The Queen's Lover: A Novel

by Vanora Bennett

  His madness had only driven the Queen back into the arms of her lover. And her favoritism had offended the Duke of Burgundy, Louis of Orleans' rival for power. So Burgundy had killed Orleans, and the vicious spiral of aristocratic feuding had begun. Isabeau's troublemaking had eventually called into existence two armies of warring Frenchmen, destroying their own country.

  Now a predator from England was prowling in the darkness too, and France was being dismembered.

  But the Queen was too lazy to try and put right the wrong she'd done. The Queen's only solution had been to provide her husband with a bourgeois girl called Odette de Champdivers--half nursemaid, half mistress--and, whenever his madness came on him, lock the pair of them away together and titter that she'd found him a "Little Queen" to look after him.

  The Queen, Christine told Catherine, as she caught the girl up with the history of her own family, had also found it convenient to blame the King for this infidelity, whenever she was angry or it suited her to feel oppressed. But as soon as Catherine knew, and started visiting her father, Christine had Odette quietly sent away; and she stopped locking the white room too. "We won't need her," she said, of Odette, with grim satisfaction. "Or"--jangling the keys--"these." The Queen wouldn't know of these changes unless someone told her, for Isabeau certainly wouldn't come and check for herself during one of her husband's bouts of madness.

  But, even with Christine and Catherine in the room with him, the King didn't take advantage of the unlocked door and come out. He was too scared. No wonder, Catherine thought, as she began to understand. Catherine's cousins and uncles were building battlements around their houses wherever you looked, even in Paris. The country roads swarmed with hungry men and highwaymen; and the green of the farmlands had gone wild with weeds. No wonder everyone was so frightened. No wonder her father escaped into his dark nothingness of terror and fantasy. "We call it madness, but the darkness he loses himself in isn't far from reality," Christine said sadly. "We're all in that place...a France full of fear and ghosts...we just don't see it so clearly as he does."

  "Why are you torturing the poor girl?" Jean de Castel asked Christine. "She can't help her father."

  It was late. They were watching the embers of the fire. Christine was looking stubborn.

  "Why not just try to encourage the Queen to marry her off and get her away from it all?" Jean persisted. "What's the point of keeping her there, rubbing her nose in the madness?"

  Christine's eyes glittered.

  "This is no time for marriages," she said tartly. "You know that. The young princes she might marry are all prisoners of the English, or away fighting."

  She got up, straightening her skirts, trying to look strict, though Jean noticed she was actually looking secretly pleased with herself. She added: "But, when the time does come for Catherine to marry, it won't do any harm at all if she's known to be especially close to her father."

  "Why?" Jean asked.

  "In case of wagging tongues," Christine answered, with a speed that betrayed how much she'd thought about the question. "In case anyone remembers how her mother's affair with Louis of Orleans ended with his death--but started the year before Catherine was born. It wouldn't take much to make people think about how the Bavarian woman wouldn't think twice before putting cuckoos in the nest."

  Jean shook his head. "You worry too much," he said, relaxing. "No one does say anything like that."

  "Gossip comes from nowhere," Christine replied. "When you've spent as much time at court as I have, you'll understand that. Catherine and Charles both...brought up in corners as they've been...it would be an easy conclusion to draw. I wouldn't want Catherine's chances of a good marriage spoiled by...doubts."

  She looked defiantly at her son. "It doesn't matter about Charles. He's married already--and he has two older brothers. No one is going to worry too much whose blood runs in his veins when he's only third in line to the throne. But Catherine has everything still ahead. Her husband will need to feel sure of her line. It matters for her. So--let her tend her father. Let the world see their bond of familial love. Father and daughter together. Blood tells."

  "What if," Jean asked, playing devil's advocate, "she actually is a bastard? What if, by building up that relationship, you are conniving at passing off a cuckoo child as the King's own--and maybe perpetrating a fraudulent royal marriage? Wouldn't you feel that was a sin?"

  But Christine only shook her head. She enjoyed these little jousts with her son. "No," she said, grinning too. "That knowledge is for God, not me. I can't know His mind; I'm only mortal. I can only concern myself with how things might appear to other people like myself. Those two children have had a hard enough start in life. They don't need any more trouble. I want that girl to have the happy marriage, the children, and the love she deserves. This is a way of helping that to happen."

  Jean de Castel shrugged, accepting his defeat. "You're much too devious," he said, as she kissed his forehead and moved toward the door. It was only when Christine was already in the doorway that he remembered the obvious point, and called: "But--does your Catherine even want to marry? Are there princes she talks about? Friendships? Affinities?" He couldn't remember hearing of any.

  Christine turned. For a moment he saw doubt in her eyes. She shook her head. "She says there's enough to worry about with the King as it is," she replied. She looked down. Jean could have sworn his mother felt guilty about something, though he couldn't imagine what. "She won't talk about it."

  The Queen didn't know Catherine had found her way to the white room. Although Christine insisted she go on attending her mother every day, Catherine couldn't find words to tell her mother she knew about her father's madness.

  Her head was full of questions. Her mind was full of pictures of her mother--or a younger version of her mother, still slim, in the enormous veils she used to favor, cackling wickedly over a racy joke, pertly sticking her breasts out--kissing the uncle Catherine only vaguely remembered: tall, blond Louis of Orleans, with his floppy hair and mischievous eyes.

  Could her mother really have...with her own husband's brother? Catherine found the idea almost too shocking to believe. She wanted to ask her mother, but fear stopped her tongue. She couldn't imagine her mother's face if she dared to ask. The thought of trying made her blood run cold. She kept her peace; the questions stayed in her head.

  So Queen Isabeau was mildly puzzled by her daughter's accusing looks in the hot boudoir, between the caloriferes that poured out heat and rose oil fumes from the burning coals in their bellies, and the elaborate frescoes of woodland scenes and happy children eating fruit among the flowers.

  The Queen dipped her fingers into the bowls, sampling the flavors, as the two dwarfs unwrapped the sweets and laid them out. Twenty pounds of dragees. Twenty pounds of coriander balls. Twenty pounds of paste du roy. Twenty pounds each of sweetmeats flavored with cinnamon and rose sugar. Forty pounds of sugared nuts. She licked the sugar off her sticky hands. There could be no dances this winter, of course. But there was nothing wrong with a little something sweet.

  "Good," she said thickly. "The rose sugar--try."

  The dwarfs both grinned eagerly and began stuffing their faces. But Catherine just shook her head and went on looking glum and sulky.

  Queen Isabeau didn't know what was the matter with Catherine. Girls were mystifying. It wasn't as if she was one of those poor duchesses, running round pawning their valuables to raise a ransom for their husbands.

  Isabeau munched on, looking at her daughter with a sudden speculative interest. Unless...She couldn't, by any chance, be in love with one of the young chevaliers imprisoned at Azincourt?

  She shook her head. She could see Catherine wouldn't tell her. Too cross. Well, it was her loss. The sweets were delicious. She reached out two pink fingers and helped herself to more.

  The next day, when Catherine went to her mother's rooms they were empty. The tapestries had gone off the walls; the furniture had gone off the floor. But there was a letter
for Catherine; a guard gave it to her. It said Isabeau and her household had left Paris for the castle of Melun. The Queen explained casually that she'd decided to spend Christmas there. Paris--full of noblewomen in widows' weeds, selling art objects to each other and to the Italians to raise ransom money for their husbands in England--was too depressing. She'd move on to Vincennes after Christmas.

  "The selfishness of it. She should have stayed," Christine said angrily; "at least in the same city as her husband. The last thing we need now is rumors that the King's marriage is over."

  But Catherine was quietly relieved at Queen Isabeau's thoughtless departure. At least, she thought, she needn't worry about confronting her mother and discussing the past for a while longer.

  Outside, there was only bad news. All the strongmen kept advancing across the spectral landscape of France, threatening to converge bloodily on Paris. An English army advanced across northern France. The Duke of Burgundy's separate army advanced across eastern France. In Paris, the widows and the surviving princes of the other French side--the Orleanist princes fighting with the Count of Armagnac--trembled. There were comets in the night sky; plagues in Paris; freak storms in the vineyards.

  Inside, silence descended on the palace. War, Catherine found herself thinking, seemed to be about silence; about no longer having words or a common language that you could share with other people. Now the Queen was gone, and there were just servants, a princess, and a mad king, there were no guests at the Hotel Saint-Paul. The only person who came to talk to Catherine and her father anymore was Christine. Sometimes Catherine's father was silent for days on end. Sometimes he made his own entertainment. Sometimes he shouted. Sometimes he stank. Once he defecated in front of her, and sang mockingly, "There! Golden crown shit! What d'you think of that?"

  But Catherine sensed she was being tested; and any display of life was better than the dead silence. So she kept her face calm and cleaned up the mess on the floor herself; with rags and the bucket by the door. "There," she said brightly to the wet floor when she was done, "that's better. Nothing to worry about now." And, in the window, her father started humming.

  She'd started by being always afraid he'd turn violent; always aware of how many steps there were from where she was to the door. But he never did. She stopped needing Christine's hand to hold (though she was always overjoyed to see Christine; to talk; it was exhausting being alone with her father's desolation). He wasn't angry with her. There was nothing for hert of ear from him.

  Soon the King began to come to her at the table in the white room. He'd sit down cautiously beside her, still averting his eyes. He'd drink water with her. Once he ate with her. He held her hand. He let her order a bath. He let her change his stinking shirt. And he didn't seem to mind that she was there when he put his head on the table and wept, inconsolably, for the losses they were getting used to accepting.

  "There's no comfort, no comfort," he'd whimper. "Everyone's dying; because I'm dead."

  The next day she began to feel he had been right. The messenger who came said her eldest brother, Louis--heir to the throne--had died. Suddenly, of a fever. There was an epidemic in Paris.

  She and Christine went out to hear the man's news. Visitors from the outside world sent the King into such terror that all newcomers had to be screened. Catherine had never really known her brother; the prince with the white face and black eyes and sneering ways with his wife was years older, and had never had much time for her. She'd heard enough from her mother, about Louis' bad character and cruelty, not to feel much love for him. But he was her blood, as well as the figurehead of all the French princes standing against the armies of her cousin of Burgundy; and she'd never see him again. Tears came stinging to her eyes. She nodded; thanked the man; sent him away; blinked her moment of grief away too. Christine's face was ashen as they walked back in to her father.

  Christine broke the news gently, saying "We must be strong" and "...a great sorrow." But it did no good. A moment before, her father had been sitting with them at the table, and saying, earnestly, sadly, but almost sanely, "You're the only people I can talk to; you're the only ones who understand; I'm in a nightmare I can't wake up from, and I can't get help; but you're here with me...and that's a comfort..." Now, suddenly, he drew himself out of Christine's embrace and flew across the room, back to the safety of his window perch, from where he stared out of the window. "The ravens are there," he said conversationally. "Look. Pecking out our eyes."

  It was April when the next royal brother to have been heir to the throne died. Jean. He'd been a creature of the Duke of Burgundy, whose niece he'd married. He hadn't come back to Paris since becoming Crown Prince. He'd been kept away by Burgundy. He'd been Catherine's blood; but again she hadn't known him. Catherine let the rumors--a fever? poisoned by her mother, or by the southern Armagnac princes who knew poisons?--wash over her. She felt remote. Her tears wouldn't come.

  The thought that came into her head this time was a flash of sunlight. Jean's death meant that Charles--her little brother, who'd once been her dearest friend--would be Crown Prince and would soon come back to Paris. Charles was anything but the creature of the terrifying Duke of Burgundy. He hated Burgundy as utterly as Catherine did--beyond reason, beyond logic--the older cousin, as thin as death, whose hooded eyes and paper-thin skin and cold, cold voice had haunted their every childhood nightmare. Charles had been growing up as far from Burgundy as possible, in the heart of the Armagnac south: he was a model prince for a France that might finally shake off the Duke's stranglehold. Charles' closeness to the Armagnac faction was reassuring, but it wasn't what made Catherine happiest when she thought of the brother whom fate was bringing back to her. The older, quieter, more capable young woman who came out of the white room now a days wanted nothing more than her childhood friend; a chance to be a girl again, and to be reunited with the brother she'd always been able to talk with.

  "Don't cry; don't cry," Catherine muttered at her father's hunched shoulders, wondering where her own tears had gone. "Charles will come home now to be Crown Prince. Little Charlot."

  And somehow she made her voice so encouraging, so loving, so full of hope, that her father, who was himself that day--not made of glass, or blighted by a black sun, just sobbing in anguish at the death of his sons--looked up and gave her a watery smile.

  TEN

  Charles wriggled in his splendid black velvet, and turned to his mother-in-law, Yolande of Aragon, for reassurance. The new Crown Prince of France--the Dauphin, who also bore the title of Duke of Aquitaine, for those vast tracts of southern France that Henry of England wanted for himself--had grown used to the sophistication of southern clothes in his time away; the elegant ways of troubadour castles. He was missing the lovely safety of the scent of wild garlic and rosemary in his nostrils. It was making him deeply uneasy to be back here, at the chateau of Vincennes, outside Paris, where his mother had established her court, about to meet his real parents again. It was raining. The peasant cottages outside had soaking straw roofs. He smelled mud and fear wherever he turned. His stomach churned darkly; feeling full of ground glass.

  Yolande screwed up her pretty dark monkey-face into a comforting grimace. It almost made him laugh. You'd never guess from that wry expression that she'd had the strength of purpose to write energetically back, as soon as she'd got the order from the Queen to release Charles to the court, and Paris, saying she had no intention of letting a youth who'd become her son go back to the hell of the north for good. "What, let you be poisoned, or die of plague, or neglect?" she'd said, with her lisping Spanish intonation, half indignant, half laughing. "Let you fall into that woman's clutches? Thertainly not!"

  So she'd come north too, even before her year's mourning for her husband, the Duke of Anjou, was up, bringing the powerful, pug-faced Count Bernard of Armagnac, her closest ally, to accompany Charles and Marie, his wife. They'd agreed among themselves that Charles would go back to the south, or at the very least to Angers, Yolande's home in the Loire
Valley, as soon as was feasible.

  Charles had discovered a great many things since he'd got away. He knew now that his father was mad. How that felt or looked or sounded or smelled he couldn't imagine; all he remembered of his father were rare, happy walks in the garden with a big, laughing, easygoing man who flung Charles in the air and carved him little flutes out of twigs. When he imagined his father mad, it was, nowadays, with the big fleshy drunk face of the Count of Armagnac. It was Armagnac's pleasure to stretch his eyes wide, so they looked crazy, and pull them down at the corners, so the red rims showed. He'd let his mouth flap foolishly underneath, make his hair and clothes rumpled and wild, and complete his impersonation by howling, "Woo--wooo--WOOOH!" and running round the room. Charles would cringe with embarrassed horror at the thought of his father losing his royal dignity and turning into that wild animal. If Charles couldn't understand what his father must be like mad, he did understand it was bad for France, and that only a new king--the man he was now destined to become--could save the land from the English and from his uncle of Burgundy. When news of his brother's death had reached him, on a visit to Yolande at Angers, Armagnac had been breathless with excitement--even during the solemn Mass said for Jean--and, afterward, downing his favourite Gascon wine, had clapped him on the back, over and over again, saying, "We're all in your hands now, my boy; all in your hands."

  Charles had also discovered, and also mostly from Bernard of Armagnac, that his mother was evil. That, he had no trouble putting mental pictures to. He had so many painful memories from his early life: of going hungry when Odette the cook walked out tearfully because she hadn't been given any wages for the three months since the King had been ill, and had even tually run out of savings. He remembered being told he must have stolen all the sweets, when he'd been nowhere near; when it must have been his mother who'd eaten them. He remembered not having clothes to put on his back, and not having anyone to dress him. He remembered knocking on his mother's door, and being turned away. "Go and play in the gardens," he remembered the Saracen saying; "your mother's busy," and no one noticing he had only a ragged shirt on his back, and it was raining.