Blood Red, Sister Rose

by Thomas Keneally

  Blood Red, Sister Rose

  Thomas Keneally

  TO MY DEAR DAUGHTERS

  MARGARET AND JANE

  BOOK ONE

  Shadow Kings

  When young Charles was seven he lived in his own suite of apartments at the Hotel Barbette in the capital. His mother lived on other floors of the Barbette and sometimes visited him. Since she would bring with her a leopard on a leash or a baboon with smelly breath, Charles never liked her visits.

  His mind was already subject to priest tutors, Dominican theologians from the University of Paris. They began to teach him that he would be king under God, that France and the Pope were consanguineous through God.

  The head nurse at the Barbette, a fat Breton, twenty-eight years old, was a woman called Madeleine. It is important to consider what she taught him.

  Madeleine: A king is a god.

  Charles: There is but one God almighty, Deus Omnipotents …

  He’d already begun learning Latin.

  Madeleine: Oh, but there’s small gods. Kings and saints are small gods. Now a king needs a pair, a brother-king who’s king secretly. And the brother-king has to be sacrificed and the brother-king’s blood feeds the power of the king himself.

  Madeleine showed him her two index fingers.

  Madeleine: This king is king openly.

  She waggled her right index finger potently.

  Madeleine: He wears the crown and people make oaths to him and sing Noël.

  Her left index finger shifted subtly.

  Madeleine: This king is the king who has to be sacrificed. Like Jesus died for us and made all of us wonderful. This king never wears a crown. His blood makes the king a firm long-reigning king.

  Charles: Who’s the king that’s dying for Papa?

  Madeleine: Duckling, your father hasn’t got a shadow king.

  Charles: Maybe Uncle Louis was Papa’s shadow king …? Uncle Louis bled …

  Uncle Louis had been murdered three years ago outside the Barbette. Madeleine and Charles had heard the screams. The murderers had certainly made a copious sacrifice of Uncle Louis.

  Madeleine: Duckling, your Uncle Louis was a nice man, but a witch.

  She was able to say whatever she wanted to Charles, because when Queen Isabeau came visiting her son she had enough trouble stopping her wildcats from savaging the servants. And therefore no time to see whether her boy was being taught the right things.

  Madeleine: It’s because your father’s had no shadow king to die for him that he’s mad.

  Charles: Will I have one?

  Madeleine: You’re a good boy. God will provide …

  But the boy felt all the blood run from his chest into his belly. There it boiled about hopelessly. He knew it wouldn’t happen: no shadow or brother king for him.

  Unaided kingship, Madeleine implied on most days of all his years till he was ten and she was dismissed, unaided kingship was a terrible onus – it invited assassins, it bred wars inside and outside the king.

  His father the king had wars inside him. He lived in locked apartments in the Louvre. He was incontinent in the clothes he wore. He beat up his attendants.

  The little boy was very thin. He thought, I’ll be like that. But I won’t even be strong enough to bully the servants.

  Madeleine: Now there’s just you. You’re the darling of the Armagnacs.

  The Armagnac party was the party that upheld him.

  Earlier that winter, in the Royal Castellany of Vaucouleurs, the girl-child of two peasants called Zabillet and Jacques had her baptismal day. She had two brothers and a sister. She was baptized Jehanne but the brothers and sister called her Jehannette. The village they lived in was called Domremy-à-Greux. It had an interesting location, speaking politically. Only to say for now that the forests there were dark green and the Meuse wide and sombre.

  To my honoured principal, the Esteemed Francesco Maglia-Gondisi, of the Bank of the Family Gondisi of Florence, from his newly appointed agent in Poitou and the Loire region, Bernardo Massimo.

  Dated 23 July 1419

  You must forgive me if other agents of the bank in other areas have already given you some of the information contained in this letter.

  The fact is that since I came here I have found it difficult to acquire much real information at all. The dauphin’s Armagnac Council and his foster-mother Queen Yolande of Sicily let go of news reluctantly. One of the reasons must surely be that the news is so consistently bad. They certainly want capital, they want bankers to underwrite their armies, they seek mortgage and credit arrangements. But they will not tell me the simple business facts and probabilities that any client seeking finance is usually anxious to detail. I have discussed this with other bankers, who are all treated in this same way. We can only conclude that with the English in Normandy and the south-west and the Burgundians in control of the north and of Paris, our Armagnac clients’ dependence on us is so strong that they resent it.

  Two most important items I have learned.

  In the first place, the Duke of Burgundy, Jean (called sans Peur) has managed to introduce the dauphin’s sister Catherine to King Hal Monmouth of England. There are a number of speculations on the subject of why he arranged the meeting, in fact it was simply one item on the agenda of a long conference Jean and the English king held west of Paris. What else happened at the conference few seem to know: only that King Hal met the dauphin’s elder sister. Besides seeing the political merit in marrying her he is said to have actually fallen in love with her. I do not know when the marriage will be celebrated. But I am sure you understand how it will effect the dauphin. He will have one sister queen of England and another, Michelle, duchess of Burgundy. If my honoured principal would permit a sketch map.

  You can see how the Armagnacs are not only outflanked but out-married.

  In the second place, I have discovered that Duke Jean of Burgundy and the dauphin intend to meet again somewhere south of Paris, perhaps at Montereau, in September. There is a danger to our interests in that Jean will put heavy pressure on the boy, attempting to talk him into going north to visit his father and mother. In this way Jean hopes to absorb the boy the way he has absorbed the father (whom he keeps a raving prisoner in the Louvre) and the mother (who is said to be his mistress).

  If Jean succeeds in this purpose there will no longer be an Armagnac party. The Royal Chamberlain, Monsieur Tanguy, is so concerned about the coming meeting that he fears the Duke might even consider assassinating the boy if he refuses to go north. Tanguy is taking a very vigilant attitude towards this possibility.

  In view of these prospects I cannot see any profit for the Bank of the Family Gondisi in pursuing business with the dauphin, Queen Yolande, and the Armagnac Council. I shall therefore postpone final approval on all business pending until I receive your instructions …

  Bernardo Massimo

  One hot September day when Jehannette was nine she woke early. She twitched all morning, even in church. Her eyes stared. After Sunday dinner – bacon and bean broth – she had a convulsion, spilt very hot soup on herself. Jacques beat her on the face till her breath came back and she was put in the high family bed. Though she wanted to sleep her eyes kept snapping open and looked to the steamy light lying across the kitchen floor.

  In that daylight she could read it: something would happen to put her at a distance from Jacques and Zabillet, to lock her into a solitary future. To cut her out of the thick musk of her family as a vealer is cut, mourning, out of the herd. She didn’t want that. She was sure she wanted to grow up to be like Zabillet, ironic and fertile towards some warm oaf. That seemed enviable. A priceless direction to take.

  About seven o’clock she thought well, it’s done now, the fat�
�s in the fire. She was able to rest soundly.

  That day (it was autumn 1419) there were to have been talks between Duke Jean of Burgundy and young dauphin Charles at the walled town of Montereau. Both parties to the talks were letting the fine Sunday go by. They were nervous about assassination and other possibilities.

  Dauphin Charles had apartments inside Montereau. There, he heard three Masses that morning. Perhaps he attempted by all these devotions to build up his royalty, which had diminished since Madeleine’s day. He had lost Paris and his father was a prisoner there – yet another layer of imprisonment for a mad king.

  On a wet afternoon four years before, the English King Hal had butchered the loyalist army. Agincourt was the place’s bad name. Charles could tell in his blood that other tragedies would grow out of a name like that. Hal, Henry Monmouth, had spent the years of Charles’s puberty in re-acquiring Normandy and courting Charles’s sister Catherine. Successfully.

  Maman Isabeau, the boy’s mother, lived in Troyes with all her crazy, ravening or grotesque beasts. Exotic birds left droppings on the candelabra, monkeys ran along the tapestry rails and carnivores stalked around the partitioned rooms. Frequently she slept with little Duke Jean of Burgundy, cleaving her eighteen stone to his eight. No wonder (a political joke ran) they called him Jean sans Peur.

  The meeting between Charles and Jean that Sunday was to be at two o’clock. Charles had a plain buffed suit of armour put on his body and stood sweating into it.

  On the hour delegates from Duke Jean begged a postponement. When his attendants took Charles’s armour off, he was found to have a heat-rash.

  Across the river Duke Jean himself had lunched very light and drank only water. Penitentially. He was saying, God, prince-to-prince, statesman-to-statesman, notice this little courtesy of mine. If there is danger this afternoon, remember my little abstinence at lunch. His family was distinguished in Europe for buttering up all sides in any dispute. He wasn’t afraid. He was depressed, which he wasn’t often, and he had diarrhoea.

  At two o’clock, while he was resting, the Count of Navailles came in. It was Navailles’s idea to keep putting off the talks all day: he felt it would make the dauphin’s party nervous, throw into chaos any plans for violence they might have. He was large in his armour beside the thin duke who lay in a shirt and drawers, bare-legged, bare-footed, on the bed.

  Navailles: How are the bowels, Jean?

  Duke: No problem.

  Navailles: We had a carrier pigeon from our man over in the town. He says the houses by the river haven’t any soldiers in them. They’re occupied by the people who ought to occupy them. Meals are cooking. Kids getting put on the breast. All that.

  Duke: Good.

  Navailles: If they’d let you talk to the little prick. Alone, just the two of you.

  Duke: It’s not a perfect world.

  Navailles: Would five o’clock suit you?

  About ten past four, Navailles and eight other lords went downstairs straight on to the Yonne bridge. The tower in which they and the duke were billeted gave directly on to the carriageway. A trumpeter blew a parley call and the nine lords strode out over the bridge, one standard-bearer ahead of them but no escorts at all. From a tower over in Montereau an Armagnac trumpeter blew an acknowledgment.

  The bridge was partitioned crosswise with walls, so that it displayed three compartments, an ante-room at each end of the bridge – one for the use of Duke Jean’s party, one for the use of the Dauphin Charles’s aides. The centre room was the meeting place. It had no furniture, but was hung with drapes, blue, white, red, green. A golden sun and golden lilies showed up on the blue, and the St Andrew’s cross of Burgundy stood out on the red.

  Navailles and the others waited ten minutes in their ante-room while the dauphin’s advisers got their armour on and came out of town on to their end of the bridge and into the meeting hall. The protocol was that the French were to invite the Burgundians into the meeting place. The Duke of Burgundy was a vassal of France, according to feudal theories already laughable.

  Someone unlatched the meeting-place door at last, but no one called out for the Burgundians to come in.

  Sulky, said Navailles, and his colleagues tittered, moving in pairs into the meeting chamber.

  To simplify the complex story of what happened that germane afternoon only Navailles is mentioned by name amongst the Burgundy lords. On the French side all the lords would fall or diminish because of what would soon happen on the bridge. Just the same, a few must be mentioned.

  When Navailles went through into the meeting-chamber he saw thirty yards off, against drapes of blue and gold, Tanguy Duchâtel with seven other Armagnac monsters.

  Navailles saw, for example, Monsieur Brabazon, a real killer, who had once raped an abbess to death in Touraine. Just for the sake of saying he’d done it. He saw Pierre de Giac, Charles’s bedmate. Burgundian spies said he was a Satanist and used witchcraft and poison for results. But his face was sensitive, he sat through all the masses with which poor Charles tried to fortify his failing majesty.

  Navailles thought, that pitiful little sod Charles. No mind of his own, and only murderers to talk to.

  And Tanguy Duchâtel, the boy’s most darling mouthpiece.

  Tanguy: Are you serious this time? Or still farting around?

  Navailles: Does five o’clock suit the dauphin?

  Tanguy: Five o’clock. You’ve had all bloody day.

  Navailles: Five’s the best we can offer now. You’d better go and dress Charlie.

  By this time the lords on both sides were catcalling and barracking each other. Burgundy’s Monsieur Antoine Vergy and Brabazon were enjoying themselves. They were comradely about it, both being genuine pirates.

  Navailles mistrusted Monsieur Tanguy Duchâtel. Earlier in the year, when Jean’s troops entered Paris, Tanguy Duchâtel, Provost of the city, had woken young Charles the Dauphin at the Hotel Neuf des Tourelles, carried the whimpering boy in his arms out the Temple Gate to the Bastille where horses were gathered for flight south. Navailles knew how to deal with Tanguy’s power-lust and homicidal intent. It was his new vanity as saviour of a prince that made him uneasy. The Tanguy of earlier days could be expected to act inside the limits of his cool, hard purposes. But some crazy bond, some father-son thing burgeoning in Tanguy’s guts as he carried the sobbing boy across town and led his horse south – that was a thing whose consequences Navailles couldn’t predict.

  Correctly, he thought it dangerous.

  De Giac knew Charles’s soft frightened flesh. He kept pleading for everyone to be gentle with the boy.

  De Giac: Remember the boy’s mother. If anyone hurts Charles she won’t ever let Jean back into bed. She prides herself on being a good mother. And none of this catcalling. He’s likely to bolt.

  He and Tanguy were jealous of their status as men who knew what made Charles nervous.

  Before they all left, Navailles pointed to the riverside houses by the Montereau wall and wanted to know did the French have archers there.

  Tanguy: If I want to hurt the duke I’ll do it myself. I won’t get some peasant to do it from two hundred metres off. He’ll know it’s me, his friend Tanguy. That’s what chivalry’s about.

  Strangely, Navailles was satisfied. He left the chamber and the bridge with other members of the delegation.

  Duke Jean’s overt position towards the boy Charles would be this. The English have all of Normandy now. King Henry is living in Rouen and met your own sister at Meulan in May and eyed her up and wants her … it’s sad, but there you are. Your father is ill in the Louvre, your mother’s down in Troyes with her pets. It’s you and me now. Let’s forget the old, old issues, let’s call the Estates General, at any town you name, let’s raise a big levy, buy ourselves a big army, keep the English out of Paris. Come back to your mother. Come back to your poor father.

  Duke Jean’s secret position was this: he had an under-the-table alliance with Henry. So secret was it that he’d let the people
at Rouen hold out against Henry, let them think he’d send relief. By the end of the siege the townspeople were sitting in the ditches outside the city. No one would feed them. Not the garrison. Not besieging Hal or his little brother Clarence. An English soldier said he saw babies sucking at the teats of dead mothers in those ditches. Duke Jean was said to be coming.

  Hal had known Duke Jean wasn’t coming. But didn’t pass the word on to the ditches. Or the garrison. That was politics.

  What Duke Jean wanted from the boy Charles was: submission. Jean had the schizophrenic father in the Louvre. He could have the queen in bed whenever it was apt to politics or concupiscence. He wanted the boy for his pocket.

  But to the boy, Jean was a figure from mythology. When Charles was four, Jean had had Charles’s Uncle Louis killed. In those days Jean and Louis had fought each other for control of the sick king. One night in November Uncle Louis had been at the Barbette, in Maman Isabeau’s apartments, drinking with her. A happy scene: all the animals were placid when Uncle Louis was about. Unexpectedly the king’s valet knocked at the queen’s door. Papa was supposed to be having a clear-headed phase and wanted to see Uncle Louis. Downstairs the valet had a donkey and a small escort of armed servants on foot. Louis sat the donkey. Just beyond the Barbette Gate, in rue Vieille-du-Temple, a legion of killers jumped out of the doorways. They strewed his brains, ran him through, pounded him to offal. They cut off an arm. The day after the funeral Jean admitted in the royal council that he had ordered the event. A necessary killing, he said, even if a bloody one.

  Those mutilations recurred still, twelve years later, in the boy’s dreams. His waking eyes cringed from his cousin of Burgundy.

  Before the meeting Jean was sick and felt better for it, but not well enough to dress in armour. It was arranged that a servant would carry his armour before him across the bridge and retain it in the ante-room. So he had his britches laced on and slung over his head an orange tunic with Golden Fleeces. He was a careless dresser.

  At five o’clock Navailles and the others came for him. The duke’s secretary Père Sequinat went along too. As if the sanctions of canon law weren’t likely to save him, he wore a cuirass under his Augustinian habit. One of the lords rat-tat-tatted on the heavy serge of the monk’s chest. The sound was metallic.