The Queen's Lover (56 page)

She smiled sadly. "It doesn't matter," she replied, cutting through his stumblings. She was grateful for those words, inadequate though they were. At least if nothing else they had a
few more months of this tantalizing bittersweetness, of whispers on the way somewhere, of stolen moments, of the sight of one another. But what he said next took her breath away.

"I can't stay till September," he added very quickly, looking down. "I've thought a lot about it. Give me permission to go away before Michaelmas. Please."

She turned sharply up toward him.

Warily, he stepped back. "It's unbearable," he said.

"What do you mean?" she asked, inching toward him. "Unbearable?"

He inched away. They were circling each other like hunter and prey. She didn't know who was which. There was an imploring look in his eyes.

"Being here with you. The hopelessness of it. Waiting for the end," he said too quickly. She sensed there was more. She held his gaze. After a pause, he added: "Loving you."

The words hung on the air.

Loving me,
she repeated to herself wonderingly. He said
loving me.

"Wanting you," he added. "A torment." He looked up. She thought: He really did say that.

"Always," she said quietly, not knowing whether she was talking about his feelings or hers.

He nodded. "Always," he confirmed in the same monotone, as if it didn't matter whose feelings; as if they'd both always known they felt the same need anyway.

They went on looking at each other. "You too," he said expressionlessly.

"I didn't realize you..." she answered.

They couldn't touch. Life had caught them in separate traps. There was her royal blood; there was his tainted Welsh blood. They'd both always known that, too. The only honorable thing to do, after this admission, was for her to let him go at once. It wouldn't be decent for him to stay in her household.

"Stay," she said very quietly, not caring. "Please."

He looked anguished. He shook his head. "It won't make it any easier to have said all this," he told her. "For either of us. It will be worse than before. You know that, don't you?"

"Don't think about that," she replied, wondering if he felt the same burning, unsteady heat she did, whether his yearning to touch her made him as faint as she was now, wondering what she'd do if he really did go. "So little time--six months. We need you. I need you. Don't leave."

They stood in silence, looking down at the birds in their cages, pecking disconsolately at bits of chaff, waiting for the knife.

"Stay," she persisted.

"What," he said, pointing at the doomed fowls, still shaking his head, "like them?"

She nodded impatiently. Those birds had a bit more life to enjoy, didn't they? He had to say yes.

She couldn't breathe. It seemed an eternity before Owain nodded too. "All right. I'll stay," he muttered. He looked miserable. But before he walked away, for the briefest of seconds, he reached out and blindly squeezed her hand.

PART SEVEN

The Song of Jehanne of Arc

THIRTY

Was it easier, this feverishness? This new daily agony of glancing toward and glancing away, this twitching and pacing, the heightened awareness of the other body's proximity and position, the new muteness and blushes and arranging of their own limbs, for modesty's sake, or beauty's, and the hands, always on the move, always beginning to move together, held apart only by acts of will or prayer?

Often, Catherine thought Owain had probably been right. Knowing they loved each other but would have to part made both their lives more of a torment. Yet she was still more grateful than she had words to explain that he was there.

She tried to tell herself that the tension she could see that both of them now felt--like the electric crackle in the air before a storm--had nothing to do with their new knowledge. Wasn't it, she suggested to herself, just that everything around them was really moving faster; events piling up on each other: the frenetic jingle of harnesses from the courtyard; a rush of consultations between the Earl of Warwick and the powers at Westminster; vestment-makers pinning coronation silks and fretting over the placing of lacings; the end rushing up?

Harry's coronation date had been set, long ago, for November 6, 1429, close to his eighth birthday. After that date Catherine would lose her right to run his household (though Humphrey, with his usual chaotic disregard for detail, hadn't actually set
out for her what would become of her from November 7). But, after Charles of Bourges had had himself crowned in France, the English coronation plan acquired a new dimension. No wonder Humphrey was too preoccupied to talk to Catherine. The dukes decided they wanted their King to have not only an English coronation, but also a French one, as soon afterward as could be organized, and a better one than Charles of Bourges' at that.

The Earl of Warwick told Catherine that the word from Duke John in Paris was that a French coronation for Harry was considered vital for the war effort. It would impress the French enough to help the English forces seize back the military initiative from Charles and his peasant miracle-worker. Privately Catherine doubted that any awkward English-style ceremony, concocted by Duke John and wrong in every detail, would impress the French in the least. In France, which had been governed by one family for a thousand years, tradition and ancient ritual were woven too tightly into the fabric of life for a foreigner to hope to get it right. Especially an English foreigner, with Duke John's awkward, careless, sweaty way of improvising some sort of tawdry, second-rate mummery, shrugging away all doubts and hoping it would somehow do. It wouldn't do; not in France. In any case, she feared the English couldn't do anything to compete with the memory of Charles' near-miraculous coronation at Reims. She wished it wasn't so, but she feared that battle was lost already. There was scarcely any point in trying.

But Catherine kept quiet about her Frenchwoman's doubts. There'd be time to discuss them later. For now, there was only one question she needed answered.

"Who will take Harry to France?" she asked.

Warwick's eyes glittered. "I will, Madame," he replied officiously.

Catherine bowed her head over her food. But she'd decided, inside her head, that she was going too. Humphrey wouldn't like it, but she'd find a way. If she could get permission to accompany Harry to France, she could spin out her time with her son by months. Perhaps more. If they left after the November
coronation, maybe only after the worst of the winter; if they made their way slowly through northern France, it might be as much as a year. There'd be delays everywhere; there was war everywhere; and how long would it take the English to plan a French coronation? There was no telling how long she might spin the trip out before she'd be forced to return to England and accept whatever new humiliations Duke Humphrey had devised for her after her job as the Queen Mother was done; whatever half-life in the shadows, waiting for death.

Are turn to France: it would be something to plan for, at least. Something to distract her from the knowledge that the feast of Saint Michael and all the Angels was only weeks away, on September 29, and Owain would have left before then.

Harry didn't admit to liking being cuddled, now he was tall enough to seem almost grown up at times, and would be eight before the end of the year. But when no one was looking he didn't mind snuggling back into Catherine's arms. And Warwick, mercifully, was away in London, conferring again with Duke Humphrey. So Catherine ordered a bath for the King in her chambers, and once he was clean, and in his nightrobe and cap, and had drunk his milk and honey and cinnamon, she and Harry lay side by side on cushions, with his head on her shoulder, looking into the dying fire.

Warwick couldn't complain if, for once, the child wasn't in that herd of boys, she thought defiantly. It was part of her duties to talk French to her son and prepare him to rule France. Humphrey had told her that himself. If they were going to crown him over there, she should begin to prepare him for that possibility too; tell him the right way it should be done; spread the knowledge she had.

"One day," she said dreamily, stroking Harry's soft hair, "you'll be crowned King of France, too, did you know that?"

He curled tighter into her.

"Do you know what happens when they crown you King of France?" she whispered in a singsong voice, enjoying the peace of this moment, the relaxation of his little body against hers.

She could feel his head shake.

She paused. She didn't really know herself the detail of what should happen at a French coronation. No one did. Her grandfather had died so long ago, and the war and upheavals since had killed so much of the nobility that there could hardly be a soul still living who'd remember actually seeing her father's crowning nearly fifty years ago. But she knew the general picture.

"Well," she said, stroking his head, "of course, it's not unlike what you will do for your English coronation at Westminster Abbey...there's an
ordo
of special words and prayers, promising God that you will do your duty to Him, and to the land He's sent you..."

Uneasily, she felt Harry squirming away. She added: "...thought he French words are more beautiful, of course."

He liked that. He looked at her with delighted shock. No one was disrespectful of English ways. They giggled like conspirators.

"In fact, your French coronation will be the most solemn and beautiful moment you can imagine...the moment when you know you have the same clear lovely blood in your veins as ran in Saint Louis', and Charlemagne's, and Clovis'. The best blood in the world. When the spirit of God comes to you and transfigures you, so that you know you are the latest in an illustrious line stretching back to the dawn of time--the holiest and Most Christian King..."

He nodded, reassured by the familiarity of these words, and snuggled up to her again.

"It all starts when you enter Reims Cathedral, with all the nobility of France gathered to watch you..."

He piped, in his awkward not-quite-native French: "Why Reims? Why not Paris? Or Saint-Denis, or somewhere else? What's so special about Reims?"

"Well, you do process on from Reims to Saint-Denis, down the Saint Marcoul of Corbeny road, and after that on to Paris, with crowds cheering all the way--but only afterward, when you're already the King, because the abbey of Saint-Denis is the spiritual home of those who are already king," she replied patiently, wondering at how much he still didn't know about
France. She added: "Once you've been granted the divine royal power to cure sickness and work miracles," because as a child that's what she'd been told happened to a King of France after his coronation. She stifled the brief thought that came to her now: If only Papa had really been able to work miracles and cure sickness--even his own.

"Reims is the place where you're crowned King of France because that's where our ancestor Clovis became the first king of the French...and a Christian...and where a white dove flew to him with holy oil for his baptism...and for the thousand years since then, that ampulla and the chrism inside have stayed at Reims Cathedral...waiting to anoint new kings...waiting"--she turned to him and widened her eyes and touched her nose playfully against his--"for
you
!"

He squealed an answering squeal of delight.

She was enjoying losing herself in this recitation of how things should be, or might have been. So was her son. "You wear gold, and you carry the sword of Charlemagne," she intoned, and he looked at her with shining eyes. "And you can choose your crown. You can wear the Holy Crown, Saint Louis' crown, which has a true thorn from Jesus Christ's crown of spines embedded init...or you can wear Charlemagne's imperial crown, covered in French lily flowers."

He nodded again, but sleepily now, with eyelids beginning to droop. "The holy one," he muttered importantly. "I'd like that one."

She stroked his drowsy, happy head again. She was imagining the soft trace of chrism on forehead and hands; the catch of myrrh in the nostrils, the fleeting knowledge of the holiness in majesty that a whiff of that bitterness would bring him...

"That's all you need...those are the symbols that are sacred to France," she murmured, almost singing. "When your people see you in that crown and with that sword, lit up in gold and sunshine, they'll know you as their true King for the rest of your life. You and no one else."

His head dropped. She kissed him. "You and no one else," she repeated, more to herself than him.

But he wasn't quite asleep. He stirred as she quietly rose. He said, with his eyes still shut: "But Maman, what about the other King of France?"

Catherine froze. "What other King of France?" she said.

He wouldn't open his eyes. He dug himself deeper into the cushion and it muffled his words. "The one who's just been crowned at Reims. The boys told me. There's another one."

"Oh,
him
...he's not the real king," she replied quickly, trying to sound casual, wishing that the little boy stretched out below her, hugging at the cushion, didn't look so like Charles had long ago. "He's just a bad man, pretending. We're trying to catch him and stop him."

Harry was quiet. Catherine snuffed out lights and tiptoed toward the door.

"But how do we know he's pretending?" Harry called insistently. "If he's already gone to Reims, and done those things, and said those prayers, and God did nothing to punish him? How do we know it isn't me who God will think is pretending?"

She laughed uneasily from the doorway. "We just know," she said, peering back into the darkness where he lay. "Trust me."

It wasn't enough. She could hear that in the expectant quality of his silence. Harry wanted more.

"God didn't recognize him, and nor did the people of France. They all knew he was cheating," she improvised.

"How?"

"Ah," she said. "Because he didn't have the crown or the sword; because he wasn't the King."