JOANNA HICKSON
The Agincourt Bride

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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Copyright © Joanna Hickson 2013

Joanna Hickson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007446971

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780007446988

Version: 2019-01-07

Dedication

For Ian and Barley – the two who share my life, thank goodness.

The House of Valois

Epigraph

“It is written in the stars that I and my heirs shall rule France and yours shall rule England.

Our nations shall never live in peace. You and Henry have done this.”

Charles, Dauphin of France

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The House of Valois

Epigraph

Narrator’s Note

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part Two

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Part Three

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Part Four

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

Extract from The Tudor Bride

About the Author

About the Publisher

NARRATOR’S NOTE

January 1439

Respected reader,

Before we embark on this story together, I think I should explain that I am not a historian or a chronicler or indeed any kind of scholar. I did not even read Latin until my dear and present husband undertook to teach me on dark winter nights by the fire in our London house, when a more dutiful goodwife would have been doing her embroidery. Luckily my days of being dutiful are behind me. I am now fifty-two years of age and I have had quite enough of stitching and scrubbing and answering becks and calls. I have been a servant and I have been a courtier and now I am neither so I have become a scribe, for one good reason; to tell the story of a brave and beautiful princess who wanted the impossible – to be happy. Of course, here at the start of the tale, I am not going to tell you whether she succeeded but I can tell you that some momentous events, scurrilous intrigues and monstrously evil acts conspired to prevent it.

Two things encouraged me to write this story. The first was those Latin lessons, for they enabled me to read the second, which was a cache of letters found when I used a key entrusted to me for safekeeping by my beloved mistress, the aforementioned princess, to open a secret compartment in the gift she bequeathed to me on her untimely death. These were confidential letters, written at turbulent times in her life, and she was never able to send them to their intended recipients. But they filled gaps in my knowledge and shed light on her character and the reasons she chose the paths she followed.

Sadly, for the most part, she was powerless to shape the direction of her own life, however hard she tried. But there were one or two occasions when she, and I too by extraordinary circumstance, managed to steer the course of events in a direction favourable to us both, although this was never recorded in the chronicles of history.

I do not have much time for chroniclers anyway. They invariably have a hidden agenda, observing events from one side only, and even then you cannot trust them to get a story right. Some are no better than the ink-slingers who nail their pamphlets to St Paul’s Cross. One of them got my name wrong when he recorded the list of my mistress’ companions back in the days of Good King Harry. ‘Guillemot’ he called me, if you can believe it! Who but a short-sighted, misogynistic monk would saddle a woman with the same name as an ugly black auk-bird? But there it is, in indelible ink, and it will probably endure into history. I beg you, respected reader, do not fall into the trap of believing all you read in chronicles, for my name is not Guillemot. What it is you will discover in the story I am about to tell …

PART ONE
Hôtel de St Pol, Paris

The Court of the Mad King

1401–5

1

It was a magnificent birth.

A magnificent, gilded, cushioned-in-swansdown birth which was the talk of the town; for the life and style of Queen Isabeau were discussed and dissected in every Paris marketplace – her fabulous gowns, her glittering jewels, her grand entertainments and above all the fact that she rarely paid what she owed for any of them. The fountain gossips deplored her notorious self-indulgence and knew that, like the arrival of all her other babies, the birth of her tenth child would be a glittering, gem-studded occasion illuminated by blazing chandeliers and that they would effectively be funding it. Paris was a city of merchants and craftsmen who relied on the royals and nobles to spend their money on beautiful clothes and artefacts and when they did not pay their bills, people starved and ferment festered. Not that the queen spared a moment’s thought for any of that, probably.

For my own part, when I heard the details of her lying-in, I thought the whole process sounded horrible. It’s one thing to give birth on a gilded bed but at such a time who would want a bunch of bearded, fur-trimmed worthies peering down and making whispered comments on every gasp and groan? With the notable exception of the king, it seemed that half the court was present; the Grand Master of the Royal Household, the Chancellor of the Treasury and a posse of barons and bishops. All the queen’s ladies attended and, for some arcane reason, the Presidents of the Court of Justice, the Privy Council and the University. I do not know how the queen felt about it, but from the poor infant’s point of view it must have been like starting life on a busy stall in a crowded market place.

Being born in a feather bed was the last the poor babe knew of luxury though, or of a mother’s touch. I can vouch for that. In the fourteen years of her marriage to King Charles the Sixth of France, Queen Isabeau had already popped out four boys and five girls like seeds from a pod, which was about the level of her maternal interest in them. It was questionable whether she even knew how many of them still lived.

Once all the worthies had verified that the new arrival was genuinely fresh-sprung from the royal loins and noted that it was regrettably another girl, the poor little scrap was whisked away to the nursery to be trussed up in those tight linen bands the English call swaddling. So when I first clapped eyes on her she looked like an angry parcel, screaming fit to burst.

I did not take to her at first and who could blame me? It was hard being presented with all that squalling evidence of life, when only a few hours ago my own newborn babe had died before I was even able to hold him.

‘You must be brave, little one,’ my mother said, her voice hoarse with grief as she wrapped the tiny blue corpse of my firstborn son in her best linen napkin. ‘Save your tears for the living and your love for the good God.’

Kindly meant words that were impossible to heed, for my world had turned dark and formless and all I could do was weep, great hiccoughing sobs that threatened to snatch the breath from my body. In truth I wasn’t weeping for my dead son, I was weeping for myself, swamped with guilt and self-loathing and convinced that my existence was pointless if I could not produce a living child. In my grief, God forgive me, I had forgotten that it was He who gives life and He who takes it away. I only knew that my arms ached for my belly’s burden and desolation flowed from me like the Seine in spate. So too, in due course, did my milk – sad, useless gouts of it, oozing from my nipples and soaking my chemise, making the cloth cling to my pathetic swollen breasts. Ma brought linen strips and tried to bind them to make it stop but it hurt like devil’s fire and I pushed her away. And so it was that my whole life changed.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

I have to confess that my baby was a mistake. We all make them, don’t we? I’m not wicked through and through or anything. I just fell for a handsome, laughing boy and let him under my skirt. He did not force me – far from it. He was a groom in the palace stables and I enjoyed our romps in the hayloft as much as he did. Priests go on about carnal sin and eternal damnation, but they do not understand about being young and living for the day.

I am not pretending I was ever beautiful but at fourteen I was not bad looking – brown haired, rosy-cheeked and merry-eyed. A bit plump maybe – or well-covered as my father used to say, God bless him – but that is what a lot of men like, especially if they are strong and muscular, like my Jean-Michel. When we tumbled together in the hay he did not want to think that I might break beneath him. As for me, I did not think much at all. I was intoxicated by his deep voice, dark, twinkling eyes and hot, thrilling kisses.

I used to go and meet him at dusk, while my parents were busy in the bake-house, pulling pies out of the oven. When all the fuss about ‘sinful fornication’ had died down, Jean-Michel joked that while they were pulling them out he was putting one in!

I should explain that I am a baker’s daughter. My name is Guillaumette Dupain. Yes, it does mean ‘of bread’. I am bred of bread – so what? Actually, my father was not only a baker of bread but a patissier. He made pastries and wafers and beautiful gilded marchpanes and our bake-house was in the centre of Paris at the end of a cobbled lane that ran down beside the Grand Pont. Luckily for us, the smell of baking bread tended to disguise the stench from the nearby tanning factories and the decomposing bodies of executed criminals, which were often hung from the timbers of the bridge above to discourage the rest of us from breaking the law. In line with guild fire-regulations, our brick ovens were built close to the river, well away from our wooden house and those of our neighbours. All bakers fear fire and my father often talked about the ‘great conflagration’ before I was born, which almost set the whole city ablaze.

He worked hard and drove his apprentices hard also. He had two – stupid lads I thought them because they could not write or reckon. I could do both, because my mother could and she had taught me – it was good for business. All day the men prepared loaves, pies and pastries at the back of the house while we sold them from the front, took orders and kept tallies. When the baking was finished, for half a sou my father would let the local goodwives put their own pies in the ovens while some heat still remained. Many bakers refused to do this, saying they were too busy mixing the next day’s dough, but my father was a kind soul and would not even take the halfpenny if he knew a family was on hard times. ‘Soft-hearted fool!’ my mother chided, hiding a fond smile.

He was not soft-hearted when she told him I was pregnant though. He called me a whore and a sinner and locked me in the flour store, only letting me out after he had visited Jean-Michel’s parents and arranged for him to marry me.

It was not very difficult. No one held my lover at knife-point or anything and afterwards Jean-Michel said he was quite pleased, especially as it meant he could share my bed in the attic above the shop. He had never slept in a real bed because until he went to work at the king’s stables, where he dossed down in the straw with the rest of the boy-grooms, he had slept on the floor of his father’s workshop with his three brothers. The Lanières were harness-makers and operated from a busy street near Les Halles, where the butchers and tanners plied their odorous trades, making leather readily available. With three sons already in the business, there was no room for a fourth and so, when he was old enough, Jean-Michel was articled to the king’s master of horse. It was a good position for he was strong and nimble, but also kind and gentle-voiced. Horses responded to him and did his bidding.

The royal stables were busy day and night and inevitably the apprentices got all the worst shifts, so after we married we only shared my bed when he could wangle a night off. Otherwise it was a tumble in the hayloft or nothing – mostly nothing as I grew larger. When my father sent a message that my birth-pains had started, Jean-Michel rushed from the palace, hoping to hear the baby’s first cry but instead he wept with me in the mournful silence.

Men don’t feel these things the same as women though, do they? After an hour or so, he dried his eyes, blew his nose and went back to the stables. There was no funeral. I wanted to call the child Henri after my father, but when the priest came it was too late for a baptism and Maître Thomas took the tiny body away to the public burial ground for the unshriven. I know it is foolish but all these years later I sometimes shed tears for my lost son. The Church teaches that the unbaptised cannot enter heaven but I do not believe it.

It must be obvious already that I was an only child. Despite ardent prayers to Saint Monica and a fortune spent on charms and potions, my mother’s womb never quickened again. Perhaps because of this, when my baby died she thought I might have lost my only chance of motherhood so, when she could no longer bear the sound of my sobbing, she walked along to the church and asked the priest if there was any call for a wet-nurse.

It so happened that Maître Thomas had a brother in the queen’s household, and later that day the appearance in our lane of a royal messenger brought all the neighbours out to gawp at his polished ebony staff and bright-blue livery with its giddy pattern of gold fleur-de-lis. When my mother answered his impatient rap, he wasted no time on a greeting, merely demanding imperiously, ‘Does your girl still have milk?’ as if he had called at a dairy rather than a bakery.

The first I knew of anything was when my mother’s moon-face rose through the attic hatchway, glowing in the beam of her horn lantern. ‘Come, Mette,’ she said, scrambling off the ladder. ‘Quick, get yourself dressed. We’re going to the palace.’

Still befuddled with grief, I stood like a docile sheep while she squeezed my poor flabby belly and leaking breasts into my Sunday clothes and pushed me out into the daylight.

The route to the king’s palace was familiar from my frequent love-trysts with Jean-Michel. We walked east along the river where the air was fresh and the sky was a bright, uncluttered arc. In the past I had often lingered to watch the traffic on the water; small fishing wherries with fat-bellied brown sails, flat-bottomed barges laden with cargo and occasionally, weaving between them, a gilded galley bedecked with livery, its crimson blades dripping diamond droplets as it ferried some grandee to a riverside mansion.

It was in these leafy suburbs close to the new city wall that many imposing town-houses had been built by the nobility. The highest tower in Paris was to be found there, rising brand-new and clean-stoned above the Duke of Burgundy’s Hôtel d’Artois. In the shadow of the ancient abbey of the Céléstins lay the impressive Hôtel de St Antoine where lived the king’s brother, the Duke of Orleans. Neighbouring this, however, and overlooking the lush meadows of the Île de St Louis, was the king’s magnificent Hôtel de St Pol, the largest and most sumptuous residence of them all. It sprawled for half a league along the north bank of the Seine, the spires and rooftops of a dozen grand buildings visible behind a high curtain wall of pale stone which was fortified with towers and gatehouses constantly a-flutter with flags and banners.

Old men in the market-place told how the present king’s father, King Charles V, distraught at losing eight consecutive offspring in their infancy, had eyed his nobles’ airy new mansions with envy and went about ‘acquiring’ a whole parish of them for himself around the church of Saint Pol. Then he had them linked with cloisters, embellished with Italian marble, surrounded with orchards and gardens and enclosed within one great wall, thus establishing his own substantial palace in a prime location and leaving his disgruntled vassals to rebuild elsewhere. This regal racketeering was justified on the grounds that the king’s next two sons survived, born and raised in much healthier surroundings than the cramped and fetid quarters of the old Palais Royal.

For my trysts with Jean-Michel I used to slip into the palace by a sally gate in the Porte des Chevaux, where the guards came to know me, but the queen’s messenger led my mother and me to the lofty Grande Porte with its battlemented barbican and ranks of armed sentries, his royal staff acting like a magic wand to whisk us unchallenged through the lines of pikes into a vast courtyard. Men, carts and oxen mingled there in noisy confusion. I was kept so busy dodging rolling wheels and piles of steaming dung that I failed to notice which archways and passages we took to reach a quiet paved square where a fountain played before a fine stone mansion. This was the Maison de la Reine where the queen lived and held lavish court and where, presumably, since she’d produced so many children, she received regular visits from the king, although rumour had it that he had not fathered her entire brood.

The grand arched entrance with its sweeping stone staircase was not for the likes of us, of course. We were led to a ground-level door alongside a separate stone building from which belched forth rich cooking smells. The heat of a busy kitchen blasted us as we were brought to a halt by a procession of porters ferrying huge, loaded dishes up a spiral tower-stair to the main floor of the mansion. The queen’s household was dining in the great hall and it was several minutes before we were beckoned to follow the final steaming pudding up the worn steps to a servery, where carvers were swiftly and skilfully dissecting roasted meats into portions. The aroma was mouth-watering even to my grief-dulled senses and my mother’s long, appreciative sniffs were audible above the noise made by the hungry gathering on the other side of the screen that hid us and the carvers from them.

We were ushered through a door beyond the servery and down a narrow passage into a small, cold chamber lit only by a narrow shaft of daylight from a high unglazed window. Here our escort brusquely informed us that we should wait and then departed, closing the door behind him.

‘What are we doing here?’ I hissed to my mother, stirred at last into showing some interest in our circumstances.

‘Not being fed, obviously,’ she complained. ‘You would have thought they could spare a bit of pudding!’ Huffily she sank onto a solitary bench under the window and arranged her grey woollen skirt neatly around her. ‘Come and sit down, Mette, and compose yourself. You want to make a good impression.’

Gingerly I lowered myself onto the bench beside her. It was not many hours since I’d given birth and to sit down was painful. ‘Impression?’ I echoed. ‘Who should I make an impression on?’ My breasts throbbed and I was becoming distinctly nervous.

‘On Madame la Bonne, who runs the royal nursery.’ Now that she had got me here, my mother risked divulging more information. ‘She needs a wet-nurse for the new princess.’

‘A wet-nurse!’ I echoed, wincing as I recoiled along the hard bench. ‘You mean … no, Ma! I cannot give suck to a royal baby.’

My mother drew herself up, both chins jutting indignantly from the tight frame of her goodwife’s wimple. ‘And why not, may I ask? Your milk is as good as anyone’s. Better than most probably, for you are young and well-nourished. Think yourself lucky. If they take you, you will have drawn the top prize. It might have been a butcher’s baby or a tax collector’s brat.’

I opened my mouth to protest that a baker’s daughter could hardly despise a butcher’s baby but swallowed my words as the door opened to admit a thin, erect woman of middle age and height, dressed in a dark wine-coloured gown with sweeping fur-lined sleeves. The eaves of her black gable-headdress shadowed a pinched, rat-like face and she looked so unlike anyone’s idea of a children’s nurse that my mother and I were both struck dumb. We stood up.

‘Is this the girl?’ the woman asked bluntly. Her lip curled. ‘Ah yes, I can see it is.’

Following her disdainful gaze, I glanced down and saw that damp milk-stains were beginning to spread over the front of my bodice. Shame and grief sent fresh tears coursing down my cheeks.

‘What is your name?’ demanded the fur-sleeved lady but any reply I might have made was forestalled as she grabbed me by the arm, pulled me under the beam of light from the window and wrenched my mouth open, peering into it.

My mother spoke for me. ‘Guillaumette. My daughter’s name is Guillaumette.’ She frowned at the crude treatment I was receiving but was too over-awed to object.

Madame la Bonne grunted and released my jaw. ‘Teeth seem good,’ she observed, aiming her rodent nose at my damp bodice and taking a long investigative sniff. ‘And she smells clean. How old is she?’

‘Fifteen,’ replied my mother, trying to edge her ample frame between me and my tormentor. ‘It was her first child.’

‘And it is dead, I hope? We do not want any common nursling bringing disease into the royal nursery.’ My instantly renewed sobs appeared to convince her of this for she nodded with satisfaction. ‘Good. We will take her on trial. Five sous a week and her bed and board. Any sign of ague or milk fever and she is out.’ Before my mother could question these terms, the dragon-lady turned to address me directly. ‘You should stop snivelling, girl, or your milk will dry up and you will be no use to anyone. The queen was delivered at the hour of sext and the princess needs suck at once. I will send someone to collect you.’

Not waiting to hear whether or not her offer was accepted, Madame la Bonne swept out of the room. My mother stared after her, shaking her head, but the mention of five sous a week had struck a chord. Although my eyes were blurred with tears, I caught the commercial glint in hers as she calculated how much this would add to the family coffers.

‘We had best say goodbye then,’ she said gruffly, kissing my wet cheeks. ‘It is a good opportunity, Mette. Blow your nose and make the most of it. Remember Jean-Michel is not far away. You will be able to visit him between feeds.’ Gently, she wiped away my tears with the edge of her veil. ‘It will be hard at first but who knows where it could lead? You will get used to it and the baby needs you. You heard the lady.’

I nodded, barely comprehending. When another liveried servant arrived to take me away I followed him without a backward glance. My head was spinning and my breasts felt as if they would burst. Relief from that piercing ache would be welcome, no matter what followed.

They put the baby in my arms and unlaced my bodice. I had no idea what to do but the midwife was there, an ancient crone who must have witnessed a thousand births, and she showed me how to hold the tiny bundle so that my oozing nipple was available to the seeking mouth. At first the infant could not clamp the slippery teat between her hard gums and she yelled with frustration while fresh tears poured down my face.

‘I cannot do it!’ I cried. ‘She does not like me.’

The midwife wheezed with amusement. ‘What does she know about liking?’ she said, bringing the baby’s head and my breast together like a pair of ripe peaches. ‘All she wants is to suck. She is a little poppet this one, healthy as a milkmaid and strong as a cobweb. Just you sit quiet now and wait for her to latch on. She will. Oh yes she will!’

She did. Very soon she was fastened to my nipple like a pink leech and I could feel the painful pressure dropping. I stared down at the swaddled crown of her head and noticed a tiny wisp of pale gold hair had slipped between the linen bands. Otherwise, she seemed anonymous, almost inhuman, like one of the gargoyles on the roof of our church. I shivered at the sudden notion that she might be a creature of the devil. Supposing I had been foist with a succubus?

I closed my inflamed eyes and took a deep breath. Of course she was not a demon, I told myself firmly. She was a baby, a gift of God, a morsel of human life that was strangely and avidly attached to my body.

Gradually, I began to feel a steady and reassuring rhythm in the mysterious process of giving suck, a regular swishing sound like the soft hiss made by the surge of the tide on the Seine mudflats. I sensed that the child and I were sharing a universal pulse, joined together in the ebb and flow of life. And as my milk flowed, my tears dried. I did not stop grieving for my lost son but I no longer wept.

2

How can we ever know what life has in store for us? My new situation nearly ended as abruptly as it had begun, because the next morning some of my breast milk oozed onto the white silk chemise that had been pulled over the baby’s swaddling in preparation for her baptism. I trembled, awaiting the full power of the rat-woman’s wrath, but luckily the stain was quickly hidden under the folds of an embroidered satin christening robe and then, crowned with a tiny coif of lace and seed-pearls, the baby was carried off to the queen’s chapel. Later we were told she had been baptised Catherine after the virgin martyr of Alexandria, whose staunch Christian faith had not even been broken by torture on the wheel.

In the beginning I did not really have much to do with Catherine, except to let her suck whenever she cried for the breast. Madame la Bonne insisted on attending to the swaddling herself. She changed it every morning, convinced that only she knew the secret of how to make the royal limbs grow straight. Two dim-witted girls were in charge of washing and dressing and rocking the cradle, which they did with scant care or attention, it seemed to me. After a few days the governess must have decided I could stay, for my straw mattress and Catherine’s crib were carried into a small turret room, separated by a thick oak door from the main nursery. I was told that this arrangement was in order to prevent the baby’s cries waking the other children but I was far from happy. Terrified of the responsibility of looking after a royal baby alone throughout the night, I became jaded from lack of sleep, home-sick and heart-sick for my own lost son. Yet none of this seemed to affect my milk, which flowed profuse and steady, like the Seine beneath the turret window.

My experience of royal nurseries was nil but even so this one struck me as distinctly odd. Here we were in the palace of reputedly the most profligate queen in Christendom and yet, apart from the pearl-encrusted christening robe which had been swiftly borne away for safekeeping, I could find no evidence of luxury or wealth. There were no fur-lined cribs or silver rattles or chests full of toys, and the rooms, located in a separate tower to the rear of the queen’s house, were cold and bare. Although my turret had a small grate and a chimney, there were no fires even to warm the newborn child, no hangings to keep out the autumn draughts and only smoky tapers and oil lamps to light the lengthening nights. Food came up from the queen’s kitchen, but it was nothing like the fare I had seen on the day of my arrival. No succulent roasts or glistening puddings for us; we ate potage and bread messes, washed down with green wine or buttermilk. Occasionally there was some cheese or a chunk of bacon but rarely any fresh meat or fish. We might have been living in a monastery rather than a palace.

The reason was not hard to find, for in contrast with her name, there was very little that was good about Madame la Bonne. I quickly understood that her first concern was not the welfare of the royal children but the wealth of the royal governess. I was to learn that any savings she could make on the nursery budget went straight into her own pocket, which was why she had employed me. A courtier’s wife would have been more appropriate as wet-nurse for a princess, but a lady of rank would not only command higher pay, she would also have powerful friends, and Madame la Bonne’s plans and schemes depended on no one with any connection to power or authority ever coming near the place; none ever visited, not the master of the household or the queen’s secretary or chancellor, or even one of their clerks and certainly not the queen herself.

As well as Catherine, there were three other royal children in residence. The oldest was Princess Michele, a solemn, rather plain-looking girl of six who was always trying to keep the peace between her two younger brothers, the Princes Louis and Jean. Louis was the dauphin, the unlikely heir to the throne, a skinny, tow-headed four-year-old with a pale complexion and a chronic cough whose clothes were grubby and too small. However, I observed that he had a quick brain and an active imagination, which often led him into mischief. His brother Jean was a bull-headed terror, a ruffian even at three, darker and sturdier than his brother and more headstrong. You could be sure that if Louis started some mischief, Jean would continue it beyond a joke. After I caught him dropping a spider into Catherine’s crib, I decided to keep a very close eye on Monsieur Jean! I knew that if any harm came to the baby, the blame would instantly be laid on me, not on her infant brother.

Being an only child, I had never had much to do with other children and yet, to my surprise, having been thrown into close contact with these as-good-as-motherless youngsters, I found I knew instinctively how to handle them. Oddly, I felt no similar instinct when it came to Catherine. I could not help nursing a certain resentment that she was alive while my own baby was dead and I could not see past those horrible swaddling bands, which seemed to squash all the character out of her. Sometimes it felt as if I was suckling a sausage. Besides, I grew restless just sitting around waiting to open my bodice, so in between Catherine’s feeds I started playing with the older children.

I could see that the boys’ naughtiness sprang from boredom rather than wickedness. They were bright and spirited but the two giggling nursemaids were too busy gossiping or sneaking out to meet their lovers to have much time for their charges. They would plonk food on the table but they rarely brought water to wash the children and never talked or played with them. Madame la Bonne had pared their wages to the minimum and, like my mother always said, ‘If you pay turnips you get donkeys’.

To start with, the children were wary of me but soon Michele opened up, being touchingly grateful for some attention. A slight, mousy little girl, she had fine, dirty blonde hair that was always in a tangle because Louis had thrown the only hairbrush out of the window in a tantrum and Madame la Bonne had chosen not to replace it. Although outwardly placid, she was terribly insecure, shying at raised voices, assuming slights where there were none and fearful that at any moment she might be whisked away to marry some prince in a foreign land. When I tried to reassure her that she was too young for that, she blinked her solemn sea-green eyes and shook her head.

‘No, Mette.’ My full name, Guillaumette, was too much for young tongues to master. ‘My sister Isabelle was only eight when she went away to England.’

I remembered that departure. I had watched Princess Isabelle being paraded through the streets of Paris at the time of her proxy marriage to King Richard of England, a tiny doll-like figure propped up in a litter, weighed down with furs and jewels, and it had never occurred to me or to any of us in that noisy crowd of citizens how frightened she must have been, being carted off to a strange country to live with a man old enough to be her grandfather. And what had become of that little bride? An English lord named Bolingbroke had stolen King Richard’s throne and his abandoned child-queen was still languishing somewhere across the Sleeve, her future uncertain. I realised that Michele was right to be frightened.

The boys took longer to respond to my overtures. Prince Louis’ insecurities sprang from a different source but were equally deep-seated. He was haunted by a ghost. At the start of the year his older brother Charles had died of a sudden fever and the whole of France had plunged into mourning. Unlike his younger siblings, the nine-year-old dauphin had been doted on by Queen Isabeau, kept beside her at court, given his own household and showered with gifts and praise. He was shown off to every high-ranking visitor and proclaimed ‘the glorious future of France’! Even my down-to-earth mother had joined the crowds cheering him in the streets, raining blessings on his bright golden head.

It was the sweating sickness that carried him off. One day he was riding his pony through the city and the next he was dead, consumed by a raging fever. Queen Isabeau collapsed and the king succumbed to one of his devilish fits. I suppose during the months that followed, the new dauphin might have expected to be whisked off to the life of luxury and privilege that his brother had enjoyed, but this did not happen and so, every time he was reprimanded or denied something, Louis would throw a tantrum, hurling himself to the ground shrieking ‘I am the dauphin! I am the dauphin!’ This was always a source of great entertainment for Jean, who would squat down nearby and watch with undisguised glee as Louis drummed his heels and screeched. I never saw him try to comfort his brother. Even in infancy Jean was an odd, isolated boy.

Madame la Bonne had devised her particular way of ensuring that the sound of Louis’ tantrums did not carry outside the nursery. The first time I heard his blood-curdling yells, I rushed in panic to the big day-room and was horrified to see the governess lift up the screaming little boy, bundle him into a large empty coffer, close the lid and sit on it.

‘Madame, really you cannot …!’ I protested.

‘Presumptuous girl!’ she snapped. ‘Be silent. You are here to give suck, nothing more. I advise you to keep your mouth shut and your bodice open or another wet-nurse will be found.’

Beneath her skinny rump Louis’ muffled cries dwindled into whimpers and I was forced to retreat to my turret. It was not until much later, when I was convinced he must be dead, that the governess let the little boy out. Peeping cautiously around the door I saw him emerge trembling and gasping and run to a far corner to press his tear-stained face against the cold stone wall. In his terror he had wet himself but no one offered him dry hose. No wonder he always stank. The governess caught me peeking and gave me another warning glare, so I fled.

A month or so after her birth, Catherine started sleeping for longer periods and I was able to risk my first visit to the stables. Always a man of action rather than words, Jean-Michel greeted me shyly and immediately led me up the ladder to the hay-loft and began shifting bundles of fodder to create a private corner for us, away from the prying eyes of his fellow-grooms. The rows of horses in the stalls below radiated warmth and although at first we talked awkwardly and strangely, it wasn’t long before we were exchanging eager kisses. The result was predictable. I am sure I don’t need to go into detail. I was fifteen and he was eighteen and after all we were married … it wasn’t natural for us to remain sad and celibate.

Afterwards we talked some more, carefully avoiding the subject of our dead baby. I told Jean-Michel how Madame la Bonne’s greed made life so cold and comfortless in the royal nursery. By now it was early December and the nights were freezing in the turret chamber. Being a kind-hearted lad, he exclaimed indignantly about this and the next time I came he presented me with some bundles of firewood. ‘Smuggle them in under your shawl. No one will see the smoke if you burn it after dark,’ he suggested.

So when Catherine next woke in the small hours, making restless hungry sounds, I lit a taper with my flint, pulled straw from my mattress for kindling, piled some sticks on top and set the taper to them. As I did so I noticed that her swaddling had come loose and a strip of damp linen was dangling down. On an impulse I pulled it and all at once I could feel her legs begin to kick. In the light of the fire I could see pleasure blaze in her deep-blue eyes and I made an instant decision.

I pulled my bed in front of the hearth, spread the blanket over it and laid Catherine down, eagerly removing the rest of the offensive linen bands. I prayed that no one would take notice of her squalls of protest as I used the icy water from my night-jug to clean her soiled body, and soon the warmth of the flames silenced her cries and she began to stretch and kick, luxuriating in the dancing firelight. Her little arms waved and I bent to smile and coo at her, blowing on her neck and belly to tickle her soft, peachy skin so that she squirmed and burbled with delight.

The previous summer, walking among the wildflowers on the riverbank, I had watched entranced as a butterfly emerged into the sunshine, the full glory of its multicoloured wings gradually unfurling before my eyes. In those first moments by the fire Catherine reminded me of that butterfly. For the first time her big blue eyes became sparkling pools, glowing with life, and her soft mop of flaxen hair, for so long flattened and confined, began to spring and curl. Then, as I bent low and whispered soft endearments into her ear, I was rewarded with a wide, gummy smile.

All the love I had been unable to lavish on my own baby seemed to burst like a dam inside me. I wanted to shout with joy but instead, mindful of the ‘donkeys’ sleeping in the next room, I swept Catherine up and pressed her little body tightly against mine, whirling her round in a happy, silent dance. I could feel her heart fluttering under my hands and, tiny and helpless though she appeared, she put a powerful spell on me. From that moment I was no longer my own mistress. In the leaping firelight I gazed at that petal-soft, bewitching cherub and became her slave.

When I again wrapped her warmly and began to feed her, giving suck was an entirely new experience. At my breast I no longer saw a pink leech but a rosy angel with a halo of pale hair and skin like doves’ down. Now that her limbs were free, she pushed one little hand against my breast and kneaded it gently, as if caressing and blessing me at the same time and under the power of this benison the milk that flowed from me seemed to contain my very heart and soul.

3

‘The king’s in the oubliette again,’ announced Jean-Michel one afternoon when we were alone together. The ‘oubliette’ was servants’ slang for the special apartment set aside to contain the monarch during his ‘absences’.

‘They carted him off there yesterday afternoon. Apparently he drew his dagger in the council and started slashing about with it wildly, so they had to disarm him and tie him up.’

‘God save us! Was anyone hurt?’ I asked with alarm.

‘Not this time.’

‘Have people been injured in the past then?’

‘Well, they try to hush it up but one or two chamberlains have mysteriously disappeared from circulation.’

‘You mean they have been killed?’ I squeaked, incredulous.

‘No one has ever admitted it, but …’ Jean-Michel spread his hands. ‘Mad or not, he is the king. Who is going to accuse him of murder?’

I shivered. The closer I got to it, the more I was bewildered by the power of monarchy. Since I had been at the palace I had never laid eyes on the king – at least not as far as I knew. It had been drummed into me by Madame la Bonne that if I should happen to encounter anyone of rank, unless they spoke to me directly, I must avert my eyes and remove myself from their presence as fast as possible. Servants were issued with drab clothing; in my case a mud-coloured kirtle and apron and a plain white linen coif, and like all other palace menials I had perfected the art of scuttling out of sight at the merest flash of sparkling gems and bright-coloured raiment. So, even if I had glimpsed the king I would have been obliged to ‘disappear’ before I could distinguish him from any other peacock-clad courtier. Of course everyone knew of his recurring malady. One day he would be quite normal, eating and talking and ruling his kingdom, and the next he was reduced to a quavering, raving, deluded wreck, a state which might persist for any length of time, from a week to several months.

‘What happens now?’ I enquired.

‘The queen will pack up and go to the Hôtel de St Antoine,’ Jean-Michel said with a sly grin. ‘When her husband is out of the way, she jumps into bed with her brother-in-law.’

‘The Duke of Orleans!’ I exclaimed. ‘No! She cannot. It is a sin.’

‘Listen to Madame Innocente!’ teased Jean-Michel. ‘It is treason too, as it happens, but no one says “cannot” to Queen Isabeau. Who is going to arrest her? When the king is ill, she becomes regent.’

Now I was even more shocked. Did God not punish adultery? Did not the fiery pit yawn for the wife who bedded her husband’s brother?

‘What about hellfire?’ I protested. ‘Surely even queens and dukes go in fear of that.’

Jean-Michel shrugged. ‘I thought you would have realised by now that royalty does not live by the same rules as the rest of us. They can buy a thousand pardons and get absolution for absolutely everything.’ His brown-velvet eyes suddenly acquired a familiar gleam. ‘You look outraged, my little nursemaid. I like it when you get hot and bothered.’ He reached over to pull off my coif for he loved it when my dark hair tumbled down my back and it usually led to other items of clothing becoming disarranged.

I pushed his hand away, softening the rejection with a rueful smile. ‘No, Jean-Michel. I must go. Catherine might be crying for me.’

‘Catherine, Catherine!’ he mimicked, frowning. ‘All I hear about is Catherine.’ His tone was indignant but a note of indulgence lurked beneath. To look at him you would not think there was anything soft about Jean-Michel but I think he understood that I had come to love my little nursling the way I would have loved our own baby.

I scrambled up, brushing stalks off my skirt. ‘I will come again tomorrow,’ I promised, giving him a genuinely regretful look, for he was not alone in wanting to linger in our hayloft hideaway.

‘One day you must tell Mademoiselle Catherine what sacrifices we made for her!’ he caroled after me down the ladder.

As he had predicted, the queen did indeed de-camp to the Duke of Orleans’ mansion and their Christmas celebrations set the city abuzz. Night after night bursts of minstrel music drifted up to the nursery windows from lantern-decked galleys ferrying fancy-dressed lords and ladies to a series of entertainments at the Hôtel de St Antoine. Craning our necks through the narrow casement, we could just see the crackle and flash of fireworks and hear the roar of exotic animals, brought from the king’s menagerie to thrill the assembled guests. Jean-Michel reported that the taverns were full of minstrels and jongleurs who had converged on Paris in droves, drawn by the promise of lavish purses for those who impressed the queen.

It was a mystery to me why she did not include her children in all this fun. She did not even send them presents. The joy of Christmas barely touched the royal nursery. On the feast-day itself, Madame la Bonne pulled their best clothes out of a locked chest and took the children to mass in the queen’s chapel and I was allowed to sit at the back with the donkeys. Otherwise we might not even have known it was Christmas.

Our dinner was even worse than usual, consisting of grease-laden slops and stale bread, which the children understandably refused to eat. Only the Christmas pies I fetched from my parents’ bake house gave the poor mites a taste of good cheer.

By Epiphany the palace had ground to a halt. Madame la Bonne had gone to a twelfth-night feast at the house of one of her noble relatives, leaving the ‘donkeys’ in charge, and they had taken advantage of her absence to make themselves scarce as well. ‘You’ll be all right on your own, won’t you, Guillaumette?’ they said airily. ‘Just ask the guards if you need anything.’

The next morning the varlets who brought our supplies of food and water failed to turn up. I was alone with four royal children, no food, no warmth and no one to turn to. I was terrified. Only the sentries remained at their posts, guarding the entrance to the nursery as usual.

‘Nobody has been paid,’ one of them revealed bluntly, when I plucked up courage to ask where everyone was. ‘The master of the household has gone with the queen and taken all the clerks and coffers with him.’

‘Then why are you still here?’ I enquired.

The soldier’s sly grin revealed a row of blackened stumps. ‘The royal guard is paid by the Constable of France, God be praised – and he is an honourable man.’

‘Unlike the royal governess,’ I muttered. ‘I have not been paid for weeks.’

‘Best leave then, my little bonbon, like the rest of them,’ he wheezed in a foul-smelling chuckle. ‘Fools earn no favour.’

But how could I leave? How could I abandon four friendless and motherless children? I persuaded the guard to fetch us some bread and milk for the children’s breakfast and after the donkeys finally returned looking smug and dishevelled, I fed Catherine and left her sleeping while I sped home to the bakery and begged a basketful of pies and pastries from my mother. I told her the king’s children were starving in their palace tower.

It was no real crisis because Madame la Bonne returned from her social engagement and the meal deliveries, mean though they were, began once more. But there was still no sign of any laundry and I was sent to the wash-house to investigate. Overwhelmed by the acrid stench of huge bleaching vats overflowing with urine and the smelly heaps of dirty linen turning blue with mildew, I filched an armful of linen napkins when I spotted them and ran. I could wash the napkins daily and keep her clean. Without a supply of clean swaddling, Madame la Bonne could no longer truss the baby up every morning, so Catherine’s limbs were allowed to kick free and strong. Meanwhile her blonde curls rioted under the little caps I sewed for her. Ironically, during those dreadful weeks of winter she grew as bonny and plump as a bear cub.

But I felt sorry for the older children. They were cold and hungry and the only thing in plentiful supply was punishment. Whenever mischief flared, which it often did, especially between the boys, some new and vindictive retribution was devised by their governess. On several occasions I saw Jean struggling against tight bonds tying him to his chair, or Louis sitting down gingerly, his buttocks clearly smarting from a beating. I often saw his eyes glinting with resentful anger but he was only four, powerless to retaliate, and if he could have voiced a complaint, who would he have voiced it to? Perhaps the worst thing however, was the fact that their father’s oubliette was too close to the nursery tower and the inhuman noises which frequently erupted from that grim place were enough to freak young minds.

The general belief was that the king’s madness was caused by agents of the devil. Perhaps living close to the king, Madame la Bonne had been taken over by them as well. Sometimes I was sure I could hear their wings fluttering against the door and I scarcely dared to inhale for fear of contagion.

Jean-Michel told me that in the city taverns, out-of-work palace menials made easy ale-money telling lurid tales of black masses where sorcerers called up flocks of winged demons and sent them flying to infest the subterranean vault where the mad monarch was housed. I often heard the donkeys frightening each other with sightings of these imps. No wonder all the children had bad dreams and Jean wet his bed. As punishment, Madame la Bonne made him sleep on a straw mattress on the floor. At least she ordered the donkeys to wash his bedclothes and not me, but not until they reeked abominably.

The winter was stormy and snow-laden and the children hardly left the nursery for weeks but somehow, with the aid of my father’s pies, my stock of family fairy-tales and Jean-Michel’s pilfered firewood, we struggled through those cold, dark days. Then, at last, the season turned, the sun began to climb in the sky and the ice melted on the Seine. When the guilds of Paris began their spring parades and the blossom frothed in the palace orchards, the king suddenly regained his senses and the queen came back to the Hôtel de St Pol.

‘If she wants to be regent when he is ill, she has to live with the king when he is not,’ Jean-Michel observed sagely when I remarked on the speed of her return. ‘And believe me, she loves being regent.’

Of course she still came nowhere near the nursery, but at least she brought back her coffers and courtiers and Madame la Bonne was forced to start paying servants to bring us food and supplies instead of relying on free hand-outs from my father’s bakery. It had not escaped my notice that the rat-woman must have amassed a great deal in unpaid wages over the winter so I summoned my courage and demanded the sum I was owed.

Madame la Bonne simply laughed in my face. ‘Four marks! Whatever made a chit like you think she could reckon?’ she mocked. ‘Five sous a day do not come to four marks. You are not owed a quarter of that sum.’

Despite my best endeavours, I only managed to prise one mark out of her. When I showed it to my mother I think her anger was more due to the governess’ slighting of my education than her act of blatant cheating. ‘I suppose we should be grateful to get that much,’ she said with resignation. ‘They are all at it. Every shopkeeper and craftsman in the city complains about the “noble” art of short-changing.’

As it grew warmer, the palace became like a fairground. The gardens filled with gaily dressed damsels and strutting young squires, laughing and playing sports. Music could be heard drifting over walls and through open windows, and court receptions were held out of doors, under brightly painted canopies. It made life difficult for us menials, as we constantly had to change direction to get out of the way of groups of courtiers making their way to these receptions or to the pleasure gardens and tilting grounds. Often it took me twice as long to get to the stables in order to meet Jean-Michel because I would have to wait with my face to the wall while processions of chattering ladies and gentlemen ambled past me in the cloisters. At least I was able to take the children out to play every day, although Madame la Bonne made it a strict rule that we were only to go to the old queen’s abandoned rose garden because we could get there from the nursery without encountering anyone of consequence. She did not want a nosy official querying the state of the royal children’s clothing, did she? Nor – heaven forefend – did she want some inadvertent meeting between the queen and her own offspring!

As for the queen herself, as the summer progressed and the August heat became stifling in the city, she set off in a long procession of barges for the royal castle at Melun, further up the Seine. Soon after her departure, word spread that she was pregnant and, in view of the timing, rumour again flared that the child was not the king’s but had been fathered by the Duke of Orleans during the last royal absence. I did my own calculations and came to the conclusion that she could just about be given the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the king did the same because there was no sign of any rift between himself and his brother or his queen.

At about the same time, I began to notice certain changes in my own body. It was popular belief that nursing a child prevented the next one coming along, but this did not hold true for me. My mother put it all down to Saint Monica of course and Jean-Michel boasted to his stable-mates that it took more than a royal nursling to stop him becoming a father!

Madame la Bonne said nothing until it became obvious that I was breeding, when she sniffed and said, ‘It’s time Catherine was weaned anyway. You can leave at Christmas.’

Remembering the miseries of the previous Christmas, I hastily assured her that since my baby was not due until spring, I could stay well into the New Year. I could not bear to think of Catherine having only the donkeys and Madame la Bonne to look after her, but I knew I had to steel myself for the inevitable parting. Perhaps, had it not been for my own babe, I might have timed Catherine’s weaning so that I could have remained as wet nurse for the queen’s new child, but I knew that no lowborn baby would be allowed to stay in the royal nursery or share the royal milk supply. Our time together was drawing inexorably to a close. Soon after her first birthday, Catherine began to take wobbling steps and I started feeding her bread and milk pap, and by February, when the queen’s new son was born, I had prepared her as best I could for the arrival of her new sibling.

Far from questioning the paternity of his latest offspring, the king was so delighted to have another son that he insisted he should be called Charles, apparently unconcerned by the fact that both previous princes of that name had died young. Like all his siblings before him, this new Charles popped obligingly from the queens womb, was baptised in silk and pearls and then brought to the nursery, well away from his parents’ attention. His wet-nurse was another nobody, like myself, who could be exploited by Madame la Bonne but, I like to think unlike myself, she was a timid individual who took no interest in the older children and confined herself to suckling the baby and gossiping with the donkeys. She was a deep disappointment to me, because I had hoped she might be the motherly type who would give Catherine the cuddles she would need after I was gone.

My little princess now toddled about on dimpled legs, a delightful bundle of energy who giggled and chattered around my skirts all day. I could not imagine life without her, but there was no alternative. It was a beautiful spring day when, forcing a bright laugh and planting a last kiss on her soft baby cheek, I left Catherine playing with her favourite toy – one of my own childhood dolls. Once clear of the nursery, I became so blinded by tears that Jean-Michel had to lead me home.

I had the consolation a month later of giving birth to my own healthy baby girl who, the Virgin be praised, breathed and sucked and wailed with gusto. We named her Alys after Jean-Michel’s mother, who adored her, having raised only boys herself. I loved her too of course but, although I suckled her and tended her every bit as scrupulously as I had Catherine, I admit that I probably never quite let her into the innermost core of my heart, where my royal cuckoo-chick had taken residence.

To many I must seem an unnatural mother, but I looked at it like this: Alys had a father who thought the sun and moon rose in her eyes and two doting grandmothers. She didn’t need me the way Catherine did. As the summer passed and the days began to shorten once more, I thought constantly of my nursling. While dressing baby Alys and tucking her into her crib, I wondered who was doing this for Catherine. Was anyone cuddling her and singing her lullabies? Would they comb her hair and tell her stories? I saw her face in my dreams, heard her giggle in the breeze and her unsteady footsteps seemed to follow me about.

No one understood how I felt except my mother, bless her, who said nothing but bought a cow and tethered it on the river bank behind the bakery ovens. When Alys was six months old, I weaned her onto cow’s milk and went back to the royal nursery. I know, I know – I am unchristian and unfeeling – but both the grandmothers were delighted to have a little girl to care for and I could no longer ignore my forebodings about Catherine.

Dry-mouthed with apprehension, I approached the guards at the nursery tower. Suppose they did not recognise me, or were too honest to resist the bribes of pies and coin I had brought? Things had not changed in that respect however, and I was soon quietly entering the familiar upper chamber. But how she had changed, my little Catherine! Instead of the sturdy, merry-eyed toddler I had left, I found a moping moppet, thin, dull-eyed and melancholy with lank, tangled curls and a sad, pinched face. When she saw me she jumped straight down from the window-seat where she had been glumly fiddling with the old doll I had left her and ran towards me shouting, ‘Mette! Mette! My Mette!’ in a sweet, piping voice.

My heart did somersaults as she flung herself into my arms and clung to my neck. I was astounded. How did she know my name? She had been too young to speak it when I left the nursery and surely no one else would have taught it to her. Yet there it was, spilling joyfully off her tongue. Tears streaming down my cheeks, I sank onto a bench and hugged her, murmuring endearments into her shamefully grubby little ear.

I was brought down from the euphoria of reunion by a familiar voice observing with undisguised sarcasm, ‘Well this is a touching sight.’ Madame la Bonne had been sitting at a lectern under the window with Michele – I had, it seemed, interrupted her reading aloud in Latin – but now the governess moved across the room to stand over me wearing her usual disapproving expression. ‘Does this mean you have lost another baby, Guillaumette? Rather careless is it not?’

I stood up and deposited Catherine gently on the floor, where she clung tightly to my skirt. I smiled at Michele. It was difficult to swallow my anger at this heartless enquiry, but I knew I must if I wanted to stay. ‘No, Madame. My daughter thrives with her grandmothers. Her name is Alys.’ To Michele I said, ‘I’m glad to see you are still here, Mademoiselle.’

I exchanged meaningful looks with the solemn princess, who had grown significantly since I had last seen her. No one else appeared to have noticed this fact however, for her bodice was straining its stitches and her ankles protruded from the hem of her skirt.

‘We are all still here, Mette. Louis and Jean have a tutor now though.’

‘And your lesson should not be further interrupted,’ complained Madame le Bonne, glaring down her nose at me. ‘If you can keep Catherine quiet, you may take her over there for a while, Guillaumette.’ She pointed to the other window recess, where I had played so many games with the children in the past. ‘Princesse, let us continue your reading.’

Michele dutifully returned her attention to the heavy leather-bound book on the lectern and I took Catherine’s hand and retreated gratefully to the other side of the room. There were two windows in this upper chamber and the depth of their recesses meant that one was almost out of sight of the other.

Almost, but not quite; I could just see the governess sitting poker-faced throughout the next hour, doubtless pondering the implications of my arrival while she lent half an ear to Michele’s hesitant recital. Unbeknown to me, one of the ‘donkeys’ had run off with her varlet lover and my arrival had handed the governess a heaven-sent opportunity.

At the end of the lesson she left Michele and approached us. To my dismay I felt Catherine instinctively shrink from her presence.

‘The younger children need a nursemaid, Guillaumette. You can start straight away. Of course you will not be paid as much as you were as a wet-nurse. Three sous a week, take it or leave it.’

I knew that the chances of being paid anything like that sum were slim but I did not care. ‘Thank you, Madame,’ I said, rising and bowing my head. ‘I will take it.’ Hidden by the folds of my skirt, I squeezed Catherine’s little hand in triumph.

Within a week she was the sunny, laughing infant she had been before I left. Even Louis and Jean seemed pleased to see me. They lived separately from their sisters now, on the ground floor of the tower and were subject to a strict regime of study and exercise supervised by one Maître le Clerc, a supercilious scholar who wore the black robes of a cleric and one of those linen coifs with side flaps, which left his hairy ears exposed. I was intrigued to learn that Louis was already managing to construct simple sentences in Greek and Latin but unsurprised to hear that Jean was constantly being punished for his academic shortcomings. Supervising his bedtime one evening I glimpsed red weals on his legs and buttocks and despised the high-nosed tutor even more. However, at least he had introduced books to the nursery. Most girls of seven might have preferred stories or poetry but quiet, studious Michele was quite content with the worthy, religious tracts that he selected for her from the famous royal library in the Louvre.

I suspected that the governess and tutor might be related. They were certainly cast in the same mould for I soon learned that Maître le Clerc was as adept as Madame la Bonne at filling his own coffers. I confess I closed my eyes to their thieving ways. I had promised Catherine I would never leave her again. The children needed someone who was on their side; someone who would look out for them, encourage the boys not to fight, tell them jokes, bring them honeyed treats from the bakery. So we all rubbed along, playing what effectively amounted to blind man’s buff for nearly two years. Then, with the suddenness of a whirlwind, our lives were dismantled.

4

In late August of 1405, a searing heat wave had caused trees to wilt and stone walls to shimmer. In the hope of catching an afternoon breeze off the river, I had taken the children to the old pleasure garden which ran down to a river gate. Planted on the orders of the king’s mother, Queen Jeanne, and sadly neglected since her death, it was smothered with overgrown roses which clambered about tumbledown arbours, making perfect haunts for Catherine’s imagined fairies and elves. As always when she played, little Charles shadowed her like a small lisping goblin, tottering determinedly on skinny legs in wrinkled, hand-me-down hose. Catherine loved him, though no one else seemed to, always comforting him when he cried.

In her usual quiet way Michele perched sedately on a bench under a tree and immersed herself in Voraigne’s Legendes d’Or and I am ashamed to say that as I sat with my back against a sun-baked wall, lulled by the murmuring of bees, I drifted off to sleep. I did not doze for long however, because Louis, little menace that he was, took advantage of my lapse to creep up and drop something wriggly and bristling down the front of my chemise. Roused by a stinging sensation between my breasts, I squealed and sprang behind some bushes, tearing open the laces in order to delve into my bodice while the boys screamed with delight. Shuddering, I removed a hairy black caterpillar and tossed it away. An itchy rash had already appeared on the tender damp flesh and, mortified, as I re-tied the laces of my bodice I was already rehearsing the rollicking I was going to deliver to the young princes when their giggling ceased abruptly. Emerging red-faced from my refuge, I stared open-mouthed at the sight that met my eyes.

It was as if a flutter of giant butterflies had alighted in the garden. The guards had rushed to open the old gate that led to a little-used dock on the riverbank and through it was advancing a procession of ladies and gentlemen clad in the height of fashion and chattering and laughing together. The gilded galley from which they had disembarked could be seen bumping gently against the landing stage, while a trio of escorting barges drifted in mid-river, each carrying a score or more of arbalesters and men-at-arms. Rooted to the spot, the children stood gawping like street urchins.

The half dozen ladies of the party wore full-skirted gowns in rainbow hues with high waists and trailing sleeves and they walked with a studied, laid-back gait, carefully balancing an array of architectural headdresses – steeples, arches and gables – glittering with jewels and fluttering with gauzy veils. The men were no less flamboyant, sporting richly brocaded doublets with high, fluted collars and exotically draped hats and teetering on jewel-encrusted shoes with high red heels and spring-curled toes.

In the van of the procession strolled the most magnificent pair of all, locked in animated conversation. I had never seen her at close quarters, but I knew instantly that this must be the queen, linked arm in arm with her brother-in-law the Duke of Orleans.

Queen Isabeau was not slender any more – eleven children and all those succulent roasts had seen to that – but on this stifling afternoon when everything was melting, she glittered like ice. Her gown was of lustrous pale-blue silk so liberally woven through with gold thread that it shimmered as she moved and around her shoulders hung thick chains of pearls and sapphires. On her head an enormous wheel of pale, iridescent feathers was pinned with a diamond the size of a duck’s egg.

Her escort was no less resplendent. Louis of Orleans was tall and handsome with a jutting jaw, a long, imperial nose and twinkling speckled grey eyes. To my astonishment there were porcupines embroidered in gold thread and jet beads all over his gown and his extravagantly dagged hat was trimmed with striped porcupine quills, which rattled as he walked. It was only later that I learned that the porcupine was the duke’s personal emblem. Louis of Orleans liked everyone to know who he was.

I was so mesmerised by these visions of fashionable extravagance that I had forgotten to scamper out of sight and now I could only sink to my knees, for Catherine and Charles had taken shelter behind me and were clinging to my skirt. As it turned out I need not have worried, for I do not think Queen Isabeau even noticed us. She only tore her gaze from the duke in order to fix it on Michele, who was now standing nervously, clutching her book like a shield.

‘Princesse Michele?’ The queen beckoned to the trembling girl and I detected a distinctly peevish note in the deep, Germanic voice. ‘It is Michele, is it not?’

Well may she ask! I heard my own voice exclaim inside my head. To my knowledge she had not laid eyes on this daughter of hers more than once or twice in the nine years since her birth.

‘Come. Come closer, child!’ She made an impatient gesture.

The grubby hem of Michele’s skirt moved into the scope of my vision and I saw her bend her knee before her mother. For one so young her composure was remarkable.

‘Yes, you must be Michele. You have my eyes. And these are your brothers, are they not?’ She gestured towards Louis and Jean and nodded at Michele’s whispered, ‘Yes, Madame.’

‘Of course they are! What other children would be playing in Queen Jeanne’s garden? But how wretched you look!’ exclaimed the queen. ‘Have you no comb – no veil? And your gown … it is dirty and so tight! Where is your governess? How dare she allow you to be seen like this?’

Michele coloured violently, her expression a mixture of fear and shame. I waited to hear her denounce Madame la Bonne but she merely swallowed hard and shook her head. Perhaps she knew that her all-powerful mother would never believe the truth; that the nursery comb had few remaining teeth, there were no clean clothes and the governess was closeted in her tower chamber counting the coins she had managed not to spend on her royal charges.

‘Have you forgotten your manners?’ the queen demanded. For a tense moment it looked as if she might explode into anger but then she shrugged and turned to the duke. ‘Well, never mind. Young girls are better quiet. What do you think, my lord? Will she polish up for your son? He is only a boy after all. They are cygnets who can grow into swans together!’

Louis of Orleans bent and placed one gloved finger under Michele’s chin. The little girl’s eyes grew round with apprehension, giving her the appeal of a frightened kitten. The duke smiled, releasing her. ‘As she is your daughter, Madame, how could she be anything but perfect? I love her already and so will my son.’

The queen laughed. ‘You flatter us, my lord!’ Orleans’ charm made her forget Michele’s shortcomings and the absent governess. She waved the large painted fan she carried. ‘Michele, Louis, Jean, follow me. I am glad to have found you in the garden. It has saved us sending men to search the palace. The time has come for you to leave here. It is no longer safe for you. The new Duke of Burgundy thinks he can use you to rule France himself but I am your mother and the queen and I have other plans. You need bring nothing. We are leaving now.’

Her words fell like a thunderbolt in the scented garden. The three named children exchanged astonished glances; Michele with alarm, Louis with excitement and Jean with bemusement. None of them dared to speak.

‘We are going somewhere where Burgundy cannot force you into undesirable alliances. We will foil his schemes and you will have new playmates in your uncle of Orleans’ children. Ladies!’

The queen snapped her fan at her attendants, two of whom hastened forward to manoeuvre the long train and voluminous skirt around her feet so that she could turn around. While they busied themselves, she cast another doubtful glance at her children, then leaned closer to Orleans, murmuring, ‘Are they worth saving from Burgundy’s machinations? They look a sorry bunch to me.’

Orleans made a reassuring gesture. ‘Have no fear, Madame, they are of the blood royal. They will polish up.’ He turned to address Michele, who still clutched her book fiercely, as the only solid object in a violently shifting world. ‘The Duke of Burgundy wants to marry you to his son, Mademoiselle, but how would you like to marry my son instead?’

He clearly expected no reply, for the procession was already moving off, back towards the river-gate, and he immediately returned his attention to the queen, missing Michele’s eloquent glance in my direction. ‘I told you so,’ it said, ‘I am to be married to heaven-knows-whom and taken to heaven-knows-where!’ I crossed myself and whispered a prayer for her. Poor little princess, her worst fears were realised.

‘But the dauphin is our first priority,’ the queen insisted more forcefully, still within earshot. I saw little Louis flush at hearing himself referred to by the title he had so long desired. ‘If he can marry Louis to his daughter, Burgundy will try to rule through him.’

‘You are right, as always, Madame,’ acknowledged the duke. ‘The dauphin, most of all, must be kept away from Cousin Jean. He who calls himself Fearless! What is fearless about stealing children? Jean the Fearless – hah!’ The porcupine quills rattled their scorn as the Duke of Orleans tossed his head and cried, ‘But you need have no fear, my children! He shall not steal you from your mother. Forward! We are heading for Chartres, with all speed.’

These were the last words I heard because the two remaining infants began to jump and wail beside me as their siblings walked away without a backward glance. Who could blame them? They were confused and frightened. A band of total strangers had invaded their world and within minutes their sister and brothers were disappearing. The river-gate clanged shut. A band of musicians on the galley struck up a merry tune as if nothing untoward had occurred. Sailing off in her cushioned galley, Queen Isabeau was totally unaware of the misery she left behind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had just reached the part where the saint tames the fire-breathing beast by raising the Holy Cross when we were suddenly assailed by the sound of manic laughter, harsh and insistent and impossible to ignore. Who knew what new and weird delusion had stirred the poor mad king, now back in his oubliette, but the intrusion of his insane laughter into our cosy little world was like a leper’s clapper rattling in a hushed church. Both the children screwed up their faces and covered their ears with their hands, but after a minute Catherine took her hands away and asked, ‘Is that the man from the garden, Mette? Is that the king?’

I shook my head, dismayed that she had obviously heard more than I thought of the minder’s words. ‘Who can tell, my little one? It is a nasty noise anyway. But we can run away from it. Come with me!’

I gathered them up and swept them downstairs to Madame la Bonne’s abandoned chamber. Her big tester bed had heavy velvet curtains, which I drew closely around us. As we huddled together in the flickering light of an oil lamp, I made up a story pretending we were fugitives who had sought sanctuary in a secret chapel where only God could find us. The warmth and intimacy of the curtained bed with its feather pillows and fur-lined covers seemed to comfort them for, royal though they were, they had never experienced such luxury and at least the thick hangings deadened the noise from outside. There was no more mention of the manic laughter or the screaming man.

I could find no comfort myself however. When the children had fallen asleep and the lamp had spluttered and died, I lay between them in the stifling darkness, wide-eyed and rigid with fear. Echoes of the king’s cackle summoned nightmare images of the tavern stories Jean-Michel had relayed, of winged demons sent flitting through the night by sorcerers. I imagined flocks of malevolent creatures clinging to the bed hangings, carrying the taint of madness on their breath and infecting the black shadows. Convinced that their very breath could send me mad, I buried myself in the bedclothes muttering a string of Aves. It was hours before I slept.

5

The terrors of the night were nothing compared with the horror of waking. Jerked out of sleep by a loud metallic clang, I opened my eyes just as the curtains were hauled back by an armoured figure brandishing a naked blade. My shrill scream was underscored by the panic-stricken wails of the children who instinctively dived behind me into the protective pile of Madame la Bonne’s pillows. I am not brave, but in that instant anger overcame my fear and I reared up like a spitting she-cat to confront our assailant. What a pathetic sight that must have been – rumpled linen versus burnished steel!

‘In here, my lord!’ yelled the anonymous intruder, his dagger aimed at my throat.

I recoiled, clutching at the yawning neck of my chemise and demanding divine protection and information in one hoarse, garbled screech. ‘God save us – who are you – what do you want?’

‘Calm yourself, Madame,’ the man advised. ‘His grace of Burgundy would speak with you.’

Even had I dared, there was no opportunity to protest that this was hardly a convenient moment to receive the noble duke, for in that instant an even more terrifying figure parted the curtains at the foot of the bed with a movement so violent it tore the hooks from their rail. His grace of Burgundy, framed in blood-red velvet. I let out another scream.

Encased to the neck in black and gold armour, his presence loomed like an incarnation of the demons of the night. The very smell of him seemed to rob the air of life; not the natural odour of male sweat, but a sweet cloying scent, like rotting fruit. And his face matched his armour, dark in every way; expression grim, complexion swarthy, grey eyes deep-socketed, cheeks shadowed with several days’ growth of beard, black brows thick and bristling and a nose hooked like a meat-cleaver over a fleshy, purple mouth.

‘Where is the dauphin?’ this demon demanded, peering past me at the small legs and feet protruding from the pillows. ‘Who are you hiding there? Take a look, Deet.’

The man with the dagger flung me roughly aside and hauled Catherine from her refuge. The brave little girl kicked and fought, but she was as powerless as a fly in a web. Cursing, the knight dumped her at arm’s length and reached for Charles, who immediately set up a scream of astonishing volume.

‘That is not the dauphin,’ observed the duke, raising his voice above the din and eyeing Charles with distaste. ‘Too small. You, Madame, tell me immediately, where is the dauphin? Deet, help her to think.’

To my relief, I saw the dagger sheathed but then I felt my arm almost wrenched from my shoulder as I was dragged off the bed and thrown to the floor at the duke’s feet. The pain was no more fierce however than his basilisk glare. In that split second he seemed like evil incarnate and I did not believe that such an ogre could have the best interests of the royal children at heart, certainly not more than even the most neglectful mother, as the queen undoubtedly was. Inwardly I resolved to tell him nothing and, in any case, I was trembling with fear and tongue-tied.

‘Well?’ His gold-tipped metal foot tapped. ‘I know who you are, Madame, and your family is no friend to Burgundy, so it would be foolish to make me lose my temper.’

It was suddenly clear to me that the duke had concluded that I was Madame la Bonne. It was an understandable mistake, given that I had been found in the governess’ quarters and even in her bed, but it was not an identity I wished to own to, especially in present circumstances.

‘I am not Madame la Bonne, sir,’ I hastened to reveal, panic restoring my voice. No wonder the governess had fled. God alone knew how she and her family had offended Burgundy, but I did not wish to carry the blame for it. ‘She has left. I do not know why, but when I looked for her and the tutor yesterday evening they were nowhere to be found.’

The duke began to pace the floor. For a moment I feared he was not going to believe me, but something obviously convinced him of my ignoble roots. He began muttering, thinking aloud.

‘Left, has she? I am not surprised. She fled because she is corrupt and greedy, like all the queen’s ladies. However, she will be found and punished for abandoning her charges. But she is unimportant. What I need to know immediately is the whereabouts of the dauphin.’ His voice had risen and his pacing had brought him back to me. Almost casually, he grabbed a handful of my hair and jerked my head upwards, forcing me to look at him. ‘You can tell me that can you not, whoever you are?’

The burst of pain brought tears to my eyes and I thought my scalp would split. ‘No!’ I yelped. ‘I cannot. I am only a nursemaid. The queen came with the Duke of Orleans and took the dauphin and his brother and sister. I do not know where they went.’

‘I do not believe you,’ he snarled, hurling me away from him so that I cannoned into the steel-clad legs of the other man. I felt a fearful crunch in my neck as my head whipped back and tears of pure terror began to course down my cheeks.

‘Do not do that!’ Through blurred vision I saw Catherine hurl herself at the duke’s armoured leg, hammering at the gleaming metal with her fists. I shouted a warning and scrambled forward, but I could not reach her before he did, bending to snatch her up and hold her level with his face, her bare feet dangling helplessly. She was stunned into silence, mesmerised by his predatory glare.

‘You are a little shrew, are you not, Mademoiselle?’ he hissed, eyes glinting with anger.

‘Do not hurt her!’ I screamed in desperation. ‘She is only a child.’

The duke shot me a look of cold venom. ‘When the hawk swoops, it does not ask the age of its prey,’ he snapped. His eyes drilled into Catherine’s, his hooked beak almost touching her nose. ‘Now, little shrew, you tell me where your brother is. I take it you are the dauphin’s sister?’

Catherine stuck out her chin, her mouth clamped shut. His cruel treatment had brought out her stubborn streak and I feared the result. ‘She is not yet four, my lord,’ I protested. ‘How can she know anything? These two are only babes.’

The duke sneered. ‘I have children and I know that they understand a great deal more than you think.’ He shook Catherine so that her head wobbled alarmingly. ‘Is that not so, little shrew? You know where they have gone.’

‘Chartres!’ Charles’ high lisping treble rendered the word almost indecipherable, but it diverted the duke’s attention and he dropped Catherine in a heap on the floor beside me. I clutched her to me, sobbing.

Now the ducal gaze focused on Charles whose thumb, as always in times of stress, had gone to his mouth. The duke bent and wrenched it out, gripping the small wrist so fiercely that Charles let out a wail of anguish. ‘Silence!’ roared Burgundy, pushing the little boy towards his armoured companion. ‘Did he say Chartres, Deet? Make him say the word again.’

‘No!’ I screamed as the man pulled Charles towards him. ‘He did say Chartres. The queen said they were going to Chartres! That’s all we know.’

With sudden and vicious momentum, the duke swung round and swiped my cheek with the back of his hand in its studded gauntlet. Stars exploded in my head and I fell back against the bed, gasping with shock. ‘You stupid slut!’ I heard him shout through the ringing in my ears. ‘Why didn’t you tell us that straight away?’ He began to issue orders to the man he had called Deet. ‘Get the men mounted immediately. We can be sure that the queen will not hurry. She will have rested overnight at Melun. But they must not reach Chartres. We will cut them off at Étampes. Go, man! I will join you very soon.’

My head was still spinning but I managed to haul myself to my feet as Charles was abruptly released and ran to my arms. My cheek was burning and the unfamiliar taste of blood was in my mouth where my teeth had cut the inner flesh.

Behind his hawk-like beak, Jean of Burgundy’s grey eyes glittered, fixed not on my face but on my unlaced chemise and my breasts, scarcely covered by the thin cloth. I felt blood dribble from my cheek and mingle with the sweat running cold between them.

‘Let that be a lesson to you, slut,’ he sneered, moving towards me.

His gaze was like an obscene caress and my skin crawled. Slowly, he removed the gauntlet from the hand which had struck me and from its bristling surface he flicked a scrap of what I assumed was my own torn flesh. Without the glove I could see that his hand was white and soft and I cringed, thinking he was going to grope me. The thick, sweet smell of him was nauseating.

‘Name, slut?’ The repetition of the insult was effective in reducing me to an object, without free will.

I heard myself say in a croaky whisper, ‘Guillaumette,’ and immediately regretted it. Why had I told him the truth? The unusual name marked me out. Why hadn’t I said Jeanne or Marie and been lost in the crowd?

His let his hand hover over me and a cruel smile twisted his lips as he relished my mounting terror and disgust. Then, instead of reaching downwards to grope my breasts as I feared he would, he let his fingers linger briefly on my battered cheek. When he withdrew them, they were red with my blood. My gorge rose as I watched him push them one by one into his mouth and suck them clean. His action struck me as so revolting that it was all I could do not to vomit over his steel-clad feet.

‘Not noble blood but sweet enough,’ he conceded, smacking his lips. ‘Unfortunately I have no time to savour it now but I will remember – Guillaumette, the slut …’

He slipped the gauntlet back on and his mood immediately became businesslike. ‘There will be changes here. The king’s affairs must be put in order. I will leave a guard on these royal children. See that they do not venture out.’ Then he turned on his heel and was gone. His threat echoed in my head, ‘I will remember – Guillaumette …’

Catherine stared after him, her pretty little face twisted into an expression of loathing. ‘Who is that man, Mette?’ she asked in a thin, fierce voice.

‘That is the Duke of Burgundy,’ I told her, struggling to control my voice.

‘He is a bad man,’ she responded, her voice rising in passion. ‘I hate him, hate him, hate him!’

Young though she was, I often wondered if Catherine had a premonition about the Duke of Burgundy. It was many years before she was to encounter him again, but his image was to haunt her dreams as vividly as mine.

To my surprise, most of the palace servants saw Burgundy’s arrival as a boon and it must be said that he did impose some much-needed order. The sight of the Burgundian cross of St Andrew fluttering on every tower and gatehouse alongside the royal lilies made me feel distinctly uneasy, but it held no sinister overtones for the mass of scullions, chamberlains and varlets, who were only too happy to start pocketing regular wages for a change. In the nursery we even received a visit from a household clerk enquiring after our needs and, amazingly, within hours the children received new clothes, two tire-women arrived to scrub the floors and stairways and decent food and hot water were brought to us regularly. Several luxury items were also brought to the children, including a beautiful miniature harp which had apparently been sent to Charles months ago by his godfather, the Duke of Berry. It seemed that Burgundy’s agents must have caught up with la Bonne and le Clerc and recovered the goods they had looted. Having felt the violence of the duke’s anger myself, I shuddered to think what punishment had been meted out to that thieving pair.

The children liked the new clothes and the better food and didn’t associate them with the terrifying encounter in the governess’ chamber. They hardly noticed that there was now a double guard on the nursery tower and that armed soldiers shadowed us whenever we ventured out for fresh air, but I certainly noticed these things, for I became a virtual prisoner, unable to visit Jean-Michel or my parents. Consequently, it was some time before I discovered what had been going on in the outside world.

Had I known that the three older royal children had never reached Chartres, but had been abducted from their mother’s procession and forced into Burgundian marriages, I might have been more prepared for what was to come. In the event, perhaps ignorance was bliss, because when she asked about her sister and brothers I wasn’t able to tell Catherine that Louis had been forced into a binding betrothal with Burgundy’s daughter Marguerite and had since been confined in the Louvre with Burgundian tutors, while his sister and brother had been whisked away to live with the children to whom Burgundy had matched them; Michele in Artois with the duke’s only son Philippe, and Jean in Hainault with Burgundy’s niece, Jacqueline, his sister’s daughter. However, I also heard that, far from considering themselves beaten, the queen and the Duke of Orleans had raised an army to confront Burgundy outside Paris. The king remained mad and confined, and the spectre of civil war stalked the land.

For the next three weeks I lived on tenterhooks, happy to have sole charge of Catherine and her little brother, but daily expecting a new governess to arrive and take over in the nursery. One September morning I believed that moment had arrived.

Little Charles had never been much of an eater. Who could blame him, given the awful slops he had been offered during most of his short life? I was encouraging him to finish his breakfast bowl of fresh curds sweetened with honey – a new and delectable treat – when there was a commotion on the tower stair. The door of the day nursery flew open to admit a richly dressed lady shadowed by a large female servant in apron and coif, not unlike my own. I sprang to my feet and hovered protectively over the children, who looked up in fright.

‘I am Marie, Duchess of Bourbon,’ the newcomer announced, without smile or greeting and only the merest glance to show that her words were addressed to me.

I backed away and dropped to my knees, my apprehension rising rapidly as she continued speaking. ‘His grace of Burgundy has requested me to make arrangements for the care of the king’s children.’

The mention of Burgundy rang loud alarm bells in my head. ‘Y-yes, Madame,’ I stuttered.

Catherine heard the name Burgundy and the tremor in my voice and her gaze swivelled in panic from me to the grand visitor. ‘No!’ she cried, instinctively sensing danger. ‘No, Mette. Make them go away.’

Marie of Bourbon glided forward and knelt by Catherine’s stool. With a smile and a touch she tried to reassure the trembling child. ‘Do not be frightened, my little one,’ she cooed. ‘There is nothing to fear. Your name is Catherine, is it not? Well, Catherine, you are a very lucky girl. You are going to a beautiful abbey where kind nuns will look after you and you will be safe. You will like that, will you not?’

Catherine was not fooled by a soft voice and a tender touch. ‘No! No, I want to stay with Mette.’ Like a whirlwind, she jumped off her stool and ran to my side, closely followed by little Charles, curds dribbling down his chin.

Still on my knees, I put my arms around them, tears springing to my eyes. ‘I am sorry, Madame,’ I gulped, avoiding the lady’s gaze. ‘There has been much upheaval in their lives lately and I am all they know.’

Marie of Bourbon rose and her tone became brisk as her patience grew thin. ‘That may be, but these are no ordinary children. They have been woefully neglected and it is time they were given the training they need and deserve. I will be taking Charles with me now. He is my father’s godson and he is to live in his household and receive the proper education for a prince. You are to prepare Catherine for her journey to Poissy Abbey. She will be leaving tomorrow morning.’ She waved an imperious hand at her servant. ‘Get the boy. We are leaving.’

Before he realised what was happening, Charles was swept up in a pair of sturdy arms. He set up a shrill screech and began to kick and struggle, but the woman had been picked for her strength and his puny efforts were stolidly ignored.

‘No! Put him down!’ Catherine screamed and ran at the woman, swinging on her arm and trying unsuccessfully to dislodge her brother. With tears of fear and frustration, the little girl turned to me. ‘Mette, don’t let them take him! Help him!’

Miserably, I shook my head and wrung my hands. What could I do? Who was I against the might of Burgundy, Bourbon and Berry? Our last sight of Charles was of his agonised, curd-spattered face and his outstretched hands as his captor descended the stairs but the sound of his screams persisted, punctuated by Catherine’s sobs. Marie of Bourbon’s cheeks were flushed and her expression grim as she stood in the doorway and gave me final instructions, raising her voice above the commotion.

‘I will come for Catherine at the same time tomorrow. See that she is prepared to leave. I do not want any more scenes like this. They are vulgar and unpleasant and not good for the children.’

‘Yes, Madame.’

I had bowed my head dutifully, but my deference disguised a mind whirling with wild rebellious notions. Could I whisk Catherine off to the bake house and raise her as my own child? Could I flee with her to some remote village? Could I take her to the queen? But even as these ideas flashed through my mind, I knew that no such course of action was feasible. Catherine was the king’s daughter, a crown asset. Stealing her would be treason. We would be hunted down and I would be put to death and how would that help her, or my own family? To say nothing of myself! As for taking her to the queen – I did not even know where she was, let alone how to get there.

I suppose I should have been grateful that we had another day together, that Catherine had not also been carried instantly to a closed litter, while Burgundy’s guards turned deaf ears to her heart-rending screams. At least I had a few hours to prepare her for our separation and to try and convince her that it was for the best.

How do you persuade a little girl of not quite four that what is about to happen is not the worst thing in the world when, like her, you completely believe that it is? How was I to make my voice say things that my heart utterly denied? I had heard cows bellowing in the fields when their calves were taken from them and I could feel a thunderous bellow welling up inside me; one that, if I let it out, would surely be heard throughout the whole kingdom. But I knew that I could not – must not – if I was to help Catherine face up to her inevitable future.

At first she wept and put her hands over her ears, screwing up her eyes as she cried, ‘No, Mette, no. I won’t leave you. They c-cannot make me. I will stay here and you can f-fetch Charles back and we will be happy, like we were b-before.’

I held her tightly in my arms. She was shaking and hiccupping. Wretched though I felt, I had to deny her. ‘No, Catherine. You must understand that you cannot stay here and that you and I cannot be together any more. You have to go and learn how to be a princess.’

She broke away from me and started shouting indignantly, ‘But why? You are my nurse. You have always looked after me. I thought you loved me, Mette.’

Ah, dear God, it was soul-destroying! Loved her? I more than loved her. She was an essential part of my being. Losing her would be like losing my hands or tearing out my heart, but I had to tell her that although I loved her, I had to let her go. She was not my daughter but the king’s and she had to do what her father wished.

‘But the king is mad,’ she cried. ‘We saw him in the garden. He does not care about me. He does not even know who I am.’

Out of the mouths of babes …! It was heartbreakingly true. He and his queen may have loved Dauphin Charles, the golden boy who had died, but none of the rest of their surviving offspring could be said to have benefited from one morsel of parental concern.

‘But God cares,’ I responded, grasping at straws. ‘God loves you and you will be going to His special house where His nuns will look after you and keep you safe.’

‘Does He love me as much as you do?’ Her breath was shuddery and in her little flushed face her eyes were round and questioning. My darling little Catherine. Those enchanting, deep sapphire eyes seemed to hold the entire meaning of my life, even reddened and swollen as they were. The image of them would stay with me for ever.

‘Oh yes,’ I lied. Call it blasphemy if you like, but I swear that the Almighty could not have loved that little girl as much as I did. ‘He loves us all and you must remember His commandment – the one about honouring your father and your mother, which means you must do as they say.’

‘But that lady said it was the Duke of Burgundy who sent her. He is not my father. I hate him. I do not have to do as he says, do I?’

Sometimes, I thought, she was far too bright for her own good.

Involuntarily, I touched my cheek, which would always bear the mark of Burgundy’s vicious, studded gauntlet and swallowed hard on the bile his name inspired. ‘Well, yes, Catherine you do, because he is your father’s cousin and helps him to rule his kingdom.’

I could sense her desperate resistance crumbling. Her shoulders drooped and her lower lip began to tremble. ‘What about my mother? Does she want me to go away to this place?’

Who knew what the queen wanted? I had heard that she and Orleans had raised an army, but so far no other news of her had reached my ears.

‘I am sure the queen agrees with the king,’ I answered lamely, casting about in my mind for some way of distracting her. ‘Now, supposing we go out for a bit? Shall we go and light a candle to the Virgin and ask her to protect and keep us until we meet again?’ I hoped the guards would not stop us going to the chapel and that its peaceful atmosphere might calm us both. I might pray for a miracle, I thought, but in my heart I knew that not even the Blessed Marie would be able to save us from Marie of Bourbon.

I was so proud of my darling girl when she took her leave the next morning. She and I had already said our farewells, exchanging a long embrace and many tearful kisses before I laced her into her new, high-waisted blue gown, ready for the journey. Then I brushed out her long, fine, flaxen hair for the last time and tied the ribbons of a white linen cap under her chin, trying not to let my hands shake and transmit my own churning emotions to her. When the Duchess of Bourbon held out her hand to lead Catherine to the waiting litter, she looked the perfect royal princess; obedient, sweet and decorous. Only two bright pink patches on her cheeks indicated the misery and turmoil beneath the calm façade. Looking back, I think the diamond quality of her character was revealed in that moment.

At the door of the litter the grand lady turned to me with a gracious smile. ‘I believe your name is Guillaumette,’ she said. ‘For one who can have no knowledge of courtly manners, you have done well by the princess. However, I am sure you understand that there is much for her to learn that you could never teach her. Now you may go to the grand master’s chamber and collect what is due to you. The nursery is to be closed. Goodbye.’

As the litter swung out of sight through an archway, I longed to run after it and shout, ‘I do not want what is due to me! I do not want your blood money! No payment can be recompense for losing my darling girl!’

But I did not. I stood, frozen like a statue, praying. I prayed that Catherine knew my love for her was unconditional, knew that it would never fade and that whenever – if ever – fate brought us together again, she would remember her old nurse Mette. I was nineteen years old and I felt like a crone of ninety.

PART TWO
Hôtel de St Pol, Paris

The Shades of Agincourt

1415–18

6

‘I have news that may lift your spirits,’ said Jean-Michel as we lay in bed, whispering so as not to wake our children who slept in the opposite corner of the cramped chamber.

‘News of what?’ I responded dully, too tired to rouse much interest. I was always tired these days – had been ever since returning to the Hôtel de St Pol, after years away. Many highs and lows had led to Jean-Michel and I sharing a bed together in the royal palace and our lives were very different now.

For over eight years I had raised my children in my old home under the Grand Pont. The summer after leaving the nursery, I gave birth to a baby boy and, thanks be to God, he lived. We called him Henri-Luc after both his grandfathers, but he was always just Luc to me. Jean-Michel completed his apprenticeship at the palace stables and was appointed a charettier, driving supply wagons between Paris and the royal estates, which meant he was away a great deal. He was allocated family quarters at the palace, but my mother became increasingly crippled by painful swollen joints and I was needed at the bakery, which suited me fine, because for a time the Duke of Burgundy had kept his hands on the reins at the Hôtel de St Pol and after my terrifying encounter I preferred to stay as far from him as possible.

But city life wasn’t easy. No one lived in cosy harmony with their neighbours any more, for after Burgundy’s abduction of the royal children, Paris had become a sad and vicious place, its people divided into factions according to which of the royal affinities they supported or were dependent upon. Locked in their battle for power, the Dukes of Burgundy and Orleans lobbied and bribed all the various guilds and in the church and university. As a result, split loyalties tore society apart, causing a succession of riots and murders, burnings and lynchings, which brought terror to the streets. Officially the ailing King Charles still sat on the throne, but for long periods he was unable to command the loyalty of his lieges and, while attempting to rule in his stead, the queen played one duke off against another – as rumour had it both in and out of bed.

It must be said, looking back, that Catherine was well out of it, tucked safely away in her convent in the country, but I missed her like a limb. I knew I should forget her and that I would most likely never see her again, but every new stage of my own children’s lives reminded me of her. I loved Alys and Luc, of course I did, and as they grew older it was obvious that they loved me. Under their grandparents’ roof and with Jean-Michel coming and going, they were part of an outwardly tight-knit family unit, loyal to each other and loving, but for me they were also the source of an intense heartache, which I could confide in no one, for I knew that no one would understand or condone such maternal ambivalence.

Gradually my mother’s illness grew so bad that in the morning she could barely haul herself out of bed and spent most of the day sitting behind the open shutter of the shop telling me what to do and finding fault with my efforts. I knew she could not help it because the terrible pain in her swollen joints made her cry out in agony, but I found it hard to keep my temper with her and I have to confess I often failed. That she only ever scolded me, not my father or the children, did not help. Eventually she started taking a special remedy, which I would fetch for her from the apothecary. It was hard to believe how a syrup made from poppies could affect someone the way that potion affected my mother, but from the day she started taking it she was more or less lost to us. At first I was so grateful that it relieved her pain that I ignored her total lassitude and the vacant look in her eyes, but after several weeks I grew worried and secretly substituted another remedy. However, when she started shaking and vomiting and screaming for what she called her ‘angel’s breath’, I was forced to give in. One night I think she must have swallowed too much of it, or else the mixture was tainted in some way, because my father woke up to find her dead beside him.

We were both devastated, remembering the strong woman she had once been, but we were also thankful that her suffering was over. In some ways she was lucky to die in her bed, for at that time life in Paris was perilous and cheap. People were murdered simply for wearing the wrong colour hood or walking down the wrong alley. Bodies were found in the streets every day with their throats slit or their skulls cracked like eggs.

One freezing November night it was none other than the Duke of Orleans himself who was hacked to death, set upon by a masked gang in the Rue Barbette behind the Hôtel de St Antoine. He had been a frequent visitor at a mansion there, in which a lady, widely believed to be the queen, had been living for several weeks. As royal guards swarmed through the streets seeking the duke’s murderers, news spread that the corpse’s right hand had been severed at the wrist. Blue-hooded Burgundians declared this to be proof positive that Orleans had been in league with the devil, who always claimed the right hand of his acolytes. White-hooded Orleanists maintained, meanwhile, that the only devil involved in this murder was the Duke of Burgundy who, rather giving credence to this claim, abruptly quitted his coveted position of power beside the king and fled to Artois, destroying strategic bridges behind him. That left a power vacuum, which for the citizens of Paris was the most dangerous situation of all. In the gutters the body count mounted nightly.

My father knew the baker who delivered bread to the heavily guarded house in the Rue Barbette and it was he who told us that the lady the Duke of Orleans had visited so frequently and foolhardily had given birth to a baby and had only just survived. After the murder she too fled, no one knew how or where. The house was just suddenly empty. A few weeks later, a royal pronouncement told us that Queen Isabeau had given birth to another son, stating that the boy had been baptised Philippe and died soon afterwards.

My father and I wore brown hoods and kept our mouths shut. We managed to stay alive, but it was a daily struggle to keep the ovens fired. The brushwood we burned had always been collected by fuellers in the countryside, but desperate gangs of bandits and cut-throats made the gathering of it too dangerous. Flour supplies were another problem as factional armies were constantly on the move around Paris, purloining food stocks as they marched. Fortunately, Jean-Michel was often able to ‘divert’ sheaves of dry furze and sacks of flour to the bakery from supplies shipped in by barge to the royal palace. Yes, I am afraid we took to filching royal assets as freely as Madame la Bonne had done. It was the only way to survive.

After years of scheming and struggling to keep the bakery going, a sudden apoplexy carried off my father and even before we had buried him, the Guild of Master Bakers callously informed me that our license was revoked. It was pointless to protest. Women were not admitted into the guild and only guild members could bake bread. Although, as my father’s sole heir, I owned the ovens, I could not use them, nor could I safely live alone with my children in lawless Paris. So, lacking any choice, I let the house and bakery to one of our former apprentices and brought Alys and Luc to live with their father at the Hôtel de St Pol.

I was far from happy to be back, but at least Burgundy was no longer in charge. By then the dauphin – little Prince Louis who had dropped the hairy caterpillar down my bodice – had turned sixteen and taken his seat on the Royal Council, aided and abetted by his much older cousin, the Duke of Anjou. Between them they managed to prevent Burgundy and his cohorts from making any successful moves on Paris, but it wasn’t all good because the queen had clung onto her position and she and the dauphin had to share the regency. It was a daily feature of life at St Pol to see red-faced emissaries scuttling between the Queen’s House and the dauphin’s apartments, making futile attempts at building bridges between a mother and son who were constantly at loggerheads.

Not that I was one to talk. I have to admit that it wasn’t all peace and harmony between me and Jean-Michel. After the death of my mother, I had grown used to being mistress of my own home and helping to run a business. Now I was once more on servant’s wages and living in one damp, dark chamber with no grate and no garderobe. We peed in pots and had to use the reeking latrine ditch behind the stables. I grumbled constantly about my reduced circumstances, so no wonder Jean-Michel was glad to have news to cheer me up.

‘Not news of what,’ he countered. ‘Of who. Of the Princess Catherine.’

I sat bolt upright, wide awake. ‘Catherine! What about her? Tell me!’

Until he said her name I had not realised how starved I had been of her, my longing raw and secret, like a concealed ulcer.

‘She is coming back to the Hôtel de St Pol.’

‘When?’ I nearly screeched, rearing round and shaking him by the shoulder. ‘When, Jean-Michel?’

‘Shh!’ I could not see him in the dark, but I could sense the admonitory finger on his lips. ‘Sweet Jesus! Simmer down, woman, and I will tell you. Quite soon, I think. One of the grand master’s clerks was down at the stables today, making arrangements for her travel from Poissy Abbey.’

My mind was doing somersaults, but I tried to steady myself so that I could ponder this development. ‘I wonder why she is coming back now. There must be a reason. My God, Jean-Michel, will you be involved?’ There were occasions when he was called on to ride in the teams which carried the royal horse-litters.

‘No, no. She is the king’s daughter. There is to be a full escort – twenty knights and two hundred men-at-arms – too grand a job for me.’ Jean-Michel reached out to pull me down beside him. ‘I must find more things to get you excited,’ he murmured, nuzzling my ear, and being by now full of pent-up feelings, I reciprocated. But after we had stoked the spark of passion to a blaze and zestfully quenched it, I lay wide-eyed, my mind spinning like a windmill in a gale.

A few weeks previously, an embassy from England had arrived at the French court. A cardinal and two bishops, no less, had ridden in with great pomp and show, parading through the city with banners flying, trailing a huge procession of knights and retainers eager to enjoy the sights and brothels of Paris. It was a surprise to see them come in peace, because up to then we had heard tell that the English king was mobilising to re-claim territories on this side of the Sleeve, which he considered belonged to England. Normandy, Poitou, Anjou, Guienne, Gascony, they were all on his list. I remember wondering why he did not just claim the whole of France, the way his great-grandfather had done. Being a staunch royalist, my mother had told me how seventy years ago King Edward III of England had tried to claim the French throne as the nearest male heir to his uncle, King Charles IV of France, who had been his mother’s brother. But thirty years before that, in their own male interests no doubt, the grandees of Church and State had decided that women in France could not inherit land – pots and pans yes, horses, houses and gold yes, land no. They could not even pass land through their own blood line to their sons, pardieu! They called it Salic law, but my mother never explained why. Perhaps she did not know. Anyway, this law nullified King Edward’s claim and put Catherine’s great-grandfather on the French throne instead. Arguments over sovereignty had been rumbling between France and England ever since.

However, the present argument was not about who sat on what throne. This high-powered English embassy was apparently only interested in settling the dispute over territories, and in sealing the deal by acquiring a French wife for King Henry V of England, who was the great-grandson of Edward III. Well, you didn’t have to be a genius to conclude that the return to court of our king’s youngest and only unmarried daughter might have something to do with this. I decided there and then that if my darling Catherine was coming back to St Pol to be dangled before the King of England as a prospective bride, then she was going to need help – and who better to help her than her faithful old nursemaid?

Gone were the days when everything closed down if King Charles had a bad turn. From a powerful man with periodic delusions, he had dwindled into a predominantly childlike creature, only occasionally violently mad; a puppet-king to be manipulated by whoever guided his hand to sign the edicts. As a consequence, the palace was brimming with courtiers on the make, all looking to fill any official posts that might put them within reach of the pot of gold that was the royal treasury, which meant that accommodation was at a premium. If you lived in servants’ quarters, you had to earn them and therefore our whole family was employed in the royal household, even Luc.

In fact, he was the happiest of all of us, for although he was only eight, he was in his element as a hound boy in the palace kennel. He had grown into a bony-kneed, cheeky-faced lad with an affinity for animals like his father and a stubborn streak like me. I had tried hard to teach him the rudiments of reading and writing, but with an ambition to be a huntsman, he could not see the point. Alys had taken to her letters easily, but now had little time to practice since she worked in the queen’s wardrobe, where she hemmed linen from dawn till dusk. How she bore the tedium, I’ll never know but she’d grown into a docile, long-suffering little maid and I consoled myself that seaming was better than steaming, which was my unhappy lot. Since females were banned from working in the bake house or kitchens, where I might have used my skills to their best advantage, I was forced to become an alewife – the lowest of the low. I was used to hard work and fermenting barley was no harder than baking bread, but it was different when it wasn’t your own business.

The worst thing for me, living in the palace, was being constantly reminded of Catherine. I saw her face at the windows of the nursery tower, heard her laughter in the old rose garden and her footsteps on the flagstones of the chapel cloister. Only her imminent return looked set to stir me out of the deep, persistent melancholy I had been feeling without admitting it to myself.

The day after Jean-Michel dropped his bombshell, I went to the grand master’s chamber in the King’s House and, mercifully, my powers of persuasion did not desert me. Within minutes, the clerk charged with assembling staff for Catherine’s new household had agreed that I was ideally suited for work as her tiring woman and arranged for my transfer from the palace brewery. I would be on familiar ground, for she had been allocated the very rooms in which she had spent the first years of her life. We were both going back to the nursery tower. My feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground as I sped to my new post, gloating over the fact that soon, very soon, I would once more be as close as any mother to the child of my breast.

The first-floor chamber of the tower, once Madame la Bonne’s bedchamber, had been turned into a salon where Catherine and her companions would be able to read and embroider and entertain themselves and her visitors. The former governess’ crimson-curtained bed had been long ago removed and the chamber walls were hung with rainbow silks and jewel-coloured tapestries. It was furnished with cushioned stools, polished chests and tables and a carved stone chimneypiece framing a deep hearth, where a blazing fire would keep the air a good deal warmer than it had ever been in the old days. It was while I was lighting this fire a few days later, that the door opened without warning and a young lady entered and stood staring at me.

Catherine! I sank to my knees, glad to do so as my legs had turned to jelly. Dumbstruck, I gazed up at a vision of loveliness, dressed in a cornflower-blue gown, her beautiful Madonna face framed by neat little horns of netted blond hair and a filmy white veil.

‘Do not look at me, woman!’ the vision snapped. ‘I will not be gawped at by a servant.’

I flinched and lowered my eyes. A thousand times I had imagined a reunion with Catherine, but this reality jarred alarmingly. Everything looked as it should – the stylish velvet gown neatly trimmed with fur, the small oval face, the royal-blue eyes and the creamy complexion – but the sweet nature I remembered seemed to have vanished, the vibrant, loving spirit of the child had apparently withered into brittle pride. With a sinking heart I was forced to conclude that my darling, winsome girl had become a haughty mademoiselle.

‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What is your name?’

‘Mette,’ I replied, struggling to control my shock.

‘Mette? Mette! That is not a name. What is your full name?’

I was prepared to forgive the fact that she had not known me by sight, but she had known my name as a toddling infant – surely she would not forget it. But I heard the cold scorn in her voice and I neither wanted nor dared to look up and see it in her eyes. Suddenly I was consumed with anger against the nuns of Poissy. What could they have done to destroy the gentle essence of my Catherine?

‘Guillaumette,’ I gulped and had to repeat the word to make it audible. ‘Guillaumette.’

I risked a fleeting glance. Not a flicker of recognition.

‘That is better. What you are doing here, Guillaumette?’ The lady began to patrol the room, peering at its hangings and furnishings, viewing them without any visible sign of approval.

‘I have been appointed your tiring woman, Mademoiselle. I thought you might need a fire after your journey,’ I said meekly.

‘In future, if you are needed you will be summoned,’ she declared, fingering the thick embroidered canopy of a high-backed chair as if assessing its market worth. ‘Servants should not loiter in royal apartments. Remember that. You may wait below in the ante-chamber.’

‘Yes, Mademoiselle,’ I murmured and scuttled for the door, as eager to leave as she clearly was to be rid of me.

I stumbled down the stairs in a state of disbelief. Of course I had considered it possible that Catherine might not remember me after such a long period of separation, bearing in mind how young she had been when we parted, but such an evident change in character was a tragedy. I felt as if my heart was being squeezed in a giant fist.

The ante-room where I had been ordered to wait was on the ground floor, off the main entrance. It had been a bare, cold room when Louis and Jean used to have their lessons there, but now there was a brazier to warm the draught from the door and a tapestry on one wall depicting a woodland scene, with benches arranged beneath. No candles had been lit however and only a few dusty beams of twilight slanted in through the narrow windows.

Such gloom echoed my mood. Angrily dashing tears from my eyes, I cursed myself for being so foolish as to believe that my former nursling would automatically greet me with warmth and joy. She had been sent to Poissy to be educated as a princess and royalty was used to receiving personal service from noble retainers. Courtiers fought amongst themselves for the honour of pulling on the sovereign’s hose or keeping the keys to his coffers. I knew that my duty as a menial servant was to be invisible, performing the grubbier tasks in my lady’s absence and, if caught in the act, turning my face to the wall and scuttling out of sight. To gaze directly at a princess and expect her to remember the affection she had shared with me as a child, had been to defy the social order. I might harbour a lifetime’s love for the tiny babe I had suckled, but there was no rule which said she must return the sentiment. Quite the reverse, in fact. She was far more likely to have closed her mind to her neglected past and embraced her glittering present. Downcast, I nursed my injured feelings and contemplated a future which seemed once more joyless and bleak.

7

‘Mette? It is Mette, is it not?’

I’d been huddled on a bench in the far corner of the ante-room, too wrapped in misery to look up when I heard someone open the door. Then the low, sweet voice startled me to my feet with such an acute pang of recognition it made my very bones tingle. A hooded figure stood hesitating in the doorway, the face in shadow.

‘Yes, Mademoiselle. It is Mette,’ I whispered, my hands flying to my breast where my heart was leaping and fluttering like a caged finch.

I caught a faint hint of indignation as she eased back her hood and asked, ‘Do you not know me, Mette?’

‘Oh dear God! Catherine!’ Tears swamped my eyes and I must have swayed alarmingly, for she rushed across the room and I felt her arms go around me, supporting me as my knees buckled. We fell together onto the bench.

Even the smell of her was familiar; the soft, warm, delicate, rosy smell of her skin was like incense to me. How could I have mistaken another for her? Every inch of my body knew her without looking, like a ewe knows her lamb on a dark hillside or a hen knows her chick in a shuttered coop.

‘You are here,’ she crooned. ‘I felt sure you would be. Oh, Mette, I have longed for this day.’

We drew back from our close embrace to study each other. The curves of her brow and lips were like glowing reflections of my dreams and even the gloom of the chamber could not leech the colour from those brilliant blue eyes. I gazed into their sapphire depths and felt myself submerged in love.

‘I have crawled on my knees to St Jude,’ I cried, my voice breaking on a sob, ‘asking him to bring us back together, but I never thought it would happen.’

Catherine gave a little smile. ‘St Jude – patron of lost causes. That was a good idea. And, you see, it worked.’ She shook her head in wonder, her eyes still roaming my features. ‘I have seen your face in my dreams a thousand times, Mette. Other girls at the convent pined for their mothers, but I pined for my Mette. And now here you are.’ Her arms slid around my neck and her soft lips pressed my cheek. ‘We must never be parted again.’

Her words were like balm to my soul. During those long years when I had secretly kept her image locked in my heart, she had also cherished mine. She was the child of my breast and I was the mother of her dreams. I could have crouched in that shadowy corner for ever, feeling her breath on my cheek, our hearts beating together.

‘Ah, you are here, Princesse. This lady said you had arrived.’

There were two figures outlined in the doorway against the light of the hall, but it was the aggrieved tones of the lady I would never forgive myself for mistaking for Catherine that shattered our idyll. Whoever she was, she came rushing forward, clearly horrified at finding the princess in close embrace with a servant. ‘For shame that this impudent woman should accost you, Mademoiselle! Let me have her removed. I fear she does not know her place.’

With her back to the door, Catherine rolled her eyes, gave my hand a reassuring squeeze and smothered a little giggle; that blessed giggle which had echoed in my head down the years. Then she stood up and turned to face the outraged newcomer. The real Princess Catherine was dressed more plainly – a drab hood and travelling mantle covering a dark robe – than the girl I had thought to be her, yet there was something in her carriage which made the haughty creature in her fashionable attire fall back.

‘On the contrary, she knows her place well. Her place is with me,’ my nursling told her, casting a hand back to encourage me to rise. ‘Her name is Guillaumette. Who are you?’

The haughty girl sank into a courtly obeisance; a skilled crouch which I presumed was of precisely the right depth to honour the daughter of the king. ‘Forgive me, Mademoiselle. My name is Bonne of Armagnac. The queen has appointed me your principal lady in waiting. She sent me to welcome you and to command you to attend her as soon as you have recovered from your journey.’

Catherine turned to me with an expression of exaggerated surprise. ‘Do you hear that, Mette?’ Her voice had suddenly acquired a crystal hardness which startled me. ‘My mother wishes to see me. There is a first time for everything.’ Then she stretched out her hand to the other girl, who still hovered uncertainly in the doorway, gesturing her forward. ‘Agnes, this is Guillaumette – my Mette about whom you have heard so much. Mette, this is my dear friend Agnes de Blagny, who has bravely agreed to accompany me to court. She and I have been close companions for the last four years, ever since Agnes came to Poissy abbey after she lost her mother.’

Agnes de Blagny was dressed like Catherine in a simple kirtle and over-mantle, with a plain white veil. I assumed it to be some sort of school habit worn by all the abbey pupils, but somehow Agnes did not wear it with the same easy elegance as her royal friend. She looked swamped and nervous, but she returned my smile with a shy one of her own.

‘There is no time to linger down here, Princesse!’ An older and more forceful female presence bustled into the room stirring dust off the flagstones with her flowing fur-lined mantle. ‘Court attire has been prepared for you. We will help you dress to meet the queen.’

Fittingly, it had been the Duchess of Bourbon who had fetched Catherine from Poissy, just as she had delivered her there nearly ten years before, and it was she who now made a brisk entrance, greeted Bonne of Armagnac graciously, gave me a dismissive glance, then swept all the young ladies off to Catherine’s new bedchamber, the room that had once been a day nursery but which was now transformed by silken cushions and hangings and some fabulous flower-strewn Flemish tapestries.

‘Do not go away, Mette,’ Catherine had whispered as she reluctantly left my side. Nothing could have made me leave, but I thought it prudent to keep a low profile, so I took up position on the stair just beyond the entrance to her bedchamber, carefully hidden by a turn in the spiral, and waited patiently, rendered impervious to the cold draughts by the knowledge that I was only a few steps from my life’s love.

When I next saw her, I might have been forgiven for not recognising her. She was encased in a weighty jewel-encrusted gown and mantle, her head crowned with gold and stiffened gauze. The stair was hardly wide enough to accommodate her voluminous skirts and the two noble ladies were too busy assisting her descent to notice me peering around the central pillar. The brief glimpse I had of Catherine’s face showed me rouged cheeks, stained lips and a wary, closed expression. In less time than it took a priest to say mass, they had turned my sweet girl into a painted doll. Agnes had been found a simpler court costume and scampered after the grand ladies like a little mouse. I did not think the timid school friend would make much of a mark at Queen Isabeau’s court.

I had plenty to occupy me as I waited for Catherine’s return. The chamber bore all the signs of a major upheaval. Her travelling clothes had been flung to the floor, brushes, combs and hair-pins were scattered on dressing-chests and pots of face-paints and powders had spattered polished surfaces. I set about restoring the chamber to the pristine condition in which I had left it and preparing for the return of what I was sure would be a drained and exhausted Catherine, lighting candles and setting glowing coals in a hot box to warm the bed. Guessing (correctly as it turned out) that the queen would have dined and would not think to offer Catherine any refreshment, I also set some sweet wine and milk to curdle near the fire and put out some wafers. As I worked, I tried to imagine what the conversation would be like between mother and daughter, meeting as strangers.

The candles had burned down several inches when a noise like birds twittering roused me from my sentinel stool. It was the high-pitched chatter of excited young ladies drifting up the stair and I swiftly retreated to my previous hiding place. Catherine’s retinue had obviously expanded and fortunately, as they tripped into the bedchamber, they left the door open, so I was able to hear Bonne of Armagnac’s authoritative voice begin allocating various tasks concerning Catherine’s toilette.

‘With your permission, Mademoiselle, Marie and Jeanne will help you to undress whilst I secure your robes and jewels …’

Catherine’s voice broke in, low and sweet but firm enough to silence her attendant. ‘No, Mademoiselle Bonne. You do not have my permission. What I would like you to do is call Guillaumette. She is the one I need to help me.’

‘Do you mean your tiring-woman, Mademoiselle?’ Bonne protested. ‘A menial cannot be trusted to handle your highness’ court dress or safeguard your jewels! That is a task for someone of rank.’

I smiled at the steely determination audible behind Catherine’s deceptively mild reply. ‘Mette is not “a menial”, as you put it, she is my nurse. When I was a child she was trusted with my life. I’m sure she can be trusted now with a few rags and baubles. Summon Guillaumette if you please.’

I heard my name called from the doorway and waited a timely minute before responding. Meanwhile Catherine was gently attempting to mollify her affronted lady-in-waiting. ‘You are older and wiser than I, Mademoiselle Bonne, but I suspect that even you have a nurse who cared for you in childhood and who knows all your little ways …’

‘Well, yes,’ Bonne of Armagnac admitted reluctantly, ‘but I thought …’ Her voice trailed away uncertainly.

‘… that mine would have long gone?’ Catherine suggested gently. ‘But you see my faithful Mette has not gone. She is here …’ As indeed I was, entering the salon exactly on cue and dropping humbly to my knee inside the door, head bowed to deflect the angry glare of Mademoiselle Bonne. ‘… and I have decided that she and she alone will have full charge in my bedchamber.’

I had to pinch myself to remember that she was not yet fourteen. I sent up a silent prayer of thanks to St Catherine, for it was surely she who had inspired this combination of sweetness and obstinacy in her namesake.

Peeping under the edge of my coif I watched Catherine stifle a yawn and say wearily to the assembled bevy of young ladies, ‘I am very tired. There will be much to do tomorrow. The queen seems to have commissioned half the master-craftsmen in Paris to fit me out for court life and I shall need all your advice on the latest fashions. So now I will bid you goodnight and I know you will show kindness and assistance to my friend Agnes de Blagny who, as you know, will be one of your number.’

I felt quite sorry for the timorous Agnes as she was carried off by four court damsels who obviously found the prospect of a day spent picking clothes and jewels so enchanting that their excited chatter died only gradually away down the stair. Bonne of Armagnac remained behind however, sidling up to Catherine and dropping her voice to a confidential murmur. I tactfully retired to the hearth to re-heat the curdled posset, but I have sharp ears and easily caught the gist of her speech.

‘Coming from the convent, Mademoiselle, you will need more than just advice on jewels and fashions. The ways of the court are complex. It is easy to make mistakes. The queen trusts me to help and guide you, just as my father helps and guides the dauphin.’

‘No doubt she does.’ There was a pause as Catherine gazed steadily at Bonne before continuing with the kind of regal assurance that I now believe cannot be taught. ‘And you may be sure that I will be as grateful to you as the dauphin is to your father, Mademoiselle. But I must remind you that the queen made an announcement at court tonight which you seem to have forgotten. As the only remaining unmarried daughter of the king, I am to have the courtesy title of Madame of France. I feel certain that you of all people will not want to continue making an error of protocol by addressing me as Mademoiselle. Now I wish you a very good night – and please leave the key to the strong-box.’

It was only later I learned that the key in question was tantamount to Bonne’s badge of office. It hung from her belt on a jewelled chatelaine and for a moment I thought she was going to refuse to hand it over. Then she unhooked it abruptly and dropped it on the table beside Catherine.

‘As you wish, princesse. Good night.’

‘Good night, Mademoiselle Bonne,’ replied Catherine, her painted court face unsmiling beneath the ornate headdress.

The Count of Armagnac’s daughter made one of her precise courtesies and stalked out, casting a baleful glance at me and leaving the door deliberately open. As I obeyed Catherine’s mute signal to close it, I heard the lady’s footsteps halt at the curve of the stairs and guessed that she had paused in the hope of catching some of our conversation. With a grim little smile I ensured that the only sound that carried to her ears was the firm thud of wood on wood.

‘Am I to address you as Madame then, Mademoiselle?’ I asked Catherine, confusing myself.

To my delight she giggled again. ‘Well, you certainly do not need to address me as both, Mette!’ she exclaimed. After a moment, she said, ‘I think I would rather you stuck to Mademoiselle. I seem to remember that when you called me a little Madame you were usually cross with me.’

‘I am sure I was never cross with you, Madamoiselle,’ I assured her. ‘You were always a good child, and you are scarcely more than a child still.’

She raised a quizzical eyebrow at me.

‘You may not know, Mademoiselle,’ I said, crossing to the hearth to pour the warm posset into a silver hanap, ‘that while you were away there was much political upheaval and at one time the Duke of Burgundy ordered a number of the queen’s ladies to be imprisoned in the Châtelet. Mademoiselle of Armagnac was among them. It is said that their gaolers abused them and I know that they were mauled and mocked by the mob on the way there. She can have no love for commoners like me.’

Catherine gazed at me steadily for several moments before responding. ‘See how useful you are to me already, Mette,’ she remarked. ‘Who else would have told me that?’

I placed the hanap on the table beside her and began removing the pins that fastened her heavy headdress.

As I lifted away the headdress, she briefly massaged an angry red weal where the circlet had dug into her brow, then she cupped her hands around the hanap and took a sip. ‘Now I will tell you something that you may not know, Mette. Mademoiselle Bonne has recently become betrothed to the Duke of Orleans, he who was supposed to marry Michele but ended up marrying our older sister Isabelle. I went to their wedding when I was five but unfortunately she died two years later in childbirth. I prayed for her soul, but I did not weep because, as you know, I hardly knew her. The queen was at pains to tell me all about Bonne’s betrothal this evening. Apparently Louis does not allow his wife Marguerite to come to court because he hates her for being the Duke of Burgundy’s daughter, so when Bonne marries Charles of Orleans, she will be third in order of precedence after the queen and myself.’

Fast though news spread in the palace, this gossip had not yet reached the servants’ quarters. The present Duke of Orleans was the king’s nephew, heir to the queen’s murdered lover. His Orleanist cause had benefited greatly from the Count of Armagnac’s military and political support, and this marriage would be the pay-back, bringing Bonne’s family into the magic royal circle. Mademoiselle Bonne was definitely a force to be reckoned with and I feared that, by showing me favour, Catherine had already irretrievably soured relations with her.

I bent to unfasten the heavy jewelled collar she was wearing and she put down the posset and raised her hand to my face, pushing under my coif to trace the two puckered scars that ran from cheekbone to jaw.

‘The Duke of Burgundy gave you these,’ she said softly, ‘when you were defending me. And my lady Bonne dares to question your trustworthiness!’

‘I am surprised you remember, Mademoiselle,’ I said. ‘You were so young.’

‘How could I forget?’ she cried. ‘Burgundy’s black face still haunts me.’

‘You should not let it,’ I admonished, though I suffered similarly myself. ‘You have the queen’s protection now. It seems that nothing is too good for her youngest daughter.’

Catherine gave a mirthless laugh. ‘A change from the old days, eh, Mette? Do you know, this evening I could not recall my mother’s face?’ She paused reflectively. ‘Yet I should have remembered her eyes, at least, for they are the most extraordinary colour – pale blue-green, almost the colour of turquoise – very striking. I knelt, I took her hand and kissed it as I had been told to do and she raised me and kissed my cheek.’

I began to unpin the folds of her stiff gauze veil and she helped me as I fumbled with the unfamiliar task. ‘You must have been nervous, Mademoiselle,’ I said, thinking that a mother and her long-lost daughter should have met in private, not conducted their reunion in the full view of the court.

Catherine nodded. ‘I was, at first. I had no idea what was expected of me, but then I realised that she did not want me to say or do anything. Just to be there so that everyone could see me. She was very gracious, very effusive. “I declare Catherine to be the most beautiful of my daughters,” she announced. “The most like me.”’

Catherine’s mimicry of her mother’s German accent was done straight-faced, but I saw that her eyes were dancing. ‘Praise indeed, Mademoiselle!’ I remarked, my own lips twitching.

‘Then she made me sit on a stool at her side and proceeded to talk over my head. The hall was full of people hanging on her every word. She said, “We must make the most of France’s beautiful daughter. I have commissioned the best tailors, the finest goldsmiths, the nimblest dance-masters!”’

I had only heard the queen’s voice once before, but Catherine’s impersonation was a wickedly accurate reminder of that fateful day in the rose garden.

When she spoke again, it was in her own soft tones. ‘I asked after my father, the king, but she merely said that he was as well as could be expected. Then I asked about Louis and she looked annoyed and said that the dauphin was away from court but would be back for the tournament

‘They have a huge tourney planned to entertain the English embassy. I am ordered to appear at my most alluring. The queen herself will choose my costume.’ Catherine sighed and her voice trembled as she asked, ‘What is she scheming, Mette?’

‘A marriage, undoubtedly, Mademoiselle,’ I said, removing the last pin, finally able to lift away the unwieldy veil.

‘Yes, inevitably – but to whom?’ She shook out her hair, running her hands through the thick, pale strands. I swear it had not darkened one shade since babyhood.

I saw no need to hesitate in my reply. ‘Why, to King Henry of England I suppose.’

Her brow wrinkled in alarm. ‘Surely not. He is old! Besides, does he not have a queen already?’

My heart lurched at the sight of her, tousle-haired and doe-eyed in the soft light from the wax candles. Whichever king or duke it was who got her would win a prize indeed.

I began to unlace her gown. ‘You have been in the convent a long time, Mademoiselle. The old King of England died more than a year ago. The new king, his son Henry, is said to be young, chivalrous and handsome – and in need of a wife.’

‘Young, chivalrous and handsome,’ Catherine echoed, rising to discard the voluminous jewel-encrusted court robe. I gathered it up with a grunt of effort and I did not envy her the wearing of it. ‘What do you call young?’ she queried ruefully, plucking at the ties of her chemise. ‘By my reckoning he must be at least six and twenty. Twice my age! That does not seem young to me.’

As she spoke, her chemise fell to the floor. A sumptuous velvet bed gown had been provided for her use and I held it out for her, marvelling at how slim and sleek the limbs that I remembered rounded and dimpled had become. Hugging the robe closed, she ran her hands over the silky fabric. ‘This is beautiful – so soft and rich. The nuns would think it enough to put my soul in danger,’ she remarked.

‘Seeing you without it would put King Henry’s soul in danger!’ I countered with a twinkle.

This brought a girlish blush to her cheek and I reflected that nubile though she now was, she was still little more than a child. What could she know, fresh from her convent, of the power of her own beauty or the strength of male lust? Mademoiselle Bonne was right; Catherine did need a wise and steady hand to guide her, but I feared the jealous, opinionated daughter of Armagnac was not the right one for the job.

8

With her new-found indulgence towards ‘the most beautiful of my daughters’, the queen promised Catherine anything she wanted and it turned out that what she wanted most, God bless her, was me. The nuns of Poissy had taught her Greek and Latin and the Rule of St Dominic, but in their strict regime of lessons, bells and prayers there had been no room for love or laughter and, instinctively, she knew where she might find both.

So, in order to keep me close, she gave me two rooms on the top floor of her tower. I do not believe she can have remembered, and I never discussed it with her, but one of them was the small turret chamber where I had lit those secret fires for her as a baby, and the other, the larger chamber adjoining it, was where the infants and the donkeys had once slept. This one had a hearth and chimneypiece, a window overlooking the river and in the thickness of the outer wall, much to my joy, a latrine. In the past this floor of the tower had been used as a guardroom for the arbalesters who patrolled the battlements and so it was accessible from the curtain wall-walk, which meant that once the sentries got to know them, my family would be able to come and go without passing through Catherine’s private quarters.

‘You will need to have your family around you, Mette,’ she told me earnestly. ‘I would not like to think that being with me took you away from your own children.’ It was no wonder I loved her. I swear there was not another royal or courtier in the palace who would have given a second’s thought to the family life of a servant.

Originally the accommodation had been ear-marked for those of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting yet to be appointed and they were rooms that Bonne of Armagnac had counted on filling with some of her own favourites, so when she heard that I was to be given them, she went straight to the queen’s master of the household and complained that I was unsuitable for such preferment and would be a pernicious influence on Princess Catherine. Me – a pernicious influence on the daughter of the king! I had certainly come up in the world. It would have been funny if it had not been so alarming. I had seen what happened to servants who offended their lords and masters. I did not want to end up shackled in the Châtelet or even to become one of the mysteriously ‘disappeared’.

Luckily Lord Offemont, the wily old diplomat who ran the queen’s household, understood only too well the jealousies and machinations of court life and managed to mollify Mademoiselle Bonne with some even more desirable accommodation for her protégées, but the episode further strained relations between me and the future Duchess of Orleans.

When Catherine heard of Alys’ sewing talent, she immediately arranged for her also to be transferred to her ever-growing household, which meant that instead of endlessly hemming the queen’s sheets and chemises, my nimble-fingered little daughter found herself tending the princess’ new wardrobe, sewing fashionable trimmings onto beautiful gowns which, needless to say, she loved.

Ah, those gowns! A score of them were ordered, all truly fabulous; designed and constructed by the best tailors using gleaming Italian brocades, embroidered velvets and jewel-coloured damasks, the hems of their trailing sleeves intricately dagged into long tear-drops or edged with sumptuous Russian furs. Despite their constant complaints about unpaid bills, the craftsmen of Paris clamoured for the patronage of this new darling of Queen Isabeau’s court. Tailors, hatters, hosiers, shoemakers, glovers and goldsmiths flocked to Catherine’s tower, filling the ground-floor ante-room with their wares and spilling out into the cloister until it began to resemble a street-market where the fashion-mad young ladies-in-waiting fell over each other to handle lustrous silks and gauzes, try soft Cordovan leather slippers and exclaim over exquisite jewelled collars, brooches and buckles. It was these ladies who decided which craftsmen and traders should be invited to present their wares personally to the royal client and I soon learned that their decisions were not made on merit alone. Even I was promised a silver belt-buckle if I would clear the path to Catherine’s door but, although as one of Catherine’s key-holders I had recently taken to wearing a belt, I angrily refused the offer and roundly scolded the offender.

My intimate relationship with the princess was a constant irritation to Bonne of Armagnac and flashpoints occurred almost daily. I tended to keep a close, motherly eye on my chick, whereas Bonne’s attitude was more didactic, offering copious advice and instruction but often leaving Catherine to flounder in awkward situations.

Entering the salon at the height of the fashion frenzy, I found the princess cowering in her canopied chair surrounded by a bevy of tradesmen all gabbling at once and thrusting samples of their wares in her face. For a young girl only a few days out of the convent, it was a distressing situation and, seeing Catherine close to tears, I inwardly cursed Bonne and her silly court creatures, conspicuous by their absence, being unable to resist the temptations displayed in the cloister.

‘Shame on you, masters,’ I protested, pushing the men aside. ‘The princess will make no decisions while you rant at her like that!’ I bobbed a knee before Catherine’s chair. ‘Forgive me, highness, but it is time to prepare for court. Have I your permission to clear the room?’

‘Yes, thank you, Mette,’ she murmured and I shooed the importunate craftsmen through the door, still trying vainly to cry their wares. Catherine was visibly shaken, her hands white-knuckled on the arms of her chair. ‘That was horrible!’ she exclaimed. ‘I did not know what to do. They just kept coming. I feel so foolish.’

I was about to point out that she should not have been left without support when Bonne arrived looking flustered. Seeing me, her expression changed abruptly.

‘Oh, it is you,’ she said coldly. ‘The masters said some wimpled hag had dismissed them.’ Pointedly turning her back on me, she addressed Catherine in a more circumspect tone. ‘Could you make no choices, Madame? It will be hard to dress you adequately for court if no accessories are selected. Did the masters offend you in some way?’

‘Yes,’ replied Catherine, lifting her chin and fixing Bonne with a suddenly dry and steely gaze. ‘There were too many in the room and I should not have been left alone with them. Fortunately Mette came to my aid.’

Colour flooded Bonne’s creamy cheeks. ‘I crave your pardon, Madame. They were only the most worthy craftsmen. I thought your highness understood that furnishing your wardrobe is a matter of urgency.’

‘That may be so, but I do not have to be pestered,’ Catherine retorted. ‘The queen relies on you to help me, Mademoiselle, and I think she would not be pleased to hear that you left me alone with all those men, however worthy you consider them.’

Bonne had no alternative but to look contrite and murmur another apology, but the most galling thing for her was probably not the reprimand but the fact that it was delivered in my presence.

Of course there were times when Bonne came into her own. Catherine was summoned daily by the queen to attend a meal or an entertainment or be presented to a visiting dignitary. Mademoiselle of Armagnac was an expert on protocols and pedigrees and before each visit was able to relay snippets of useful information picked up from her court-wise father. These coaching sessions intensified as the grand tournament approached, a day Catherine was dreading.

‘Oh the tournament, the tournament! The queen never stops talking about it,’ she complained one morning, fidgeting fretfully as a gesticulating tailor issued quick-fire instructions to Alys, who was kneeling before Catherine, pinning final adjustments to the magnificent gown ordered for the princess’ first grand public appearance. A high-waisted, sweep-skirted style known as the houppelande was the new height of fashion at the French court and Queen Isabeau had insisted that this vitally important example of it should be tailored from cloth-of-gold, which would clearly demonstrate Catherine’s high value in the marriage market. I was no expert on fashion but I thought the heavy gold gown threatened to overwhelm her fair, translucent beauty.

‘The queen keeps reminding me that the English envoys will be reporting every detail of my appearance and behaviour back to King Henry and that I have the honour of France to uphold. It makes me so nervous that I will probably fall over or come out in spots.’

I overheard this comment whilst busy tidying behind the guarderobe curtain and I immediately wanted to rush out and tell her that there was not a princess in the whole of Christendom more brilliant and beautiful than she, but with Mademoiselle Bonne supervising the fitting I let discretion rule me.

She took a less reassuring line. ‘I’m sure the queen only wishes to remind you of how much is at stake, Madame,’ I heard her say. ‘If there is no marriage there will be no treaty with the English and war will inevitably follow. My father tells me that the treaty talks are at a crucial stage and Cardinal Langley is a very slippery customer.’

‘I cannot think why King Henry sent a cardinal to do his wooing,’ Catherine grumbled. ‘What does a celibate know about marriage?’

I smiled to myself, hearing the schoolgirl speaking. One day someone would tell her of the many former convent pupils ensconced as the paramours of primates.

Mademoiselle of Armagnac was not put off her stride. ‘Cardinal Langley is a diplomat first and a priest second, Madame. When it comes to a royal marriage, the bride is always part of an extended negotiation.’ It occurred to me that Bonne might have been describing her own marriage. ‘In such circumstances birth and pedigree are of paramount importance.’

‘So why does the queen lay so much store by my appearance?’ retorted Catherine. ‘I am the King’s daughter – that is all they need to know.’

Bonne shook her head. ‘A queen who charms her lord and husband can influence his actions. The cardinal may not take this into account but the queen certainly does. This marriage is not just to seal a peace between France and England. She wants you to seduce King Henry into making your enemies his enemies.’

Bonne’s shrewd analysis of the machinations of diplomacy did not surprise me for she was born to it. Although neither prince nor duke, the Count of Armagnac had nevertheless manipulated himself onto the Royal Council and won his daughter a marriage to the king’s nephew. Bonne had clearly observed and absorbed her father’s serpentine skills.

However, Catherine’s response equally clearly demonstrated that her lady-in-waiting had not cornered the market in clear thinking. ‘Yes, I can see how that would benefit the queen,’ she mused, ‘as long as my enemies are her enemies.’

I could not see Bonne’s expression, but her silence was eloquent. I wondered how long it would be before this remark reached the queen’s ears.

The Grand Tournament brought Paris out en fête. It was held on Shrove Tuesday, the last permitted day before the onset of Lent brought a temporary halt to such war games. Even the palace servants were encouraged to go and watch, so Alys and I joined the throng jamming the streets leading to the royal tourney-ground beside the Seine.

It lay on flat land in the shadow of the Louvre, the ancient fortress of the old kings of France, whose towering battlements and fearsome, impregnable donjon still guarded the royal exchequer. Gaily decked pavilions had been erected along the curtain wall, ready for royal and court spectators and before them stretched the lists, two sandy gallops the width of a field-strip, divided by a stout jousting rail, while beyond the arena a series of railed-off enclosures waited to receive the common herd, and beyond these ran the river Seine with flotillas of boats and barges moored as viewing platforms for extra spectators. At one end of the ground stood the Heralds’ Gate, a painted wooden barbican fluttering with flags and banners that marked the entrance from the knights’ encampment, a field full of gaudy tents displaying the colours and devices of hundreds of participating knights who had ridden in from every corner of Europe, eager for a chance to win prize money and display their combat skills.

The day was cold and bright and under a clear blue sky the air seemed to vibrate with the sound of neighing horses, whistling grooms, rattling harness and ringing anvils. It was a number of years since Paris had hosted a spectacle of this magnitude and, except for the great festivals of the church, I had never seen such a massive gathering of people. Hawkers manned every vantage point, crying their wares; spiced ale and wine, hot pies, pardons, cures and tawdry trinkets. Bands of musicians played on street corners, their instruments screeching out of tune as each battled to be heard above the next. Hordes of students and apprentices, granted a day off to join the fun, brought their rowdy rivalries out into the squares and fights sprang up without warning. Alys and I held hands tightly so as not to lose each other as we elbowed our way through to the arena reserved for royal servants where we squeezed onto a bench which gave us a clear view both of the lists and of the royal pavilion.

In due course a loud fanfare of trumpets announced the grand entry of the royal party, which processed slowly down a covered wooden stairway, specially erected to give access from the soaring walls of the castle. One by one the king, queen and their eminent guests acknowledged the crowd and then seated themselves on cushioned thrones and benches set under an emblazoned canopy. Heraldic banners fluttered from the pavilion’s roof, depicting the personal crests of every seated celebrity and somehow lilies had been grown in mid-winter, which nodded their noble heads solemnly along the parapet. From our lowly viewpoint the royal family and their guests resembled a row of gorgeous dolls, clad in brilliant hues, sable-lined against the cold and so laden with precious stones that they glinted blindingly in the flat February sun.

It was no easy task for Catherine to stand out amongst this muster of peacocks, but in the end her beauty and simple elegance paid off. The fabulous gold gown, flowing and pearl-trimmed, glowed serenely against the scintillating glitter of her parents’ showy magnificence, and her gleaming pale gold hair, falling loosely from a pearl-studded circlet, rippled down her back like a silk oriflamme. (And so it should. God knows I had brushed it hard enough!) It was the custom on formal occasions at the French court for unmarried girls to leave their hair loose and uncovered, which meant that beside the queen and the other royal ladies with their elaborately veiled and jewelled headdresses, Catherine looked fresh and nubile and, to put it bluntly, eloquently marriageable. I have to confess that while my heart swelled with pride at the sight of her beauty, my stomach churned at her vulnerability.

‘If this king does not get her, then the next one will,’ I whispered to myself, brushing a sudden tear from my eye.

‘She looks like an angel!’ cried Alys, her sweet round face flushed with adoration. ‘There can be no lady in the world more beautiful than Princess Catherine!’

‘Let us hope the fat cardinal thinks so then,’ growled a voice from the row behind. ‘Otherwise the English excrement will be sailing up the Seine come September.’

I turned to look at the speaker. He wore the blue and gold livery of a royal chamberlain and was bleary-eyed and stubble-chinned, with a sharp, foxy face and probably a bald head beneath his draped black hat. ‘It will not be Princess Catherine’s fault if they do,’ I countered, adding a smile on the grounds that I had few enough chances to glean palace gossip and did not want to kill the conversation stone dead.

He responded with a meaningful wink. ‘Aye, she is a beauty all right. Any man would like to get her maidenhead! … What?’ He stopped abruptly, warned by my fierce frown and head-jerk in Alys’ direction.

Anxious to steer him onto a less prurient topic, I pointed to the red-faced cleric seated on Catherine’s left, whose crimson soutane was stretched tightly over his substantial belly. ‘I take it that is Cardinal Langley,’ I said, ‘and they are the king and queen on her other side. We work for the princess but we do not get a chance to see the other royals at all.’

As if to make amends for his vulgarity, the chamberlain became quite voluble. ‘There is no mistaking the queen – see all the jewels she wears, three times more than anyone else – and the king beside her, poor devil. He looks all right from here but he is as simple as a six year old. I know this because I empty his bath and he has a fleet of wooden ships that he plays with.’ Registering my incredulous expression, he nodded vigorously. ‘It is God’s truth. The lady beside him is the dauphiness. I am surprised she is here. The dauphin cannot stand her and usually keeps her locked up in a nunnery. He only lets her out when he absolutely has to.’

I stared at the lady in question – Marguerite of Burgundy, a thin, whey-faced creature who looked older than I knew her to be, which was about twenty. She was richly dressed in ruby velvet liberally embroidered with dolphins and daisies. The dauphin might not want her as his wife, but she was defiantly declaring her status by linking his heraldic dolphin device with her own marguerites.

‘Is she not the Duke of Burgundy’s daughter?’ I asked, keen to prompt more information. Fox-face had a wine skin clamped between his thighs, from which, by the looseness of his tongue, he had been drinking freely.

‘Yes, that is the trouble. The dauphin hates her father’s guts so he wants nothing to do with her. Perhaps she prefers being locked up in a nunnery to being married to him, but it is my bet she prays for the day the Duke of Burgundy comes back to Paris!’

I chose my next words carefully. ‘I hear that he still has many followers in the city.’

A grin split the chamberlain’s narrow face and he nodded vigorously. ‘So he does and they say that he is wooing the English as well, offering his own daughter, Catherine, as bait. Hey, look – the fun is about to start!’

Another loud blast of trumpets announced the first joust, a contest between the dauphin and the Earl of Dorset, the English king’s uncle who was leading the embassy. The two contenders cantered up to the royal pavilion to make their salute. It was the first time I had clapped eyes on Prince Louis since he had quit the palace garden as a nine year old boy and frankly I was shocked.

Now eighteen, he could only be described as fat. No – he was obese! I had been expecting an older, taller version of the lanky boy who had dropped the caterpillar down my bodice. It hadn’t occurred to me that the deprivations of his youth might have turned him into a glutton. Only a half-blind sycophant could have called him handsome, for his features were blurred by puffy jowls and multiple chins, his eyes appeared mean and small, sunk into the flesh of his cheeks and his hair was shaved high up the back of his head in the mode currently favoured by young men-about-court, exposing thick rolls of fat on the back of his neck. Only his aquiline Valois nose remained distinctive, unmistakably declaring his lineage. In his huge suit of armour his body was a vast metal hulk covered with a blue and gold surcôte and squashed into a high-cantled jousting saddle. Somehow a horse had been found strong enough to bear his weight, but getting him onto its back must have required substantial lifting-gear. Even from afar he did not look well. If he had still been in my charge I would have prescribed a strong purge and a prolonged diet of bread and water.

Although in boyhood Louis had been the brighter of the two princes, it was Jean who had excelled with the sword and, now that he was a man, Louis still showed little skill at knightly pursuits. To the disappointment of the crowd, he was trounced by the considerably older Earl of Dorset whose lance scored a direct hit on the first pass, such as would have lifted a normal man out of the saddle but which barely nudged the elephantine heir of France. My garrulous neighbour informed me that the rules of chivalry stipulated that the loser in a joust must forfeit the price of his armour, which in the dauphin’s case must have been a considerable sum, so it was hardly surprising that Prince Louis was puce with anger when he joined his family in the royal pavilion to watch the rest of the tournament.

Over the next few hours the cream of French and English chivalry rode against each other in a blur of colours, dust and glinting steel. It was a brutal spectacle and more than once I regretted bringing Alys along. Numerous armoured men had to be dragged from the ground on hurdles, their helmets so badly dented that their skulls must have burst within them, and right in front of us a magnificent horse suffered a crashing fall, snapping its foreleg. The poor beast screamed and thrashed for many agonising minutes before it could be bludgeoned out of its misery and hauled away across the sand. During this incident Alys hid her face against my shoulder and I looked anxiously across at Catherine expecting to see a similar reaction on her part, but her expression remained rigidly schooled, as if such stomach-churning sights had been a daily occurrence at Poissy Abbey!

The grand finale of the day was to be a mêlée, when the jousting rails were removed and the French and English knights staged a mock battle in the open arena, challenging each other at random until the heralds judged which side had won. I wanted to take Alys away from what I feared might be another bloody spectacle but, just as we were about to leave, the Earl of Dorset rode up to the royal stand. ‘If the beautiful daughter of France will grant me a favour for the coming trial I will carry it on behalf of my nephew King Henry,’ he declared gallantly.

The crowd roared its approval of a gesture made in the true spirit of chivalry. I could see Catherine glance at the queen who nodded indulgently but, as she leaned over to pluck a lily from the floral display, the dauphin moved to restrain her.

‘No favours for the English!’ he bellowed, rising to his feet. ‘Not while they plot to snatch France from its rightful heirs!’ He had a voice to match his bulk and his words echoed clearly around the lists. ‘Go back to your nephew, Dorset, and tell him that his dream of possessing my sister founders on his daydream of stealing my father’s lands. You may have won in the lists, my lord, but I vow before God and St Denis that that is the last victory England shall have over France!’

Dorset’s reply was lost in the general hubbub that followed, and some of the French and English knights, who had been swapping rude gestures and insults ahead of the mêlée, decided to forego ceremony and clash swords before the trumpet sounded; instantly a war developed which the heralds had no chance of controlling.

In the palace viewing arena many of the male servants began to join in the fun, standing on their seats and shouting encouragement with wine-fuelled gusto, among them the foxy-faced chamberlain. ‘There goes your lady’s marriage!’ he yelled at me as I pulled Alys away. ‘If English Henry wants her, he will have to come and get her!’

9

‘This is the last straw!’ exclaimed Bonne, furiously pressing all her weight against the door of Catherine’s bedchamber. ‘Either you admit me to the princess’ presence instantly or I will go straight to the queen and demand that you be removed from her highness’ service immediately.’

I am a sturdy body and had no difficulty keeping hold of the door, but I cannot pretend that her words did not send cold shivers down my spine. I reckoned that, influential though her family was, Bonne did not have the clout to actually demand such a thing of the queen, but a sly remark, dropped at the right moment, would have the same effect. By thus barring her entrance, it was possible I could find myself in the Châtelet by evening, or at the very least expelled from the palace. Nevertheless, I held firm.

‘Believe me, Mademoiselle, it is for your own safety that I respectfully suggest that you do not enter,’ I insisted in a far from respectful tone of voice. Bonne had managed to wedge her foot in the door and our conversation was conducted through the narrow gap. ‘The princess has a fever and until we know the exact nature of the illness she gave orders that no one else is to come near her. The physician has been sent for, but meanwhile she asks that you and her ladies pray that it is not serious or infectious.’

For a moment the sliver of Bonne’s face that was visible to me expressed doubt, swiftly replaced by firm resolve. ‘This state of affairs has been allowed to go too far,’ she said with cold finality. ‘It should not be some ignorant, jumped-up tire-woman who decides whether or not the princess has a fever and who takes it upon herself to send for the physician, it should be the queen’s appointed lady-in-waiting. I shall remain here until the physician comes, and then I shall accompany him to her highness’ bedside and inform the queen of his conclusions. I shall also inform her of the dangerous position of influence a common creature from the back streets has been allowed to assume over her daughter.’

‘You must do as you think fit, Mademoiselle,’ I responded, suddenly pushing the door hard against her foot in its soft leather slipper. There was a squeal of pain as she jerked it back and I closed the door with relief, inserting the peg which locked it against further entry. I had fulfilled my promise to Catherine not to let anyone in, but at what cost? This time I feared serious repercussions.

It was two days since the tournament. Immediately after its ignominious ending, Catherine had been witness to a terrible row between the queen and the dauphin over his high-handed and very public sabotage of the Anglo-French treaty. Queen Isabeau had accused Louis of ruining France’s prospects of peace and prosperity out of mere pique at being bettered in the lists, and Louis had countered by calling her faith in King Henry’s goodwill naive and foolish.

‘Henry is a bully, Madame,’ the dauphin had thundered, ‘who will stop at nothing to grab lands, titles and treasure in order to build himself an empire. How you can even contemplate giving Catherine in marriage to such a greedy, ignoble creature is beyond me. All he wants her for is to get his foot on the steps of the French throne. You want to kiss the cheek of a man who would lock my father away, humiliate my sister and disinherit me. I have not ruined any chance of peace. I have thrown down the gauntlet to a glory-seeker and told him that peace is not for sale. We will not buy off his aggression with vast tracts of land, a pair of blue eyes and a two million crown dowry. If he fancies himself as Emperor of the World he will have to fight and, God willing, die for it!’

Queen Isabeau had retorted, ‘It is you who is naive, Louis. King Henry is not a bully, he is a warrior. He will not retreat from your bombast as you hope, he will pick up your gauntlet and march against France and we cannot rely on our lieges to defend us. You have not taken control of your destiny, you have thrown it to the wolves!’

It was a thoughtful and distracted Catherine who had described this confrontation to me in detail as I helped her out of the gold gown. Then she sat and regarded me for so long without speaking that I feared she was about to reproach me for something. It was, however, the very opposite.

‘I can absolutely trust you, can I not, Mette? In fact, I think you are the only person I can trust.’ She said this so gravely and sorrowfully that I sank to my knees beside her, took her hand and kissed it.

‘I would give my life for you,’ I said softly. ‘But even more dreadfully, I would live my life without you if that would serve you better.’

‘God forbid that,’ she breathed. ‘Not again. He could not be so cruel.’

Despite her apparent maturity she still possessed youth’s need for reassurance and the instinctive optimism of a child. With cynicism born of bitter experience, I was far from certain of the Almighty’s benevolence in this matter.

She stood, took my hand and pulled me to my feet, steering me towards the hearth where her canopied chair was set. ‘You sit there, Mette,’ she said, pushing me gently into the chair and perching herself on a nearby stool. ‘I will tell you my thoughts and you can tell me afterwards what you think.’

Feeling distinctly awkward with our positions reversed in this way, I found myself wondering what Bonne would say if she could see my common backside sullying the royal cushions. However, all such petty thoughts were soon banished as Catherine broached her subject.

‘What I am going to tell you must never go beyond these walls,’ she began cautiously, ‘for some might call it treason. But the longer I am at court, the less I find myself able to trust my mother.’

My involuntary exclamation made her raise her hand to cut off any protest. ‘Please do not say all the things I would hear from others, Mette. I know I am young and I may not fully understand what she says and does but I am not a simpleton. I could give you many examples of her dishonesty, but it is only necessary to give you one. She professes to loathe the Duke of Burgundy for his involvement in the murder of Orleans, but that is just words. In fact, she hates the Count of Armagnac, whom she professes to admire. Whenever they are together it is easy to detect the animosity between them. Nor is there any love between her and Louis, as you know. Publicly she embraces the Orleanist cause, but in fact she schemes with Burgundy.

‘This would not matter so much if she was loyal to the king, but she is not. She sits beside him at formal occasions but otherwise she shuns him. She only wants him alive because as his queen she has the power of regency. When my father dies Louis will be king and she will be powerless, so she secretly treats with the Duke of Burgundy, paving the way for him to return to the king’s side. Why? Because Burgundy controls Jean. In alliance with him, through the son she sent into exile ten years ago, she could continue to rule France.’

‘But only if Louis were dead!’ I exclaimed.

‘Exactly.’ She leaned over to lay a finger on my lips. ‘Ssh. I only tell you all this because I want you to understand why I am going to ask you to help me. I need to speak to Louis without my mother knowing. I want you to take a message to him, Mette, asking him to come here secretly. He could come via the wall-walk and we could meet in your chamber, while we put it about that a sudden fever confines me to my room. You would have to keep my ladies at bay, for they all report to the queen in one way or another.’

‘Especially Mademoiselle Bonne,’ I murmured. ‘And it won’t be easy to fend her off. She already hates my guts.’

Catherine looked apologetic. ‘I know. She is liable to complain against you, but do not worry. If anyone threatens your removal, I will just throw a real fever and show no sign of recovery until they bring you back to me.’ I was far from convinced that this ploy would succeed, but she grasped both my hands excitedly, forestalling any objection. ‘I need to see Louis, Mette. He is so isolated, caught between our mother who wishes him ill and Armagnac who professes loyalty, but serves only his own interests and is shackled to a wife who is the daughter of his sworn enemy. I must let him know where my loyalties lie.’

I was all at sea, floundering in affairs that were way above my head. ‘What about your own interests?’ I felt bound to ask. ‘The dauphin has already ruined your chances of being Queen of England.’

She shook her head. ‘Actually, I thank him for that. The marriage would have put me in an impossible position. As I said at the start, it is a matter of trust. I must marry whoever is chosen for me, I know that. But who will do the choosing? My father is too feeble and I do not trust my mother. I would rather put myself in the hands of my brother.’

I had said I would die for her and if this scheme went wrong it looked as though I very well might, but I had to help her – how could I not?

Having barred the door against Bonne, I waited in Catherine’s bedchamber for what seemed like hours, trying to busy myself with small tasks; tidying her toilet chest, pounding Fuller’s Earth for robe cleaning and replenishing the sweet-smelling herbs on the guarderobe floor. As I worked, I pictured Louis and Catherine conversing earnestly in the chamber above, where I had placed the largest chair available by a good fire, and below me I imagined Bonne of Armagnac pacing the floor of the salon, waiting for the physician who would not arrive, for the simple reason that he had never been sent for. I constantly expected to hear a hammering on the door as Bonne grew impatient, but to my surprise none came.

Eventually Catherine descended, her forehead knitted in a frown. I was aching to know how the meeting with Louis had gone but was forced to wait.

‘I must pray, Mette,’ was all she said, going straight to her prie-dieu. ‘Please keep the door a little longer.’

I promised I would, but now that Catherine was back in her chamber I thought it safe to slip down the stair to check on Bonne, whose silence I considered more ominous than her anger. As I descended, I encountered a page wearing the Armagnac cross of Lorraine climbing the stair towards me. ‘I have a message for the Princess Catherine,’ he announced.

I held out my hand, my heart racing, certain this was the first sign of Bonne’s backlash. ‘Her highness is indisposed,’ I said. ‘I will take it to her.’

He removed a sealed letter from the purse on his belt and gave it to me before retreating down the stair. I was sorely tempted to destroy the letter there and then, but prudence prevailed for I reasoned that if Bonne was working against me the sooner Catherine knew of it the better. When I re-entered her bedchamber, she made the sign of the cross and rose from the prie-dieu. The Virgin gazed benignly down from the candlelit triptych revealing nothing, but I noticed that whatever intercession had been asked of Her, the creases had not been smoothed from Catherine’s brow.

Silently I handed her the letter and, when she broke the seal and opened it, I saw that it contained several lines of script. I waited while she read it, imagining I could already hear the stamp of the guards’ heavy boots advancing up the stair to arrest me.

When she raised her head, Catherine’s eyes were wide with surprise. ‘It is not from Bonne, it is from her father the count,’ she said, re-folding the parchment. ‘In view of the failure of the English treaty, Armagnac and Orleans have decided that the marriage between Bonne and the duke should take place immediately. The count deeply regrets that his daughter’s duty in this matter takes her away from my service, but he hopes I will understand and wish her well.’ Catherine laid a gentle hand on my arm. ‘So you can stop twitching, Mette. Mademoiselle of Armagnac is no longer a member of my household.’

My sense of relief was short-lived as I realised the news was bad as well as good. ‘But very soon she will be Duchess of Orleans,’ I pointed out, ‘more powerful and even more alarming.’

‘And much too busy and important to concern herself with us,’ Catherine reasoned. ‘Meanwhile, she is not here so let us sit together, while I tell you about my meeting with Louis.’

I stirred up the fire and we sat by the hearth, this time with her enthroned under the canopy and myself on a stool. Outside the wind howled and driving rain rattled the shutters, but the candlelight and blazing logs enfolded us in a flickering intimacy.

‘Thank you for leaving the wine and the sweetmeats in your chamber, Mette,’ Catherine began with a smile. ‘You certainly know the way to Louis’ heart.’

I shrugged. ‘I remember how he used to fall on the pastries I brought in from my father’s bake house. He was always hungry as a boy.’

‘That has not changed. He consumed everything you left.’ Catherine made a face. ‘He is so greedy!’

‘It is making him ill,’ I commented. ‘He has too much black bile.’

‘Is that so? It is a pity because he needs to be fit and healthy. France has suffered too long from an ailing monarch.’

There was a pause while she considered the dire truth of this.

‘Perhaps I should not ask, but what did you pray for when you returned?’ I probed gently. ‘You seemed so troubled.’

She shook her head as if to clear it. ‘I felt confused. Sometimes when you pray, things become a little clearer.’

‘Yes,’ I said, unable to think when prayer had done the same for me. ‘And did they?’

‘No. Not really.’ Her eyes found mine then and I saw that they were full of tears. ‘Oh, Mette! I feel so lost.’

Impulsively I took both her hands in mine, feeling the prick of tears in my own eyes. But I did not press her to confide in me. Instead I tried to be reassuring. ‘You can never be entirely lost when I am here.’

She squeezed my hands then let them drop, settling back and clearing her throat. ‘I have to make a decision, Mette. Telling you about my dilemma might make it seem less daunting.’

I nodded encouragement and gestured towards the triptych. ‘You know that I will remain as silent as the Virgin.’

Catherine’s brows lifted in mild censure. ‘I think sometimes that you are too irreverent, Mette,’ she said reproachfully.

I occurred to me to remind her that I did not have the advantage of a convent education, but instead I tried to look contrite and receptive at the same time and said nothing.

‘I was never happy at the convent,’ she observed, as if she had read my mind. ‘But I am grateful to the nuns for showing me right from wrong. It is a shame that no one did the same for my mother and brother.’

I must have looked surprised at this outburst because she went on hurriedly. ‘It is true. They are as bad as each other. At least, I think they are. I am not absolutely sure about Louis yet. I know he is not being straight with me, but I feel I should not judge him until I know why. I was praying to be shown the reason.’

A log shifted on the fire, throwing up a cloud of sparks and heralding a rush of words from Catherine.

‘He told me that he had stopped my marriage to King Henry because he did not want to see me tied to a godless libertine. Stories had reached him from England that Henry lived a debauched life and he, Louis, wanted to save me from shame and humiliation. Well, of course, I thanked him very much, but I also asked if Henry’s demands for land and money had nothing to do with it. He looked irritated and said that these had been only minor considerations. When I expressed concern that the failure of the treaty might spark an English invasion, he laughed and told me that Henry would never dare to invade France and, if he did, he would be chased back into the sea. Then he said: “England is a paltry little country and Henry is an apology for a king. His father was a usurper and he will pay the price for it. I would not give him a parcel of tennis balls, never mind my sister in marriage!”

‘I could not believe my ears, Mette. I was there when he told our mother that he sabotaged the treaty because Henry was power-crazy and only wanted to marry me in order to claim the French throne. There was no mention then of saving me from the clutches of a libertine. It was more a case of saving his own inheritance. Not that I blame him for that, but why is he not consistent?’

‘So did you tell him of your suspicions about the queen?’ I asked.

‘No, not in so many words, but I did formally pledge my allegiance to him as the heir of France, and he seemed very touched when I knelt and kissed his hand. He said he understood that as a female I was obliged to obey my mother, but to remember that he always had my best interests at heart. I think he has his own suspicions about the queen. It is clear that he does not trust her, but then he obviously does not trust anyone. What a mess! It seems that everyone is working to their own secret plan, but all of them involve me in some way or another. I feel like one of Louis’ tennis balls, being hit in all directions with no power over where I will land.’

I nodded sympathetically. ‘I can only say that wherever you do land, Mademoiselle, if you call me I will come to you.’

I felt her arms go around my neck and her soft kiss on my cheek. ‘Oh, Mette, you are more to me than mother, father and brother! I will always want you with me no matter where I go. I wonder what England is like. To be honest, I am beginning to believe that any marriage, even to “an apology of a king”, would be better than having to live in the perfidious House of Valois!’

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