Crown in Candlelight (30 page)

The orange glow flowed against the walls of Henry’s pavilion where he sat on the evening of the third day. Montjoie Herald had conceded the victory. And now a wave of dreadful melancholy, so sudden and inappropriate that it made him shiver, dropped upon Henry. Holy God! he thought, hearing the laughter and song from outside, jubilation runs like a hare through my army, and no wonder. But can they not realize, as I do, that this is only a beginning? The French, after their catastrophic defeat, will soon be renewed, gorged with the lust for vengeance. Doubly savage, I must return next spring and face them again. I feel so weary. Now I must fight this crippling
accidie
and question Charles of Orléans, who sits opposite me, shocked silly, and my royal subject.

‘What was your latest news from Paris?’

‘Would to God I were there,’ replied the Duke.

Henry thought: you will not see Paris for a long time. There will be no ransom for you until I have conquered France anew.

‘You gave birth to a butchery,’ said Charles. ‘To slaughter the prisoners was shameful, criminal.’

Henry was past thought, past judgement, part of a heredity of victors. He said: ‘Did not your countrymen do likewise, at Nicopolis?’ Charles was silent.

‘What of the King of France?’

‘He is in grave madness again,’ he said sadly. ‘And it’s rumoured that the Dauphin Louis is dying.’

‘How so?’ Ten years younger than I, thought Henry. Debauchery has carried him off.

‘There’s talk of poison at the hands of my father’s murderer … the Burgundy assassin, Jean sans Peur.’ Tears came to his eyes.

Henry said evenly: ‘How are you sure? Could it not be your own faction, Armagnac?’

He knew enough of Armagnac and the powerful Count Bernard whose daughter, Bonne, Charles had married, to accord him respect, for the new leader of the Orléanist party was more potent than the murdered Duke Louis had been; while Charles was thinking regretlessly of Bonne, whose pinched shrewish face he might not see again for years. Suddenly he longed for Isabelle, his beloved ‘Madame’. But Isabelle was dead.

‘Come, cousin,’ said Henry not ungently. ‘There’s no merit in holding back. Who will gain supremacy now?’

‘Armagnac.’ Charles wiped his eyes on silk. ‘We will wrest the Constable’s baton from the King, in face of Jean sans Peur’s ambition. Armagnac will end the factions, the constant brawls and murders …’

‘Can you be sure?’ Henry leaned forward, the muted fires gleaming in his eyes.

‘No,’ said Charles helplessly. ‘But I can hope!’

Henry sat back, satisfied. Let France remain in a state of chaos. And let me gain Burgundy against the fierce Armagnac! Feeling a little less despondent, he said:

‘What more? The Princess Katherine? How and where is she?’

‘She’s well, and with her mother in Paris, the last I knew.’

‘How does she look?’ said Henry curiously.

Oddly, Charles’s clearest picture of Katherine was as on that dread day at Blois. Time had ceased for her there in his memory.

‘She is still much a child, even at fourteen.’ Then: ‘Sire, I’m weary.’ Henry rose, motioning the guard to escort the Duke to bed.

Later he went outside across the rosy flame-lit field, black with scavenging birds, to visit the surgeon’s tent where Humphrey lay in some pain, but able to grin at his brother.

‘Is he mending?’

‘Ay, your Grace,’ said the surgeon. ‘There’s some proud flesh, but I think it will be well.’

‘All’s well, eh, Harry?’ said Humphrey of Gloucester. ‘All is very well!’

I must pray. I must sleep. Henry left the tent abruptly, feeling a strange dementia. All round, the men were singing a
Deo Gratias
. He stared at the raging red pyre that bubbled and stank, and saw clearly the tortured resolute face of Badby. Great God! He clenched his fists and looked up at the bloodshot sky. Great God, I did that for Thee! And this I did at Agincourt in Thy Name. God, I am no ingrate. But what has been achieved? Many dead, a few ransoms, the long campaign just beginning. You gave me the day. Now give me peace of mind.

Music, the healer. As David soothed Saul … He turned to his escort and said:

‘Bring me the harpist, the bowman, the Welshman.’

Tomorrow, he decided, I will hold the celebratory Mass. But tonight I must have reassurance, the mystical concessions of old legend, whose significance I do not fully understand myself. I, who should not need strength seek it now, now that the battle is over, and the men rejoice. My stepmother’s jewels, my lands, are still in pawn and the stench of my father’s usurpation once more in my nostrils. And yet—as he entered the pavilion with the hellish light wavering on its walls—the first step is taken, the first veil drawn upon self-doubt …

Owen, fresh as a lark and slightly drunk, entered with his harp and a light step. As before, Henry motioned him to sit. ‘Shall I play holy things, Sire?’

Henry’s thin hand covered his eyes, he spoke without lifting his head.

‘There was something you once told me of … a ballad, concerning some fair young knight .…’

‘Culhwch,’ Owen said eagerly.

‘That is the one, then.’

‘Oh, your Grace,’ Owen burst out intemperately, ‘was it not all a miracle, a mighty victory?’

‘Sing of Culhwch.’

Ruefully, he said: ‘It should, by rights, take hours in the telling.’

‘Then, tell of the essence.’ He searched among labyrinths of wanting, the magic, the only words. ‘He confounded the fiercest giant …’

‘… in the world. He had been rash in youth. Thus he shone more brightly against the darkness of his past. And he conquered—the princess, and the giant who was turned into a little child in face of his prowess, and the mighty Boar …’

‘And the domain?’

‘All lands, all dower, all splendour. His by right.’

Silence. Then Henry looked up, smiling frailly.

‘I saw you fighting, Owen ap Meredyth ap Tydier. I shall reward you now.’

Duw annwyl!
He will knight me as he did poor Davy.

Owen’s shining hopes flew crazily. Then the King said:

‘I shall create you an esquire of the Wardrobe. You will be under the jurisdiction of Master John Feriby from now on, in my Household.’

‘It is an honour, Sire,’ Owen said jerkily. The King’s eyes looked past him to where the corpse-pyre made a pattern on the canvas of the tent.

‘Now, sing,’ said King Henry.

The first note dropped, silver on the silver of the voice. For a brief moment player and listener shared an identical thought.
Is this the greatness of which I dreamed?

Il est ecrit,

Pur voir et eil,

Per mariage pure

C’est guerre ne dure.

(From Katherine’s Coronation feast, 1421)

She still had a cough, relic of the old fever, and now there was no Dame Alphonse to bring her the sweetbriar necklet, for Alphonse was dead and Poissy a place of the past. The cough was more an indication of nervousness than ill-health, intermittent and sometimes an embarrassment. And in her mother’s household there were plenty to care for her, a plethora of abigails and béguines, like benign sheepdogs round a rather independent little lamb, for Katherine of Valois was learning how to care for herself.

A woman now, nurtured as the bait she was, treated by Isabeau with an eerie indulgence, she had developed a secret self, a mental sanctum, detached, full of private conclusions and often passionate thoughts. Her will was strong, although not as strong as she would have wished. She was fairly biddable. She had survived, through a concealed, wary determination. She was tall, her face serene, her bearing steady. Her colour was ivory with a musk-rose flush on the cheekbones. Her great dark eyes were thoughtful, often distant, her lips wide and sleek, and her smile still sometimes transformed her, so that the eyes bloomed mysterious as black satin. It was almost a wanton smile. It challenged, teased. None could see Katherine smile without acknowledging her curious glamour, neither could they guess that the smile was often only a propitiation, a defence that sheltered her spirit.

She was smiling now at some witticism of her mother’s. They sat together in the bower at Troyes under a stained-glass oriel, its light glinting on their finery. Katherine’s dark hair hung below her waist and shone with filaments of gold and green and red under the sunlit glass. About her head she wore a filet of gold and pearls. A tight crimson gown, faced from neck to hem with ermine, constrained her long body. Small sapphires punctuated the collar. A loose mantle of cloth of gold was draped about her shoulders. Beneath all this, her rigid flesh prickled with sweat. The sun was fierce for May, and they were waiting, still waiting, as they had waited in other bowers, other manors, through stress and hope, since Agincourt.

Isabeau watched her daughter, and tried another jest. If only the girl would laugh more! all might yet be saved. When sullen, she could look almost plain. The portrait sent recently to Henry of England had a false smile plastered upon it, and she was doubtful of its efficacy. Worry dragged at her, as she sat in her sumptuous blue sarcenet and sipped Burgundy. She shifted her spreading hips upon the window-seat and tapped her feet. She was heavy with ambition as well as anxiety, and, like Katherine, she thought often of the dead. Dauphin Louis for one, her fierce, bibulous little son, gone to his grave before his twentieth year, rotted by debauchery and full of spleen at the incredible catastrophe sustained by France in 1415. Such was Isabeau’s reputation that men said she, the mother, had administered poison. She smiled wryly. At least it could be said that she did not mourn Louis. He had become truculent, an embarrassment, furious at her negotiations with the English King because they rocked his own dreams of supremacy, hating her association with Jean sans Peur of Burgundy, the enemy turned lover. She had plotted and schemed at Tours and Troyes with Jean sans Peur, encouraging him to keep the bloody feud between Burgundy and Armagnac running, so that Parisian Armagnacs were murdered in their beds and factions festered like a sore. How easy it had been for the invader to return from England and resume his conqueror’s trail through France!

The whole of Normandy was now virtually Henry’s. Many towns had been captured by him and his captains: his brothers Clarence and Gloucester; Umfraville, March, Salisbury and Warwick and Exeter. Touques was his, and Auvillars, Caen (besieged cruelly by Clarence and Warwick); Creully and Villars Bocage in the west of Caen, the castle of Alençon; Falaise (the birthplace of Henry’s own mother), Bayeux, Cherbourg, Louviers and Pont de L’Arche, eight miles from Rouen. Then Rouen itself, which had a undergone a siege from which even Isabeau’s rock-hard sensibilities recoiled, though she cared nothing for the common people and had not wept for years. What was the English poet’s name? Paynter? No, Page, John Page. His ballads were read in both England and France. Untutored, a common soldier, he had written from his eye-witness heart.

And also their bread was near hard gone,

And flesh, save horseflesh, had they none;

They ate both dogs and cats,

And also both mice and rats …

The French soldiers had turned the citizens of Rouen out to starve into the drenching town-ditch, ruthlessly forfeiting French lives for their own survival. Beyond the moat the English force refused to let them pass, and there they had lain, the dead and the living.

And then they ate both roots and rind,

And dew of the grass that they might find,

All love and kindness was gone aside,

When each from the other their meat might hide.

Babies had been born in the moat, while nearby corpses lay unburied. Babies who were hauled on pulleys up to the battlements to be baptized, then lowered again to their deaths in the pit. Skeletal girls had struggled as far as the enemy lines to sell their bodies for a crust. There had been women suckling dead infants, and babies hanging on the breasts of their dead mothers.

At every gate they were put out,

Many a hundred in a rout …

And all they cried at once then,

‘Have mercy on us, ye Englishmen.’

Isabeau drank wine, and tried to think with detachment about the present situation. Her own son, the third and present Dauphin, Charles, and his enmity for Jean sans Peur had been at the root of that carnage, albeit indirectly. Just as she herself was to blame, for the factions seeking to destroy one another, even as the English King had desired. Henry had played one off against the other while babies were born and died in that ditch of Purgatory, flooded by rain and the tears of illimitable suffering. So it was, she thought. Life! Fate! I must not grow soft or pliant in my age. Her eyes turned severely on Katherine. Smile, woman! Smile, salvation!

She had stayed in her fortified manors, fringed by the howling strife, cultivating Katherine like a magic herb and upholding Jean sans Peur. Burgundy, the crafty old warrior, had come to her like a miracle at the time when she needed him most. Despite his murder of Louis of Orléans, she had welcomed him gratefully; they were in complete accord. Shrewd and cool, he was a man to match her own strength at last. She knew and approved of the knowledge that he was hand in glove with the invader, holding back his troops from the defence of the realm and rejoicing to see Armagnac’s forces harassed, beleaguered, betrayed. When Bernard, Count of Armagnac, was murdered in a Paris street-brawl to lie naked and mocked by the Burgundians for three days, she and Jean sans Peur had celebrated with a revel lasting twice as long. King Charles was not present on that occasion. He had a turret-wing to himself at Troyes, and stayed there most of the time, unstable, muttering of old sins and regrets; useless as a broken cannon. A scrapheap of a man.

The second Dauphin, Jean, who had been as tiresomely obstructive of her private schemes as his brother Louis had been, was also dead. Young Jean had been dedicated to the Armagnacs, to the Dukes of Brittany and Berry, and, like Louis, had feared for his own succession at the hands of his mother and Burgundy, and when Henry of England ruled France through marriage to its Princess. Jean sans Peur was blamed for the Dauphin Jean’s death; people spoke of poison. None would ever know the truth. It was of no account. The prime consideration was to treat with Henry of England, for he had proved stronger and cleverer than any, and was an ally devoutly to be wooed.