The Queen's Lover: A Novel Read online

  "I have to get home," she said. "I have children. Grandchildren. Work." She gestured down at her simple blue gown and laughed reassuringly, giving them her most flirtatious smile. It was always best to use charm first, before letting the man know she meant business. Her smile had always melted hearts. "I don't look worth robbing. You can see that. I'll be all right." She wished the man would hurry and make his mind up to let hergo. She didn't want to be out at night either.

  Suddenly the guard nodded, as if he'd just seen a way of killing two birds with one stone. "We've got an Englishman here who needs a bed for the night," he said. "I'll let you out if you put him up. He'll keep you safe."

  It would be crowded, but if they'd let her out she'd find a corner for a guest. Even an Englishman. She nodded. Brisk with relief, the guard whistled out a mule and handed her onto it. Christine recognized the young man holding the harness. He was tall but still hardly more than a boy--the black-haired page, or aide, or whatever he was, who'd held open the casket while the Duke of Clarence gave Princess Catherine her jewel. He had a big pack on his back and was wrapped, ready to go, in a cloak too heavy for the mild evening weather. He gave her a small, shy smile. He wouldn't save her from any footpads, she saw. But at least he'd be no trouble.

  She noticed the boy moving his head to stare at everything they passed. He stared at the great paved sweep of Saint Anthony Street, where fruit blossoms peeked over the walls of the Duke of Orleans' home and the convent of Saint Catherine of the Schoolboys. Once inside the Saint Anthony gate, when they turned away from the river into narrower streets, where the paving stones stopped and the sound of the mule's hooves was muffled by ankle-deep filth, he gazed at the pink blossoms waving over the King of Sicily's home on one side and Little Saint Anthony convent on the other.

  At first she thought he was scared, and listening for footsteps. She was, though she'd have died before admitting it. They passed the crowded space of the Jews' road on one side, and more walls swaying with pink and white clouds, with more slender towers and spires rising behind the wafts of flowers, then came up to the Bishops of Beauvais' hotel. As they reached the crossroads, she looked straight at him to show him he had to turn the mule's head to the left here, and she realized, from the alert, curious, joyful look on his face, that he wasn't scared at all. He was just drinking in every detail of their surroundings. From the slightly raised ground here, you could see down to the Greveport. You could see the top of the crane that was used for unloading hay bales and the last speckles of glitter on the river. You could see the double towers of the cathedral, the turrets of the palace, and the dark green of the bare vineyards on the slopes of the Left Bank, with the University and church buildings scattered behind them up the hillsides, silhouettes in the dusk.

  Because she was suddenly seeing it through his newcomer's eyes, the sight humbled and amazed her as it hadn't for years. She hardly ever remembered anymore even what had made her write, in one of her most famous books, about the experience of coming here from Venice as a child, and about the extraordinary impression that her first months in Paris had made. She'd forgotten the beauty she lived amidst. These days, all she thought about in these streets was the troubles they all lived with. But look at this boy, staring. Paris must still be a dream, a miracle, to anyone who'd never seen or imagined two hundred thousand people living, working, singing, praying, and thinking together.

  "I had no idea," the boy said, turning frank eyes to her, "no idea it would be like this." His French was accented but fluent. Taken aback by his warmth and openness, she almost smiled.

  A dog barked somewhere near; something creaked. She jumped. There was no point in getting your throat cut just for the joy of exchanging pleasantries with an Englishman, she told herself. "Come on," she said gruffly. "Let's get you inside."

  It was so dark by the time they stopped in Old Temple Street that they had to bang at the locked courtyard gate, and when Jean came out to let them in, he was carrying a lantern.

  "We were worried," he said, not noticing the visitor at the head of the mule, coming straight to her and slipping her off its back. His voice was quiet but she could feel the tension vibrating in it.

  "I'm sorry," she said, tilting her head up, feeling the usual rush of wonder at his olive skin and black hair, the elegant slant of jaw and nose, the clean smell. Her son: the man her love with Etienne had made. The way he reminded her of Etienne, who'd been dead these twenty years now, brought a tragic undertone into her husky voice. "There was nothing I could do. Everything got late. There were visitors from England."

  Jean screwed up his face. He was no fonder of the present-day rulers of England than she was. Once, long ago, when Jean was just a boy, she'd sent him to England as pageboy to the old Earl of Salisbury. That had been a good placement for a boy who needed to make his way in the world. But the Earl had been killed soon after old King Richard was deposed. The new King of England--so-called King of England, she added fiercely to herself--who'd replaced Richard had wanted to keep young Jean de Castel, and even to get Christine to move to England to be with her son and light up his court with her writing. But she wasn't having any truck with usurpers, and she'd had no intention of moving from civilization to that damp wilderness over the water. So she'd sweet-talked that first Henry of Lancaster into sending her son back to France while she pretended to be making up her mind, and, eventually, she'd found Jean his place here in Paris. It was better the way things had worked out. They were together. Still, Christine and her son knew too much about the betrayals and bloodshed Henry of Lancaster had provoked to enjoy thinking of England. And they liked the idea of England even less now it was ruled by that Henry's son--now Henry V--who, no sooner than he'd become King, had sent his brother over to France with an army to fight the French in Normandy, and who seemed to want to revive the old claim of the English kings to lands in France--which had been wrongful even when the kings were still rightful--to be the God-given rulers of France. The English were dangerous: king-killers, scavengers, wolves. This Henry was no kind of husband for Catherine. Anyone could see that.

  "What English visitors?" Jean was asking, with the lantern flame reflected in his eyes.

  "The brother. The Duke of Clarence. With a proposal for our Princess Catherine to marry King Henry," Christine replied quickly, keeping her voice neutral.

  Jean rolled his eyes. "I see," he said drily, raising his eyebrows, obviously not believing anyone could have taken such a proposal seriously, taking it as a cue for wry laughter. "And who did he talk to, if the King's..." Then he looked round, as if noticing the boy holding the mule's head for the first time, and raised his eyebrows in a different, mute, cautious question.

  "This is a member of the Duke of Clarence's entourage," Christine explained, still in her watchful public voice. Jean inclined his head at the newcomer--not quite a bow. The boy, grateful to be noticed at last, was already bowing eagerly and murmuring thanks for his bed in his fluent but guttural Anglo-Norman French. He was surprisingly tall. He towered over well-knit Jean.

  "They asked me to put him up here," she went on. "An Englishman..." She turned to the boy with a question in her voice. "Owain Tudor," he said, and bowed again. But there was something unboyish in his eyes--a flicker of pain? Embarrassment? Grief? Pride?--as he added, with a slight twist of the lips: "Not English. I'm Welsh."

  They'd heard of the Welsh rebellion against King Henry, in the remote western Marches of England. Of course they had; France had supported the Welsh rebel, Owain Glynd?r, against the English usurper. A French army under the then Chancellor, the Breton lord Jean de Rieux, had even spent a couple of years in Wales, once the Welsh leader had been crowned King Owain IV, leading three thousand Breton horsemen under the Welsh dragon flag. French and Welsh alike had been for old King Richard of England, already dead by then, rather than the king-killer Henry; it had all started from that. So Christine and her son knew that the uprising, which for a while had spread through the English aristocracy and turned eve
n some of England's greatest lords into mutineers, had nearly destroyed that Henry of England. The rebels had carved up England in their minds, before they'd even won it: the Midlands to the Welsh, the south and west to the Mortimer lords of March; the north to the Percy clan. But the uprising had finally been defeated, even if its Welsh leader was still hiding out in the misty hills, raiding; even if he still called himself the King of Wales. So they looked at this youth in puzzlement as he told them that Owain Glynd?r, the rebel leader, was his cousin--King of the old Welsh royal house of Powys Magog, as the boy put it, not without pride, in his excellent French. If this boy was that rebel's kinsman, what was he doing here, nicely dressed, in Paris, in the service of an English duke?

  The boy only shook his head at the confusion he saw on their faces. He looked older than his years again; as if he was used to people being puzzled about who he was and what his status might be.

  "My family's been punished," he said, with the light shrug of someone affecting indifference. "One of my uncles was executed. Our lands are confiscated. But I was only a child. Prince Henry took me in; not as a hostage...out of kindness...and made me a page in his household," he said, retreating fully from his moment of touchy self-assertion; putting the others at their ease. "King Henry now. So I suppose I'm nearly English, after all." He met their eyes boldly. "I was lucky," he added with another of those deliberate light smiles, as if daring them to disagree.

  Saying that so confidently gave Owain the usual dizzy feeling of being in two places at once. As he smiled for his hosts, he couldn't help also thinking, privately, for a flash, of what might have become of him if he hadn't become English. He thought of the cousins he'd played and ridden and hidden with, who'd been kept by their father to stand or fight with the Welsh armies, who were all now prisoners in the Tower of London: Glynd?r's oldest son Gruffydd, twenty or so, with his father's light eyes and quick wit, who could cut a raindrop in two with his sword, the fastest runner Owain had ever seen, the fastest rider too. Owain's childhood hero. The three little blond Mortimer girls, lisping and giggling, none of them older than eight or nine, with their tired-eyed mother, Catrin, Glynd?r's daughter and Owain's aunt. The women had all been taken captive when Catrin's husband, the powerful Englishman Edmund Mortimer, had been killed at the siege of Harlech, when the English King's men had finally broken down the walls. Not everyone he'd grown up with was a prisoner now; not quite. Owain thought of Glynd?r's younger son, Maredudd ap Owain Glynd?r, hiding with his fugitive father in Herefordshire--laughing quietly over their place of refuge--with one of Glynd?r's English sons-in-law, paradoxically the English Sheriff of the County, still very much on the run. He thought of his own immediate family: his mother long dead, they said of shock and fear after hiding from Prince Harry's raiding party come to burn down Sycharth Castle. He couldn't remember her. His father, a joyous smile or a giant puff of rage, depending on his mood; riding out with the French and taking Owain with them; teaching Owain a first few words of the incomers' ways and language when he was only five or six and prouder than any boy had ever been to be taken on the army's marches. Even if Owain no longer respected that reckless father--who'd handed him over to the enemy when it suited him--or the uncles who'd saved their skins by handing over their own men to be tortured and killed, he couldn't help but feel sorry for them all. His father, Maredudd ap Tudur, like all the other surviving brothers, was living on nothing now: on the run, lodging in attics and churches, surviving on pity. The houses had gone. Owain remembered two of the moated manors burning; a confused child's recollection of peering out between fingers clamped over eyes, choking on smoke; being hushed into tickly, terrified silence. They'd been somewhere among the smooth stretches of gray-green turf and tree and sea on the island some knew as the Dark Island, or Honey Island, or the Island of the Brave, which had once been his family's home: Mon, beyond the great snowy mountains of Gwynedd, which the English called Anglesey, and which he would never see again. Uncle Rhys' head was on a pole at Chester. Uncle Rhys' boys were not allowed back to Erddreiniog. Uncle Gwilym had lost Clorach; Uncle Ednyfed's children had lost Trecastell. Only Morfydd, his bravest cousin, Uncle Goronwy's daughter, who had charm and more determination than every other member of his family put together, and, what was more, was blessed with a husband not quite so out of favor as the rest of Owain's family, still dared to petition the King of England to get the family lordship of Penmynydd back.

  In his mind's eye, Owain saw the thousand children taken as servants when the English King had stabled his horses in the church of Strata Florida Abbey, letting them foul God's altar. That older Henry had been a cruel man. He'd enjoyed demonstrating that he feared no one, not even God. If it hadn't been for young King Henry, with his pardons and his peace...Owain heard the anguished howling of the mothers that night; the fearful quiet of the children, their lost stares, driven off like sheep into the abbey and on into the unknown. That had been the beginning. Owain saw the end too: grass in the streets; roofless houses; burned-out villages; a land without men.

  "I was lucky," he repeated lightly. "My King Henry is a good master."

  Christine and Jean exchanged glances. Then, putting an arm on the boy's shoulder, Jean led him inside.

  They gave the boy a drink and a bite to eat. He said politely that he couldn't take a thing, but of course in the event he wolfed down slice after slice of meat and bread, and washed it all down with a big cup of wine. He was young, after all, whatever he'd seen in that remote war; fifteen, maybe; and he had a healthy appetite.

  Seeing them all standing around the circle of light, watching him--not just Christine and Jean, but Jean's wife Jehanette and little Jacquot and Perrette--he watered his wine liberally, and explained, through a cheerful mouthful, "We're under orders not to drink French wine without water, because it's so good and strong; we're not allowed to get drunk." He hesitated; they could all see him wondering whether to tell them the reasoning behind the order too--too obviously "Don't get drunk in case a Frenchman ambushes you"--then realizing that would be tactless, and blushing. Instead, he ran an appreciative tongue round his mouth, which was stained dark red. "I don't know yet if it's strong, but it certainly is good," he finished, giving them all a beaming smile. Christine saw Perrette's snub nose wrinkle in the beginning of a return laugh; warningly, she caught Perrette's eye. There was no point in being too easily charmed.

  As soon as he'd satisfied his appetite for food, the boy sighed, pushed his stool back from the table, and, in the biddable fashion of a well-bred child, set to trying to entertain his silent hosts with stories from his day and his life. Eagerly, he started talking--gabbling, Christine thought severely--about the audience his Duke had had with the Queen of France--well, not his Duke, exactly; Owain had just been seconded to Clarence for the trip to Paris. He fixed his eyes rather pleadingly on dimpling, curly-haired Jehanette, who looked the readiest to smile. "My master sent your Princess a jewel with the marriage proposal. It was my duty and pleasure to hand it to her today...I think your Princess liked it. She's a very beautiful princess. A jewel herself. The marriage will be a blessing for both our lands...don't you think?" he finished, and even he could hear the imploring note in his own voice.

  He had no idea why they were looking so cheerless. Even the pretty wife. He sensed he must have said the wrong thing--but what? Did he smell? He restrained the impulse to sniff at his armpits.

  But he watched in dawning alarm as the elderly woman who'd brought him home pursed her lips and drew her back up very straight. She'd been beautiful once, this Christine de Pizan, you could see that; there was still the ghost of beauty in her ravaged face and in the pride with which she carried her small, tough body, prodding out her barrel chest, half pugnacious, half flirtatious. But there was something frightening about her too; he certainly didn't want to get on the wrong side of her.

  Christine glared at him. She said severely: "I'm not so sure about that, young man. And I wouldn't get your hopes up too much, if I were you. I d
oubt very much whether this marriage will happen."

  She dropped her chin and went on gazing implacably at him.

  Owain shrank into himself, wishing himself invisible, wondering how he could have given such offense.

  He noticed the younger Frenchman quietly putting a restraining hand on his mother's arm. He also saw Madame de Pizan didn't seem to care. The gesture almost seemed to goad her into going on.

  "No doubt your English...King...wants a marriage with the oldest and greatest royal line in Europe," she said, and her husky voice vibrated deeper with contempt. "But one of our royal princesses has already turned down a proposal of marriage by your King, don't forget. As I recall, there was a question of the validity of his claim to the throne, at the time...and I'm not aware of anything having changed in that regard since then." She pushed her head a little closer to his. "Are you?"

  Owain felt like a rabbit being hypnotized by a snake. "Ye--no..." he stammered, desperate to please but sensing he was being lured into danger too; and, mostly, simply not knowing what answer was expected.

  "In any event, it's our King who will decide, when he recovers from his...his illness," Christine was sweeping superbly on, overemphasizing her words and raising her eyebrows to add yet more insistence to her speech. (Owain noticed she didn't say, the King's "madness" in fact, he realized, no one he'd met in Paris seemed to talk of the madness that everyone in England knew the King of France was afflicted with.) "Not our Queen. And as for our Queen...she might have seemed to you to be enthusiastic about marrying Catherine to your King, but don't forget you're an outsider here, and a very young one at that. If you were a Parisian, you'd know without needing to be told that her main pleasure in life these days is goading her son into behaving badly. It amuses her. She's of a mischievous turn of mind, and the two of them don't get on. You saw how he reacted. That was him--Louis, our Crown Prince, the Dauphin--making a scene back there. He was right, of course. He should never have risen to her bait; but that's Louis for you. Always been a fool. He didn't see she was only considering the idea to provoke him into making the scene he made."