The Queen's Lover (35 page)

After Christine had gone, Owain carried on standing in the darkness. He could see his breath, white and sharp. He could see squares of light in the walls. He could hear cheers and whoops from inside.

He wouldn't go and join in. There wouldn't be any real happiness at those celebrations--just the counterfeit that passed for it in wartime. And he'd had enough of all that.

He tried to remember the last time he'd seen generosity, or hope, or good wishes, in anyone's eyes. But he couldn't. The war, which had gone on for almost all the years since a younger Catherine had kissed him at Poissy, had eaten away at the souls of everyone it touched, like rust on metal. It was worse than just one wicked old Queen, sniggering as she gave away her kingdom and destroyed her family to spite her son. Something more insidious had happened, all over France; some devilish alchemy had darkened every soul. It was every man for himself now, with friendships faded and old loyalties crumbled to dust and secretive new silences on all sides. All you saw in every pair of wild-beast eyes that fixed on you was fear, or calculation, or mistrust. You couldn't expect grandeur of spirit from people who had reason to fear they'd be forced apart from the
families they loved, or who'd buried their children before their time, or been betrayed by people they'd trusted, or casually robbed of what they'd thought would be theirs forever. All those survivors had been separated from each other by their sufferings, until each of them felt he was alone in the darkness with his fears. People who'd had to live with hate had forgotten how to love. They couldn't even talk to each other. The war had taken their innocence. Perhaps none of them would ever get it back.

He thought of the hollows under Christine's eyes and cheekbones; the defeat in her eyes tonight. He was overwhelmed with pity for the one woman he could think of who hadn't lost the capacity to love. Christine had a vision of a future in which hope and honor and generosity were still possible. But she'd lost the people she loved and the life she'd treasured anyway. She knew she'd have no place in the peace that would come tomorrow. She was taking her losses with courage. It was too late to tell her how he admired her. He wouldn't see her again.

He bashed his hands down in impotent fury at the futility of all that effort; all that bloodshed; all those years wasted. Trying to calm himself, he drew in great gulps of homely stable stink. He told himself that his blackness of spirit was because he'd never been a soldier at heart; nor a negotiator. This was reality: he'd wake up in the hay bale outside the stables when dawn broke, pick the stalks out of his clothes and hair, and begin his journey back to England, to his books, to try and recover his peace of mind; to find his own life at last.

He didn't know why that thought wasn't a comfort; why he couldn't stop tears coming to his eyes.

In the mirror, Catherine's eyes sparkled. They'd lit dozens of candles in her rooms.

When she heard the door, she ran lightly toward it, with her lustrous ringlets of hair streaming back from the filmy lace and fine linen, to welcome the lover she'd been waiting for all these months.

But it was Christine.

"I've come..." Christine began, a little nervously. She'd
been going to say goodbye; to pray a little with Catherine; to commend her bravery; to wish her the strength to bear all the trials life still had in store for her.

But once her eyes took in the scene--the rose oil, the ribbons, the finery, and the flushed, radiant young face--she stopped. She understood at once. The girl was waiting for a lover.

She'd had no idea. There was a black pit yawning inside her. It must be shock. She'd been so blind. There was so much, everywhere, so much she didn't know.

It must be Henry of England. She didn't know why it had never occurred to her that Catherine might
want
to marry Henry.

She looked harder at the bride-to-be; the future Queen of England and France. The radiance had ebbed out of Catherine's face. She'd hung her head. The flush had become guilty. Her poise had gone.

"Give me your blessing," Catherine mumbled, but she didn't dare look up. "Please. Wish me well."

Very tenderly, Christine took the Princess's hands, feeling as she did how they'd been softened and artificially scented for the tryst to come.

"My dearest girl," she whispered, "I wish you the best of everything, always...of course I do...I always will...but I can't bless your marriage."

She felt, rather than saw, the glance Catherine stole.

Remembering Owain Tudor's wintry voice by the stables, Christine added wistfully: "I'd rather you'd married away from royalty altogether than this. I'd have been happier seeing you with the Welshman. At least that would have been honest."

She drew the unresisting Catherine to her, praying for the girl to be protected from whatever demons her mother--it must be her mother--had set loose around her. "We won't meet again," she muttered, memorizing the warmth of that beloved young body against hers. "I'll pray for you."

NINETEEN

In brilliant June sunshine, in cloth of gold, Catherine dismounted from her horse in an explosion of light and glory. She entered the gloom of the church, closing her eyes and drawing in the rich scent of incense, then letting her eyes take in the candlelight everywhere, as if surrendering herself to the lifetime of ecstasy that was to follow this ceremony. As she processed toward the altar--not a long procession; Saint John was only a tiny church, more suitable for merchants' weddings than the alliances of kings--she kept her eyes lowered. But she was aware, all the same, all the time, of the profile of her husband keeping pace beside her, another shimmering column of gold and jewels; the straight nose; the big eyes. She was overwhelmed with love and success; drunk with happiness.

This was the hour of her greatest triumph.

She looked around. She hardly knew any of these English and Burgundian faces. A flash of memory briefly troubled her: her younger self, lying in the grass on a hot happy day before the war, with Christine and Charles and Owain, talking lazily about the day she'd be married in gold, and they'd all be there to cheer her on. But there were no friends here.

It didn't matter. She nodded at her mother and father, sitting by the altar, frail and old on their thrones, but her father in his right mind again at last, and giving her a long, soft look, and those two old hands on each other's, together. She flashed loving, hopeful glances at her English ladies-in-waiting, the beautiful
strangers who'd made the journey to France to attend her on this day; who would become her friends and confidantes in the peaceable future she was going to; who would perhaps be the great ladies of the glittering English court she was going to establish with Henry.

At her side, Henry stifled a yawn.

Henry of England was dog-tired. One last tedious ceremony, he told himself, trying not to let his eyes close as the Bishop intoned the solemn vows of marriage; one last dull feast; then a good night's sleep.

He and his sixteen thousand Englishmen had set off from Rouen a full month ago, at the beginning of May. He'd judged it important to give the French a fearsome display of English military might. He'd marched his men into a glittering semicircle around Paris while he went to pray, as the Kings of France always had, at the royal abbey, Saint-Denis. A good symbolic touch, that; and it had the extra benefit of allowing the skinny, ragged people of Paris to climb their city walls and gawp at the spikes and helmets of the soldiers they'd surrendered to. After Saint-Denis, the English army had marched across the plains of Brie, past Prince Charles' various enemy strongholds, leaving permanent encampments of soldiers at strategic bridges. They'd been met at Champagne, and Troyes, by the young Duke of Burgundy and as many Burgundian and French dignitaries as he could muster.

There had been more work to do at Troyes to make sure there was no possibility of treachery. Young Burgundy had assigned Henry's men the lower part of town. But there was no room in those twisty cobbled streets for anything like sixteen thousand men. Most of them would have to camp outside the city walls. Henry didn't want his men separated. So he'd had the city walls taken down.

Only when he was satisfied that the English were not vulnerable had he agreed to get down to the real business: the peace agreement.

Two weeks ago now, they'd given the formal declaration of the treaty the full trumpets-and-triumph treatment. A glittering
ceremony in the Cathedral of Saint Peter in the center of Troyes; Henry with his sister-in-law of Clarence on his arm; and the place stuffed with forty English lords and knights, the Queen of France, the Duke of Burgundy, and forty of his councilors.

His bride-to-be had been there too, of course. After they'd heard the recital of the articles of peace, they'd tagged a betrothal ceremony onto the end of that day.

Then there'd been two weeks of celebrations. Two weeks in which, while his lords made fools of themselves swigging and toasting and capering about in their finery, the important business of proclaiming the peace went on, both in French and English, throughout the city; throughout the English army; throughout the land. At the same time, Henry completed the equally important business of accepting vows of allegiance from the Burgundians and French who'd come over to him.

And when he was done, at the end of each day, there was little Catherine. She'd got prettier and more clingingly sensual than ever. No more skulking in the Queen's tent or other people's rooms with her anymore, either. Proper long nights, in his own rooms, in his own bed. No interruptions.

They'd been married, to all intents and purposes, in body at least, for getting on for a year now. She was a good girl. It was a stroke of luck. Still, it was time to wind the whole business up. A quick churching next door to his rooms. Tie up the loose ends. Get back to normality.

Henry had never had much time for courtliness; for dances and dressing-up, those distractions from reality of life in the field. As the Bishop droned on, Henry let his mind wander eighteen miles away, to where he knew the Earl of Huntingdon was besieging Prince Charles' men at Sens. Huntingdon would need reinforcements soon. The King of England was aching to get back under canvas; to his men; to the straightforwardness of the war.

In a dream, in the dusk, Catherine let her beautiful new sisters, the English ladies with their long, dignified faces, flit solicitously around her. Gradually they removed each item of her jewelry
and clothing with their lovely fingers and passed it out, in the candlelight, to lesser ladies, who would fold and care for her treasures with all the ceremony due in a court at peace; ladies who would, in their turn, pass on to yet lesser women those items that might need cleaning, or polishing, or repair. This was how things should always have been, she thought dreamily, as her hair was brushed out and her face and body smoothed with creams and scents. Murmuring melodiously to each other in English, a language she didn't understand, though she was beginning to try, now she would have to master the language of her future home--stammering new words every day--the ladies slithered the fine white nightgown over her shoulders and led her into the bridal chamber, hung with a king's cloth of gold, scented with rose petals and lavender.

They turned back the bed. They helped her in. They arranged her hair on the pillows. Then, gravely, they bowed and withdrew as Henry appeared in his doorway, also neat and spruce in night linens, with his retinue of advisers. Her husband. Her King.

"You can go," he said gravely to his men. They too shuffled away in silence. He shut the door and came to the edge of the bed. He stood looking down at her, without expression. She hoped he would tell her how beautiful she looked; more beautiful than ever before on the day she'd become his Queen; that she was the jewel in his crown; that he would always love her. But what he did was scratch his head. Then he smiled at her, a little absentmindedly, and she melted at the sight of those good-natured wrinkles in the corners of his eyes.

"Well, thank God all that's over," he said, puffing out his cheeks as he sighed. "I've had enough larks' tongues in honey to last me a lifetime, haven't you?" Without waiting for an answer, he climbed into the bed and pulled the covers up. She didn't wait for him to pull her to himself. She poured herself onto his body; let her hair hang heavy over his face and shoulders as she leaned down and kissed him. It was their wedding night. She didn't think twice; she knew his body would respond.

But it didn't. He shut his eyes; grinned, kindly enough, but
without interest; lay inert under her; pushed a little at her shoulder as if to dislodge her, and mumbled, in French, as always, even though she was now supposed to speak English with her ladies, "Tired..." Then, with a sleepy echo of what must be a crude English soldiers' joke, "Can't conquer France tonight..."

He didn't even notice her flinch. He was already asleep.

Isabeau gave Henry a look in which natural suspicion tussled with the conscious determination to love. She leaned forward, scattering bonbons over her cards, wishing her son-in-law wasn't lounging so insolently against the fireplace, yawning; wishing she still had the power to intimidate at a glance.

She hoped he wasn't going to be as difficult about the wedding celebrations that Isabeau had planned for the next few days as he had been about negotiating in these last, extra six months, when every hour had seemed to bring some new, unreasonable additional demand, until the Queen of France, who'd never been a patient woman, had been ready to scream and slap his long, smug face.

In a minute, Catherine would be here, with Charles, and she'd have to stop hissing instructions at her new son-in-law. Best, she thought, to get it all worked out properly beforehand.

"Now. The tournament this afternoon. You will carry dear Catherine's colors, of course...and you will win," she said, in firm, chivvying tones, adding, as an afterthought, "my dearest son."

Catherine sat with her father for an hour every morning, and walked with him in the gardens. Today was no exception. Why would it be? It wouldn't be long before she set off for her new life in England. She wouldn't have much longer with her father. She didn't want to miss any of the precious moments she still had left. This morning, they were walking down a stone path; in dappled shade; between clouds of blue and yellow flowers. She was holding his arm, and she was talking in her quietest, softest voice, as if she were gentling a horse. This was what they did now. They remembered things together.
Sometimes, if lucid, he told her things he had done when he was a child. Once he'd told her how his own father had offered him the choice of a book or a tiny suit of armor, made in his own five-year-old size; and he'd asked for the suit of armor, and everyone in the ballroom had cheered. She'd laughed. He'd said, with regret: "I always wanted to be a hero. But I should have had the book."