Then I looked more closely and of course it was not Jean-Michel at all, it was Luc, looking so like his father it was uncanny. It was more than a year since I had last seen him and my son had filled out into a broad-shouldered youth, with Jean-Michel’s dark complexion and his swinging, loping stride. Tears filled my eyes, tears of joy at the sight of my son and, I confess it, a few tears of disappointment that it was not his father.
‘Luc!’ I shouted, ashamed at even momentarily wishing him to be another. ‘You have come!’ So much had he matured in mind as well as body that he did not protest when I ran up and hugged him, planting excited kisses on both his cheeks.
‘I got your message,’ he said when he could speak, ‘but the courier found the dauphin in the middle of a hunt and my lord heard what the man said to me.’ Luc looked a little sheepish as he said this. ‘I know that if I had learned to read you could have sent me a private letter.’
‘Never mind that!’ I exclaimed. ‘He found you and you found me and it is Christmas! What could be better? And it is pure chance that I came to the bakery to fetch a pastry for little Catrine. Did you expect to find me here?’
He shook his head. ‘No. I came to see the tenant because I thought he would know where you were. But the point is that the dauphin himself sent me to Paris because he wanted me to carry a letter secretly for him to his sister, the princess.’
‘The queen. She is Queen of England now,’ I reminded him. ‘The dauphin sent her a letter, you say?’
‘Yes. He gave me leave to come and even let me take a horse so I rode back with the courier. I left the horse at the bakery and walked down the towpath because the baker said you would be coming.’ He looked wonderingly around him. ‘I remember playing on this path when I was a boy.’
‘Oh, so at fourteen you are a man, are you?’ I teased him. ‘Not quite yet, I think.’
‘I do a man’s job!’ he retorted. ‘The dauphin thinks so anyway, or he would not have trusted me with the letter.’
‘That is true,’ I agreed, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Can I see it?’
‘You can take it,’ Luc said, pulling a folded paper square out of the front of his jacket. It was sealed with a blob of wax on which a fleur-de-lis was boldly imprinted. Luc looked relieved to be rid of it and I noted that, wisely, he was not wearing any sign of his affinity to the dauphin.
‘I cannot go to the palace, Ma!’ he exclaimed. ‘Can I stay with Alys? Does she have a place?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, tucking the letter safely away. ‘We will go there as soon as I have seen the baker. You can meet your new niece. Catrine is a little beauty.’
‘Catrine? Is she named after her?’ Luc’s mouth twisted.
‘After Queen Catherine yes – who else?’ I answered, frowning. ‘She stood godmother to the child, Jesu bless her. Have you forgotten how much we owe her?’
He scowled and turned away. ‘No,’ he muttered. ‘But things have changed. There was that treaty. I do not think the dauphin’s letter will be a friendly one.’
I caught his sleeve, stopping him as he opened the gate into the bakery yard. ‘Do not tell anyone about the letter,’ I warned, ‘and I beg you, do not speak of the dauphin, even to the family. It is Christmas. Let us celebrate in peace together.’
Luc nodded. ‘You are right. After all, who knows if we will ever celebrate Christmas together again?’
His last words sent a chill through me and I wished he had not said them, for we cannot read the future but sometimes premonition strikes out of an empty sky.
So even now, as I write this nearly twenty years later, I treasure the happy hours we spent together as a family in the little house behind the old royal palace. Alys and Jacques had cleared the workshop and hung it with evergreens and ribbons and we had our own little feast of pies and puddings and roasted fowl washed down with a cask of wine sent by Catherine as a Christmas gift. We even had music because Jacques had clubbed together with other local craftsmen to share the cost of paying a little troupe of minstrels, who moved down the street from house to house singing carols and playing reels and jigs for dancing. Flushed with wine and mirth, I danced with Jacques and I danced with Luc and we all twirled baby Catrine until she shrieked with delight. Flopping breathless onto a bench and taking her on my knee, I sat and watched the young people kicking up their heels arm in arm, elated with the fellowship of laughter and the joy of the season. I was in the company of those I loved and the world seemed peaceful and in harmony. I could not remember being as happy as we were that night since Agincourt had wrought its terrible legacy.
Through all the days of Christmas the dauphin’s letter to Catherine weighed heavy on my mind, exacerbated by the sadness of bidding farewell to Luc, when he rode off from Alys’ house, with ten crowns of rent money under his belt, to return to the dauphin’s court. Later, back at the Louvre, I locked the letter away in my private coffer, awaiting a suitable moment to deliver it to Catherine. She was by turns so elated by the excitement of the extended festivities and exhausted by the strains of her condition that I kept putting it off until she seemed ready to deal with its contents. Of course I did not know what the contents were, but Luc’s warning had been enough to raise my fears.
Then, just after Epiphany, our worst fears were realised. Catherine began to bleed and although at first I hoped it might just be one of those peccadilloes of pregnancy, the bleeding persisted and grew more serious until we knew for sure that there would be no baby in the following summer, no heir yet for the Heir of France. While Catherine wept and railed at her bad fortune, I concentrated on making sure that the flow of blood was staunched and her condition stabilised. Above all, I wanted no repetition of the sad case of Bonne of Orleans who had bled to death.
I sent a message to King Henry who came to her chamber straight from one of his council meetings, still wearing his boots and fur-lined riding cloak. I sank to my knees as he strode through the door, fully expecting an explosion of anger and an outburst of blame, but he seemed quite resigned when I gave him the woeful news. In fact, surprisingly, he ended up reassuring me.
‘Do not berate yourself, Madame, it is no one’s fault,’ he said. ‘All that matters is that the queen recovers. She will recover, will she not?’ There was a faint sign of tremor in his voice when he asked this and I realised for the first time that he genuinely regarded Catherine as much more than the bearer of his children.
‘I am certain she will, your grace,’ I replied earnestly, still on my knees, having expected to plead for his forgiveness for allowing this disaster to happen. ‘She is mourning her loss but she is strong and healthy. There will be other children I am sure.’
‘And so am I,’ he said, nodding solemnly, ‘for it is God’s will that I shall have a son.’
His absolute certainty took my breath away. It was the same total confidence that had propelled him from near annihilation before Agincourt to his present state of glorious supremacy. And it was catching. The way he said it also made me completely sure that there would be another child on the way before too long and when he went in to speak to Catherine he conveyed the same sense of assurance to her. I began to understand what the Earl of Warwick had meant when he told Catherine that great leaders create leaders, for it takes supreme confidence to imbue others with self-belief and that was what King Henry did.
However I plucked up my courage and dared to warn him to exercise patience. ‘I am not a midwife, your grace,’ I said when he was leaving, having coaxed a weeping Catherine into healing slumber, ‘but I do know it would not be advisable to get the queen with child too soon. Her body needs a few weeks to heal.’
He regarded me steadily with his tawny eagle eyes and then nodded curtly. ‘I understand what you mean, Madame. My mother died from breeding – too young, too many and too soon after each other. I rely on you to nurse the queen back to health as quickly as possible. No, not for the reason you may be thinking,’ he cast me a brief and rueful smile, ‘but because we will be travellin
g to England soon for Catherine’s coronation. I want her to be my true anointed consort before any son is born to us.’
At least my decisions were made for me. I could not leave Catherine while she was recovering from her miscarriage, nor could I show her the letter from the dauphin. And I could not bring myself to leave her while she was still anxiously waiting to become pregnant; waiting to display the fertility which was so important to the long-term success of the Treaty of Troyes. So I decided that I would have to leave Alys and Catrine instead. Jacques was happy working in Paris among the cream of Europe’s designers and tailors and Alys did not want her children to grow up in a strange country across the sea.
‘It will not be for ever, Ma,’ she said when we discussed my leaving for England. ‘People travel across the Sleeve frequently and I am sure you will be back in Paris before too long. I have always known that the princess would need you, wherever she went, and you can make sure she does not forget her god-daughter!’
I laughed at that. She was not without a good bourgeois eye to the future, my canny daughter! I did not believe that she and Jacques and Catrine would do anything but thrive together in Paris.
I had said I would follow Catherine anywhere, but that was before I saw the sea and the ship we were to sail in, bumping up against the harbour wall in Calais six weeks later. Oh, it was a splendid ship, there was no denying that; the best in King Henry’s new royal fleet. It was sturdy and fat-bellied with bright-coloured pennons fluttering from every line and spa and it sat comfortably in the water like a prize hen on its nest, its three masts and upper decking painted royal blue and crimson and picked out in costly gold-leaf. But it was hardly as long as the great hall of the Louvre and it was supposed to carry two hundred people over a sea which looked grey and greedy and ready to swallow anything that ventured onto its restless, crested surface. However, when I whispered my fears to Catherine she just laughed and said, ‘Really, Mette! Do you think God would have granted King Henry a glorious victory at Agincourt and the crown of France if He intended him to drown on his way back to England?’
I might have pointed out that her father was still living and therefore the crown of France was not yet on her husband’s head, but I did not because she was by now totally persuaded of the fact that King Henry ruled England by divine right and that the Almighty also supported his claim to rule France. That was why he had won every battle and siege he had engaged in on French soil in the last six years and why there would be a son to inherit all that he had gained. In Catherine’s opinion you could not, and did not, argue with God and only rarely with King Henry. And it was this confidence, born of the newfound love that had blossomed between them, that had persuaded me it was time to show her the letter Luc had brought from the dauphin.
I did it when the ship was halfway across the Sleeve and the coast of France had dwindled into a blurred line on the horizon behind us. The action of a stiff breeze on the triangular sails hoisted fore and aft had been enough to push us out to sea, but as we cleared the harbour the crew had broken out the huge square mainsail and I had gasped in wonder at the bright-coloured image revealed on its flapping canvas. The king’s ship was called the Trinity Royal and there, in benediction over us all billowed the sacred figures of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Perhaps Catherine was right. It really did look as if the Almighty did not intend King Henry or any of his entourage to drown on the crossing to Dover. I approached her as she stood on the deck of the forecastle, the wind blowing her veil off her face, which was turned resolutely towards the north and England. There was no one else nearby.
‘I have a letter for you, Mademoiselle,’ I said softly. ‘I have had it for some weeks but now it seems the right time to give it to you.’
She took it from me and examined the seal. ‘A letter from Charles!’ she exclaimed in astonishment. ‘However did you come by it, Mette?’
‘It was brought to me by Luc, Mademoiselle. No one else knows of it.’
Her face fell. ‘Ah, yes. I suppose it must be kept a secret, even from Henry.’
‘Particularly from King Henry,’ I echoed solemnly.
‘Do you know what it contains?’ She seemed suddenly reluctant to open it.
‘No, Mademoiselle! As you see, the seal is intact.’
She shrugged. ‘I thought perhaps Luc might have an inkling. He must be much in my brother’s favour if he was entrusted with a secret document.’
‘As you know, Luc cannot read, so he is a safe courier.’
‘Ah, yes.’ She pondered this then gathered her courage and broke the seal. As she unfolded the letter, one single word stood out, written in bold black ink at the top of the page.
Seeing it my heart sank and I turned away, not wanting her to feel that I was reading over her shoulder but I need not have bothered for once she had scanned its contents she handed me the letter without speaking, her face as pale as the paper.
It did not take more than a few seconds to read.
You were my sister but you are no longer.
You have betrayed me and think to steal my throne but I warn you, when you go to England do not hope ever to return to the land of your birth. It is written in the stars that I and my heirs shall rule France and yours shall rule England. Our nations shall never live in peace. You and Henry have done this.
The devil take you both.
Charles
The hand holding the letter dropped to my side and I crossed myself with the other. ‘I am sorry to be the bearer of this, Mademoiselle,’ I said.
She shook her head and bent to take the letter from me. ‘Let us pretend it was never written,’ she murmured with a sigh and dropped it over the ship’s rail.
It was whipped away by the wind and the last thing I saw was that terrible word at the top, scrawled in the fiercest script and the blackest ink.
Traitor
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of the people I would like to acknowledge are dead, inevitable when you’re transporting the reader back six hundred years. If I could I would personally thank Catherine de Valois for living such an extraordinary life and, for contemporary accounts of 15th century France, the marvellous chroniclers Enguerrand de Monstrelet, Juvenel des Ursins and Jean Froissart. How I wish I could meet them! And there are many historians of subsequent centuries whose work I have shamelessly cherry-picked – too many to name but to whom grateful thanks are due and of course any factual errors made are my own.
Expert medical advice regarding the possible causes and symptoms of Charles VI’s madness came from Bill and Janie Riddle, psychiatrist and psychotherapist respectively, and I gleaned vital information from a string of patient curators and librarians on my research trips to Paris, Picardy, Normandy, Champagne and the Île de France, during which I was inevitably forced to consume some gorgeous French food and wine. So I thank all of them, except perhaps the proprietors of an Algerian restaurant in Poissy where I was served a Couscous Royal from which my figure has never recovered!
And dear reader, The Agincourt Bride would not have reached your hands without passing through those of some wonderfully encouraging (and obviously very discerning!) people. They are, in order of handling, Scotland’s literary agent sans pareille Jenny Brown, friend and novelist extraordinaire Barbara Erskine and the crème de la crème of Harper Fiction – Kate Elton and Sarah Ritherdon, editor par excellence Kate Bradley and copy-editor magnifique Joy Chamberlain. I am extremely grateful to all of them and also to the production team of designers, publicists, marketeers, distributors and printers. I tremble with fingers crossed in the wake of their expertise but if you enjoy it, dear reader, it will have been well worth our while, so thanks to you most of all for picking it up or, in this digital age, downloading it.
Twitter: @joannahickson www.joannahickson.co.uk
Joanna
Read on for an exclusive extract from the compelling
follow-up to The Agincourt Bride
The Tudor Bride
by Joanna Hickson
THE TUDOR BRIDE
1
The grey-green sea had a hungry look as it lapped and chewed on the defenceless shore, like the monsters that map-makers paint at the edge of the known world. With her sails flapping, the Trinity Royal idled nose to the wind under the walls of Dover Castle, a vast stronghold sprawling atop chalk cliffs which gleamed pink in the flat February sunlight. At their foot it was possible to make out flags and banners and a large crowd of people gathered on the beach. Unfamiliar music from an unseen band drifted towards us on a dying breeze.
Having almost completed my first sea voyage, I could not say that I was an enthusiastic sailor. Queen Catherine, on the other hand, looked radiant and unruffled after the crossing from Calais, even when faced with the prospect of being carried ashore in a chair by men bizarrely called the Wardens of the Cinq Ports; bizarrely because apparently there were seven ports, not five, as the title suggested. It may have been an English tradition, but I considered it barbaric that she and King Henry were expected to risk their lives being lifted shoulder high over treacherous waters to a stony beach when they could have made a dignified arrival walking down a gangway to the dockside. Besides, being keeper of the queen’s robes, I, Guillaumette Lanière, would have the job of restoring the costly fur and fabric of the queen’s raiment from the ravages of sand and salt-water. As one of her attendants, I stood a few paces behind the royal couple on the aftcastle deck, much relieved that the swell which had plagued my stomach all the way from France had now eased and the ship’s movement had dwindled to a gentle rocking motion.
From our high vantage point we watched a gaily painted galley advancing fast over the waves, oars flashing in the sunlight and a leopard and lily standard proclaiming the approach of the King of England’s brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the man responsible for the coming chair-lift. That his grace of Gloucester thought himself a fine fellow was amply evident in the swashbuckling way he climbed the rope-ladder, vaulted the ship’s rail and sprang up the companionway to reach us. A short green velvet doublet and thigh-high boots hugged his muscular physique and his broad shoulders admirably displayed a heavy gold chain from which hung a trencher-sized medal of office. His knee-bend showed practised perfection and he flourished his stylish chaperon hat in his right hand as he grasped his brother’s with the left.
The Agincourt Bride Page 44