by Hilda Lewis
A long, sad progress, different from the joyous progress of her marriage, but outdoing it in love and reverence—in worship, almost—paid to her, the dead man's wife, mother of the infant King.
It was late September when she entered Rouen. Bedford was waiting to escort her to the castle where the body lay. Two hundred burghers all in black, had ridden out to meet the funeral cart, he told her, to bring it in solemn procession into the city.
She stood before the effigy that wore Henry's robes, Henry's crown...Henry's features. “God comfort you, my fair sister,” Bedford said; and looked into her face. It was quiet...or was it, he wondered, carefully void of all expression?
At Rouen he bade her Farewell. He disliked letting her make the journey alone, dreading for her the ordeal of returning widowed to a foreign land. But, he thought, the careful emptiness in her face had given place to pride; there was confidence in her bearing. Was she thinking to take her part in the Regency? It would not be unnatural; he could not help wishing Henry had named her, even though the naming had been courtesy only. Besides, young though she was, she had courage. But did it come from greatness of spirit or from the foolishness of youth? He knew her so little, he could not say.
Abbeville, Montreuil, Boulogne. Creeping at snail's pace, priests chanting the Office for the Dead, masses from dawn to dawn, the long procession wound its way.
Within the litter Catherine sat upright and still, her mind urgent upon the future. She would waste no time breaking her heart for Henry who had not loved her. Due honours she would pay, yes! This long tedious journey was right and proper. Let Henry reflect his dead glory upon her child and upon herself—the King and the mother of the King.
She was filled with love for her child; her arms, her breasts ached for the feel of him. But she was enough Isabeau's daughter to love him the more for the power his baby hands must, she was certain, put into her own.
At Dover her courage sank a little. The sharp wind blew the English rain into her face; the country was covered with a November pall. There were crowds in the harbour, very quiet and still. The Barons of the Cinque Ports came aboard all in black; once they had leaped into the water to carry their King ashore and he laughing and waving his chaperon like any young boy. She saw the humble folk patient, waiting to bring home their King; and every man and woman however poor with a twist of black about his arm. There they waited for the Archbishop to bring her home—her and her dead lord.
Back along the road to Canterbury, about the litter the bishops riding soberly, sadly; and so to the Cathedral where once the Archbishop had blessed them both to a new life. Now, kneeling alone, there was little softness in her heart, little but a harsh grief; resentment that the bright promise had been clouded, determination to look to her own future. But, so kneeling, hard with her sorrows and with her determination, she found, in spite of herself, her spirit moved by the beauty of the place, by the solemnity of the service and by her own memories.
* * *
Within the litter she watched the road unwind to London.
Rochester, Dartford.
She remembered, she remembered...riding with Henry and hoping to win him yet; Henry who had loved nothing but prayers and politics and battles. Riding through midsummer England and the people crying out to her in love as though she were an angel of God. Barely twenty and filled with triumph as though her body were a goblet of Venice that must burst with her joy.
And now the people stood in the bitter November wind with their rags of black standing patient and dumb beneath their grief.
She shook an impatient head. She was weary of their grieving. Three months since Henry had died. It was enough. If they cared so much for the dead King, let them think now for his wife widowed and for his young child. I am the Queen...I am the mother of the King.
Death. And death. And death.
At Blackheath the Lord Mayor of London with his sheriffs, the merchants and the craftsmen of London waited as they had waited to bring him home after Agincourt—so she had been told; as they had waited after his marriage, his marriage and hers. Now they waited again to bring him home; but this time in black...black.
All the way from Blackheath the slow procession crept chanting. London was smoky and luminous with torches; in the dark night every man stood by his house door his torch held high casting an orange light upon the effigy crowned and robed and smiling its dead smile. Along Lombard Street and to St. Paul's; and always the red flare of the torches, and always the masses and the chanting; and all night long the dead King lay before the high altar like an offering to God.
Westminster. The end of Henry's journey, Catherine told herself; the beginning of her own. He was being buried with more glory, Gloucester said, and with more tears, than any English King for over two hundred years. And was that supposed to comfort her? she wondered, impatient, above her resigned smile. She was pricked further by her brother-in-law of Gloucester. Unlike Bedford, he had not consulted her wishes in the slightest with regard to the funeral; or, indeed, in anything at all—she had not yet found it possible to set eyes on her son. Well, she would wait a little; when all this was over she would assert herself, make her position clear.
But still it went on day after day, week after week—the weeping and the sad priests and the angelic choristers. She was sick to the heart of it all. She wanted nothing but to get the smell of death out of her nostrils.
CHAPTER XXIII
The smell of death. She would never get it out of her nostrils. Would there never be an end?
So short a time—Michelle; and then Henry; and now her father.
Her father's death, though not the heaviest blow, she found most pitiful. She grieved because she had never loved him. She had feared him, shrunk from him, but there had been no love and little pity. And yet he had been kind and simple when he was well; a most loving father. When she had left for England two years ago he had been pitiful in his parting. Others had wept; yet she had hardly cared except to wish she had been spared embarrassment. Her head had been stuffed with her own glory.
And now he had died alone. Even at the last she had been lacking in love. She might have been there; she had chosen instead to display herself in the useless grandeur of her widow's weeds when she might have played a daughter's part. But I am glad I was not there, I have seen enough of death. She knew the truth; hated herself for the truth.
But her mother had not been there either. Where had she been? Disporting herself with some new love? And her brother? Quarrels and angers there had been between him and his father; but dying cancels all. But does it? Does it cancel the loss of a crown? Did it cancel her own resentment against Henry?
She stood at the window looking down upon the bare trees of Windsor Park and the faraway steel thread of the river.
Death cancels little after all, she thought. And so I find; and so my brother will find...
From an inner room came the soft gurgle of a child. If I lay dying and my son came not near me! She was shaken at the thought. And yet so it had been between her father and herself; and so it had been between her father and his son. Charles had wept, Bedford wrote, at his father's death and he had had the sense to wear a suit of black. But twenty-four hours later he had been peacocking it in vermilion.
Her father had been alone in his dying; perhaps death had come too swift. But what of his burying? No prince of the blood there; not her mother nor her brother, nor Burgundy, nor...herself.
But the Englishman, the foreigner had shown respect. John of Bedford had not failed. He had walked in the procession; he had stayed throughout the long service and had not stirred from the coffin. He had made offerings for her father's soul. No-one but her brother-in-law had thought to do that, neither peer of England nor of France. But John had thought; John with his English sense of decorum. She might not find it easy to love him but she could thank him, trust him, lean upon him.
She picked up his letter, yet another token of his kindness. Since she had not been able to be there, he w
rote, he would tell her of her father's funeral.
...The canopy was azure and crimson embossed with fleur-de-lis of gold; and beneath it, upon the coffin, an image of leather, the likeness moulded by that same hand that made the effigy of my brother whose sweet soul Christ assoil.
It was robed in cloth of gold and vermilion; upon the hands white gloves, the fingers set out with jewels that blazed in the lights of the tapers. On his head a crown of diamonds; and on each side a shield the one of gold, the other of silver...
All fit and proper she thought, save for the absence of those he had loved.
...and when the coffin was lowered and the earth cast upon it, the Berri King-at-arms cried out, May God show mercy and pity to the soul of the most puissant and excellent Charles VI of France...
And now came the end of the letter, the words she had read and read again.
...And then he cried out May God grant long life to Henry by Grace of God King of France and of England, our most sovereign lord. And though your heart were sore, yet it must have been a little glad. For all, with one voice, shouted, Long live the King!
A month, she thought, a little month, and my husband would have worn a double crown. Who could have believed he would die so soon, die before the frail sick man, my father?
Death. Desolation and death.
She left the window, walked restless about the room.
Where should she look for comfort now? To John, perhaps? He was kind in that stiff way of his; but he was in France guarding her son's rights. He had lost no time. Neither had her brother. Charles had immediately pronounced himself King. John had countered at once by proclaiming the Treaty of Troyes again, demanding for the second time the swearing of the oath of allegiance to England. No, he had his hands full—she could not turn to John.
To Beaufort then, her bel-uncle? Heartless Beaufort, my lord Bishop of Winchester, set first and last upon his own advancement? One would have to be as cunning as he to wring comfort out of that cold heart.
Humphrey then? Humphrey rash, inconstant—save in forwarding his own ambition. There he would be constant enough.
When she thought of Gloucester, her bitterness against her husband overflowed. Henry had denied her all share in the Regency; all share in her child, even; she—the King's mother. In the eyes of Christendom he had humiliated her, shown his distrust. But Gloucester he had not humiliated, Humphrey he had not distrusted. Well, let it go! Henry was dead; and she—alive. She would not endure to be thrust aside; not Catherine, not Isabeau's daughter.
* * *
She smiled her welcome at Jacqueline, pretty, pussycat Jacqueline, plump delicious Jacqueline. She had thought, once, to lean on Jacque in her desolation; but Jacque, it was clear, had her own affairs. Why, she wondered, should she care so much for Jacque? The girl was sly for all her pretty smiling. But she was gay. No-one like Jacque to laugh and to sing; no, nor to tell a spicy scandal...if Jacque were not careful she would be the centre of scandal herself!
“And how is my little King?” Jacqueline asked. “I haven't seen him this week and more!”
“Then you need scant your duties no longer,” Catherine said and clapped for the women.
“I thought my little lord was with his own household.”
“He's been allowed to visit his mother. And for that I must be grateful, I suppose. But, Jacque—they talk of a governess already, and he not a twelve month old! And who is to choose, but his Uncle of Exeter? His mother is to have no voice in it at all!” She smiled, pretending she felt no anger.
“Exeter—a Beaufort!” Jacqueline all-but spat the name. “You won't get much comfort out of him! Beaufort, Beaufort, Beaufort—I'm sick of the sound of the name; sicker still of their precious bishop, Rome's intriguing, lick-spittling, mischief-making bishop setting himself up against Humphrey as though Humphrey weren't Regent...”
“Protector only,” the Queen corrected; but Jacqueline stormed on. “...interfering, lying Beaufort with his letters to Bedford, his letters to the Pope, scandalizing me...”
“I'm glad it's only scandal,” Catherine said.
Jacqueline sent her a sharp look. Was Cat being simple now? Or subtle? “Dearest Cat,” she said, smiling, “let us talk plain. Humphrey and I—no-one shall come between us; certainly not your Beauforts and your Bedfords. Does the priggish John think I'd take him? Not in this world—the man's too grave, too politic, too much like Henry himself. I wouldn't take him, not though he offered me three crowns one on top of the other.”
Catherine wanted to cry out, Have a care, Jacque! Humphrey is greedy and scheming; you can't trust him! But then Jacque knew how to manage her own affairs. Jacque's affairs. They were fast becoming Gloucester's affairs. Could one, perhaps, turn that to one's own advantage?
“Your husband meant me for Humphrey,” Jacqueline said, smooth and lying.
The Queen did not answer. She was holding out her arms to take the child.
“A child and his mother should be together, don't you think?” she asked, lips against the baby's golden head.
“Why not?” Jacque smoothed the silk over her plump hips; it was a habit she had. “And those who are promised to each other, likewise.” Her sly eyes sought the Queen's.
“If they are promised...” Catherine kissed the little head.
There was silence in the Queen's chamber. Each woman wondered what might be got from the other. The one had Gloucester in her pocket; the other was a widow, friendless—but her infant son was the King.
Their eyes met; the unspoken bargain was signed and sealed.
* * *
The Queen was at Kennington Palace and she was lonely. She saw nothing of Jacqueline—but she heard plenty; that scandal was growing. Jacque and Humphrey were married, so gossip ran; and if they were not—then the sooner the better!
But surely, Catherine thought, the scandal would be worse then. If they had really gone through the mockery of marriage, they would make themselves the scandal of Christendom, instead of merely the scandal of England and of the Low Countries—Jacque was fast-married still to John of Brabant. Catherine was troubled and she was hurt. Had Jacque forgotten who had sheltered her when she had fled her hateful husband; who had countenanced her, even to making her godmother to the little King?
She longed for Jacqueline with her laughter and her spiced gossip. And she envied Jacqueline. Like Jacqueline she was young and she was pretty; like Jacqueline she had known little love. Was it surprising that desire to be loved pricked in her, desire the more disturbing because she must walk delicately, watch where she cast her eyes?
In her loneliness she longed for someone in whom she could trust, on whom she could lean.
She remembered her kinswoman Johanne.
* * *
She was shocked when she saw Johanne, did not know in that first moment who she could be. Johanne had been a beauty; everyone had always said so. And she had kept her beauty, so they said; her white neck, her rounded arms were famous. Even Henry himself had admitted it, angry though he had been with his stepmother. “Lovely,” he had said, “with her golden head and her red mouth, and the perfect line from jaw to ear...golden and round and smooth as an apricot.” But then Henry had not seen Johanne since he had thrust her into prison.
The bloom that had lain upon her was gone. It was a lovely face still, the line of cheek and jaw delicate; but it was the face of an old woman. And she was dressed in black, Johanne renowned in Paris for the brilliance of her clothes—a dull woollen gown; and, though her neck and arms were hidden, her hands stood out long and white against the black stuff. She wore no jewel, either, except the great S chain worked with myosotis flowers. Now and again, the white hand in the long tight sleeve would move up to touch it; as though, Catherine thought, she must assure herself she was still that Johanne whom Henry of Lancaster had married not for policy, nor for gain, but because he loved her.
Unsmiling, Johanne considered her kinswoman.
So this was Catherine the Fair, this y
oung woman with the Valois nose and the drooping underlip! But the wide dark grey eyes, the clear carnation-and-white, made one forgive that nose, that mouth. She would pass for a beauty as long as she kept her pretty youth.
Catherine came from the great chair, both hands out-stretched. “I have longed to see your face, Cousin,” she said. “You would not believe how much!”
“Then you have been patient, indeed!” Johanne said, dry. Suddenly bitterness took her. “When you first came into England, Madam—and all the world at your feet—you cared not at all to see my face; no, nor that I languished in prison where an unjust King and ungrateful son had thrust me.”
Catherine's soft mouth drooped still further. “It was none of my doing,” she said mildly. And suddenly she wanted Johanne with her hard mouth and her clever eyes as a friend. “Forget the Madam; I am your kinswoman.”
“And when did you remember that, kinswoman?” Johanne asked mocking. “Did you ever visit me? Or ask to visit me? Surely my fair son could not have refused his bride so natural a request? And my dower, kinswoman; my revenues and my lands—what of them? Gone to fill your pockets, so I hear. You and Madam Jacque—my other kinswoman—have not done ill between you.”
“You shall have it back and at once; my share, at least. Back payment, too—when I can. I have the dower my father agreed upon; twenty thousand gold crowns. As for the rest, the forty thousand crowns England promised—it will come.”
“Will it indeed? Not if you count upon Gloucester; he could not, if he would. It is my Lords in Council you must woo. As for Gloucester, keep out of that tangle with Madam Jacque. I warn you—and I have been thought none so foolish in my time—there's a tangle that may cost us dear; all of us.”
“Henry himself desired the match.” Catherine remembered the unspoken bargain with Jacqueline.
“Tell that to another and not to me! Henry would never stir up a hornet's nest in the hope of honey; he wasn't such a fool. As for my revenues—let them go. I have been over-careful in my time and for that I have been punished. Had I gone on giving I should never have seen the inside of a prison. A witch! Son Henry knew better than that! It was my money he was after and all Christendom knows it. For why was I never brought to trial? And why, when he felt death at his shoulder, did he order them to set me free? Well, I have said my say; and now I must guard against growing garrulous as well as old...But...” she paused, “if I did not speak once, the thing would fester and we should not be friends but enemies.”
