The Tudor Bride (24 page)

I let the letter drop from my shaking fingers. Her dilemma was an agonising one. ‘Oh, Mademoiselle, what can I say? It is a terrible decision to make.’

‘If I do not go, the world will ask why I was not there and if I go and lose the child, I will not bring Henry comfort but instead a terrible loss. I am already filled with remorse that I did not go to Sheen in time for young Henry’s birth. My lord has not reproached me, but because I defied the prophecy I feel I am responsible for his recent misfortunes.’

Her eyes sought mine in desperation. ‘Perhaps if I travelled in a litter I might bring him the solace he needs without harming the child …’ Her voice broke on the words.

‘Have you confided in no one else, Mademoiselle? Do any of your ladies know of your condition?’

I asked the question in the faint hope that I might share the responsibility of commenting on such a critical situation.

‘No, Mette. They think I am unwell in my stomach. I only tell you because I know I can trust you and I have often called to mind your advice from my first pregnancy. What do you think? Will the child come to harm if I make the journey to Vincennes in a litter?’

I hesitated, recalling that Prince Henry had been a healthy baby despite his mother’s tumble from a horse whilst carrying him.

‘If your heart is set on going, Mademoiselle, perhaps you are prepared to risk a mishap?’

There was a long silence as Catherine struggled to make a decision that she alone could make.

At dawn the following day, Queen Isabeau’s horse litter was drawn up outside the entrance to the royal apartments and surrounded by royal guards mounted and waiting as an escort. As we descended the steps, I glanced anxiously at Catherine. In the gathering light she looked deathly pale but determined, head held high, the line of her jaw a sharp silhouette.

Neither of us had enjoyed much sleep and nor had Agnes, who rode her mount close by. She had been invited to join us the night before and once she was fully informed of both the urgency of the journey and the risk involved, we three had talked into the small hours as we righted wrongs and made plans.

Once Catherine was securely seated in the well-cushioned litter, I took the seat opposite and waved at a worried-looking Agnes to signal the procession to move off. With a rest-stop planned at the abbey of St Denis, at our slow and steady pace we were unlikely to reach Chateau Vincennes much before dusk, but our fervent hope was that Henry would survive the day. We had covered only a few miles however when I noticed Catherine’s face suddenly go as pale as bleached linen and she clutched at her stomach.

‘Holy Marie, Mette, I should not have come!’ she cried.

Abandoning all niceties, I lifted her skirts to be confronted with a dreadful sight. Her chemise and kirtle were already soaked in blood.

‘Turn around!’ I thrust my head out of the litter door. ‘Turn around now! We must go back.’

All the way back to Senlis, I held Catherine as she lay crying with pain and misery, and I cursed the evil demons that had brought her to this state. It seemed that not only was King Henry on the brink of death, but his queen had jeopardised her own life trying to reach his bedside. My vision of death stalking them both did not fall far short of the mark. As the queen miscarried their child and almost died from loss of blood, the soul of Henry the Fifth of England was slipping away from his disease-ravaged body in the King’s Chamber at the castle of Vincennes. The last day of August 1422 proved a fatal one for King Henry, his potential offspring and very nearly for his queen.

It was Windsor Herald who brought the dreadful news of the king’s death and Catherine struggled from her bed, white and shaking, to receive it. She was far too weak and distressed to do more than murmur an almost incoherent acknowledgement and after the herald left she collapsed back into bed. We had managed to pull her through the miscarriage, but the added grief of Henry’s death rendered her completely prostrate in body and mind. However, the following day a more familiar courier arrived from Vincennes bearing another letter from Sir Walter Hungerford and in his saddlebag, his harp.

When I opened the door of Catherine’s chamber in answer to his hesitant knock, I did not immediately recognise him. His handsome face was drawn and grey, a mirror of Catherine’s, and he was clad all in black, adding to the sombre nature of his appearance. Although it was not a year since I had last seen him, he looked several years older, still broad-shouldered and slim-hipped but his curly chestnut hair had been given a military clip and his dark-brown eyes were deep-shadowed, witnesses to recent sorrow. I stepped from the room.

‘Master Tudor! I am sorry I did not at first know you. The queen is refusing all visitors.’

He bowed his head apologetically. ‘I am sure she is, Madame. I have a royal warrant, so the guards let me pass this far. Sir Walter sent me with a letter for her grace. He thought my music might bring her some solace but chiefly he thought she would need someone familiar and trustworthy to carry information between Senlis and Vincennes. There will be many arrangements to put in train for the king’s obsequies.’

‘That was very kind and considerate of Sir Walter,’ I replied. ‘Of course the queen’s first thought was to go to Vincennes herself, but in truth she has not been well and grief has prostrated her.’

The young squire seemed relieved to hear this. ‘To be honest, Madame, at present Chateau Vincennes is not a place for a queen in mourning. When a king dies there is much to be done. The castle is overrun with captains and counsellors, clerks and couriers running in all directions.’

‘Yet you seem to have managed to acquire black clothes, Master Tudor,’ I said, appraising his neat and new-looking attire which, together with his pallor, made him look like a soldier in scholar’s clothing. ‘That cannot have been easy at a time of such frenzy.’

He shrugged. ‘The heralds and pursuivants always have a supply of black clothes for delivering news of battle casualties and I scrounged some from their store. I could not sully the queen’s quarters with the dirt of a troop camp. Will you take the letter to her now?’ He pulled a folded and sealed missive from the purse on his belt.

I took it from him. There was a tray of wine and wafers on a side table in the ante-room where we stood and I gestured towards it. ‘Wait here and take refreshment if you please. Her grace might wish to speak to you.’

Catherine’s chamber was shuttered and shadowy, lit only by a few candles scattered about. I brought one to the bed and bent over her with the letter. She was wide awake, her eyes huge and red-rimmed. When I had helped her to sit up, I broke the seal of the letter at her bidding and handed it to her.

‘It was carried by Owen Tudor, Mademoiselle. He has brought his harp in case music might bring you solace. I believe he played for the king at Vincennes.’

There was a crackle of paper as Catherine unfolded the letter. ‘I do not wish to see anyone, Mette. I told you.’

‘Perhaps if the door was open he could play in the ante-room. Shall I at least ask him to fetch his harp?’

I put the candle down beside her so that she could see but she did not respond to my suggestion, seemingly absorbed in the contents of the letter. I took silence to mean consent and left her to read it.

When I returned, the letter lay on the coverlet beside her and she was staring into space but she turned to look at me as I approached. ‘Henry knew he was dying,’ she said dully. ‘He gave detailed instructions for what was to be arranged for the regency after his death and for the education and care of his son. But, Mette, it seems he said almost nothing about me.’

She shivered and I took up a shawl to cover her shoulders but she went on directly ‘The king’s body is to be embalmed and an effigy of him is being made that will lie on his coffin. Sir Walter tells me the funeral procession from Vinciennes will move slowly through France to Calais and I am invited to join it at St Denis in two weeks’ time. I am to follow at what he calls “a suitable distance”.’ Her voice broke at the words ‘a suitable distance’ and no wonder!

She dissolved into deep, heart-rending sobs and I went to cover her shoulders with the shawl and take her in my arms. For a long time she wept for a marriage and a man whose true nature she was only now beginning to understand. From outside the chamber door in a haunting elegy came the ripple of harp music.

The grand funeral cortège wound through the Île de France and Normandy to Calais; King Henry’s final farewell to the territories he had conquered. As instructed, Catherine joined the cortège at the abbey of St Denis and, in the basilica where so many of her relatives and ancestors were buried, she had her first opportunity to pray and weep over the coffin of her dead husband. How desperately she must have longed to seek solace from the warm and living presence of the little son she had been obliged to leave in England and how much the separation must have added to her grief.

Agnes and I attended her vigil, watching as she knelt beside the catafalque, her black widow’s weeds drooping shapelessly off her bony frame like mourning flags on a windless day. At only twenty years old she was a dowager queen stranded between kingdoms, without husband, father or brother to champion her cause. It was a lonely and precarious position.

The effigy of King Henry that was laid on top of his massive lead-lined and gilded coffin was fashioned from boiled and tooled leather, crowned with gold and adorned with the mantle of sovereignty, but in my eyes it was a grotesque puppet which made a mockery of the magnificent and forceful man that had been Henry of Monmouth. The features of the face were painted in garish colours, the hair was coarse and kinky like the fibres of a frayed rope and the expression was that of a peevish merchant, not a proud and glorious king who had been admired and fêted throughout Europe; by whom I myself had been both frightened and, fascinated. And, of course, there was no sign of the iconic scar which had disfigured his face and shaped his character. However Catherine appeared not to notice these failings and kept touching the effigy as if it were the man himself and this her last contact with the husband she had waited five years to marry and lived with for only a few short months.

For days on end, as the cortège wound its way through the war-torn countryside, it rained, almost as if the heavens were weeping for the conqueror of the land he was passing through. But, much to everyone’s relief, a mile or so before we reached Pontoise the rain stopped and the sun came out. Steam began to rise from the long column of horses and riders and a courier galloped up to the Duke of Burgundy who rode at its head. Without drawing rein Duke Philippe perused the letter handed to him, but it was not until the cortège had entered the town and the catafalque was being lifted off its car that the duke approached Catherine as she emerged, dazed and blinking, from her litter.

‘I regret to tell you that I have received terrible news from Ghent,’ he said, taking her arm supportively. ‘My beloved duchess, your sister Michele, is dead. There was an outbreak of sweating sickness and she succumbed quite suddenly and unexpectedly. I am shocked and saddened almost beyond words. I cannot believe that God has taken such a good and beautiful person.’

Catherine stared at him dumbstruck, the small triangle of her face almost as pale as the widow’s barbe which she now wore to hide her chin and throat. For several seconds she seemed to gasp for breath then she uttered a keening cry and crossed herself. ‘Ah sweet Jesu, death truly stalks us. You are right, my lord, Michele was a good person but it seems the good are beloved of the angels whilst you and I stumble on under an earthly pall of misery.’

Together, in respectful silence, they watched the royal bier with its bizarre effigy carried slowly into the church of St Eustace under a richly embroidered canopy borne by the leading citizens of Pontoise. The duke bowed his head in salute. ‘I admired Henry enormously,’ he said. ‘He was a man of great faith, an implacable enemy and a staunch ally. In some ways I think he and Michele were quite similar; conscientious, loyal and God-fearing. I believe they will both be safely gathered into Heaven’s grace.’ He bent to give Catherine a brotherly kiss on the cheek. ‘I must bid you farewell, sister,’ he said. ‘I need to make a start for Flanders while the light lasts. I know you think your future looks bleak at present but, for Henry’s sake, I will always be your friend, should you need me. May God give you strength.’

As he strode off to remount his horse, I rushed forward to support Catherine, who looked as if she might sink to the ground. ‘Oh, Mette, he is right,’ she murmured faintly. ‘If I am to give due honour to my lord and support to my son, I need God’s strength now as I have never needed it before.’

W
hen the cortège reached Rouen, King Henry lay in state for several weeks, giving time for the new barons of Normandy to pay homage to the monarch who had rewarded them for their part in his campaigns by granting them title to the estates of dead or dispossessed French nobles.

Owen Tudor had ridden in the escort of five hundred men at arms who had followed the king’s coffin but, after leaving Senlis, Catherine had not asked him to play for her again. However, during her vigil beside the catafalque in Rouen, she sent for him to come in the evenings, after the long queue of citizens had gone. Apart from quietly thanking him each time, nothing passed between them except, after several days, a small purse of coin which she placed beside his harp as she left.

Owen sought me out to ask if this ‘payment’ meant she no longer wished him to come. ‘I fear she does not like my music after all,’ he said, his deep-brown eyes troubled.

I hastened to reassure him. ‘On the contrary, Master Tudor, I think she appreciates it greatly. She merely feels that you deserve some recompense for the time you have already spent playing. Please do not stop coming.’

He slung his harp over his shoulder, safely packed away in its leather bag. ‘When I played for the king it was often to lull him to sleep and judging by the weariness I see in the queen’s eyes she, too, needs help in that way.’ I noticed the blood rush to Owen’s cheeks as he said this and guessed that his awe of King Henry had also inspired a young man’s fascination with his queen, to the extent that the very planes and shadows of her face were imprinted on his mind. His lilting Welsh voice trailed away as he added hesitantly, ‘Perhaps I could play outside her chamber door again …?’