The Agincourt Bride. Joanna Hickson

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СКАЧАТЬ on the galley struck up a merry tune as if nothing untoward had occurred. Sailing off in her cushioned galley, Queen Isabeau was totally unaware of the misery she left behind.

      Nor were the day’s dramas over. I had taken Catherine and Charles to the seat in the overgrown arbour for a reassuring cuddle, so I did not see a group of men arrive at the palace end of the garden and begin to play some sort of game in the bushes, but the unusual sound of excited whoops and male laughter soon reached us and I popped my head around the sheltering foliage in alarm. We had always had the garden to ourselves and I had no wish to encounter any fun-seeking courtiers or playful lovers who might have strayed there. I wondered if we could escape to the nursery tower without being seen.

      Alas, we could not. The strange and disturbing figure of a man was already approaching our hiding-place and had seen me poke my head out. He stopped dead with a smile of childish glee frozen for an instant on his thin, pale face before it turned to a ghoulish grimace of dismay. Strangely, in this palace of smooth-cheeked, neatly-trimmed courtiers, his chin had a growth of straggly brown beard and his lank hair trailed down in a messy tangle to his shoulders. His clothing was rumpled and filthy, but had once been fine and fashionable, the shabby blue doublet edged with matted fur and patterned with a tarnished gold design that might once have been fleur-de-lis. With a fearful flash of intuition I realised that I was now, incredibly, face to face with the ailing king, as if having just encountered the queen were not enough for one day, not to mention having lost three of my charges.

      We stood speechless with shock at the sight of each other, but Catherine, whose curiosity never dimmed, stepped past me into the king’s path. As she did so, two sturdy men in leather jackets appeared at the far end of the garden – the king’s minders. I reached to pull Catherine back, but she wriggled out of my grasp and walked boldly up to the stranger, staring at him enquiringly. ‘Good day, Monsieur. Are you playing a game?’ she asked sweetly. ‘May I play too?’

      She did not know, of course, that this might be her father. She had never met him, any more than she had met her mother, and a three year old who is not shy will always be ready to play with someone new, oblivious of circumstances.

      For his part, the dishevelled king was provoked into an extraordinary reaction. Perhaps, whether mad or sane, he was frightened of children. Certainly, he had avoided his own. He threw his arms up to fend Catherine off as if she was a springing lion or a charging bull and he screamed! God in Heaven how he screamed! Hurriedly I picked up baby Charles and held him. The noise seemed to fill the shimmering arc of the burning sky. Through wide-stretched lips and discoloured teeth the king hurled invective at the little girl, releasing sounds from his throat like the screeching of a wounded horse, high-pitched and ear-splitting. There were words contained within the scream which struck me with icy terror and must have traumatised Catherine, standing as she was only an arm’s length away.

      ‘Keep away! Do not touch me! I shall bre-e-e-e-eak!’

      A look of terror on her face, Catherine spun around and threw herself at me for protection. I could feel her whole body shaking with fear as she buried her head in my skirts and broke into muffled sobs. At the same time the two strong-looking minders arrived panting, having raced down the path at the first sound of the scream. One of them had pulled a large sack out of a pack on the other’s back and between them, without saying a word, they pulled it over the king’s head, pinning his arms to his side and then picked him up and carried him bodily towards the palace gate, his legs kicking helplessly. Despite the sack he was still screaming, if anything even louder than before.

      A third man, similarly dressed in studded leather, appeared from nowhere and panted at us, ‘I am sorry, Madame, but he is more frightened of you than you are of him. He thinks he is made of glass. He would not have hurt the little girl. Please tell her he is not an ogre. He is the king and he is ill.’

      Not waiting for a response, he touched the edge of his bucket hat and raced after the others. It took several minutes for both children to stop hiccoughing with fear and my heart was still thudding in my chest when I grasped Catherine’s little hand and hurried with them both to the relative peace of our tower. I told myself that it would be a very long time before I would venture into Queen Jeanne’s garden again.

      Back in the nursery the two little children clung to me as if to a rock in fast-rising water. I did not think they had heard what the third ‘minder’ had said and I was not about to make it worse for them by revealing that the terrifying man they had met in the garden was their father, the king. It was enough that they had suffered his animal screams and would probably see his agonised face in their dreams. More disturbing in the long term was the absence of Michele, Louis and Jean. Their older sister and brothers had been an integral part of their short lives; not always easy or kind but always there, to squabble with, play with or annoy. The nursery was silent and strange without them, a place at once both familiar and frightening.

      Catherine was full of questions. Where had the others gone? Why had they gone? What would happen to them? When were they coming back? Was that lady really her mother? Why hadn’t she spoken to her? Would she come for her, too?

      I had no answers because I had no idea why the queen had taken the older children away, or what would happen to them, or whether they would be back, or why she had completely ignored her two youngest children. Her actions seemed arbitrary and inexcusable, but she was the queen and I supposed there must be some rhyme or reason to it. I had heard much mention of the Duke of Burgundy and his boastful nickname Jean the Fearless, seen Michele’s anguish at the sudden talk of her marriage and gathered that Chartres was their destination, but that was the sum of it. I was as mystified as the children. Perhaps it was significant that we all avoided making mention of the screaming man.

      Once I’d tucked them up, cuddling each other in one truckle bed, I went to seek guidance from the governess and the tutor, but there was no sign of them. Significantly I found their chamber doors standing open and, on entering, the chests and guarderobes empty. Madame la Bonne and Monsieur le Clerc had packed up and gone and, on further investigation, so too had the latest donkeys, for their meagre bundles of belongings were also missing. I had not grasped then what I soon discovered; that having inherited Burgundy, Flanders and Artois on his father’s death the previous year, Jean the Fearless had now set his sights on France and was heading for Paris, scheming to rule in the mad king’s name through his son the dauphin, thus ousting the cosy regime of the queen and the Duke of Orleans.

      I felt completely out of my depth. Only hours before I had been a sleepy nursemaid in a sun-baked garden and now I was alone with two of the king’s children and with little notion of exactly what had happened to the others. Who could I turn to for advice? Would I be blamed for the disappearance of the three older children? Did anyone in authority even know they were missing? Was there anyone in authority still in the palace? It may sound odd, but I felt an urgent need to settle my feelings of panic with some pretence at normality, so I took my basket of mending and sat down in the window of the main nursery to catch the last of the daylight and await developments.

      Tired though they were, the little ones could not sleep and before long they appeared hand in hand, eyes enormous in solemn pinched faces. In their crumpled white chemises, they looked like the waifs of the wood from one of their favourite fairytales.

      ‘We are frightened, Mette. Please tell us a story,’ Catherine begged.

      My heart ached for them. Abandoning the garment I was mending, I opened my arms and pulled them both onto my lap. For a few moments we clung together and gazed out of the open window at the muddy, drought-shrivelled stretch of the Seine which had carried the other children away. The evening sun cast gloomy shadows down the tree-lined banks while across the river on the Île St Louis, weary peasants were stacking corn stooks at the end of a long day’s harvesting. There was a lump in my throat as I started the familiar tale of St Margaret and the dragon.

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