Authors: Vanora Bennett
She knew what the soldiers of the guard would see from up there on their walls; she’d spent enough dreary days and nights here, on the way to somewhere else, to know everything Calais had to offer. They’d be looking down at Pillory Haven, the wool storage hall. They’d see the neglected hospitals of St Nicholas inside the walls and St James outside, where people said the poor, the sick and the vagrants were routinely refused admittance and where everything that wasn’t nailed down had long ago been stolen. Their eyes would move over the roofs of the half-forgotten churches of Notre Dame, St Nicholas, St Peter, St Mary and St Clement, and the near-derelict Carmelite monastery, which all lived on the King’s charity. None of the English locals would part with a penny of their tax-free Calais income for the upkeep of the monastery. Yet it was the thankless calling of the forlorn and penniless Carmelite monks to pray for the souls of the community – this godless, greedy, thrusting, perpetually discontented, perpetually drunk settlement of Englishmen on the make.
Henry’s grandfather, Edward III of England, had captured Calais from Catherine’s great-grandfather. He’d meant to kill the inhabitants, but in the end he’d let them escape to Saint-Omer instead. Their descendants were still out there, waiting. No wonder there were so many beer houses at Calais. The English settlers, lured out here by the promise of easy money, on their long, dank holiday from reality, drank to stave off their homesickness. The five hundred soldiers of the garrison drank to forget that, in reality, their promised wages so seldom came. The few foreigners who came to Calais for the market or for the herring season, who were watched so carefully from the moment they passed through Lantern Gate in single file, drank to blot out the knowledge that the innkeepers were spying on them. And everyone drank to forget their fear.
Catherine remembered growing up with a kind of abstract horror of Calais: thinking of it as a shameful symbol of French
defeat at upstart English hands. But when you got here you saw it wasn’t really the terrifying military stronghold it was made out to be, however many weapons were crammed into the keep. It was too squalid for that; too makeshift and too tainted by greed. It stank of rancid mutton fat and wet wool. It was only when she’d actually seen it with her own eyes for the first time – still tearful and lost from her farewell with her parents, still tongue-tied among her new escorts – that she’d realised what English hands had made of their first little corner of France. It was so ugly.
Perhaps the English could never have made Calais lovely. Perhaps the French would never have made Calais lovely either. For all the towers now looming over her, this place had always been a hopeless, watery no-man’s-land of salt marsh and flattened, windswept, acid grass. But the English hadn’t done much better, later, with Paris. All the beauty there’d once been in Paris … She shook her head, wondering what strange magic this air was working on her, so that all these wisps of melancholy and rebellion, the thoughts that she normally kept out of her head, came crowding in. All the beauty of Paris was long gone. All that was left, now the English had stripped the city of its colour and grace and luxury, were closed shops, tired churches, high walls, and battered paint and stone, with English earls strutting through the streets. She imagined them, proud and graceless and insulting, heads held as high as stags’.
Looking up, catching the guards’ voices, shivering, Catherine couldn’t help wondering whether she’d find the English ugliness had spread further once they got into real France this time. Still, she hadn’t come out here to worry. Determinedly, she put out of her mind all thoughts of reality; and, at the same time, of this strange, in-between place where she found herself, neither fully on land nor on sea, neither truly in England or in France, where no one felt they owed the next man anything, and which no one, anywhere, truly felt was home. She leaned her back against the rough stone of the wall and turned her eyes upwards, beyond all this, to the moon, to the rush of clouds, to the evening star.
She knew they were his footsteps. She didn’t straighten up as he approached; just turned her head a fraction, with a smile as faint as starlight.
He leaned against the wall next to her, looking up. She returned her own gaze to the prickling of the skies.
There was a silence.
‘They’re saying we’ll have to stay a while,’ he said, so quietly she could hardly catch the words. She could sense the pace and panic of the discussion he must have witnessed in the great hall. ‘The war’s too close … they can’t be sure it would be safe to leave.’
She took in a long breath. She didn’t understand what the war risk could be so far north; but then the dukes of Burgundy had always been fickle allies. The news didn’t make her unhappy. She was enjoying being out of reality; in between. She wouldn’t mind staying here, like this.
She laughed a little, keeping her eyes fixed on the star. ‘Stay a while … in this miserable little place,’ she murmured. ‘Well, at least we’re all friends together.’
He laughed too. The darkness of that sound, so near, filled her with delight. ‘It’s not so bad,’ she heard. ‘Did you know they call the harbour basin Paradise?’
She turned her head towards him. He was closer than she’d thought. There was still just enough moonlight to see the laughter fading from his face. She could feel the smile fading from hers.
She didn’t know how they came together; how the kiss began. Except that everything had been leading to this, for hours, days … months. Except that she’d always known. Just as she knew the smell of him; and the contours of his body enveloping her in the shared warmth of his cloak; and the line of cheek and jaw and nose that her fingers and lips were now rediscovering.
His eyes were open, looking straight into hers. How blue they were. How tender.
There was no time any more; just the night air, and the happiness, and the two of them.
‘You won’t mind … won’t reproach yourself?’ she murmured,
maybe much later, pulling her head back a little to see his face better, though lacking the strength of purpose to edge her body away from his; suddenly remembering the pain and misery that had ended the other time.
He only smiled. He breathed: ‘Why?’
Hesitantly, she muttered, ‘Oh … the things you worried about then: reasons of state … the importance of my marriage … your loyalty to Henry …’
He pulled her closer so she couldn’t see his eyes. Kissed her forehead. Let her bury her face fearfully against his neck. She couldn’t bear to look, in any case. She shouldn’t have said anything. She shouldn’t have spoiled everything.
She was so close that when he laughed she could feel his chest vibrate with it. ‘Why?’ he breathed again, and he was still laughing. He stopped. Putting a hand under her chin, he lifted her face towards his.
Seriously, he went on: ‘It’s all gone, all that, hasn’t it? Long gone. Who’s watching now? Who’s making you a new marriage? You’ve raised your son; done your duty. What you do with your life now is between you and your God. What I do is between me and mine. Nothing matters any more; except us. We’re old enough to know our minds.’
She could hardly understand the ease; the vanishing of barriers. ‘Like the people of Calais,’ she whispered, trying unsuccessfully to make light of it. ‘A law unto ourselves.’ She giggled foolishly, then screwed up her eyes, wishing she hadn’t said anything.
But her clumsiness didn’t matter. Owain always made everything come right. He put his lips to hers again.
A little while later, it was Owain who drew back. ‘And you?’ he whispered, looking as stricken as if the thought had only just occurred to him. ‘
You
won’t reproach yourself? Have regrets?’
She shook her head. This wasn’t forever, a pact in the sight of God. Here, now, they didn’t have to worry about her blood; his blood; or the disapproval of others. This was just … a space. God looking away for a moment, a moment that no one could guess the end of … How could he ask?
‘We’ve left reality behind here, haven’t we? We’re somewhere else …’ she breathed. ‘Free.’
He nodded, as if her nonsense words had reassured him. She sensed he understood.
‘At the harbour of Paradise,’ he said, ‘under the evening star,’ and the corners of his lips turned up, and her heart turned over.
Her mind knew it couldn’t last. But somehow this magic went on.
The first night was full of casual, thrilling deceits – the feigned yawns while dismissing the Governor of Calais’ wife, who’d been courteously sitting up in Catherine’s chamber, waiting to undress her and settle her in her bed; the polite order, through eyes half-closed to mask their bright anticipation, that no one was to disturb her in the morning so she could sleep off the journey; her request to the guard a moment after the Governor’s wife had left, that they let past any messenger from the Cardinal if he should choose to send word to her; Owain’s careful timing, appearing just before the guard changed, so the next guard wouldn’t know he was with her; the breathless, disbelieving grins at having managed to conjure up the hours that followed, alone together, behind curtains, behind a locked door, shut away entirely from the world.
But there was more. After that, Owain managed to rearrange the household so that things were easier. The Cardinal’s rooms were changed, and Owain’s antechamber with them. Owain suggested his master might prefer the sea view from the suite directly above Catherine’s. The Cardinal had no reason to use the unguarded back staircase for servants, which linked the two floors.
Dame Butler was reassigned to attend the Queen Mother and run the King’s little household. That was easy enough, too. The Earl of Warwick had been preparing, ever since that first dinner, to set off with the English army for the siege of Compiègne, where, it was rumoured, Jehanne of Arc was planning to lead a French force to relieve the townspeople defending their homes. He wanted to be back in the world of men. He
was relieved to have a plan put to him that would salve his conscience while keeping the King occupied.
Dame Butler was as delighted as Harry to get her little charge back. ‘I hoped this might happen,’ she confided, with her kindly grey eyes crinkling into a smile; ‘though I didn’t think it would be so fast.’ There would be no more fencing and hunting marathons for Harry here, she added briskly. There was no point, and nowhere to ride without a military escort, and no one to practise with anyway now all the young knights had ridden off with Warwick. The child needed rest and thought to counteract all the over-excitements of travel. She’d have Master Somerset show him around town, maybe; they’d start lessons in a day or so; but for now Harry should be catching up on his sleep. She didn’t seem to suspect a thing when Catherine begged her not to trouble herself by waiting up to undress her last thing at night. ‘You’ll have far too much else to do,’ Catherine heard herself say, and wondered at the smoothness of her deceit. ‘You’ll be up at dawn every day with Harry as it is; and I like to sit up late. I don’t want to keep you up till all hours … There aren’t enough ladies here; but it doesn’t matter in the least … I’m quite capable of taking my own clothes off at night; it’s not as if any of us have to be especially beautiful here. We’ll all just have to make do a little while we’re on the road.’
Catherine felt no guilt at any of the lies she told or heard drop from Owain’s lips. In fact, she even enjoyed them: took pride in the quickness of wit she needed to remember each small untruth and fit them plausibly together; enjoyed the business of constructing a wall around her movements behind which she could be private.
They were all idle here; there was nothing to do but wait.
Any news that did come from outside was a tale of frustration. When Duke John wrote briefly to Catherine, a formal word of greeting, his letter referred in passing, equally briefly, to a coronation for Harry
in Paris.
She sighed over the word. Not Paris! Reims! He’d already started to imagine it all wrong.
She learned something similar from the Cardinal. He laughed a little as he told her; and he softened the blow further
by starting, ‘Poor dear John; he always means well.’ But what he presented as a minor slip-up, Catherine felt to be a catastrophe. Duke John, it seemed, had mislaid Charlemagne’s sword.
‘Mislaid?’ she said, open-mouthed. ‘What do you mean, mislaid?’ The Cardinal shrugged and tried to look serious, but he couldn’t stop his lips twitching as he explained; he was clearly enjoying the idea of his nephew’s discomfiture more than he was fretting over the loss of the sword. Seven years ago, after the burial of Catherine’s father, Duke John had gone to Paris from the Abbey of Saint-Denis with the sword. He’d had it carried before him without touching it himself: a sign he was regent of France but not quite king. His idea had been sound forward planning, not self-aggrandizement, or at least that’s what he said: he’d wanted to have the sword safely at hand for Harry’s coronation. But there’d been so much moving about since then, so many campaigns and shifts and panics, so many retreats, advances, surges, pullings-up, that the Duke was shocked but not altogether surprised to find no one could turn it up in the armoury.
‘He’s saying a replacement will have to be used,’ the Cardinal said.
Catherine looked at the Cardinal, wondering whether even he had the least understanding of what he was saying. The English couldn’t have lost Joyeuse, as if it was some old piece of rubbish. Joyeuse was sacred – a miracle in itself. It had a piece of the Holy Lance that had drawn blood and water from Christ’s side embedded in its pommel. Charlemagne used Joyeuse to behead the Saracen commander he had vanquished after creating the Empire of the Franks.
The Song of Roland
had boasted four hundred years earlier that Joyeuse was the mightiest sword in the world and changed colour thirty times a day. It was the most potent symbol of French majesty you could imagine; proof you could hold in your hand that Harry’s French family, stretching back through the generations, united by their blood, had been favoured by God since the dawn of time. And this man in front of her was talking of replacements …