Читать книгу Blood Royal - Vanora Bennett - Страница 15

Catherine was at Mass with her parents when the messenger came.

There was a scuffle at the door. Then a dozen heads were pushed inside. ‘Sire,’ the voices said. The priest looked up through the incense at the expectant eyes. The King looked away. Catherine could feel how much her father, who was still frail and slow-moving as he convalesced from his bout of illness, didn’t want to be interrupted. ‘Sire,’ the voices said, insistently.

It was clear to all of them that it must be bad news. Catherine could feel her heart quicken. Catherine’s mother wheezed and heaved herself up. She put a hand out to the King, who was staring at his hands. ‘Afterwards? Surely?’ he said piteously, indicating the priest and the chalice; but she only said impatiently, ‘Come,’ and began tugging at his arm.

When they told him, he did nothing. It was the Queen who rushed out of the room, with big tears pouring down her face, yelling, ‘Call the council!’ and ‘Send word to Prince Louis to come!’ and ‘Why weren’t we informed earlier?’ and ‘Condolences to the widows! A list of ransoms! Mass at Notre Dame! Full mourning for the court!’ The messenger and the courtiers rushed after her, remonstrating or agreeing or making busy suggestions; a wind of noise and importance. But King Charles just sat, with empty eyes, on his bench.

Timidly, Catherine reached out her hand and put it on his trembling liver-splodged one. Her head was spinning. She’d danced with Charles of Orleans only last week. He’d told her about his war horse. Pegasus, he’d said easily: the closest thing to a winged horse on this earth. He’d smite the King of England to the ground with his hoofs alone. ‘It’s my dream to bring him down myself in the thick of battle, with a single blow of my sword’. Catherine had admired the ambition. Charles of Orleans had been wearing blue velvet sewn with pearls. Now she was trying to imagine him in chains, being marched through the mud to Calais and roughly embarked on an English ship, but found that her imagination failed her. This couldn’t be real. There must be a mistake.

Her father twitched his head and said nothing.

‘It’s hard to believe,’ Catherine murmured; stroking his papery skin; remembering how just a few years ago her father had lifted her into the tree she could see through the window, roaring with laughter. How strong he’d been then. How young. He seemed like an old man today. He didn’t seem to be listening.

‘It will be all right, Father; you mustn’t worry …’ she ventured. He was shocked, she thought. How hard it must be to bear the burden of all this on your own shoulders; how heart-breaking to be a king in times of trouble. ‘We’ll raise the ransoms. We’ll get everyone back. Henry of England isn’t a bad man. He knows the law of war. Even if it takes time …’

Quietly, her father said: ‘Not Henry of England.’ But it wasn’t really an answer. She had a feeling he was thinking of something quite different. He gave her a knowing look. He grinned. ‘George.’

‘George?’

He grinned again. ‘Me.’

She stared. Had she misheard? He burst out laughing. Then he looked cunning. Then surprised. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know,’ he said, and winked at her. ‘I am Saint George of England.’

She didn’t know what to do.

She didn’t understand what he was saying.

She just knew she needed help. Father needed help. He wasn’t himself.

She edged back, looking for a man-at-arms to signal to.

But before she could catch any eyes of the men in the doorways, her father looked down at the doublet he was wearing, which was decorated with woven fleurs-de-lys.

She saw the look of terror on his face; a terror so intense she nearly screamed with it. His face contorted. His eyes popped. ‘Spiders! Spiders!’ he yelled, beginning to scrabble at them, getting a grip on one flap of the cloth and ripping it away from his body with hands that weren’t, after all, so frail and old.

Now men-at-arms did start to appear, clustering near him, looking alarmed. ‘Spiders! Get them off me!’ he was squealing in horror.

‘They’re not spiders, Father,’ she said faintly, but he was down on the ground now, snarling and grabbing the material with his teeth, saliva pouring from his mouth, worrying at the cloth like a dog chasing its tail. ‘They’re French lilies. Your emblem.’

What she was most aware of, apart from the strange, unreal quality of everything that was happening this morning, was that although the men-at-arms were frightened, they weren’t surprised at the way her father was behaving.

They were grouping themselves around him; ready to pick him up. They didn’t, though. No one dared touch the King’s person. They were waiting for an order. With a slow buildup of horror, she realised they were waiting for an order from her.

‘Filthy French spider lilies!’ she heard as she turned away. She could feel tears welling up inside her. She couldn’t cry. She swallowed. Seeing the captain of the guard’s eyes on her, she nodded. There was nothing else to be done.

‘Tell my mother,’ she said, covering her eyes with her hand as if shielding them from the wind. Guardsmen shouldn’t see a princess of the blood royal lose her dignity.

She must have known, in a part of herself. But understanding it now was like feeling her own fabric being ripped agonisingly apart. No one was surprised except her, because they’d all seen it before. This was what her father’s illness was. He was mad.

Catherine was still sitting in her mother’s private chapel, what might have been hours or moments later, when Christine found her. Christine had decided to come to her as soon as she’d heard the news of Azincourt. This was no time to remember past bitterness, Christine thought determinedly, rushing to the Hotel Saint-Paul; it was a time for old friends to come together. She’d been missing her visits for months. Catherine would need her.

The brazier seemed to give no warmth. There was a threat of early snow in the air. Christine was shivering under her furs with the shock of the news from the front; and even from here she could see Catherine shaking.

‘My charge needs me,’ she said to the guard who automatically stepped forward to block the way of anyone trying to disturb the Princess’s privacy. She turned tragic eyes on him.

‘Seeing as it’s you …’ the guard said, perhaps seeing the red rims of those eyes. He let her through.

Catherine was on her knees, alone. She was looking at her hands. They were a bloodless, whitish blue. Christine didn’t think she’d been praying.

She slipped down to her own knees beside the Princess.

When Christine opened her arms, Catherine let herself sink into them.

‘I saw Father …’ Catherine muttered, ‘… start … you know …’

Christine held her tighter. She hadn’t known that. It took her breath away. She hadn’t thought anything worse could happen today.

‘He said he was Saint George of England. He tore the fleurs-de-lys off his own back. Called them spiders.’

Christine smelled the Queen’s overblown rose oil on the girl’s hair; but she smelled the freshness of youth there too. Catherine should have had so much to hope for. But there was so much to fear as well. How sorry Christine felt for this girl, facing a hardship she couldn’t yet begin to understand. The first of many, maybe.

‘They should have told you before,’ she said, and by ‘they’ she meant ‘the Queen’. ‘You’re not a child any more.’

‘He’s … mad,’ Catherine said, raising her eyes to Christine; and in those unfocused pupils Christine saw bottomless depths of horror; demons and crawling spiders. ‘Possessed. We’re cursed. All of us. France is cursed.’

It was so close to what Christine was thinking that she drew in breath. Catherine was being braver than she’d expected – naming her fears. Still, she shook her head.

Catherine said harshly: ‘But it was you who taught us. The King is the head of the body politic. The nobles its arms and hands. The peasants its legs and feet. You remember?’

Reluctantly, Christine nodded.

‘Well, doesn’t that mean that, if the head goes mad, the country goes mad with him?’

A pause.

‘That’s what’s been happening all this time, isn’t it?’ Catherine said.

Christine couldn’t bear to agree.

‘They’ve always just shut him away,’ Christine said in the end, changing the subject, aware she sounded disjointed but unable to compose herself fully. ‘Whenever this happens. Everyone’s scared to admit he’s gone mad. He used to get violent. He’s not violent any more. I go to him sometimes. There are servants. We know. But he’s afraid; always afraid. He never has anyone he loves with him.’

‘What about my mother?’

Christine shook her head. She knew it was disingenuous not to tell Catherine that whenever the King, in his madness, saw his wife, he attacked her. But years of dislike of everything about the Queen – a dislike she couldn’t discuss with Catherine – stilled her tongue. She let the accusing silence deepen.

‘But he loves you,’ she said quietly. ‘If you went to him … if you weren’t afraid … if you listened to the things he’s afraid of … who knows what good that might do? It might help make him whole … it might even help heal him …’

Catherine drew in breath. She could hear that even Christine, who was suggesting it, thought it a faint hope. She bit her lip. She said, with dread: ‘You mean … me … go to him?’

Christine nodded.

‘When he’s …’ Catherine muttered, looking down. Flexing her fingers.

Christine drew her closer; put her own hands over those fingers; let Catherine bury her head in her breast. The girl needed comfort; it would help her make her decision. Then, through their shared heartbeats, Christine murmured, with utter certainty, ‘Yes. Now.’

He was in a white shift. He was in a white room she’d never seen before, with guards outside. Christine stayed behind with them; squeezed Catherine’s arm as they opened the door.

He was up on the window ledge, with his feet drawn up from the floor, staring out at the white sky.

‘I’m parched,’ he said, not looking at her, in a little-boy voice. But when Catherine poured him water from the jug on the table, he ignored it.

She waited. The voice began again; cunning this time. ‘You won’t fool me. You’re pretending to be my little Catherine. But I know who you really are and what you want. You want to steal my soul. And you’re cruel, cruel … you know how thirsty I am … the thirst of the damned … my soul’s so parched and desperate … you’re just trying to trick me with your water … you know I can’t drink.’

Catherine sat very still, feeling the stool beneath her. She thought: I have to say something. She said: ‘Why?’

There was a strange cackle of laughter. ‘Because you’ll steal my soul if I do, of course. Don’t think I don’t know. Let you in once and you’ll take everything; leave me nothing. It’s what you always do. You stole my sword, didn’t you? You, or her, you’re all the same … And now the sun’s gone black and the world is ending you’re going to steal my soul too.’ He stopped. Hummed to himself. Picked with one gnarly hand at his gnarly foot, keeping his head averted from Catherine all the time.

After a while, she heard his voice again; softer this time; pleading. ‘Don’t look at me, though, will you?’ it said. ‘It’s dangerous to look at someone who’s made of glass. One look goes straight through, you know. Pierces me to the heart. One look and I’ll splinter. You’d smash me to bits if you looked. And you don’t want that, do you?’

She shook her head, feeling tears on her hand. Then she remembered he wouldn’t see her movement. He wasn’t looking. ‘No,’ she snuffled, wishing, impossibly, that he’d hear her distress and come to; come running over to comfort his little girl; that she’d be lost in his big, embrace, smell the warmth of him and forget all this. ‘No, Papa, I don’t want that.’

It felt an eternity before Catherine heard sounds at the door. Christine slipped in; looked alertly round at Catherine, giving her a look glowing with warmth and admiration and compassion. At last, Catherine thought, so wrung out with relief that she loved Christine unconditionally and forgot their past coldness in the warmth of this moment.

She noticed that Christine didn’t even look at the King of France, clawing up there against the bars of his window with his feet off the ground. But she said, ‘Good morning,’ to him, over her shoulder, in a brisk voice.

Christine sat with Catherine at the table and put a hand on hers. It was warm. It was blessedly normal. Catherine clung to it. But she kept her face brave.

‘Have you been talking?’ Christine said, raising her voice for the silent third person in the room. ‘You two?’

The voice began. Whining; sing-song; tale-bearing; treacherous. Things Catherine’s father would never be. She listened, hating it. ‘Oh, it’s cunning,’ her non-father said to Christine (and Catherine thought suddenly: Perhaps he had a voice like that, long ago, when he and Louis and Christine were just three children playing together in the gardens?) ‘It’s cunning all right. It’s come here to the ghost of the weed garden … to the windy desert … so it can steal my soul. It says it doesn’t want it but I know.’

Christine tightened her grip on Catherine’s hand, as if sensing her distress. ‘But you’re here with us,’ she said matter-of-factly to the voice. ‘You’re still here.’

‘No I’m not,’ it said quickly. ‘I’m not here. I’ve hidden myself. There are wild beasts in the woods. I’m staying still. So still. They won’t see me. I can be nothing. Quiet, quiet. Stop breathing. Nothing moves. Nothing is alive. Everything’s outside. They can’t see me here. I’m nothing. Nothing.’

Despite herself, Catherine felt her face pucker. She concentrated on Christine’s hand, feeling its strength.

But she couldn’t bear it. A voice as strange to her as her father’s sing-song broke out of her own mouth: an angry, excruciating wail: ‘You’re not! You’re the King of France! You’re my father!’

The voice stopped. Christine was shaking her head. It was clear Christine thought she’d done the wrong thing. But she could feel the man in the window thinking.

‘No … that’s what they say, but it’s not me,’ it said in the end, very reasonably. ‘What’s a king? It’s a crown. A horn. A flag. That’s what they want. A symbol. But that’s not me. I’m not made of gold or scarlet, am I? I’m not made of metal. I’m not made of anything. I’m a ghost. I don’t deserve to be anything else. Golden feet … it would be scary to have a golden belly.’

Christine’s tense hand relaxed. But then the voice screamed and the man in the window covered his head with his hands.

‘I’m a good boy! I do what I’m told!’ the voice said, then dropped to a whisper. ‘Look after him when I’m gone; he’s my hope of eternity; and he’s so young. Flighty. Make him serious and as wise as Solomon. Read him philosophy.’ Then it said brightly: ‘Make him strong and brave and bold.’ Shouted: ‘A soldier king! Fight off the English! Give him armour! A sword! Let’s go hunting! Let’s fight! Let’s love each other! No, let’s fight! Save the blood royal! Shed the blood royal! Make love, not war! Love your wife! Have children! Perpetuate the blood royal! Have mistresses! Don’t cry when the children die! The blood royal knows no grief! Don’t cry, dance! Let’s have a ball! The biggest you’ve ever seen! Fountains running with wine! Show them what you’re made of! Cure the sick! Kings cure disease … Kings, and Jesus … Kings are God’s anointed. Cure! Marry! Spend! Save! Fight! Love! Hate! Dance! Kill! Forgive!’ Her father stopped screaming. He had tears running down his cheeks. He snivelled, ‘He’s gone to the bad, of course; doesn’t think of anything except hunting and dancing all night. She doesn’t love him. She loves his brother. He’s not the man his father was, this one. No hope against the English. Not with this one.’ Plaintively, ‘I love my brother.’

His energy was spent. He curled up into a ball, muttering words Catherine couldn’t hear.

Regretfully but calmly, Christine was shaking her head.

Catherine was shaking. But she’d found pity somewhere deep inside herself. She shouldn’t have said he was the King. That was what had started it. She could see that now.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, without looking at Christine for guidance. ‘I’ve upset you. And I only meant to say, I love you.’

Christine patted her hand, then said: ‘She didn’t understand. But she doesn’t mean to hurt you. You know you can trust me, don’t you? You can trust her too.’

The muttering went on.

‘I won’t look. I won’t steal your soul,’ Catherine said. She suddenly, desperately, wanted to do something to ease the desolation in the sick man’s soul. She wanted to quench his thirst.

She got up and took the cup to him on the windowsill.

She kept her head turned away.

She put the cup down and walked away, with her head down.

Only when she’d sat down did she take courage to glance up at Christine’s face. The older woman’s eyes were alive with hope. She raised her eyebrows, nodded, and mouthed: He drank it.

Catherine began to go to the white room every day.

It was the place where secrets were unravelled. Everything she hadn’t understood became clear. What she didn’t understand for herself, Christine explained. Christine was showing her the adult world – at last, the truth she’d only ever halfseen. By turns, Catherine was horrified and grateful.

Christine said she believed that the King of France had taken refuge in madness because he was mortally afraid of facing the realities of his life.

He had been a child king – an orphan, with no one to guide him. His own father had wanted him to be brought up as a wise philosopher like himself. But, as it turned out, Charles’ childhood passed very differently – being squabbled over by noblemen who all wanted to steal the absolute power that was his destiny, and then in a fast-moving, free-spending blur of entertainments and escapades with his wild, witty younger brother Louis of Orleans.

Then he’d married: and he’d thought for a while he’d found salvation in his wife’s love. But that had been as much of an illusion as his father’s love. Queen Isabeau had been a beauty, in her youth. King Charles fell completely under her spell as soon as he saw her. He did whatever she wanted. She was charismatic; loved parties; loved jewels; loved fun. And a girl who’d grown up quietly in Bavaria, never expecting to be Queen of the greatest court of Europe, couldn’t believe her luck at being the most important woman in glorious France. It had gone to her head. The balls she’d held … the entertainments … the lovers she’d taken … the havoc she’d caused. The King had never questioned anything. He was her slave. She’d driven him wild.

‘Lovers?’ Catherine had questioned. Christine only raised her eyebrows and let the accusing silence thicken again. There was a lot of silent accusation in this account, Catherine was beginning to see. She sensed that the duty of explaining the Queen’s shortcomings wasn’t one Christine found altogether unpleasant.

Queen Isabeau’s most scandalous affair had been with her husband’s brother, Louis of Orleans, Christine said.

The brothers had gone to Provence together. For a bet, they’d raced each other back to Paris – on boats, horses, whatever they could find. Louis got there first – after five days. While Charles was still on the road home, his brother went straight to Isabeau.

That affair was what had finally done for King Charles’ sanity, Christine believed. The King’s madness began as soon as he’d found out. He’d lost himself in his wife; and now she was destroying him.

Charles and Louis had gone hunting a few days later. It was hot; Charles was sweating in black velvet. But no one expected him to start screaming that there were eyes behind the trees … enemies … and to start running his own pages through with a lance. He’d killed four by the time they managed to get him down and restrain him.

His madness had only driven the Queen back into the arms of her lover. And her favouritism 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 towards 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, veiled in the enormous veils she used to favour, 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 calorifères that poured out heat and rose oil fumes from the burning coals in their bellies, and the elaborate frescos of woodland scenes and happy children eating fruit among the flowers.

The Queen dipped her fingers into the bowls, sampling the flavours, as the two dwarves unwrapped the sweets and laid them out. Twenty pounds of dragées. Twenty pounds of coriander balls. Twenty pounds of paste du roy. Twenty pounds each of sweetmeats flavoured 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 dwarves 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 house it was 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 rumours 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 any more 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 her to fear 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.