Wife to Henry V: A Novel

by Hilda Lewis

  He stopped short, smiling at all the wonders. She smiled back. Now that they had seen him so beautiful and so good; now that they had crowned him, sworn allegiance, surely now all would be well!

  “Then they brought me a canopy and they held it over my head as I rode through Paris. It was blue as the Virgin's robe and all sewn with flower-de-luce. It was very pretty and it kept off the wind.

  “There was so much to look at—I can't remember it all; but there was a fountain and it fell into a lake all of wine; and there were three mermaids swimming about in it; they were real mermaids because they had tails. And I hope they didn't get drunk!” He giggled a little. “Oh yes and I remember another thing. In front of the church they'd made a little forest and there was a white fawn in it, a little white fawn. As soon as I got there they unleashed the dogs and I don't think that was kind because the fawn was frightened. But it ran to me and I saved its life. It was a dear little fawn and I wanted to keep it; but my lord Governor said No. Crowned Kings don't play with fawns, he said...”He sighed.

  “I can't tell you all the things. But I went into my palace—the Louvre you know—and I saw the holy relics. And they let me take them into my very own hands and I said a prayer, holding them you know. Afterwards we had a great feast and then I went to St. Pol...”

  “I was born there,” she said softly, remembering how she had played in its gardens, a neglected near-hungry little girl.

  “That was where I saw our grandmother and I told you about her. Well, after that I was tired and so we went to St. Vincennes for me to rest.”

  “Your father died there.” Her eyes darkened with tears not for Henry dying but because he had neither sent for her nor remembered her.

  He nodded. “I went into the room—where he died you know—and I prayed for his soul. I hunted a bit but I don't like hunting; I don't like to see animals hurt. But my lord Governor says it's a kingly sport. We stayed two weeks about and then we went back to Paris for me to be crowned.

  “All the streets were crowded and the church was crowded and it smelt of people and wine and incense and you could hardly breathe.

  My uncle the Cardinal did the crowning and he sang the mass, too. The Bishop of Paris was angry about that! Then I made the offering of bread-and-wine and I prayed to be a good King. And I saw God, very little, standing on my Uncle Beaufort's hand. And He looked sorry for me. Why should God be sorry for me?”

  She shook her head, a little disturbed.

  “You think I didn't see him,” he said very quickly, his mouth trembling. “But I did, I tell you, I did, I did...I often do.”

  “Yes,” she said, “yes...”

  “Perhaps He was sorry because of all the quarrelling in His House. Grown-up people do quarrel a lot! You see the wine was in a great silver cauldron and our priests claimed it for theirs; and the canons of Nôtre Dame said it belonged to them. So my uncle Beaufort said they should have it and then our priests were angry.

  “We went back to the Louvre and we had the feast. I sat in the middle of the Table of Marble; it goes right across the middle of the hall...”

  “I've seen it.”

  “So you have! But you didn't see me there in all my robes.” He chuckled. “And while we were feasting there were all sorts of masques. One of them was Our Lady with a little King crowned by her side—and it was meant to be me. Well, the next day there was a great tournament at St. Pol and when it was over I said Goodbye to our grandmother. She curtseyed right down to the ground; and she sent you her love...but I didn't like her any better.

  “The next day I went back to Rouen.”

  “Rouen!” she said and asked the question she had not dared to ask. “Did you see anything of the burning?”

  “The burning?” And he was crimson.

  “The Witch,” she said.

  He was white now but still he looked at her wide-eyed—innocence overdone.

  “Before you went to Paris. Last spring—have you forgotten? Surely there were not so many witches burnt!” And God grant he had the spirit of his father!

  “It was not a witch,” he mumbled and would not look at her. “It was a heretic.”

  “The heretic, then.”

  He did not answer but sat there eyes cast down. She took his chin in her hand, forced him to look at her.

  “I was not brave enough...not good enough,” he said.

  “When a deed is done in the King's name, the King must be man enough to witness it,” she said.

  He said nothing. He sat there on the low stool looking miserable, guilty.

  “And though you burn the body, still you save the soul; you said that yourself, remember?”

  He nodded troubled. “So Father Netter says...” he corrected himself, “used to say.” His lips trembled remembering the one person who had understood him, the beloved confessor dead in Rouen. “But,” he was a little defiant, “my uncle of Bedford said I should please myself. Though—” he added honest, “my lord Governor was not pleased. But,” and he was glad to have something to offer, “I was at the trial...at least some of the time.”

  “What was she like—the Witch?”

  “Just a boy. Or rather a girl. But she had short hair, and she was like a boy.” He touched his own meagre chest. “She didn't look wicked; just tired. But—” in spite of himself the truth came bursting out. “I didn't like the trial. It was because of her voice. Every time she spoke my heart began to shake. It wasn't the voice of a bad person; it was like...like the voice of the saints. I hear them and I know. That's why I didn't like the trial; I didn't like it....” His voice was thin with hysteria.

  “A devil's spell,” she said, comforting.

  He nodded, ashamed. “When I'm big I will be better, serve God better. I promise.”

  * * *

  It was long before she slept. She turned wearily trying to forget Tudor's face drawn in disgust at the thought of a child staring upon agony. But this is no ordinary child, she told herself, told Tudor, this is the King. I am afraid for his gentleness, his compassion...Great Henry's son.

  But she knew his answer well enough. Compassion is not weakness, nor does the hard heart signify success.

  But, for all that, she remembered the old prophecy and she was afraid; she was very much afraid.

  Fallen asleep at last she dreamed of Henry—for the first time in years. .

  My son should have been born in Westminster, he said and he wore the old, cold look.

  The pains came suddenly and there was no time, she told him. But what does it signify where he was born? What he is, himself, that is the thing.

  That is the thing, Henry agreed; and now he looked not angry but sorrowful. The thing in you—the weakness, the not understanding—that is in him, too. It is because of that weakness, because of that not understanding, he was born in Windsor; and, it is because of these things that, in the end, the prophecy will come to pass.

  She cried out that it was not true...the child was a saint. But in her heart she knew it was true; that something within herself, something she had passed on to her son, might yet rob him of everything.

  Next day Harry gave a masque in her honour. She sat in her rich gown, her lips, her pale cheeks painted; she looked little more than a girl. In this moment she forgot the abandoned child, forgot the nightmare dreaming. Harry bent lovingly towards her, whispered in her ear; they nodded towards each other, smiled.

  She looked up to find my lord Governor watching them. In his still face nothing was to be read...but still the child read it and tossed his head in a little swaggering gesture. There was no change in Warwick's face.

  She was not surprised, next day, to be given the royal permission to depart. Nor to hear, later, that the King had been taken to task for insubordination.

  She made her farewells to Johanne, that best of friends.

  “Fate has been kind—kinder than you could have dared to pray,” Johanne said. “Beware how you tempt her again.”

  Catherine shrugged. “I'm no
t likely to see much of Harry. I’m subversive so it seems. My lord Governor doesn't approve.”

  “Nor Humphrey, neither. There he was, staring sour as verjuice.”

  “Je m'en fiche!” There was the old hardness about her. Or a new one, perhaps, covering her grief, remembered now, her remorse for the abandoned child.

  “Nevertheless have a care,” Johanne said. “You cannot dodge fate forever.”

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  She was back at Nettlebed. A nettlebed, indeed! she said, stung with memories. She had left this place great with child, hoping in her despair, to lose it...and she had lost it. Now, returned, she could not accept her loss. Had he died, she would have acquiesced—there is no arguing with death. But he had not died.

  She could not stay here to look upon her two children; their freedom, their laughter seemed a further betrayal of the lost child. Seeing her so hag-driven, Tudor longed to take her back to Talybolion—the sweet Welsh air could ease her heart's pain. But she cried out that such happiness could come no more; she had destroyed happiness with memories of a lost child.

  She moved, restless, from one house to another; to Rochester where town and castle were her dower; to her Manor of Mould, to Whitchurch, to Englefield; she could rest nowhere but must be continually about her lonely journeying. The solace of Tudor's company she would not allow herself; it was as though she must punish herself as far as she might.

  Daylong she would travel, staring from the litter. Her world was grey; grey in the early morning dew when she rode out; grey in the noontime dust when they stopped to eat; grey in the twilight as they rode in; grey as her mind so that she did not see the blue of the summer sky nor the gold of the buttercups, nor the pink chalice of wild roses. She saw nothing but the lost child, felt nothing but the touch of his lips and the swelling of her breasts with milk. And, fallen asleep at last in her strange room, she would awake crying; and Owen was not there to comfort her with his kindness.

  She could not wander forever, could not always be remembering. She might be happy again, she thought, away from her bed of nettles. Tudor moved the household to Englefield Manor. In Berkshire she would be near London for the news.

  She came back in high summer and her welcome was sweet. Edmund bent the knee with grace and courtesy; for all his few years he bore the stamp of his breeding. Jasper, nearly three, hovered between shyness and attraction, so that when at last he flung himself upon her, her welcome was the sweeter. And sweetest of all, her welcome from Tudor. Surely she would be happy again!

  Her first night was a bad one. She lay in the midst of love and security haunted by the child she had abandoned. “I want him back. It is my right, my right.” She said it over and over again shaken by weeping. She did not need Tudor's patient telling to know that she had no right. The child was dead to her. It was the condition.

  Tudor was patient and the children sweet; she began to lose her hag-ridden looks, to bloom again clear red-and-white. She rarely went to London now; nor did the King visit her. If he was not kept busy at Westminster, he was praying with the monks at St. Edmundsbury. Now and again he would send her a gift, and though she was enough Isabeau's daughter to delight in the richness of a jewel, she was even more his mother to delight in his poorly-written note.

  Now, her hurt for the deserted child ail-but healed, she gave herself to the warm life she lived with Tudor and her children.

  Gloucester and Beaufort were at their old ding-dong quarrelling, and, Tudor said, it was mainly Gloucester's fault. His tongue had wagged loudly accusing my lord Cardinal of treason; it had brought my lord Cardinal hurrying to defend his honour. The King had had to stand up in full Parliament and assure my lord Cardinal that all men held him a true and loyal subject.

  “And how did Harry bear himself?” she asked.

  “Modestly, as is seemly in a young King,” Tudor said and did not tell her how the ten-year-old had stammered, fingers plucking, eyes upon the ground.

  She was surprised to find how little she cared about Gloucester or Beaufort. Let them cut each other's throats as long as they left Harry in peace!

  Here in the quiet of the countryside, news from France, too, lost its urgency. True she had cried out at the news of Philip's truce with her brother, but soon she was taking, even that, with her old philosophy. The truce would never last out its two years; and things, were, after all, pretty much the same as ever! Though Philip had withdrawn from the fighting, he had not forbidden his men; almost as many Burgundians as ever were fighting for her son's crown. As for the enemy successes! She shrugged at Chartres fallen, at ground lost in Maine. Even the disaster at Lagny left her undisturbed. Tudor saw that she did not at all appreciate its extent—Bedford's first real loss in battle.

  “We shall win it all again,” she said as she had said before.

  She was grieved, though, and frightened, a little, to hear that Bedford was ill; exhausted in the great heat he had had to break camp. John—ill! For the first time she began to ask herself how things might be without this bulwark between the enemy and her son. She was more anxious about him than about any news of battle.

  Towards the end of November John's wife died, she who had been little Anne of Burgundy; dead of infection caught tending the wounded in camp. Untimely dead.

  Untimely, indeed. The uneasy tie was broken between John of Bedford and Philip of Burgundy—what now?

  * * *

  Life flowed sweetly at Englefield; time seemed to stand still. Catherine forgot the need to hide the truth about the children; and, Tudor, too, grown used to the danger, lived with it, forgot it—both of them grown sleepy with security.

  At Christmas she went to London to see Johanne. She was disappointed not to find the King; he had gone to Edmundsbury for Christmas.

  “They'll make a monk of him yet,” she said and sighed.

  “Hardly a monkish party,” Johanne assured her drily. “Humphrey and his duchess! Plenty of junketings, I assure you.”

  Johanne was always the same, Catherine thought; the same dry wit, the same faithfulness, never-changing by a day, except—when one looked closely—a little thinner perhaps, more swollen at the joints. But she carried herself upright as ever, showed an unblunted shrewdness.

  Catherine was changing, Johanne could see quite clearly. The Valois in her was becoming more and more apparent. A young Queen, she had tried to model herself upon Isabeau, eager to dip a finger into public affairs. That she was no Isabeau she had not believed, though she had been told so many times. Her mother had told her so; her husband had shown it only too plainly; Johanne herself had warned her over and over again. Slowly, with bitterness, perhaps, she had come to accept it.

  Now, happy with her love and with her children, she made little effort to understand events. She listened to Tudor or to Johanne, accepted their views and did not care greatly what happened unless the thing touched her personal life. That John had retired sick from Lagny she understood and grieved about; but the significance of the defeat she was far from understanding. This mental laziness, this inertia, this wrapping of herself in her own concerns made her truly Charles' sister, Johanne thought; except that Catherine's concerns embraced those she loved, while Charles loved no-one but himself—except perhaps his bedfellow Agnes Sorel.

  Now, though things were desperate in France, she dismissed them with her old philosophy. She preferred to talk about the children, about Owen, about the wickedness of Madam Paramour; and to wish, sighing, she could see Jacqueline happy again. Poor Jacque! In spite of the sworn friendship with Philip, in spite of her great properties given into his hands, she was still virtually a prisoner. So now, when there was happy news of her at last, it seemed more important to Catherine than the loss of Chartres—for Chartres would, no doubt, be regained.

  She sought Johanne her face aglow. Jacque had married again! Like a princess in an old tale she had won her noble gaoler's heart. Her Franz was handsome and rich and they adored each other. She was, she wrote, the happiest woman in th
e world.

  “And Philip?” Johanne asked, dry. “Has Philip agreed?”

  “He wasn't asked. You know Jacque!”

  “Better wait till she hears what he has to say before she talks of happiness.”

  * * *

  Philip had not contented himself with words. The unfortunate Franz lay in prison under sentence of death. Jacque, that passionate amazon, had saved her husband at the price of the last remnants of her property...and was still the happiest woman in the world.

  News from France see-sawed up and down. There had been talk of peace but it had fallen through. And, in Catherine's opinion, rightly. “War must go on,” she said, “until Harry's crown is safe.”

  Johanne stared at her. Simple Catherine was; but surely she must know that if the war continued, Harry might well lose his French crown altogether. Had Charles the sense to be generous with Burgundy, war would have come to an end already. France and England were sick of it, both. Parliament had as good as said so when it gave the King's uncles leave to treat of peace. Isabeau had written about the piteous state of Paris—grass grew still in the streets, empty houses burned down for firewood. “I would burn them that burn,” Isabeau wrote, not grown gentler with the years.

  * * *

  Back at Englefield she found her complacency a little disturbed. She could not help comparing Jacque's happy position with her own. Jacque's name had been a mock in Christendom; now she was an honourably wedded wife. But she, upon whom the breath of scandal had never blown, might find herself exposed to its bitter blast.

  “Do not envy Madam Jacque. You have more...much more!” Tudor nodded to the children where they played.

  She smiled at that; but she felt the wound throb, wound all but healed for the child she had deserted.