The Queen's Lover (45 page)

Humbly, she asked Saint Denis to save the soul of her father, and to protect her poor mother, left alone in Paris, and to intercede for her own soul, when her time came, and, most important of all, to protect her son, whose future, since he was now King of France, also depended on the saint's goodwill. Only after that, with a slight sense of shame, did Catherine offer a mumbled prayer for the saint to bless the soul of her departed husband. She wasn't sure in her heart of hearts that, even now the abbey was in English hands, Saint Denis would take kindly to Henry--not just because Henry had invaded France, the Most Christian Kingdom, but generally because he'd been the ruler of an irreverent nation whose people had a habit of sloughing off inconvenient kings whenever it suited them and ignoring the sacred pact made between God and King. The English, coarse and cold-blooded, only snickered at the most glorious traditions and holy beliefs. They didn't understand or respect the Word of God, or the sacredness of the blood of kings.

It was different if you were French. The gist of every sermon she'd heard here was that royal blood was blessed. "The lords of the blood are members of and belong to your body," every abbe had told the King her father at every ceremony she'd attended here throughout her childhood. "The lords of the blood are the eyes of the body of the state, watching over it continually. They have a singular affection for it, and a nobility, and a special perfection."

How she'd revered that belief as a child...how awed she'd been, gazing up at the blue and gold-starred vaults, at the idea of being the eyes and the limbs of the body of the state. She'd loved the idea that the sanctity of the blood royal and the sanctity of France itself were intermingled. The kings of France ruled the Most Christian Kingdom by virtue of their pure, purple, sacred
blood--a land where faith was illuminated; where, as Saint Jerome said, no snakes or Jews or pagans lived; a place where royal blood was only ever spilled in defense of France and its faith.

But then everything changed--in her lifetime--when the lords of the blood royal of France had started to destroy each other, shedding each other's blood for no purpose.

Perhaps it was those two royal murders in her lifetime--both the terrible acts of
lese-majeste
and high sacrilege--which had made Saint Denis' power start to fade. The saint had not cured her father's madness. The Oriflamme had not protected the French army at Azincourt. Her brothers Louis and Jean were not buried in these walls, not protected by Denis; France had been too troubled by the time of their deaths to bring them here.

Her living brother Charles would not be buried at Saint-Denis either, Catherine thought. He had shed royal blood. He no longer belonged to this sacred land.

She crossed herself one final time and got to her feet. Even remembering those disconcerting years when Saint Denis' protection had seemed to stop working, she felt calmed by being in this ancient refuge where it was known that her existence was part of the great sacred order of things; where saints and archangels would protect her and her kind.

She thought: Charles' impure blood...Charles' unroyal brutality...there had been good reason for him to be cast out. But Saint Denis would protect her, Catherine, and those she cherished. Saint Denis would surely protect her father in death; help him to Heaven.

Even if Duke John didn't know anything else about how to bury a King of France with proper honors, she thought, composing herself and moving back to the shouting crowd of Englishmen outside, she could at least make sure that he brought Papa's body to its eternal rest here.

With his duty done, Owain took a boat back from Westminster to Bishop Beaufort's house at Southwark, where his two modest rooms had been kept during his absence. It counted as home.

Fatigue had stopped his mind racing at last. He was so dirty, and every muscle ached. He had no energy left for thinking. In a daze he watched the river water flow by. The clangor of mourning was already beginning: church bells booming out their one harsh note of grief. He could see wherrymen and their passengers, on his craft and all the others jostling down the waterway, turning, listening, and starting to talk, very fast and anxiously. You couldn't hear much of what they were saying for the bells, but you could guess, or read their lips. The words "dead" and "King" and "infant" and "What will become of us?" and "God help us all" were easy enough to make out. He shut his mind to them. Even at high summer, and it was a hot afternoon, the river water was gray. It stank. He needed to sleep.

Perhaps, he thought--and in his tired daze the thought no longer had the power to cause pain--Catherine hadn't meant to be cruel. Perhaps she had just been scared: clutching at a familiar face, a familiar pair of arms, because, unlike these worried-looking Londoners, trying to guess at their future, Catherine knew exactly what lay ahead for herself now she was a widow.

Owain knew as precisely as Catherine. There was no need for either of them to guess. Christine had spelled out the misery of widowhood so precisely that nothing was left to the imagination: how from the moment you became a widow you also became suddenly invisible to all your former friends...and the only people who still seemed able to see you were those taking advantage of your defenselessness by making up claims that you owed them something.
"Problems sprang at me from everywhere; lawsuits and trials surrounded me as if this were the natural fate of widows,"
Christine had written.
"The leech of Fortune did not stop sucking my blood for fourteen years, so that if one misfortune ceased, another ordeal happened, in so many different ways that it would be too long to tell even half of it. And the leech did not stop sucking my blood until I had nothing left."

Catherine, who knew so little about England, and who was so accustomed to the respect and deference of everyone she encountered, probably had no idea yet how pliable and willing to adapt she'd have to become to survive and prosper. Owain,
who knew all about adapting and bending, masking his Welshness or brazening it out, could be sure of that...She'd be helpless, all right, without her husband's protection. There'd be no one to knock all those headstrong dukes' heads together for years.

Without intending it at all, Owain felt the pity seep into him, and with it he began to sense a new possibility. His desire might be a sin, a crime that needed to be punished, but his anger, his repentance, should be directed at himself, not at Catherine. She would have enough to contend with already.

He should direct his efforts at helping the needy. His punishment should fit his crime.

Owain would never have recognized his cousin. They were about the same age, which must mean that he'd last have seen Glynd?r's one surviving son, oh, fifteen years ago, maybe; back in that time of smoke in the eyes and loyalty and hope and exhausting night rides, when everything still seemed real in a way it never had since. They'd been half children still, somewhere between five and ten, Owain thought vaguely--messengers at best, running or riding occasionally between men, then boasting about their errand to the other children for months afterward, but usually only frightened observers of the fighting around them. There was nothing left now of the bright, brave boy Owain remembered his cousin having been in the grown-up Maredudd ap Owain Glynd?r he saw here at this Southwark inn, nursing his tankard of ale and his grudge. This grown-up man who'd come slipping into the Bishop's house on a tired old nag this afternoon, asking for Owain Tudor--and lucky to have found him just hours after he got back from France--was small and rat-like, with none of his father's lordly charisma. Maredudd had watchful eyes and resentful lines branding his forehead and face, which were half hidden by an enormous, misshapen, provincial hat. He looked far older than twenty-two.

"But why are you here?" Owain asked again, trying not to let his disappointment show.

Maredudd and his father had vanished into the hills thirteen years before, after the fall of Harlech. The English had never
caught them, although there was always an enormous bounty on Owain Glynd?r's head. What had become of Glynd?r had, formally, remained a mystery. Owain chose to believe the story that most often circulated--that father and son had taken shelter with Maredudd's sister Alys, over the border in English Herefordshire, and that she and her English husband had sheltered the rebels from her family with the connivance of almost everyone else in the border region. The story had it that Owain Glynd?r had "become" the confessor of Alys' family by marriage, the Scudamores of Monnington Stradel--pretended to be a Franciscan called Sion Cent, who'd become known far and wide as a trickster as wily as any in the old Welsh tales. Owain Glynd?r's son was always said to be masquerading as a lesser friar. The great charm of the story was that Alys Scudamore's husband John was the Sheriff of Herefordshire, appointed by Henry of England himself. For Owain, a still greater charm was that Henry himself knew the story that his old enemy might have gone on living right under the nose of the English crown's man on the Welsh Marches, and had been confident enough of his generous handling of Wales never to have tested the truth of it with searches and arrests.

Who could say? It could be true. Owain Tudor, who hadn't quite managed to rip every shred of secret sympathy for his Welsh brethren out of his heart, had always quietly hoped it might be true. That story was the last flicker of hope for a Welshman, after all. All those other relatives imprisoned in the Tower--the Mortimer womenfolk and Maredudd's elder brother Gruffydd ap Owain Glynd?r--they were all dead now, long before their time. And Owain's own direct family, all the children of his grandfather Tudur, were as doomed as the Owain Glynd?rs; with the children and the children's children of that part of the clan also paying the price of their forebears' rebellion against the English crown. Even though they were still alive, and living in what was left of their lands, it was clear that Owain's immediate family would never have their old powers again. And he, Owain, wouldn't be seeing those faces again, or those lands either. He was banned for all eternity from Wales. He was banned from owning land in England too, or claiming
rents from Englishmen. He lived modestly on the grant of twenty pounds a year that the young King Henry V had made him when he was still a boy: enough to keep a squire in horses and armor and gentleman's clothes, just. Anything above that he had to earn. And, as a Welshman, it would always be almost impossible for him to do that. That was his poisonous legacy; that was what his blood had brought him. Since he was cut off from his homeland by the King's orders, and cut off from making his fortune at war by his own choice, and cut off from marriage by the English government's stipulation that he seek official permission before taking a wife, as well as by the cruel disobedience of his own heart, he'd realized that if he wanted to avoid the poison of resentment--which he did--he could only thank God that he had an aptitude for learning that would eventually help him flourish in the Church. He'd found a path.

Still, anyone would dream sometimes; it would be too hard not to allow yourself a daydream from time to time. So Owain had spent years thinking--idly, mostly--that one day the Glynd?r family might come marching out of the hills again: that there would be another time of riding like the wind for freedom and a future. But for that to be possible, Glynd?r himself would have to have survived, or cousin Maredudd be as much a hero as his father, able to lead his people through their wilderness to their Israel. But this little man--short, dark, and wiry, in shoddy, old-fashioned clothes, with that bitter yet calculating look--seemed anything but a hero. There was nothing to hope for from Maredudd.

"He died," Maredudd said. "Father. We buried him." There was a little glint of truculence in his grin; a "and-don't-ask-me-where," "you-didn't-suffer-with-us-so-you-can't-know-our-secrets" sort of look. He added, "And then I thought, what now for me?"

Maredudd was muttering, looking down, throwing him those bright little birdlike glances only every now and then, when he raised his nose from his pitcher. But Owain was very aware of people around them listening, of heads turning furtively toward them, then turning away. This was Southwark, after all. These rough South London tradesmen might think nothing of a burst
of Sicilian or Flemish or French--but Welsh? It was still banned; still the language of danger.

"God rest his soul," Owain said in English, a bit louder to appease the silent listeners; feeling to his horror almost sympathetic to them. His cousin seemed so...foreign.

Maredudd, with the recklessness born of not knowing what it was to be a Welshman in London, repeated a little louder in Welsh: "And then I thought, what now for me?"

Sighing, Owain inclined his head. If Maredudd would only go back to muttering.

"So I've decided: I'm going to take the pardon."

Owain stared. Years before, King Henry had offered Maredudd a pardon, hoping to tempt the Glynd?rs on out in to the open and separate him from his father. There'd never been anything but silence in reply. But now--surely Maredudd hadn't rushed straight to London from his father's grave to take up that ancient offer?

"What?" he said dully, shaking his head. "Is that why...? But..."

Maredudd was ready to argue. He was boiling over with guilty resentment; seething with it. His words came rushing and hissing out. "Don't look at me like that. Don't. Do you think it's easy being the son of a rebel?" he said, very fast, very angrily. "No way forward, no way out--do you think I've enjoyed hiding out in
robes
pretending to be something I'm not, and afraid all the time?" In his agitation he'd knocked the strange hat off his head. Owain saw (with secret satisfaction) that a tonsure was growing out. So, he thought, it was true: you
were
dressing up as a pair of Franciscans. But there was no point asking Maredudd, who was whining in a thin, hungry voice: "I want to be a man again. Hold my head up. A wife, children; some land. To go out on my horse without fearing they'll be along any second to hunt me down. I want a normal life."