The Queen's Lover (29 page)

Isabeau, not her husband, would sit in the throne at the talks. The King had reacted badly to the traveling. In his rooms, over Catherine's at Pontoise, he was hovering between weak sanity and one of his mad times; and no one wanted him to suddenly start screeching like an eagle or running around the
room tearing off his clothes in the presence of Henry of England. So Burgundy had ruled that it would be better if he and the Queen represented France in the King's place. But Burgundy had done as much as was possible to make sure the Queen's taste for luxury was respected; to lavish visible honors on her. "It's all just right, isn't it?" Catherine went nervously on. "Don't you like it?"

Isabeau only squinted malevolently at her, as if she'd said something very stupid, and grunted.

Henry of England looked round the room. There were half a dozen secretaries to hand, but no one he trusted like Tudor. He beckoned. He pulled a ring off his finger and held it out to the young Welshman: the rubies set in it glittered.

So did Owain Tudor's eyes. "I've got a job for you and your cloak of invisibility, Tudor," Henry said easily. "Take this to the Princess at Pontoise, and tell her thank you for the pretty portrait, and, mm, anything else that strikes you as right...love talk. Only don't tell the whole world, all right?"

The Welshman nodded. But he didn't enter into the spirit of the thing. His face was set.

Henry went on whistling under his breath as he watched Tudor go out to his horse. But he didn't altogether like that look. He liked his men to be enthusiastic.

Tudor hadn't wanted to come to these talks, he recalled. He'd been asking all winter to go back to England. Perhaps that was what the smoldering look was about. He'd been useful in France; and he'd done too well with that first negotiation with Burgundy to be sent away yet. But it would be time, soon, to let him go. He wasn't a boy anymore. He was big and strapping; old enough for a wife and children.

Henry of England turned back to the portrait, forgot Owain Tudor, and grinned. The French Princess with the pushy mother really was a very pretty girl. He couldn't believe his luck.

Owain rode as far as the inn, got down from his horse with a face like thunder, went in, and wrote a brief note from Henry to go with the ring. He'd asked the King seriously enough and of
ten enough for permission to go home. It hadn't been granted. Loyalty and obedience were one thing; but he couldn't run lover's errands to Catherine.

He put everything back in his saddlebag. He looked around. He breathed relief. There was his old comrade Owain Dwn, drinking in a corner. Thank God for Welshmen, he thought.

"Dwn," he said. "Do me a favor. Take this to the Princess at Pontoise for me, and I'll buy you all the drink you can swallow for the rest of the talks."

Dwn gave him a skeptical look. "Why?" he said.

"
Cer i'r diawl,
man, don't ask stupid questions. I don't have to explain a favor. Just take the bag."

Dwn shrugged. "More fool you," he said cheerfully. "We could be here for weeks. Do you know how much I can drink in weeks, if someone else is paying?"

Owain passed him the saddlebag. "There's a ring in there, and a letter," he said shortly. He didn't want drinkers' camaraderie. "From the King. Give them to her, personally."

It was only when Dwn had already cantered off down the Pontoise road that Owain realized he'd been so eager to get shot of the ring that he'd handed over the whole saddlebag, containing most of his own possessions too--his knife and spoon, his little box of poems, and a change of linen. He hoped Dwn wouldn't get drunk over there and forget it somewhere.

Catherine stared. The King of England was slightly built and not very tall, with rat-colored hair, a long, thin, pale face and pop eyes set very wide, like his brothers'. He had gray at his temples. He had lines running from nose to mouth, where his too-red, too-full lips were fixed in a determinedly cheerful grin. She rather liked the grin. But he was nothing like the prince she'd been expecting.

She had to call consciously to mind that this man represented England, and England represented everything she should want for herself--calm and order, dignity and decorum, in a place where she'd never need to be frightened--and very likely also peace for France.

She tried to make her eyes lose their focus and swim and be
dazzled in the sunlight and glitter of cloth of gold outside the tent. She wanted to feel that her heart was stopping and her breath was coming fast and shallow. She'd felt that before; once. But now she felt nothing. He was here, the man she was going to try and marry, and all she felt was desperately uncomfortable in her gold and red gown, with the ruby ring he'd sent her scratching away at her finger, and awkward at the knowledge that, by her side, her uncle of Burgundy's grim face would be split apart by the rictus he wore for a smile.

In her mind, she was reviewing all the scenes she'd ever imagined with her future husband as Queen of England--redrawing the wedding scene, which still took place in a Westminster Abbey that looked exactly like Notre Dame Cathedral--so that the groom at her side no longer had the black hair and height and grace she couldn't quite scrub out of her heart, but was this odd-looking rat of a man with the awkward eyes. Redrawing what followed. The dinner. The disrobing. She was a fool to feel so disappointed. What had she expected?

At some point in the morning's negotiations--long speeches of formal praise which Catherine couldn't pay proper attention to--Catherine became aware of her mother. Isabeau was busy. She'd called a lady-in-waiting to her other side and was whispering instructions. Catherine felt uneasy when the woman left the tent a few minutes later and headed for the French side of the field. Her mother sat on, looking smug.

Isabeau had musicians playing in her tent after the single combat that ended the morning's events.

Catherine didn't know whether it was a put-up job that the King of England had won his sword fight with his brother, the grizzled Duke of Bedford, in the open center of the field, but she certainly admired his skill. He fought with concentration. He was utterly still; then struck like a snake when he saw his opportunity. He was far more impressive when he was with men than Catherine had found him in conversation.

When it was over, and the King and his brother were sweating and laughing and putting away their swords and clapping
each other on the back, Catherine walked toward them to try her luck at flirting. She let her eyes go wide and her voice husky with appreciation, and told him, "I've never seen such skill as yours." She was pleased to see his already glistening skin go a touch pinker with pleasure.

It was Isabeau who slyly invited the King and his brother to her tent for refreshments, going against Burgundy's strict rule that no one, under any circumstances, was to cross the field. The Duke of Bedford looked dubious and excused himself, heading off with the tight-lipped Duke of Burgundy to the table on which a restrained meal for the negotiators had been set out. But Henry, flushed and victorious, bowed with more confidence than before and replied, too loudly, "With great pleasure!"

Isabeau's tent contained a great many cushions and embroideries, as well as a small table on which wines and meats and, of course, many bowls of sweets were set out. She made a point of showing the King of England the embroideries and plying him with wine and food, cackling cheerfully, and explaining that the finest cushions of all were in her daughter's tent.

With a blush so hot she thought it might take her face off, Catherine realized what the lady-in-waiting had been ordered to do that morning--take cushions and rugs out of the main tent, which still seemed overstuffed and wadded to anyone not used to the preferences of the Queen, but which an expert in the ways of Isabeau might guess had been denuded of several hundredweight of luxury goods. The cushions must have gone to Catherine's tent.

"Stay, listen to the music," Isabeau ordered Henry breezily. "You will be tired. So much talking. Have a rest. Sleep if you like. The tent flaps shut. My daughter will attend to you personally."

It was too late to protest. Blowing her daughter a merry kiss, Isabeau was already wafting fatly away with her servants, over the walkway boards set across the field, back to the conference tent. She and the King of England were alone, in the Queen's tent, with its flaps up; looking out at the musicians.

Henry stayed a few feet away, staring at Catherine with a mixture of intense delight and alarm. He couldn't have expected this any more than she had. But she'd been willing enough to go up and shamelessly flatter him after he'd displayed his fencing skills; and this was just one step further down the same road; and she probably should have expected it of her mother.

Henry of England grinned again. There was panic rising inside her, but it was hard to be afraid of that grin. "Well," he said awkwardly, "aren't you tired after all that talk?"

She smiled and moved closer, thinking, very coolly, This is one way forward, I suppose, with one part of her head, while, in another part of it, all she could hear was the whoosh and rush of blood and breath.

He patted the nearest cushions. "Let's sit down here," he said, and she could hear he was trying to seductively soften his tone. Perhaps he was feeling as scared as she was. "Get to know each other a bit better."

The smaller tent was a love nest. They'd thought it all out. It wasn't just cushions and strategically placed wine behind the closed flaps. There was a basin of water, too, and towels; and someone had set out a table with pins and brushes to repair her hair and torn linen with.

He kissed her before he went, an hour or so later. Held her close--quietly, with none of the wild urgency that had been in him before, but very tight--so tight she could hardly breathe. The musicians were still playing outside.

All he said was one awkward phrase: "I had no idea you'd be such a pretty girl."

Yet she liked the soft look she surprised in his eyes as he said those uninspiring words: the kind of look that made her think that she might, when she stopped hurting, and dripping, and discovering new bruises and bite marks every time she moved a muscle, want to come back into his arms. She'd had to shut her eyes at first and imagine him looking different; she'd been surprised and disappointed every time she'd touched that stringy hair; but now, afterward, when she'd learned what it felt like
to be in this man's embrace, she didn't like to remember anymore that she'd started by wanting to imagine black hair and blue eyes and youth.

There'd been a fierceness in her own body's response to this stranger that she hadn't expected. There was a slack, unquestioning wonder in her now at the fact that she knew where the veins rose in his flesh; how his muscles felt under her hands; how his hairs curled on his skin; what made him sigh and tense and cry out. He had a mole on his left shoulder. She'd kissed it. She glowed at the memory of his skin. She was too confused to be sure, but she thought she felt proud. She'd done it. She'd tasted sin, and power. She'd become one flesh with Henry of England. She was beginning to see that that would change everything. Her mother had been right to push her into this. The Queen was no fool. There was no way back now. There'd have to be a deal...a marriage and a peace. All of France would be grateful when the marriage ended the war, Catherine told herself, wondering why she had to persuade herself of this. She was doing something better than just helping herself.

There was a messenger waiting for him outside the tent.

Henry looked irritably away as the man stared at his feet and muttered, "Sire, my lord of Bedford wanted to know..."

No wonder the man sounded miserable. There was no substance in the message he'd been sent with. Henry knew his brother John of Bedford just wanted to show he knew what had been happening in the tent.

Still, it wasn't the messenger's fault.

"Thank you, Tudor," Henry said, with his usual punctiliousness. He strode off to the main tent.

He was thinking, as he went, how sickly that pale Celtic skin under black hair could sometimes seem.

"Wellll?"
her mother whispered from her golden throne, with an expectant grin; her whole face was jigging and moving.
"Telll..."

The two entourages were filing into the tent. There was a
buzz of quiet talk; flurries of movement at the tent flaps; people finding chairs. Catherine was torn between embarrassment and exasperation and laughter: how could her mother expect to have the gossipy, racy, confiding talk she clearly wanted now--
now, here
?

But she opened her eyes as wide as she could and flashed Isabeau the briefest of smiles as she sat carefully down--a return signal of sorts. There'd be time later for the whispers; the bashful lowered eyes; the dazed nodding of her head; the shy smiles and sighs and blushes. Her mother would get it all out of her, she knew.

Meanwhile, she didn't mind in the least when Isabeau's hand crept out from the side of the throne, and, through the afternoon's dull exchanges of compliments in French and Latin, stroked her arm.

On the second morning, Catherine saw Owain Tudor. She'd dreaded this moment coming. But now it was here it wasn't so bad.

He was looking frantic with worry, being turned away from the tent. "I have no orders to let you in," the commander was saying mechanically, without really looking at him. "You're not on my list for today."

"But I'm needed! You must have me there! Let me see!" Owain was stuttering back.

He was very pale. He'd lost weight. There were unhealthy dark smudges under his eyes. She could see how threadbare his doublet was, how worn his boots.

Coldly, Catherine looked him over. How young he is, she thought. She felt confident in a way she never had before, with the memory of her whiskery, wiry royal lover's embraces so recent in her mind. She didn't need to care.

Without greeting Owain Tudor, or helping to get him access to the tent, she moved serenely inside, turning her back on the hapless Welshman and his problems.

A routine was established as the week wore on. Every morning there was the ride from Pontoise to the field, with Catherine's
mother winking and glittering at her from her litter. There was the awkward jostling as the two entourages assembled, with men guarding the two entrances and commanders snapping at anyone who tried to get in through the wrong set of tent flaps and resigned faces on all sides as weapons were removed and identities checked.