by Mark Alder
Prince John was not there – notoriously difficult to rouse.
‘She died,’ said King Philip. ‘Taken in the night.’
Charles wondered if he should try to remove the dagger.
‘What was the cause, Lord?’ Charles was trying to be helpful. Philip was the highest authority in the land. His word would determine what killed Joan, not the sight of the dagger in his hand, nor even had someone seen him plunge it into her breast.
‘She died of Plague. Is it not clear?’ Philip’s eyes were like those of a panicked horse, thought Charles. ‘So many taken and now one close to us. Is it not horrible, my Lords, is it not horrible?’
‘Horrible indeed, sir,’ Charles turned to the servant. ‘Announce to the rest of the court that the Great Pestilence has taken Queen Joan. We will make the provisions for a funeral.’
‘She must have a funeral,’ said Philip. ‘Full of pomp and majesty. She was my queen and my love.’
‘Yes, sir. Might I take the knife?’ Charles removed it from Philip’s hand and placed it on the table.
“But then,’ said Philip, ‘oh happy day. I am free to marry the darling Blanche.’
‘She’s betrothed to your son, sir,’ said Charles.
‘No longer. I broke it off last night. They weren’t right for each other. She needs a king as a consort, no mere prince.’
Charles broke into a big smile.
‘That is good news indeed, sir.’
A besotted king, an otherworldly sister. He would be de facto ruler of France. He could formalise his power in a way that would make his enemies fear him – and give him access to huge power and wealth.
‘There is the question of the constableship, sir,’ he said. The right hand of the king!
‘We have no constable,’ said Philip. ‘Not until Eu returns.’
‘He is coming to us as quick as he can, sir? No English captain would convey him, I am told and devils hunt him. I am sure he will be here when he can.’ Edward, Charles had discovered, did not consider Eu’s ransom paid in full. Eu, having sent certain letters of promise, did. At the moment Eu was hiding, having the moral right to leave England but not the opportunity.
‘Send for Blanche,’ said Philip.
Charles’s mind was racing. In days of Plague all was uncertain – John might die. The little Prince Charles, his son, might die. Lots of the Valois might die, particularly if given a little bit of encouragement, clearing the path to the throne for his nephew – it would be a boy. He would be regent. ‘Never king of France,’ said the angel. But regent, up to his neck in gold and castles, restorer of the Capetian fortunes. Or would it have been better if she had married John? He did a quick calculation in his head. No, he would have to kill roughly the same number of people. This way he’d just be able to get on with it sooner.
‘Well,’ said Charles to the servant, ‘send for my sister and then clear this corpse away. Come on, man, don’t just stand there, there’s a future out there waiting to happen.’
13
The lodge at Vincennes had received Osbert easily – the kitchen porter had come over feverish that day and had been booted out. He was surprised at the rate of pay he was offered – a small stipend on top of his food and board. The kitchens were warm, the work easy because of the reduced number of nobles and, in particular, attendent servants at the lodge, and there was plenty of opportunity to dip a finger into a meaty Parma tart or a pottage of rys, to take a pinch of powder douce as he passed or snaffle a salty rissole. Even the wine was not that well guarded. The chief cook – who had been a mere apprentice before the Plague took his master – said standards had slipped since the Great Pestilence had come. Was it possible to have a good plague, Osbert wondered? Here, he was sure it was.
In fact, for a short time he was as happy as he had ever been. There was no pressure on him that he could not answer, no demanding king or lord, just the smell of cinnamon and ginger, the taste of exquisite wines. The Plague had also very pleasantly loosened the morals of the scullery maids, one of whom had tugged him off in the pantry for a couple of silver deniers. This was Gilette – she had been a milkmaid until everyone on her farm had died and she had come into service rather than starve. Her skin was as pure and unblemished as that of milkmaids tended to be, and she had a gap in her teeth at the front which made her whistle pleasantly as she spoke. This meant it fell into that broad category of female traits that caused Osbert’s codpiece to tighten.
‘God seems gone from the world,’ she’d said as she’d wiped the mess from her hand.
From where Osbert was standing, things seemed to be going along just fine without him.
‘If He doesn’t come back by Thursday, will you let me fuck you properly then?’
‘For five deniers. Why not? Why not? If we are both still alive.’ He saw she was crying and felt sad for her. He put his arm about her and hugged her.
‘Everyone dead,’ she said. ‘Everyone.’
‘You and I survive.’
‘Why ?’
‘That is a troublesome and rather useless question, I have found,’ said Osbert. ‘I limit myself to what, who, how and, if pushed, when. Why is not for us.’
‘But why ?’
‘I don’t know. There will be a better world. One day. I met a boy once who said he could bring Eden to the earth. Can you imagine, you and I wandering around in a garden full of talking snakes, where we meet God coming the other way in the afternoon? As a person.’
‘I would like to meet God,’ said Gilette. ‘I would like to ask Him why. Why bring life to bloom if it is to be cut down so cruelly? Why does He allow it?’
‘Now you sound like a Luciferian,’ said Osbert.
‘Do they die of the Plague too?’
‘I hear it has reached Calais.’
He thought of his friends there. Dow. That serious, scarred little boy would be nearly a man now. Could he shake the world, as he had said? Osbert did not doubt it. And Orsino, the Florentine killer. What had become of him? Even Montagu. He remembered him on the ship they had taken to France, looking as if the world was his to command. Well, the news said he had fallen from favour now but Osbert had seen him fight. Devils looked weak by comparison.
‘You are crying too,’ said Gilette.
‘Five deniers is a lot of money. But I will find it.’ She laughed, wiping her face.
‘It seems right to fuck. All this death. Let us trip the dance of life, let us fuck before Heaven and say “This is what we say to your death.”’
‘For free?’ said Osbert, brightening. This was a philosophy he could share.
‘For free. But give me the money anyway.’
Osbert gave her a quizzical look but said nothing. Strange times, strange dealings. How might life have been different? What would it have been to have been born a simple man, unmarked out by God or Satan or whoever had marked him out (without so much as a by-your-leave); to have tended the same piece of unremitting earth from the time he could crawl to the time they put the earth over his head; to have married this woman and lived the life of toil, pain, happiness and tears that people had lived for generations?
He smiled to himself. His thinking was wrong. God had become a Luciferian, it seemed. No longer did He hold His special destinies back for the noble and the heroic. He handed them out to everyone – everyone who lived. Gilette had left her farm and had come to work in a palace. The palace had taken her in. Instead of knowing one loutish man her whole life, now she would know many loutish men. One of them might live in a town or take her far away to new destinies. If she ever went back to her farm, she could take what land she liked from her neighbours – the dead rarely complain. The Plague was good and bad, he thought, as all calamities are.
For instance, life at court was to his liking. The tone was very pleasantly set by the king himself. With his new wife Blanche – he’d married her two weeks after his wife had died – he spent every waking hour rutting like a man half his age. The sounds of his groans and her wails could be hear
d throughout the lodge, as the great chimney that served the oven also served the king’s chamber.
‘I’m surprised he’s got it in him,’ said the cook.
‘I expect he won’t have for long,’ said Osbert. ‘He has to run dry eventually.’
The cook laughed. He liked Osbert, it seemed, which was lucky because with so few staff – the kitchen was down to no more than twenty – there were few places to avoid people if you found them disagreeable.
But the king did not run dry, and there was a call for foods with chick peas, birds’ brains, egg yolks, and cloves in milk. Osbert tried all these foods and found that they did, indeed provoke lust. But, there again, pretty much anything provoked lust in Osbert and he was obliged to spend more of his deniers in an attempt to discharge it.
The great advantage of his position was that he was not expected to leave the kitchen. He even slept there, warm by the ovens. He might venture into the servants’ dining halls but never any further. He was not allowed there, never mind expected. The expulsion of La Cerda made his task more pressing but not so much that he couldn’t lie low.
So it was that he spent a few good weeks, as happy as a louse on a sheep’s back. No one could touch him here – he was safe from La Cerda and from Navarre. The porter who had been feverish returned, well again, but Osbert was kept on. The Plague did touch them at Vincennes, but not as badly as it had struck in Paris. The corpses threatened to swamp Notre Dame, it was said, though no one wanted to go in to test the claim.
Spring came and then summer. The Plague got even worse in Paris and the scullery maid Gilette, who so enlivened Osbert’s days, went to visit her family and didn’t come back. Had she died? He worried about her for a while, but then no more. Best not think on such things for those who want to stay sane. Often he thought he was coming down with a fever, felt for a lump at his throat, or was convinced there was a tightness in his armpit. He wasn’t looking forward to his own death. Having had a taste of Hell when the boy Dow sent him there, he was in no hurry to return.
Autumn came around, the woods a glimmering copper. The kitchen was down to fifteen now and deliveries were difficult to get – they relied on the hunt and what could be gathered from the woods most of the time. The only constant was the groaning and shrieking that came down the chimney.
‘He’ll wear it away!’ said the new cook.
‘I reckon he must have two,’ said Osbert.
‘I’m surprised Navarre lets him keep us all awake like that.’
‘Lets him ?’
‘He runs the show now – the young Prince Charles follows him around like a puppy and everyone’s convinced he’s going to be uncle to a new prince. Old John’s taken to his rooms in pique since his dad nicked his bride. The footmen’ll tell you what’s what. You see how long John lasts!’
‘Do you think Navarre will kill him?’
‘He killed Queen Joan, didn’t he?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s what I heard. She was cut to ribbons, though no one talks of it.’
‘No one talks of it’ was kitchen code for ‘everyone talks of it’. Who exactly had been responsible was a matter for debate. Many flatly refused to believe that the king had been capable of such a monstrous act. The servant who had discovered her body had died the same day – of Plague, said the king of Navarre. Some noted that it was unusual for the king to concern himself, let alone mention, the fate of servants.
The kitchen people died; new ones came and they died too. The cook died in May and was replaced by a new cook, who died in early September.
Osbert did what he could to bring the harvest in – cropping apples mainly – and the cook showed him how to lay down cider the day before he died. A new cook had been sent for, new hands too. By mid-September hardly anyone who had been there when Osbert arrived remained. But, happy day, Gilette returned. He found himself fond of her now. He had ceased giving her money for her favours and instead brought her nosegays and things he thought might please her. They went walking together and he found her good company. He hoped she wouldn’t die. That was a bad thought because so many people did die.
Then, one soft blue dawn when he was out gathering mushrooms, he heard the hunt go by. Venison, at least, was in good supply with no one there to poach it.
He lay down on a grassy bank and watched the sun rise, thinking of Dowzabel, that strange, serious boy who seemed to turn any conversation you ever had to Lucifer, Son of the Night, angel of the dawn. The morning star was up, a sharp twinkle. He could hear the hunt stirring away across the fields by the stables, a distant clamour of hounds. In his time at the palace he had encountered none of the nobility who might recognise him, but he wasn’t too worried. La Cerda was right – no one looks at servants, especially one as ugly as he. He was, he supposed, much changed from his time as court magician. He was younger looking from all the angel’s blood he had consumed to fight off his hangovers, and his hair was long and unkempt, his beard ragged.
What it would be , he thought, to lie on this bank in the warm sun for ever. To exist whole and complete, here in this moment – no demands of the body, none of great men to contend with, to enjoy an unthreatened repose for ever. Was that Heaven? Something like it, he supposed. He closed his eyes, drifting off a little. He thought of Gilette, but not in the way he was accustomed to think of women. He thought of her lying next to him, the kitchen spice smell of her hair, her rough hand in his.
She was away in the palace somewhere, doing God knew what. In these days of Plague the servants had to do tasks that would have been quite outside their remit normally. She was probably stitching something or maybe even tending a noble baby. When noble ladies die off, someone needs to take their place. From milkmaid to lady-in-waiting. What a topsy-turvy world. What a bumpsy-mumpsy, top-to-tail mimsy-momsy world, what a . . .
A shadow fell across his face and he was suddenly cold. ‘The court magician. Yes, it’s you, isn’t it?’
He opened his eyes as if pricked by a dagger.
In front of him stood an exquisitely dressed gentleman of the court in blue brocade. His face looked familiar but Osbert couldn’t quite place it.
‘Who is Gilette? You spoke of her in your sleep.’
‘No one to trouble great men. Just a country girl of my acquaintance.’
‘I sense you love her!’
‘Perhaps. I haven’t had the pleasure.’ Osbert felt very much as the worm must feel under the eye of a blackbird.
The man smiled.
‘Oh, but you have, my lord mage. The pleasure, the pain and everything in between. You’ve had the lot! Pastus. Simon Pastus.’
Unusually for a nobleman, he extended his hand to help Osbert to his feet.
Osbert took it and it was as if every bone in his body had been turned funny, a sickly vibration humming through them.
Upright, Osbert released the hand.
‘I am but a kitchen hand collecting mushrooms.’
‘No, no,’ said Pastus. ‘I am quite sure of who you are. After all, it was you who summoned me. Do you not remember, in the Temple of Paris, with the unfortunate Hugh Despenser? I should have thought it would be unlikely to slip your mind. Look!’
With a quick movement, he pulled up Osbert’s smock to reveal a complicated pattern of scars on his belly. It was, as anyone with half an eye could see, a magic circle.
‘Oh, that Simon Pastus, of the Screaming Towers of Maloch?’ said Osbert. He’d summoned so many devils he forgot all their names but that one, for some reason, had stuck.
‘The very same. I have a message for you.’
‘From whom ?’
‘Satan.’
‘The jailer of Hell?’
‘No, Satan the costermonger who lives on the Quai d’Orsay,’ said Pastus. ‘Yes, Satan, Lord of Hell.’
‘I’ve come to his notice, have I?’
‘Very much so. You’ve been pulling devils through the cracks in the walls of Hell for a while now, haven’t you? An
d you have something of interest in your possession. A certain key.’
‘How does he know that?’
‘You are in the service of a devil known as “Gressil”?’
‘He’s in my service!’
Pastus raised his eyebrows.
‘That’s as maybe. Whispers have come through the walls of Hell. Whispers have come back again. Satan wants you to do a little job for him.’
‘He’ll have to get in the queue,’ said Osbert.
‘He is not used to queuing.’
This would, as far as Osbert could determine, constitute quest number three he had been asked to fulfil. He considered his options.
One of Osbert’s more surprising faculties was that of speed; he was a fast runner, and now he set off at a clip across the fields back towards the lodge. He jumped a stile, turned his ankle on a root, limped on, fell, stood, limped some more, glanced back and saw no devil, slowed to a hobble, and finally made the kitchen. Where the devil was waiting for him, picking his teeth with a straw.
‘Keen to get on?’ said Pastus.
‘Not exactly,’ panted Osbert.
‘Well, you will be when I tell you what’s on offer.’
‘What ?’
‘Salvation. Hell will not take you when you die.’
‘What will happen to me?’
‘Well, who knows?’ said the devil. ‘Perhaps you’ll wander the earth as a ghost. Perhaps you’ll enter Heaven. Perhaps all sorts of things. One thing is certain. You won’t be getting the special attentions of the Sisters of Suffocation in the sands of the Desert Perilous.’
‘Best avoided,’ Osbert nodded.
This was, maybe, a chance. He had never seen how he could avoid God sending him to Hell for his deeds but here was a way out that sidestepped God. What if Hell refused to take him? Life as a wandering ghost couldn’t be all that bad. He could creep into ladies’ chambers, lie under the summer moon on perfumed riverbanks, chat to other ghosts if they were amenable. Does every cup of wine, once drunk, become a cup of ghost wine? Were there ghost cellars waiting to be plundered?
‘So you will do it?’