Crown in Candlelight

by Rosemary Hawley Jarman

  There were as many of these tents on Henry’s side of the palisade as his most recently captured towns: Montivilliers, Lillebonne, Fécamp, Etrepagny, Tancarville, Dieppe, Gournay, Neufchâtel en Bray. La Roche Guyon (thought to be invincible but whose foundations had been undermined by Warwick); Eu (for the second time), Honfleur, and Ivry, taken by Humphrey of Gloucester.

  The oaths of chivalry had been sworn, the terms offered. Katherine could hardly believe that she was the focus of their extravagance. Her dowry was named by Henry at 800,000 crowns. To this Isabeau objected, saying that 600,000 crowns was still owing as the sum taken to England by Isabelle for Richard. In response, Henry reminded them of the ransom for King John, captured by the Black Prince, and never fully reimbursed. Jean sans Peur mentioned Katherine’s jewellery, assets which would accompany her. The answer was brisk: these jewels could not match even one bauble of Henry’s, for example the ‘Great Harry’, a crown pawned for his Agincourt campaign. He also demanded his own kingdom in France, including all the conquests of Edward III and his own gains in Normandy. Touraine, Anjou, Maine, Brittany, Flanders, Ponthieu and Montreuil were but a few of the claims he sought. Above all he must be regent and son-in-law to King Charles, and upon the sovereign’s demise, supreme ruler.

  This sovereign, upon whom all such decisions should have fallen, swayed to his feet as the craft was moored and trumpeters played a fanfare. His face was milky-pale, his eyes withdrawn, He knew neither where nor what he was. Gently Jean sans Peur pressed him down into his red silk chair.

  ‘Stay! Rest, grand seigneur!’ he said, as if to a well-bred hound. And to Katherine: ‘You also, Madame.’ He stepped from the barge and joined Isabeau in a litter where boys dressed as angels were playing pipes and shawms and women fussed to arrange the Queen’s gold robes. Katherine waited for a further two days at the castle of Meulan, with her father, until she was escorted by the Count of St Pol into the great pavilion. She wore the most costly of her new dresses, green velvet panelled with intricate silver brocade, so heavy and hot she could scarcely walk, and adding to its weight a vast downfall of ermine attached to a high-arched coronet. When her women had placed the coronet on her head they had caught some of her fine hairs round a jewelled floret; this pained her. She was pale and her dark eyes immense.

  It was dim in the pavilion after the brightness outside. A stake was planted in the middle of the cloth of gold carpet, a halfway mark between the nations, and there she knelt with her mother and Burgundy. She saw the shapes of noblemen, the transient brilliance of jewels in the gloom, a movement of dark robes and bright heraldry, and peering up, sought to tally the old description, given by Dame Alphonse.

  ‘His head was bare, his cheek florid. He has a scar on his face. Aged about three-and-twenty. He looks clever.’

  Three men stepped forward, making deep obeisance, all tallish as they rose, but this must be Henry in the centre. He came to take her hands and lift her for a brief embrace. His full lips pursed to kiss her. Yes, he was florid, but patchily, over the weathered cheekbones. Steady eyes in a thin restless face. An old scar. But two-and-thirty now, to her eighteen. Clever, yes. A stubborn cleverness in face and body. His hands were strong, his mouth slightly moist. She thought, with an insight that amazed even herself: he is unwell. Devoured by something—what?

  ‘La Belle Katherine.’ A good, mature, mellow voice. ‘The portrait lied.’ He spoke good French too, nearly as perfect as the Earl of Warwick, whose long, welcoming address had lately finished.

  She had known the painting was not good. She lifted her face and smiled her brilliant seductive smile.

  ‘He showed you to be fair. But you are lovely. Comme une ange.’

  Then Henry had presented his brothers. Thomas, Duke of Clarence, capturer of castles. He looked war-weary. His breath none too sweet, he kissed her, as did Humphrey of Gloucester. This one was different. She looked up, startled, in to his eyes. Then away, quickly, back into that secret inner sanctum where dwelt Belle and her ghostly advisers. They were whispering, an instant chaos of warning. Beware him! Beware! then the moment snapped and she found herself murmuring the rehearsed greeting, though now avoiding the eyes in which she had seen an unmistakable evil.

  That, in retrospect, was her clearest impression of the meeting. The rest, recalled in the stifling room at Troyes, was vague, not unpleasant. Henry had seated her at his right hand in the gorgeous pavilion, had studied her carefully but with courtesy and a severe clerkish charm. She had felt that no detail of her went unobserved—not the way she drank or took her food, and when she asked for water with her wine, she fancied a spark of approval gleamed in his eyes. Choristers sang a motet during the feast, and this was when they talked of music. The harp, said Henry, was his favourite instrument, and as if in illustration of his discourse, behind a screen a musician pulled down a pellucid fountain of bright notes, his light tenor voice winding a skein about their conversation. A strange voice; she heard it sometimes even now, on the edge of dreams.

  ‘That,’ explained Henry, ‘is the Welsh harp you hear. A difficult skill to master. The tuning …’ The music attracted her, overlaying Henry’s descriptions of technique—she feigned attention, nodding demurely. He had promised her a harp and here it now stood, beside the sulky nightingale.

  Above his head a banner, held by two attendants and embroidered in blue and gold thread, had read: UNE SANS PLUS. She had forgotten then that he was dabbling with Aragon. Naively she had thought his attention, his desires, were hers. She had trusted the raison.

  The negotiations had failed through the fault of Jean sans Peur, now for ever silent. He had been afraid of those in his own party who resented Henry’s terms, and dared not risk losing partisans to the Dauphin and Armagnac. So the tents at Pontoise were dismantled, the French royal family resumed their river journey and Henry, when he returned a month later expecting a final settlement, found an empty field. That was when he had sent the jewels. And after that he began a further campaign, throwing a force from Nantes against Pontoise itself, the stronghold of the Burgundians. Now Pontoise was fallen, the trenches overgrown with grass, the scars where the bright pavilions had stood healed by a year.

  She could well have married him. He was pleasant enough, she could not imagine him wine-flushed and raging like her mother, or gibbering insanely like her father. He had an appealing stability. Meanwhile, there was this limbo of unknowing. She would sit for ever, cooked by clothes, in the bower at Troyes, a virgin in her nineteenth year. Her sisters, perhaps even Marie the nun, must have seen more of life. Dear lovely Belle had had love and death for bedfellows. Briefly she thought of Charles of Orléans, held for five years since Agincourt. Still Henry’s captive, still writing his sad songs in the Tower of London.

  And then a messenger scratched urgently upon the door, and the nightingale, without warning, began to sing.

  A paperchase of seabirds, flying downriver, followed the cavalcade as it approached the spires and turrets of Troyes. Flanked by horsemen and followed by hundreds of footsoldiers, Henry rode beside Philip, the new Duke of Burgundy. They rode so close that the sleek quarters of their mounts jostled together. Philip leaned slightly towards the English king as if in physical token of his complete amity. The young Duke wore a large black hat, the fold of its chaperon trailing over one shoulder. Over a black woollen tunic, a mantle of the same stuff enveloped him down to his spurs. The only relief in this gloom came from a gold crucifix and an enamelled collar across his chest from which hung his emblem, a small gold ram. His face was as hollow and serious as Henry’s. Beneath delicate brows his black Valois eyes were tragic. He had mourned his father, Jean sans Peur, for a year. The murder had utterly dislocated his life and his intentions. Neither warrior nor strategist himself, he had found himself waking nightly, weeping, crying Death to Armagnac! Death in particular to the Dauphin Charles, death or ruin. Innocent of how to achieve this, pious and gentle and nicknamed ‘The Good’, he had turned in desperation to the English king, arm
ed with treaties and concessions. In Henry’s strength he saw a weapon for his vengeance. And like most Frenchmen, the fate and eventual suzerainty over his own country took a second place to his personal desires. When they had met at Christmas for the preliminaries of the vast treaty which now travelled with them, he had practically promised Henry the earth.

  ‘If you will fight against the Dauphin, my father’s assassin—’ his voice almost strangled with longing—‘Cousin, my own fair cousin Katherine shall be yours. You shall have all that you desire.’

  Henry had not been surprised. Carefully conscious that he was now not only the conqueror but also the prime arbiter in this internecine strife, he had weighed the Treaty in terms of its acceptance by those towns he had so far left unbesieged. Paris was not one such, for he had it virtually surrounded, but when he passed by from Rouen to Troyes he saw the walls crowded with a throng obviously delighted by the prospect of a peaceful settlement. Seven masters from the University of Paris had helped to draw up the Treaty. Seven French envoys had addressed the Parlement’s chamber of representatives, whose reaction had been unequivocal assent. Paris itself, though near starvation, sent four cartloads of wine to Henry, a gesture of friendship. These he received sombrely gracious, accepting them as his due.

  Wine was the conversation now as they rode. Against Philip’s mourning dress, Henry’s scarlet gown, worn over full armour, had a bloody gaiety. Before him a page bore his tilting helm from which, instead of a panache, a fox’s brush moved glossily in the wind. This quirk of fashion set him apart, as a man savage and vulpine in combat rather than one enamoured of silk fripperies.

  ‘Some of the Loire yield I found much to my taste,’ Henry said. ‘There’s one with a flinty pleasing palate of which I took a little.’

  ‘The area is rich in minerals. Did your armies appreciate the wine?’

  ‘I forbade them to drink unless each cup was mixed with three parts water. I do not brook intemperance.’

  Philip glanced behind at the lined barbarous faces of young men grown old in service, who had triumphed in the clashing maw of Agincourt and returned for further conquests. He looked at Henry with even greater respect for his discipline of such men.

  ‘I am ever grateful to you, my liege,’ he said, ‘for the letter you sent in sympathy of my father’s death.’

  ‘Queen Isabeau wrote me in equal cordiality,’ said Henry. He thought how blatantly she too had shown readiness to come to terms. Now he could dare to be generous. The death of Jean sans Peur could be the final solution to the vacillations and feuds which continued even while France fell at Henry’s command. His own letter to Philip had been warm yet stern. There could be no reneging on promises or oaths as Jean sans Peur had done. Meanwhile Philip’s grieving mother fanned the flame, writing in complaint to the Pope, harassing the University of Paris, whose patron Jean sans Peur had been, to rise in arms against the Dauphin. And the campaign of vengeance had already begun; Philip and Henry’s combined forces had launched a successful attack on Tremblay, an Armagnac château-fort, their armies fighting well together, with only a little friendly rivalry. And now, although this expedition to Troyes was one of diplomacy, it had been thought prudent to arm the men in case of a Dauphinist ambush on the road.

  ‘Queen Isabeau will be glad to see you,’ said Philip.

  ‘So will our dear father, the King.’ The ghost of a smile brushed Henry’s thin cheek.

  ‘Ah. The King,’ Philip said less happily. Then: ‘I trust you found the Princess pleasing. She is a good maid, most devout and modest.’

  ‘That is what I thought.’

  The heralds on the walls of Troyes raised their trumpets. Banners rippled, azure and scarlet and gold. Henry spoke honestly; he had been impressed with Katherine and by a letter she had sent him, doubtless written under dictation but sweetly and simply penned. He could not recall her face, save that it was nothing like the portrait which he had scarcely had chance to study. He wished she had written in English, little knowing that she had wanted to but had feared errors; Henry’s own letters were exemplary, with all the prepositions spelled right.

  The dignitaries of Troyes came out to do them homage. Prominent among the vested prelates was the old Archbishop of Sens. Pale-faced, he looked at Henry with unmistakable supplication. As they rode on towards their royal lodging in the Hôtel de Ville, Philip said:

  ‘The Archbishop is greatly troubled. The Armagnacs have turned him out of his diocese,’ and Henry answered firmly: ‘If he’s the one who will join me to the Princess Katherine, he shall see an end to trouble!’ His eyes flicked over the crowd of nobles travelling with them through the cobbled streets. In a chariot drawn by two pale horses sat a lady, leaning outwards with a kind of desperate confined energy. Exceptionally blonde, glittering braids fell to her waist from beneath a towering crescent of white veiling. Young and rosy, her small mouth was twisted with discontent. Henry knew her: Jacqueline, Princess of Hainault, widow of the second Dauphin, Jean of Touraine, and niece of Jean sans Peur. Now another husband, the new Duke of Brabant, rode before her on a prancer, and her eyes, set upon him, matched the distaste on her lips.

  ‘All’s not well between my cousins Dame Jacqueline and Brabant,’ Philip said softly.

  Young Brabant bowed to Henry without enmity. He was rather an ugly young man. He gripped his restless horse with skinny legs, while his wife’s beautiful eyes bored like basilisks into his unknowing back.

  I had hoped, thought Henry, to marry Dame Jake to my brother of Bedford. A useful link with Burgundy, and more, she is heiress to Hainault, Zeeland and Holland. Then, suddenly aware, he watched acutely where the lady’s eyes went next, although at the same time managing to ride on and bow and converse. Humphrey of Gloucester had spurred up to ride beside Jacqueline’s litter, and her eyes were no longer bored or cross. When Humphrey, resplendent in sapphire silk, doffed his hat to her, her eyelids dropped as though scalded. So, thought Henry. He has the good looks—he can make ladies fall in love … he might have done better than I with Katherine but he could not have bested me in the field. He filed away the knowledge of Jacqueline’s coy longing, and rode on.

  The citizens, sensible that the forthcoming treaty might mean an end to looting, ransoms and ruin, had prepared a welcome. Burgundian poets and chroniclers from all the noble households edged the streets. A frenzied spate of minstrelsy flowed from wagons, courtyards and balconies. The song changed from street to street, the tail of one tune merging into another key and then another. A song would be left behind in minutes, drowned by the hollow tabor of hooves, to be replaced discordantly by the next, diffused, dying then emerging changed in the next square or swallowed by trumpets.

  He was reminded of his triumphal entry into London five years ago with his war-weary armies. There had been singing boys and girls, blessings and the roar of the Deo Gratias anthem. While he, still sick from the melancholy that follows great triumph as it sometimes follows love, had endured it all like one dead. All he could think of, under the waving banners and the showered coins and flowers, was that his conquest was left unfinished, and that, in further holy settlement he must find and burn Oldcastle, the Lollard. And this he had done …

  In London little birds, their feathers painted gold, had been freed to flutter about him, settling on his shoulders as he rode over London Bridge. They fell on him like small soft missiles, choked and dying from the paint. On the Bridge two almost pagan giant figures held the keys of the City and an immense laurel wreath of silver and gold. Inside a brocade pavilion was a twenty-feet-high effigy of St George, his helmet covered with more laurel and studded with pearls. Men and boys with laurel in their hair had sung and, as now, the singing had risen and faded and become diffuse, garbled, competitive, its beauty overwhelmed by zeal. One tune in unison would have been enough. But that singing, like this singing, was like the tune of life itself, the clashes and uncertainties, the pains and joys, the facets of the spirit ever at war, ever seeking the one true music.
<
br />   On Cornhill, old men dressed as the prophets had sung, bowing down: Cantate Domino canticum novum, Alleluia! Well, they should sing a new song again, he thought, dismounting with Philip at the Hôtel de Ville. Upon his next return home he would glory in it all, this time he would not fast through all the banquets that had been prepared for him. The way was open, and achievement within his hand.

  Owen ap Meredyth ap Tydier rode among the train, a rightful and experienced member of the King’s Household. He did not sing; his talent was too precious for streetbawling. He had been present at the robing of the King for this journey, had helped Henry with his long scarlet boots, and he had given the tilting helm a rub, although it already had a glassy sheen. He had touched the fox’s brush, soft as a girl’s hair, and full of strange crisp lights.

  And touching it, seeing it now bouncing in the wind, he thought of Madog. With Madog came Hywelis. He had thought of neither for over five years. But the feel of the brush was the feel of Madog, and it woke in him a long memory like an unfashionable caress, one that he quickly put aside.

  Charles of France did not rise from his dais as Henry strode through the crowded hall towards him. He watched the red-mantled figure vaguely. Somewhere in him was the notion that the gaunt man who came with such purpose was important. The idea swam about in his consciousness, then evaporated, becoming part of the inconsequential greyness that hid memory and anticipation alike. The figure came on. Not dangerous, so long as it did not touch him, for he was precious today, his limbs and eyes and hands made of finest spun crystal, the whole enclosed in a brittle egg of glass … Two women knelt on either side of him. The tall stoutish one, well-nosed and flushed, was smiling. The younger one was very still but her vibrations made him uneasy; she could crack his delicate shell. Her heavy gold robe too looked sharp, it was stiff enough to stand in points about her as she knelt. He shifted an inch away. The man was at his feet now, on one knee, and behind him another dressed in black did likewise, and there were so many people … Charles gazed down the packed hall blindly. Drool ran down his chin.