Wife to Henry V: A Novel (21 page)

“Rest? With men short and sickness on the camp; with my captains uncertain and my allies only waiting to sell me?”

“The more reason to rest while you can. Go and make music with Catherine; I'll watch our friends for you.”

“You don't say make love,” Henry said, grim. “Well, you're right at that! The girl's too young—frightened of me. As for myself, I'm too tired a man, so it seems, for begetting a son.”

“To be young is no fault in a wife. She's gentle…”

“You're wrong there—she's a hard piece beneath her softness; she's very much Madam Isabeau's daughter.”

“She's in love with you—or was. You may still make of her what you please. Send her away, Harry; away from France and the fighting and the famine. Send her to England; but give her a child first.”

“To beget sons an Englishman needs English air. When this town falls we go to Paris; and then—for England.”

“It's time for England,” Tom said. “The people keep asking for you; they ask again and again. Don't let their love go stale, Harry.” He caught the King's surprised look. “It could happen; not easily, perhaps, but still it could happen.”

As Clarence went out, Burgundy strode in. “We must storm the walls, make the assault—and at once.” His face was puckered in imitation of his father's frown. “My allies are melting away—Orange gone home already and he isn't the only one. As for my own fellows, I can't keep them. They're sick to the guts of this sit-down fighting.”

“If you can't keep your men, the worse captain you! And, as tor the fighting, what's more certain to win a town in the end than a sit-down siege? If you need more men send for Luxemburg's archers—they'll soon make these townsfolk sing a different song.”

“Wait for the archers, wait for this, wait for that! And while we wait...” .

“Our best ally is at work. So it was at Rouen; so it will be now.

“Ally? I know of none but what we have.”

“Famine.” Henry was holding himself in to patience. “Famine. There's our ally. As always she has the last word.”

Isabeau nagged at Catherine with the same tale—the need to attack. It was clear who had been egging Burgundy on.

“This Henry! He sits patient outside the walls while Philip's allies go home and the English captains grumble and gamble. As for his men—half of them are bursting their guts with sickness; and the rest of them yawn their heads off and long to get drunk to forget their troubles, and cannot get drunk because this man of yours has watered the wine and the beer casks. And all the time he counts his flour bags, counts his cannon stones, counts his arrows even—so Philip says.”

“Philip says!” And was her mother, too, Catherine wondered, playing with the notion of striking a bargain with the enemy? “It isn't what Philip says—it's what Philip does! He's always to be found on the winning side. That's why, for all his talk, he'll stay where he is.”

“Well said, good and dutiful wife!” Isabeau mocked. “You think you're very clever with your little politics. Let me tell you this. Don't think, my girl, that all the swearing at Troyes will keep our French faithful to your English. No, nor yet all the proclamations your father is forced to make. Your Henry is a fool to think it. And so are you. That treaty went sore against the grain. Our people will keep it only if they're made to keep it.”

“They will keep it,” Catherine said.

* * *

The trees had shed their leaves; they shushed along the paths where Catherine walked.

And still Melun remained untaken.

It was the longest, the most exhausting of sieges; Rouen had been nothing to it. But Henry with his terrible patience had been right.

Now his last ally had spoken.

In the snug house at Corbeil, Catherine heard that the townsfolk were eating their dogs, eating their cats, eating rats and mice, no vermin too hateful to command its fantastic price, too repulsive to thrust into a sick and empty belly.

For the first time in her young life she looked at the fine white bread wondering whether she, too, would have sold her honour for it; and, as she carried the savoury venison to her lips, her imagination, so little concerned with others, transformed it to rats' flesh so that she sickened and put it down quickly.

Isabeau, eyeing her, wondered whether she had begun to breed.

* * *

Mid October. When one put one's nose out-of-doors the wind was sharp enough to cut it off. Through the house at Corbeil, for all its great fires, the draught swept and froze one's feet in the fur-lined shoes. Stretching her hands towards the flames Catherine wondered what it was like in the besieged city now. Sometimes she would remember that the people in Melun were her own people—French flesh, French blood. Why should they die miserably between two masters?

They died because they chose to die. Always she answered her own question. How could they hesitate between their masters—her brother the sly weather-cock; and her husband, who, for all his harshness, made just laws? Their sufferings were upon their own head.

Henry rode over. He was elated in that cold way of his. The archers from Picardy had come. “As in Rouen, so now,” he said. “The story repeats itself. There were the foolish wretches on the wall watching the army draw nearer...nearer...my army; and telling each other the Dauphin had remembered them at last; forgetting, poor fools, how he has betrayed them again and again. Standing there and staring and all their bells ringing. And then the bells dropping off one by one; and silence.”

“The fortunes of war,” Isabeau said. “And a good thing for Melun—though they won't believe it just yet. A good thing for France, too. Let everyone understand how good a master is my son who leaves them to stew in their own juice. Now Melun must surrender.”

But Melun did not surrender.

Mid November. A month, a whole month since the archers had marched from Picardy. The roads crackled with ice; sleet continually fell. Now in the city firing as well as food was exhausted. And still the terrible siege dragged on. In Corbeil Catherine longed for Paris; she was weary of the little house where she could never escape from sight of her father, nor the sound of her mother's tongue. She was weary of the English ladies, yes, even of Clarence's gentle wife. She was weary of the minstrels with their eternal music morning and evening; weariest of all of the distant sounds of battle. Sometimes it seemed to her that the sighing through the trees at Corbeil was the sighing of sad Melun. If we don't leave this place soon, she thought sometimes, I shall grow like my father; and shook at the thought. .

“Patience,” Isabeau advised hearing the long-drawn sighs, watching the drumming fingers. “Any day now the town must surrender. Surely you must long to see your husband's triumph.

Yes, she wanted his triumph...but she did not want to see it. She did not understand herself these days. Once she had had spirit enough to match her mother's, to match Henry's; now she did not want to look on slaughter again.

* * *

It was worse even than she had feared.

She had not wanted to see the actual capitulation, but Isabeau would have no such nonsense. “It's your husband's hour and you must match it!” And surprisingly reminded Catherine of that Hebrew King whose wife had spoiled his triumph with a mean spirit.

Warm in her furs, her horse snugly blanketed, she saw the prisoners march out...hundreds, and then hundreds. And not only the defenders, but old men and women; and—those she pitied most—ladies of birth who should have been spared. Grey all of them with starvation, shaking with fever and with cold, hardly able to set one foot before the other.

“Half of them will be dead before they get to Paris,” Isabeau said, brisk. “As for the rest—if they can't find a ransom, prison will finish them!”

Justice, Catherine thought. The King's pardon!

She was all confused with her thoughts, pulled this way and that. Surely it was justice to avenge Burgundy's murder however bloodstained the murdered man. But then, surely that murder had already been fully avenged—the spilt blood at Montereau could testify! And these people were, for the most part, innocent; what had the new horrors to do with it?

Now, her own face whipped rosy by the winter wind, she watched the grey prisoners crawl out; she wanted to ask mercy for them—but she was afraid. She could not endure that they should go unknowing to an undeserved death. She turned in the saddle, implored Isabeau to intercede.

“I am not a fool to ask for what will never be granted. Why should I risk Henry's anger?”

“But the King's pardon; they were promised the King's pardon. And now if they are to die on the journey or to rot in prison—what pardon?”

“Your husband is very subtle and you are very childish. Take care, my girl, how you offend him.”

* * *

She made herself beautiful for him. She said the things he desired to hear. A great hero, first knight in Christendom and God's Own Soldier...
And you stooped to this!

Her heart was not in her smiling and he knew it; she was too young, too ignorant to hide her heart. He took her smiles and her praises; later he took her body.

But he remembered it against her.

Through the winter countryside rode Henry; on his one hand, Charles the mad King whom his people loved; on the other, Philip of Burgundy in his crow's black, dreaming of rule in France. At Henry's heels rode his captains—Clarence and Bedford and Exeter and Warwick; behind, the chivalry of both lands led the armies with banners.

“A grand sight,” Isabeau had said shading her eyes against a blood-red sun. “But if they were Satan and all his devils still Paris would go mad with joy. Paris is tired of bloodshed, tired of taxes, tired of the shiftless changing from side to side. But come in, girl! The wind turns your nose blue—and we are to follow tomorrow. It would be a pity to enter Paris your nose running under that new crown of yours!”

* * *

She rode a little in front of Isabeau, high on a great white horse where all might see her, rode through a Paris hung with tapestries, strewn with flowers; rosewater fountains scented the air, wine sprang from cocks in glittering spray.

She was beginning to understand something of the glory of being Henry's Queen. For here, at the Porte St. Antoine, a pace or two behind Henry, Philip stood bowing to the ground, Philip who, like his father before him, had treated her with scant courtesy. Behind him shone the massed peers of England and of France; and behind them the burghers of Paris in their holiday clothes.

And it was to bring her in triumph to their city—herself and not Isabeau. For her the music and the speeches and the cheering; for her the gifts of jewels and of gold. For her, for her alone. And they said Paris was poverty-stricken! Well, Paris could always be relied upon to make a good show.

She rode smiling, bowing, to right and left, a hand lifted now and again in salute—Catherine Queen of England, who would be Queen of France. But for all that she felt a little lost when Isabeau rode off to St. Pol and she went with Henry to the Louvre. It was strange to her, unfriendly; and quite suddenly she remembered Louis who had died there; and John who was dead, too...and young Charles who would not weep if she died herself. Well, she did not mean to die, not she! It would take more than the Louvre to frighten her! She was no longer that little Catherine who had played, dirty and hungry, in the gardens of St. Pol. She was Catherine of England.

In the days that followed—days of feast and music—she forgot she had ever been saddened by eternal warfare. Blood must flow for the peace of the people.

* * *

Triumph upon triumph.

In the great hall of St. Pol the Three Estates had, with one voice, ratified the Treaty of Troyes. And more; all who refused to accept it were to be branded traitors.

Isabeau rode over to tell Catherine the news. “They finished the proceedings by discussing the murder of Burgundy. With Henry sitting next to your poor father there was never any doubt which way the verdict would go.”

“I am bored with Burgundy's murderers.” Catherine yawned.

“What a ninny you are! Such a simpleton I'm afraid to let you out of my sight. My girl, my girl, I thought, I feared—how I feared!—they would find excuses because Charles is so young! But now he stands guilty; the Dauphin of France guilty of murder. Don't you see what this means? It puts an end to Charles forever. Lost. Everything lost. The title of Dauphin—and with it the succession. And it isn't only your father who speaks; it's the Parlement. Now the King of England is truly heir to France. Strange but true. Now your son—if ever you get one—will wear the crown of France.”

No King in Christendom so glorious as Henry. And she, she was his Queen...the charming princess twice crowned with gold. And her brother—young Charles? She shrugged the thought of him away. He had brought disaster upon his own head and France would be the better fork!

Sweeping the train of her gown upon the stone floor of her chamber, unable to sit or stand for the upsurge of excitement, she felt herself burgeon, flower, grow in stature.

She expected to find some change in Henry, some lightening of the heart, certainly triumph. He was the same as ever, shut tight within himself. There was, he said, little time for indulging in joy. The Parlement might name him Regent and Heir, but it was for himself, himself alone, to enforce it. Commissions must be sent at once to Picardy and the north for the swearing of the oath. And he needed reinforcements for his army; he had lost more men than he could afford through sickness alone, never mind the fighting! He was negotiating with her brother's captains, she knew; trying to win their friendship and to swell his army—two birds with one stone. Meanwhile in Paris itself there were not enough armaments; more must be made; more, more, more. And the new coins Henry had insisted upon had not yet been struck. How did they propose to carry on trade with the shameful clipped money?

All these burdens pressing upon one pair of shoulders—the hundred, hundred questions the King of France had not the wit, nor Isabeau and Philip the integrity to consider.

And all these things cost money. Taxes pressed too hard upon the poor already, Henry said; others must share the burden.