The Queen's Lover (22 page)

Brusquely, coldly, Charles crossed his arms over his chest. He said: "Take
him.
He's in no fit state to be out." And he jerked his thumb again, toward their father.

Horrified, Catherine realized she'd been so paralyzed with shock that she hadn't even looked at her father, standing quietly
by her side, to see how he was taking the arrest of his wife by his son.

Now she saw. The King of France was weeping; silent floods of tears pouring down his cheeks, soaking into his doublet. His eyes were vacant. It was as if he didn't know he was crying.

But perhaps, after all, he was aware that he'd finally become the center of everyone's attention. As they all turned to stare at him, King Charles VI of France began to hum; a strange, tuneless dirge, in a high-pitched, quavering voice. He pointed upward with a trembling finger, into the cloudless blue sky where the birds were still shouting out their joy at being alive. "A black sun...and ghosts...and clouds of ravens, coming to peck out our eyes," he sang; then, looking around, with a busy, cunning expression; "but they'll see right through me...I'm made of glass."

He laughed; laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

Charles quivered in what looked like disgust. Catherine saw him turn to Bernard of Armagnac, and saw Bernard of Armagnac quietly shake his head and wrinkle his nose and shrug.

"Go," Charles said, turning his back. He wouldn't meet his sister's eyes. He started to walk away. He tossed back his last words over his shoulder. "Take a carriage. Go now."

It was only once the carriage was jolting out of the gates, with her father hunched up in his corner, still singing to himself, with his disregarded tears still pouring down his cheeks, that Catherine gave in to the great, bitter, disappointed, frightened torrent of tears pent up inside her too--ugly tears that shook her body and forced snuffles of air and quick, sharp animal howls of pain out of her; that turned her face wet and red and blubbery and trembling with despair. Once they were safe.

It had all gone wrong. There was no hope.

Even the princes who were supposed to be allies were riven by hatred of each other. Even the one person whose love she'd been sure of all her life had turned against her. If they were made of glass, the glass was shattering now. They were all living under the same black sun as the King, and there would be no end to it; no end...She couldn't even stop when she felt the timid, trembling hand of her father, still humming his song,
still hunched up in his own hell, stroking her hair as if to comfort her in the awful darkness they'd both found themselves in.

"He sent your mother to prison..." Christine murmured the next day, shaking her head, stroking Catherine's.

Catherine tried to stop herself from weeping again, and, except for a slight tremble about the lips, succeeded. But she couldn't bring herself to tell Christine about Bosredon's face as he balanced on that wheel rim. She couldn't bring herself to say what Charles and his bully friend the Count of Armagnac had been doing. She recoiled utterly from that memory. She didn't want it in her head.

"That's bad," Christine was saying, gently and sadly. "Very bad. He shouldn't have done that."

Catherine was comforted to know that Christine, who was so honest as well as learned that you could always respect her judgment, believed Charles had done wrong.

But when Christine got up to go, still shaking her head, she was muttering, "That poor fool of a boy..." And when she kissed Catherine goodbye, she whispered, "...horrible...but try to forgive him."

Catherine bit her lip and didn't answer. She wouldn't forgive Charles. There was no point in trying.

ELEVEN

"You'll go incognito..." Henry, King of England, said. "You're the right man for the job. You know their faces, where to find them; they'll remember you. And you're a bit of a man of letters, too." Behind him, Duke John of Bedford nodded--another royal brother with pop eyes; the spitting image of the King, and his closest friend. Owain didn't know him but he'd heard Duke John was a good master. He was known for never panicking under fire. Owain felt calmed in his presence, just as he did in the King's. The Duke had a steady voice and strong hands.

"The King's at Paris, with his daughter. The Prince is there; but separately. At the Louvre. They say the King's mad most of the time these days. So you'll need to talk to Prince Charles. And the Count of Armagnac. He's the one who pulls the Prince's strings."

"And the Queen?" Owain ventured. "Is she with them?"

Duke John laughed shortly. "No. She's in prison. They say Charles didn't like the rumors about her. He's had her shut up. They say she's hopping mad; doesn't know who to hate most, Armagnac or her own son. But she won't get out. The boy's got a nasty temper. And he hates her. A rum lot, the Valois. Especially when you think they're all supposed to be on the same side!"

Owain's eyes widened. That helpless-looking little boy had dared do that to his bully of a mother?

"What do the letters say?" he said, tapping the bundle he'd been given.

Duke John shrugged. "They reiterate the marriage proposal."

Owain said nothing. But his frown must have spoken his thought: But...they rejected it. Years ago.

Duke John patted his back, as if he was being naive. "Never say never," he replied briskly. "They may find it easier to say yes now. They must be scared. They're stuck in a city with no firewood, no grain. No river access. With us down the road one way, and Burgundy's army down the road the other. There's no way out for them. They may well feel it's time they talked. We've made it easy for you with the letters--there's one to her; and copies of another to the King; to the Queen; and to the Prince--so you'll be able to use your head on the spot to find the best way to proceed."

Owain nodded miserably.

"What does she look like?" King Henry asked suddenly; as if the idea had never struck him before.

"Freckles." It was all Owain could think of in reply. He cursed his clumsy tongue. But his face must be showing his admiration.

"Pretty girl, eh?" the King said, not unkindly. "So much the better."

Owain had been high in the King's favor since he'd found Charles of Orleans, facedown in the mud at Azincourt, white with fear and exhaustion, and marched him back to the English camp. No one had even asked what he, Owain, had been doing in those scrubby bushes next to Charles of Orleans. Everyone knew how few real heroes there were in battles; some questions were best left unasked. But Owain remembered. When the sounds were so loud he hadn't been able to make out any single sound in the roar, he remembered seeing a face in the scrum of French knights all around: a man lifting his visor to look down at the wound in his leg. A hard, thin, dark face, gray with pain, but stoical; the face of someone who had borne pain before. In a flash, Owain had recognized that face: it was Henry Gwyn, who should have been lord of Llansteffan; who, he remembered, had
run from Henry V's order to join his enemies in France. He'd known Henry Gwyn once: had been a child, laughing and climbing up those muscular legs and being swung round somersaulting in those wiry arms. It was only a glimpse. The next time he looked up, he was yards past Gwyn; the face was lost in the flailing of arms. But somehow Owain had become more terrifyingly aware than ever, in the middle of that charge, of his body being soft and fragile and breakable inside its casing of heavy clothing; of the impermanence of everything; of impossible worlds colliding. He remembered the uncanny way everything had seemed to slow down around him, until even the sparks from the swords and axes seemed to be moving through the air as gently as feathers. He remembered the bursting of his heart when, after his horse fell, he staggered clumsily for shelter. However much he loved his King, he'd known since then that he wasn't made for war. He'd been lucky in the more than three years since; he'd managed to avoid battles; to stay back from the fighting; to make himself useful with negotiations and letters.

But he didn't want this job. Going to Paris would mean the end of this strange, busy, traveling escape from the feelings he refused to let into his heart: the comfort and camouflage of war. Going to Paris to try and negotiate the marriage of Catherine to his master would force him to think. He didn't want to think.

"Be careful on the roads," Duke John finished calmly, passing him a bag of money. "No one knows who owns what in France anymore. It's all abandoned farms; burned-out towns. Checkpoints. Private armies. Highwaymen. Bandit country. So--watch yourself."

He should have gone straight to the Louvre. But what he wanted to do instead was go to the modest stone house on Old Temple Street. He'd been fighting the thought all the way there; trying not to imagine he was going to be able to walk back into his past. He hardly knew what he was doing when he first felt his hands turn his reins so his horse ambled east off Saint-Denis Street, when he should have kept on right to the heart of the town. He was heading through the narrow lanes that led to Christine's house.

It was as close as he knew how to get to Catherine, whose memory was now only a lovely confusion of rose oil and glimpses of eyelashes, lips, breast, neck, freckles, and joyful silences. Catherine: the essence of beauty, and still the meaning of his life, but someone whose reality he could hardly recall. But standing outside Christine's house made him feel Catherine might, at last, be close again.

Yet he couldn't go to Christine. He stopped a little way down Old Temple Street from her door and stared, half hoping someone would come out or go in: Anastaise with a bunch of flowers, or Jean de Castel. Yet he knew, really, that there was no point in being here, feeling nostalgic for the easier times of the past; for that first starburst of light and music inside the cathedral; for the tiny squares of light and color and beauty on parchment; or for the other thing--the feel of Catherine's body against his, the thing he tried to forget.

The past was past. He was the enemy now; that's how Christine would see it. He shouldn't be here.

But he was tired. He couldn't go to the Louvre and announce himself without resting. So he walked his mount down by the river and over to the Island, from where he could see the twin towers of the cathedral; telling himself he'd find a bed for the night at an inn somewhere on the Left Bank, among the students.

Paris didn't look as miraculously beautiful as it had before. He found himself noticing the boarded-up shop fronts; the piles of stinking rubbish in the streets; the beggars; the shabbiness everywhere. Had it been like this before? he wondered. Or was it just his own darkness of heart now coloring the way he saw the town around him?

He didn't go into the cathedral. He was too troubled; he didn't feel he deserved the blissful serenity that looking up into that heavenly light promised. But he did walk down New Notre Dame Street, dawdling past the workshops, letting the horse come almost to a halt, hoping to meet a familiar face who would welcome him; unable to stop himself from hoping it might be Christine.

There was a lot of bustle at the workshop: bags being piled
up just inside the open courtyard door; people rushing in and out with cheerful looks on their faces. Owain looked more carefully, trying to work out what was going on. When he saw that one of the busy pilers-up of luggage was a bald, nearly hunchbacked man with a freckled head and pale eyes--Jean Malouel, who'd shown him the first illuminated manuscripts he'd ever seen--he nudged his reluctant mount forward and bowed.

Malouel looked brightly up at him. "Christine's boy," he said, putting his head on one side. "I remember you." But he was too excited to ask why Owain had come back to Paris. It was perfectly possible he didn't know Owain had ever left. "I'm just off," he went on, gesturing at the piles, taken up with his own drama. "See? They're bringing the horses in a minute."

Owain was cheered by the little man's happiness. He grinned down at him. "Where are you off to?" he asked politely.

Jean Malouel snorted like a horse ready for the road. "Troyes," he said; then, giving Owain a slightly scornful look, as if not understanding why anyone need ask such an obvious question, "of course."

Owain couldn't see any reason why he should know what was taking the illuminator to Troyes. He smiled to himself at the man's self-absorption and, humoring him, asked: "What's there?"

Malouel gave him a distinctly fishy look this time.

"Have you been away, or what?" he said suspiciously, as if everyone must know what was at Troyes.

Owain nodded.

And what the old man told him next changed all his plans. French politics had been turned on its head again.

After Owain had set out for Paris, the Queen had found a way to escape from her son's prison. She'd managed to get a letter to her old enemy the Duke of Burgundy, asking him to rescue her. Burgundy had been besieging the town of Corbeil; but he'd dropped the siege and had come straightaway with his army. ("But why?" Owain stammered. "They're sworn enemies." And the old man chortled knowingly as he replied, "Not
anymore, they're not; they're the best of friends now. She's forgiven him everything; well, she would, wouldn't she? And it's good for him to have the Queen under his control.") The Queen and Burgundy had ridden off into the forests together and fetched up at Troyes. Yesterday, the Queen had proclaimed herself Regent; and now she and the Duke of Burgundy were calling out artisans and bureaucrats from Paris to work for the rival government and Parliament they were setting up there. There was hardly a man in Paris who wasn't willing.

Owain's head was spinning. He needed to work out what to do; who controlled whom; who it would be best to see; where to go. He tried to pull himself together. If this was true, Paris might no longer be the place in which to negotiate a marriage between the King of England and Princess Catherine. He might be better off heading for Troyes himself; delivering his letters to the Queen and the Duke of Burgundy. Burgundy was negotiating with the English; Burgundy was almost on the English side.

"Where's the King? And the Princess?" he asked faintly.