Root of the Tudor Rose (16 page)

‘I'm dying, John,' said Henry through parched lips, ‘let's not pretend otherwise.' He raised his hand feebly to quell his brother's loving denial. ‘Comfort my poor wife when I am gone. I cannot leave her much, the jewellery must be sold to pay off debts but she is provided for. Come, have you brought a scribe with you? Good. There are things I need to arrange and I must tell you what they are.'

With what little energy he could muster, the King dictated a codicil to the will which had been drawn up before he sailed for France and before the birth of his son. The fact that there was now a male heir to the throne made the corrections imperative.

‘He must be known as the Prince of Wales,' Henry insisted between laboured breaths, ‘he is the eldest son of the sovereign. It is my particular wish.' The scribe made a note of the fact. Slowly and painfully but with deliberation, Henry went on to dictate his wishes for his son's education and upbringing. His brother Humphrey of Gloucester was to be made responsible for the baby, guarding and protecting him in all things. The Prince's household was to be run by Henry's trusted friend Sir Walter Hungerford. John of Bedford was to oversee English interests in France.

During the ensuing days, Catherine spent hours lingering near sickroom, fanning her face in the oppressive heat, waiting to be summoned to her husband's bedside. He had not yet asked for her but she wanted to be near at hand when he did.

Then, on the last day of August, she rose abruptly from her seat as a priest, clutching a rosary, emerged from the King's room followed by John of Bedford, his eyes red-rimmed and swollen. He didn't need to tell her what she already knew in her heart.

‘He's dead?'

John nodded mutely.

‘And he never sent for me,' she said in a dull voice.

The early days of September passed in a dim, grey muddle. Not that Catherine cared very much. She had been shocked by the sudden death of her sister then, with her husband's death so soon afterwards, she had simply let other people take over her life. She did what she was told to do, she ate when food was put in front of her, and she tried to sleep when she went to bed but that was the hardest thing. The bed felt vast and lonely and that was when she missed Henry most of all, missed curling up against his broad back. She remembered how, in winter, she would warm her icy feet on the backs of his legs until he squealed in laughing protest before turning towards her, taking her in his arms, and warming her thoroughly. She smiled at those memories but her throat ached with longing for him and tears were never far away.

She tried to take an interest in arrangements for the funeral. John of Bedford had explained to her that, really, Henry must be taken home to England for his burial. His people would want to pay homage to him in his own country. It was unthinkable that he should be buried in France.

‘But, surely, that won't be possible, it … it will take too long to convey him back to England!' She couldn't bring herself to say that the journey would take many weeks and that, in this heat, her husband's corpse would surely soon begin to rot. John understood her hesitation and explained to her as kindly as he could that Henry's organs had already been removed and given a Christian burial in a French graveyard. By now his body had been embalmed in aromatic herbs and balsam, wrapped in lengths of silk, and placed in a wooden coffin which had then been sealed inside another made of lead. It would safely make the journey to England, no matter how long it took.

In the second week of September, Catherine stood outside the door of the donjon, watching as the funeral cortège assembled for its slow, solemn journey across France. Several princes, lords, and knights of the royal household and four hundred men-at-arms would accompany Henry's coffin on its long journey home to England. Suddenly she gasped, gripping John's arm.

‘Henry!' she cried. ‘It's Henry. Look, John, look!' She pointed to a figure lying on top of the coffin, dressed in Henry's robes, wearing a crown and holding an orb and sceptre.

John caught her as her knees gave way and her body slumped, cursing himself for not having warned her of what she would see. It was an effigy, a manikin made of boiled leather, but from a distance it might have been her husband, back from the dead. Shaking uncontrollably, she covered her face with her hands, blotting out the image, as John put his arm around her shoulders to comfort her.

Catherine joined the funeral cortège later in the month, escorted by John of Bedford. By the second week of October, having made frequent stops for masses to be said for the dead king in churches and cathedrals all along the route, the long, bleak procession of mourners reached Calais and waited for suitable ships to convey them across the English channel.

It was in Calais that she received the news which, if she'd been honest with herself, she had been half-expecting for years. Nevertheless, it was news which nearly pushed her over the edge of reason. In a message sent with great haste from Paris she learned that, on October the twenty-first, her father, King Charles VI, had finally succumbed to his torment. Now her world really had come to an end, she had nothing to live for. There was too much death. Her sister, Michelle, had been taken from her too suddenly and, though they had seen little of each other as children and had never been very close, Catherine still felt a great sadness at her death. And now the only two men who had ever loved her were both dead. She had no husband, no father. Nothing.

She no longer even had the comforting presence of John of Bedford since, on hearing of the death of the French king, he had decided that he must stay on in France to represent England at the funeral and make certain that, in any public declaration of succession to the French throne, the French people would be left in no doubt that Catherine's son, King Henry VI was now their sovereign. They must not expect to see the Dauphin Charles on the throne of France.

Death and decay seemed to be everywhere that October. The beauty of autumn leaves, turning red and yellow, falling to the ground in great colourful drifts to reveal the skeletal shapes of trees, was just another aspect of death for Catherine. In desolation, her world seemed to close in on her and her troubled mind painted pictures of anguish and grief as she slept. The horses returned to haunt her and the screaming children came again in the night.

She almost forgot the reason why she had, until now, always looked forward so much to this time of the year; but Guillemote had not forgotten. So when she came into the royal bedchamber to wake her mistress on the morning of October the twenty-seventh, she brought with her a small posy of autumn flowers, Michaelmas daisies, hawkbit, and a few late roses, to place on Catherine's bedside table.

‘Happy birthday, Your Highness,' she greeted her.

Catherine opened her eyes. ‘Happy birthday, Guillemote? I hardly think so.' She blinked back sudden tears. ‘I'm twenty-one years old today and already my life is over.'

Guillemote was thoughtful. ‘My Lady,' she said, ‘I believe I have been in your service long enough to presume to correct you occasionally, without fear of punishment.'

‘That is most impertinent of you, Guillemote,' Catherine said, with a wry smile of affection for her friend.

‘Forgive me, Your Highness,' Guillemote continued, ‘but I have been thinking. Bad things often come in threes and you have suffered three most distressing bereavements in just over three months. You can no longer be the three things you have been in the past. You can no longer be a sister to Michelle and you cannot be a wife to your husband nor yet a daughter to your father. So, on this birthday you must look forward to being a mother to your son. He is still a little baby and he is already a king but he will not be ready for kingship for many, many years. Until he is, he will need all your help and all your devotion. Today, on this birthday, the direction of your life must change.'

Catherine felt herself losing control, her lower lip trembling. ‘Guillemote,' she said, ‘dear Guillemote. Your thorough lack of respect is very refreshing.'

It was then that the tears came, floods and torrents of tears, seeming to wash through her shuddering frame, sluicing away all the sorrow, all the bitterness and all the frustration of the months gone by. At first, Guillemote tried to comfort her but, wisely, she decided to let her mistress weep for all that she had lost in such a very short time.

Catherine remembered Guillemot's words as she stood alone on the deck of the
Trinity Royal
, her eyes firmly fixed on the horizon. She was within sight of England and, as she watched the white cliffs rising steeply out of the water, she knew that the reception she was about to face would be very different from the last time. Her gaze came to rest on the closely guarded catafalque which supported Henry's coffin with its hideous boiled leather effigy of the King. Then she remembered that other homecoming, less than two short years ago when the people of Dover, in a frenzy of enthusiasm, had waded waist-deep into the freezing water to welcome them both, the living Monarch and his Lady, waving and shouting their greetings, jostling each other to get near the boat.

‘
Long live the King
!' That tumultuous welcoming shout still seemed to echo in her memory as she looked at the people who now waited in dark, silent groups on the foreshore, watching as the heavy lead coffin was lowered on ropes and pulleys from the
Trinity Royal
and manoeuvred carefully onto the wooden jetty in the harbour mouth. Henry was back on English soil and the only sound that welcomed him was carried on the wind from the tower of the little church of St Mary-in-Castro, where a single bell tolled the death knell for the departed king.

Catherine was still the Queen of England and there was still a King Henry. But Catherine was now the Dowager Queen and her son was king of both England and France. He was barely ten months old.

Part Two

Owen

Maent yn dweud fy mod yn caru,

Lle nad wyf, mi allaf dyngu.

Yn lle ‘rwyf yn caru mwyaf

Y mae lleiaf sôn amdanaf.

People say I have a lover,

Who she is they can't discover.

Though she holds my heart in tether

No one links our names together.

‘Maent yn dwedyd' (‘They Say') – an old Welsh folk song.

Chapter Nine

Windsor Castle, November 1422

‘
Diawl
!' Owain cursed loudly as he knocked over the ink horn.

‘Clumsy devil!' Maredydd jumped up from his seat. ‘Thank God there wasn't much ink in it, it's hardly spilled at all. Here, let me help you to clear it up. You're going to have to do better than this if you want to impress old Hungerford.'

The two were alone in a small room behind the great library of Windsor Castle, entirely illegally. To be fair to Maredydd, he was doing a favour for his young kinsman, who had newly arrived at Windsor from the far north of Wales having used up what little money he had on the long journey south. He was desperately in need of employment and Maredydd knew that one of the household clerks, thanks to his unsavoury habit of frequenting the cheaper whorehouses of Southwark, had recently died of the pox. There was a vacancy.

Before his mishap with the ink horn, Owain had been leafing through columns of figures in a parchment ledger. Now he straightened up, rubbing his back. ‘The light is going,' he said. ‘I can barely see what I'm doing. But I think I've got the hang of it.'

‘Not my line of business,' said Maredydd. ‘We gentlemen-at-arms don't concern ourselves with such things. Anyway, you shouldn't appear to know too much about the accounting systems, otherwise Hungerford will want to know how you came by the knowledge. And we're not supposed to be here.'

‘Let's go into the town, then,' said Owain. ‘I've worked up a rare thirst squinting at those books.'

‘Let's find something to eat first. We'll see if we can scrounge something from that pompous little Frenchie in the kitchen.'

This was a quiet time of day for the kitchen staff, the debris from the midday dinner had been cleared away and the scullions had finished their cleaning and scouring. With order restored to his realm, Anton was standing at a table in his private room at the back of the main kitchen, next to the larder. This was the inner sanctum where he stored his most expensive ingredients: sugar, sweet galingale, and grains of paradise. Here the kitchen accounts were kept and it was here, under lock and key in a small coffer on a high shelf, that he kept his precious copy of
Le Viander
, a collection of recipes written by the great Valois family chef Taillevant and given to him as a gift on completion of his apprenticeship in the Valois kitchen. With pestle and mortar in hand, he was grinding valuable imported sugar and spices for a
poudre-douce
when Maredydd knocked at the half-open door.

‘
Entrez
!', he trilled and looked up. ‘Ah! The ‘andsome Welsh gentleman-at-arms! And why are you not at the funeral?'