The Queen's Lover: A Novel Page 3

  "Maman," Jean de Castel murmured.

  She shrugged off her son's hand with an irritated little puff of breath: "Pah." But then she paused. "Well, perhaps you're right," she said a moment later, sounding less angry. "I'm speaking out of turn. Still, I wouldn't trust the Queen's enthusiasm. It's liable to wane. There'll be no marriage."

  Owain nodded, less worried about trying to defend his King than about just trying to keep quiet so the alarming Madame de Pizan wouldn't go on the attack again. He was mystified by her air of imperious assurance. He was even more mystified by the familiarity--if she'd been a less frightening person, he'd have called it impertinence--with which she described the French royal family. He looked furtively around the quiet and modest room in the quiet and modest townhouse in which he was sitting. He stole another glance at Madame de Pizan's quiet and modest blue and white clothing. There were no signs that she was a great lady. He'd have said the son was a government official of some sort; not privy to the counsels of the highest in the land, by any means. Was it normal here to discuss the failings of the rulers of the land at every table?

  Changing the subject, Owain hastily asked Jean what his calling in life was. Everyone breathed a little easier, but it wasn't a subject that brought joy to anyone's face either. There was a shadow on Jean's fine dark face as he replied, very carefully and neutrally, that he was an administrator; that he'd had some small experience under the Duke of Burgundy; but that, as Owain might know, the Duke was no longer in Paris, so Jean was now doing some work for the Chancellor of France and seeking a new permanent position and patron.

  Owain nodded, feeling he was beginning to understand. He'd heard about the troubles in France. He knew what Englishmen knew: that since the King of France was too mad, most of the time, to make decisions, the royal uncles and cousins were all wrangling for the chance to power as regent in his "absences," and France had fallen into something like civil war as a result. The Queen and the various quarrelsome princes were almost all on one side, more or less, with their armies, usually led by the Count of Armagnac--and they were all against the Duke of Burgundy. Burgundy was the most powerful nobleman in France--rich, with lands all over northeastern France and across the Low Countries, and expanding his territory still further in every direction as fast as he could. He was the only prince whom the people of Paris loved, because they found him reliable. He might be too fond of plotting, but at least he paid his tradesmen's bills. But he'd overstretched himself last year. He'd been blamed for stirring up riots in Paris against the King's government, and had taken himself prudently off to his lands when the rioting had petered out. No wonder this family was so gloomy, if their breadwinner had been employed by Burgundy; if, now Jean had lost his patron, they were consumed with money worries...

  Owain turned sympathetically to Christine, seeing lines round her eyes and mouth etched by hardship. Riots, civil war, fear, money problems, a son needing a patron; this was a story he suddenly felt he understood. It must be a constant worry for a widow in her sunset years, he thought. "It must be very frightening for you, sitting at home with the grandchildren...with nothing to do but wonder how your son's faring..." he ventured kindly.

  He sensed, rather than heard, the indrawn breaths; felt the silence. He'd said something wrong again.

  He didn't dare look at Madame de Pizan's face. He could hardly bear the outrage in her voice as she replied, in freezing tones, "Well! I do my best to keep busy. In my humble way. I, Christine de Pizan."

  He fixed his eyes on Jean instead. He saw Jean glance at his mother; he saw the expression of wry amusement on the older man's face, and realized, feeling mortified, though less full of dread than he'd been a second ago, that Jean was enjoying what must be a look of the purest fury from Madame de Pizan.

  "Young man, there's something you should know..." Jean said, quite kindly. "I could see you didn't recognize her name when we introduced ourselves out there, but my mother is a very famous woman. She's written dozens of books, on everything from love to military history. Kings come to her for guidance; dukes seek her advice. Even your King--well, his father--once tried to tempt her to live at the English court. She brought me and my sister up, after our father died, on the money she earned from writing poems; she's taken on the greatest minds in Europe to teach them the dignity of women. She's unique; known all over Christendom; an ornament to the civilized world. Also, she has a very short temper. You should know all that before you go on."

  He paused. He gave Owain a quizzical look, as if waiting to see how he'd react. Owain could see Jehanette was trying not to laugh.

  "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 realized, just the faintest glimmer of dawning humor. "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 humor 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 honored to know you. And I beg your pardon for my ignorance. Truly. I didn't mean to give offense...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 sil
ence, 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 anymore). 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 somberly, "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 Orleans' 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

  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 anymore. 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 graying 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 toward 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.