The Queen's Lover (37 page)

Even after making Paris secure against the Armagnacs, Henry didn't really want to leave France. Catherine's English was worse than hesitant--she couldn't really imagine forming words in any language but French, even now--but even she was able to follow the slow, emphatic shouts of her husband's brothers when they'd had too much to drink in the evenings and took, peasant style, to thumping their fists on the table and roaring at each other. She sat up in bed one night when the noises got especially loud, listening.

"You have to go home. You're out of money. You can't afford another siege," she heard Thomas of Clarence bawl. They were always talking about money, these English dukes: as if they were clerks trying to balance their books. They had none of the magnificence, the
gloire,
she'd grown up expecting royalty to possess. She wrinkled her nose in distaste.

"How, then?" Henry, this time; sounding just as blurred as his brother after a pitcher or two of Ile-de-France red. "Because we have the advantage. Madness not to press on."

"I keep telling you how. Obvious. Take the girl home and put a crown on her head," Thomas shouted. "Then you'll get the dowry. You have to make the time for that. It needn't take long. That money would keep us going. I've told you a thousand times."

Eagerly, she strained her ears to hear Henry's reply. If only he would agree they could go to England...But the voices dropped to an inaudible murmur, and she felt her eyes closing.

When Henry came to bed, a good hour later, the heavy fall of his fully clothed body beside her woke her again. Her husband saw her open eyes and kissed her. He smelled of wine. He was drunkenly contrite.

"I've kept you here too long," he muttered. "Haven't I? Thomas been telling me off. Quite right. Neglected my duty...
sorry. But it's time you saw your new home...time we got you crowned...so...home to Westminster...soon."

She didn't mind knowing that Henry mostly wanted to take her to England only to get her dowry money for the war. She longed to go; to start her new life, not this garrison imitation of it. Her husband was doing the right thing by taking her to England at last, even if his reasons were not the ideal ones; he would always do the right thing in the end. Joyfully she put her arms around him and tried to marshal appropriately gracious words of gratitude. At least with Henry and his brothers, who'd been brought up speaking French with their own French mother, she didn't have to struggle (at least while they were all still in France) to find the gracious words in a foreign language.

But there was no time. A gentle snore told her that Henry had fallen asleep in her arms.

England came swiftly on her, even before she'd forgotten the tears of her parting with her parents, even before she could quite smell the sea that would take her away forever.

The gateway to England came as you picked your way through the empty marshland outside Calais. Inside the town's towering fortifications, Calais looked like any other settlement along the northern coast: wattle and daub, muddy inhabitants, the glint of salt water in the reeds. But the sounds were foreign. There wasn't a French or a Flemish voice left. All the staring shopkeepers, wool merchants, innkeepers, and market women were settlers, speaking English. The last English king to make war on the French, Edward III, had thrown out all the locals and colonized Calais with his own sort. She could hear a babble of foreign voices, whispering.

Catherine stared back down from her horse at them. She hardly listened to the military tattoo as their cavalcade made its way to the castle. She was straining to hear those voices beyond the fifes and drums--proof she was on the move at last: overseas, before she felt she'd really even left France. How strange it all was.

"So--England at last!" Henry said lightly, when the obligatory dinner with the Castle Keeper was over, and the King and
Queen of England had retired. "Saw you take it all in as we came in--what do you think?"

Privately, she thought: Thank God it isn't all going to be like this: sea air, garrison food, and mud. She felt honored to be asked. She said, "It's a joy to be here," and the sincerity in her voice must have been audible. There was a cheerful light in his eyes as he pulled her close.

But there was a lot more mud. Her new home at Westminster Palace backed onto the Thames, a great swamp of a reed-fringed river, which they said would be alive with ducks and insects and fumes and agues and fevers when the heat began. The views across to the dubious pleasure places of Southwark to the east, and west to the more innocent Surrey woods, were pleasant enough. But in winter, under the jetties and ropes and boats used by the brown and gray local people to go after salmon and carp and perch, the nearside riverbank was all fierce-looking swans, with nicks on their beaks signifying who owned them, and rats scuttling through the brown rushes, and mist.

She couldn't believe how small and provincial London was--a quarter the size of Paris: a walled market town a couple of miles upriver, dominated by the Tower, with a single bridge over to the wilderness of dock and hovel and wood and those prostitute-infested riverside walkways in the south. There was no great charm in the squat churches and religious establishments of the city itself, and certainly nowhere remotely like the colleges and spires of the Paris University. The bishops' and noblemen's palaces that lined the Strand connecting the City and Westminster were great hulking castles, gazing out over the water, built for defense, not beauty. One, known as the Savoy, was a blackened ruin, with trees growing between the stones. They said rioters had burned it down long ago, and it had been left like that: a warning of the mutability of fortune, the fragility of wealth. The thought of rioters made her shiver. So did the mud and mist.

The mist got everywhere; the biting winds too. She couldn't get away from the smell of damp. The palace was a great drafty barracks with only the bare minimum of tapestries and screens
to keep out the chill, set against walls that seemed to have soaked up centuries of coldness like frozen sponges. Catherine set herself and her ladies to sewing several new tapestries, to elaborate French designs of hunting scenes, which the English ladies professed, in their solemn way, to admire, but she shivered at the thought of how long it would take before they were completed. Meanwhile, however, many candles and tapers and torches bravely burned. However many fires were lit, it seemed impossible to get warm.

Catherine didn't want to complain about anything, of course. Nor could she, even at the times when she felt most ill at ease and alone among strangers. A tacit rule seemed to have come into force, which no one had told her about, in which she was no longer supposed to speak French even with those she'd always spoken to in her own language. It was English only from now on; if she tried French on anyone from Henry down, they looked patient and answered in English. She wished she'd tried harder while still in France. Her English was still so bad, and she didn't like to make a fool of herself by opening her mouth only to fail to make herself understood, so she felt herself shrink into a smiling, nodding, perpetually concentrating, perpetually surprised, perpetually overpolite simulacrum of herself. She'd seen her mother's enjoyment of running things in France. But a foreign queen, who couldn't properly make herself understood, didn't seem to have much chance of any kind of power in England.

It wasn't just queens, either. All Englishwomen seemed quieter and dowdier than their French counterparts, and certainly less powerful, both at home and at court. Love of women was not considered the high art it was in courtly France, or celebrated in poetry and song, arts that, as far as she could see, scarcely existed in English. This was a place where courtly festivities seemed to consist of little more than eating and drinking in silence for several hours at a stretch, dressed in simple fashions that followed the colors of the English riverbanks--dank greens and drab browns and muddy mists--followed by the dancing of outlandish rustic dances to outlandish rustic music with men whose voices had gone slurred with ale or
wine, and whose bodies lurched to and fro almost independently of the primitive banging of the rhythms.

But at least she had Henry often at her side now, organizing their time in England as if it were another military campaign, and everyone obeyed Henry, so everyone she met was very respectful to her, and no one seemed to mind if she just nodded dumbly back, and bobbed her head, and felt a fool to be the one foreigner sticking out like a sore thumb in their dun-colored English uniformity.

And Henry was a man of his word. He set his men immediately to preparing the coronation. It would take place before Lent was over, because they'd have to be quick. Once she was crowned, he wanted to take her around England to show her to his people, before getting back to Westminster for a Parliament in May.

She stifled questions as to what she would wear for all these ceremonial occasions. No one suggested she would have new English robes made. She felt she would probably be expected to use the French robes she had brought with her. She didn't mind: the jewel-bright French robes, in velvet and silk, were more beautiful than anything she saw around her. But didn't they prefer their English fashions? Didn't they care if she wasn't dressed in their style?

Apparently not. Perhaps the English dukes didn't want to lay out more money on making their Queen's clothes as English as her language was supposed to become. Perhaps they just hadn't thought ahead to the traveling. The only discussion was about the coronation itself.

And even with the coronation, Catherine realized, there was a great deal she was failing to understand.

It was only at the end of a Council meeting, in which Henry had carefully explained to her the finalized timetable of the entire two-day crowning ceremony for her, starting from the overnight stay at the royal apartments at the Tower, to the barge ride downriver, and the serenades, and the cloth of gold, and the fireworks, right through to the ceremony and the feast at Westminster Palace, that she thought to ask (and found the hesitant English words for her question):

"Where will
you
be?"

Henry looked at her in surprise, then laughed as he realized what she meant. "Not with you," he said, not unkindly. "This is your coronation. You'll be on your own."

"But..." she stammered, not knowing how to express her fear. She widened her eyes; drew in breath.

There was no point.

Henry patted her hand. "That's our custom," he said easily. There was nothing more to say.

In the event, she rather enjoyed the ceremony. There was nothing to worry about, after all. At every stage there was someone to nudge her, politely if firmly, into doing the next right thing. They'd thought it all out for her. They'd left nothing to chance. By the time she sat down to the Lenten feast, back at Westminster Palace, and watched her husband's subjects--
her own, too, now,
she admonished herself, catching herself on that thought--tucking into the salmon, sole, sturgeon, crayfish, porpoises, whelks, lampreys, and tench on offer, she was tremulous with relief.

Between each course there was a pastry-cook subtlety, a sculpture whisked up out of hardened sugar strands. They were brought out into the hall to cheers and wolf whistles. The best was a magnificent tiger, striped in yellow and black sugar stripes, led by Saint George. The entire hall went wild at the sight of it, yelling and drumming their feet under the table.

Usually she found the English drumming-feet habit strange and slightly threatening. But now the euphoria was catching. Catherine opened her mouth to laugh. Then, looking round, she realized there was no one willing to catch her eye and share her merriment. Everyone was enjoying the moment of appreciation with someone else. Uncertainly, glancing from side to side before turning her gaze back toward the tiger, she fixed a determined smile on her face. It was either a queenly smile, or the smile of an outsider with no friends. Or perhaps those two things were the same.

"You did well," Henry said that night. His voice was warm. Catherine glowed.

She wanted so much to do well for him now. She was lonely; but with her husband, at least, she had enough of a connection to be sure that, if he met her eye, he would then talk to her, make sure she understood what was happening around her, and reward her with appreciation if she managed to join in. Perhaps this warmth that Henry inspired, whenever he singled someone out for a glowing moment of appreciation, was what made his soldiers and servants so devoted, she thought; so ready to conquer their fears for him. She shared their devotion now. There was no one else to attach herself to. She lived for his smiles of approval; wilted when he forgot her.

"Tomorrow," he whispered in her ear, wrapping himself around her, half dancing, half marching her to the bed, "St. Albans." He nudged her down onto the quilts. She laughed up at him, relieved to see her emotion reflected back on his smiling face. He added: "And soon, an heir."

St. Albans was followed by many other English towns and residences in the next eight weeks. They went west to Bristol and Shrewsbury and Kenilworth Castle. They went north to Coventry and Leicester, Nottingham and Pontefract, York and Bridlington. They went south and east to Lincoln and Lynn, the holy shrine of Walsingham and Norwich, before the procession turned back toward London, in time for Parliament at Westminster.

Catherine had never ridden so much. She wore the same three French gowns at every stop. No one ever even commented on what she wore. There was no time for frivolity.

"Tell me if it's too much for you," Henry said, kindly and seriously, at every stop. "We don't want to do anything to damage your health." And he'd give her that questioning look--had she conceived yet?--but without asking directly or making her feel a failure for not yet being with child. She was so grateful to Henry for his tact; so full of admiration for him. His polite consideration made her pray, each day more humbly than the last, for the baby boy they needed.

All the same, she was increasingly ill at ease. It was the public conversation at every stop that worried her. At every banqueting
hall, at every discussion with every mayor and lord, Henry had just one topic: raising more money for the war. And the King of England's desire to return to the war overseas became more visible after York, where news came to them that Henry's brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence, had been killed in France, near Anjou. Not that Henry wept for his brother in front of Catherine or anyone else, but he shut himself away for a day, and delayed their departure for two, and ordered a solemn Mass said at York Minster. After that he couldn't stop himself talking, passionately, everywhere, about the war Clarence had died at.