Blood Royal

‘But,’ Owain faltered, hardly daring to speak for fear of falling into yet another trap he hadn’t suspected. He’d never heard of such a thing. ‘A woman …? Educated …? Writing …? What …?’

Christine snapped: ‘A woman can educate herself, if she has the wit and application to. I did; why not?’ Then, less angrily, ‘In any case, if this was a just world, all girls would automatically be properly educated, without having to teach themselves – just as boys are. So, no, I don’t just sit at home worrying. You have to help yourself in this life; there’s no guarantee anyone else will help you if you don’t. I go to court. I get commissions. I write: I, Christine. What’s more, I run a manuscript workshop out at the back here, to have my work copied and presented to clients. I don’t have time to sit around being frightened. And let me tell you one last thing, young man,’ she added, with her eyes still full of flash and injured pride, but also, Owain suddenly realised, just the faintest glimmer of dawning humour. ‘My most talented employee, by a long chalk – the best illuminator of manuscripts in Paris, and probably in the world – is a woman too.’

Owain opened his eyes very wide – even wider than the astonishment he genuinely felt was merited. It had taken a while, but now instinct told him he might have the measure of her at last. To be impressed would appease her. If he could only appeal to the humour he sensed in her eyes; to the good heart that he sensed lay behind her fierce exterior …

He opened his hands wide, too, in an imitation of the French shrug he’d seen so often today.

‘They told me’, he said, with all the worldly charm he could muster, staring back at her as boldly as he dared, ‘that Paris was a city of miracles. And now I know they were right.’

He bowed. ‘Bravo!’ he heard Jehanette whisper.

‘Madame de Pizan,’ he went on, in the same light, unfrightened tone – the words coming glibly to his tongue now he was finding his way; knowing he was on safer ground. ‘I’m honoured to know you. And I beg your pardon for my ignorance. Truly. I didn’t mean to give offence … but I wasn’t to know … there are no women with your genius in my country … and I’m not a man of letters myself … I’ve never read … well, not properly … only the Bible, and my Book of Hours …’

He could see, from the little nods of Jean’s head, that he was doing all right now. And, as his panic receded, he remembered that he had always wanted to know more about the world of letters. He’d always been intrigued by the priestly scholars in the castles he’d moved between since he came to England; by their austere, dusty calling; but repelled, too, by their elderly, glum faces. He’d always wished they had some of the life and lightness of Red Iolo, Owain Glynd?r’s bard, who in spite of being unimaginably ancient – more than eighty, people said – with a white beard and a bowed back and a stick, and white-blue cloudy eyes, still had an amused smile and a joyful wit and a poem always on his tongue. Not that it mattered, back in England. As a Welshman, one of the Plant Owain – the Children of Owain – he was banned from university anyway. He didn’t care. But here, in this great city, home of the greatest university in Christendom, every young man was reputed to know his astronomy and even the women were scholars … There’d be no sour old faces here; it might all be different.

‘I’d like to read more widely,’ he added eagerly, for Owain was a young man of irrepressible optimism and adaptability, ‘I’d really like to. If I’m to stay with you while my Duke’s embassy is here, will you show me your books?’

When he dared look up into the next silence, he saw everything had changed. Christine de Pizan was smiling at him – a smile so dazzlingly beautiful that, for a moment, he could no longer see the lines etched on her face by time. And she was nodding her head.

They sat up late, after that. They drank another pitcher of wine together (Owain was wise enough not to water his any more). He didn’t know whether he was drunk. He only knew he was overwhelmed with the excitement of this adventure: with being in this extraordinary city, developing a camaraderie with a woman so learned she was the talk of Christendom, and knowing that his refusal to give in to his fear of her had helped make her eyes go soft and her voice gentle as she talked.

Christine was telling him about coming to Paris for the first time herself. Her father had been a Venetian; he’d brought her to Paris when she was four and he had been appointed as the astrologer to the old French King’s court. She still remembered her first sight of Paris’s four bridges and the hundreds of princely hotels in the town along the Seine’s right bank; the glittering pinnacles of palace and cathedral in the city, on the Island in the middle of the river, and the sweeping vineyards, cornfields, churches and colleges of the university districts on the Left Bank. ‘And the King’s library …’ she reminisced, with a soft look in her eye, ‘… a thousand books, each more beautiful than the last … and the graciousness of the King himself … a true philosopher-king … So I understood your astonishment when you saw the city spread out before you this evening. I remember that moment myself. Paris is the most beautiful city in the world … and always will be.’

When Owain asked about the riots last year, and whether they hadn’t damaged the city – destroyed buildings, caused fires – she only waved a magnificent hand and made her ‘pshaw!’ noise, as if what Owain guessed must have been a terrifying couple of weeks had been an insignificant triviality. ‘Butchers!’ she said dismissively; ‘A hangman! What damage could people of that sort do?’

But, before she let Jean show him to the bed that Jehanette had made up for him in the scriptorium, Madame de Pizan drew him across to the window, and said, more sombrely, ‘Look here.’ She opened the shutters. They squeaked. She pointed down at the dark street outside. ‘Forget the butchers. If you want to know where our civil war really began, it was right there.’

Owain let his eyes get used to the dark, enjoying the air, fresh with early flowers. Up on the left, he could see the slender turrets of the Hotel Barbette; she’d shown him that earlier, on the way here. Opposite, he could just about make out a dark space, where a house should have stood. A froth of weeds; jutting timbers. ‘Yes,’ Christine said, ‘that burned-out space. That was where it all happened: the first death in the war. When France began to destroy itself.’

Christine fell silent for a moment, looking out, forgetting the boy, remembering that moment. She’d watched the aftermath from this window: the torches, the shouting, the panic. Out there, on a cold November night seven years ago, right outside that house, the Duke of Burgundy had sent men to waylay his cousin and rival, the Duke of Orleans, and murder him.

There’d been quarrels between the two men for years before that. Louis of Orleans had a light, teasing temperament; John of Burgundy was quiet and thorough and ruthless. They could never have been close. Louis of Orleans, charming and intelligent and musical though he was – Christine’s most glittering patron, back then – had been provoking too: so many mistresses, so many orgies in bathhouses, helping the Queen steal money from the royal coffers for her entertainments.

Burgundy’s men had come to this street for vengeance only after Orleans had hinted mischievously to Burgundy that he’d had an affair with Burgundy’s own Duchess. But they’d chosen precisely this spot to do their murder because they knew how often Orleans came here. The Queen, the wife of Orleans’ royal brother, had a private house on the corner of Old Temple Street – the Hotel Barbette, with its white turrets, fifty yards away. Queen Isabeau moved there whenever her husband was mad. For years before he was killed, Orleans had spent too many of his days and nights there too, whenever she was in residence. People whispered that he must be Isabeau’s lover.

There was no end to the mischief Louis of Orleans had done, it was true. But Burgundy’s response – murdering him – was a crime so horrifying it blotted out all the pranks and tricks Louis had so enjoyed.

Shedding the blood royal was sacrilege.

God anointed a king to be the head of the body politic. A country’s fighting noblemen might be the body politic’s arms and hands; the priests its conscience; the peasantry its legs and feet. But the King was the head, to be obeyed in all things, since everything and everyone depended utterly on him to convey the will of God from Heaven to Earth. And the blood that ran in his royal veins was as sacred as the sacrament and so were the persons of his closest relatives, the other princes of the blood, whom God might choose to take the throne tomorrow if He called today’s King to Heaven. It was the blood royal that brought life to the body politic – the will of God made manifest on Earth – and anyone who shed the blood royal was going against the will of God.

Once Burgundy, a prince of the blood royal, had ignored that divine imperative, and destroyed another royal prince, like a dog, the whole contract between God and man was destroyed too. The darkness had got in.

That was why, ever since the night of that murder, the hand of every prince in France had been turned against the Duke of Burgundy – even if Burgundy’s personal magnetism was such that he’d bullied the poor, sickly King into pardoning him; even if he’d bullied Louis of Orlean’s young son, Charles, into saying publicly, through gritted teeth, in front of the King, that he forgave him too, and would not seek revenge for the death.

That was why France was cursed.

Even now that Burgundy had slunk away from Paris, it wasn’t the end. That there would be more bloodshed Christine had no doubt. Every prince who would have followed Orleans’ son Charles, if he had raised his hand against Burgundy, was taking a lead instead from his fiercer father-in-law, Count Bernard of Armagnac, who was bound by no peace promises. But, whatever the princes thought, the people of Paris still loved Burgundy. He paid his bills, unlike the more spendthrift Armagnac princes; as Christine and her son had both found, Burgundy was a better employer. Sooner or later he’d be back, with an army behind him, to trade the love that Parisians bore him for power. And then …

She leaned against the window frame.

‘Are you all right?’ A timid boy’s voice came from her side, making her jump. It was Owain Tudor; still there, staring at her with big gentle eyes. She’d forgotten all about him. She sighed. ‘Just regrets,’ she said wistfully, ‘for so many past mistakes.’

He murmured; something optimistic, she guessed. He was too young to know there were some wrongs that couldn’t be righted; some sins that would follow you to the grave. She shook herself. Smiled a brittle, social, off-to-bed-now-it’s-late smile at him, and began locking up. But perhaps his naive young man’s hope was catching. As she heard his footsteps, and Jean’s, creak on the stairs, she found herself imagining a conversation she might have, one day soon, with someone still full of hope – someone like this young Owain.

‘What are you writing now?’ he would ask.

She’d answer: ‘The Book of Peace.’ And she’d smile, because it would be true.

THREE (#ulink_9249be17-7316-5ba2-b5d0-6e051e824e04)

Owain meant to lie awake in the room where they’d made up a bed for him, and imagine himself walking through the city streets tomorrow. The room was warm, but furnished only with a huge table scattered with parchments and pens and with two long benches. There was a shelf of books on the wall. He’d imagined himself taking a book off the wall and, very carefully, putting it on the table and beginning to read it by candlelight. But sleep overcame him as soon as he threw himself down on the quilt. Instead of reading, he dreamed: fretful, regretful dreams, of woodsmoke, and stinging eyes, and the blurred outlines of rafters high up, and a woman’s arms cradling him, and a lullaby in a language he hardly remembered.

A few streets away, in the Hotel Saint-Paul, Catherine crept to her bed, shedding her sister-in-law Marguerite’s borrowed houppelande, which had made her sweat so much, leaving it on the floor with all the other neglected garments no one picked up any more. Marguerite wouldn’t notice, she thought, with childish unconcern; Marguerite spent so much time lying round crying in the Queen’s chambers at the mean way Louis treated her that she didn’t have time to worry about where her clothes were. Marguerite was always weeping; always running to the Queen for sympathy, and getting it, too. Catherine couldn’t understand why her mother was so much sweeter with Marguerite than she was with her own children. They all hated Marguerite’s father, the Duke of Burgundy; they all knew that was why Louis was so cruel to his wife. And the Queen hated the Duke of Burgundy at least as much as anyone else. But it didn’t seem to make her hate Marguerite. Struggling with the jealousy that thoughts of her mother’s public affection for Marguerite always aroused in her, Catherine thought, without really questioning why: perhaps Maman just hates Louis more than she does Marguerite’s father.

All Catherine had on below the houppelande was the dirty shift she’d worn for two days. She’d been tucking up its greying sleeves for hours under the green velvet, to keep them out of sight.

She stopped. There was someone already snuffling under the bedclothes. She held the candle close. Charles, damp and muttering, with his thin boy’s arms and legs rumpling the sheets into a linen whirlpool. She stood at the side of the bed and, with one hand, reached down to straighten the covers and stroke his hair. Then she saw there was a trace of meat grease still on his face. She raised the candle to look round the room. Sure enough, there was a hunk of bread and a slice of beef waiting on a platter under the window. ‘Thank you, Christine,’ she muttered, as she tiptoed towards it.

She put the candle on the table and ate, remembering the anxiety on Charles’ pale little face when he’d slipped out of the audience hall. There was no need for him to worry, she thought, rather sadly. Everyone else knew nothing would come of this marriage offer.

Still … it would be nice to be a queen … to know you’d always be fed and clothed and happy … and safe. She sighed, snuffed out the candle, and got into bed beside Charles.

In pitch darkness, Catherine sat bolt upright in her bed, with her hair wild and her eyes wide in terror. That woke little Charles up too. He sat up; started to shake. He clutched her hand.

She pulled open a corner of her curtains, so they could see out. They waited. They listened. But all either of them could hear, through the thump of their heartbeats, was the doubtful creaking of floorboards, and draughts flapping distant cloth. There was no one there.

‘Nothing,’ Charles whispered stoutly. ‘You must have been dreaming. Go back to sleep.’

He snuggled back down into his quilt. He didn’t want to remember the butchers with thick bare arms and leather jackets smelling of death, with aprons streaked with blood, who’d broken into the Hotel Saint-Paul last summer. Screaming. Sweating and waving sticks and yelling and jeering. Smelling.

Catherine lay down again too, but she couldn’t stop listening or controlling her breathing to keep it quiet, in case someone else was listening. She could have sworn she’d heard the smash of glass again.

When they’d come last summer, they’d broken right into the ballroom. There was nothing to stop them. The Hotel Saint-Paul didn’t have proper battlements. It was just a collection of houses and gardens, bolted together by long galleries – a made-up palace of pleasure gardens, created inside the city wall by her grandfather in times when there were no rebellions. They stayed here still because her father liked it; it reminded him of his own happy childhood. But Catherine’s memories were different.

She’d watched three of the butchers chase one official down the corridor. The official had flung himself at Marguerite and clung to her skirts. She’d thrown her arms round him, but the butchers hardly noticed. They had yanked Marguerite’s arms away and torn her sleeve. They had pulled him off her, sobbing, the terror of a hunted animal on his face. The detail Catherine remembered most clearly was that Marguerite’s headdress had caught on one of the men’s belts. Marguerite had just gone on standing there, with her arms still outstretched and tears streaming down her cheeks and her blonde hair streaming behind her; not even trying to grab for the twin horns of the headdress as it bobbed absurdly on a butcher’s behind.

They all said it wouldn’t happen again. Everyone said the riots had been Marguerite’s father’s fault. They said the Duke of Burgundy had paid the butchers to attack. And he was gone now.

The memory of him still made Catherine shiver. So tall and lean and stooped; and when he looked at you with his cold, hooded eyes you went still, as if he were turning you to stone.

She wrapped her arms round herself. She didn’t believe he’d gone for good. She knew it wouldn’t take long before there was more fighting. They all hated each other too much for anything else.

If only there were stronger walls around the Hotel Saint-Paul.

The thought came unbidden to her mind as she lay down again. If she went to England, where there was peace, she’d never need to be afraid again.

She put her hand on Charles’ shoulder. He was so small, and so thin. She couldn’t leave him.