The King's Women

by Deryn Lake

  “Whoever they are from, it is important we receive these men in splendour. Shall I order on your behalf, Monsieur, that the messengers are treated as honoured guests until such time as we can see them?”

  “No, I am most anxious to know what they have come about. Instruct that they shall be given time to wash off the dust of the road and take refreshment. Say we will give them audience in an hour.”

  “Very good, Monsieur,” answered the Dauphine, and curtsied like a dutiful wife.

  But at the appointed time she was agog with interest as four Gentlemen at Arms, wearing the livery of the King of France himself, made a stately entrance into the audience chamber where Charles and she sat on high seats, the rest of the Council gathered round.

  Afterwards, Marie d’Anjou supposed she should have guessed their purpose but her mind, like that of most others, was so much taken up with the matter of war that the obvious truly had not occurred to her. And it was clear that it had not done to anyone else either as the spokesman for the four strangers went down on one knee, in low obeisance before the Dauphin’s chair of state.

  “Monsieur,” he said, his voice trembling, “we left Paris two days ago and have ridden without stop.”

  “To tell me what?” asked Charles impatiently.

  “To tell you, Majesty, that your royal father has closed his eyes on this world. Monsieur, the King is dead, long live the King.”

  Charles sprang up, his face scintillating and suddenly white.

  “So the prophecy has come true,” he gasped almost inaudibly. “I am truly King at last.”

  There was an intake of breath as everyone present knelt to pay due homage.

  “Long live the King,” came the chorused shout.

  “I thank God for bringing me safely to this moment,” answered the boy, and with that swept from the room to be utterly alone with his tumultuous emotions.

  Twenty-Four

  “No,” shouted Richemont, “you must not leave me.”

  He had been dreaming of Yolande, dreaming that the years had never passed and they were together again. But he woke lonely, his fingers reaching to his face to feel for the mutilations which had taken away his perfect looks. They were there of course, just as they had been ever since the moment he had recovered consciousness on the field of Azincourt, just as they had throughout his five-year imprisonment, just as they would be for the rest of his life.

  “Christ have mercy,” said Richemont softly, and poured himself a flagon of wine.

  As ironic fate would have it he had been freed from prison two years before Henry of Lancaster’s death, when Gloucester would have ordered his release in any case. Just man though Duke Humphrey was, it was in his best interests to get the great lords of France on England’s side, a point of view to which Henry V had eventually come round himself.

  “You can go,” the English King had said, looking down from his dais at the wounded and filthy prisoner who stood before him.

  Richemont had given him a surly glare and eventually said, “On what conditions?”

  “How clever of you to guess, my dear brother. Because indeed there are two. The first being that you end your allegiance to the Armagnac cause and serve me as ambassador to your brother of Brittany’s court. He was supported by English troops during an insurrection by the Penthièvre claimants to his title, and consequently has transferred his loyalty to England.”

  “And the other?”

  Henry V’s red mouth had smiled briefly. “It is not so much a condition as a promise. Your mother, the Queen Dowager of England, is under arrest in Pevensey Castle.”

  “On what charge?” Richemont had interrupted, not believing what he was hearing.

  “Witchcraft,” the King had answered, almost casually.

  The Earl had been utterly shaken, knowing nothing in his prison cell, not having a notion that his mother was anything but alive and well.

  “What dark political plot is this?” he had growled. “I suppose the poor creature made too much of a stir when you threatened the lives of her sons.”

  “How loyal you are,” Henry had said, examining his nails. His tone changed. “But not sufficiently loyal to respect your oath of allegiance to my father. You should have fought at Azincourt with my soldiers, you bloody little traitor.”

  “Don’t give me traitor,” Richemont had hurled back. “You who put Frenchmen to the sword in the name of God, pretending He is on your side giving you some divine right to slaughter. It is you who are the traitor, Monsieur. You are the master turncoat of us all. I am not even in the same league.”

  It was a miracle he had not been marched straight back to his cell, but the English King had merely shrugged a delicate shoulder and curled his crimson lip.

  “You sound off like a fart in a thunderstorm, Richmond. Now be gone before I change my mind.”

  The Earl had stood his ground. “You still have not told me the second favour, brother” He pointed the word with as much sarcasm as he dared.

  “No attempts to rescue your mother. She will be released from Pevensey only when I am assured she does not traffic with demons.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Richemont murmured beneath his breath, making an icy bow as best he could in chains.

  Henry could not have heard, for that same day the Earl was allowed to have a bath, put on a new suit of clothes and board a boat bound for Brittany, only to find the Duke turning away at the sight of him.

  “I know,” Richemont had said bitterly. “I left you whole and have come back a monster. In future I will wear a mask.”

  Duke Jean had rallied, clasping his brother in his arms and kissing him on both wounded cheeks.

  “Don’t say such terrible things. It was the shock, that’s all. You must never hide your face.”

  But Richemont had been forced to accept that Jean’s initial reaction was common to all, everyone who saw him, particularly the women who had once found him so attractive, shuddering when they beheld his mighty scars.

  It had been the fact that Marguerite, daughter of the murdered Jean the Fearless and widow of Richemont’s friend Louis the Dauphin, did not turn away repulsed, as much as the memory of their night together, not quite lovers, that had made the Earl marry her on 10th October 1423. Marguerite was still very pretty, only in her early twenties, and had so much love for him she hardly seemed to notice that it was not fully reciprocated. For even after the passing of all the years, even after the flowing of so much blood, Richemont’s obsession with the Duchess of Anjou, Queen of Sicily, remained.

  It was an odd situation, reflected Arthur, wide awake and once more filling his wine cup to the brim. Despite the fact he very rarely thought of Yolande on a conscious level, still she consumed him. A subtle haunting indeed! At night she lay between him and his wife in bed, filling his mind with the remembered scents of her skin, spoiling him for poor Marguerite, who had sought adoration so earnestly from her first husband. But that malicious sprite Louis had loved his best friend Richemont far more than he could ever love his wife and now Marguerite longed to be cherished by her second husband.

  “Of course I care for you,” the Earl would answer her eternal questions, patting her head absently, his mind far away, almost in limbo.

  And so he did — a little.

  “Oh God, why did you choose to make me so ugly?” he said aloud now, in a sudden passion of despair.

  But there was no answer, only the inexorable feeling that he must work out his destiny for himself, as he stared into the flames that had at last begun to die down to a dull red glow.

  Yolande, too, dreamed of the past. She stood in the rain again and saw a lovely boy walking the parapet of a castle’s battlements, and laughed with him and at him, overcome with joy merely by watching his youth and beauty. Even though she was dreaming, the pleasure and excitement of reliving the moments she had shared with Arthur de Richemont made the Duchess of Anjou smile in her sleep. And then she sighed and woke, and lay in darkness staring at the vague
outlines of her bed canopy, thinking of what had happened in the years since he had come back to France.

  Yolande had heard of Richemont’s injuries almost as soon as he returned to Brittany, and her immediate instinct had been to see him, to express her sorrow that such a grim fate should have befallen him. And then the Duchess had stopped, quill in hand, and laid her pen back upon the desk. Almost as if he had walked into the room she had felt its atmosphere change, had sensed his anguish over the miles that separated them, and known that the last thing she must do was sympathise.

  “He feels less the man already,” she had said to herself, “far be it from me to add to his humiliation.”

  And then had come an event which had put Richemont far from the Duchess’s thoughts. On 3rd July 1423, Marie had given birth to her first child, an ugly little boy who had been named Louis. Yolande had been in the room, holding her daughter in her arms, encouraging her to deliver her baby, as Marie sweated and struggled on the great bed of state beneath a canopy bearing the fleur-de-lis woven in gold. Charles and his entourage had moodily stalked the corridors till the first wailing cry had rung out, then the young King had rushed to be at Marie’s side, smothering her with kisses.

  Not long after that, the Queen-Duchess had been informed that the Earl of Richmond had married the widow of Louis the Dauphin, and been glad for him. So why had a strange feeling lurked at the bottom of her stomach when the news had come? Surely after all this time it could not be one of resentment? And then the state of the nation had again absorbed her entire attention and she had thought no more of it.

  Richemont’s new wife was also the sister of Duke Philippe of Burgundy, now known as Philippe the Good because of his leonine attractiveness and habit of throwing largesse to the scrabbling poor. Unfortunately for the Dauphinists, Philippe had another sister, Anne, and she had married John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, the Regent of France. Thus a great alliance between Bedford, Burgundy and Brittany had been formed, a triple alliance whose might in the field seemed destined to doom the new King’s cause irretrievably. At the battle of Cravant in July 1423, Charles’s army had been decimated, the cause of France set back firmly.

  And yet there had been a ray of hope from a most unlikely source. Louis the Dauphin’s widow had married again and so, indeed, had the widow of Jean the Dauphin, the large and ugly Jacqueline, Duchess of Bavaria and Countess of Hainault, Holland and Zeeland. Jacqueline’s father, the Count of Hainault, furious that his influence had been diminished to nothing by the death of his son-in-law, had insisted on Jacqueline’s re-marriage, this time to a cousin and friend of Philippe the Good, namely the Duke of Brabant.

  For such a big ungainly girl, the young widow was obviously as highly charged sexually as her kinswoman, Isabeau, and had fled the country in horror when her bridegroom, some whispered through lack of interest, had found himself incapable of consummating their marriage. In England, where she had sought sanctuary, Jacqueline had fallen in love with Henry V’s other sibling, Humphrey of Gloucester, the English Regent, John of Bedford’s younger brother.

  Humphrey, chivalrous and passionate, a brilliant man, had been appalled by the fat red-faced girl noisily declaring her love for him, but had been quite literally forced into seeking an alliance with the land-owning heiress by his greedy councillors. As there was little hope of an annulment of Jacqueline’s marriage coming from the Pope recently elected by the English and the Dutch, she had gone instead to the Spanish Antipope who, valuing Gloucester’s support, granted her wish. Thus Duke Humphrey, snail-slow with reluctance, had gone through with the wedding — and acquired enemies as a result! The slighted ex-husband and his friend Philippe of Burgundy.

  Nothing anyone could do or say would remove the conviction from Burgundy’s mind that the whole thing was a deliberate plot to insult and rob him, and that Humphrey’s brother John was not only party to it but partly to blame. The first cracks in the triple alliance had begun. To add insult to Philippe’s injury, the gossip had already come from London that Humphrey, hearing that the Roman Pope had declared his marriage bigamous, null and void, had turned to one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting, the golden-haired dark-eyed Eleanor Cobham, for love.

  All this and more had been grist to Yolande’s mill; the louder Jacqueline complained of her treatment, the louder the Pope thundered about adultery, the better she had liked it. Skilfully, the Duchess of Anjou had painted a portrait for Jean of Brittany in which the triple alliance had split asunder and he had been caught like a hog in middle ground.

  Lying in bed, gazing round the vaulted chamber, lit by moonbeams yet deep in shadow, Yolande sighed again for the past and put the present out of her thoughts. It had been many years since she and Richemont had made love in this very room, creating Jehanne out of their long and passionate embraces.

  “Why does his memory still fascinate me?” she Said out loud, and admitted in a moment of ruthless honesty that she would give almost anything to see the Earl again, all the old anger between them now surely dead and buried.

  She rose then, luxuriating in the warmth of that June night, and crossed to her desk, her mind suddenly made up.

  ‘My dear Richemont,’ Yolande began her letter, and thought of the last she had sent him, telling him to leave without seeing her again.

  And it was then, pausing for a moment in the moonlight that an idea came, cool as a stream, making the Regent’s spine prick with the audacity of the notion that had just come into her head.

  ‘I have a matter of supreme urgency I wish to discuss with you.’ she wrote, then paused again. Letters sent across country were frequently intercepted and yet, without putting anything that could be used by the enemy, she must entice him to come to a secret destination. ‘So I would very much appreciate it if you joined me in Angers for Whitsuntide or 7th June, Easter having been late this year. In gratitude, your friend, Yolande d’Anjou. Dated this 2nd day of June, 1424.’

  It was pithy and to the point but it was also intriguing. Knowing the scampish boy that once had been, the Duchess was reasonably certain that the Earl of Richmond would come to her, out of sheer curiosity if nothing else.

  Suddenly, she felt that a burden had been lifted, that she was young again and full of the tremulous painful emotions associated with being raw in the world. Going to the mirror, Yolande held her candle high and gazed. Her eyes blazed green fire, her curving mouth was smiling, her cheeks hollow and fine. Youth had, in fact, gone, but she had entered the age of elegance and there was nothing to fear. She was in the forty-fifth year of her life and had become assured and worldly-wise, her loveliness beyond time. In this soft light with her hawk features relaxed, her winged black brows as shapely as they had always been, Yolande d’Anjou was still one of the most exciting women in France.

  Richemont was in torment from the moment he got Yolande’s letter. After all these years, after going to hell and back again with that agonising mixture of love and hate, the pain and torment of hope and desire, the Earl admitted to himself that it was only the fact of his gashed face that stood between him and rushing to be at the Duchess’s side.

  He cared nothing about being married, about any future association between them being adulterous. All he wanted was to see her, to be once more in her presence. And yet he hesitated, staring into the mirror, seeing the way his right eye dipped very slightly where the point of the wounding blade had pierced the skin beneath it, looking with loathing at the criss-cross marks of the gut that had been clumsily sewn in by an English physician desperately trying to put his face back together.

  “You hideous monster,” he said to his reflection, and did not know whether to laugh or weep at the sheer tragedy of it all.

  In the end, Richemont decided to go to her, ordering from his tailors a dozen visors made in different colours to match the new clothes they were hurriedly making, holding on to what was left of his tattered vanity, yet at the same time smiling wryly at his pathetic conceits.

  Thus, prepared as best he c
ould, the Earl left Nantes early in the morning of the Feast of Whitsuntide, turning inland to follow the Loire the relatively short distance to Angers, riding with a safe conduct signed by his brother the Duke of Brittany, and an accompanying party of two dozen men. Yet on arrival at the castle in the heat of late afternoon, Richemont discovered that a shock lay in wait for him.

  “The Queen of Sicily is not in residence, Lord Earl,” the maître-d’hôtel announced, bowing gravely.

  “But surely she is expecting me?”

  “She asked me to give you this.”

  And a sealed parchment was put into his gloved fist, which the Earl broke open impatiently.

  Even looking at that long flowing hand was enough to wipe thirteen years from his mind. He was a youth again, despairingly in love, being sent away like a disgraced dog because his mistress preferred Pierre de Giac. Yet now, having heard so much of that particular man’s nefarious activities, his cruel treatment of his wife, his allegiance to Satan, Richemont wondered if any of it had been true.

  “By Christ’s passion, if I learn from her lips that de Giac lied to me I’ll strangle the wretch barehanded,” he said under his breath.

  The very thought made sweat start out on him, drenching his skin, and it was with some difficulty that the Earl wrested his attention back to the letter he held.

  ‘My dear Richemont.’ he read, ‘it is vital that I speak to you in a place that is utterly secure. I have, therefore, decided to name our secret meeting place only in a letter that will be put directly into your hand on your arrival in Angers.

  ‘My friend, I am asking you to undertake the long and hazardous journey to Provence, as will I, and go to the Chateau de la Napoule situated in the bay of the same name. A contingent of horsemen are standing by to escort you to the right destination and bring you safely there. I beg you to treat the castle of Angers as your own in my absence. Everything is prepared for you to spend a comfortable night. I trust that you will find yourself able to comply with this, my strange request. In gratitude, Yolande d’Anjou.’