Wife to Henry V: A Novel (40 page)

* * *

She was telling him about the King. She knew she looked attractive so—the mother young and perplexed. But for all that she was truly disturbed about the child. His head was stuffed with saints and martyrs, my lord Governor Exeter had said so! He prayed too much; and—she could see for herself—he did not play at all.

“It is for God to choose who shall pray and who play,” Tudor said. “A saint. Do you break your heart for that? In my country we honour the saint above the King.”

“But he is so small,” she said, “so small...and always the threat of the rod.”

“Princes must be curbed more than common men.”

She sat there, tears running through her fingers and wondering why she wept. She had not been bred soft herself; she had known the taste of the whip, the small ache of hunger and of cold. But she was alone and desolate.

A tear dropped; and then another. And though her heart felt fit to break, she was still conscious that she looked charming so, pure pearl upon pure pallor of her cheek. But for all her piteousness, all her charm, there he stood, comforting, impersonal, telling her what, indeed, she knew—Spare the rod and spoil the child.

“This is not a child to be spoiled,” she said; and told him about the knotted rope.

“For the saints there are two disciplines,” he said. “One from within and one from without. Even the saints must feel the rod, and—what is more—accept it. It is part of their sainthood.”

“Yes,” she said, “yes. I lose my wits...a woman alone.” She put a hand to her breast. Above the low-cut gown her breasts were high and dazzling white. Her pointing finger drew the eye. He could not, if he would, look away.

He was a man to take love where he found it; to take it lightly, giving and getting pleasure. Since his hand had touched the Queen in the dark of the garden he had sought no woman...though the Queen, he knew well, had sought him.

The tide of his manhood rose. He thrust it down. The woman was a Queen and friendless. More than any woman in the land she could be brought to disgrace and ruin.

“You should take a husband, Madam,” he told her. “For, when all is said, what is there for a woman but a man and his children?”

He saw her breasts lift in the low gown. “Oh,” she said, “tell that to my fair brother of Gloucester! The days go by, day upon empty day, night upon empty night...”

But still he stood, a man of stone, the width of the chamber between them.

“Oh,” she said, “and must I speak plainer? And why not, for why should I pretend to undue modesty? I have lain in the marriage-bed and all eyes upon me—a virgin ready to be taken. Lying there and trying not to listen and being forced to listen to the lewdness with which they blessed the marriage-bed. After that, it does not become me, I think, to act over-innocent.”

In the brightness of the Queen's chamber he took her.

* * *

In the heat of the summer afternoons the Queen was slumbrous, satisfied. She let the first month go by and the second—and no word to her lover. It was too early to be certain. By the third month she was certain; and she was frightened.

“It is a hard thing that a man may not rejoice in the birth of his child,” Tudor said. “But I must put aside my joy. It is of you I must think, of you alone.”

“Yes,” she said, “yes.” And for a while was silent.

“I am a Queen,” she said and her voice was sudden in the quiet room, “but poorer than the poorest. They have taken my first-born from me. I may not see him from day to day, how he grows, nor treasure the dear things he says. Harry gets a crown—and loses his mother. For him the bargain is good enough. But I? I'm a mother who has lost her child; a widow who must not wed; a lover who must hide her love. And now I am to bear this child—your child, mv love—and I must go in fear, hiding my condition as though my body carried some monster.”

“Be comforted, my heart. It will not always be so. Our child is like treasure put out to sea.”

“And if the treasure strike upon a rock?”

“I will chart a safe course. A little journey; and it will return bringing you a three-fold blessing.”

“You talk like a poet,” she said. “But you do not understand a mother, how she yearns over her child...every word, every look, every sweetness of childhood garnered against the future. For what in the end is left to us but the little things we remember? Oh,” she said piteously, “what is life to me if I must hide my love as though it were a shameful thing and lose this child, this child also? I will go to John, thank God he is here—the most powerful of them all; and he has a better heart than Humphrey. Humphrey when he's angered is a heart of stone; but John had always a kindness for me. I will beseech him. I will not move from my knees until he says
Yes
to our marriage.”

“It is all useless,” he said. “My lord of Bedford has his full share of Lancaster pride. But even should he say
Yes
—which I much doubt—then the moment he is gone back to France, Gloucester would hang me.”

She cried out at that.

“I hanging from the nearest tree and you wearing your heart out in prison. They would shut you from the light of day and our child would die. That is a thing I could not endure and God would not ask it. Rather I would die by the rope—though it is not a death I desire—or, by the torment, and gladly.”

It was true and she knew it.

“Then what must I do?” she asked. “A queen's bastard. In my country it could be managed; not easily perhaps when the queen has no husband. Still, it could be done. But in this country of the most chaste Henry, in this cold and righteous country...” She wrung long, fine hands.

“There is Madam Queen Johanne,” he said. “She has no great love for the house of Lancaster. And she is your kinswoman and your friend.”

* * *

“I said you would find your answer,” Johanne told her, austere, “but this is more of an answer than I bargained for.”

Catherine looked at Johanne old and virtuous, lean and sapless. She was glad to be Catherine and not Johanne; glad, in spite of all her fears, that she was lusty enough to bear a child to her love.

“It was your advice,” she told Johanne. “Take a lover you said. Well—I followed it.”

“That's only too evident! Well, once the matter is done, God forbid it should be undone. All will go well enough if you are careful. You will pass for some time yet; a high stomach is the peak of fashion and you are neat enough. Stay in London; show yourself while you're fit to be seen. Leave Windsor—that's where you'll get the gossip; you'd probably have to leave in any case. Exeter may decide, any day, it's wanted for Harry. I'm a little surprised he hasn't said so already...except that he's sick. Go to one of your own houses, one you haven't visited before and where your face isn't known—and the further away from the court the better! Move from one house to another; and don't stay too long at any. You have women you can trust?”

Catherine nodded.

“Then take them with you; no others. And keep them near you. Dress simply, live simply—and it's odds the servants won't pick you out from the rest. There's a young woman of yours—the one whose English sits sweetly on a French tongue...”

“De Coucy.”

“You can trust her?”

“As I trust you, Johanne.”

“Then take her with you. Keep her always about you. And who is to say which Frenchwoman lies in the great bed of the Queen's Chamber and which in the truckle? Or who sits in the Queen's place? Say little. Lies grow like snowballs. You'll need discretion but nothing beyond your wit. When you're near your time send for me. I'll have everything arranged—midwife, swaddling clothes, whatever you need. And...the child? You'd like me to arrange that, too?”

Catherine said, head turned away, “He...will see to it.”

“If you think to keep the child now, or ever, put it out of your mind. Don't tempt the gods too far, Catherine; I'm warning you.”

Catherine said, “You will have done enough in this matter without burdening yourself with the child. If your part in this should ever be known...”

“I've seen the inside of a prison before now.”

“All the more reason you should never see it again.” She ignored the faint dwelling upon I She took Johanne's hand with its swollen joints—Johanne's famous hands. “Why do you take this risk for me?

“Because we are friends. Or because we are of kin, maybe. Or because like you I love a well-made man. Or because it pleases me to rob Humphrey's slut of her tit-bit of scandal. Or...it could be that I'm glad to see my
dearest son
Henry cuckold in the grave.”

* * *

She took Johanne's advice. She did not return to Windsor and she appeared in public a great deal. Christmas she spent at Westminster with Bedford and his wife, very gay—and missing Tudor miserably. Early in the year she went over to Eltham with her presents to the King—the little soldiers carved and painted, the missal its great letters set about with flowers that he might learn them, the gay abacus to help him in his counting.

She found him enraptured with Gloucester's present—the coral beads that had belonged to the martyred King Edward. He had put them on a shelf beneath the crucifix and could hardly bear to leave them. Not for all her persuading could he be induced to wear them; he was unworthy, he said. He was still wearing the knotted cord; and it was clear that he was not likely to play with his soldiers or with anything else. She tried to make him laugh, but it was not easy. When he came from his tutors, Astley and Butler kept him with a firm hand. And the chaplain Netter had notions of kingship and of sainthood, however young the king, however small the saint.

Still he was not uncheerful. He had enjoyed a merry Christmas, he told her. My lord Governor had sent the players, Jacques Travail and all his company. Yes, he had liked the players well enough; but he liked church best of everything. He liked the coloured windows and the tall candles and the singing and the smell of incense...and watching for God. And when God did not come, it was as though, he said, his soul was a bird that beat against his heart and longed to fly right up to heaven.

“There is time enough for that!” she told him smiling.

“Father Netter says we are never too young to face God,” he told her gravely.

She was chilled by his unchildlikeness, his lack of warmth. She was not to know how he had longed for this visit, picturing her as though she were the Queen of Heaven. And now, something about her, something he did not understand, offended him. It must be her worldliness, he thought. She did not care about the saints; and certainly she did not care enough about God. That curiously tutored in piety he was learning to fear all women he did not know; nor that her pregnancy, sensed but not understood, offended him. He only knew that he must turn his eyes from the white bosom against which he longed to lay his head; he only knew that something about her threw him back upon himself.

The visit was not a success. She was glad to get back to London to say Goodbye to John before his return to France. She was sorry to see him go; in his careful, measured way, he was a good friend—and at this moment she could ill afford to lose him. And Exeter lay dying in his Greenwich home. For all her complaining he had been a wise governor to the King and she knew it. He had not approved of over-saintliness nor of visions and fantasies. And he had let her see her child. A new governor might not be so easy. Truly she had lost a friend there.

John gave a farewell banquet at Westminster. He looked tired; great hulk of a man, he had lost his rosy colour. Fighting in France was less tiring, it seemed, than the constant quarrelling in England. Humphrey was pale, too—he had been unwell; pale and interesting and debonair and untrustworthy. Beneath his charm he was not friendly—he was not one to forgive an insult; and, besides, the figure of betrayed Jacqueline stood between them.

But all the same they swore eternal friendship, all three. And Humphrey must needs gild the lily; he swore to play a brother's part by Catherine. Remembering her own brother she felt the vow ill-judged; she sat smiling between John and Humphrey and felt anxious.

The Cobham was not at table; it was not to be thought of. But after supper, on her way to bed, Catherine passed a hooded figure on the stairs. And there was dark Eleanor staring from spiteful eyes. Couldn't Humphrey sleep without her for one night that he must drag her into Westminster Palace itself? A witch indeed!

It did not take from her anxiety.

She was even more anxious when she said Goodbye to Johanne next day.

“The Cobham wouldn't dare set foot in Westminster-Humphrey wouldn't allow it—unless John showed himself not unwilling,” Johanne said.

“John encourage that slut!”

“Humphrey's mad about her. In her arms he forgets Jacqueline. Playing the Cobham's game, John spoils Jacqueline's.”

“Is there no-one to stand Jacque's friend?”

“No. And that should suit you well enough—if you value your son's French crown. Besides—” she stopped; she said, slowly, “Waste no pity on your friend. You may need all of it for yourself.”

Catherine's eyes darkened in her head.

“You had a woman...Agnes. She's waiting upon the Cobham now—Madam Eleanor has taken unto herself the state of a duchess! You may be quite sure there's nothing Agnes knows that Madam doesn't know.”

“And what does Agnes know? There was nothing to know.”

“There is now. What was Madam Eleanor doing at Westminster? Be sure those eyes of hers were on your belly! You were not clever with Agnes, my dear. Besides—a spiteful woman needs to know nothing. A word here, a word there—true or not—and the mischief's done. Humphrey's not your friend. And now with John going and Exeter dead...”

“Exeter...dead?” She had expected it. But still she had hoped, she had hoped.

Johanne nodded. “And Henry Beaufort's going too.”

“Beaufort...going? Leave the game to Humphrey? Impossible!” And now she was white and white indeed.

“All the same he's going. John has seen to it. An end must be put to this quarrelling.”

“But he'll come back. Johanne, he must come back.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. And if he does—” Johanne shrugged, “it'll be complete with Cardinal's hat. Henry always said No to that. Now John says
Yes
.”