He also knew for a certainty that Bishop Louys was well-thought of by all his people here. Given that they had been in England longer than any of them had wanted to be, that no one thought their purposes there had gone well, and that now they were making a winter crossing of a rough sea, the fact that their displeasure did not spread to include the bishop spoke very well of him, Joliffe thought. There was no one could dislike a man as much as those who lived nearest with him.
On his own part, he had no other encounter with Bishop Louys, and after the household’s landing in Honfleur, he was treated as not much more than a piece of baggage, hurried off the ship along with the bishop’s traveling chests and loaded with them and most of the household men onto another ship, not so different from their English one but crewed by men familiar with the river they would be following to Rouen, Joliffe gathered.
Then they all waited.
From the talk around him as he sat on one of the traveling chests, Joliffe learned that Bishop Louys was gone to meet briefly with the captain of the Honfleur garrison and certain important citizens, to give them letters and greetings from King Henry and the royal council in England, and that in the usual way of things, the bishop would have celebrated Mass here in Honfleur, in thanksgiving for the safe crossing from England, but the river—the Seine, Joliffe heard it called—was as tidal as the Thames, and if the bishop left now, he would have the tide’s advantage to speed the beginning of his upriver journey. So the boatmen were ready, and when someone shouted the bishop was approaching, they began to loose ropes holding the ship to the quay.
Besides his accompanying dozen household men, six men-at-arms and a dozen archers came with the bishop along the quay, and boarded, and while the bishop took a seat on his traveling chair under a tilt amidship, they shifted about to find places out of the way as the last ropes were cast loose, freeing the boat to the current. Not until some sort of cooked cold meat, bread, and cheese were being handed out for supper did Joliffe make chance to say to one of the few Englishmen in the bishop’s household, with a twitch of his head toward the soldiers, “What’s that about, then?”
The man answered, not totally hiding he thought Joliffe was an idiot not to know it, “They’re our guard. These days the French are ramping and trampling in and out of Normandy like someone left a gate wide open. It’s why we’re going by way of the river instead of straighter across country. Safer.”
Just as coming to Honfleur instead of Calais had been thought to be safer, Joliffe thought.
He looked around him at the men-at-arms with swords and long daggers casual on hips, and the archers with their bows and quivers of arrows slung easily over shoulders or at hips. They were variously garbed in padded surcoats and canvas jacks, some with well-linked mail shirts, others with breastplates, all with other armor for arms or legs and a variety of helmets, some simply pot-shaped, others close-fitted, some even visored. What all their clothing had in common was obvious hard wear. What all their weapons shared was how well-kept they were. These were not some men pulled from their plows to serve their handful of duty-days for their lord and intent on going back to their plows at the end of it. These were men hired to the war; men who made war their livelihood and at ease with knowing there would surely come a time when they would have to kill. Or be killed.
Joliffe, watching them, started to find that knowing there was war in France was a different thing from being in the war in France, and he did not like the difference. Hopefully he was well away from any of the fighting. Even more, he hoped he would be able to stay that way.
Their first night upriver from Honfleur, with the river wide around them and the weather clear, they sailed all night. The next nights, when the river had drawn in between high, steep-sided hills, they spent ashore, behind the walls of fortified towns. Bishop Louys sent a messenger from both places, to let the council in Rouen know he was coming, and Joliffe, still speaking French haltingly but understanding more of what he heard than he let on, gathered that these overnight stops were as much for the bishop to learn what was happening across France and Normandy as for safety’s sake. Precisely what he learned, Joliffe did not know, but he saw no joy of homecoming lightening the bishop’s face from one day to the next.
The weather remained gray but not so cold as it had been. Warm enough in his cloak, Joliffe kept well-occupied with watching the land and the many other boats on the river slide past. Sometimes Cauvet would join him at the railing and tell him things, such as that most of the barges and lesser boats to be seen were carrying supplies to the garrisons in the towns and castles along the river, and that the English presently held most crossing places along the Seine from Honfleur to somewhat above Paris. “Because we need to control the river, both to move supplies and as a barrier against the Armagnacs. Until lately, fortified bridges at walled towns kept them mostly, much of the time, south of the Seine and from our throats. What my lord of Bedford hoped was to make the Seine serve as the moat of Normandy.” Cauvet gave a grim half-laugh. “For a while, a few years ago, the hope was to make the Loire our ‘moat.’ If that could have been—if we could have shoved the Armagnacs beyond the Loire and kept them there—things would be far different now. But the French witch spoiled that six, almost seven, years ago, and the land south of the Seine, all the way to the Loire, it is desolate from being fought over so many times. They say it made the duke of Bedford weep to see it. Now we look to see the same all over again in Normandy. Thanks to god-cursed Burgundy opening the eastern ways to them, the Armagnacs are north of the Seine again, burning and killing across Normandy as they have not been able to do for years. The duke of Bedford must be writhing in his grave. He gave Normandy peace. The people had begun to have hope. Now Burgundy has ended all that, and if Burgundy ceases to play his waiting game of the past few months and sets his men to join openly with the Armagnacs in the field—” Cauvet shrugged his shoulders high and left the thought for Joliffe to finish, saying instead, “God and Christ and the saints willing, he’ll turn all his heed against Calais instead.”
He crossed himself. Joliffe copied the gesture, readily willing to invoke any and all help there might be.
The strange thing was how at peace the river seemed to be, whatever was passing in the world beyond its banks. Twice, Joliffe saw black smoke columning into the sky north of the river, telling that somewhere something large was burning. Once one of the men-at-arms barked a warning that brought all his fellows to their feet and the archers into a line along the north side of the boat, their bows at the ready. With everyone else, Joliffe stared where they were staring, up the steep slope of the winter-pale hillside above that stretch of the river to where a line of horsemen were black-shaped against the sky, a double-pointed pennon carried above them.
“Can you see whose they are?” someone of the bishop’s household asked.
The soldiers’ captain shook his head. “Can’t make out the arms. French, though, most likely.” He amended that. “Armagnacs. But anyway no trouble at this distance.” But neither he nor his men eased their watchfulness until, a while later, the riders swung away from the river and out of sight.
Joliffe carried away two thoughts from that. One was that rushing all your men to face an open foe on one side left your back to anyone waiting to come at you from the other way. The other was that he heartily wished England’s King Henry V had not taken up his great-grandfather’s claim to the French crown—or else that when France’s King Charles VI had been brought to grant the French crown should go not to his son, the Dauphin, but to King Henry as husband of King Charles’ daughter, the Dauphin had then died. The intent was to join the two kingdoms under a double crown. What neither king foresaw was that King Henry, still in the full flourish of his manhood, would die of disease something like a month and half before old, mad King Charles, leaving the crowns of France and England to King Henry’s infant son, King Charles’ grandson.
Only now, fourteen years later, was that child nearing an age to rule in his own righ
t—a right opposed all these years by his disinherited uncle, the Dauphin, so that along with his double crown, young King Henry VI had inherited this war, begun seven years before he was born and showing less sign than ever of coming to an end.
Unless this new alliance between the Dauphin and the duke of Burgundy proved able to defeat and drive the English out. Which it surely would not.
Not while I’m in the middle of it anyway, I hope, Joliffe thought wryly.
But among other things he had learned in his player’s life was that the only moment possibly under his control at any time—and even then assuredly not always—was the moment in which he presently was. Plans and hopes could be made and had, but there was no certainty of what would come, not even from one moment to the next; and he stood gazing at the river’s swirl and flow, and at the—just now—peaceful-seeming countryside, and knew that he had been set into the swirl and flow of matters he did not much understand, with probably a great many unfamiliar and presently unseen dangers all too near. More all the time, he was wondering into just what Bishop Beaufort had sent him.
A change in the rhythm of men about the ship told him when they were nearing Rouen, even before a yards-long standard streamed out from the mast, bright against the clouded sky, showing a red lion rampant and what Joliffe supposed were the heraldic arms of the bishopric of Therouanne. So near to Rouen, it was safe to let the world know the bishop was here, aboard this very ship, and to give warning ahead to any sharp eyes on watch from one of the towers in the city appearing now below the high-rolling hills that curved to make a wide bay of land along the river’s north side. There, behind a stretching town wall fattened here and there by towers, a thick scatter of church towers and spires rose above steep house roofs. From their midst, higher than them all, were the long stone intricacies of two massive churches, while on the city’s side toward the hills the higher walls and close-built towers of a castle bulked huge.
Something that promised to be as large was being built this downriver side of the city, and as Cauvet joined him at the railing, Joliffe pointed and asked, “What’s that to be?”
“That would have been King Henry’s new castle.”
Joliffe sorted out the verb’s tense and said, “Would have been. It will not be?”
“Work on it has gone on for more than a dozen years. Or it is maybe better to say work has mostly not gone on. Building is costly. So is war.” Cauvet made a gesture of balancing one hand against the other, then sank the left one lower. “When choice is made where the taxes will go, war wins.”
The river here was busy with the coming and going of other ships, with barges and vari-sized boats. The bishop’s ship was slowing among them, heeling in a long turn toward the low quay that ran along all of the riverside of the town wall, and Cauvet said, spreading an arm outward, “But there she is. Rouen. The queen of Normandy. In all of France, only Paris can claim to be greater, and that is Paris, and Paris is not in Normandy. Normandy is Normandy. But you are missing one of Rouen’s wonders. Look there.”
He turned, making another wide gesture, this time to the ship’s other side, upriver, and was probably well-satisfied by Joliffe’s sharply in-taken breath. The river here was wider than even the Thames at London and with the same treacherous tidal flow, and yet there was a stone-built bridge of—how many arches? More than London’s, anyway. Joliffe tried to count them but settled for “many.”
“Five hundred years it has been there,” Cauvet said, proud as if he had built it. “Five hundred years. Made by a great queen for her people. It is a marvel, no?”
It was, and Joliffe said so. For him, France had always been a place simply talked of. It had been words in his mind, not sights. Through these past few days his mind had been spreading to take in all the new he was seeing, and here, with more than ever to take in, he stayed at the railing while Cauvet went away to whatever his duties presently were at the end of Bishop Louys’ travels.
Others, elsewhere, were busy at their duties, too. By the time the ship had been brought around and to the quay, with ropes thrown and tied and the landing-plank run out, a swarm of liveried servants and several saddled horses and a white mule with purple saddle and trappings were waiting on the quay. Most of the men were in ecclesiastical black with the bishop’s badge on their doublets, but there were others in green with a black band of cloth worn over one shoulder and slantwise across their chests, and it was one of the latter who stepped forward to greet the bishop with a deep bow as he descended from the ship. Joliffe was too far away to hear what few things were said between them, but their brief exchange ended with the bishop making a gracious bow of his head, the man bowing deeply in response, and the mule being brought forward for the bishop to mount while the man and several others took the horses and rode away, surrounded by a flow of liveried servants and at least some of the men who had been to England and back.
Left behind with the baggage and those who were to see to it, Joliffe got himself off the ship and aside from the ordered hurry of unloading the many boxes, bags, and chests, unsure what he should be doing with himself. Should he have gone when the bishop did? Or . . .
Cauvet paused in passing with a small, locked chest that must contain something of particular worth, and said, “You look lost.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Come with us. We’re away to Joyeux Repos.”
Joliffe picked up the sack he had set at his feet, slung it over his shoulder, and asked as he joined Cauvet in the flow of laden men toward the nearest gateway through the town wall along the quay, “That’s the bishop’s place here in Rouen?”
In England at least it was common for bishops to have not only their episcopal palace in their dioceses, but a house in London where the government was centered. Here in Normandy, Rouen was the government’s center, and Bishop Louys was the duchy’s chancellor; so never minding where his bishopric was, he had more reason than most to have a place here.
But Cauvet said, “Joyeux Repos? No, it was the duke of Bedford’s hotel. Though little joy or repose he had there at the end, God keep his soul. After his wife, the Lady Anne, died—Blessed Mary have her in keeping—he hardly could bear to be there. Now it is his widow’s place, and she is my lord bishop’s niece and very young. It was understood before we went to England that my lord would move in there, both for her good and as the duke himself wished as he was dying.”
“Wait. Wait.” In his confusion, Joliffe forgot to keep to his attempt to speak in French. “The duke’s wife died, but his widow . . .”
Cauvet threw him the pitying look of a man hardly able to believe another man’s ignorance. “He married again, yes? The Lady Jacquetta. My lord bishop’s niece. It was not a marriage that pleased the duke of Burgundy, but I think that by then my lord of Bedford was past thinking there was any pleasing the duke of Burgundy.”
Joliffe had lately written plays making sport of the treacherous duke of Burgundy, and Basset’s company had acted them everywhere, from village greens and gentry houses to the great halls of high lords, always to much laughter. But that had been there and this was here, and Joliffe was rapidly finding how very differently things looked to him now he was on this side of the Channel instead of the other. Until now, everything here had been happening somewhere else for him. He had felt no great need to think over much about whatever he happened to hear about it. But now that he was here, not comfortably somewhere else, he did not like he knew so little. He had vague remembrance of knowing that the duke of Bedford’s first wife had been the duke of Burgundy’s sister. If his widow was Bishop Louys’ niece, that meant . . .
He found he did not know what that meant. But great lords and ladies did not marry for simple reasons, nor was the duke of Burgundy likely to have been displeased about this marriage for any simple reason.
There was no time now, though, to think about it or to ask Cauvet. They were to the gateway, and the guards, accepting they were among the bishop’s men leaving the
quay, let them pass without question into the wide, stone-arched passageway between the gateway’s towers, to come out the other end into daylight again. If Joliffe had been alone, he would probably have paused then, to give himself chance to take in that for the first time in his life he was somewhere that was not England; but Cauvet kept onward and Joliffe did, too, assuredly not wanting to be left behind. Basset had taught him early on to take in quickly as much as he could about any place the players came to, to judge what the welcome there was likely to be and whether they should ply their trade or simply keep on their way to somewhere else. As a traveling player, he was use to being in “foreign” places, because in England, folk used “foreign” as readily for a neighboring village as for Constantinople, but as he kept among the bishop’s men along a street running with surprising straightness between tall, narrow houses, the feeling grew in him that he was come to somewhere foreign in a wholly new way. He had known Rouen would be foreign in a way different from foreign among English villages, but somehow he had not expected Rouen to be this foreign. It was more than that he was not hearing English words anywhere around him. The townspeople moving out of the way of the bishop’s men had somehow a look to them that was not English. Was it a subtly different cut to clothing? Something in the way they moved? Those were things that, as a player, he was trained to note, knowing the difference they made, but just now he lacked chance to look long enough at anything or anyone to tell for certain. By the time the street opened into a wide marketplace in front of what had to be Rouen’s cathedral, all he had managed to acquire was the queasy, growing certainty that he was somewhere more foreign than anywhere he had ever been.
A Play of Treachery Page 5