VANORA BENNETT

Blood Royal

For Chris, Luke and Joe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

PART ONE: The Book of Peace

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

PART TWO: The Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

PART THREE: Lamentations on the Troubles of France

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

PART FOUR: The Vision of Christine

ONE

TWO

THREE

PART FIVE: The Prison of Human Life

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

PART SIX: The Book of the Body Politic

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

PART SEVEN: The Song of Jehanne of Arc

ONE

TWO

PART EIGHT: The Mutability of Fortune

ONE

TWO

PART NINE: The Treasure of the City of Ladies

ONE

TWO

THREE

HISTORICAL POSTSCRIPT

Acknowledgement

About the Author

Praise for Blood Royal:

Also by Vanora Bennett

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

The Book of Peace

ONE

The page made himself as inconspicuous as possible at the back of the English delegation, looking at the vast tapestries on the walls of this dusty, splendid Parisian hall, clutching his box to his chest, waiting for his cue.

His latest master, the Duke of Clarence, had turned away from the repulsively fat French Queen, his hostess, whose eyes were glittering as wickedly as the jewels half-buried in the flesh of her slug fingers. Clarence fixed his eyes on the fourteen-year-old Princess at her side. The Princess was Owain’s age, and quite a pretty girl, Owain judged, with light brown hair and freckles and gentle eyes over a long nose; it would be sad if time turned her into a swollen monster like her mother. Owain also noticed that the Princess’s cheeks were very pink, which perhaps wasn’t surprising since her top garment was an enormous green velvet houppelande, magnificently trimmed with miniver fur – very stately, but far too hot for this bright May afternoon. Perhaps they felt the cold more in Paris, he thought. Or perhaps she was just blushing because she knew what was coming.

Thomas of Clarence opened his pop eyes wide, broadened his mouth into something like a smile and bowed slightly to the girl – the closest an English soldier duke would ever come to the elaborate manners of the French court. The Duke had been a little thrown, when he and his men had reached Paris at noon, by the news that the King of France was indisposed today and couldn’t meet him, and that the French side in these negotiations would be led by Queen Isabeau instead. After a whispered conference before the French delegation walked in, he’d decided to proceed regardless. But he wasn’t a ladies’ man. He didn’t know how to talk to women. He was far too abrupt.

‘Your Highness,’ he said to the Princess. ‘I am bidden by my master to seek you out and raise with you the question that is uppermost in his mind.’

He paused. She paused. There was an expectant silence from the two dozen other people in the hall.

‘If it please God, and your father and mother, he hopes you will marry him, and become our mistress and Queen of England,’ Thomas of Clarence barked, without the slightest attempt at diplomatic finesse.

There was a collective indrawn breath from the French side of the room. Owain knew the French were supposed to be grateful for this offer, because the French, though grand, were weak. Their King was ill. They said he went mad every time the moon was full. And while he was mad the French quarrelled among themselves. So they hadn’t managed to put up much resistance to the English army’s rampagings through Normandy. Now they were meant to think that this promise of a marriage between this Princess and the King of England must mean the King of England planned to stop his brother attacking Normandy and pursue an alliance with France and England instead. And, if the French nobility didn’t have to fight the English, they could go on plotting against each other to their hearts’ content. Still, Owain’s impression was that the French side of the room was not exactly grateful. Looking from one polite, squeamish, uncomfortable expression to another, he guessed: they want the marriage; they’d just rather have heard this another way. They can’t believe he’s made the proposal without days of entertainments and compliments, hints and manoeuvrings beforehand. They’re shocked.

One of the English dug Owain in the back. It jolted him back to what he was supposed to be doing. This was his moment. He took a dozen steps forward, with his heart thumping, his palms damp, terrifyingly aware of every eye in the room being on him. When he reached the middle of the hall, beside the Duke, he sank down on one knee, with the flamboyant arm and head movement he’d been practising (perhaps he could be courtly enough to make up for the Duke’s gruffness). Making sure he was perfectly steady on his knees, he opened the clasp on the little casket and threw it open so the jewel inside glittered.

Thomas of Clarence nodded and half-winked thanks at him, aware of the youth’s embarrassment. He was a kind man in his way. Then he stepped up to the casket to take out the huge ruby on its gold necklet and offer it to the Princess. Obligingly, she moved closer, looking down at Owain, her cheeks pinker than ever, her eyes opening very wide and the beginning of a smile on her lips. She wasn’t really seeing him, Owain thought; he was just something to fix her eyes on so she could look composed. She was embarrassed too. But he could see she had green eyes; beautiful eyes, he thought gratefully, gazing back at her, feeling his leg muscles strain in their precarious one-knee position, hoping he wouldn’t wobble. This part of the procedure, at least, was going well.

No one expected an interruption. So everyone was startled when a thin, reedy male voice suddenly said, with a note of challenge in it: ‘My family has a history of English marriages, after all.’

The Duke turned.

A young man, a few years older than Owain and the Princess, had appeared in the doorway. He was lounging there insolently, with a nasty little sneer on his handsome face. Owain’s leg suddenly started shaking so badly he thought he might fall. He shifted, put a hand quietly on the floor, and lowered himself to a more stable two-knee position. He didn’t need to worry about looking a fool before the entire room, at least; all the eyes had shifted to the young French nobleman in blue silk. As Owain looked furtively round to make sure no one had noticed his lapse of dignity, he saw just one pair of eyes still on him. To his horror, he realised it was the Princess staring down at him. But even that was all right. When she saw the panic in his eyes, it was as if she’d suddenly focused and realised there was a real person down there on his knees. She was looking straight at Owain, and reassuringly; she briefly screwed up her face and nodded at him.

Then she turned, like everyone else, to stare at the young man in the doorway. Still hot and cold with his own embarrassment, left stranded, kneeling in the middle of the room, Owain stared too.

‘You will recall that our sister Isabelle, now called to God,’ the young man was saying, eyeing the Duke of Clarence, ‘was also married to a king of England. The late lamented Richard II.’

Watching the French faces cringe, Owain realised that this unpleasant young man must be one of the Princess’s older brothers, a prince of France, and that he’d come to this room deliberately to pick a fight with the English delegation. The shame and embarrassment that swept over Owain now, on behalf of his master and of England, was of an altogether different magnitude to what he’d felt on his own account a moment before. He could hardly breathe.

Thomas of Clarence crossed himself briskly. ‘Late lamented,’ he agreed in a peaceable mutter, without letting his eyes meet those of his challenger. Owain could see he wasn’t going to get himself embroiled in that discussion. The Duke was a man who picked his fights carefully and this wasn’t a good fight for any English ambassador. Richard II had been deposed by a cousin after his French marriage nearly twenty years before; and Richard’s wife Isabelle, this Princess’s eldest sister, sent weeping and humiliated back to France. The new King, Henry of Lancaster, had tried to keep her in England: he’d wanted to remarry Isabelle to his own eldest son, the man who now reigned as King Henry V of England. But Isabelle had been proud enough to refuse. So Henry IV had let her go, but kept her dowry and jewels. They’d probably been spent on funding the English armies now skirmishing around Normandy. The French still thought of the new Lancastrian kings of England as usurpers. And they’d never forgiven the insult to their Princess.

The young Frenchman in blue stared at the English Duke, as if willing him to rise to the bait. Then, when he got no response, he went on, very deliberately and insultingly, ‘The late lamented King Richard II of England, who died by God knows whose orders.’

The silence deepened. No one did know how the deposed English King had died. The Duke of Clarence let his eyes rise to those of the French Prince. The Frenchman let a taunting half-smile flicker on his thin face. Everyone in the room seemed to stop breathing. The Duke’s face went red. He’d clearly forgotten all about being diplomatic with the French. He just wanted to hit the sneering Frenchman. With muscles tightening everywhere, he took a threatening step forward.

Owain flinched and looked down.

But, even while staring fixedly at his knees and the forgotten casket he was hugging, he was aware of the Princess just next to him. Now, unexpectedly, he felt her move into the middle of the fray.

Hardly seeming to know what she was doing, the Princess grabbed the Duke’s swinging arm, then swiftly turned that movement into a trusting gesture, putting his muscly limb with its clenched fist through her thin green-covered arm, and turning him gently but firmly away from the doorway and back towards the French Queen.

The Duke looked at her in dull surprise, but he let himself be turned. The Princess said, very quickly, in a voice so tense with suppressed panic that it somehow came out gay and flirtatious, ‘Sir, if it please God and my lord father and my lady mother, I will very willingly be your mistress and the Queen of England.’

Owain looked up, impressed by the Princess’s bravery. She’d brought the Duke right back to the French Queen’s feet. Looking to her mother for approval, and getting a brief nod, she went on, in a less formal way, with the beginning of laughter that might have been caused by relief in her throat, ‘After all, I’ve always been told I’d be a great lady one day.’

The Duke seemed to be adjusting only slowly to the change in tempo. He looked from the Princess to her mother. He glanced over to the doorway, where the Princess’s older brother, if that was who the insulting Frenchman was, was also staring open-mouthed at the girl. Then, very slowly, his head began to nod. Up, down, up, down. He was still thinking. It seemed hours before his mouth opened and a great choking guffaw of a laugh came out.

He didn’t laugh alone for more than a second. The whole hall filled with a wolf-pack’s howling; mirth and the release of fear mixed. The French Queen was cackling so hard her whole body was wobbling with it. She was so pleased with the way things were turning out that she didn’t even notice her pet squirrel grab the sweetmeat on her golden saucer and start chewing at it, sitting on its hind legs, watching the spectacle with bright round eyes. And all the French officials were giving their Princess soft, thankful looks as they snuffled into their hands.

It was the first time she had really understood what it meant to be Princess Catherine de Valois: that people would listen. It was the first time she had ever exercised any sort of power. It was the most exciting thing she’d ever done. Her heart was racing. There was blood drumming a tattoo in her ears.

Ignoring the baleful look her eldest brother Louis was giving her from the doorway, and the baleful look her mother was giving Louis from her carved chair – there’d be trouble between the two of them soon enough – Catherine breathed in deeply and let herself enjoy the laughter that meant her words had saved the day.

Then she looked down. The poor English page was still kneeling there, holding that casket. The English Duke had forgotten all about him. The handsome boy with blue eyes and floppy dark hair was gazing at her with the same soft, adoring look everyone was giving her now, but he was obviously also longing to get up off his knees and rush back off to the shadows. But she could do anything today. She could cut his agony short; she could save him too.

‘Is this for me?’ she said, touching the Duke’s arm and indicating the casket with a nod. ‘How beautiful …’ and she bent her neck for the Duke to lower the jewel over her head. Startled, but still chuckling, the Duke reached out for the necklet, murmured, ‘Thank you, Owain,’ and leaned over her to do his courtly duty. She was aware of the English page with the name that wasn’t English at all scrambling to his feet and moving quickly away, free at last now his master had dismissed him. She could imagine the ache in his knees; she hoped he was grateful.

Then she concentrated on the English Duke’s thick, corded neck and the giant fingers fumbling over the chased gold at her throat. Thomas of Clarence was rather like a bull with a ring through his nose, she thought, a little smugly: dangerously strong, but quite easy to steer once you had a hold of the ring. Would his brother, the King of England – now, just possibly, her future husband – be as amenable? She hoped so. But she also found herself hoping Henry of England wouldn’t have that thick neck and pop eyes and grizzling temple, and that he wouldn’t wear the muddy, dull greens and browns that these Englishmen were all covered in. Letting her mind flit off to a future in which an archbishop put the crown of England on her head, in a blaze of candlelight and jewels, the husband her imagination sketched in was as young as she was. He was tall and slender and lithe; with dark blue eyes and floppy black hair and a shy, adoring smile.

The ducal fumbling seemed to take a very long time.

The first time she glanced up, she saw her little brother Charles, looking very pale and much younger than his twelve years, stumbling out of the hall past Louis and into the corridor, where she could just see Christine de Pizan beckoning to him from the shadows. She hoped that meant Charles was going to be fed. Neither of the royal children had been fed all day. She was suddenly achingly hungry herself now she remembered how long it was since she’d last eaten. But Christine was as loyal and busy as a terrier, and good at gingering up the sullen, scary servants into making them meals. And perhaps Charles would save some of the food for her for later.

The second time she glanced up, as the Duke muttered ‘There!’ in a kind of thick-fingered triumph, she was relieved to see Louis had vanished too. There was no one in the doorway but men-at-arms.

TWO

It was sundown before Christine de Pizan got out to the palace gatehouse. She’d managed to persuade the Queen’s cook to part with some bits of meat and bread for the two youngest royal children, since their own cook was nowhere to be seen (which was unsurprising, perhaps; the children’s servants hadn’t been paid for two months, since the King’s latest bout of illness began, and you couldn’t rely on the Queen for anything). Suppressing the rage she habitually felt when she saw how that idle, self-indulgent Bavarian schemer let her own youngest son and daughter be neglected, Christine had tucked an unusually quiet Charles into bed. Catherine, she supposed, was still in the audience hall. She’d made Charles promise to save his sister some meat. Neither Christine nor the boy had had the heart to mention the proposed abomination of an English marriage that the Queen had just so shamefully accepted.

Christine was really only supposed to read with the Prince and Princess – to guide their minds. That was a natural appointment for someone who’d written as much as she had, to the acclaim of all Europe, about how princes should be educated. But, whenever their father was in the grip of his demons, Christine also found herself going every day to the Hotel Saint-Paul, the garden palace their grandfather had built just inside his new city walls, to the cobwebby children’s annex and their mother’s overheated, parrot-filled, sweetmeat-loaded quarters, where Christine’s only role was to play nursemaid-cum-mother: making sure they had enough to eat, and clothes to wear. It wrought havoc on her concentration and disrupted her writing and the direction of her manuscript-copying workshop. But how could she do anything less? She was grateful to poor, kindly, afflicted King Charles for letting her live out her life in France – she’d had no desire, when she was widowed, to go back to Venice – and for showing her such favour over the years. And she felt sorry for him, in his troubles, and sorry for the children too. So quiet, the pair of them, as if neglect had withered their tongues (though Christine had noticed that Catherine, at least, was now becoming resourceful enough to marshal what she needed in the way of food and friends even without words; using the wistful looks and ways of a girl coming to her adult beauty to charm the people she needed. And she’d risen to the occasion today, all right, with a quip that had pleased everyone).

But this wasn’t the time to worry about little Charles and Catherine. All Christine had time to feel now was anxiety on her own account. She whisked her wiry body briskly towards the head guard. How had it got so late? Outside the Hotel Saint-Paul, she could already see a glitter of red on the river, up past the Island and the old royal palace and Notre Dame Cathedral. Night was dangerous. The men were ready to close the gatehouse, locking the inhabitants inside for safety.

‘You’re late,’ one of them said roughly to her.

‘It’s only ten minutes’ walk to my house,’ she said firmly back. ‘You know I live just nearby.’

The man shook his head doubtfully. They all knew the figures: ten bodies a night delivered to the morgue at the Louvre. Ten throats cut on the streets after honest folk were supposed to be inside and asleep. Paris was a frightening place these days, even now, when things were relatively quiet.

‘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 her go. 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 on to it. Christine recognised 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 hoofs was muffled by ankle-deep filth, he gazed at the pink blossom 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 realised, 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 Greve port. 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 any more 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 civilisation 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 even 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 blonde 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 son-in-laws, 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 grey-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: Môn, 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 favour 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 realising 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 doubt 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 offence.

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 hypnotised 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, overemphasising 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 realised, 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.’

‘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 north-eastern 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 realised, 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 recognise 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 civilised 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 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

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.

Trying to still her thoughts, Catherine closed her eyes. When Charles burrowed his small, hot hand trustingly into hers and whispered: ‘Catherine, are you awake? Don’t let them send you to England. Please,’ she squeezed his hand back, and felt guilty for having hoped, for a moment, for escape.

FOUR

Owain sat at the table in the thin morning light. Upstairs he could hear the excited voices of five-year-old Jacquot and three-year-old Perrette, about to burst down if only the serving girl could persuade them to put their clothes on. No one moved to touch the meal. Owain didn’t like to ask why, though he was hungry. He just drank them all in, all those thin, dark, clever faces, enjoying being with this family that had grown up together. He didn’t remember his own mother. He’d been brought up in packs of boys, being taught by gruff men to hold a sword and a bow. He was unsure how to act in this easy intimacy. He waited, shyly, for enlightenment.

A bang at the courtyard door shocked him, but everyone else relaxed. ‘Jean,’ said Jean, and Jehanette rushed out to open up. A tall blond man in his twenties was there, swinging off his mule; very good-looking, dressed more richly than anyone in the de Pizan or de Castel family, in confident blues and greens, with a sash of red and a touch of gold at neck and wrist; twinkling cheerfully down at Jehanette. He strode in, stopped at the sight of Owain; then bowed and clapped the boy on the back as the explanations about the guest flowed around him.

‘Delighted,’ the blond Jean said, with an easy warmth Owain didn’t know from his years in draughty castle corridors among Englishmen, but remembered from a time further back; a warmth that made Owain feel this man, too, might soon become a friend. Blond Jean raised an eyebrow at dark Jean de Castel; jerked a casual shoulder back outside. ‘Wouldn’t you like to eat before we go?’ said the dark Jean; though he was clearly ready to take his lead from his friend and miss breakfast if that was required.

But blond Jean shrugged and gave in with a laugh. ‘Hungry?’ he said; a man of few words. ‘Well, after all, why not? Let’s.’ He put down the big wooden-backed document case he was carrying and lounged back on a stool. Politely, he picked up a piece of meat with his knife and laid it on a chunk of bread, but he only ate a mouthful. Dark Jean didn’t eat much either; an atmosphere of strain and haste had come upon the family.

When the two young men had gone, a few minutes later, dark Jean taking the mule Christine had had from the palace last night, Christine said: ‘Jean’s working with the other Jean at the chancellery. It’s important for us all that it goes well. Luckily Jean’s friend’s father is Henri de Marle …’ She paused and looked at Owain, who only looked bewildered. ‘The Chancellor of France now,’ she explained, with none of last night’s softness, just haughty astonishment that anyone could fail to know something so vital, ‘since the Duke of Burgundy left Paris; he was president of the Parliament before. A good connection …’

She bustled around, picking things up; preparing for the day; not looking at him. She was putting things in a basket. When Owain plucked up courage to speak again, she took a moment to turn round in the direction of his voice, as if she didn’t really want him there. ‘My Duke is busy with your Queen today,’ he ventured; ‘a hunting expedition. I’m not needed.’ He sensed, from the hard line of her back, that she didn’t want to be reminded that he was the servant of an English duke. ‘So perhaps … I could … go with you, if you’re going into Paris?’ he finished, in a breathless hurry. He was longing to see the city; but he was a little scared of venturing out alone.

She said briskly, ‘I’ll be busy here for a while.’ She didn’t meet his eye. Perhaps she was regretting the warmth of their conversation last night, he thought. She didn’t like the English, and even if he wasn’t really an Englishman, and knew he’d never be considered as one back home, he could see that, in her mind, he might still count as one. For a moment, he felt disconsolate.

But only for a moment.

Then the memory of the books came back to him. Brightly, Owain asked her if he could spend his free day reading one of her books, if she would choose him one; and then she did turn and reward him with a smile of surprising depth and intimacy. ‘You really want to learn something, then,’ she murmured, in her magnificent throaty rumble; nodding as if she were surprised and impressed. He glowed. He wanted to impress her; he could sense she knew many things he’d be interested to find out.

She didn’t say any more. She just led him back to the scriptorium where he’d slept, looking approvingly at the way he’d tidied his things into a corner so as not to be in the way. She hesitated over the books on the bookshelf for a few moments, picking at first one, then another. Finally her hand pulled one out. She set it up on a lectern and left in silence.

Owain read.

He’d expected it to be hard. He’d expected to be out of his depth. But the story she’d chosen was a very simple one. It was the story of her life. It was like nothing he’d ever read or heard before. Even the poems and stories he remembered from long ago, before England, back there – the legends, the tales of ancient kings, the songs of praise – weren’t so shockingly personal. Before he knew what had happened, he’d been swept off into another time and place, lost, for the first time, between the covers of a book, experiencing the love that had once been in the newlywed Christine’s heart.

The first night of our marriage, I could already feel

His great goodness, for he never did to me

Any outrage which would have harmed me,

But, before it was time to get up,

He kissed me, I think, one hundred times,

Without asking for any other base reward:

Indeed the sweet heart loves me well.

Prince, he makes me mad for love,

When he says that he is all mine;

He will make me die of sweetness;

Indeed the sweet heart loves me well.

Owain turned the page, realising only now, with a sudden sickness in his heart, that he already knew that Christine had been widowed young. This story wouldn’t end well.

‘My husband was the head of the household then: he was a young, wise and sensible gentleman, well-liked by princes and all those who used to work with him as King’s Secretary, a profession that enabled him to sustain his family. But already Fortune had consigned me to its wheel, preparing to confront me with adversity and knock me down. It did not want me to enjoy the goodness of my husband and killed him in the prime of his life. It took him from me in his prime youth, when he was thirty-four and I twenty-five. I was left in charge of two small children and a big household. Of course, I was full of bitterness, missing his sweet company and my past happiness, which had lasted no more than ten years. Aware of the tribulations that would face me, wanting to die rather than to live, remembering also that I had promised him my faith and love, I decided I would not remarry. And so I fell into the valley of tribulation.’

Owain flicked forward.

‘I could not exactly know the situation regarding his income. For the usual conduct of husbands is not to communicate and explain their revenues to their wives, an attitude that often brings troubles, as my experience proves. Such behaviour does not make sense when the wives are not stupid but sensible and behaving wisely … I had been so used to enjoying an easy life, and now I had to steer the boat that had been left in the storm without a captain. Problems sprang at me from everywhere; lawsuits and trials surrounded me as if this were the natural fate of widows. Those who owed me money attacked me so that I would not dare ask anything about it. Soon I was prevented from receiving my husband’s inheritance, which was placed in the King’s hands … The leech of Fortune did not stop sucking my blood for fourteen years, so that if one misfortune ceased, another ordeal happened, in so many different ways that it would be too long and too tedious to tell even half of it. It did not stop sucking my blood until I had nothing left.’

Owain jumped. It took him a second to remember where he was. He was in the scriptorium. It must be midday. The sun was brilliant through the square of the window. And Christine was somewhere behind, moving very quietly so as not to disturb him.

He turned round to her; ducked his head in the beginnings of a polite bow. There was something strange now about looking at her; she was as fiercely self-possessed as ever, and three times his age, but he knew so many intimate things about her … He’d felt her love as if it were his own … and he was in pain for her past grief … and he thought he understood why, after all those troubles brought on by her widow’s weak helplessness, she’d be quick to attack now if she ever felt belittled. It explained even her sharpness, at moments, with him.

Perhaps she saw. She was nodding to herself; she looked warmer than she had in the morning. She didn’t acknowledge the traces of tears on his cheeks. But she did nod her head down at the basket on her arm.

‘I’m going to run my errands now,’ she said; and suddenly she smiled that brilliant smile. ‘Would you like to come into Paris with me?’

Christine hated the Butchery. There was no alternative but to pass Saint-Jacques of the Butchery Church on the Right Bank, on the way to the Island that was still the heart of Paris: they had to walk by that great show-off church building that the rich bully-boys had spared no expense on, making its stained-glass windows glow and its saints glitter with gold. But at least she needn’t tell Owain any more about the butchers, and what they’d done last year, she thought, averting her gaze. He knew enough. The streets of the Butchery were strangely quiet these days: the calves and cows, lowing uneasily, still came here to be slaughtered from Cow Island, their flat last pasture in mid-river, and the tanners still hung skins on ropes from side to side of their street to cure them, like great stinking brown sheets, but now that the butchers weren’t allowed to sell on their home territory any more, the district had lost its old swagger and bustle and arrogance. When Owain asked, ‘Why is that church chained up?’ she only pursed her lips and pretended not to hear. He asked again. With all the old rage coming back at the oafs she could suddenly remember, yelling their slogans and thrusting their torches priapically through the smoke and darkness, so her throat was so tight she thought she might choke, she said, shortly and incoherently, ‘What sense could there ever have been in men of the streets – monkeys like these; animals – trying to imitate things they don’t understand.’

It wasn’t a question; nor was it an explanation he understood. He just looked vaguely hurt, as if it might be a slur on him. She took his arm and led him quickly away from the Butchery. There was no reason to linger. Enough of it was blocked up – another part of the rebels’ punishment – to make it as hard to get to the big ostentatious houses of the butcher clans, the Thiberts and St Yons, as it had always been to penetrate the stinking back alleys: Disembowelment Lane and Pig’s-Trotter Alley and Flaying Yard and Skinners’ Court and the Tripery and Calf Square and Hoof Place.

She crossed herself and passed on. It was only once they were safely on the approach to the river; almost underneath the turrets and crenellations of the Châtelet, with the sun glittering peacefully on the water and the cheerful cries of the boatmen ahead – and behind them the Island from which France was governed, and behind that the alluring world of prayers and vineyards and books of the Left Bank and the University – that she felt the pent-up breath ease out of her.

In a gentler voice, she said: ‘“The beauty of the world lies in things being in their own element – stars in the sky, birds in the air, fish in water, men on earth.”’ She meant: There is an order in creation; the likes of butchers shouldn’t dream of trying to seize power from the King that God has anointed. But she could see Owain stare; she could see him trying to tease meaning out of her words. Whatever did they teach boys at the court of England? she wondered; he was completely unlettered. ‘William of Conches wrote that,’ she said, smiling at Owain, enjoying his visible desire for knowledge so much that she repressed her irritation at his masters for leaving him such an ignoramus. ‘It’s a thought I like to remember, when I see the world stretched out before me like this, in the sunlight; when all is well everywhere you look.’

She could see him trying the words out in his own mouth, experimenting with them in a mutter. She knew it wouldn’t be long before he’d try them out on someone else. Then his eyes slipped sideways again; she knew now where he was looking. Over to the Left Bank. With a little burst of happiness that she’d recognised one of her own sort so easily, she saw he couldn’t keep from glancing at the University.

But Owain was astonished enough by the King’s new Notre Dame bridge, just completed, with its seventeen wooden pillars and sixty-five narrow new timber houses and the mills rushing and grinding below, between the columns, to be distracted again from his contemplation of the University. The bridge took them at a sedate pace to the Island, where, until this King’s father had moved his family to the gentler pleasures of the Hotel Saint-Paul a few decades ago, kings throughout history had made their homes under the hundreds of pinnacles of the Royal Palace. ‘That’s where Jean’s gone with Jean de Marle,’ Madame de Pizan said proudly, gesturing at the pinnacles on the right before pointing out the enormous mass of the cathedral on their left, with its strange outside ribs of stone. She showed him the market at the Notre Dame approach, too, on the way to the scriptoria of the Island book business. And she let him peep inside the little red door in the side of the cathedral – the one placed just at the spot, on the body of the church, that would remind worshippers of the spear-wound in the Flesh of the Divine Martyr – and watched him marvel at the soaring height of the slim spires, made of honey stone so delicate it seemed like lace, and, further up than he’d have thought possible, at the luminous sky erupting through a vast open fretwork of coloured glass that glowed ruby and sapphire and emerald. Looking up was like seeing an explosion. Owain craned his neck towards the glorious luminosity of the heavens until it hurt. Time stood still. Somewhere in the candlelit gloom around him he was aware of male voices chanting; one sustained, ever renewed, bass note, with a host of others rising and falling in a complex movement around it: working the same magic on his ears that the colours he was staring at were working on his dazzled eyes. He knew exactly what Madame de Pizan meant when, without breaking the spell, she murmured, ‘“I am that living and fiery essence of the divine substance that glows in the beauty of the fields. I shine in the water. I burn in the sun and the moon and the stars.”’ The unfamiliar words thrilled through him with something that felt like recognition; he’d never understood how God could be light until he’d come to stand in this space, staring up, hearing what felt like the music of the spheres. He was beginning to understand how his new acquaintance’s mind worked, too, well enough, at least, to know that she’d also murmur straight afterwards, ‘St Hildegard wrote that,’ and put her hand on his arm, before he had a chance to ask who St Hildegard had been (but he could ask later). He could tell she’d nudge him quickly back to the street, where the light was just light, and not poetry and prayer and honey and song spun together, but, even if it no longer made him feel he could float into the heavens, it was still beautiful light, and the sun was warm on his back.

‘They call Paris the mother of liberal arts and letters,’ Christine said breathlessly, in her deep, throaty, musical voice with its rolling southern r’s. She walked quickly and easily, propelling her lean little body so expertly over the dirt so that her feet didn’t seem to touch the ground. Owain liked the respect in her voice. ‘Equal to ancient Athens,’ he added. He was just repeating a chance remark he’d heard somewhere; but he felt proud when she turned to him in surprise, and rewarded him with a glowing smile.

‘The other colours you dilute in water, with gum … pine gum or fir gum,’ Anastaise said, her voice flat and concentrating, watching the thick liquid hover before dropping into the little vessel. ‘It’s only these two – the red and white lead – that you mix with egg white. Minium, the red one’s called. The white is ceruse.’

They’d found her fumbling with the bolts at the courtyard gate when they got back to Christine’s home in Old Temple Street, Owain loaded up with Christine’s purchases – parchment scrolls and a cloth-wrapped package they’d stopped to pick up from a tiny, bent-over goldsmith in a workshop filled with slanting sunlight and glittering dust, one of several workshops they’d dropped in at. She’d looked up in relief as they’d walked up. ‘I can’t open it,’ she’d said, without preliminaries, and nodded down at herself. Owain realised why: she was trying to do the bolts with one hand. The other big raw hand was nursing a bunch of wilting blue cornflowers, wrapped in muslin.

Anastaise was a big, blowsy woman in her middle years, who towered over Christine. She had a bold look in her eye and a ready tongue, and a rude good humour shining on her reddish cheeks; but she and the fine-drawn, high-minded Madame de Pizan were clearly on the best of terms. ‘They say Paris is the centre of the world of illuminations,’ Christine told Owain proudly, as they walked inside and put their packages down on the scriptorium table, ‘and you’ve met some of the finest illuminators and miniaturists in the world today; but, whatever you hear anywhere else, Anastaise is the greatest of them all.’

‘Ahhh – get along with you,’ Anastaise replied roughly, but Owain could see her colour up, redder than before; and he caught her smiling to herself as she tucked her greasy pepper-and-salt hair back inside her kerchief.

He stayed in the room, hovering, unwilling to go and miss finding out how this queen of illuminators worked, but uncertain what to do with himself as Anastaise got to work and Christine opened the big ledger in the corner to enter her purchases. He whistled under his breath and tried to be inconspicuous, and watched. He was going over in his mind their brief stop at the illuminators’ table on the way out of the busy scriptorium in central Paris, where Christine had bought the parchment scrolls. The little man in there, wearing a splodged apron, almost a hunchback, with piercing pale eyes under a bare head, only a few wisps of baby hair still wafting out of its freckles, had caught the newcomer trying to see what he was drawing.

‘You want to see, don’t you?’ asked the little man, whom Owain now knew was Jean Malouel (until last year the head painter to the Duke of Burgundy). And he’d scuttled off, sideways, like a crab, Owain thought, to the shelves and tables at the back of the room, where unattended pieces of parchment were laid out, weighed down with stones and pots – which Owain guessed must be uncompleted work at different stages, drying, waiting for the next coat of colour, or just to be bound.

‘Here,’ Malouel said finally, ‘no one is supposed to see this; but you’ve got no one here to tell, have you?’ He beckoned Owain over. There was a pleased, expectant grin on his face.

The little square was a jewel: so bright and vividly alive that Owain gasped. He’d never seen anything like this. It was almost like reality. No, it was better than reality: more perfect than anything he’d ever have thought it possible to imagine. The world writ small; but with its everyday flaws and dirt and minor uglinesses painted out. He could see at once that it showed the Royal Palace he’d just walked past outside, though from an angle he didn’t yet know. He recognised the blond walls, the gatehouse at the western tip of the Island, and the blue-green roofs, with tall round cones topping the towers, mostly in the same almost turquoise blue as the roofs, but a few marked out in a red as rich as rubies. The delicate tracery of the Holy Chapel tower, with its rose window and fingers of stone rising to the heavens, topped by a gleaming golden cross. The river, lapping against the green by the shore, with a boat and a blue-coated boatman approaching the steps of the gatehouse. The glory of daylight and sunshine. His eyes dwelt greedily on the paler greens of the picture’s foreground – the Left Bank, showing early summer grass and sprouting vines, with each tiny tendril somehow got down separately, and three bare-legged labourers, one in blue, one in white, one in red, backs bowed with effort, reaping their corn, swinging their scythes and sweating in their field, under their straw hats. But it was the blue of the sky that truly caught Owain’s imagination. It deepened, from a pale, delicate near-white behind the rooftops, through a thousand peaceful shades, to the deep, near-night colour of the summer heaven at its heights. How had the artist done that, he wondered; bending down; peering closer; not quite daring to touch. How could anyone but God have so effortlessly imitated the Creator’s design?

Malouel had met Owain’s eye; bashful and welcoming, both at once. Sagely, he’d said: ‘That’s June, that one. My three nephews are doing it – it’s good work. You can see that, can’t you? … But what you don’t know yet is that now you’ve seen it, you’ll see the June outside differently from now on. It changes your eye forever, seeing something as good as this. You mark my words.’

Owain remembered that now, as he edged closer to where Anastaise was beginning to lay out careful brushstrokes of whitish paint on her own small, empty square drawn on a leaf of parchment covered in neatly sloping writing. There was another blank – a margin – around the edge of the page. She’d already told him the cornflowers she’d harvested that morning, at dewfall, from the garden of the Beguine convent by the Hotel Saint-Paul, where she was a lay sister, were the ingredient that gave the azure blue of the sky that had so mesmerised him while he was looking at the Limbourg brothers’ picture of June. And he wanted to see her make that.

Quietly, from the other side of the room, from above her ledgers, Christine watched Owain inch forward as Anastaise pulled the heads off the cornflowers, ground them with mortar and pestle until there was nothing but a slimy blue juice in the bottom, and dipped her paintbrush into it. She let herself enjoy the pleasure that the boy’s intent gaze brought her. It was so long since she’d seen innocence this childlike. It made her feel young.

‘There, you see,’ Anastaise said contemplatively. Owain didn’t jump; but he realised she was talking to him, holding out the square to him, and he was grateful. She’d filled the page with wet, gleaming blue the colour of the sky. ‘That’s the first layer,’ she went on. ‘It’s not how it’s going to look in the end, though. To get the colour the way you want, you need to paint over it – four or five layers, one by one.’

‘What will you paint on top of the blue?’ Owain asked, but she only rumbled with laughter. ‘Listen to the boy!’ she chortled. ‘We’re not there yet. Do you know how long this will take to dry?’

He felt abashed. Malouel had told him. ‘Ten days,’ he said.

She nodded; gave him a twinkle.

‘Learning already,’ she replied; then, play-reproachfully, ‘and that’s just one coat. So it can take a good couple of months to do the purple of a cloak or the green of a wood properly. But it’s important to get it right. The beauty is in the brightness. And it’s important to make it as beautiful as you can.’

‘May I …?’ Owain essayed, growing bolder. ‘May I see something you’ve already finished?’

She put her big hands on her big hips, gave him her bold stare, and burst out laughing. ‘You’ve got the bug, all right,’ she said. ‘Madame Christine; you’ve infected this one, good and proper.’

Christine was smiling too, from her corner. ‘Show him this,’ she said; and pulled out another book from the shelf. She brought it forward to the table. Owain hardly noticed the text. His eyes were drawn only to the picture under Christine’s pale fingers: another little square full of more moving, breathing vitality than seemed possible. It showed a woman in a modest blue dress, whose white kerchief was pulled up in imitation of a proper fashionable two-horned court headdress. The woman was kneeling in the centre of a group of women, and handing over a book to a magnificent red and gold lady with a green and gold silk sash and a rich jewelled headdress and ermine sleeves; a lady sitting with two attendants on scarlet and green cushions by a mullioned window, hung with fleur-de-lys cloths in blue and gold, and with the sky outside glowing the azure blue Owain now knew how to prepare. There was so much to look at; so much to take in.

‘That’s you,’ he said, turning to Christine. ‘Giving your book to the Queen.’

The painted Christine looked just as she did in real life: alert, watchful, ready both to fight and charm. But the Queen of France had deteriorated since this picture was made: the painted Queen was still a beautiful woman, with traces of kindness lingering on her face; though you could also see in her set eyes that she’d brook no one else’s nonsense. The much fatter, older person he’d seen in the flesh yesterday had become a spoiled, glinty-eyed monster. He’d smelt the selfishness, the wilfulness, coming off her; he’d known her at once for the kind of woman who’d stop at nothing to get her own way.

‘I knew at once,’ Owain said warmly, ‘what a picture.’ But he was wondering as he spoke, and saw Anastaise dimpled with pleasure, whether she’d deliberately made the Queen seem younger and kinder – she didn’t seem the type for flattery. Instead, he asked, ‘How do you get the gold so bright?’

Anastaise was breaking open one of Christine’s packages to show him the wafer-thin sheet of beaten gold and beginning to explain that you took beaten egg-white, without water, and painted it over the place the gold was to go, then, moisturising the end of the same brush in your mouth, you touched it on to the corner of the leaf, ready cut, then lifted it very quickly, put it on the prepared place and spread it out with a separate dry brush. ‘And whatever you do, don’t breathe; or your piece of gold will fly off and you’ll have the worst trouble finding it again. And then it’s the same as the painting. You let it dry. You put another layer on. You let it dry. You put another layer on. It’s all just patience.’ When the gold was ready, you polished it – with the tooth of a bear or a beaver; or with an agate, or an amethyst stone – first quite gently, then harder, then so hard that the sweat stood out on your forehead.

Christine slipped away. Owain was so enthralled he didn’t notice.

Jehanette’s maid was in the kitchen, preparing a meal. The children were playing with their grandmother upstairs; while Jehanette was at the Halles market. ‘Take some meat and bread and wine out to Anastaise,’ Christine directed. ‘But tell the boy to come here and eat with me.’

She didn’t think why. It was an instinct: like warming yourself at the fire, or opening your shutters when the sun was bright. Usually she liked her quiet meals with Anastaise: everyone else out of the house; hearing the idle talk the beguine brought with her from the convent where the sisters worked in the cloth trade of Temple New Town, or tending the poor. The beguines knew everything; and no one more than Anastaise. But today she wanted some time alone with this boy with hope in his eyes and hunger in his mind. It was a waste of his intelligence to let him go back to soldiery.

He came quickly, eagerly, glowing as if someone had applied gold leaf to him.

He said, with genuine warmth: ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ and, taking a piece of bread and a slab of meat and a slice of onion on his knife, without waiting to be asked, as if he felt at home, while munching, ‘This has been the best day …’ Then he paused, and she saw the thought he couldn’t name begin to take form on his brow: ‘I only wish …’

She said, a little brusquely, cutting him off: ‘Eat up. I find I have some time today after all. When we’re done, I’ll take you over the river if you like. We could look at the university districts. I can see you’re interested.’

The look on his face was reward enough. It encouraged her to go on.

‘Tell me,’ she said, leaning forward, supporting her little heart-shaped face with both her hands, and caressing the boy with the gentlest look imaginable, ‘you’re a bright boy; I can see you want knowledge; and, as I understand it, your family history means you aren’t encumbered by estates that would take up all your time either. So why haven’t you thought of giving a bit of time to educating yourself?’ She nodded hypnotically at him, willing him on. ‘You could, you know …’

She saw him stop looking happy. His face got a pinched, miserable expression she didn’t like at all.

‘What, go to the University, you mean?’ he said in a small voice. ‘In England?’

He didn’t know how to explain it to her. He didn’t know how to summarise all those years of snubs and sneers from beefy English pageboys and knights and even servants – the jokes about being a wild man from Wales, an eternal outsider – in a voice that wouldn’t betray his feelings. ‘I never thought about it, because I don’t think I could. You see, I’m foreign …’ He gave her a desperate look. ‘Welsh,’ he added.

She looked bewildered. ‘So?’ she said; ‘I’m Venetian by birth; and Guillebert de … well, no point in making a list. But there’s hardly a native-born Parisian at the University here, or in the world of letters at all. We’re all some sort of foreigner. What difference would it make to you, being foreign?’

Owain tried to keep the memory of the sneers he was so used to out of his ears, the mocking of his singsong intonation in English. But he couldn’t quite stop tears prickling behind his eyelids.

He took a moment to compose himself. He managed a smile. ‘In England,’ he explained, striving for a lightness that still somehow eluded him, ‘since the uprising in Wales, you can’t even marry an Englishwoman if you’re Welsh, not without a special dispensation allowing you to be considered an Englishman, which is impossible to get. We’re a conquered race, you see …’

He looked warily at Christine from under his lashes. Once he’d believed there would be two Welsh universities; they’d been ordered into existence by Owain Glynd?r when he’d been crowned at Machynlleth ten years before. How could he explain all the details of that history? He thought she’d think he was making excuses. He thought she might get angry.

But Christine wasn’t angry. To his surprise, he thought she looked strangely sympathetic. She was gently nodding her head. ‘So you’d have to teach yourself,’ she said slowly. ‘Like I did.’

Then she laughed; and she was laughing with him, not at him, he could see. ‘My God,’ she said, with grim satisfaction, as if she’d been proved right yet again. ‘I don’t know what would become of our University if there were no foreigners! How provincial the English are …’

In this respect, at least, Owain found he was guiltily enjoying her contempt for his adopted country – so much he almost nodded.

She put a sympathetic hand on his, and looked deep into his eyes again. ‘Shall I tell you how things are here?’ she went on. ‘Norman, Picard, English, German, Fleming, Provençal, Spaniard, Venetian, Roman, you name it, they’re all here. The colleges have bursaries, too, so good students don’t have to pay for their own studies. You just have to enrol at a college that deals with your nation – they count four nations, and the one that’s called the English nation takes the English and the Germans and Flemings and Dutch too. Why ever wouldn’t they take the Welsh? If you were ever to want to go to university in Paris, there would be no problem. And if they turned you down, it certainly wouldn’t be because of your nationality.’

There was a deliberately comical look of astonishment in her eyes at that outlandish notion. She was shaking her head.

‘Eat up,’ she said, suddenly purposeful, and he let himself be drawn to his feet. ‘Let’s go.’

It was late when they came back from the University. But Owain’s eyes were still shining.

She said: ‘I’ll put another book out for you. For when you’ve finished this one. It’s one of my early ones, something I wrote when Jean was going to go away to England. Advice to a young man; on how to learn to learn. I thought it might appeal.’

His face lightened even more; then suddenly darkened with memory. He said: ‘But I’ll have to go …’

She said: ‘How long can you stay?’

He fell silent. He scuffed one toe against the other foot. She could see him remembering his pointless existence; waiting in palace corridors; being left out by English pageboys and aides with a proper claim to their lords’ time. ‘My lord of Clarence will be off in a day or two,’ he said eventually. He eyed her for a moment, as if thinking.

What Owain was fumbling towards articulating was that he wanted to find a way to stay on after Clarence left. These Parisians – fearful as they all seemed, with the memory of their conflict so recent on them that you could practically smell the blood on them, so fresh that they didn’t yet have words to talk about it – were, at the same time, full of a joy he didn’t know: the pleasure of being here, where they were, doing what they did. They knew something that made it almost irrelevant if the great men of the day destroyed each other over their heads. They might tremble at the profound crisis they were caught up in, and mourn the passing of the established order of the world they knew. But they believed in something universal that couldn’t be destroyed. They were putting their hope in beauty. Owain had never had a day when so many enticing futures opened up before him. He didn’t know whether he wanted to go and enrol at the University, or just stay in this house with these warm, kindly people and read himself into the life they lived. But he wanted to be here.

‘Did Anastaise tell you?’ she asked, as if she were changing the subject. ‘She took a poultice this morning to an old woman with sores under her arms that Anastaise said looked like plague sores.’

She saw the flicker on his face; she didn’t think it was fear. ‘I’m wondering,’ she went on. ‘Perhaps I should tell my lord of Clarence you’ve been exposed to the miasma, out here in the town. Perhaps I should suggest you stay on until a doctor gives you the all-clear.’ She poured him a cup of wine. ‘You could rejoin them at Calais later,’ she murmured; the voice of temptation. Then, realising that the Duke of Clarence might well be heading straight back to Normandy to go on making war, she added, with asperity, ‘or wherever the Duke prefers.’ She put the jug down. There was a hint of mischievous laughter in her voice when she said: ‘After all, it would be a service to him to make sure his men didn’t get ill.’ She could take Owain to meet a friend or two from the University in the next few days; set wheels in motion.

‘But,’ Owain said, hesitating naively, ‘there wouldn’t be a risk of illness. I haven’t really been exposed to any miasma, have I?’ Hastily, he added: ‘Though I would love to stay …’

She caught his eye – a challenge. She raised her eyebrows. Cheerfully, she said: ‘Well, then – lie! It would be in a good cause. I can’t imagine God would mind.’ And when she saw the disbelieving grin spread over his face, she knew he would.

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