Blood Royal

‘We were worried,’ he said, not noticing the visitor at the head of the mule, coming straight to her and slipping her off its back. His voice was quiet but she could feel the tension vibrating in it.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, tilting her head up, feeling the usual rush of wonder at his olive skin and black hair, the elegant slant of jaw and nose, the clean smell. Her son: the man her love with Etienne had made. The way he reminded her of Etienne, who’d been dead these twenty years now, brought a tragic undertone into her husky voice. ‘There was nothing I could do. Everything got late. There were visitors from England.’

Jean screwed up his face. He was no fonder of the present-day rulers of England than she was. Once, long ago, when Jean was just a boy, she’d sent him to England as pageboy to the old Earl of Salisbury. That had been a good placement for a boy who needed to make his way in the world. But the Earl had been killed soon after old King Richard was deposed. The new King of England – so-called King of England, she added fiercely to herself – who’d replaced Richard had wanted to keep young Jean de Castel, and even to get Christine to move to England to be with her son and light up his court with her writing. But she wasn’t having any truck with usurpers, and she’d had no intention of moving from civilisation to that damp wilderness over the water. So she’d sweet-talked that first Henry of Lancaster into sending her son back to France while she pretended to be making up her mind, and, eventually, she’d found Jean his place here in Paris. It was better the way things had worked out. They were together. Still, Christine and her son knew too much about the betrayals and bloodshed Henry of Lancaster had provoked to enjoy thinking of England. And they liked the idea of England even less now it was ruled by that Henry’s son – now Henry V – who, no sooner than he’d become King, had sent his brother over to France with an army to fight the French in Normandy, and who seemed to want to revive the old claim of the English kings to lands in France – which had been wrongful even when the kings were still rightful – to be the God-given rulers of France. The English were dangerous: king-killers, scavengers, wolves. This Henry was no kind of husband for Catherine. Anyone could see that.

‘What English visitors?’ Jean was asking, with the lantern flame reflected in his eyes.

‘The brother. The Duke of Clarence. With a proposal for our Princess Catherine to marry King Henry,’ Christine replied quickly, keeping her voice neutral.

Jean rolled his eyes. ‘I see,’ he said drily, raising his eyebrows, obviously not believing anyone could have taken such a proposal seriously, taking it as a cue for wry laughter. ‘And who did he talk to, if the King’s …’ Then he looked round, as if noticing the boy holding the mule’s head for the first time, and raised his eyebrows in a different, mute, cautious question.

‘This is a member of the Duke of Clarence’s entourage,’ Christine explained, still in her watchful public voice. Jean inclined his head at the newcomer – not quite a bow. The boy, grateful to be noticed at last, was already bowing eagerly and murmuring thanks for his bed in his fluent but guttural Anglo-Norman French. He was surprisingly tall. He towered over well-knit Jean.

‘They asked me to put him up here,’ she went on. ‘An Englishman …’ She turned to the boy with a question in her voice. ‘Owain Tudor,’ he said, and bowed again. But there was something unboyish in his eyes – a flicker of pain? Embarrassment? Grief? Pride? – as he added, with a slight twist of the lips: ‘Not English. I’m Welsh.’

They’d heard of the Welsh rebellion against King Henry, in the remote western Marches of England. Of course they had; France had supported the Welsh rebel, Owain Glynd?r, against the English usurper. A French army under the then chancellor, the Breton lord Jean de Rieux, had even spent a couple of years in Wales, once the Welsh leader had been crowned King Owain IV, leading three thousand Breton horsemen under the Welsh dragon flag. French and Welsh alike had been for old King Richard of England, already dead by then, rather than the king-killer Henry; it had all started from that. So Christine and her son knew that the uprising, which for a while had spread through the English aristocracy and turned even some of England’s greatest lords into mutineers, had nearly destroyed that Henry of England. The rebels had carved up England in their minds, before they’d even won it: the Midlands to the Welsh, the South and West to the Mortimer lords of March; the north to the Percy clan. But the uprising had finally been defeated, even if its Welsh leader was still hiding out in the misty hills, raiding; even if he still called himself the King of Wales. So they looked at this youth in puzzlement as he told them that Owain Glynd?r, the rebel leader, was his cousin – King of the old Welsh royal house of Powys Magog, as the boy put it, not without pride, in his excellent French. If this boy was that rebel’s kinsman, what was he doing here, nicely dressed, in Paris, in the service of an English Duke?

The boy only shook his head at the confusion he saw on their faces. He looked older than his years again; as if he was used to people being puzzled about who he was and what his status might be.

‘My family’s been punished,’ he said, with the light shrug of someone affecting indifference. ‘One of my uncles was executed. Our lands are confiscated. But I was only a child. Prince Henry took me in; not as a hostage … out of kindness … and made me a page in his household,’ he said, retreating fully from his moment of touchy self-assertion; putting the others at their ease. ‘King Henry now. So I suppose I’m nearly English, after all.’ He met their eyes boldly. ‘I was lucky,’ he added with another of those deliberate light smiles, as if daring them to disagree.

Saying that so confidently gave Owain the usual dizzy feeling of being in two places at once. As he smiled for his hosts, he couldn’t help also thinking, privately, for a flash, of what might have become of him if he hadn’t become English. He thought of the cousins he’d played and ridden and hidden with, who’d been kept by their father to stand or fight with the Welsh armies, who were all now prisoners in the Tower of London: Glynd?r’s oldest son Gruffydd, twenty or so, with his father’s light eyes and quick wit, who could cut a raindrop in two with his sword, the fastest runner Owain had ever seen, the fastest rider too. Owain’s childhood hero. The three little blonde Mortimer girls, lisping and giggling, none of them older than eight or nine, with their tired-eyed mother, Catrin, Glynd?r’s daughter and Owain’s aunt. The women had all been taken captive when Catrin’s husband, the powerful Englishman Edmund Mortimer, had been killed at the siege of Harlech, when the English King’s men had finally broken down the walls. Not everyone he’d grown up with was a prisoner now; not quite. Owain thought of Glynd?r’s younger son, Maredudd ap Owain Glynd?r, hiding with his fugitive father in Herefordshire – laughing quietly over their place of refuge – with one of Glynd?r’s English son-in-laws, paradoxically the English Sheriff of the County, still very much on the run. He thought of his own immediate family: his mother long dead, they said of shock and fear after hiding from Prince Harry’s raiding party come to burn down Sycharth Castle. He couldn’t remember her. His father, a joyous smile or a giant puff of rage, depending on his mood; riding out with the French and taking Owain with them; teaching Owain a first few words of the incomers’ ways and language when he was only five or six and prouder than any boy had ever been to be taken on the army’s marches. Even if Owain no longer respected that reckless father – who’d handed him over to the enemy when it suited him – or the uncles who’d saved their skins by handing over their own men to be tortured and killed, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for them all. His father, Maredudd ap Tudur, like all the other surviving brothers, was living on nothing now: on the run, lodging in attics and churches, surviving on pity. The houses had gone. Owain remembered two of the moated manors burning; a confused child’s recollection of peering out between fingers clamped over eyes, choking on smoke; being hushed into tickly, terrified silence. They’d been somewhere among the smooth stretches of grey-green turf and tree and sea on the island some knew as the Dark Island, or Honey Island, or the Island of the Brave, which had once been his family’s home: Môn, beyond the great snowy mountains of Gwynedd, which the English called Anglesey, and which he would never see again. Uncle Rhys’ head was on a pole at Chester. Uncle Rhys’ boys were not allowed back to Erddreiniog. Uncle Gwilym had lost Clorach; Uncle Ednyfed’s children had lost Trecastell. Only Morfydd, his bravest cousin, Uncle Goronwy’s daughter, who had charm and more determination than every other member of his family put together, and, what was more, was blessed with a husband not quite so out of favour as the rest of Owain’s family, still dared to petition the King of England to get the family lordship of Penmynydd back.

In his mind’s eye, Owain saw the thousand children taken as servants when the English King had stabled his horses in the church of Strata Florida Abbey, letting them foul God’s altar. That older Henry had been a cruel man. He’d enjoyed demonstrating that he feared no one, not even God. If it hadn’t been for young King Henry, with his pardons and his peace … Owain heard the anguished howling of the mothers that night; the fearful quiet of the children, their lost stares, driven off like sheep into the abbey and on into the unknown. That had been the beginning. Owain saw the end too: grass in the streets; roofless houses; burned-out villages; a land without men.

‘I was lucky,’ he repeated lightly. ‘My King Henry is a good master.’

Christine and Jean exchanged glances. Then, putting an arm on the boy’s shoulder, Jean led him inside.

They gave the boy a drink and a bite to eat. He said politely that he couldn’t take a thing, but of course in the event he wolfed down slice after slice of meat and bread, and washed it all down with a big cup of wine. He was young, after all, whatever he’d seen in that remote war; fifteen, maybe; and he had a healthy appetite.

Seeing them all standing around the circle of light, watching him – not just Christine and Jean, but Jean’s wife Jehanette and little Jacquot and Perrette – he watered his wine liberally, and explained, through a cheerful mouthful, ‘We’re under orders not to drink French wine without water, because it’s so good and strong; we’re not allowed to get drunk.’ He hesitated; they could all see him wondering whether to tell them the reasoning behind the order too – too obviously ‘Don’t get drunk in case a Frenchman ambushes you’ – then realising that would be tactless, and blushing. Instead, he ran an appreciative tongue round his mouth, which was stained dark red. ‘I don’t know yet if it’s strong, but it certainly is good,’ he finished, giving them all a beaming smile. Christine saw Perrette’s snub nose wrinkle in the beginning of a return laugh; warningly, she caught Perrette’s eye. There was no point in being too easily charmed.

As soon as he’d satisfied his appetite for food, the boy sighed, pushed his stool back from the table, and, in the biddable fashion of a well-bred child, set to trying to entertain his silent hosts with stories from his day and his life. Eagerly, he started talking – gabbling, Christine thought severely – about the audience his Duke had had with the Queen of France – well, not his Duke, exactly; Owain had just been seconded to Clarence for the trip to Paris. He fixed his eyes rather pleadingly on dimpling, curly-haired Jehanette, who looked the readiest to smile. ‘My master sent your Princess a jewel with the marriage proposal. It was my duty and pleasure to hand it to her today … I think your Princess liked it. She’s a very beautiful princess. A jewel herself. The marriage will be a blessing for both our lands … don’t you think?’ he finished, and even he could hear the imploring note in his own voice.

He had no idea why they were looking so cheerless. Even the pretty wife. He sensed he must have said the wrong thing – but what? Did he smell? He restrained the impulse to sniff at his armpits.

But he watched in dawning alarm as the elderly woman who’d brought him home pursed her lips and drew her back up very straight. She’d been beautiful once, this Christine de Pizan, you could see that; there was still the ghost of beauty in her ravaged face and in the pride with which she carried her small, tough body, prodding out her barrel chest, half pugnacious, half flirtatious. But there was something frightening about her too; he certainly didn’t want to get on the wrong side of her.

Christine glared at him. She said severely: ‘I’m not so sure about that, young man. And I wouldn’t get your hopes up too much, if I were you. I doubt very much whether this marriage will happen.’

She dropped her chin and went on gazing implacably at him.

Owain shrank into himself, wishing himself invisible, wondering how he could have given such offence.

He noticed the younger Frenchman quietly putting a restraining hand on his mother’s arm. He also saw Madame de Pizan didn’t seem to care. The gesture almost seemed to goad her into going on.

‘No doubt your English … king … wants a marriage with the oldest and greatest royal line in Europe,’ she said, and her husky voice vibrated deeper with contempt. ‘But one of our royal princesses has already turned down a proposal of marriage by your King, don’t forget. As I recall, there was a question of the validity of his claim to the throne, at the time … and I’m not aware of anything having changed in that regard since then.’ She pushed her head a little closer to his. ‘Are you?’

Owain felt like a rabbit being hypnotised by a snake. ‘Ye—no …’ he stammered, desperate to please but sensing he was being lured into danger too; and, mostly, simply not knowing what answer was expected.

‘In any event, it’s our King who will decide, when he recovers from his … his illness,’ Christine was sweeping superbly on, overemphasising her words and raising her eyebrows to add yet more insistence to her speech. (Owain noticed she didn’t say, the King’s ‘madness’; in fact, he realised, no one he’d met in Paris seemed to talk of the madness that everyone in England knew the King of France was afflicted with.) ‘Not our Queen. And as for our Queen … she might have seemed to you to be enthusiastic about marrying Catherine to your King, but don’t forget you’re an outsider here, and a very young one at that. If you were a Parisian, you’d know without needing to be told that her main pleasure in life these days is goading her son into behaving badly. It amuses her. She’s of a mischievous turn of mind, and the two of them don’t get on. You saw how he reacted. That was him – Louis, our Crown Prince, the Dauphin – making a scene back there. He was right, of course. He should never have risen to her bait; but that’s Louis for you. Always been a fool. He didn’t see she was only considering the idea to provoke him into making the scene he made.’

‘Maman,’ Jean de Castel murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But,’ Owain faltered, hardly daring to speak for fear of falling into yet another trap he hadn’t suspected. He’d never heard of such a thing. ‘A woman …? Educated …? Writing …? What …?’

Christine snapped: ‘A woman can educate herself, if she has the wit and application to. I did; why not?’ Then, less angrily, ‘In any case, if this was a just world, all girls would automatically be properly educated, without having to teach themselves – just as boys are. So, no, I don’t just sit at home worrying. You have to help yourself in this life; there’s no guarantee anyone else will help you if you don’t. I go to court. I get commissions. I write: I, Christine. What’s more, I run a manuscript workshop out at the back here, to have my work copied and presented to clients. I don’t have time to sit around being frightened. And let me tell you one last thing, young man,’ she added, with her eyes still full of flash and injured pride, but also, Owain suddenly realised, just the faintest glimmer of dawning humour. ‘My most talented employee, by a long chalk – the best illuminator of manuscripts in Paris, and probably in the world – is a woman too.’

Owain opened his eyes very wide – even wider than the astonishment he genuinely felt was merited. It had taken a while, but now instinct told him he might have the measure of her at last. To be impressed would appease her. If he could only appeal to the humour he sensed in her eyes; to the good heart that he sensed lay behind her fierce exterior …

He opened his hands wide, too, in an imitation of the French shrug he’d seen so often today.

‘They told me’, he said, with all the worldly charm he could muster, staring back at her as boldly as he dared, ‘that Paris was a city of miracles. And now I know they were right.’

He bowed. ‘Bravo!’ he heard Jehanette whisper.

‘Madame de Pizan,’ he went on, in the same light, unfrightened tone – the words coming glibly to his tongue now he was finding his way; knowing he was on safer ground. ‘I’m honoured to know you. And I beg your pardon for my ignorance. Truly. I didn’t mean to give offence … but I wasn’t to know … there are no women with your genius in my country … and I’m not a man of letters myself … I’ve never read … well, not properly … only the Bible, and my Book of Hours …’

He could see, from the little nods of Jean’s head, that he was doing all right now. And, as his panic receded, he remembered that he had always wanted to know more about the world of letters. He’d always been intrigued by the priestly scholars in the castles he’d moved between since he came to England; by their austere, dusty calling; but repelled, too, by their elderly, glum faces. He’d always wished they had some of the life and lightness of Red Iolo, Owain Glynd?r’s bard, who in spite of being unimaginably ancient – more than eighty, people said – with a white beard and a bowed back and a stick, and white-blue cloudy eyes, still had an amused smile and a joyful wit and a poem always on his tongue. Not that it mattered, back in England. As a Welshman, one of the Plant Owain – the Children of Owain – he was banned from university anyway. He didn’t care. But here, in this great city, home of the greatest university in Christendom, every young man was reputed to know his astronomy and even the women were scholars … There’d be no sour old faces here; it might all be different.

‘I’d like to read more widely,’ he added eagerly, for Owain was a young man of irrepressible optimism and adaptability, ‘I’d really like to. If I’m to stay with you while my Duke’s embassy is here, will you show me your books?’

When he dared look up into the next silence, he saw everything had changed. Christine de Pizan was smiling at him – a smile so dazzlingly beautiful that, for a moment, he could no longer see the lines etched on her face by time. And she was nodding her head.

They sat up late, after that. They drank another pitcher of wine together (Owain was wise enough not to water his any more). He didn’t know whether he was drunk. He only knew he was overwhelmed with the excitement of this adventure: with being in this extraordinary city, developing a camaraderie with a woman so learned she was the talk of Christendom, and knowing that his refusal to give in to his fear of her had helped make her eyes go soft and her voice gentle as she talked.