Crown in Candlelight

by Rosemary Hawley Jarman

  You’ll find your place still open at court, Page said. All your old friends are there. Robert Waterton (though he’s somewhat changed, he can’t seem to stop mourning Harry’s death)—Tom Harvey. They’re short of staff in the Wardrobe. Several were pensioned off; Gervais died. There’ll be no difficulty. It was almost as if Page knew. He could not know, Owen thought.

  No, nothing could go wrong, from the perfect fit of the blue doublet and hose, the good elegant fall of the tawny cloak, to the fact that even after paying the Jew he still had a good portion of his French wages intact. There were honest people left in the world. He was in love with the world. There was an intermittent stiffness in his thigh. When, you reach London, Page told him, have yourself massaged in the old Roman manner. (Grinning.) There’s a new place in Southwark. A friend said that a real Nubian girl, black as warsmoke, gave him new life—and he was sixty! What would you say, John, if I told you that no woman has touched me, and I have touched no woman, for over two years? though I am only twenty-five or so … you would not believe me.

  No woman has touched me, but one has rooted in me like a flowering tree. The dream entwines about me, possessing my heart, my veins, my vitals. That’s why my hands still shake as I bid Page an affectionate farewell and crack my whip over the head of this good noble horse, who takes me again into the service of joy.

  And then Fleet; driving past the prison and the shops hung with guild banners and the close-hugged dwellings, their lintels carved with angels and flowers and fruit. The prison, where folk lie rotting, all love lost; the houses, where folk dwell never having known love, at least not like this … urging the wagon through the press of citizens, while the scribes worked diligently in their doorways and traders cried their wares. Moving on, oblivious to the rubbish lacing the cobbles, the fish-guts and slops and parchment shavings; seeing nothing that was not fair. A golden haze caught permanently within his eye. The carved angels looked serenely on him with her face. Their wooden draperies were her soft garments that once again he might tend and store and cherish. And in his mind, the lily and rose and honey of her blotted out the smell of the spilled ale in the taverns, the clerk’s pungent ink, the heavy dankness of the river. London’s reek was purified. The dream was near.

  Then to John Bore’s, a place often visited before, dark, yet glittering with instruments old and new. Long-stemmed clarions stacked like wide-mouthed lilies in the corner, fifes and whistles and shawms in velvet-lined cases; the curving double-reeded cromorne, the psaltery, the three-stringed viële with its bow shaped almost identically to an archer’s weapon. Battle-drums and round-bellied little tabors. Harps of all kinds; the small metal-stringed ones and the larger gut-strung ornament harps; he saw immediately the royal pair, two slim gold birds with backspread wings.

  John Bore greeted him with pleasure, begged for the news of France (his son being there and no letter for a year), and showed disapproval at William Menston’s tardiness in collecting the Queen-Dowager’s property.

  ‘I was about to deliver them myself. They’re expensive pieces. A liability. They cost nearly nine livres sterling and that was in ’twenty-one … Will you pay, or am I to send the reckoning?’

  ‘I’ll pay,’ Owen said.

  They carried the harps into the street and laid them on the straw bed prepared for them in the cart. Very tender, said Bore approvingly. But then you always did treat an instrument like a woman: have you still the little Welsh harp? I’ve a new Italian one, lovely work … but you’re in a hurry. Come again, Master Tydier. Good musicians are always welcome in my house.

  The sun was beginning to dip when he reached Windsor. Soon, now. The dream was nearer. He could hardly breathe. The gate-ward recognized him after a moment, and demanded news, which in courtesy had to be given; the whole tale, the battles, ambushes, looting and knifework.

  ‘I wish I were back in the fighting,’ he said. He peered into the cart. ‘What have you there, Master Owen? Angels’ skeletons?’

  Owen told him.

  ‘Well. Enterprising of you. You’ll need a couple of boys to help you to the Upper Ward with those things. Sire Louis de Robsart will take charge of them.’

  He turned to bellow at a couple of pages dicing in the courtyard behind.

  Owen said very carefully: ‘I thought I might return them to her Grace in person, and explain …’

  The guard laughed. No reason for him to laugh, Owen thought.

  ‘Her Grace is no longer here. And don’t ask me her whereabouts. The last we heard was that she had gone to find her son, and the Devil knows where he is today! King he may be, God save him, but ruled, is our young ruler, by the caprices of the Council! Here, come in the gatehouse a moment. That leg must pain you, you’re ghostly.’ The pages came dawdling up. He smacked one across the ear. ‘You took your time.’

  ‘Leave the harps with me,’ Owen said, sitting down on an arrowchest. His blood was so sluggish he thought his heart might stop. It would be very easy for it to stop. ‘They are my sole responsibility.’

  Then said no more, seeing that nothing now could go right.

  ‘Dear Katherine,’ said James of Scotland, ‘is there nothing on my table to tempt you?’

  ‘Please eat, Katherine!’ said Joan Beaufort, the new bride, flushed and pretty and concerned. ‘You used to eat so heartily—you astonished us all!’

  She smiled frailly at them both. She had been at Hertford Castle for three days, and this was the final banquet, for James and Joan were leaving for Scotland in the morning. The cooks, surpassing themselves, had taken away her appetite. Their mountainous concoctions reminded her of other feasts, when Harry, fasting to appease his pain, had watched her gorging. Like an indulgent father. Now she pushed away the ‘Douce me’—a capon in honied milk, hyssop and pine-nuts coloured with saffron. The carver approached and bared the contents of another great dish with a flourish.

  ‘A cockatrice!’ said James. Mythology lay before them. Half a swan and half a piglet had been sewn together, roasted and glazed. Great bowls of salad came to the table, garlic, onions, mint, rosemary, rue, leeks. Goblets were filled with heavy Calabrian wine. James raised his cup.

  ‘To your Grace’s health and happiness,’ he said.

  He drank. Joan drank. After a moment Katherine drank, She swallowed the whole cupful in one draught. The times she had watched Queen Isabeau do that! A little comfort began to spread through her.

  ‘Alas, your happiness,’ James said softly. ‘But how can I wish you other than happiness.’ He took Joan’s hand and kissed it. ‘We owe you everything, Katherine.’

  ‘De rien,’ she said. Her cup was refilled. ‘May your joy last longer than mine, James.’ She drank.

  Tumblers were in the hall, leaping through fire-hoops. Joan touched her arm.

  ‘But you saw him, Madame … that was something after all.’

  ‘For a day!’ said Katherine bitterly. ‘They’d moved him from King’s Langley to Eltham. I wasted time finding him. He was in a room full of people, he seemed scarcely to know me. Sainte Vierge!’ She shivered. ‘Dame Boteler … I hate that woman. Then Humphrey came and I coughed and he sent me to lie down and fetched his physician, that maudit Swanwyth, whom I swear helped to kill Harry with his nostrums …’

  ‘Katherine,’ said James under the yelps of the acrobats, ‘don’t take Gloucester’s medicines.’

  She drank. Her mouth twisted in a smile. ‘Sweet James. What would it profit him to poison me?’

  James’s hand lay on Joan’s thigh under the table. Katherine looked away quickly. Her goblet was refilled by an admiring servitor; her trencher was loaded with rabbit in syrup.

  ‘Has he ever made an attempt to pay court to you, Katherine?’ said James.

  ‘It would be against consanguinity,’ said Joan. She leaned her head lovingly for an instant on James’s shoulder.

  ‘Yes … but if he were in your favour—he would gain power. He would do anything to outmatch the Bishop!’

  James looked
tenderly at his wife. ‘I must always uphold the Bishop.’

  And so must I, thought Katherine. My enemy’s enemy must be my friend? ‘Though I love you anyway, mes chèrs amis’, she said aloud. The feast is splendid, though there is no Crustade Lombard, no Harry. The sympathy is warming. And tomorrow I shall lose them, too!

  ‘Scotland is so far away,’ she said. She drank. Did Isabeau drink to kill the pain, or salute the taste? A team of bagpipers had entered the hall. Another dish arrived on the table. Roast goose with garlic stuffing, in a lake of galingale, sage, parsley and wine, where grapes, cubed pears and quinces made little islands.

  ‘It’s Sauce ‘Madame’, Katherine,’ cried Joan over the bagpipes’ yowling. ‘Invented by King Richard for your late beloved sister. Please eat,’ she begged.

  Katherine bowed to the carver, who cut her a slice and ladled sauce over it. So I will eat to the dead. And drink. Mother, I could drink side by side with you now. There is a kiss mark on Joan’s neck, where James has forgotten himself. Last night, or the night before. Mother, I am more like you than I feared. This feeling, this envious lust in me, must be inherited debauchery. Yet I am chaste. Oh, my dear friends, I am chaste. Don’t touch, don’t kiss before my eyes! She wanted to put her forehead down on the table and groan.

  ‘Some figs, Katherine,’ Joan said. ‘They’re good for the blood. How pale you are, doucette!’

  Figs had made Harry ill, on their wedding-night I want another wedding-night. I am chaste. Oh, God …

  The bagpipes had left and now a man beat a drum while a monkey juggled with two oranges. James liked his entertainments noisy, after years in the prison-house.

  ‘I wish I could hear sad songs,’ said Katherine unsteadily. ‘Shall I ever marry again?’

  Joan’s face was smoothly reassuring.

  ‘But naturally, Madame … The Council will doubtless propose a match …’

  ‘The Devil have the Council,’ said Katherine quietly. Her eyes, enormous in her drawn white face, moved over the hall. Fat lords, thin lords, drunken lords. Lords so old they looked like effigies, with saurian faces, withered shanks. Young lords appraising one another’s jewellery. Half-witted earls, dukes notorious for their lechery. The wine soured her mouth.

  ‘I know one who would think himself in Paradise to marry you,’ said Joan. ‘Edmund, my brother.’

  ‘But sadly,’ said Katherine with her twisted smile, ‘he is a prisoner in France. Harry tried to ransom him but the bargain failed. I’d love you for a sister, Joan.’

  ‘I am King Harry’s first cousin,’ said Joan proudly, ‘albeit through the bar sinister.’

  ‘You are truly royal, Joan,’ said Katherine thickly. The hall was spinning gently. ‘In France we count our friends by their deeds, not their lineage.’ (Bet at the tavern, the kindness, the baby’s laughter.) ‘Here, there are degrees of greatness … each man better than the man beneath.’ Her hands shook; she spilled wine. ‘What a weight for the fundamental man to bear!’

  ‘But, Madame, it must be so.’ Joan was puzzled. ‘Or there would be uprisings, revolutions …’

  ‘Every man is equal in the sight of God.’ Katherine pushed her untasted food away. She swayed a little where she sat.

  ‘No, Katherine,’ said James, overhearing, ‘there must be master and man. There must be leaders.’ He had his arm round Joan’s little shoulders, he smiled at her, a secret smile. The hall stopped spinning; it was fuzzed with tears. A group of minstrels had replaced the monkey and were playing a jaunty, complicated pastourelle. The treble singer was a little off-key. There was a new course before her, coffin-shaped pastries filled with pork and fruit. I long for sadness. A sad song, a song of lovers lost.

  ‘Must you go to Scotland?’ she said suddenly. ‘Can’t you stay? I’ll give you Hertford Castle …’

  They looked at her kindly.

  ‘It’s a fine castle,’ Katherine said wildly. ‘It was built on ancient foundations to protect London from the Danes.’

  ‘But, Madame,’ said James tenderly, ‘my own kingdom awaits me!’

  Silent, she looked away. The minstrels had finished. Someone called for the jester. At the end of the hall a door opened. Very faintly came a voice raised in protest. The arras swayed as if blows were being struck behind it and a rumbling noise ensued. Elderly guests who had succumbed to the feast woke abruptly, feeling for their purses. A figure appeared, shaking off the ushers. James rose. He was always terrified of assassination by the English. He said: ‘Who the devil comes?’ Joan looked frightened. The figure completed its illegal entry and came through the hall, the rumbling noise was explained. The harps, polished to a sheen, had been placed on a trolley, and this Owen drew behind him like an instrument of war. He came grimly, his face as white as Katherine’s. Ushers ran after him, expostulating.

  Katherine stood up. I am drunk. No, I am not drunk, far from it. I see a face from the past, from the happy and sad times. Now he comes, with my beautiful harps, mended anew, in his blue and tawny clothes, splashed with mud; he’s ridden hard to bring them to me. She pushed back her chair. James said again: ‘Who is this, that disrupts my feast?’

  ‘A common man,’ Joan said doubtfully.

  And Katherine said: ‘No! a friend … a fine chanteur … he served my father, and Harry … he now serves me.’

  Then she was down in the body of the hall with no recollection of having stepped from the dais. Drawn willingly by a mystery, seeing the harps, the proud gold birds, going lovingly to caress their graceful shafts while the proud gold man knelt beside them at her feet. The indignant ushers withdrew. For the first time in her life she had his name right, and called him by it.

  ‘Master Owen Tydier. It’s a long time since you were with the Household. Are you well?’

  He looked at her, and she at him. He with his blue-gold look that she had called ‘féroce’, culled from the years of passionate thought, and he rocked and held her on that look which contained her life and his, the sadness, the longing, the desires. She stepped behind the harps so that his face was masked a little by the strings and she could study it. She knew it far better than she had thought. He was older (as they all were); he looked tired, there was a new crease between his brows. The rest was the same, the smooth honey skin, the bright hair, the mouth. As if without thought or knowledge she had stored him in her mind. The blazing blue-gold eyes never wavered, they locked on to hers and drew her in.

  The dream is very slender, thinner than I remember. So pale, but she’s flushing now, she sees me, she almost knows. She’s so weary, so sad. She’s not as tall as I remember—perhaps she was always wearing pattens when we met before, I judge that her head would come up to my eyebrow if I were standing. I love her. I’d like to make her laugh. I’d like to make her cry. I love her. I’d like to kiss her until she fell unconscious. I’d like to have her tread on my face. I love her. Am byth. For ever. She could put a knife right through my heart. She already has. I love her.

  The dream is mortal. It is moved by my look. The colour deepens. The dream is flesh. The perfume is real. Look at me Cathryn. Look at me. I am stronger than you, dearest dream. Soul of my bliss, cariad, I never thought I was so strong. You may look away now. I’m happy.

  ‘Are the harps in tune?’

  ‘Perfectly in tune, your Grace.’

  Jacqueline had called him the handsome one, and so he was, and more than that, and she could not stand here still scalded and shaken by that look, in full view of James’s guests. She said unquietly: ‘Gramercy … Owen. Are you to entertain us today?’

  He would sing her a sad love song, no doubt of that, but the urge for it had gone, vanished into his look, and enough for now, more than enough, for he was looking at her again, a look like honey on steel.

  She heard herself saying: ‘You could … you will, perhaps, accompany us. You might … you may … you will accompany us to Windsor, where you will entertain. Sing … dance?’

  He said very calmly: ‘I am honoured, Madame.
There’s a dance I have composed—it has never been performed.’

  ‘Bien,’ she said. She broke at last from the gold and blue; she had to turn away to do so. She walked back to the dais. He rose, bowed and left the hall. The ushers wheeled the harps to safety. Katherine sat down and began to eat her supper.

  Bishop Beaufort, leaving the Queen-Dowager’s apartments, had no idea of how narrowly he had missed being embraced by her. That would have created a fine scandal, she thought, smiling into the austere grey eyes. He’s given me my heart’s desire, if only for a season.

  ‘I trust the King’s Grace will enjoy his visit to you, highness,’ he said. ‘On your coming birthday—for which, félicitations—‘he wagged a princely finger—‘let him not be overtaxed. He should be in bed by five at the latest. No doubt his good governess will see to it.’

  His good governess, she thought with glee, will do as I say! This is my household. It will be my birthday. And, most wonderful of all, there is no Humphrey of Gloucester to interfere! He shall stay up as late as he wishes, I shall do exactly as I please. Meekly, she said:

  ‘I am sure the King would be honoured by your presence at the feast, my lord.’ Beaufort, standing flanked by his subservient clerks, answered sternly: ‘Madame … I regret .… I have much to occupy me in my diocese. For one week I leave the King’s Grace in your care. I trust the purse will be sufficient for his entertainment.’

  Sufficient! She had seen the coffers of gold coming in. It was enough to keep her household for a year. Another worry over. Blessed Bishop Beaufort!

  ‘God’s blessing be on your festivities,’ he said. ‘May they be holy ones.’

  As he made his measured exit she thought acutely: he is enjoying this added power now that Humphrey has gone to Hainault. He relishes bestowing the Council’s favour without let or argument from his bête noire. Doubtless he hopes that Philip of Burgundy will ride after him and slay him on the road. She smiled radiantly. Humphrey is gone. It was like music. She had the feeling that Humphrey was doing more or less exactly what the Bishop wished. For surely, had the Council wished to prevent his going they would have stopped him with swords … He’s gone, and he’s taken an army with him, paid for from the Duchy of Lancaster. No more of his misery-provoking presence, for weeks, or maybe months! Now, would that I could hide my little boy away, as Belle hid me at Poissy. No. He is to rule England, and I must not rob him of his destiny. There are others who would gladly take his place.