Crown in Candlelight

by Rosemary Hawley Jarman

  Owen, fresh as a lark and slightly drunk, entered with his harp and a light step. As before, Henry motioned him to sit. ‘Shall I play holy things, Sire?’

  Henry’s thin hand covered his eyes, he spoke without lifting his head.

  ‘There was something you once told me of … a ballad, concerning some fair young knight .…’

  ‘Culhwch,’ Owen said eagerly.

  ‘That is the one, then.’

  ‘Oh, your Grace,’ Owen burst out intemperately, ‘was it not all a miracle, a mighty victory?’

  ‘Sing of Culhwch.’

  Ruefully, he said: ‘It should, by rights, take hours in the telling.’

  ‘Then, tell of the essence.’ He searched among labyrinths of wanting, the magic, the only words. ‘He confounded the fiercest giant …’

  ‘… in the world. He had been rash in youth. Thus he shone more brightly against the darkness of his past. And he conquered—the princess, and the giant who was turned into a little child in face of his prowess, and the mighty Boar …’

  ‘And the domain?’

  ‘All lands, all dower, all splendour. His by right.’

  Silence. Then Henry looked up, smiling frailly.

  ‘I saw you fighting, Owen ap Meredyth ap Tydier. I shall reward you now.’

  Duw annwyl! He will knight me as he did poor Davy.

  Owen’s shining hopes flew crazily. Then the King said:

  ‘I shall create you an esquire of the Wardrobe. You will be under the jurisdiction of Master John Feriby from now on, in my Household.’

  ‘It is an honour, Sire,’ Owen said jerkily. The King’s eyes looked past him to where the corpse-pyre made a pattern on the canvas of the tent.

  ‘Now, sing,’ said King Henry.

  The first note dropped, silver on the silver of the voice. For a brief moment player and listener shared an identical thought. Is this the greatness of which I dreamed?

  Part Four

  THE TREATY

  France and England, 1420–22

  Il est ecrit,

  Pur voir et eil,

  Per mariage pure

  C’est guerre ne dure.

  (From Katherine’s Coronation feast, 1421)

  She still had a cough, relic of the old fever, and now there was no Dame Alphonse to bring her the sweetbriar necklet, for Alphonse was dead and Poissy a place of the past. The cough was more an indication of nervousness than ill-health, intermittent and sometimes an embarrassment. And in her mother’s household there were plenty to care for her, a plethora of abigails and béguines, like benign sheepdogs round a rather independent little lamb, for Katherine of Valois was learning how to care for herself.

  A woman now, nurtured as the bait she was, treated by Isabeau with an eerie indulgence, she had developed a secret self, a mental sanctum, detached, full of private conclusions and often passionate thoughts. Her will was strong, although not as strong as she would have wished. She was fairly biddable. She had survived, through a concealed, wary determination. She was tall, her face serene, her bearing steady. Her colour was ivory with a musk-rose flush on the cheekbones. Her great dark eyes were thoughtful, often distant, her lips wide and sleek, and her smile still sometimes transformed her, so that the eyes bloomed mysterious as black satin. It was almost a wanton smile. It challenged, teased. None could see Katherine smile without acknowledging her curious glamour, neither could they guess that the smile was often only a propitiation, a defence that sheltered her spirit.

  She was smiling now at some witticism of her mother’s. They sat together in the bower at Troyes under a stained-glass oriel, its light glinting on their finery. Katherine’s dark hair hung below her waist and shone with filaments of gold and green and red under the sunlit glass. About her head she wore a filet of gold and pearls. A tight crimson gown, faced from neck to hem with ermine, constrained her long body. Small sapphires punctuated the collar. A loose mantle of cloth of gold was draped about her shoulders. Beneath all this, her rigid flesh prickled with sweat. The sun was fierce for May, and they were waiting, still waiting, as they had waited in other bowers, other manors, through stress and hope, since Agincourt.

  Isabeau watched her daughter, and tried another jest. If only the girl would laugh more! all might yet be saved. When sullen, she could look almost plain. The portrait sent recently to Henry of England had a false smile plastered upon it, and she was doubtful of its efficacy. Worry dragged at her, as she sat in her sumptuous blue sarcenet and sipped Burgundy. She shifted her spreading hips upon the window-seat and tapped her feet. She was heavy with ambition as well as anxiety, and, like Katherine, she thought often of the dead. Dauphin Louis for one, her fierce, bibulous little son, gone to his grave before his twentieth year, rotted by debauchery and full of spleen at the incredible catastrophe sustained by France in 1415. Such was Isabeau’s reputation that men said she, the mother, had administered poison. She smiled wryly. At least it could be said that she did not mourn Louis. He had become truculent, an embarrassment, furious at her negotiations with the English King because they rocked his own dreams of supremacy, hating her association with Jean sans Peur of Burgundy, the enemy turned lover. She had plotted and schemed at Tours and Troyes with Jean sans Peur, encouraging him to keep the bloody feud between Burgundy and Armagnac running, so that Parisian Armagnacs were murdered in their beds and factions festered like a sore. How easy it had been for the invader to return from England and resume his conqueror’s trail through France!

  The whole of Normandy was now virtually Henry’s. Many towns had been captured by him and his captains: his brothers Clarence and Gloucester; Umfraville, March, Salisbury and Warwick and Exeter. Touques was his, and Auvillars, Caen (besieged cruelly by Clarence and Warwick); Creully and Villars Bocage in the west of Caen, the castle of Alençon; Falaise (the birthplace of Henry’s own mother), Bayeux, Cherbourg, Louviers and Pont de L’Arche, eight miles from Rouen. Then Rouen itself, which had a undergone a siege from which even Isabeau’s rock-hard sensibilities recoiled, though she cared nothing for the common people and had not wept for years. What was the English poet’s name? Paynter? No, Page, John Page. His ballads were read in both England and France. Untutored, a common soldier, he had written from his eye-witness heart.

  And also their bread was near hard gone,

  And flesh, save horseflesh, had they none;

  They ate both dogs and cats,

  And also both mice and rats …

  The French soldiers had turned the citizens of Rouen out to starve into the drenching town-ditch, ruthlessly forfeiting French lives for their own survival. Beyond the moat the English force refused to let them pass, and there they had lain, the dead and the living.

  And then they ate both roots and rind,

  And dew of the grass that they might find,

  All love and kindness was gone aside,

  When each from the other their meat might hide.

  Babies had been born in the moat, while nearby corpses lay unburied. Babies who were hauled on pulleys up to the battlements to be baptized, then lowered again to their deaths in the pit. Skeletal girls had struggled as far as the enemy lines to sell their bodies for a crust. There had been women suckling dead infants, and babies hanging on the breasts of their dead mothers.

  At every gate they were put out,

  Many a hundred in a rout …

  And all they cried at once then,

  ‘Have mercy on us, ye Englishmen.’

  Isabeau drank wine, and tried to think with detachment about the present situation. Her own son, the third and present Dauphin, Charles, and his enmity for Jean sans Peur had been at the root of that carnage, albeit indirectly. Just as she herself was to blame, for the factions seeking to destroy one another, even as the English King had desired. Henry had played one off against the other while babies were born and died in that ditch of Purgatory, flooded by rain and the tears of illimitable suffering. So it was, she thought. Life! Fate! I must not grow soft or pliant in my age. Her eye
s turned severely on Katherine. Smile, woman! Smile, salvation!

  She had stayed in her fortified manors, fringed by the howling strife, cultivating Katherine like a magic herb and upholding Jean sans Peur. Burgundy, the crafty old warrior, had come to her like a miracle at the time when she needed him most. Despite his murder of Louis of Orléans, she had welcomed him gratefully; they were in complete accord. Shrewd and cool, he was a man to match her own strength at last. She knew and approved of the knowledge that he was hand in glove with the invader, holding back his troops from the defence of the realm and rejoicing to see Armagnac’s forces harassed, beleaguered, betrayed. When Bernard, Count of Armagnac, was murdered in a Paris street-brawl to lie naked and mocked by the Burgundians for three days, she and Jean sans Peur had celebrated with a revel lasting twice as long. King Charles was not present on that occasion. He had a turret-wing to himself at Troyes, and stayed there most of the time, unstable, muttering of old sins and regrets; useless as a broken cannon. A scrapheap of a man.

  The second Dauphin, Jean, who had been as tiresomely obstructive of her private schemes as his brother Louis had been, was also dead. Young Jean had been dedicated to the Armagnacs, to the Dukes of Brittany and Berry, and, like Louis, had feared for his own succession at the hands of his mother and Burgundy, and when Henry of England ruled France through marriage to its Princess. Jean sans Peur was blamed for the Dauphin Jean’s death; people spoke of poison. None would ever know the truth. It was of no account. The prime consideration was to treat with Henry of England, for he had proved stronger and cleverer than any, and was an ally devoutly to be wooed.

  By St Denis! she thought. How many dead! Even Jean sans Peur now, and men had judged him immortal. Struck down at a meeting with the new Dauphin, Charles, on the bridge of Montereau. Before this event, further towns had fallen to the English: Lavilleterte and Bouconvillers, Gisors, Meulan, Montjoie and St Germain, Château-Gaillard. News of Burgundy’s death had come back to Isabeau in garbled versions. He and the Dauphin had met in a small barricaded square east of the river on the periphery of the bridge. Jean sans Peur had disliked the venue but had finally acquiesced, saying that something must be risked in the cause of peace.

  Although Burgundy, to the rage of the Dauphin Charles, had long been intriguing with Henry, giving and receiving promises, they had quarrelled after the terrible siege and fall of Rouen, and Jean sans Peur had dismissed as null all the tentative negotiations that had gone before. So he had agreed to meet the Dauphin for exploratory talks. He was annoyed with Henry, and toyed for once with the idea of the factions healed and a united front presented to the conqueror. Learning of this proposal, Henry, who had been keeping truce, launched an offensive on Pontoise, and then reached the gates of Paris, from which Isabeau and Jean sans Peur were forced to run by night.

  It had been early September (less than a year ago, she mused) that Burgundy, accompanied by seven hundred armed men, arrived at the Montereau bridge and entered the enclosure with a small entourage. One of the Dauphin’s chief officers, Tanneguy du Chatel, greeted him there. Jean embraced him, praising his fidelity, then knelt to the Dauphin who was leaning, fully armed, upon a wooden frontier set up on the bridge. What then ensued had never been clear. A few insults of no real weight had been uttered by the Dauphin to the Duke. Jean sans Peur, rising to his feet, found his sword caught up in his velvet mantle. In order to untangle it, he took the sword by the hilt. There were shouts of outrage from the Dauphin’s party—he draws a weapon before our lord!—and Tanneguy du Chatel whirled his axe across the Duke’s throat. Then all the Dauphin’s men fell on him, stabbing and gouging him to death, while the heir of France, still leaning on the barrier, watched without a sign or a word.

  It was so sudden that the seven hundred fighting men drawn up outside remained uninvolved. Perhaps, she thought, they saw only a distant scuffle. Perhaps they were traitors – who could tell? The Dauphin Charles was later helped by his friends into the castle at Montereau. Was he appalled by the savage finality of it all? Although he was Armagnac through and through and that day two murders had been avenged; Louis of Orléans, and Count Bernard. He was only sixteen years old, and perhaps confused by inexperience …

  Whatever the truth, Jean sans Peur was dead. Of all Isabeau’s paramours he had been the most useful, the most likeable. There would be none to match him, with his ruthless wit. His long heavy face returned to her sometimes in stabs of regret. And now there was only Henry of England, the symbol of survival, the prime concept by which she and Katherine stood alone to gain. For in her heart Isabeau knew the Dauphin to be merely the tool of strong conspirators, and his father was continually quaking-mad.

  ‘Sit straight!’ she said suddenly, although Katherine was sitting as if she had a rod against her spine. ‘The gown looks well. Would to God you had more jewels. I could hang those marauders with my own hands.’

  Henry, after his first meeting with Katherine almost a year ago, had sent her a gift of gems worth one hundred thousand crowns (unfortunately they had been stolen in transit by robbers, Frenchmen for all that, on the road to Troyes.) He must therefore have admired her. Did he carry her face in his thoughts, like a troubadour? Unlikely, from what Isabeau knew of Henry. Was the portrait an uninspired reminder, with its manufactured smile? None could persuade Katherine to smile, the week of the painting. She had murmured that she was mourning the anniversary of a death. Whose? when there were so many dead, and who knew who was loved or hated?

  Katherine now listened to the sporadic conversation of her mother as to the rumblings of a far-off battle, dangerous but too distant to be of account. They were waiting; they would eternally be waiting, for news of a second chance to meet Henry of England, for a messenger to slide through the studded oak door and possibly be harangued by Isabeau for not bringing the desired words. Katherine was accustomed to waiting. Her mind was trained to drift from poignant memory to curious recollection—from a little white dog now dead to the willow tree at Poissy—to Belle, whose remembrance no longer hurt, being welded to her own spirit. Constant within that private dominion, a silent counsellor whose essence was truer than a memory and more potent than a ghost.

  Nearby stood a harp, its woodwork carved with roses and acorns. At her mother’s bidding she had become adept upon it. Henry loved the harp. That was one of the subjects that had arisen in their brief conversation. And near the harp was a caged nightingale, an insignificant brown bird who would go for weeks without singing and then burst into a desperate abandon of melody. Silently Katherine rehearsed a chanson newly learned, thinking without understanding of the love it celebrated.

  J’ay prins amours a ma devise,

  Pour conquérir joyeuseté,

  Heureux seray en cet esté

  Se puis venir a mon emprinse.

  Such a happy, courtly song! And how hot it was in this room, in these clothes! The gown was pinned to her back by sweat. Scattered at random in her mind were courts and castles and dowries and stolen jewels and strange lands and somewhere love. She dreamed of open fields; meadows, and brisk trembling air, and mountains. And love? Why, Henry of England was her love. She had been rehearsed in this thought, yet her long glossy lips curved a little cynically and the black eyes came on fire with humour.

  He and she had met at last nearly a year ago near the bridge at Pontoise. A high day in Katherine’s lifeless almanac. The first and possibly the last meeting. Perhaps she would die before they met again. Of longing for Henry? The smile turned to a chuckle. Isabeau looked up approvingly and the nightingale cocked its captive head, closed its pin-sized eyes and prepared itself for another recital, perhaps in about two months’ time.

  It had been almost as hot as now, with May slipping into June, and she had been even more royally robed, as she sat in the barge with her mother, her trembling, glassy-eyed father, and Jean sans Peur, who had kept his hand on her shoulder as they approached the Île Belle in the Seine near where the rendezvous had been arranged. Noxious odours rose f
rom the river and she was glad of the Duke’s proximity; his clothes were rich with Venetian perfumes. He murmured encouragement, his voice vibrant against her unbound hair: ‘When the King sees you, ma belle, he’ll forget all about his Aragon princess!’

  She had scarcely been aware that Henry was contemplating an Aragonese liaison, nor that he was trying to bring all Europe to his side by arranging marriages for his brothers Bedford and Gloucester, wooing the German and Hainault courts. In between making diplomatic representations to Genoa, Flanders and the Archbishops of Treves and Mayence in aid of his proposed war against the Infidel. Treaties and abortive treaties, unfulfilled pledges and cancelled meetings came thick and fast without her knowledge. She was, however, aware that Rouen, its population vastly decimated by the siege, was being held to ransom for 300,000 crowns, and that Henry was building a palace among its ruins.

  ‘Smile, Doucette!’ the Duke of Burgundy whispered, and she obeyed, glancing back at her parents. Isabeau, fanned with peacock feathers by a page, was watching her as usual. The King of France closely surveyed his own hands and fingernails, his lips trembling. The barge, hung with cloth of gold, moved steadily on towards the meadow outside the west gate of Meulan, north of the river. Beribboned pavilions had been set up, and palisades ringed three enclosures; one for the French, one for the English, and one, holding the largest pavilion a neutral meeting-place dressed with the lilies and leopards of the two countries. Deep trenches had been dug to mark the territorial boundaries and for further defence, lines of stakes planted along their edge. Henry was bringing English bowmen. A small city had arisen in the Meulan field. Noblemen of both countries had erected smaller tents of rivalling magnificence, coloured and tasselled with gold and set in neat patterns, like jewelled streets.