Blood Royal (44 page)

‘But didn’t he ask for me?’ Catherine couldn’t help asking. ‘Wasn’t there anything personal?’

Duke John patted at her hand again. ‘It was all done for you,’ he said sincerely; ‘for your boy.’

He couldn’t see the difference. But he could see the hurt in her eyes.

‘He’s made good arrangements,’ he added, not knowing what else might comfort her. ‘You can rest assured of that.’

She nodded, feeling defeated. Duke John had already detailed the arrangements that concerned Catherine and Harry. Duke John was to be Regent of France and stay in Paris to run the war, while his brother Duke Humphrey would be Protector of England with responsibility for Catherine and
Harry. Mother and son, with overlapping households, would live together in the royal castles of the Thames Valley during Harry’s infancy. Once the King turned seven and his infancy was over, Catherine’s influence would diminish. Male tutors and guardians would be appointed, and Harry would be taught the ways of men and warfare, and be crowned. Catherine hadn’t asked, and he hadn’t spelled out, what her role as Queen Mother would be after Harry’s seventh birthday, when her household would be unlinked from her son’s. She assumed she might have remarried by then. Otherwise, nothing seemed to be suggested. It didn’t matter. It was over six years away. It seemed too remote to imagine.

She dug her fingernails into her palms until they nearly drew blood. Petulantly, she thought: I don’t want good arrangements. She was grateful, more than grateful, of course she was, because she was terrified of the chaos that might so easily come upon them all at any time; and this hasty lastminute ordering of Henry’s effects, while imperfect, at least left her in a better position than the cruel tumble into widowhood and financial ruin and legal chaos, all at once, that so many others had experienced and Christine had written about. But she so wanted her husband to have left her something else, too – a final prayer, or word, or note, or kiss, or instruction – something, anything, to show he’d had her on his mind, and not just his duty.

It was too late for any of that now; too late for anything except a future without Henry’s protection.

Masses were sung all over Paris while the arrangements were made to send Henry’s body home.

Catherine, the Duke her brother-in-law and the Duke her uncle-in-law, in the plainest of black, attended the cathedral of Notre Dame, followed by a cortege of Englishmen.

Catherine and her mother and father and Anastaise prayed together in the quiet of the Hotel Saint-Paul’s chapel for her husband’s soul.

Catherine thought they might be the only French people to do so, for all the ringing of bells in Paris that the dukes had
ordered. And even Anastaise only prayed for the English King out of a servant’s loyalty to the whims of her masters.

The King of England’s cortege set off from Paris two weeks later, on a grey, gusting morning. The summer was over. The weather had turned. Men in white, carrying torches, surrounded the bier. The household servants streamed behind in black, with the great procession of lords behind them, including the King of Scotland, who had been in France attending on the King of England. At the very back of the procession, a mile or two away from the bier, sat Queen Catherine in her black, in her litter.

Above the coffin, visible to all the crowds lining the roads and filling the churches at every one of the hundreds of Masses sung along the way, lay a figure of boiled leather made in Henry’s likeness, complete even to the hair. It was wrapped in purple bordered with ermine. Its feet wore golden sandals. There was a diadem of gold and jewels on its head, a sceptre in its right hand, and in the left a golden cross and ball. Catherine shuddered at the sight of it – a nightmare version of Henry, the kind of image you could imagine squelching out of a night bog on a moonless night. It had been Duke John’s commission: designed to terrify the French into submission. He was a good man, Duke John, but with no taste. She kept her eyes down. She was glad to be far from the horrible image. When they stopped for the night, she kept her face veiled.

It would take till November to get to London. There would be an important stop at Saint-Denis, the holy abbey dedicated to the patron saint of French royalty, where all the kings of France since the dawn of time had been buried. Catherine’s duties at Saint-Denis had been much discussed among English brothers and uncles. She was to intercede for Henry with the Abbé. She was to ask for a blessing for her husband, who, while not a King of France himself, was the father of the next King of France, and had for many years ruled a significant part of the Most Christian Kingdom with the blessing of the current King Charles VI. Once that had been obtained (and it would be obtained, of course, since the holy abbey of Saint-Denis was in English hands now), the English procession would
move on, through Rouen, Abbeville and Hesdin, making many stops between each town for prayers, then to Calais and England.

Catherine had submitted quietly to the frenzy of planning and ritual from the start. She’d moved, as she was required to, from her family at the Hotel Saint-Paul, looking glassy-eyed at her mother and father, her father lost in his own confusion, her mother seeming shrunken too, patting helplessly at her. ‘I didn’t know you would take it so badly,’ Isabeau said, strangely hushed, so understanding that Catherine felt her red-eyed, silent composure would crack. ‘But you have a son; you’ll find your strength in him, believe me. Whatever else happens, our children are our great joy, our consolation …’

Her father was unwell on the day Catherine left. She went up to his chamber to kiss him goodbye, and found him sitting on his bed, with white stubble on his trembling chin, staring at the great billows of grey cloud folding up in the sky outside. ‘They all go,’ he said anxiously, as if Henry’s spirit was about to come at him from the clouds.

But she didn’t want to have a nonsense conversation with him; not now, when she was leaving. She cut through his words. ‘Pray for me, Papa,’ she whispered, embracing him. ‘I will for you.’

He only looked back at her, then smiled a pleading smile. ‘You’ll bring the boy next time?’ he asked.

‘Of course I will,’ she promised, softening, lingering in his arms, touched by the idea that he was longing to meet little Harry and hold his grandson in his arms.

She had to go. But she stole a last look at her father from the doorway. He was staring at the clouds again, and his lips were moving. ‘Poor Charles,’ he was saying. ‘Poor Charles.’

Isabeau came out, with Anastaise attending her, to settle her in the litter and bless her for the journey. Catherine watched them fuss around, tucking in her robes. They all knew it was unlikely she would be back – unlikely they’d meet again on this earth. ‘I will come back,’ she said anyway. ‘God willing. I will bring Harry.’

She had to lie. They all did. She couldn’t cry for this farewell. There were so many other tears to be shed; and once she started, would she stop? Catherine turned away from her mother’s eyes, which weren’t tearful either but haunted, as soon as her litter started shuddering off down Saint Anthony’s Road to the Louvre. She felt frozen; hardly able to move, weighed down with a fear that went beyond tears.

No one seemed to mind if she did very little or excused herself very early or appeared at dinner – at every improvised banquet of kings and dukes – without a word, without eating. She was supposed to be heartbroken. It was in the order of things. The great machine of statehood was built to cope with her grief and move on.

She didn’t know what had become of Owain. She didn’t dare ask where he had been sent; whether he was in the cortege somewhere, avoiding her, or at the front, or back in England. There was no point in thinking about Owain, who didn’t want to know her, when everything was lost. She tried to make her thoughts of the husband she’d lost. She tried to pray.

Owain would have done anything to get away from Paris after letting his body betray him into that mortifying kiss. He’d done everything since that other return from France, two years earlier, to make sure he would never get caught in this trap again. At least he thought he had. But here he was.

Back then, his plan had seemed so clear: forget poetry, a young man’s rash self-indulgence, and follow Christine’s ascetic example instead, devoting himself to learning; taking himself, step by step, through the great classics of history, philosophy, science and devotion, so that sooner or later the furious anguish in his heart would fade, and he would gain wisdom and peace of mind. Then, when he fully knew himself, he would take his eternal vows.

But now? Every one of those hundreds of days at Saint Mary’s – in the honey-stone cell, in the library, in the chapel – wasted. All those resolutions made after all those endless hours on his knees, staring into candle flames – broken.

She’d seen him, and thought, like a cat noticing a mouse, that she’d like to call him back to play with. She’d broken his composure. He’d let her. What a fool he was. And she: so cruel, so cruel.

He’d been so sure he’d mastered himself.

He crossed the Channel in a wool packboat, sitting in the hold on stinking, greasy bales of wool, muttering rosary after rosary in a frenzy of self-reproach that seemed to get worse, not better, with every exhausting hour. He hated himself, and her, even, for the way this turmoil was getting in the way of what should be all he could think about – his grief for his lost master.

Even when he fell asleep, it was not to memories of Henry but to wild dreams of galloping all the way to Jerusalem, in a pilgrimage that would at last rip the sin from out of his heart.

If not Jerusalem, he thought, waking up under grey skies to see white cliffs looming up ahead – the southern English chalk faces that now signified home – he would lock himself away in some great act of penance, a mortification of the flesh. A hair shirt; lashings; forty days of hunger. He’d ask the Bishop to set him the penance, he thought heatedly.

Then he imagined the Bishop’s clever, worldly face with its wide mouth – a mouth that often quivered on the brink of unkind laughter – looking back at him as he made that request. Unlike the other royal brothers and uncles, who’d been irritated by Owain’s wish to leave the war and return to Oxford, the more sophisticated Bishop had been interested in the young Welshman’s self-questioning, his yearning to find the most honourable way to live his life (or perhaps the Bishop had just wanted to further irritate his kinsmen by taking Owain up). Yet Owain could suddenly imagine the Bishop’s amused, nasal reply if he now requested that dreadful penances be imposed on him: ‘Too much mortification, surely … what can you possibly have done that is bad enough to justify all this punishment … are you by any chance taking yourself too seriously … indulging in the sin of pride, dear boy?’

Cringing at the thought of the humiliation he would bring
on himself, he shook his head. He’d have to think of another way. He’d have to wait till he’d delivered his message to Westminster, and prayed, and rewarded himself with a full night’s blessed sleep. There must be a way out of this pain; a way forward. Perhaps once his head had stopped whirling with sleeplessness and sorrow at the loss of his master, and shock at the memory of
her
, the one he refused to call up but couldn’t let go of either, it would be easier to see where that path lay.

FOUR

The bells were already clanging at Saint-Denis long before the procession reached the abbey gates. Catherine, whose head ached from the stuffiness of the closed litter, opened the curtains and felt she could almost see the deafening waves of gloom buckling and bending the trees. But it was only the wind.

There was a knot of peasants standing at the roadside. Weeping. There were more coming from the muddy fields, with hay in their hair and their pitchforks still in their hands. They weren’t coming to stare at the King of England’s image, a mile ahead. They were staring straight at her: and those who weren’t sobbing and keening had haunted eyes.

Catherine sat up straighter. ‘God rest his soul,’ she heard one female voice sniffle.

God rest his soul.

There’d been no tears till now. Who in France would truly mourn the passing of the King of England? There’d been just awe at the passing of life, the stillness of death. She’d seen fear of change in some of the faces that had passed before her, anxious eyes, but no grief. She began to listen properly. The litter-bearers too. The litter bucked and heaved as they craned their necks.

The main cortege was already at the abbey gate. Far ahead, she could see Duke John riding back down the road towards her from the centre of that procession, at a stately canter,
followed by three knights. She stared dully at them, in case one might be … But none of them were Owain.

She watched Duke John’s face coming up, turning from a blur to a gooseberry-eyed whole. He looked worried; worse. She leaned forward, pushing the curtains away. He swept his hat off.

‘Your Highness’s father, His Majesty of France,’ Duke John said without preamble. But she knew by then that her father was dead. She knew because she’d opened the curtains so wide she could see three of the litter-bearers, and they all had silent tears streaming down their cheeks.

No one could have expected two kings to die.

Duke John spent less than an hour at Saint-Denis before riding off to supervise the other funeral preparations now starting in Paris. He and Catherine’s mother would be the chief mourners at the King of France’s funeral.

Catherine said: ‘May I come? May I attend to my father? Mourn with my mother?’

But he shook his head. There was no time for girlish feelings in all this. ‘Your place is here with your husband. You were his Queen. Take him home. Your son needs you.’

She began, ‘But …’

Duke John said warningly: ‘… Your son, Harry, King of England, is now King of France too.’

Titles no man had held together before, she realised: the most powerful titles in the world. Held by a child of nine months old, she thought, dazed. No wonder the peasants had frightened eyes.