Blood Royal

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.’