Crown in Candlelight Read online

  Isabeau, followed by the Duke of Orléans, marched up the Hall. The King, sitting erect, extended his hand, palm down.

  ‘An honour, my dear Isabeau.’ he said, as she snatched angrily at his fingers and brushed them with her lips. ‘And how is Tours? Our court is bereft without you. Will you not admire my new Italian tapestries? All beauty comes from Italy. Your little painter will know this. But I was forgetting that Monsieur de Laon is no longer in your service. A pity, he is so skilled in the new grisaille …’ He half-turned, almost winked at Jean sans Peur.

  It was a puny gibe, but enough. Isabeau mounted the two stairs of the dais and put her mouth close to the King’s ear.

  ‘Have a care, Charles. Remember when you were Georges Dubois!’

  ‘Dubois?’ he said pleasantly, so that everyone heard. ‘A paramour of yours? Dead, as I recall.’

  The King was ahead of her in taunts and in strategy. No longer could she raise his nightmares. Like a vicious child, he ordered wine and sweets, bidding her admire the gold goblet and plate that had once graced her own table at Tours.

  She took a long draught of wine and said roughly: ‘I did not come here to parry insults. Where is Lord Bosredon?’

  He said seriously: ‘If he is not with you, then … God help us, is there no loyalty? He must have deserted your household. Come, let me console you!’ He stretched out his hands. She saw with fury the wry amusement of Jean sans Peur and the lips of her own son the Dauphin parting in a chuckle. This was a game he understood.

  ‘I demand you bring Bosredon to me. Let me know the nature of his disaffection. Its instigator I need not ask.’

  ‘Why should he be within my court?’

  ‘I sent him—’ She bit her lip. ‘I sent him here to Paris.’

  Charles laughed. ‘Paris! It’s full of taverns and rogues who play with cogged dice. Perhaps even now he lies in drink with his pockets cut, tattling of his high associations …’

  ‘No,’ she said tightly. ‘he’s here.’

  ‘Maybe.’ The king’s whole mood changed suddenly. ‘You are weary from your journey. You must rest, change your clothes.’ He clapped his hands, and Odette came forward. ‘My little one, attend the Queen.’

  ‘I have my own servants,’ said Isabeau.

  ‘I’ve ordered a special banquet,’ he went on. ‘A rare, unequalled catch was taken from the Seine today. I impounded it for my table. You must share the feast.’

  She looked back angrily on her way from the Hall, but she was hungry and there was little merit in argument.

  ‘You will join us?’ He was almost pleading. ‘Then we will talk further of Bosredon.’

  Servants set damask-covered trestles in a rectangle to the dais. Plates rimmed with gems were brought, and multi-coloured goblets of Venetian glass. A place was laid for Isabeau on the King’s right, and for Louis of Orléans on his left. The Dauphin sat next to Jean sans Peur, and Isabelle and Charles lower down. Minstrels arrived and began to play a rondel. The King skipped from the dais to greet Isabeau’s return, showing such amity that she almost wondered whether secretly he desired a reconciliation. It was only six years since she had borne a child of his.

  ‘How is Katherine?’ she said, following her own thoughts.

  ‘She is well, at Poissy,’ said Isabelle instantly.

  ‘Broth, my lady?’ said the King.

  Steaming bowls of venison from the Loire, the meat crushed and blended with eggs, cream and wine. Isabeau ate greedily, while the King watched with solicitous approval.

  The minstrels played; a youth sang a chansonette. Isabeau, her confidence swelling with her stomach, thought: he is ready to be reconciled; the idiot is as weak as ever. After supper I shall demand some of my treasures back. Charles kept her cup filled up with the cornelian yield from Jean sans Peur’s vineyards which tasted, to her, none the worse for that. After a time her reasoning grew muddled and her head hot. She said:

  ‘You keep a good table, my liege. Once we were great and powerful together, and could be so again.’ Louis of Orléans heard this and bit his lip in dismay. The King smiled warmly.

  ‘Agreed, why should we not all be friends? You and I, my lords of Burgundy and Orléans, and your chevalier, Monsieur Bosredon …’

  Fuddled by wine and food, she had almost forgotten.

  ‘So he is here! Charles …’ almost wheedling: ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He’ll be with us, soon.’ Flambeaux had been lit all around the hall, shining on the tapestries and the goblets, jewelled eyes. At Charles’s signal, the minstrels played a fanfare. From the buttery twelve men bore in a vast covered dish.

  ‘Fresh!’ said the King. ‘The bounty of Mother Seine!’

  Isabeau leaned forward. ‘Is it salmon?’

  ‘No, but a big fish.’ The butlers lifted the cover of the dish. Neatly lying in the middle of a bed of green herbs lay the naked, cyanosed body of Louis Bosredon. Before drowning he had been half-strangled, and the marks were livid on his neck.

  Even the butlers had not been told, having been forbidden to lift the dish’s cover earlier. One of them reeled into a corner to vomit. For a moment his retching was the only sound.

  Then the Dauphin Louis, jumping up, ran round the table to peer closer into the dish. He let out a shriek of laughter, while the King watched Isabeau greedily; the wine-flush faded to chalk and her hand snapped the stem of her goblet so that Burgundy wine ran softly over the table edge. Then the child’s laughter died away and there was only the drip of wine on the tiles.

  The Princess Isabelle sat very still, her head filled with rolling waves of faintness. She saw her father’s terrible triumphant eyes, the gleeful face of the Dauphin, the barely concealed satisfaction of the Duke of Orléans. She felt herself surrounded by monsters from some lavish portrait of Hell. A voice beat at her silently: you too inherit Charles’s madness, Isabeau’s evil. All the intercessions in the world cannot temper this devil of Valois. She would have cried out, then felt an arm about her. Charles of Orléans was beside her, pulling her up and through a side exit between the ranks of stunned servants, just as the storm broke.

  ‘Your doing, my lord!’ Her mother’s voice.

  ‘Yes, mine! And so shall I do to all your mountebanks and spies that fill your lust, that weasel into my Council chamber …’

  There was a scream, the crash of glass, wild weeping. Isabelle and Charles went, as urgently as if heaven itself were about to close, up the stairs to the chapel.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said faintly, ‘I would gladly die!’

  He swathed her in his cloak. ‘And take my own life away! Madame, sweet Madame …’

  She clasped him tightly about the waist. I told Katherine … love is the only candle .…

  ‘The world seems darker still today,’ she said.

  They reached the chapel. The door was open and the scent of flowers and wax wreathed about the high altar with its burning golden Christ.

  ‘Stay by me,’ said Charles of Orléans, ‘and I will be your light.’ ‘Murder,’ said Jean sans Peur, stretching his long legs in the hearth, ‘is not the royal prerogative.’

  It was November, sickly with fog and the stench of wet withered fruit left on the bough. A grave-cold mist clung about the fortress at Bapaume where the Duke had installed himself to meditate, to assess, and to worry more than a little. Tense and sober, a small ring of followers deployed themselves quietly about his presence.

  Three things fretted Jean’s cool mind, and two of them concerned the House of Orléans. Isabelle’s forthcoming marriage with the young Charles solidified the rival claim to Valois. Bosredon’s assassination two months earlier had proved fortunate for Duke Louis. Lastly and most important, the King’s health, when last assessed, had given Jean sans Peur some disturbing moments. He could only hope he had imagined that clouding of the eyes, those non-sequiturs in the royal conversation. The King had studied his own fingernails intently; always a bad sign. His calm was precarious. Any shock could overset him. Jean sans
Peur spoke quietly to a man in the forefront of the circle about his chair.

  ‘And where was the Queen yesterday?’

  ‘At Troyes, my lord. Orléans was with her. They are preparing to leave for winter quarters.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Paris. The Palais again.’

  Jean sans Peur lowered his head, smiling ruefully, his heavy nose like a preying bird’s beak.

  ‘She’s confident, then.’

  ‘Yes, lord. So is he. Very light of heart.’

  ‘She would not go to Paris,’ he said, raising his head and addressing the listeners directly, ‘were she not sure of some calamity to follow that will render her immune. After the Bosredon affair she swore never to return while Charles held power. Are there physicians with the King?’

  Anxiety cooled his brain further; his thoughts, like swordsmen in dark places, moved deliberately on. He weighed the whole structure of events; intuitively seeing France in the round, a globe balanced precariously on the fragile thread of her sovereign’s spirit, a globe about which rats crept and gnawed. Also he foresaw the danger from beyond that sphere, from Henry of Lancaster, who even though sick was capable, through his heir, of further ruthless demands. Henry had been willing to compromise for a French princess but would soon be willing no longer. Jean sans Peur thought, suddenly appalled: Valois has behaved like a true imbecile. Diplomacy is dead. Were I in my cousin’s shoes, I would, by now have averted disaster. Should that cousin’s reason fail, what then?

  Isabeau, allied to Orléans, will see the country damned. So long as she can have her pleasure, rape the treasury before Henry of England gets to it, and doubtless flee with her favourites across the nearest frontier … just as I caught her once before, on the road to Milan. Milan.

  The name came like a flash of flame. Violante of Milan was wife to Louis of Orléans. A poor neglected wife for sure, but Louis had a certain sense of responsibility, a basic tenderness. Had not Jean himself seen him, refusing to travel on because of a sick child? Was this the answer, or part of it? The way to weaken by elimination, at least some of the dangerous power of the Queen?

  There was a trick to which lovely sinful Paris would lend her darkness. He beckoned his agent closer.

  ‘All others may go,’ he said.

  Murder is not the king’s prerogative, he told himself again. Had I been king, France would be safer than she is today. It is not too late.

  At seven years old, Katherine had grown tall but was still very thin. She had a trick of holding herself tight, arms crossed over her waist. Her appetite was hearty but she remained pale, and the nuns, surveying her like some jewel, worried in whispers. Daily they enveloped her in prayer.

  She found Poissy safe and boring. She watched her sister Marie take her final vows: she played with Jacquot, who had outgrown puppyhood and guarded her with dignity. She wove small coloured tapestries of St Denis and St Antoine. She rose obediently to the night offices and yawned through the long services of the day, and all the time she waited for visits from Belle. She marked the days off on tally-sticks, she cut them from candles and watched them waste to bring Belle nearer. Sometimes there was an unexpected visit, which threw her whole calendar into joyful chaos. On a foul November day, Dame Alphonse bustled into the parlour where Katherine sat coughing from the fog which seeped even through the lead-lined windows.

  ‘My princess!’ She stopped mid-stride, keys and rosary swinging. ‘Have you la grippe? Here …’ She fumbled in her pouch. ‘Wear this. It will cure you quicker than anything I know.’

  It was a suckered frond of sweetbriar, noduled with a warty growth.

  ‘L’églantine,’ breathed Dame Alphonse. ‘The bush from which this came was planted in our garth during the time of Philip-Augustus. When the canker shows on the briar, it cures the cough. Permit …’

  The princess bent her long neck to receive the garland. From his corner Jacquot watched sternly, then seeing that the nun means no harm, went to sleep again, waking the next instant to leap and fawn round Isabelle, who entered with a smile.

  ‘Oh, Kéti!’ Isabelle cried after a moment, half-strangled. ‘How strong you’ve grown! Wait, I can’t breathe. I want to give you a present.’

  It was a miniature painting by Colard de Laon mounted in blue enamel. It was a good likeness; the little artist had caught Isabelle’s courage and much of her beauty. She sat down on a high-backed chair and drew her sister on to her lap.

  ‘You’re too old for that Princess,’ said Dame Alphonse, hovering near the door. ‘You are nearly grown up. Nursing is for babies.’

  ‘Then I’ll be a babe for ever,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Madame.’ The nun was red with importance under her wimple. ‘All the community offer you felicitations on your betrothal. When is the marriage taking place?’

  ‘Very soon,’ said Isabelle absently. She took between thumb and finger the sweetbriar garland round Katherine’s neck. ‘What’s this nonsense?’

  ‘The princess was coughing,’ said Dame Alphonse, redder than ever.

  ‘Then she must have a physician.’ Isabelle looked gravely down at Katherine. She removed the prickly trophy and held it out in silence to Dame Alphonse. Defeated, the nun withdrew.

  ‘Belle,’ said Katherine in the peace that followed, ‘are you really to be married soon?’

  ‘Yes, my love.’

  ‘Will you be very unhappy?’

  ‘I trust not.’ Isabelle laughed. ‘Why?’

  ‘When you were married before …’ She slid from her sister’s lap and knelt. ‘I remember, Belle, how you wept.’

  ‘That was afterwards.’ She looked down tenderly at Katherine. ‘I was only a year older than you when I married Richard … he said to my father: “I would not have her any older. I am young enough to wait for her. We shall be so strongly united that no king in Christendom can in any way … hurt us.” ’

  ‘Oh, sweet Belle!’ cried Katherine. ‘You’re weeping now!’

  Unheeding, Isabelle went on. ‘And when I was conveyed in state from Lambeth to the Tower, soon after we came to England, nine people were crushed to death in their effort to see me—the little queen! It was a bad augury which was fulfilled worse than either of us had dreamed …’ She brushed her tears away. ‘It’s finished. Charles loves me and I am fond of him. His father was kind to you. I shall be saved from Henry Bolingbroke and his knavish son. You also, and Michelle. You will make good marriages and be happy. When I’m married I shall live at Blois. Or Charles will take me to Angoulême, where he is Count. It’s lovely there in spring.’

  Katherine’s dark eyes were suddenly wild.

  ‘You swore you’d never leave me, Belle! Never while life lasts!’ She began to sob, and Isabelle took her close again.

  ‘I swore it. I swear it now. We shall not be parted for long.’ She shivered. A ghost-voice whispered in her head: Adieu, Madame! Adieu! until we meet again!

  ‘I want to be with you. Take me with you to Blois, to Angoulême!’

  ‘Katherine,’ said Belle sternly, ‘you must trust me. It’s safer for you here at Poissy, until such time as you marry. Oh, Katherine! as if I should ever desert you! I’ll come to see you often, do you think I don’t miss you? Care for you constantly, pray for you every day? I’ve told you, Kéti, this is a dark, evil world. Stay a while longer here. Dame Alphonse is loyal and this place is so holy none dare meddle with it. Here, dry your eyes. Bring your lute and sing to me. We’ll have a lovely time together.’

  While they played and sang and told one another stories, the day shortened and the fog thickened, becoming a noxious brew like that which had covered Paris the previous evening as if obedient to some powerful will. Death-cold and filled with the stench of sewers and river, it seemed elemental and gorged with sin.

  As Katherine played and Isabelle tapped her foot and smiled, there came a hammering on the outer door of the convent. A hammering that might have come from the swordhilt of one seeking sanctuary, so desperate and violent we
re the blows. They heard the porteress’s raised voice, and feet running down the cloister to where the sisters sat. A man’s voice cried: ‘Madame! I must see Madame!’

  It was a henchman of Charles of Orléans, one who loved the family well and who consequently wept and whose white disastrous face made Isabelle spring up with a cry. When he could speak he told a dreadful tale. The secret premonitions of Louis of Orléans had come to their full.

  For him, triumph and consummation had been all he had ever hoped for. After the evening of Bosredon’s murder had ended in chaos, the Queen shrieking with rage and grief, the King laughing wildly and eventually becoming pale and silent, Isabeau had almost collapsed. Leaving the table with its overflung goblets and skirting the gruesome corpse, Louis had followed her from the hall, offering her his arm, expecting it to be struck away with a malediction. But she had turned to him, her face patched scarlet and white, her eyes sunken with shock.

  ‘For God’s love, Louis, take me from this place.’

  He summoned for all his resources to find a lodging fit for her and not too far away, for her strength seemed on the wane. An unfamiliar sense of power possessed him; he blessed Bosredon’s demise and found it possible in his mind to congratulate the King. It seemed a long time since he and Isabeau and Louis of Bavaria had wandered into the Hôtel de St Paul to taunt the filthy and raving Charles. St Paul was where he took Isabeau. The place had recently been refurbished; fires were kept burning and chambers sweet. There they lay that night, Isabeau tossing in a great bed, Louis watching from the foot and soothing her with eloquence he had not known lay in him. On the following day they returned to Tours, and there the Queen rewarded him at last. No longer did she flaunt her person before him only to send him off next minute with an oath. She scarcely let him out of her sight, accepting his embraces voluptuously, sharing with him the days and nights, her cup, her bed. After a few days they left Tours and moved to Troyes, within sight of the Seine and easy access to Paris. There she breathed her poisonous ambition in his ears.

  ‘I have the King watched day and. night. Yesterday he dropped his cup, his hand was shaking. The day before he wept for no reason. He is failing again, and soon we’ll show him no mercy, you and I!’