The Queen's Lover (55 page)

He wanted to stay with her. To touch her; to protect her. She needed protection. There were so few possibilities in the prison of human life. Doors that closed didn't open again.

He took a deep breath and turned the page. Firmly he told himself: The answer isn't in love poems. It only unsettles a man to sit mooning over love poems. You should know that by now. The answer never was in love poems.

He flicked through the pages till he found the text he'd intended to show Catherine. Then he closed the book with his
finger at the page he'd chosen, and strode off back to the rose garden, to show her Christine de Pizan's suggestion for the rest of her life. A last hope of grace: a way they could, almost, share each other's fates.

Catherine stood out of the wind, hard against the brick of the garden wall, so intent on her reading that she didn't seem aware of the scrape and rattle of thorns on the dead branches behind her head.

Owain knew every word of the text by heart; he was reciting them in his head as he watched.

"Here is what you must do if you want to be saved,"
Christine had written long ago.
"The scriptures tell of the two ways that lead to Heaven: the contemplative life and the active life.

"The contemplative life is a way and state of serving God wherein one loves Our Lord so deeply and so passionately that one completely forgets father, mother, children, and everybody, even oneself, on account of the all-consuming attention one unceasingly devotes to one's creator. A woman devoted to contemplation never thinks of anything else; nothing else is of any importance to her; no poverty, trouble, nor suffering preoccupies her heart, the heart of the true contemplative. Her lifestyle completely disregards everything in the world and all its transient pleasures.

"The perfect contemplative is often so ravished that she no longer seems to be herself, and the consolation, sweetness, and pleasure she experiences can scarcely be related, nor can they be compared with any earthly joy. She feels and tastes the glories and joys of Paradise. No other exultation compares to this, as those who have tried the contemplative way know.

"I am sorry that I cannot speak of that exultation any more than a blind man can describe colors. But, above all others, this is the way that is most pleasing to God..."

There was more, much more; right down to the conventional proof that God loved those who devoted their lives to contemplation--because Jesus had found Martha's busyness less virtuous than Mary's contemplation.

Catherine let her hands drop, with the book still carefully
cradled in them. She looked up at Owain. Her eyes were dull and dazed. "Why are you showing me this?" she asked, in a small, hurt voice.

"I thought," he began eagerly, "that since I know that after leaving this life in your household I will have a safe future in my cloister, the contemplative future that Christine chose in the end, that perhaps you too...that we could both..."

She was being slow to grasp his idea. She only looked horrified.

"You mean," she said, "that when Harry is gone from me...and you too...that you think I should...?" Her voice trailed off.

Owain made his voice strong. "Enter a nunnery," he said. "Devote yourself to God."

But even as he said it, he realized the vanity in it, the pridefulness; saw that he'd only wanted to close her up in a nunnery to marry her fate to his in the last way he could imagine. It would be easier for him to leave the world behind and enter his own cloister if he knew that, somewhere else, she too was giving her self up to the embrace of Christ rather than that of another man.

Catherine had expected something else, he saw. Something better.

"Christine did it," he repeated, with less conviction.

She nodded a few times, as if about to accept resignedly, politely, that he'd at least had good intentions in putting forward this awkward idea. Then something changed in her. She took a deep breath and looked up, and met his eyes more candidly than usual, so he could see the fugitive sadness in them; the sadness he suspected she always carried within.

"I don't want to go to a nunnery," she said. "It's the last thing I want. I don't know why you want to shut yourself up either. Or why she did. She didn't want to. It took her years to decide to."

She looked down at the book. She said: "I want to
live.
Don't you? Not bury myself alive."

She flipped backward through the pages. Stopped at Christine's poems. There was another long silence as she made out
the words of grief; with the only sound the whistle of the wind and the thorns tapping against the wall.

"Christine was so lucky in some ways..." Catherine said wistfully, raising her eyes again. "If only I'd felt so much for Henry, perhaps all this wouldn't seem such a waste."

She passed him the book. Her fingers brushed his. He'd learned his lesson, though; he couldn't help drawing in a little hiss of breath at her touch, but he kept his hands still and didn't respond. She added: "It would have been a kind of consolation, at least, to remember having loved a husband like that."

Silence. Owain felt the entire basis for his existence slipping away. He didn't know what to say. He had always believed that she
had
loved her husband like that. His certainty on that point had, in fact, been the foundation for the entire respectful, distant relationship he'd built up with Catherine. He didn't know what she could mean now, by just airily suggesting she'd never felt that love at all.

He stared at her, feeling like a fool, feeling she was expecting something of him that he didn't know how to give. The silence deepened. There was something hot and angry in her eyes now. He'd definitely done something wrong. He could see it. Something he didn't understand at all, and seemed powerless to put right.

As if trying to goad him into action, she added: "Sometimes I wonder what I can have done wrong in my life, to be so harshly punished." But she didn't explain. Perhaps she was shocked by the bitterness in her own voice. Those were tears in her eyes. She nodded toward the gate; and abruptly began to walk toward it.

There was no point, he thought, in following. He couldn't think what he could say to comfort her. So he watched her go, helplessly, feeling more wretched than he remembered ever feeling before, seeing that his clumsy attempt to find a way in which their two futures could be lived out, if not together, then at least in parallel, had only brought her closer to despair.

Catherine stopped at the gate, ten feet away. "Don't you have
any idea, Owain Tudor?" she called from there, intently, almost angrily, he thought. "Don't you understand...
anything
?"

Owain was turned to stone. Roiling, churning anguish inside; stone outside. He couldn't move. He'd have given anything to know what to say.

She closed her eyes, shook her head very quickly, and ran off.

TWENTY-NINE

Catherine avoided Owain for weeks after that. She felt too humiliated by the way the conversation had ended to want to risk starting it again. She'd made herself utterly vulnerable, and had been answered with a blank stare. She would not beg for Owain Tudor's affection, she told herself stiffly. She was a queen.

She couldn't avoid letting him serve her food at table, in front of all the children and servants. There would have been too much explaining to do if she'd changed that ritual. But there were points of hot color in her cheeks and a tightness about her mouth that discouraged him from speaking. She let her eyes slide past him as if he wasn't there. There was no more table talk.

For days, he tried other strategies. He followed her down corridors. He followed her into chapel. He brought Harry to her. He pleaded, "Could we speak?" or, "Could we take a walk?" But she just smiled coldly and shook her head, and let her eyes slide past him again. She refused to take in the bewilderment in his eyes; the hurt. She knew herself to be alone now. The unity of spirit she'd imagined she felt with Owain had always been an illusion. He hadn't had any idea what she was trying to say. He couldn't have had, if all he'd been able to suggest was that she shut herself up in a nunnery for the rest of her days.

She told herself: You must get used to being without him
anyway, and without Harry too. They'll be gone soon enough. You must start to learn to live with solitude now.

Owain's little book had calendars at the back--calendars he ticked off, day by day, to show how much time he still had left in Catherine's household. He sat at his table by the light of the candle, looking at the diagonal ink lines advancing across the boxes of months. So little time left; yet it seemed so agonizingly long.

She couldn't have meant what she seemed to have meant. Could she?

Because Catherine had so much more time alone than before, she took to sitting in the rose garden as spring came, trying to feel hope as she watched life come back to the bony sprays of branches on the walls; seeing them turn green again. But there was no parallel renewal in her own affairs: only more disastrous news, this time coming out of France.

Humphrey and his brother had been quarreling for months over Duke John's failure to complete the English conquest of France. Duke John couldn't capture her brother Charles in Bourges. The cost of the French campaign was astronomical. The merchants of England were fed up with paying. Humphrey was demanding better results. He said Duke John had gone soft, and was only in France for the fleshpots.

Duke John had done his share of writing angry letters back to Parliament. He'd been so nettled by the things Duke Humphrey was saying about him that he'd gone to the lengths of spending an entire winter--seven months--besieging Orleans, the gateway to Charles' southern domains. But strength seemed to have deserted the English troops. They couldn't break the town.

Instead, in the spring of 1429, Dauphin Charles' French armies forced the English to retreat from Orleans. Flush with victory, the French then advanced north, deep into English territory. English-held Paris lay helpless before them, waiting to be attacked. But the French ignored it. They whisked south and east of the capital, through the Seine Valley, accepting the
homage of French townsfolk everywhere they appeared--even in Troyes, where the English peace had been agreed by which Catherine's son was recognized as the King of France.

The French swept on to Reims, the ancient coronation place of the kings of France. There, Catherine's brother was crowned King Charles VII.

They said a peasant girl called Jehanne of Arc had led Charles' troops to victory. They said the Maid of Orleans was guided by the voice of God. It was Jehanne of Arc who'd placed the crown on Charles' head.

They said it was a miracle. And that was just what the English said, over here: people who didn't in the least want to believe that God would be performing miracles in favor of the French.

What the bemused people of France would be saying, after all these years of war, Catherine could only imagine. Blood tells, she thought they might be muttering. If God wants to give this man back the crown of France, he can't ever really have been a bastard.

What Catherine herself thought, she didn't know. Each new dispatch only left her quieter, more stunned, more fearful. There were all kinds of rumors. People said the English were finished in France. Duke Humphrey, in London, was fuming at Duke John in France; accusing him of carelessness in the prosecution of the war. From France, Duke John was writing equally furious letters back to the Council and Parliament, accusing his brother of undermining his authority, and of trying, still, to seize control of England for himself. People said that Cardinal Beaufort was on his way back to England.

There were only six months left till the end of the protectorate--till small, anxious Harry was to take control of two kingdoms in turmoil. This wasn't how she wanted her son to come to power.

She still couldn't bring herself to speak to Owain. But when, one spring day, she happened upon a dark robe crumpled over a clump of reeds, on one of her solitary walks along the riverbank, watching the dragonflies make their drunken, jeweled progress over the ripples, and recognized it as Owain's habit,
which he must have thrown off to bathe, she wasn't able just to walk away. Instead, she slipped behind a tree. From the safety of its boughs and shadows she looked down at the glitter of the water. Owain's head was bobbing there. Birds were singing above her and there was a sleepy drone of insects all around. There was sunlight on his wet head.

She could hear him singing, even from here. Then he splashed noisily out and stood naked, staring innocently out over the river, like a picture of Adam in the Garden of Eden.

She kept very still. Defiantly, she thought: Everyone would say it was a sin, but loving that man has been the only act in my life that has made me happy, loving him and my son have been the only two pleasures that I don't believe I need ever regret. She knew she shouldn't, but she was committing Owain's beauty to memory. Even a memory might be a comfort of sorts, in whatever future Fate had in store for her.

A consignment of trapped game birds was waiting in cages in the courtyard, destined for the kitchen. Owain walked through the gate with his face still damp from the river. He looked, Catherine thought, as though the swim had washed him clean of worry. He saw her and the birds waiting for slaughter at the same time. She saw the weight of his thoughts settle on him again; the furrow reappear on his brow.

He came toward her. She didn't sweep off. She could see now that there'd been no point in her pride. It was souring what little time there still was. She missed him already, but he was still here, near her. She would have a lifetime more in which to miss him, when he was really gone.

She could feel Owain giving her a careful look from the side. She could feel the hope mounting in him that they could at least--at last--talk.

"I'm sorry," he said, cautiously feeling his way. "About the other time...If I said or did anything to offend...or failed to understand..."