The Queen's Lover (36 page)

But today he didn't want to remember happy moments.

"Where's Christine?" he said mournfully. He hadn't forgotten her.

Catherine said brightly: "She's gone to Poissy, Papa--to the nunnery; to see her Marie; and our Marie."

But her father ignored the brightness of her tone, and just echoed, "Gone...gone..." and shook his head sadly with every melancholy word.

The little sprig of forget-me-nots Catherine had picked for him fell out of his collar. He didn't notice.

"You're going too," he said, and there was nothing unclear in the heartbroken look he gave his daughter. "Aren't you? You all go..."

She put her arms around him; stood there, feeling him tremble.

"Papa, I'm going to be happy," she said, with all the courage she could muster; "and you'll have a grandson who'll be King of England one day, and of France too...and he'll have a suit of armor when he's five, just like you, and be a hero...and we're all going to be a loving family forever."

He nodded. She stared at the blinding freshness of the buttercups, wishing away his pain; wishing away his affliction; wishing him peace.

But there were tears on his cheeks. "They're taking you away too," he whimpered.

"Oh Papa, don't," she begged. "Don't cry."

He bent his head to her shoulder and sobbed.

She whispered: "I'll come back, I promise. You won't lose me." Mostly she wanted to comfort him; but she thought it was true, too. Henry would often want to be in France.

"They're taking everything away..." He broke through her
thoughts, his voice a miserable, quavering treble. "And what about Charles? Where's my little Charlot?"

She held him tighter. She couldn't think about Charles. "Don't think about Charles, Papa. Charles has been a bad boy," she murmured, stroking his shoulders; but that only made the King cry in earnest.

"Poor Charles," he snuffled. "Poor Charles..."

Catherine didn't know whether he was weeping for his son, or himself.

The King cheered up, or seemed to, when Catherine made him a chain of buttercups and hung them round his neck, and made one for her own wrist, too, and kissed his tears away. Then she led him in to Henry and her mother, and the knights' dinner in the open air, which was to lead on to the jousting in the courtyard, where a platform had been erected for the ladies and hung with flags and draperies and flowers, and scattered with cushions.

"Ach, what's this nonsense?" Isabeau said, but kindly, when she saw the buttercups as they sat down to table, taking away the hand she'd clamped to her own two-horned headdress to protect it against the breeze ruffling through every gauzy veil. She had a soft look about her today, too, Catherine saw. To marry your last child was, in itself, a milestone. Catherine realized that her mother would be sympathetic to her father's wistfulness because she felt it too. The Queen of France fussed around her husband, tidying up his clothes; but she left the buttercup chain where it was.

The two kings sat on either side of Isabeau. Catherine was still astonished and grateful that she was allowed to sit at Henry's left, in full view of everyone; that the lords who approached her bowed and called her the Queen of England, that there was sunlight and music playing.

Too dazed with heat and happiness to remember to eat the food being put on her platter, she sat, sipping from her jeweled goblet, watching the courtly smiles. Suddenly she remembered. Her mother had given her a little yellow silk ribbon that she was to give Henry to wear at the joust. "He'll want to carry his
wife's token," Isabeau had muttered persuasively; "he'll be grateful."

She wrapped the ribbon round the wilting buttercup bracelet at her wrist, and, touching her husband on his strong, lean arm, passed it to him with an expectant look.

He looked blankly at the little yellow scrap.

"My token," she murmured--wondering, for a moment, whether she wasn't saying the right thing--"for the jousting. For you to wear..."

He nodded, took the token, and put it in his purse. Then he cocked his head a little mischievously in Isabeau's direction, on his other side, and said, under his breath: "Aha, I see...she's been talking to you about the tournament, has she?"

And he patted her hand. Gently enough; but it was the dismissive kind of gentleness you might show a dog or a child. He wasn't overwhelmed at all, as she'd hoped he might be; and there'd been no gallant lover's words about how he would fight to the death for her honor, either. He just stretched out the same hand immediately afterward, and touched a passing page's arm to remind him that the King's goblet needed filling. She fell silent--trying not to look wounded.

As soon as Henry's cup was full, he stood up. For a second there was a little buzz of talk, then silence. The English lords and knights all looked at him with utter devotion; ready to do whatever he commanded. The sight of their adoring eyes filled Catherine with pride on her husband's behalf. She thought, with relief: So he's going to make a speech...and I interrupted him...it never occurred to me to think...He had something more important on his mind...

The memory of the wilting buttercups and the yellow ribbon made her blush; her girlish nonsense.

Henry cleared his throat.

"We are summoned here to celebrate the union of our two countries with a joust," he cried, loud enough for everyone to hear, bowing formally to Queen Isabeau and her husband as he spoke.

His face darkened. "But while we're all here, enjoying our
selves, the enemy is massing more troops," he went on somberly. "The siege at Sens is reaching a decisive stage."

Sens, Catherine thought, confused--the town where Charles' troops were walled in, surrounded by Henry's men, hoping for reinforcements. Sens was just under forty miles away; but it was a million miles from her marriage celebrations. What did Sens have to do with today?

"We, and our knights and soldiers, could make or break that siege," Henry's voice continued. "If we were there."

There was a ragged cheer from some of the Englishmen on the other side of the courtyard, preparing for the joust. Henry raised a calming hand. It wasn't their time yet. He had formalities to get through first. They fell silent again, but Catherine realized every pair of English eyes was shining with hope and excitement.

"With the permission of Their Majesties of France," the King of England went on magnificently, sweeping another bow at Isabeau and Charles (and now, peeping sideways, Catherine could see her mother's face contorted with a look of such utter, vindictive Gorgon fury that it made her wince and turn her own eyes hastily back down toward her plate), "...I would like to command my men, and beg those of the King of France, to make ready at once, to join the siege of Sens."

There was a new quality to the silence now. Every French and Burgundian lord was visibly stunned. Some things were sacred. No one interrupted royal wedding feasts. No one changed the plans of the King of France. Not like this. Not for this. But the English didn't know that. Every English lord was turning, shifting, drawing in breath, catching someone else's eye and grinning; enjoying the change of pace; ready to be off as soon as they heard the word of command.

"Better a real-life victory in the field than an idle demonstration of our skills in the courtyard!" Henry almost shouted, firing them up so that the flickers of applause and roared approval began, again, to eddy through the crowd of men drawing closer to the banqueting table. "There we may tilt and joust and prove our courage and daring! For there is no finer
act of courage in the world than to punish evildoers--so that poor people can live!"

And now there was no holding them back, the English. In open defiance of every possible rule of French etiquette, they were standing up, raising goblets, banging on tables and trestles, laughing out loud and yelling, "Sens! Sens!" and "Henry!"

"Well then. No time to waste. Let's prepare ourselves," Henry finished very simply, sweeping the hundreds of men in the courtyard with an approving smile of his own.

Catherine felt his kiss, bewilderingly, on the top of her head. Then he was gone, walking very fast and determinedly back into the palace, and there was chaos everywhere. The English all began milling around the most senior commanders they could find, asking enthusiastically for instructions, or galumphing off toward stables and back quarters to pass on orders and prepare weapons and packs and food. The table was half empty already. Within a few minutes the unruly crowd had moved off. There were just the French left at the table: still sitting in their finery, with long, appalled, desperately correct faces, not knowing what to do.

"My lord?" the young Duke of Burgundy said to the King of France.

But the King's face was streaming with quiet tears again. He was murmuring, "Poor Charles, poor Charles," and, once again, Catherine didn't know whether he was weeping for his son or himself.

It was Isabeau who took charge. Rising to her feet, all her bulk swollen and dark with frustrated anger, the Queen reluctantly grated out the command the French lords needed to hear. "The joust is canceled. Follow the King of England."

The afternoon sky was so low and threatening it looked as though you could touch its big gray wallows. There was mud everywhere: on every bedraggled soldier scurrying past, caked to every horse's legs and belly, in the tents, in her boots, smeared on her skirts up to the knee. She was alone, in the little house Henry had had built for her, on their third battle
field together: a miserable dwelling of mud and thatch that rattled and clanked with the noise of war.

"Of course you'll come--I want my bride with me," Henry had said simply. It was a declaration of love, as her husband understood it. He made love to her every night now. He'd lost his fatigue. But now she saw it was the battlefield that exhilarated him, not her. She understood, too late, that what she'd chosen, when she chose to become English, was to be a part of the King of War's war machine.

Catherine had had no idea war was like this, when you were so close up.

Even when two kings, two queens, four dukes, and thousands of lesser men had set impetuously off for Sens, immediately after her wedding, there'd been something dashing and ceremonious about it, something close to the nobility of the jousting she'd grown up with. There'd been pennants and banners and the gleam of silver and iron. Sens had surrendered in a day or two, in sunlight. Living in tents had seemed an adventure; and even the sight of the prisoners trooping out in their chains, with their glum faces, hadn't frightened her.

But then the English army had marched on to Montereau, leaving Isabeau and the French army behind. The English ladies had been sent back to Calais--but not Catherine. And the terrible punishments had begun. Henry had a gibbet built under the walls. He had the townspeople dragged, one by one, to beg the lord of Guitry on their knees to give in, open the castle gate, and save their lives. Catherine would never forget the impassive look on Henry's face when, after each silence from behind the walls, he'd raise his hand again and watch one gray-faced prisoner after another shiver in terror as the rope was put round his neck. She'd never forget the noises; the wriggling; the feet.

And now they were at Melun, where, despite the never-ending rain, the English soldiers were digging mines and trenches around the town. They were fighting in the trenches. Fighting in the mines. In the dark. And they were all mud. Everything was mud. Seas of it. Hells of it.

"Once Melun is ours, we can go to Paris," Henry kept saying. "The hinterlands will be safe then. Paris will be safe."

She nodded unhappily. She had to nod. But she didn't believe he'd stop.

She could sense that, after Melun, after Paris, Henry would want to go on fighting; to move, town by town, village by village, fortress by fortress, south across France, until he'd driven Charles out of the south. He lived for this. He didn't really want to go home to England. So she couldn't meet his eyes, even when he came to her at night. She knew already that the next morning she'd wake up to find him gone--he always left before first light--and herself huddling under the covers, alone, with just the panicky voices outside, and the wind banging at the windows, and the boom and roar of cannon.

PART FIVE

The Prison of Human Life

TWENTY

It took months more before Henry could be dragged away from the war for long enough to take his wife back to England. The subject of return wasn't even raised until after their muted English military Christmas--in a Paris that was, although now a poor and ragged city, at least safe (or almost safe) from attack by the Armagnacs.

Her first queenly Christmas didn't match up to Catherine's expectations of her return to civilization, although it was a pleasure of sorts to be able to walk along stone-walled corridors again, see tapestries on walls, and not touch mud from one entire day to the next. Yet there were none of the Christmastide rituals she'd grown up with: none of the dances, or songs, or Masses, or seasonal foods, or meetings with the people of Paris that she'd expected. English Christmas was functional: a table groaning with food; a few dances; a lot of ale; some inexpensive gifts at New Year. Her parents were holed up at the Hotel Saint-Paul, which, on the one occasion she went to see them there, seemed strangely quiet too. There were no courtiers, no balls, and Anastaise, who had accepted Catherine's request to tend to the King's daily needs, was as worried as Catherine's mother about where the next bit of money was to come from. Although Catherine savored--or at least noticed and found odd--being called "Majesty" by the servants at the Louvre, where the English party was staying, she also saw it didn't seem to be the English way to bow and scrape and treat their Queen
with the exaggerated respect that had always been accorded her mother. She accepted their quiet nods and minimal bows with something like bafflement. She did her best to take pleasure in the new order. And she smiled--only a little wanly--over Henry's first gift to her, stingy though it seemed: the plainest gold bracelet with just one decoration, the entwined letters
H
and
C.