have been my uncle of Orleans. It fitted with the rumours and what she was saying, but no one actually asked. We told ourselves we didn’t want her to get angry, but really we just wanted it to be true. None of us wanted to go into the detail, because we didn’t want her to change her mind. Me least of all. I wanted to get Henry back to the talks. And he wanted the French throne promised to him before he’d come back. So I needed Charles to be a bastard. And yet I knew all along that my mother tells lies and is a bully; and I knew she was angry with Charles and would want revenge. What if she only said what she said so that we’d do what we did, and push him off the throne, wrongly maybe … and what if everything that has followed is God’s punishment?’

  Her eyes were diamond-shaped; brimming. Her voice was frightened. Owain sighed. He could feel her fear. He just couldn’t share it.

  ‘Look,’ he said very patiently, and he folded her back into his arms and held her tight. ‘Charles did you wrong. He betrayed you. He murdered your mother’s servant in front of you. He imprisoned your mother – his Queen. He rebelled against your father – his King – and put armies in the field against them. Nothing
he did suggested he had any proper family feeling towards any of you. He’s been punished, and rightly so; and he’s still being punished. Jehanne came to him, that’s true enough; but she’s been caught now and burned at the stake. He’s losing. So how can you think God favours Charles’ cause?’

  It seemed convincing, and obvious to him. But she went on lying stiff and unyielding in his embrace; lost in her own darkness. When she raised her voice again, he heard it was as chilled and fearful as before. ‘My brother Louis was just the same. At war with her. And my brother Jean wouldn’t come near Paris when he became Dauphin, for fear of crossing her. We’re not talking about what Charles has done. We’re talking about what he is.’ She gulped; then added, uncertainly: ‘or who he might be.’

  Owain said: ‘Even Kings have to justify their right to rule.’ There was contempt in his voice, though she knew it wasn’t for her. ‘As for your other brothers, none of them lived to take the throne. I don’t think they had God’s blessing for their behaviour either.’

  Catherine nodded, but she hadn’t taken in, or agreed with, what he said, he realised with a sinking heart. She just went back to talking about Jehanne.

  She said, stubbornly: ‘Well, we can’t tell who God favours from Jehanne’s death. All we can know is that Jehanne fell into Warwick’s hands and Warwick had her killed. There’s no reason to claim God wanted to damn Jehanne. It might just be Warwick who’ll be damned for killing her, at the Final Judgement. How can we be sure? What we do know, whatever you say, is that Charles hasn’t lost … He’s still holding court at Bourges, ten years on … He hasn’t lost any more than the English have won.’

  She pulled herself out of his arms. He felt her prop herself up on one elbow beside him. He sensed she was looking at him; searching for his eyes in the darkness. ‘If I’m damned for it, I’ll take my punishment. But what if it’s Harry who is punished? That’s what torments me. What if Harry ends up taking the punishment for my crime of spreading my mother’s lie? What if Harry ends up losing France to my brother?’