Catherine: One Love is Enough (Catherine Series Book 1) (13 page)

Looking at Michelle’s wistful face, Catherine instantly sided with the citizens of Ghent and told herself that Duke Philippe must be an idiot. Behind her the furrier from Ghent whispered to Uncle Mathieu:

‘Our poor Duchess’s life is one long martyrdom. Last year the Duke ordered great celebrations to mark the birth of his bastard son by the lady of Presles. Our good lady, who is childless through no fault of her own, wept for many days when she heard the news. But the Duke cared nothing for her tears and at once proclaimed the babe Great Bastard of Burgundy – as if it were something to be proud of!’

Catherine’s impressionable heart swelled indignantly. She would have liked to fly to the assistance of the little Duchess, so unjustly spurned by her husband.

The Duke in person followed behind. He was on horseback, escorted by a troop of knights in full war harness, and formed part of the cortege of Count Thierry of Flanders, to whom Bruges owed the Precious Blood. As such he wore the armour of a past age. A coat of chain mail covered him from shoulders to knees, and on his head he wore a hood of mail under a pointed helmet that left only the severe pale oval of his face visible. A long, broad, flat sword hung at his side. In his steel-gloved right hand he held a lance, from which fluttered a pennant in the Flemish colours. On his right arm he held a shield in the shape of an elongated almond. The lords around him were dressed in the same style, and they formed an impressive forest of rigid and sinister black steel statues. Philippe’s eyes gazed high above the heads of the crowd and seemed not to see anything. How haughty, remote and disdainful he seemed! Catherine, once more bent in a respectful posture, told herself that he was definitely not a sympathetic character.

As she rose from her curtsey Catherine suddenly felt two shaking hands encircling her waist. She tried to shake them off, thinking that someone might have stumbled and seized hold of her to regain their balance. But the furtive hands now started creeping up her body to her breasts, which they greedily seized. She cried out in a fury. Whirling round so violently that her neighbours fell back and her headdress shook, she found herself face to face with the furrier from Ghent, who was clearly stupefied by her reaction.

‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘Filthy swine!’

Beside herself with rage, she gave him three tremendous slaps on the face. His pale cheeks instantly flushed as scarlet as June poppies, and he stepped back a few paces, raising his hands to his face.

Catherine was on the warpath. Oblivious of her beautiful lace cap, now trampled in the dust, and with her gleaming mass of hair streaming about her, she went after her assailant again, despite her uncle’s efforts to stop her.

‘Niece, niece, are you mad?’ cried the good man.

‘Mad? Ask this sorry creature here, this common skin-merchant here, what he has been up to! Ask him, if he dares tell you!’

The man sought refuge in the darkness of the market hall, where he evidently hoped to escape, but the crowd now blocked his passage. By now, amused onlookers had joined in the dispute, some siding with the furrier, some with the girl.

‘Bah!’ exclaimed a grocer as broad as he was tall. ‘What’s the world coming to if one can’t squeeze a girl’s waist in the crowd without causing a scandal?’

A young woman with a fresh, round face but haughty glint in her eye leant forward to get a closer look at him.

‘I’d like to see someone try to squeeze my waist!’ she cried. ‘The young woman is quite right. For my part, I’d scratch the eyes out of anyone who tried to take liberties with me!’

To scratch the furrier’s eyes out seemed to be exactly what Catherine, who had escaped from her uncle’s restraining grip, was attempting to do. Before long, there was quite a commotion at the corner of the marketplace, and none of the those involved noticed that the procession itself had stopped. A cold voice abruptly cut through the hubbub.

‘Guards – seize these people who are disturbing the procession.’

It was the Duke in person. Halted at the corner of the marketplace, he waited, a rigid figure in his steel armour. Instantly four men-at-arms of his personal guard pushed their way through the crowd. Catherine was pulled away from her adversary, who was defending himself as best he could, seized by two of the men-at-arms and, despite Mathieu’s entreaties, dragged before Philippe of Burgundy’s horse.

She was still furious. She struggled like a little demon, and by the time they managed to control her, her hair was streaming all over the place. The collar of her blue dress had been torn off, and one fresh, soft shoulder was bared. Her eyes sparkled angrily, and her look clashed with Philippe’s like steel on steel. They glared at each other for a moment, like two fighters measuring each other up, the one tall and haughty on his horse, the other defiant as a little fighting-cock, refusing to lower her eyes. Around them an anxious silence fell, broken only by the sobs of the unfortunate Mathieu.

‘What happened?’ the Duke asked curtly.

One of the archers who had hold of the terrified furrier answered: ‘This fellow took advantage of the crowd to tease the girl a bit, sire. She slapped his face.’

Philippe’s grey gaze passed briefly, with chilling contempt, over the furrier’s ashen face, then returned to Catherine, who stood as before, with a haughty expression, obstinately refusing to utter a word. Sure that right was on her side, she was too proud to make excuses for herself in front of everyone, let alone implore forgiveness. She stood and waited. Philippe’s cold voice rang out.

‘Disturbing a procession is a serious misdemeanour. Take them away. I will take care of this matter later on.’

He leant across to the captain of the guard, Jacques de Roussay, and murmured a few words to him; then, wheeling his horse round, he once more resumed his place in the procession. The cortege moved on amid clouds of incense and the singing of sacred hymns.

The Captain de Roussay was obliged to wait till the end of the procession, a series of
tableaux vivants
illustrating scenes from the Old and New Testaments, before taking the prisoners away. His orders were to take them to the palace, and to do this he had first of all to cross the market square. Meanwhile Mathieu Gautherin tore his hair, wept unashamedly and collapsed on the cornerstone. The young woman who had taken Catherine’s side in the dispute did her best to comfort him. He had tried to speak to his niece but had been prevented by the bowmen. He pictured to himself with horrifying vividness the succession of disasters that might befall her. They would almost certainly consign the rash young woman to one of the palace dungeons. Then she would be tried and as likely as not hung, or even burnt alive, for sacrilege. As for him, they would doubtless pull down his house and banish him from his home town to wander the highroads with his family, begging his bread, always persecuted, always on the move till the time the Lord should see fit to take pity on him and gather him to His bosom …

Catherine, on the other hand, had finally cooled down and now adopted an attitude of icy composure. The archers had tied her hands together and she stood there proudly, very upright, in her torn dress that revealed her bare shoulder, enveloped in clouds of hair, scornfully ignoring the comments, some flattering, some impudent and some frankly obscene, that her beauty called forth from the spectators. She was aware of all these people looking at her. She even found a certain secret amusement in observing how the captain of the guard blushed and looked away when she happened to catch him looking at her. Roussay was young, and the sight of his prisoner clearly disturbed him more than a little.

When the last tableau, representing a paunchy Daniel amid some highly fantastical beasts, had passed, he ordered the crowd to fall back and escorted his prisoners along at a good pace. They crossed the square almost at a run. Poor Mathieu, still weeping copiously, followed as best he could, his hood all awry and his fat face, swollen by tears, irresistibly reminiscent of a disconsolate baby’s.

When he had got as far as the palace entrance, however, the lances of the guard barred the way and he was forced to give up his plan to accompany his niece. Heartbroken, he took a seat on a convenient stone and began to weep like a fountain, almost certain now that he would not see Catherine again till the time came for her to go to the scaffold.

Once inside the palace, Catherine noticed with some surprise that she had been separated from her adversary. The furrier was being taken by his guards to the left of the courtyard, while she was being conducted by Roussay himself toward the great staircase.

‘Are you not taking me to the dungeons?’ she asked.

The captain did not answer. He was walking along like an efficient robot, eyes fixed straight ahead, face impassive under the raised visor of his helmet. Catherine could not know that, if he refused to look or even speak to her, it was only because he had not felt in control of his emotions since first laying eyes on that disturbingly lovely face. It was certainly the first time that Jacques de Roussay had hated doing his duty.

At the top of the staircase there was a long gallery, then a door opening into a sumptuously-furnished room. Next came another, smaller room entirely hung with beautiful tapestries. Hidden in the tapestries was a door, which opened as if by magic when the captain pushed it.

‘In here,’ he said curtly.

It was only then that Catherine noticed with astonishment that the captain formed her sole escort at this point and that the soldiers seemed to have mysteriously vanished. On the threshold, Roussay used a dagger to cut the rope that bound his prisoner’s hands, then pushed her in. The door shut noiselessly behind her, and when Catherine turned to see if her gaoler was still there, she couldn’t believe her eyes: the door had disappeared, concealed in the pattern on the walls.

Sighing resignedly, the girl looked about her. Her prison was a room with small dimensions compensated for by a rare splendour. Walls hung with cloth of gold threw into relief the sombre magnificence of a great bed entirely draped with black velvet. There was no coat of arms above the bed-head, but the curtains were held back by gold cords attached to griffons’ heads of solid gold with emerald eyes. Near a high white chimneypiece, an ebony dresser held some gold and silver objects, the main purpose of which seemed to be to set off a large goblet of sparkling crystal with a base and cover of gold encrusted with large round pearls. An ebony coffer standing between two narrow Gothic windows held a basin of enamelled gold, in which a huge armful of blood-red roses had been placed.

Catherine advanced cautiously across the thick carpet, patterned in black and dark red, which, she would have been surprised to learn, had only just arrived from distant Samarkand aboard a great Genoese caravel still berthed in the harbour at Damme. A large mirror reflected her image as she passed: that of a young girl with sparkling eyes and tousled hair that shone brighter than the gilded walls. But her torn dress seemed to reveal more bare skin than was seemly. Embarrassed all of a sudden at the thought of all the people who had seen her so unsuitably dressed, she hunted about for a piece of cloth or something with which to cover her shoulders and bosom, but there was nothing to be found and she had to resign herself to covering her half-bared bosom with her hands.

She felt weary all of a sudden, and ravenously hungry. Catherine was one of those robustly healthy people whose appetite remains unaffected by even the most dire calamities. But there was absolutely nothing edible anywhere in this artfully sealed-up room with its invisible doors. Sighing deeply, she installed herself in one of a pair of high-backed chairs of sculpted ebony that faced each other on either side of the fireplace. They were reasonably comfortable, thanks to their thick down-filled cushions of black velvet with gold tassels. Catherine curled up like a cat, relishing the comfort, and, since she had nothing better to do, was soon asleep. Her own fate worried her much less than the terrible anxieties that must now be assailing poor Uncle Mathieu. They couldn’t have brought her to such a pretty room only to send her to the scaffold afterwards.

She woke with a start, a long while later, registering subconsciously a presence in the room. There, before her, stood a tall, thin young man, hands behind his back and legs slightly apart, watching her sleep. She leapt to her feet with a cry of surprise and alarm, and stood looking apprehensively at the newcomer.

The man before her was not a stranger, but the Duke Philippe in person.

He had changed his old-fashioned armour for a short black velvet tunic with matched hose that showed off his long, thin, but muscular legs. His head was bare and he wore his blond hair cut very short above the ears. This severe costume only enhanced the youthfulness of his face. He certainly could not be more than 26 years old. He was smiling.

The smile deepened as Catherine, still half awake, dropped an awkward curtsey and exclaimed:

‘Oh, sire, I apologise …’

‘You were sleeping so soundly that I didn’t dare wake you. And there is no need to apologise. It was a charming sight.’

Pink with embarrassment as she observed Philippe’s pale stare moving over her person, Catherine remembered the state she was in and hastily covered her bosom with her hands. To accommodate this sudden fit of modesty the Duke moved a few steps away and shrugged faintly.

‘Well, my pretty troublemaker. Who are you, first of all?’

‘Your prisoner, sire.’

‘And what besides?’

‘Nothing, since you address me so familiarly as “
tu
”. I am not of noble birth, but neither am I low-born. I am not a servant. And just because I have been arrested is no reason to treat me like one.’