Authors: Vanora Bennett
‘But I can’t. Not yet. This,’ Henry waved magnificently around at the miserable, smoke-blackened inside of the fleapit inn at Mantes, where the English leadership was still crammed, days after the talks had broken down, with a couple of hundred soldiers outside in tents. They all hated Mantes by now. Everyone wanted to be off. But Henry had kept them here. ‘This bloody awful mess has changed all our plans. So I need you to do one more thing for me here. Will you?’
Tudor nodded again. Henry could see him swallowing his disappointment.
‘You went to Pontoise, didn’t you?’ Henry went on. ‘When the French lot were there?’
‘Yes,’ Tudor said. His voice was muffled; Henry noticed his face drain of expression. Odd. But not important now. Briskly, he said: ‘You’ll remember the road, then. I want you to take a troop back this afternoon. Advance party. With scaling ladders. The rest of us will join you at dawn for the attack.’
That got the boy’s attention all right. He jolted upright. Pontoise was rich. It was the grain store for the whole area – and the gateway to Paris. Henry grinned. Henry had thought of this plan as soon as he’d heard Burgundy had torn up their deal and gone running off to the little Prince Charles of Bourges. He was pleased with it. If they wanted a fight, he’d give them a good one.
Henry was still irked by the way they’d tried to buy him off with their Princess. Not that she wasn’t a pretty enough girl: freckles, soft breasts, big eyes. He couldn’t believe they’d offered her up, just like that. Still, she wasn’t a fair exchange for Normandy and Aquitaine. Did they take him for a fool?
‘Isn’t there a truce …?’ Tudor began, breaking through his list of detailed commands: some men in the vineyards for the night; some in the dry ditches round the walls; put the ladders up when the night watch goes to bed before dawn. Then let Huntingdon’s men in as soon as you get over the walls and get control of the gate.
‘No truce,’ Henry said, with cheerful ruthlessness. ‘Not any more. We’re back at war. I’ve written, saying the truce is off if the talks are off. No point in one without the other, obviously. True, they won’t have got the letter; I only sent it this morning. But that’s not my fault.’
Tudor’s mouth opened. Henry grinned wider.
‘Anyway,’ he said kindly. ‘Your kind of thing, I thought. Stealth mission. Then – if you want – back to Oxford.’ He was keeping a careful eye on the boy’s face; he could see Tudor wanted it. ‘But the important thing now is, are you up to it?’
The boy was transformed: standing twice the height, suddenly. ‘Good man,’ Henry finished, clapping him on the back. ‘Now, go and get yourself fed before you start preparing.’
‘The English are at Pontoise,’ Christine said in tragic tones, coming into Catherine’s bedchamber. ‘No one can believe they took it so easily. From there, they could attack Paris
at any time
.’ She opened her eyes very wide and took a deep, alarmed breath. ‘The
treachery …
’ she added, letting her voice trail away. ‘Surely, at last, it’s time for a different kind of peace?’
Catherine waited. She’d heard Christine talk in this vein a lot in the past few days.
‘… a peace between the French?’ Christine went on. Catherine knew Christine believed she was being subtle. Christine had, often enough, looked innocent and begun to reminisce about one moment or another, in the gardens, long ago, with Charles. Catherine knew Christine longed to move on to making Catherine forgive her brother; she just didn’t quite know how to begin.
‘Thank God’, Christine continued, and Catherine sighed quietly, ‘that Charles and his Grace of Burgundy have at least agreed to meet and talk. I’ve been offering up prayers, every hour of every day,’ and at this she crossed herself busily, three or four times, ‘that their meeting bears fruit.’
Catherine’s eyes were veiled. She didn’t cross herself in response. She thought: Christine thinks if she tells me often enough that this meeting is good, I’ll agree.
Defiantly, Catherine finished the thought: But I won’t. I don’t want Charles back. I don’t want Burgundy either. I want to marry Henry of England, and get away from the lot of them.
On a grey September afternoon, under a sky of circling crows, the Duke of Burgundy dismounted at the approach to the stone bridge at Montereau. His troop of guard made to follow suit. He stopped them with a silently raised hand. He was here to pay homage to his future king. They waited quietly on horseback; watching.
There were barriers at either end of the bridge – stout wooden gates that locked.
The agreement was that Charles and Burgundy would meet at the middle of the bridge. Their men would wait behind the barriers.
But Charles, who had got to the meeting place early, had three or four of his young companions inside the pen in the middle of the bridge with him.
Burgundy, who was a man of his word, and had been fighting wars long before any of the young men waiting were born, didn’t let that worry him. He strode towards the barriers. He looked perfectly calm. His eyes seemed nearly closed; his leathery skin drawn tight over his hook of a nose. He was gaunter and more brooding than ever.
Charles watched him approach. He was trying to stay calm. He didn’t want to look at Burgundy and think. This is the man who chased me and Tanneguy here out of Paris that night – Tanneguy de Chastel, who’d been Provost of Paris,
back then, in charge of law and order. Charles didn’t want to remember his terror on that night.
Charles had spent the morning alone, in prayer, seeking God’s guidance. He knew he needed to keep calm. He knew he needed to be reunited with his family. He knew that everything that had divided them had opened the way into France for the English. He’d made public proclamations to the effect that there was nothing he wanted more than to lead a great, united French army into battle to destroy the English invader. But that wasn’t the only reason he’d agreed to be here. There were private reasons too; bursts of realisation he’d come to in one muddy, miserable battlefield or another, or in the quiet of the night; thoughts that had become easier to admit to since Bernard of Armagnac’s death and the end of all Bernard’s talk about Charles’ kin. He wanted to see Catherine. He missed his father. Sometimes he even wanted to see his mother. He wanted to live at peace.
But now the sight of his uncle – as terrifying and unyielding as he remembered him from childhood – unnerved him. He felt a child again. It was brave of Burgundy to walk onto the bridge alone to face Charles and his friends; but even that display of courage was a slight. Perhaps Burgundy simply didn’t see Charles as a threat. I’m seventeen, and I’ve seen my share of fighting, he reminded himself stoutly, as the measured footsteps came closer, pace by rangy pace; there’s no reason to be rattled. But that didn’t stop him from being aware that his skin, under its leather jerkin and the velvet doublet covering, was soft and pink and unlined and suddenly crawling with baby fears.
By his side, Tanneguy de Chastel was twitching his own big red barrel of a body, so the axe at his belt thudded against his leg, demanding permission to break the silence. Tanneguy was a brave man and a good fighter. He took wise precautions before taking risks; today, for instance, he’d insisted they come an hour early to the meeting. But Tanneguy had to take those wise precautions, because he was so prone to exploding with uncontrollable rage. ‘I shouldn’t have brought him here,’ Charles thought with sudden foreboding; and that thought made him
move his eyes sideways, to see that Tanneguy was, indeed, on the brink of a towering fury, and inadvertently gave his aide a chance to talk.
‘He’s late,’ Tanneguy said – a mutter, but full of blazing intensity.
But we were early, Charles thought. He’s on time.
He looked away; muttered back: ‘Calm yourself.’
‘The murdering bastard came late,’ Tanneguy repeated, a little louder; as if he hadn’t heard Charles’ command. Charles knew Tanneguy was doing what he was trying not to do himself: conjuring up the terror of their night-time escape from the streets of a Paris packed with howling Burgundian killers.
‘Be quiet,’ Charles said.
Tanneguy’s voice dropped. But he didn’t shut up at once. He said, in a monotone: ‘No – bloody – respect.’ Then he stared down, over the side of the bridge at the choppy white water below. Tanneguy went so quiet that all you could hear was the birds cawing and Burgundy’s footsteps coming closer; but Charles could almost feel him seething.
Tanneguy didn’t speak through the opening formalities. Nor did he look up when Burgundy, bowing his bare head as soon as he got within speaking distance, said, with his eyes un-movingly on Charles, ‘My lord; I am grateful that you offer me this chance to combine with you against our ancient enemies, the English.’ His voice had always been that hard monotone, Charles remembered, but the sound of it now grated infuriatingly on Charles’ ears.
Charles had Tanneguy at his side, and three men behind.
He couldn’t stop himself. Bitterly, he cried out: ‘Ancient enemies? The English? They haven’t been
your
ancient enemies for long, have they?’ But when Burgundy just went on looking at him with that calm snake gaze, he realised his outburst had sounded petulant. Childish. The very things he hadn’t wanted to be. He bit his lip, saw Tanneguy look up and catch the hot blush on his face; and hated Burgundy, and the correctness in which his ambitions were cloaked, more than ever before.
The snake eyes blinked. With spare, economical grace, the Duke of Burgundy went down on his knees, and as he went he tucked his sword out of the way behind him.
What Charles always remembered afterwards was how, at that moment, he was watching that elegant gesture with almost unbearable loathing and resentment, and thinking that here was a man who would never put a foot wrong.
He remembered it because, at that moment, Burgundy did, at last, put a foot wrong.
The Duke, not young any more, wobbled on his bony knees.
Burgundy wasn’t a man to make himself ridiculous by falling over in front of these young fighters. With dignity, he moved to steady himself. He reached out his right hand for support. He put it on the hilt of his sword.
Charles had been wrong to think Tanneguy would start the trouble. It was Robert de Loir who drew in breath so fast and loud they all startled – their nerves were jangling anyway – then screeched: ‘What! Get your sword out in the presence of the Prince?’
But it was Tanneguy who rushed into the quiet space of everyone’s indrawn breath after that screech, pulling his axe from his belt and whirling it above his head, and yelling: ‘It’s time!’
The axe fell. Very slowly, Burgundy staggered and began to collapse. Everything went red. Charles could see Burgundy, down on one buttock, pulling at his sword, trying to get it out. But it was too late. He was slipping in the blood pouring out of the wound in his head; and they were on him, all the strong young men Charles had brought to the bridge. He was old, Charles saw, with bright adult understanding, too old to move as fast as his enemies; and, under the flash of steel, Robert de Loir was hissing, ‘Kill!’
Charles was frozen a few feet from the fight, watching, surprised at the coherent thoughts still coming through his head. Charles thought judiciously: He must have known this would happen one day. Ever since he killed my uncle of Orleans and got off unpunished, he must have been waiting for someone to take vengeance. There’ve been too many crimes.
It felt a long time after that that Charles realised, I don’t want this to be happening. He looked round, half-hoping for help. Burgundy’s men were rushing to the barrier on their side of the bridge. But it was locked, and their master was already still and heavy under his attackers’ legs.
Burgundy’s men came back without even the body. L’Isle Adam didn’t exactly tell Catherine that his troop had panicked and fled. But it was obvious.
Perhaps that was why the King didn’t understand. The King only rolled his eyes at Burgundy’s dusty, stuttering lieutenant, and said cunningly, ‘Ah, the darkness got him. It’s waiting for us all.’ Then he added, with sudden alarm in his voice, ‘Don’t look at me. I’m not here. I’m in the darkness too.’
And Charles VI was off: tearing his hair; tearing his clothes; running to the corners of the room; hiding behind tapestries.
Catherine watched him run. For what felt like a long time, she didn’t move. She felt remote from the scene in this room too: from the soldiers and the bleak faces and the panic and the lengthening shadows. There’d been a lifetime of madness: not just her father’s, but the madness that was on all of them; each of them surprising the others by the new depths to which they might stoop; and all always doomed to failure.
She’d hoped, herself, for these talks to fail. But she hadn’t expected even Charles to murder their cousin, a man so advanced in years, a man who’d come in peace. How could she have foreseen that baseness?
‘Was it actually my brother?’ she asked L’Isle Adam, who was beyond diplomatic tact, who was staring in open, horrified fascination at the King’s caperings. ‘My brother who … killed?’
It took an effort for L’Isle Adam to bring his eyes back to hers. He stared at her so blankly that she didn’t know whether he had even understood. But when he spoke he sounded very certain. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I saw. The Dauphin Charles said, “Kill.” He stabbed my duke through the heart. There was nothing we could do.’
Catherine turned away, remembering Charles torturing Bosredon; the fury in him.
‘Thank you,’ she said. Quickly, L’Isle Adam left.
Catherine felt sick. There wasn’t an honourable man in all of France. Wearily, she nodded to the soldiers waiting for her signal to remove the King. She couldn’t charm her father into coming voluntarily to his white shelter today. She was too tired. Whatever Papa thought, he wasn’t made of black glass; the reality was that they wouldn’t break him, however much they touched him. He’d just have to live with his fears. They all would. There was no escape for any of them. She let them close in and drag him off screaming.
There were riots in the town as night fell. The people had wanted peace among the French; their disappointment was taking violent form. Soldiers were sent out to calm them down. But the yells and flames and clash of weapons continued through the night; the windows never quite got dark.