In a Dark Wood Wandering (26 page)

“There is a new baby,” he said reproachfully. “Why is it not lying with you in the lying-in room?”

Valentine looked calmly at her sons and smiled; the anxiety and bitterness of the past few years seemed to have vanished.

“Come here,” she said. “Now listen carefully to what I am going to tell you, and promise me here in this place that as true knights you will repeat it to no one. The infant who came to us last night is not my child. But he is your half-brother; therefore you must love and protect him as you love and protect Jean.”

“Half-brother?” asked Charles hesitantly; leaning against his mother's knee he looked close up into her large, shining amber eyes.

“That means,” Valentine continued, “that Monseigneur your father is his father also. His mother died in childbirth; and that is why he has come to live with us.”

Philippe understood nothing of all this; barely listening, he stared at the reflection of the candle flame in the golden altarpiece. Charles, however, frowned in thought.

“Where is Monseigneur my father then?” he asked at last.

“He is still asleep,” answered the Duchess; she gave her oldest son a searching look and then began to stroke his hair gently. He was six years old; did he really understand what she meant?

Charles remained silent as he had sworn he would; he rebuked Philippe when his brother tried to ask him questions about the newest baby. The Dame de Maucouvent gave neither glance nor word to the infant; she walked about with a surly look on her round face, as though she had been personally insulted.

However, the stableboys were less reticent. They spoke once in the courtyard in Charles' presence of the bastard of Orléans who had been taken into the ducal family. Charles knew very well what a bastard was; he had heard a scullery servant's puppy called that. But he did not understand how this word could be applied to his half-brother.

“Why is the little baby a bastard?” he asked his mother later. The Duke his father had been sitting by the fire with his face in his hands; he looked up.

“I want to tell you that it is not always disgraceful to be a
bastard,” he said before Valentine could reply. “But I forbid you to call your half-brother that, my son, before you are old enough to know what you are saying. His name is Jean and he is Lord of Chateau-Dun, just as you are Count of Angoulême. Address him as Dunois, that is his rightful name.”

“Do not be angry at your half-brother, Charles,” said the Duchess gently. “I love him as much as you and Philippe and Jean, child. He really should have been mine …” She looked past Charles at her husband, and gave a low, sad laugh. “He was stolen from me, the small Dunois.”

The sudden death of Mariette de Cany flung Louis back into the vortex of battle. He had with her—for a few months at any rate—been able to forget the frustrations of the past year: the death of England's former King, Richard; the fall of Wenceslaus, followed by the coronation of Ruprecht of Bavaria. Nor had he enjoyed undiluted happiness at the castle of Epernay, where he had brought the Dame de Cany after they became lovers. She never spoke of love, but her silence was more eloquent than words. Her desperate surrender terrified Louis; it was true that he was profoundly aware of guilt and sin, but he believed his passion could justify the relationship. For Mariette, however, there was no future; it had died, she thought, from the moment that she betrayed Aubert de Cany; she went through a purgatory of humiliation and remorse. Louis blamed her pregnancy for her emotional state; to the end he did not understand her.

“Forgive me that I must flee from you,” said Maret before she retired to the lying-in chamber. The pains had already begun, but she held herself erect and refused to allow the women to support her. Louis wanted to cheer her up. He took leave of her lighriy, with a joke. “You cannot escape me anymore, ma mie!”

“Alas, it is true,” replied Mariette slowly, turning back to face him. “But think of me sometimes, when you cannot find me.”

Louis had reason to think of her; when he saw her again, after the confinement, she lay straight and stiff between two rows of burning candles. Without a smile or farewell, she had left him forever.

After the quarrel in the presence of the King, the feud between
Burgundy and Orléans was an accepted fact. Uncle and nephew avoided each other as much as possible, but in the Council passionate reproaches and thrusts burst out at every turn. Their mutual hatred could no longer be hidden; in Paris the rabble taunted Orléans' household with cries of “Burgundy! Burgundy!”

In the beginning of the year 1401, Isabeau's father, Duke Stefan of Bavaria, appeared at the French court to try to conclude a pact between Charles and the Emperor Ruprecht. Isabeau promised to use all her influence. But before she could act, she received a heavy blow: the Dauphin caught a chill and died; he was barely eight years old. Only a few months earlier he had made his solemn entrance into the city of Paris; accompanied by his granduncles and a brilliant procession, he had ridden on horseback through the city to the cheers of the people. Neither the efforts of the physicians nor the masses held in the King's name in all the churches of Paris could save the child. His weak constitution succumbed to an illness which should not have been dangerous. Once more he was brought through the city to Saint-Denis, but now he was borne in a bier intended for dead kings, and weeping had supplanted the cheers. Under the weight of affliction, Isabeau for a time lost all interest in public affairs. She did not trouble Burgundy, who had begun to negotiate a betrothal between the small Marguerite de Nevers and the new Dauphin, whose elder brother lay still unburied.

Mourning for the Dauphin increased Isabeau's worries about her daughter; the eleven-year-old widow of England's King was in Windsor Castle, surrounded by all the ceremony which her station required, but in actual fact Lancaster's prisoner. Delegations from France were allowed to hold brief, formal conversations with her, but all attempts to negotiate her return to Paris and the restoration of her substantial dowry, were frustrated by Henry's cold refusal to respond, which aroused uneasy suspicions. Even Burgundy believed that Lancaster was considering a marriage between his son and the little widow. But Isabeau had other plans, with which the Duke of Burgundy, on second thought, agreed; she wanted to find a husband for her daughter in Germany.

Before summer came, Lancaster decided that keeping the dowry was not worth the loss of popular favor. No king of England had
sought a French bride for himself or his kinsmen without penalty. Preparations were made for Madame Isabelle's homeward journey. Meanwhile, Burgundy, with a great entourage, waited in state in Calais.

The prospect of her daughter's homecoming put an end to the depression from which Isabeau had suffered throughout the spring, when she had determined to do penance for the damage she had unwittingly done to French interests and to those who attempted to thwart her over the past years. During a summer storm lightning had struck Isabeau's bedchamber; the violence of the blow, the sight of the bedcurtains in flames, had shocked her into a vow to alter her way of life. But when the storm had passed, and her bedchamber was repaired, the Queen came to see things in another light. She established a church and required weekly masses to be said for the soul of the dead Dauphin. And thus she considered she had done her duty.

Her father, Duke Stefan of Bavaria, had resumed his visits to the French court. He expressed interest in the widow of the Sire de Coucy, who had fallen before Nicopolis. Their daughter was heiress to the barony of Coucy, an extensive and important territory located in Picardy on the borders of Flanders, Hainault and Brabant. It was anticipated that the young damsel would in time cede her proprietary rights in this land to her powerful stepfather of Bavaria. Not only would the domain of Coucy be a brilliant addition to the block of lands belonging to the House of Bavaria, but it was strategically important as a gateway to France. Burgundy, naturally, supported the marriage proposal; as did Isabeau, as did Berry, who occupied himself at Bicetre collecting exotic beasts. Only Bourbon hesitated; he was not convinced of the wisdom of the marriage. Orléans did not appear at the meetings held to discuss the marriage agreement; he surprised Isabeau and his fellow Regents by buying the barony of Coucy from the heiress. The King ratified by his signature the contract in which the daughter of the Sire de Coucy declared “that in the interest of the Kingdom, she could do no better than to transfer the domain of Coucy to Monseigneur the Duke of Orléans”. For the first time Louis tasted triumph; he had overtrumped Burgundy and the Bavarian princes. Their rage and disappointment made it obvious to him at the same time when he must make his next move.

In the midst of Bavarian lands lay the Duchy of Luxembourg; it belonged to the Margrave of Moravia, a kinsman and ally of Wenceslaus. This territory, a wedge between Flanders, Hainault and Brabant, on the one hand, and the states subject to Ruprecht of Bavaria on the other, was strategically crucial. The Margrave of Moravia, who wished at any cost to safeguard his property from the hated Bavarians, suggested that Orléans place Luxembourg under his protection.

The realization that his star was rising stimulated Louis to increase his political activity. While the Queen was absent, he managed to send his friend, Marshal Boucicaut, to Genoa as governor. Bou-cicaut, who understood and agreed with Louis in everything, performed his duties in an exemplary manner from the first day onward. He managed to maintain order on the other side of the Alps without endangering the peace with neighbor and ally.

Once more Isabeau and Burgundy had bitter reason to bemoan the actions of the King's brother. Each of them attempted, in his own fashion, to outwit him; the Queen, enraged because war against Gian Galeazzo was out of the question while Boucicaut was governor of Genoa, entered heart and soul into the intrigues of Emperor Ruprecht; Burgundy, meanwhile, struck elsewhere. Through artful political maneuvering, he brought the Duchy of Brittany within his sphere of influence.

Louis was in a grim mood, chiefly because of Burgundy's successful countermove. The King, more gravely ill than ever, was unapproachable; he seemed, in fact, scarcely human. Almost every day Isabeau received envoys from Germany; Louis was aware of this, although the Queen attempted to behave as though nothing unusual were happening. The Dukes of Berry and Bourbon remained aloof, wishing to see which way the cat would jump. In the Council all was confusion and discontent; it was impossible to steer a steady course with so many conflicting opinions. Louis d'Orléans craved an oudet for his feelings of hatred for Lancaster and Burgundy; he challenged his former brother-in-arms to a duel. It occurred to him to do this after he had seen his niece, the little Isabelle, move pale and mournful through the halls of Saint-Pol, still accorded the dignity and respect of a queen. She had carried back from England an attitude of injured majesty which seemed almost ludicrous in so young a child, but the grief in her bright round eyes was real. She
had loved King Richard deeply; he had always been kind to her.

“And he loved me too,” said the child, sobbing. “He lifted me in the air when he took leave of me before he went to Ireland, and he must have kissed me forty times.” When Madame Isabelle said this, her tears would not stop flowing.

Louis felt deep compassion for the unthroned Queen, the child who had become a widow before she became a woman. It would be extremely difficult to arrange so brilliant a marriage for her again. Before long she would, perhaps, be forced to set aside the high rank which she now bore so self-consciously. She sat surrounded by princesses and duchesses, arrayed in the state robes of her dowry, in furnished apartments set aside for Her Majesty, the Dowager-Queen of England. But all the ceremony, all the homage and pomp, could bring no color to her small, stiff face. Upset and angry, Louis felt it was his duty to do what the French court apparently considered unnecessary; he flung himself forward as his niece's champion and challenged Lancaster to single combat.

The Englishman replied dryly that he found the proposal ridiculous; he had no inclination to fight with one who was his inferior in rank.

In fact, things were not going smoothly for England's new monarch; he discovered all too quickly that one cannot learn to rule in a few days. With Burgundy's help he managed to achieve an extension of the peace treaty with France. He was so distracted by internal affairs that he had no time even to think about attacking French soil. Louis, believing that France should not be cheated of the chance to strike at England while it was weakened by dissension, played his trump card against Burgundy. In the summer of 1402 he set out with a great entourage for Coucy, which was favorably located near the border, and entered into negotiations with representatives of the Margrave of Moravia for the purchase of Luxembourg. The agreement was reached without difficulty. For the sum of 100,000 ducats Moravia sold the Duchy to Orléans. Louis went almost immediately to his new domain where he approached the lords of the region and bound them to him in the traditional way with gifts and grants. Thus a dangerous rift was opened in the Bavarian sphere of influence by Louis d'Orléans; in case of war he could rely now on an army of vassals and their followers. Both Orléans and Burgundy had adopted highly provocative stances; neither could move now
without mortally wounding his adversary or being mortally wounded himself.

One afternoon in May, 1403, Isabeau, on returning from a stroll in the gardens of Saint-Pol, accompanied by her entourage, heard with surprise that the Duke of Orléans had requested an audience with her; he had been waiting for a considerable time in the anteroom. Relations between the Queen and her brother-in-law had grown extremely chilly over the past few years; they spoke to each other only on state occasions and maintained the illusion of mutual courtesy only for the sake of appearances. Isabeau was involved with Burgundy's policies; she was on the side of Burgundy and Bavaria, and she did not trust Orléans. During the past few months she had begun to show her disapproval by openly avoiding him.