Blood Royal. Vanora Bennett
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Название: Blood Royal
Автор: Vanora Bennett
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007322664
isbn:
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.
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