The Queen's Lover (62 page)

Harry was gazing up. He looked worried. She could see he hadn't spotted the star yet.

There was a rumble of encouragement from behind in the half-dark: Owain. "This way, look," he said, holding Harry's gaze, pointing up. "There, you see?" Harry's teeth flashed; he'd found it. "The most important star," Owain's voice went quietly on, and Catherine wished they'd seen it a moment earlier, when the light had been brighter, when she might still have been able to make out the expression on his face. "Once you know it, you can steer your whole life by it."

Landfall brought a queasy rocking and tipping of the hard ground under foot, the flicker of lanterns, the heat of the fire in the great hall at the castle, the rush of soldiers trooping off the ships and to their quarters, the fifes and drums that marked the start of the night shift for the three troops of the scruffy-looking permanent garrison at Calais, and, when Harry had begun to whine that he was hungry, and she was almost dizzy with lack of food herself, the simple traveler's supper of herrings and beef and Bordeaux claret and English wheaten bread,
baked that morning at Southampton. As quickly as she could, Catherine retired to help Harry to bed. The Earl of Warwick had been quick to give permission for her to attend her son; he wanted his knights and the Governor to discuss troop movements and supplies as soon as the meal was finished, and the Governor was to brief him on the military situation.

Harry was asleep on his feet before he even reached his chamber. She eased his clothes off as he lolled against her on the side of the bed, thanking God for the warmth of the evening that would allow her to slip him naked between the sheets without worrying too much about lacing up nightshirts. Her own head was swimming with fatigue and sea air and what she told herself were too many new impressions to absorb so quickly; but she knew deep down that what she meant was the tremulous new shyness that had tied her tongue and made it all but impossible to talk to or even look at Owain, ever since he'd said what he'd said to Harry about the evening star. You're overwrought, she told herself, watching the little rumpled head on the pillow; listening to the innocence of her child's quick breathing; glad of the silence; glad to be away from other people's eyes. You need a good night's sleep as much as he does.

But she couldn't sleep. She was jangling with life and exhilaration; she needed to walk, to breathe this new air that was so nearly French. Not that she was homesick exactly, or nostalgic for her childhood. Her memories of her own past she simplified into just two emotions: boredom and fear. She could do without both. No, this excitement about getting into France was more about escaping from the next life she'd made for herself in England. The air she was breathing here, with its sea scents, seemed full of memories, but fuller still of tantalizing whiffs of the unknown future. Once they were out of Calais, completely away from the sounds and sights and smells of complacent Englishness, into the strange war-ravaged place that lay beyond, they'd be somewhere uncertain, undefined, where they would never quite know whether they'd be safe...but, when she got back to France, it just might feel like home.

The seagulls were circling outside. Their mewing made her restless. She just couldn't go back to the great hall. She hesi
tated on the stairs, then slipped past the cries and clinking of knives and cups, out into the courtyard to gaze up at the glittering sky, where the full moon was sailing serenely through the clouds. To look at Venus.

It was cold now, even in the shelter of the castle keep, where there was no wind. Catherine could hear the rough English voices of the soldiers scrambling along the top of the earthworks; calling to each other as they paced from one corner tower to the next; and the faint answering cries of others, southeast of the castle, patrolling the walls of the town, looking out to sea to make sure no enemy ships were sneaking unnoticed to shore, or across the marshes. Other towers and miserable forts were dotted in the watery gloom--by the dunes of Sangate, or by the bridges and roads to the Hammer River. Every landmark had its uncouth English name: Ballangers Bulwerk near Cowbridge; Boots' Bulwerk; Newenham Bridge, crossing the canal of ditchwater that ran out of the town's upper districts into the sea. Every landmark was patrolled to reassure the settlers that no enemies were somehow approaching by what passed, in this boggy wilderness, for land. It was all like this, right across the Calais Pale: Guisnes and Hammes and Marc and Terouanne: grim little towns cowering behind walls, towers, and earthworks, lines and squares set in water by the will of man. It was all the squelching of feet and endless damp, the cries of seabirds, and the quiet calling of scared men at night, waiting for the creep of boots.

The town of Calais' four gates were locked by sundown to keep its three thousand Englishmen--wool merchants and mint gatherers and herring fishermen and publicans--safe in their beds. Usually only Lantern Gate was ever open at all, even by day.

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 Saint Nicholas inside the walls and Saint 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, Saint Nicholas, Saint Peter, Saint Mary, and Saint 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 beerhouses 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 realized 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 color 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 nor 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 upward, 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 harbor basin Paradise?"

She turned her head toward 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 anymore; 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 toward 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 anymore; 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 harbor 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.