by Anne O'Brien
‘You must keep me in your confidence.’ It was all I could ask.
‘I know. I can no longer hide it from you. Nor can I bear it alone.’
I sighed. ‘Yet you will try. At least allow me to kiss you farewell.’
It was a kiss of great tenderness. I had a need to hold him, but could not: to journey every step of the way with him, but that would dishonour him. I must let him have his way, and return to me when he could. How would I bear the not knowing? I could only rely on royal couriers and Master Recoches to tell me the truth. I had no confidence in Henry sending for me when the next attack struck him down, as we both knew it would. What if he did not recover the next time? What if this was to be the final time that we stood together on this earth? Never had I felt so helpless.
Henry’s thoughts were following the same path.
‘If I die before we meet again, my dearest love, know that you were the finest part in my life.’
As emotion gathered in my throat against my will, I touched his face, still miraculously untouched by the lesions that disfigured the rest of him.
‘Don’t you dare die!’ was all I could manage, whispered against his hair, and then we walked together from the room.
*
Henry and I embarked on a new beginning. A new campaign. An outright war. Not against the rebels in north or west. Not even against the members of parliament that continued to strike at Henry like cats spitting over a mess of fish. But against a foe we could neither see nor bring to battle.
St Oswald proved not to be efficacious.
A succession of new physicians of repute were engaged to replace the ageing Recoches who had lost my confidence. I scoured the great seats of learning in Italy, bringing doctors to England to use their talents to rid Henry of this curse of pain and physical degradation. David Nigerallis of Lucca, Elias de Sabato from Bologna, and Pedro de Alcobaca. I ordered the services of the eminent surgeon John Bradmore who had saved Prince Hal’s life at Shrewsbury, who had removed the arrow head from his face with such skill. I tapped the knowledge and the skills of my ageing nurse, Mistress Alicia, whose mind was now sharper than her fingers when dipping into salves and potions. Peony against the falling evil. Chamomile to soothe a troubled mind. Yarrow to heal pernicious wounds of the skin.
We applied them all. We would leave no stone unturned.
I consulted my precious books.
‘I swear you are poisoning me,’ Henry growled as he downed yet another new draught, the bitter infusion of Bugloss to lift his spirits.
‘I swear I am not. Be brave. I have another two remedies, pounded and sieved and mixed with red wine.’
And when the new ones failed to heal his suffering flesh, I resorted to the old ones, the ones with powerful properties but dread reputation. My beloved vervain with its magical powers. Rosemary to keep evil dreams at bay. And of course Periwinkle for good measure, with its ability to ward off evil spirits. No house where Periwinkle hung over the door would contain witchery. I would protect Henry from attack within this world and without. Nothing would stand in my way.
The fear of leprosy, that most pernicious of diseases, continued to haunt us. Rumours of Henry’s ailment abounded at Court, like mushrooms in a damp autumn.
‘Tell me the truth,’ Henry demanded of Pedro de Alcobaca.
I held my breath for the reply. If it was leprosy, then it was Henry’s doom. There would never be a cure.
‘It is not leprosy, my lord.’
‘You are very certain,’I observed, fixing him with my eye, refusing to allow him to slide into lies and half-truths. We were past the days of polite untruths.
‘I have studied it, my lady.’ Gravely, his dark Portuguese features compassionate, he waxed into detail. ‘Your face and hands are untouched, my lord. There is no numbness to your hands or feet. Your eyes are keen, my lord, as is your mind. I swear that it is not leprosy.’
It was a relief, of sorts.
‘It may not be leprosy, but is a judgement from God,’ Henry said more than once. Which was a reflection of his despairing mind even when he drove his body to fulfil his royal demands.
So I would ease his mind too with herb infusions. I would drag him back from the brink of despair.
Henry never shut his door against me again.
‘For I will assuredly summon a servant with an axe to destroy the lock!’
But there were some nights, and days, when Henry must face his worst battles alone, racked with fatigue and distress and pain. I allowed him that solitude to muster his inner reserves against an uncertain future, hovering outside his door until I sensed that he was ready to communicate with me again.
*
We sank lower into despair, a circling descent into a vortex of pain and hopelessness, when Henry was unable to travel at all, not even by river. When a moment of insensitive encouragement, suggesting that he walk with me in the herb-scented gardens, roused his temper to blistering heat.
‘Walk in the garden? Why would I do that? Jesu! Once I could sprint from here to here,’ he gestured expansively with his arm, a movement that made him gasp in agony, ‘faster than my hounds. Now I can barely crawl from bed to chair. And don’t lie to me. Don’t fill me with soft hopes that we both know will never come to pass. I am dying, Joanna. We both see it. We cannot pretend that it is not so. But by God I’ll go to my death in the manner in which I lived.’
The raw fire of arrogance had not dwindled.
‘Forgive me,’ I said softly. ‘I was at fault.’
I never belittled him again. I never humiliated him. I let him set his own pace. We accepted what was clear to everyone, living the good days, tolerating the bad when pain ruled. We could have entered into a major pretence that this was not happening, that there were days of true healing. That Henry would recover and we would live out our days together.
We could not. That was not the way of it, for either of us. In those black days we faced the best and the worst together. But sometimes physical pain was not the worst of it.
Parliament, seeing the decline of the King, effectively stripped Henry of his power.
‘I am to be put under supervision, as if I were a child,’ Henry raged. ‘The sort given to Richard as a ten-year-old boy. The Royal Council will overlook all matters of government, every decision that I might make. As if my mind was as destroyed as my body. As if I am incapable of stringing two logical thoughts together.’
‘Could you not refuse? Could you not stop them?’
The reply was a silent snarl. ‘Our household expenses are to be reduced. We have been told, with utmost reverence of course, to go and live quietly in the country. By God!’
So, since parliament as ever had the whip hand in matters of finance, live quietly in the country is what we did, at Leicester, at Kenilworth, at Woodstock. While the Council became a creature of Prince Hal’s making, meeting under his auspices, obedient to his wishes, with the dread word abdication hanging in the air between us. Henry would not discuss it, and I did not push him beyond his strength. The Crown was his to dispose of as he saw fit.
How strange, it came into my mind. When I had first become Queen of England I had had ambition to wield regal power, as I had in Brittany. I had planned to share Henry’s affairs, anticipating it with pleasure, and had resented the lack of opportunity. Now the authority had been removed from both our hands so that we were compelled to a life of quiet retirement, as if old age had made of us an irrelevance. Power had passed into the hands of the next generation where Hal was already experiencing the intoxication of royal authority. Yet I would have exchanged every power in God’s universe for a restoration of Henry’s good health.
Meanwhile Henry learned to travel by litter, until travel of any description became a thing of the past. I learned patience. I learned that love must sometimes be silent, an agony of waiting and tolerance when Henry could not even bear my presence. Our love became a matter of hands touching. A brush of lips. A conversation, a plangent moment of lute mu
sic, a page shared and enjoyed from a book. Love was a union of minds and we learned to live without the physicality of desire. We rode out no more, we did not hunt. It was as much as Henry could do to visit his hawks in the mews. I had a wooden perch carved and arranged so that his favourite birds could sit in his chamber, to be fed on chicken if that was what he desired.
I would have fed them on roast peacock if it had given Henry pleasure.
We had good days. Another truce with Brittany was duly signed and seemed likely to last despite the cynicism on both sides. Hal’s incursions into Wales left Owain Glyn Dwr a helpless outlaw. Northumberland finally met his treasonous end on the battlefield at Bramham Moor. Mortimer too was dead, in Hal’s effective siege of Harlech. The threat of the Dragon, the Lion and the Wolf had come to an end at last.
My daughters Marguerite and Blanche, young as they were, were married to men of European rank and title and so flew the English nest that had nurtured them. Baron Thomas de Camoys took another wife, Elizabeth Mortimer, cousin to Henry and widow of ill-fated Harry Hotspur who had met his death at Shrewsbury. An advantageous marriage for both, and for Thomas a strategic alliance to a woman of Plantagenet blood, although I suspected Henry of shackling his suspect Mortimer cousin to the most loyal man he could find. I had to be happy for Lord Thomas. They seemed content enough together with Elizabeth soon loosening her seams and Lord Thomas anticipating another son.
Small steps of achievement, of happiness. These were days when Henry felt restored, hope renewed.
‘The despised moldewarp has won that battle after all,’ he observed, lifting his cup of ale to toast the future. ‘My son will at least inherit a country rid of war and intrigue.’
But then there were bad days, for death touched us too. Henry’s much loved Blanche died, giving birth to a son who rapidly followed his mother into the grave. John Beaufort, as close as any brother could be to Henry, left this life.
As for my own grief, my own son Gilles was struck down with barely eighteen years to his name. So much promise wiped out by some nameless fever when he crossed the channel to visit me. Marguerite, my dear Marguerite took her last breath so soon after her marriage to the Vicomte de Rohan. So much death. So much pain. These were days that must be weathered, when the anguish of our separation from our family was as great as Henry’s physical suffering. Those were the days when we shut ourselves away and mourned together. Even Henry’s favoured greyhound, Math, reached the end of her allotted years to give him much grief.
And during all these months Henry could no longer bear to be touched to any degree, other than his hands and face. We slept apart and I accepted it, waiting outside his door at dawn until he could summon the control to master his features and admit me with words of welcome and love, for engulfed as we were with loss and desolation, the bond that held us tightened with every hour, every minute. With the dread threat of separation stepping ever closer, we shared and tasted every morsel of this scant meal that time still allowed us. We met each day with a light touch of hands and lips, expressing our love in word and thought, brilliant as jewels. In simple acceptance, impermeable as granite, of what we could still experience of joy in music and poetry. We never expressed the finite quality of our life together.
Until one morning.
‘My regrets are as numerable as the stars in the heavens,’ Henry said, strong enough to climb the spiral staircase to attend Mass in his oratory. The incense still hung in the air around us, shrouding the silver crucifix on the altar in a cloud of mysticism, as he struggled from his genuflection to his full height.
‘There is no need for regrets,’ I replied, uncertain of the direction of his thoughts. His eyes were trained on the suffering Christ, his own expression less harrowed.
‘But there is. I am so sorry that we will never have the child we had hoped for.’
I thought of saying that I would never give up hope, but I could not. It was no longer possible to encourage, when the encouragements became hard lies. Henry, turning his head, must have seen it in my face, for he gripped my hand hard. ‘We must accept it.’
And so I had. ‘We have enough children of our own,’ I assured him.
A pain, a hurt, a grief. I would never let him know how much it remained with me. Henry had his own agonies without mine to drive him into deeper despair.
I wept alone, that we would never achieve this symbol of our love together.
But then I vowed to weep no longer. In the depths of this abyss of horror and despair, I came to a new calm steadiness. After all, there was no further for either of us to fall.
Chapter 15
September 1411: Eltham Palace
‘I don’t think you should be doing this,’ I said.
Tactlessly, perhaps, but Lord Thomas de Camoys, who continued to be my eyes and ears at Court, had warned me, and I did not like the direction affairs were taking. I could see nothing but unnecessary and prolonged trouble for Henry and for England.
‘I did not expect you to approve,’ was Henry’s unhelpful response.
‘I think it would be bad policy,’ I continued undeterred.
‘Your opinion on this matter is irrelevant, Joanna.’
It was short and sharp, Henry’s jaw clenched, the line between his brows etched today with frustration as much as with pain. I should have learnt to keep my tongue between my teeth when I could all but see temper snapping in the set of his head, in the tension in his knuckles. But at least Henry was alert, his mind active, his moods of depression set aside. The morning cup of White Willow, now necessary to get him through the next hours without excruciating agony, his skin afire, had been pushed aside.
‘Are you strong enough to lead such an expedition?’ I asked. ‘It will mean days at sea and in the saddle. Would you condemn your body to such excess?’
‘Am I not King?’Typically, when faced with royal policy, Henry ignored the state of his body. ‘Who else would lead an army into France?’
I knew the answer to that. So did Henry. I chose not to answer it since it would be less than diplomatic in the circumstances. It was like trying to walk on egg shells without crushing them into tiny pieces.
‘But it’s not your policy,’ I said.
‘God’s Blood! I know it’s not my policy!’The irritation slithered between us. ‘But my authority to determine the direction of England’s involvement in Europe seems to have been snatched out of my hands.’
Which was another issue I would not pursue.
Henry was sitting at the table he had had erected in his chamber so that he could work without the need to negotiate the antechambers and stairs to the room he had once used. The surface of it was covered with documents and maps. Henry had a pen in his hand and a frown on his brow.
‘And do we have the money to launch this expedition?’ I asked with caution.
If we lacked money, it would keep Henry from engaging in so questionable a campaign. For once I prayed that the coffers were empty and parliament unyielding.
‘It seems that we do. The Council is keen to go ahead.’
Worried beyond thought, I promptly abandoned my determination to be circumspect. ‘And can I guess who has persuaded them?’
‘We don’t need to guess,’ he growled.
For here it was: the policy that distressed me. The Duke of Burgundy—now my cousin John after my uncle’s death—was soliciting England’s help in the civil war that was tearing France apart. Burgundy was in open conflict with the Duke of Orleans and his followers, the Armagnacs, both of them intent on personal power building since King Charles was incapable of holding his aristocrats in check. To tempt Henry to commit troops to the campaign my cousin of Burgundy was offering the lucrative gift of four Flemish towns, as well as his daughter as a bride for Hal.
‘Look,’ Henry said, gesturing with sardonic drama. ‘It is all prepared. Ships, grants. Even the damned pennons are painted. The standards embroidered. That’s not one of them is it?’ He scowled at the embroidery that lay neg
lected on my lap, but did not wait for a reply. ‘Even my bloody bed is made ready for transportation. Hal is, if nothing else, efficient.’
For that was where this policy had received its backing. It was a sensitive area for me, to step judiciously between Henry and his heir, but I was becoming practised at it. It was not, after all, the first time I had seen such a dichotomy of interest. Since Henry’s increasing physical fragility, Hal had taken his place at the meetings of the Royal Council to drive his own vision of England’s future. The Council itself had been gradually reformed, Henry’s friends replaced by those loyal to his heir. Henry’s authority was under attack, quite wilfully, from his own son.
‘So you will go,’ I said carefully, this tragic conflict between King and Prince clear in my mind. How could he even contemplate an invasion of France? Every instinct cried out to forbid it. I would wager his being unable to walk onto the ship unaided, yet at the same time my intuition warned me that I must not interfere at this juncture.
‘Yes, I’ll go. I’ll defend our base at Calais. And then I’ll see which way the wind is blowing.’
I could ignore it no longer. ‘And will you face Hal when he pushes for more, for a full-scale campaign into the heart of France? What will you say to him?’
‘What indeed.’ Henry sighed, tossed down the pen and downed another gulp of the White Willow. ‘You see this as clearly as I do. You see which way affairs are moving. Can I stop them?’
Which gave me freedom to speak. ‘Yes I see it. And I don’t know if you can stop them.’ I feared Henry was not strong enough to do it.
‘Neither, by God, do I!’
I folded the embroidery—‘It is not a royal standard’—and moved to stand behind him, a hand light as a breath on his shoulder. ‘What does your heart tell you to do?’
‘My heart tells me…’
As if conjured up by our conversation, there was a brisk knock at the door. Hal entered, Bishop Henry following. They bowed, but I felt their courtly demeanour hid something that would not be to Henry’s advantage. Like the velvet skin of an apricot might hide the danger of a poisoned fruit in the hand of an assassin.
