Owain couldn’t see anything any more. But he could imagine the look of horror on her face as vividly as if they were in broad daylight. ‘God forbid,’ he said, firmly yet kindly, putting a hand back on her tense shoulder. Then he added, ‘I don’t think you’re worrying about the right things.’ There was so much else to fear; so much else to mourn. Why was she chasing these shadows? ‘But if you’re truly this worried about the purity of Charles’ blood, or yours, you’re in the right place to find the answer to your question,’ he added. He tried to keep his voice light and gentle; keep the scratchy beginnings of anger at bay. ‘The only person who’ll know the answer is right here in Paris. Go and see your mother. Ask her.’
They took Harry away from a coronation rehearsal to ride across Paris for the day and meet his grandmother. He hadn’t seen the city, nor had he demonstrated any curiosity, any wish to see it. Catherine and Owain watched his head turn, furtively taking it in, as they rode east from the Louvre. Under leaden skies, they took Saint Germain l’Auxerrois Street, parallel with the river, to the centre of the city, past the towers of the Châtelet and the two bridges leading over to the Island and the palace, and on down the embankment ride itself, past Greve square and the wine port and the corn port and the hay port and the fish port and the charcoal port and the Archbishops of Sens’ palace, with its private port. Catherine began to feel an uneasy sense of home-coming as she saw the Barbeau tower, and the beguines’ convent, and as they passed into the Hotel Saint-Paul itself.
There were dead leaves blowing everywhere. Owain liked the freshness of the wind; the choppy white on the waters. But he could see from Harry’s disappointed face that the city no longer made the glittering impression it had on Owain, long ago. Harry didn’t like the Hotel Saint-Paul, either. He shivered and hunched down on his pony when he saw the overgrown gardens, with litter in the bushes and broken colonnades, arches ending in piles of rubble and toppled statues, broken panes of glass in the windows, and old men with no teeth guarding the doors from cobwebby cubbyholes.
They stood in a deserted hall, stripped of all but the most broken of furniture, waiting for someone to come and fetch them up to the royal apartments. They could hear the whispering; the tap-tapping of sticks along the corridors. The appearance of visitors had caused something close to alarm. No one here was used to outsiders.
When a little old woman finally came out from behind a door, peering at them in the interior twilight, Harry looked at her in doubt. ‘Is that my grandmother?’ he asked Catherine in a piercing whisper, tugging at his mother’s arm, looking ready to burst into tears. The old woman was dirty and frowsty, with a woollen shawl wrapped around her sunken breasts.
‘No,’ Catherine whispered back, putting her hand over his. But it took even the adults a moment longer before they recognised her.
‘It’s been too long,’ Owain said, suddenly cheerful, suddenly realising who this was, and rushing forward to kiss her and put arms around her. ‘It’s years since I heard one of your stories. How are you, dear Anastaise? I’ve missed you …’
She grinned and hugged him back; and the ghost of her old robustness was still there in that cracked old smile.
‘She’s upstairs,’ Anastaise said, without formality – she’d never done formality very well – gesturing up the unswept staircase. ‘Still in bed though.’ She looked doubtfully at Catherine, then at Harry’s frightened little face. ‘You might want to go to her by yourself for a bit,’ Anastaise went on, addressing Catherine. ‘She’s not fit for visitors … not little ones’, she added, giving Harry a careful grin, ‘who don’t know her ways. You might help her make herself presentable.’
Owain nodded. ‘Go,’ he said, giving Catherine a little push. She seemed frozen to the spot. ‘Anastaise can show the King and me the gardens for half an hour.’
Catherine, looking uncertain, headed slowly for the stairs. But she kept looking back. Harry, visibly fighting the panic of a much younger child at being parted from his mother, nearly followed her. Owain took his hand firmly. ‘Stay with me. We’ll go up shortly. Your mother needs a few minutes to say hello to her mother.’
He nodded, willing Harry to nod back. After a long pause, Harry, keeping his eyes averted from Anastaise, stopped resisting. He trotted out, holding tight on to Owain, into the grey of the morning.
But even the lion cage didn’t seem to impress him. ‘It was this big, the lion,’ Owain told him, gesturing with his arms, showing him an imaginary creature bigger than a horse. ‘And golden. And when it roared, the whole palace …’
Harry looked away, letting his eyes follow a dancing leaf.
‘… trembled,’ Anastaise joined in, very forcefully. There were broken veins on her cheeks, purple on white. Owain vaguely remembered that her cheeks had once been apple-red and healthy.
Harry only looked alarmed at the loudness of her voice. He nodded and bit his lips.
‘Perhaps you’ll have lions in Paris again when you’re King?’ Anastaise said. Harry nodded fearfully. Owain thought: He doesn’t look at all convinced that he’d like lions.
Harry looked happier when they went back inside, out of the wind, into a little downstairs parlour where a fire was burning and there were still a couple of cushions and a settle by the flames. Anastaise got down a book from a shelf and showed him a long-ago picture she’d painted, a finger long and a thumb wide, of a woman in blue giving a book to a stately queen. ‘That’s your grandmother,’ she told the trembling child, with the rough kindness that, till now, hadn’t reassured him in the least. But now Owain could see Harry’s fear easing. He looked cautiously at her, then, plucking up his courage, took the book in his own hands, sat down, and began to stare at the picture.
Over the top of his head, Anastaise winked at Owain. She still had the same cheerful eyes Owain remembered.
‘My mother always told me that Paris was the most beautiful place in the world,’ Harry piped up a few moments later. ‘It’s not, though, is it? It’s grey and poor, and it’s not very comfortable in the palace where we’re staying. I’m glad I’ll be going home soon. But,’ he added kindly, ‘I like your picture. I can see now. It was beautiful then.’
Harry went back to his book, turning the pages, looking at other pictures: of hunting and dancing, and at monsters peeping out of sprays of foliage. But all Owain could think of was the painted woman in blue giving the book to the Queen. Christine de Pizan.
Anastaise guessed. She muttered, low enough not to disturb Harry: ‘Dead, poor lady. Though perhaps she was lucky. She’d have been so sad to see how things turned out.’
Owain let out his breath. He’d expected this, in a way. But it was a sorrow to hear she’d gone.
‘God rest her soul,’ Owain said, and, in the quiet companionship of grief, they both crossed themselves. Then he added: ‘We read her poem, about Jehanne … so we knew she was alive last year.’
With a look of regret from those cloudy eyes, Anastaise said: ‘Yes, she was excited, so excited, for a while. I went to see her last year, at St John’s Eve. I brought the poem out myself. She’d just written it. The dawn of hope, she kept saying. We all thought that, back then.’
Owain found his eyes were checking Anastaise’s dirty old linen shirt for white Saint Michael’s crosses. He couldn’t see any. Perhaps it was the muddy reddish light.
‘It worried Catherine, all that …’ he muttered cautiously. ‘Even she’s been thinking perhaps Charles should have been king, after all, if Jehanne … because Jehanne,’ but he stopped. He probably shouldn’t say this sort of thing, even to this old friend. Doubts were dangerous. Even whispers.
He needn’t have worried. Anastaise puffed herself up as if she still had a big barrel chest, looking furious at the very mention of Charles of Bourges. ‘What, him?’ she said, so loudly and indignantly that Harry looked up for a startled moment before hunching down again over his book, determined not to look scared. Anastaise made a visible effort to contain herself. She lowered her voice, but
she couldn’t stop the words bursting out of her, as if the stopper had come out of a bottle and what was inside had to spill over. ‘Him, King? When a miracle was sent to him and he trampled all over it? When he let that girl sacrifice herself for him and didn’t lift a finger to save her? No ransom, no negotiations, no nothing? I should say not. Nor would Christine have, if she’d seen the shameful way he cut her off … left her to be shamed and burned. After all that girl did for Charles, and for France.’ She shook her head with her hands on her hips. ‘No. He deserves everything he gets, that one.’
Owain nearly laughed; mostly out of sheer relief that not all the French stayed up at night fretting about the colour of the blood royal.
Anastaise looked abashed when she saw his smile. Then she lowered her hands from her hips and nodded. ‘Mustn’t get too cross about it,’ she muttered ruefully. ‘I know.’ Looking down at the little boy with his nose in the pages of the book, she shook her head. ‘Though what that one’s got to do with France, either, only God knows. Still; not my place to know who’s the one for us and who isn’t. Leave it to God to work out, eh?’
They looked fondly at each other. Anastaise gestured around. ‘I just wish He’d hurry up and decide. The Almighty. Because … just look at all this. Everything in ruins.’ She let her eyes turn again to the child staring at her miniatures. ‘I miss all that,’ she said wistfully. ‘The pictures. I’d have enjoyed working on that poem.’ She looked at her work-roughened hands. The time of beauty had passed for her, all right. Owain could imagine what Anastaise’s life had become, in this forgotten place of sick old people, nursing the Queen.
Sympathetically, he said: ‘Whatever God sends.’
A bell rang. A distant contralto voice shouted, ‘Hall-o-o-o-o!’
Anastaise looked up. ‘That’ll be them,’ she said. ‘Come on. Let’s go up.’ Giving Harry her biggest gap-toothed grin, she gathered up the book and put it carefully back on its shelf.
‘What’s that girl doing worrying about old history anyway?’ Anastaise muttered to Owain as they set off up the stairs. ‘She needs a bit of happiness in her life, that’s what she needs. A husband; more children. That’s what Christine would have told her, if she’d been alive. Christine was all for families. More children – that would keep her too busy for fretting about her brother. Isn’t it time one of those Englishmen thought of that?’ She shook her head, looking comically astonished by the short-sightedness of the English.
‘Well, it’s difficult,’ Owain muttered.
She shook her head again.
They reached the top of the stairs. They set out along the top corridor. There was a door open up ahead. Catherine was looking out. Harry raced towards her.
‘And you – you’re not cut out for the Church, whatever you say,’ Anastaise added. She gave Owain a penetrating look with a hint of a smile. ‘Time you stopped all that nonsense and settled down too. Found yourself a good woman; if you haven’t already.’
He blushed. He said: ‘All that … not for me.’ But he could see she wasn’t convinced.
‘You always were a deep one,’ she said, and went on shaking her head.
Catherine had blurted it out almost as soon as she’d got into the hot dark fug of rose oil and old body; right after they’d hugged and told each other how little they’d changed, and Catherine had said she’d come with Harry and he’d be up shortly, and why didn’t they tidy Isabeau up a bit first. Catherine had pulled her mother’s inert, slack weight up into a sitting position, and found her a new, clean nightgown. She’d helped her into it and done up the buttons over the withered flesh, holding the arms of the silken gown. She’d patted her cushions into place and straightened up the covers on the bed. It was easier, in a way, to ask the question on her mind while her body was so busy.
She was sitting on the bed behind her mother, with an ivory comb in her hand, when she began. ‘I’ve been worrying,’ she rushed, ‘about something very old. I have to ask. Was it really true what you said back then? Was Charles really a bastard, or not?’ She gulped. In great fear, she added: ‘And am I?’
Ever since she’d let the fear out into the open, by saying it aloud to Owain, it had grown, taking ever more monstrous shapes. If Charles were legitimate, Catherine must be a sinner who’d brought destruction on France. But it could be even worse. If her mother had had all the lovers people said, perhaps it was she, Catherine, who was the bastard, cut off from the whole great glorious stretch of history she’d grown up belonging to …? Which would mean she’d tainted the blood line of England’s kings, too, and that Harry …?
She’d expected many answers. Rehearsed what she thought were all the possibilities. But she hadn’t expected what happened next as she sat on the greasy quilt, hardly daring to breathe. She hadn’t expected laughter.
A great snuffle of it came out of the hunched shape in front of her. After a while, her mother’s billowing curves stopped heaving with it enough to say, through the wheezes of mirth: ‘Ach, don’t make me laugh. Who knows? About you, me, anyone? None of us know the half of what’s gone on; who’s been in whose beds, who’s been up to what mischief. Wherever you look. What does it matter now?’
She hauled herself round so Catherine could see one of her mother’s beady eyes fixed on her, over a quivering shoulder. Isabeau took in the intent quiet on her daughter’s face, and made an effort at control. More seriously, she went on: ‘It’s just a game, royalty. That’s the truth. We brought you up to believe kings were blessed by God; could work miracles; cure people of illness – and all because of their purple blood. But look at your poor father. No one could cure him. He couldn’t even cure himself. A good king is someone who can command and be obeyed. That’s all. If you ask me, you could put a peasant child in a royal nursery and bring him up to be King, and if he’s got the knack of command he might do as well as a real prince; certainly better than half the kings I’ve seen. Your Henry was a good king, true enough; we chose well for you. His father, too, but no one was ever very sure if he had any blood right to the throne. What’s blood got to do with it, when it comes to it? Who really believes that royal blood is any different from the other kind? If you had any sense you’d be hoping you were a bastard. Who’d want your father’s madness running in their family?’
Matter-of-factly, she added: ‘Move that cushion, there’s a good girl,’ and, when Catherine failed to move, said, more sharply, ‘that one there; under your hand; put it behind me, here. I can hardly see you. You’re giving me neck-ache.’
Once she was settled so she could look straight into Catherine’s eyes, she reached out an arm packed with sagging flesh and patted her daughter’s cold, unresponsive hand. ‘Don’t look so worried,’ she said. ‘Put it out of your mind; forget all the fairy tales. You’re too old for fairy tales. But not for living. That’s what matters. Get on with that.’
Catherine’s head was spinning. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
Isabeau looked patiently at her. ‘It’s simple enough,’ she replied. ‘All you need to do is make sure you bring that boy of yours up right – so he’s happy and strong and right-minded and honest – and so he loves you as much as you love him – and you’ll have nothing to reproach yourself with.’ She nodded, and the laughter went out of her. Her face settled into lines of sadness. ‘It’s the greatest thing there is, love for your children,’ she added. ‘When it goes wrong, you never forgive yourself… . it’s an endless sorrow.’
Catherine realised, with a jolt of emotion she couldn’t name, that she’d never asked what her mother had felt about being imprisoned by Charles, or hated by Louis and Jean, come to that. She’d just assumed: angry, vengeful. But why had she never asked?
‘When it’s right, it’s a joy,’ Isabeau’s voice went on. ‘You’ll do anything for your child, anything. The only time I ever really fought for what I loved was over you … when I said’, she twisted her lips, ‘that … put aside my son … destroyed my reputation … so we could get your Henry back
to the table for you.’ She sighed. Then she brightened. She patted Catherine’s hand again. She said, in a stronger voice: ‘It was worth it. Sacrifices don’t matter for a child you love.’
Catherine felt dizzy still. This was so different from what she’d expected and hoped for. And yet, she suddenly realised, it was enough. Very softly, she put both hands on her mother’s shoulders, leaned forward and kissed one crumpled cheek.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
They stayed like that for a moment, one flesh again, with no more need for words. Then Isabeau said, ‘Which reminds me … where’s my grandson? He’s had long enough out looking for lions with that handsome tutor of his. I spotted you out of the window earlier on … sent Anastaise down. I wanted to see you first. But we’re ready now, aren’t we?’ She patted her nightcap. There was a hungry look on her old face. ‘Bring him up.’
‘I didn’t expect Harry to enjoy himself so much,’ Owain said.
‘My mother loved him, didn’t she?’ Catherine agreed softly. The light was failing. The Louvre was coming up ahead. Harry was trotting in front of them. She’d been quiet all the way back, but Owain thought she looked happy.
Owain said: ‘He’s so much better now Warwick’s not here.’ He wanted to jolt her into conversation. She didn’t respond. He pursued the subject. ‘Don’t you think? He’s confident. Interested in what’s around him. You should tell Duke John. Or the Cardinal. He’ll have noticed the change, all right. Have them ask Duke Humphrey to keep Warwick away. Keep him at the war, maybe. He’d be happy enough in France, fighting. And it would make your life easier once you get back to England. Both your lives. You’ll need to protect yourself. Warwick will never be your friend. It would be easier for you both if Warwick wasn’t there.’
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