The Agincourt Bride

by Joanna Hickson

  ‘There can be no more celebration. This feast is over. We must pray for France and for the fallen. God have mercy on us all.’

  I found myself clutching Alys and Luc tightly to me as we watched her disappear through the privy door, her birthday gown with its silver bells and baubles suddenly appearing tragically frivolous. ‘What about Pa?’ Luc asked, his dark eyes wide. ‘Do you think he was involved in the battle?’

  His question echoed what had been my own instant dread. ‘How can we know?’ I responded faintly, unable to offer reassurance. ‘As the princess said, we can only pray.’

  Exchanging muttered comments, the diners abandoned their meal and began pushing towards the great door. Wedged among this morose crowd, I was taken by surprise when a liveried page suddenly appeared at my elbow.

  ‘The princess is asking for you,’ he said, edging close to make himself heard. ‘I am to take you to her.’

  I hesitated, loyalties painfully divided. My overwhelming desire was to pray with my stricken children for the safety of their father, but as ever in my life Catherine’s call took precedence. I nodded reluctantly. ‘One minute,’ I said and pulling Alys and Luc away from the tide of moving bodies, I took their hands and pressed them together. ‘Look after each other. Go to the church and pray for your father, then wait for me in our chamber. I will come as soon as I can.’

  Against the flow of the crowd the page struggled to clear a path to the dais, behind which imposing double doors led to the queen’s private apartments. As we approached, two liveried guards threw them open but, before entering, the page paused, a perplexed frown creasing his brow. ‘The princess said you would advise me what to fetch,’ he murmured. ‘She said the dauphin needed comfort and you would know what that meant.’

  I did not hesitate. The message could only mean that Prince Louis was in the palace, unable or unwilling to appear in public but, as at all times of stress, thirsty and hungry. ‘Fetch pastries and any meats from the feast. And some Rennish wine from the queen’s cellar. And do not stint. Where is he?’

  ‘With the princess. Come.’

  We passed down a short passage to reach a carved door and faintly through its timbers came the dauphin’s voice, keening what sounded like some ritual chant, over and over again in a high, wailing monotone, ‘I should have been there. Dear God, I should have been there!’

  ‘Fetch the refreshments immediately,’ I urged the page. ‘Go – quickly! And make sure the wine is from Anjou – he will not drink anything from the Duke of Burgundy’s estates. Go!’

  A huddle of Catherine’s ladies was gathered nearby, wringing their hands and whispering together. ‘The dauphin made us leave,’ Agnes de Blagny told me anxiously. ‘Princess Catherine is alone with him and he is very troubled. What shall we do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said flatly. ‘If the dauphin has dismissed you, there is nothing you can do. When the food and wine come, I will take them in.’

  There was a pause in Louis’ chant long enough for Catherine to interject, but I had to strain to hear her soft voice through the thick planking of the door. ‘Why were you not there, Louis? You are the Captain-General of France. Who was leading the army?’

  ‘The constable!’ responded her brother vehemently. ‘He said it would be a rout. There were only a few thousand English in the field – too insignificant a skirmish to honour with my presence. Hah!’

  ‘And what does the constable say now? How does he explain the defeat of so many by so few?’ Even muffled, I could hear the scorn in Catherine’s voice.

  ‘He says nothing for he is dead!’ cried the dauphin in an anguished screech. ‘Dead in the first charge – smothered in a sea of mud along with thousands more of our greatest nobles and knights. I galloped to the field as soon as the news came. It was a sight to make the angels weep!’ I could feel the floor shake as Louis stamped out the level of his distress.

  Catherine tried to calm him. ‘Will you not sit, Louis? You must be exhausted. You should rest.’

  ‘How can I rest when the flower of France lies rotting in a ploughed field?’ The dauphin’s pacing grew more frenetic. ‘The whole dynasty of Bar is wiped out – the duke and both his sons – Alençon is dead and Brabant and Nevers …’

  ‘Burgundy’s brothers!’ Catherine interjected. ‘My God, so they were there. And what of Burgundy himself?’

  ‘Burgundy never came,’ replied Louis dully. ‘He was only a few miles away and he kept saying he would but he never did.’

  ‘What a surprise! So much for Jean the Fearless!’ exclaimed his sister with biting sarcasm. ‘Charles of Orleans – what of him?’

  ‘Taken prisoner, along with Bourbon and many others, but at least they are alive to be ransomed, unlike half the French prisoners who were put to the sword on the order of English Henry, against the laws of chivalry! Why did he do that when we had let him cross the Somme? He is a monster! Jesu – so many are dead. I wish I was one of them!’ I heard in this cry the voice of the cowed and terrified little boy who had emerged from the nursery punishment chest in the despot days of Madame la Bonne. Life had treated Louis harshly. The frightened child was never far from the surface.

  ‘Thank God you are not!’ I heard Catherine exclaim. ‘France needs you now more than ever.’

  I missed the dauphin’s response to this, for the page arrived with the wine and a dish of remnants from the abandoned banquet. He looked grateful when I relieved him of them. ‘I will go in,’ I said, determined to do my best to protect Catherine against her unpredictable brother if it should prove necessary. ‘Open the door.’

  At the sound of my entrance Louis swung round, ready to spit out his fury at the unwanted intrusion, but his gaze fell on the contents of the dish. ‘Ah, food!’ he exclaimed, pouncing on a piece of meat pie and biting into it.

  ‘Blessed Virgin! How can you eat at such a time?’ demanded Catherine incredulously. ‘It is grotesque!’

  ‘How dare you!’ Her brother turned on her, pastry flakes falling like snow from his mouth. ‘I eat because I must. How else am I to fill the emptiness I feel? But you wouldn’t understand that, Catherine, standing there in your little pointed hat and your little pointed shoes.’ He sneered at her as he chewed. ‘I suppose you do not realise that all this death and destruction is down to you?’

  ‘Me?’ echoed Catherine, staring at him in astonishment. ‘Merciful God! How can you suggest that?’

  ‘Because you are a witch – an enchantress!’ Louis exclaimed, reaching for the cup of wine I had poured ready for him.

  The only light in the room came from the flickering flames of the fire and a single candle on a buffet-board. Smothering a gasp of shock at the dauphin’s outburst, I laid the food and wine down beside the candle and crept into a dark corner. No one ever forgot the king’s dreadful malady or that Louis was his son. Judging by her expression, Catherine was as fearful as I that he, too, might lose control. He had certainly lost all awareness of my presence.

  ‘Have you no idea what beauty like yours does to men?’ he persisted between hectic gulps of wine. ‘That impious libertine Henry of Monmouth came lusting over to France, desperate to possess your soft, white virgin flesh – and now ten thousand Frenchmen lie dead … dead, at your little feet!’

  ‘Ten thousand – Jesu!’ Catherine whispered, half to herself. I saw the blood drain from her face at the scale of the losses and I prayed that the dauphin was exaggerating in his distress. ‘That is a terrible number. However you are wrong, Louis!’ she went on bravely, in a firmer tone. ‘King Henry does not lust after me, but after France. I am not the territory he wants, I am the wretched scapegoat who is tethered to it. I am glad you did not fight because at least you remain alive to lead us out of this mess. Without you, power might fall to his disgrace of Burgundy, which God forbid! His motive for not fighting is glaringly obvious, is it not? He is saving his men to move on Paris.’

  ‘Well!’ Louis paused between mouthfuls to glare at Catherine, fury replaced in his expres
sion by grudging respect. ‘You are not just a pretty witch, are you, sister?’ he acknowledged. ‘But what you do not know is that our charming mother has already actually sent for Burgundy, promising him a hero’s welcome in Paris and a place at her right hand. My agents intercepted her messenger and I have ordered the gates closed against him.’

  Catherine crossed herself, looking alarmed and distressed at this latest bombshell.

  ‘Holy Marie! I will never understand our mother! But who is to hold the gates?’ she demanded. ‘If the constable is dead and the army is scattered, what forces can you call on to hold the city?’

  ‘I have sent for the Count of Armagnac. He is on the way from Gascony.’

  ‘Which means he missed the battle also!’ Catherine made an exasperated noise. ‘You cannot trust him, Louis, any more than Burgundy.’

  ‘I have no choice,’ muttered the dauphin, draining his cup. ‘I need men; Armagnac has men. The king needs protection; Armagnac will protect him. It is Armagnac or Burgundy – the bandit or the devil – and of the two I prefer the bandit.’

  ‘But can you be sure he will come?’ pressed Catherine. ‘If he could not bring his men to Picardy in time to fight the English, why should he bring them to Paris in time to forestall Burgundy?’

  ‘Because I have promised to make him Constable of France if he does,’ said Louis.

  ‘Ah, yes. That should bring him. And what about King Henry? Will the English army not also march on Paris?’

  ‘Now there is one blessing.’ The dauphin poured himself another cup of wine. ‘The pernicious Monmouth is so short of men that he can do nothing but march post-haste to Calais!’ His voice cracked on a cry of indignation. ‘I ask you, how in Jesu’s name did he manage to win?’

  ‘Meanwhile, where is our own king?’ Catherine asked with sudden anxiety, ignoring the prince’s rhetoric. ‘Tell me our father is safe from Burgundy’s clutches!’

  ‘His litter was right behind me on the road with an escort of five hundred men. He should be here within the hour. But I have not told him about the battle. It would break his heart.’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ said Catherine bleakly, her face expressionless as she watched her brother gulping down another cup of wine. ‘It has certainly broken mine.’

  It was hours before I was able to share the fears and prayers of my own children, for when the flagon of wine was empty and the dauphin had departed, Catherine’s admirable self-control, which had remained so strong in Louis’ presence, broke down and she began to weep uncontrollably, her tears soaking the bodice of her birthday gown.

  ‘I d-did not want to cry in f-front of my br-brother,’ she hiccupped, doubled up on a stool in her grief, ‘but oh, Mette, – all those d-deaths! Ten thousand! What a w-waste! How could it happen? It is t-terrible. It hurts me here, l-like a knife in the stomach.’

  I called her ladies in and we accompanied her, still choking back sobs, to her own apartment but it was not grief alone that caused her pain. After refusing any food and attending a special Mass in the royal chapel, she let me help her to bed, still red-eyed and complaining of stomach pain and we both immediately noticed bloodstains on her chemise.

  ‘Blessed Virgin!’ she whispered, staring at the marks in horror. ‘There must be demons gnawing at my belly, Mette! Louis said I was the cause of the battle and I am being punished for it.’

  ‘No, no, Mademoiselle!’ Impulsively I threw my arm around her shoulders, berating myself for failing to warn her of this mundane and inevitable development. I should have realised that, for their own very different reasons, neither the nuns nor her mother would have done so. ‘It is a terrible time for this to happen, but you are becoming a woman. All grown women bleed with the cycles of the moon. It is the curse of Eve.’

  ‘The curse of Eve? Then I am bewitched?’

  ‘No, Mademoiselle, not at all! I will explain – but first, a napkin to staunch the flow.’

  Having hastened to supply the necessary item, I did my best to explain God’s punishment of Eve for giving Adam the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, but even in her despair at the carnage of Agincourt she found the Genesis story hard to believe. ‘Can that really be true?’ she asked. ‘God placed this curse on women so that they should all bear Eve’s shame?’

  ‘That is how the Church interprets it,’ I nodded.

  She looked incredulous. ‘The nuns never taught us that. Did the Holy Mother suffer the curse of Eve?’

  ‘I suppose so. Perhaps you should ask a priest. I only know what my mother told me.’

  ‘That all women bleed for one woman’s misdeed? Surely God is not so unjust!’

  I pursed my lips. She was not the first to question the Church’s teaching in this respect, but it was inviting a charge of heresy to do so. ‘I suppose it is not for us to question the Almighty,’ I said tactfully. ‘And the curse is not constant. It only comes once a month for a few days.’

  ‘And it had to start today!’ I saw Catherine shudder and close her eyes, clutching her belly. ‘France bleeds and so do I. God has cursed us both.’

  When Montjoy Herald presented himself the next morning, Catherine’s salon was already shrouded and shuttered and she and her companions sat in semi-darkness, attired in sombre clothes and black veils like novice nuns. By candlelight, one of the king’s chaplains had been intoning a passage on sin and suffering from the book of Job, but he closed the book when the herald arrived. From somewhere, he had found a black surcôte and hose and came freshly shaven and bare-headed, bending his knee on entering. Rested after his hectic ride from Picardy, he looked younger than he had the previous day and I caught the two baronets’ daughters exchanging sidelong glances, apparently not so overwhelmed by grief that they did not coyly relish the presence of a handsome man.

  The formalities of greeting over, Catherine bade her visitor sit and tell them in his own words what he could of the calamitous battle that had plunged France into deep mourning. His account was a harrowing one, and he gave it with due gravity. It is the job of a herald to observe the whole theatre of chivalry, but in my opinion at times he over-dramatised things.

  ‘Constable d’Albrêt had chosen to deploy the French force at one end of a shallow valley with thick woods on either side,’ he began, ‘and the English king drew up his army at the other end – if you could call it an army for it was a pitifully small band of men compared with our thirty thousand, maybe five or six thousand. It would not be overstating the case to compare the confrontation to that of David and Goliath.’

  Agnes and the other two young ladies, who had not heard the dauphin’s agonised cries of incredulity at France’s losses as Catherine and I had, reacted with gasps of amazement at the enormous difference in numbers.

  ‘If you do not know the countryside of Picardy, Madame,’ the herald continued, spurred on by the audience reaction, ‘let me tell you that it is very lush and green, and there are few hills of any size, but we French held what high ground there was, beside the castle of Agincourt. Our cavalry was mustered across the whole valley, thirty companies of armoured knights mounted on caparisoned coursers with banners flying, packed spur to spur as thick as stitches in a tapestry and the scarlet Oriflamme raised high in the van, streaming in the breeze.’

  Now he had the ladies’ full attention. They were all young girls after all, avid for stories of gallant knights and chivalry, their imaginations fired by the vivid picture Montjoy was painting, even though they already knew the appalling outcome. In truth, I could not blame the herald becoming infected with their excitement and warming to his descriptive task.

  ‘Mercifully, the rain had stopped overnight and we could see the English gathered below us, less than a mile distant. They were all on foot. They did not appear to have any horsemen, although it turned out there were a few hundred hidden in the woods. Their foot-soldiers were mostly armed with longbows, except for two companies of dismounted knights and men-at-arms deployed on either flank. In front of one of these a huge standard billowe
d, goading us, insolently emblazoned with the combined arms of England and France – the lions and the lilies. Beside it we made out the figure of the English king, wearing his crown over his helmet as if to say “Behold! Here I am, come and get me!” Well, Madame, I must tell you that in our ranks were eighteen hand-picked knights who had sworn a vow to do just that.’

  ‘Are you sure it was him?’ interrupted Catherine. ‘I have heard that kings have been known to confuse the enemy with doubles dressed like them and wearing crowns.’

  Montjoy looked indignant that his word might be doubted, but was also anxious not to offend the daughter of the king. ‘I assure you, Madame, it was Henry of England. I had delivered a message to him from his grace the dauphin only the day before.’

  Catherine leaned forward, fascinated despite her best efforts to display dispassionate calm. ‘So you spoke to King Henry! Pray, tell me how he looked. Was he anxious, frowning, fearful?’

  The herald shook his head. ‘No, not at all, Madame. My task was to relay the dauphin’s invitation to surrender himself for ransom and thus save his army from destruction. But Henry of England smiled and shook his head. He declared that his cause was just and God would therefore favour it and that God’s will would be done. Then he bade me take that message back to the dauphin. He looked serene and untroubled, but as I rode away I could see that his men were without shelter, cold and wet. Yet none deserted or refused to fight.’

  ‘Perhaps because they had nowhere to go,’ remarked Catherine, ‘and nothing to lose.’

  ‘Nevertheless, at the start of the next day, as our forces mustered, I heard the constable say to the dauphin that he still believed there would be no battle and that the English king would surrender as soon as he saw the great might of the French host. That was when the dauphin rode away, telling Count d’Albrêt to bring him the son of the usurper in chains.’

  I saw Catherine bite her lip at that and guessed she was remembering how loudly on the previous evening the dauphin had deplored his absence from the field of Agincourt. Watching the king of arms continue his narrative, I considered the job of a herald. He was not pledged to fight, but only to convey orders, note the activity of arms-bearers and, ultimately, to count and record the names of the dead. Just the noble dead of course – those permitted to bear arms and entered in the register of chivalry. Once again, as I had so many times already, I pondered the fate of my Jean-Michel, wondering where he was and if he was still alive. If he was not, would his name appear on any list? Meanwhile the herald’s story was reaching its climax and still commanding the ladies’ rapt attention.