The Agincourt Bride (22 page)

‘Why should we trust you, for instance?’ Catherine interrupted. The colour had returned to her face and she looked grave and alert.

Tanneguy nodded approvingly. ‘That is a good question, Princesse, and I will answer it as briefly as I can. As a youth I swore my oath of allegiance to the house of Orleans and when your Uncle Louis was murdered, I swore another oath to bring his murderer to justice. The dauphin shared this desire and he was our hope for France’s future –’ he slipped suddenly from his seat and went on one knee before Prince Charles ‘– but now that hope must rest with you, Highness. You are not the legal dauphin, but I fear that your brother Prince Jean has been for too long under the influence of Burgundy and so, while my lord of Orleans remains a prisoner in England, I must now pledge my oath of allegiance to you.’ Dramatically he grasped Prince Charles’ hand and pressed it to his lips. ‘I am your liege man in life and limb, as long as you pursue the interests of France and oppose the power of Burgundy.’

Charles looked bemused but also gratified and allowed his hand to be kissed without protest. Conscious that my presence might be untoward, I kept myself a shadow in the background but Maître Tanneguy turned to fix me with a look and said, ‘You are witness, goodwife, to that solemn oath. I will do everything in my power to further the cause of both Prince Charles and Princess Catherine.’

‘But what shall we do now?’ demanded Charles impatiently. ‘Surely we must tell the queen that Louis is dead.’

‘Indeed we must, Highness.’ Tanneguy stood up and bowed solemnly to both young people. ‘Please accept my profound condolences on the death of your brother. I will go now and call the court physicians and summon Montjoy Herald to convey the news,’ he told them. ‘These things are best done by the appointed people.’

Even so, it was two days before the public announcement was made that the dauphin had died of a sudden fever. No further details were given as to the cause of death and, by then, all the arrangements had been made for a magnificent funeral Mass at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, followed by a funeral procession behind the coffin to the royal basilica at the abbey of St Denis. Catherine accompanied the king and queen to these obsequies in taxing conditions of wind and freezing rain and returned shivering and red-eyed, but I soon discovered that her tears were not only for the brother she had just buried.

‘Bonne is dead too, Mette,’ she revealed as she dropped her sodden fur-lined mantle from her shoulders. ‘She was to have represented the house of Orleans at the funeral, but a messenger came to tell us that she had died in the night. It is terrible – so much death and sorrow!’ She sank down into the cushions of her chair, reaching her hands out to the fire, as if silently beseeching solace from the licking flames. Agnes slipped onto a stool beside her, murmuring a prayer.

‘How did this happen, Mademoiselle?’ I asked, shocked to the brink of tears myself at this unexpected event. Bonne and I had hardly been on the best of terms, but I would never have wished her dead.

It was a tale too often heard. Bonne had miscarried her baby, suddenly and violently, in the middle of the night. Although she had cried out for help, no one had been able to stop the bleeding. Poor Bonne had died in a bloodbath every bit as gory and tragic as any casualty of the battle of Agincourt.

I
f, like a monkish chronicler, I was to set down a full and proper history of those times, I would record in detail the major events of every year as they took place, but this is the story of Catherine and the extraordinary way her life and mine entwined together and for the next two years, frankly, there were no events of any note – at least not compared with what had gone before and subsequent developments. New faces came and went among the small corps of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting but Agnes de Blagny remained ever present, faithful, quiet and unaffected, compliant and devout and, if I am completely honest, a bit insipid. However, their shared past gave them a sense of kinship and they complemented each other – the lustrous and the matt, the lively and the steady, the white hart and the lamb. Together they read and embroidered, attended court, attended Mass, rode in the park, learned to fly hawks and occasionally, at Prince Charles’ instigation, hunted with them in the Bois de Vincennes.

Catherine’s brother remained a close companion and, when the mourning periods for Agincourt and the dauphin’s death were over, surviving members of noble families flocked back to court, including numerous young lords and ladies raised prematurely to high rank by the Agincourt deaths, some of whom inevitably formed a ‘set’ around the princess royal and Prince Charles. There was dancing and entertainment, flirtations and frivolities, but no talk of Catherine’s marriage and no romances. Hers was a regulated and privileged existence, governed by court protocol, church rules and social taboos. Looking back, she was marking time – we were all marking time.

However, although Armagnac’s tight control of the city gates and guard meant that Paris remained relatively quiet, things were far from ordered beyond the walls. King Henry lurked across the Sleeve, raising another large force to invade Normandy, and the Duke of Burgundy tramped an army through Picardy as predicted, marching on Paris. When he failed to bully his way back to power at the king’s side, he took revenge by occupying the town of Compiègne and seizing several other royal castles. All this violent but inconclusive warmongering had the usual dire effect on life among the common people – towns were ransacked, women raped, villages plundered and once again the poor peasants who managed to stay alive were unable to plant crops or raise stock, so that when winter came everyone went hungry.

And it was a very, very cold winter. Even the River Seine, the lifeline that normally brought supplies to Paris from the less battered valleys to the east, froze over. There were bread riots as prices rose and we were constantly led to expect incursions, either from the English or the Burgundians. The riots were crushed and the gates held, but the city seethed under siege and curfew, while the Count of Armagnac argued constantly with the queen and tyrannised a council weakened by a lack of powerful and experienced members.

Having been officially declared the new dauphin after Louis’ death, Prince Jean stubbornly refused to travel to Paris from his wife’s home in Hainault, despite promises of safe passage. The closest he came was to Compiègne, the once-royal citadel in Picardy which had fallen to Burgundy. In an effort to lure her son into French-held territory, the queen travelled as far as Senlis, a day’s ride away, but the nearest she came to contact with Jean was a visit from his wife, Jacqueline of Hainault, and her mother who was the Duke of Burgundy’s sister. Burgundy’s grip on the new dauphin was apparently unshakeable.

Unwillingly, Charles had accompanied the Queen to Senlis. ‘Jean does not trust our mother any more than we do,’ Charles murmured to Catherine at one of their breakfast meetings soon after his return from the abortive trip. ‘While we were in Senlis, I sent Tanneguy to Compiègne in secret, with my pledge of allegiance to Jean, but he still refused to come and meet us. His response was to tell me to come alone next time. He would not treat with a Jezebel.’

Catherine appeared slightly uncomfortable at hearing her mother so described. ‘Did Maître Tanneguy say how he looked?’

‘Fierce was the word he used,’ replied Charles succinctly.

‘No, I mean was he in good health? Did he seem otherwise happy?’

Charles shrugged. ‘As to that I do not know but I met his wife Jacqueline. She is beautiful and will bring him a large chunk of the Lowlands in her inheritance, so he cannot be too unhappy.’

Catherine glared at her brother, unimpressed by this display of male bigotry. ‘You cannot grumble, brother!’ she exclaimed. ‘You have just been granted the Duchy of Berry. Not a bad fourteenth birthday present!’

The previous year the old Duke of Berry had died in his bed and since he was survived only by daughters, the council had approved his wish that his titles and estates should pass to his godson, Prince Charles.

‘True,’ admitted Charles smugly. ‘Suffering a childhood with a cranky old godfather had some compensations after all!’

Then, unexpectedly and shockingly, we heard that Dauphin Jean, too, had died. The report delivered to the queen by the Hainault herald said that doctors had been unable to relieve a putrid abscess in his ear, which had driven him demented with pain before finally sending him to his maker shortly before Easter. Poor Jean, he was only eighteen, and I am sure the young thug of the nursery would have wanted a more glorious end. There was a rumour that he had been poisoned by Orleanists who abhorred his affinity with Burgundy, but of course there were always rumours after a sudden death. Then I remembered Tanneguy’s dramatic vow of allegiance to Charles on the day Dauphin Louis died and wondered if the mysterious secretary’s visit to Compiègne could possibly have had any connection with Jean’s death, but I did not discuss it with Catherine. Sometimes it seemed wise to keep my thoughts to myself.

Whether Tanneguy du Chastel had any hand in the death or not, his wish was granted and Prince Charles duly became dauphin. Then the council appointed him governor of Paris. How a mere boy was expected to govern a starving city, riddled with factions and under external threat from two hostile armies, was a mystery to me but, with Tanneguy as his guide and mentor, Charles took the job very seriously.

Death and its consequences stalked the royal family in this period. A few months later, a sudden apoplexy carried off the Duke of Anjou and as a result Queen Isabeau found herself without friends in council. To Catherine’s utter shock and surprise, the Count of Armagnac grabbed the opportunity to rid himself of his
bête noir
and produced a royal edict, signed by the king, which accused the queen of treason by dint of an adulterous affair with a nobody of a knight called Sir Louis Bourdon. There was no trial. Within hours the hapless Sir Louis was arrested, tied into a weighted sack and thrown into the Seine and the queen was forced into a closed litter at sword-point and carried off to be confined in the royal stronghold of Tours, a hundred leagues from Paris.

The dimmest of wits knew that the king was incapable of fastening his own doublet, let alone comprehending the crimes and punishments he had put his name to, but no one was prepared to take the queen’s part against the devious Armagnac. Even her son showed no inclination to help her.

‘The king signed the edict,’ Charles shrugged, when Catherine pleaded with him. ‘I am only the dauphin.’

I had never seen Catherine so angry.

‘He says he owes her nothing, Mette. She abandoned him as a child and he will do nothing for her now. But she is his mother and this is a totally spurious charge! I doubt if the queen ever even met Sir Louis Bourdon. You know how she is about precedence and protocol. If she did commit adultery – and it is a big if – she would not do so with anyone of lower rank than a count. Yet look what happened to that poor knight. He didn’t stand a chance. And what will they do to
her
when she is out of sight in Tours? We are none of us safe, when bullies like Armagnac think they can play monarch.’

‘Only last week you told me that you feared the Queen would succeed in bringing Burgundy back to Paris, Mademoiselle,’ I reminded her. ‘At least we may be spared that now.’

‘Yes and that is the real reason why Charles does not intervene. Tanneguy makes sure he is terrified of Burgundy, but the truth is we are all at the mercy of whoever holds the Royal Seal and the Constable’s Sword. Oh, Mette, if only my father were not ill, if only Louis had not died! Dear God, the queen may not be good, but at least she is sane and she is strong. That is why Armagnac wants her out of the way and that is why we need her back.’

I was astonished that the day had come when Catherine was defending her mother, but there it was … uncertainty can induce strange alliances.

As to my own family affairs, I no longer knew whether Jean-Michel was alive or dead. My regular enquiries at the stables did bear some fruit when a royal scout who knew of my plight returned from a dangerous sortie into Picardy, having made a point of sheltering at the monastery in Abbeville. There the monks revealed that in the spring after the battle of Agincourt, Jean-Michel had recovered enough from his leg wound to limp off down the road towards Rouen, where he intended to find river transport to Paris. They had tried to persuade him to wait for a royal convoy or join an armed party of travellers, but he had insisted that he would make his own way and that was the last anyone had seen of him. I had heard enough stories of banditry and violence in the countryside to make me fear the worst. Whilst at last allowing myself to weep for his loss, I also scolded my husband’s ghost for walking out into danger. Perhaps he had reckoned that a solitary limping vagrant would be of no interest to the
écorcheurs
, but as time went on it became obvious that he had been fatally wrong; poor, dear, stubborn Jean-Michel. Even so, a tiny spark of hope remained before I could completely resign myself to widowhood and Alys and Luc still harboured desperate hope that their father might one day return. War can pin people down for long periods when towns and cities come under siege or are occupied by a new power. The faint possibility remained that Jean-Michel was caught up in the civil unrest that had displaced so many.

Unlike her brothers and sisters, who had all been married as children, Catherine celebrated her sixteenth birthday if not free, at least single. With Paris under virtual siege, marriage to anyone seemed unlikely, least of all to King Henry who at that time was busy storming one Norman stronghold after another.

It was my Alys who gleaned the first inkling that our lives were about to tumble into the abyss. She was still the apple of her Grandmère Lanière’s eye and she paid regular visits to the harness-shop. One day she returned looking unusually troubled.

‘The guilds are arming themselves,’ she told me. ‘My uncles talk of nothing else and I noticed that they all have the cross of St Andrew sewn under their hoods.’