The Agincourt Bride Page 3

  All the love I had been unable to lavish on my own baby seemed to burst like a dam inside me. I wanted to shout with joy but instead, mindful of the ‘donkeys’ sleeping in the next room, I swept Catherine up and pressed her little body tightly against mine, whirling her round in a happy, silent dance. I could feel her heart fluttering under my hands and, tiny and helpless though she appeared, she put a powerful spell on me. From that moment I was no longer my own mistress. In the leaping firelight I gazed at that petal-soft, bewitching cherub and became her slave.

  When I again wrapped her warmly and began to feed her, giving suck was an entirely new experience. At my breast I no longer saw a pink leech but a rosy angel with a halo of pale hair and skin like doves’ down. Now that her limbs were free, she pushed one little hand against my breast and kneaded it gently, as if caressing and blessing me at the same time and under the power of this benison the milk that flowed from me seemed to contain my very heart and soul.

  3

  ‘The king’s in the oubilette again,’ announced Jean-Michel one afternoon when we were alone together. The ‘oubliette’ was servants’ slang for the special apartment set aside to contain the monarch during his ‘absences’.

  ‘They carted him off there yesterday afternoon. Apparently he drew his dagger in the council and started slashing about with it wildly, so they had to disarm him and tie him up.’

  ‘God save us! Was anyone hurt?’ I asked with alarm.

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘Have people been injured in the past then?’

  ‘Well, they try to hush it up but one or two chamberlains have mysteriously disappeared from circulation.’

  ‘You mean they have been killed?’ I squeaked, incredulous.

  ‘No one has ever admitted it, but …’ Jean-Michel spread his hands. ‘Mad or not, he is the king. Who is going to accuse him of murder?’

  I shivered. The closer I got to it, the more I was bewildered by the power of monarchy. Since I had been at the palace I had never laid eyes on the king – at least not as far as I knew. It had been drummed into me by Madame la Bonne that if I should happen to encounter anyone of rank, unless they spoke to me directly, I must avert my eyes and remove myself from their presence as fast as possible. Servants were issued with drab clothing; in my case a mud-coloured kirtle and apron and a plain white linen coif, and like all other palace menials I had perfected the art of scuttling out of sight at the merest flash of sparkling gems and bright-coloured raiment. So, even if I had glimpsed the king I would have been obliged to ‘disappear’ before I could distinguish him from any other peacock-clad courtier. Of course everyone knew of his recurring malady. One day he would be quite normal, eating and talking and ruling his kingdom, and the next he was reduced to a quavering, raving, deluded wreck, a state which might persist for any length of time, from a week to several months.

  ‘What happens now?’ I enquired.

  ‘The queen will pack up and go to the Hôtel de St Antoine,’ Jean-Michel said with a sly grin. ‘When her husband is out of the way, she jumps into bed with her brother-in-law.’

  ‘The Duke of Orleans!’ I exclaimed. ‘No! She cannot. It is a sin.’

  ‘Listen to Madame Innocente!’ teased Jean-Michel. ‘It is treason too, as it happens, but no one says “cannot” to Queen Isabeau. Who is going to arrest her? When the king is ill, she becomes regent.’

  Now I was even more shocked. Did God not punish adultery? Did not the fiery pit yawn for the wife who bedded her husband’s brother?

  ‘What about hellfire?’ I protested. ‘Surely even queens and dukes go in fear of that.’

  Jean-Michel shrugged. ‘I thought you would have realised by now that royalty does not live by the same rules as the rest of us. They can buy a thousand pardons and get absolution for absolutely everything.’ His brown-velvet eyes suddenly acquired a familiar gleam. ‘You look outraged, my little nursemaid. I like it when you get hot and bothered.’ He reached over to pull off my coif for he loved it when my dark hair tumbled down my back and it usually led to other items of clothing becoming disarranged.

  I pushed his hand away, softening the rejection with a rueful smile. ‘No, Jean-Michel. I must go. Catherine might be crying for me.’

  ‘Catherine, Catherine!’ he mimicked, frowning. ‘All I hear about is Catherine.’ His tone was indignant but a note of indulgence lurked beneath. To look at him you would not think there was anything soft about Jean-Michel but I think he understood that I had come to love my little nursling the way I would have loved our own baby.

  I scrambled up, brushing stalks off my skirt. ‘I will come again tomorrow,’ I promised, giving him a genuinely regretful look, for he was not alone in wanting to linger in our hayloft hideaway.

  ‘One day you must tell Mademoiselle Catherine what sacrifices we made for her!’ he caroled after me down the ladder.

  As he had predicted, the queen did indeed de-camp to the Duke of Orleans’ mansion and their Christmas celebrations set the city abuzz. Night after night bursts of minstrel music drifted up to the nursery windows from lantern-decked galleys ferrying fancy-dressed lords and ladies to a series of entertainments at the Hôtel de St Antoine. Craning our necks through the narrow casement, we could just see the crackle and flash of fireworks and hear the roar of exotic animals, brought from the king’s menagerie to thrill the assembled guests. Jean-Michel reported that the taverns were full of minstrels and jongleurs who had converged on Paris in droves, drawn by the promise of lavish purses for those who impressed the queen.

  It was a mystery to me why she did not include her children in all this fun. She did not even send them presents. The joy of Christmas barely touched the royal nursery. On the feast-day itself, Madame la Bonne pulled their best clothes out of a locked chest and took the children to mass in the queen’s chapel and I was allowed to sit at the back with the donkeys. Otherwise we might not even have known it was Christmas.

  Our dinner was even worse than usual, consisting of grease-laden slops and stale bread, which the children understandably refused to eat. Only the Christmas pies I fetched from my parents’ bake house gave the poor mites a taste of good cheer.

  By Epiphany the palace had ground to a halt. Madame la Bonne had gone to a twelfth-night feast at the house of one of her noble relatives, leaving the ‘donkeys’ in charge, and they had taken advantage of her absence to make themselves scarce as well. ‘You’ll be all right on your own, won’t you, Guillaumette?’ they said airily. ‘Just ask the guards if you need anything.’

  The next morning the varlets who brought our supplies of food and water failed to turn up. I was alone with four royal children, no food, no warmth and no one to turn to. I was terrified. Only the sentries remained at their posts, guarding the entrance to the nursery as usual.

  ‘Nobody has been paid,’ one of them revealed bluntly, when I plucked up courage to ask where everyone was. ‘The master of the household has gone with the queen and taken all the clerks and coffers with him.’

  ‘Then why are you still here?’ I enquired.

  The soldier’s sly grin revealed a row of blackened stumps. ‘The royal guard is paid by the Constable of France, God be praised – and he is an honourable man.’

  ‘Unlike the royal governess,’ I muttered. ‘I have not been paid for weeks.’

  ‘Best leave then, my little bonbon, like the rest of them,’ he wheezed in a foul-smelling chuckle. ‘Fools earn no favour.’

  But how could I leave? How could I abandon four friendless and motherless children? I persuaded the guard to fetch us some bread and milk for the children’s breakfast and after the donkeys finally returned looking smug and dishevelled, I fed Catherine and left her sleeping while I sped home to the bakery and begged a basketful of pies and pastries from my mother. I told her the king’s children were starving in their palace tower.

  It was no real crisis because Madame la Bonne returned from her social engagement and the meal deliveries, mean though they were, began on
ce more. But there was still no sign of any laundry and I was sent to the wash-house to investigate. Overwhelmed by the acrid stench of huge bleaching vats overflowing with urine and the smelly heaps of dirty linen turning blue with mildew, I filched an armful of linen napkins when I spotted them and ran. I could wash the napkins daily and keep her clean. Without a supply of clean swaddling, Madame la Bonne could no longer truss the baby up every morning, so Catherine’s limbs were allowed to kick free and strong. Meanwhile her blonde curls rioted under the little caps I sewed for her. Ironically, during those dreadful weeks of winter she grew as bonny and plump as a bear cub.

  But I felt sorry for the older children. They were cold and hungry and the only thing in plentiful supply was punishment. Whenever mischief flared, which it often did, especially between the boys, some new and vindictive retribution was devised by their governess. On several occasions I saw Jean struggling against tight bonds tying him to his chair, or Louis sitting down gingerly, his buttocks clearly smarting from a beating. I often saw his eyes glinting with resentful anger but he was only four, powerless to retaliate, and if he could have voiced a complaint, who would he have voiced it to? Perhaps the worst thing however, was the fact that their father’s oubliette was too close to the nursery tower and the inhuman noises which frequently erupted from that grim place were enough to freak young minds.

  The general belief was that the king’s madness was caused by agents of the devil. Perhaps living close to the king, Madame la Bonne had been taken over by them as well. Sometimes I was sure I could hear their wings fluttering against the door and I scarcely dared to inhale for fear of contagion.

  Jean-Michel told me that in the city taverns, out-of-work palace menials made easy ale-money telling lurid tales of black masses where sorcerers called up flocks of winged demons and sent them flying to infest the subterranean vault where the mad monarch was housed. I often heard the donkeys frightening each other with sightings of these imps. No wonder all the children had bad dreams and Jean wet his bed. As punishment, Madame la Bonne made him sleep on a straw mattress on the floor. At least she ordered the donkeys to wash his bedclothes and not me, but not until they reeked abominably.

  The winter was stormy and snow-laden and the children hardly left the nursery for weeks but somehow, with the aid of my father’s pies, my stock of family fairy-tales and Jean-Michel’s pilfered firewood, we struggled through those cold, dark days. Then, at last, the season turned, the sun began to climb in the sky and the ice melted on the Seine. When the guilds of Paris began their spring parades and the blossom frothed in the palace orchards, the king suddenly regained his senses and the queen came back to the Hôtel de St Pol.

  ‘If she wants to be regent when he is ill, she has to live with the king when he is not,’ Jean-Michel observed sagely when I remarked on the speed of her return. ‘And believe me, she loves being regent.’

  Of course she still came nowhere near the nursery, but at least she brought back her coffers and courtiers and Madame la Bonne was forced to start paying servants to bring us food and supplies instead of relying on free hand-outs from my father’s bakery. It had not escaped my notice that the rat-woman must have amassed a great deal in unpaid wages over the winter so I summoned my courage and demanded the sum I was owed.

  Madame la Bonne simply laughed in my face. ‘Four marks! Whatever made a chit like you think she could reckon?’ she mocked. ‘Five sous a day do not come to four marks. You are not owed a quarter of that sum.’

  Despite my best endeavours, I only managed to prise one mark out of her. When I showed it to my mother I think her anger was more due to the governess’ slighting of my education than her act of blatant cheating. ‘I suppose we should be grateful to get that much,’ she said with resignation. ‘They are all at it. Every shopkeeper and craftsman in the city complains about the “noble” art of short-changing.’

  As it grew warmer, the palace became like a fairground. The gardens filled with gaily dressed damsels and strutting young squires, laughing and playing sports. Music could be heard drifting over walls and through open windows, and court receptions were held out of doors, under brightly painted canopies. It made life difficult for us menials, as we constantly had to change direction to get out of the way of groups of courtiers making their way to these receptions or to the pleasure gardens and tilting grounds. Often it took me twice as long to get to the stables in order to meet Jean-Michel because I would have to wait with my face to the wall while processions of chattering ladies and gentlemen ambled past me in the cloisters. At least I was able to take the children out to play every day, although Madame la Bonne made it a strict rule that we were only to go to the old queen’s abandoned rose garden because we could get there from the nursery without encountering anyone of consequence. She did not want a nosy official querying the state of the royal children’s clothing, did she? Nor – heaven forefend – did she want some inadvertent meeting between the queen and her own offspring!

  As for the queen herself, as the summer progressed and the August heat became stifling in the city, she set off in a long procession of barges for the royal castle at Melun, further up the Seine. Soon after her departure, word spread that she was pregnant and, in view of the timing, rumour again flared that the child was not the king’s but had been fathered by the Duke of Orleans during the last royal absence. I did my own calculations and came to the conclusion that she could just about be given the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the king did the same because there was no sign of any rift between himself and his brother or his queen.

  At about the same time, I began to notice certain changes in my own body. It was popular belief that nursing a child prevented the next one coming along, but this did not hold true for me. My mother put it all down to Saint Monica of course and Jean-Michel boasted to his stable-mates that it took more than a royal nursling to stop him becoming a father!

  Madame la Bonne said nothing until it became obvious that I was breeding, when she sniffed and said, ‘It’s time Catherine was weaned anyway. You can leave at Christmas.’

  Remembering the miseries of the previous Christmas, I hastily assured her that since my baby was not due until spring, I could stay well into the New Year. I could not bear to think of Catherine having only the donkeys and Madame la Bonne to look after her, but I knew I had to steel myself for the inevitable parting. Perhaps, had it not been for my own babe, I might have timed Catherine’s weaning so that I could have remained as wet nurse for the queen’s new child, but I knew that no lowborn baby would be allowed to stay in the royal nursery or share the royal milk supply. Our time together was drawing inexorably to a close. Soon after her first birthday, Catherine began to take wobbling steps and I started feeding her bread and milk pap, and by February, when the queen’s new son was born, I had prepared her as best I could for the arrival of her new sibling.

  Far from questioning the paternity of his latest offspring, the king was so delighted to have another son that he insisted he should be called Charles, apparently unconcerned by the fact that both previous princes of that name had died young. Like all his siblings before him, this new Charles popped obligingly from the queens womb, was baptised in silk and pearls and then brought to the nursery, well away from his parents’ attention. His wet-nurse was another nobody, like myself, who could be exploited by Madame la Bonne but, I like to think unlike myself, she was a timid individual who took no interest in the older children and confined herself to suckling the baby and gossiping with the donkeys. She was a deep disappointment to me, because I had hoped she might be the motherly type who would give Catherine the cuddles she would need after I was gone.

  My little princess now toddled about on dimpled legs, a delightful bundle of energy who giggled and chattered around my skirts all day. I could not imagine life without her, but there was no alternative. It was a beautiful spring day when, forcing a bright laugh and planting a last kiss on her soft baby cheek, I left Catherine playing with her favourite toy – one of my o
wn childhood dolls. Once clear of the nursery, I became so blinded by tears that Jean-Michel had to lead me home.

  I had the consolation a month later of giving birth to my own healthy baby girl who, the Virgin be praised, breathed and sucked and wailed with gusto. We named her Alys after Jean-Michel’s mother, who adored her, having raised only boys herself. I loved her too of course but, although I suckled her and tended her every bit as scrupulously as I had Catherine, I admit that I probably never quite let her into the innermost core of my heart, where my royal cuckoo-chick had taken residence.

  To many I must seem an unnatural mother, but I looked at it like this: Alys had a father who thought the sun and moon rose in her eyes and two doting grandmothers. She didn’t need me the way Catherine did. As the summer passed and the days began to shorten once more, I thought constantly of my nursling. While dressing baby Alys and tucking her into her crib, I wondered who was doing this for Catherine. Was anyone cuddling her and singing her lullabies? Would they comb her hair and tell her stories? I saw her face in my dreams, heard her giggle in the breeze and her unsteady footsteps seemed to follow me about.

  No one understood how I felt except my mother, bless her, who said nothing but bought a cow and tethered it on the river bank behind the bakery ovens. When Alys was six months old, I weaned her onto cow’s milk and went back to the royal nursery. I know, I know – I am unchristian and unfeeling – but both the grandmothers were delighted to have a little girl to care for and I could no longer ignore my forebodings about Catherine.

  Dry-mouthed with apprehension, I approached the guards at the nursery tower. Suppose they did not recognise me, or were too honest to resist the bribes of pies and coin I had brought? Things had not changed in that respect however, and I was soon quietly entering the familiar upper chamber. But how she had changed, my little Catherine! Instead of the sturdy, merry-eyed toddler I had left, I found a moping moppet, thin, dull-eyed and melancholy with lank, tangled curls and a sad, pinched face. When she saw me she jumped straight down from the window-seat where she had been glumly fiddling with the old doll I had left her and ran towards me shouting, ‘Mette! Mette! My Mette!’ in a sweet, piping voice.