Виктория Холт: The Queen's Secret

One of the saddest events of my childhood happened during my Poissy days.

I remember it well. A nun came into the room where we were doing our lessons with other daughters of the nobility. She went straight to the one who was teaching us, and a whispered conversation ensued. I was glad of a little respite from the tedious task of translating a passage in Latin, when the nun who was taking the class said: “Will the Princesses Marie, Michelle and Katherine please step up here to me.”

We obeyed at once.

“The Mother Superior wishes to see you,” we were told. “You may go to her now.”

Michelle and I exchanged glances, wondering what sin we had committed, for it was not often that the Mother Superior wanted to see pupils, and when she did, it usually meant they were in deep disgrace.

But it was not for that purpose that we had been summoned. How I wished it had been!

The Mother Superior smiled at us in a kindly fashion when we entered her sanctum. She said: “You may sit.” And we did.

“I have some bad news for you,” she went on. “It will be a shock, I fear. It concerns your sister, the Duchess of Orléans.”

“Isabelle …” We murmured her name.

“It is God’s will,” said the Mother Superior. “We must always remember that. And she has gone to a happier place.”

I sat there, numb, realizing the significance of what she was saying. I thought: the baby. It is the baby.

None of us could speak. We were too shocked.

“Your sister is now with God and His angels,” said the Mother Superior. “We must not grieve. We must rejoice in her happiness. She is beyond all earthly pain.”

I sat there thinking of her…all her unhappiness since the loss of Richard…the hopelessness she had experienced, and then had come her marriage to Charles and she had shown signs of being happy again. And the baby…how she had wanted the baby!

Life was cruel. To have dealt such blows and then to give a glimpse of happiness before snatching it away.

The Mother Superior came to us and laid a hand on each of our heads.

“Bless you, my children,” she said. “I think you may want to be alone.”

So we went out, Michelle and I not looking at each other, Marie accepting the blow with quiet resignation as the will of God.

I ran to our dormitory and flung myself on my bed. My throat was dry. I was still numb with shock and misery. It was not until I was in bed that night that I began to weep. And then I could not stop.

How we missed her! We had so looked forward to her visits. For so many years we had not known our beautiful sister. Then she had come into our lives, only to be snatched away. If they had not forced her to marry; if she had not become pregnant, she would still be with us!

I was angry with Fate and filled with apprehension as well as sorrow. We were moved around as the men of power wished to move us, and if we died, that was an end of our usefulness and they ceased to think of us, for we were then no longer a means of patching up a quarrel, no longer a bargaining counter in a treaty.

Isabelle herself had said how lucky were those who were not born royal and could lead lives which they themselves had some power to arrange.

Moreover, I knew little of what was going on outside the convent walls, for we had depended on Isabelle to inform us. Nuns do not gossip; and in any case they are shut away from the world even more securely than their pupils. I did not know that the quarrels between the houses of Orléans and Burgundy were growing to menacing proportions which were to have a dire effect on the state of our country. There could be few situations fraught with more danger: a mad king who longed to be good and wise as his father had been and whose periodic lapses into madness had loosened his grip on the helm of state; a powerful, sex-crazed wife who was ready to plot treacherously against anyone who stood in her way; rival princes—ambitious men all of them—seeking to grasp the power which seemed there for the taking when the King was mad; and the Dauphin was only a boy.

The strongest man in the country was the Duke of Burgundy. I believe many were of the opinion that, if the King could not govern them, Burgundy should take his place. Burgundy certainly thought it, and there was open hostility between the houses of Burgundy and Orléans.

I did not know this at the time, but my mother, realizing that Burgundy was the stronger man, was attempting to throw in her lot with him…against my father and her own son.

The Treaty of Chartres had been devised and everyone was delighted because it was meant to establish peace between the princes. But at the very time the treaty was signed, a man of great ambition and energy stepped into the forefront of events. It could not have happened if Isabelle had lived.

This man was Count Bernard of Armagnac. He had a daughter, Bonne, and he saw a way to power through a marriage between her and Charles of Orléans, the widower of my sister Isabelle.

I cannot guess what Charles felt about this. I was sure, from what Isabelle had told us, that he had been devoted to her. To marry so quickly after her death must seem like faithlessness. But he, no less than Isabelle, must do what he was told to do, and because it was believed by his ambitious uncles that the Count of Armagnac could be a useful ally the marriage took place.

No sooner was he connected with the royal family than Armagnac made his presence felt. With Berry and Brittany he placed himself at the head of the anti-Burgundy faction, and so powerful did he almost immediately become that from then on, instead of being called the Orléanist party, it was known as the Armagnacs.

What was tantamount to civil war was raging throughout France.

I was oblivious to this strife and my convent life went on in its peaceful way. It was sad when Michelle went away to marry the son of the Duke of Burgundy, and for a long time I felt very lonely. There was only Marie now at Poissy with me, and she was so immersed in preparing herself for her vocation that I saw very little of her.

There were no ways of learning what was happening outside. Each day was ordered by the bells. Lessons…reading…walking…prayers at regular intervals. I had my friends…girls like myself, highborn and therefore knowing that one day they would be presented with a fate which they would be forced to accept.

It was a strange life—so different from what it had been in the Hôtel de St.-Paul.

I often thought about my father. I guessed, of course, that little had changed. There would be the periods of madness, the interludes of lucidity. And my mother, what was she doing now?

But for so long I had lived in the sheltered atmosphere of Poissy that I had been lulled into acceptance of the life around me. I knew that change must come sometime, but when it did, it found me unprepared.

I was at this time twelve years old, what I suppose would be called well-educated, but unaware of much which it would have been good for me to know. My early years in the Hôtel de St.-Paul had taught me something about the unpleasant side of life, but perhaps then I had been too young to absorb it. The Hôtel where I had lived with my brothers and sisters and my mad father seemed unreal in the saintly atmosphere and rigorous routine of Poissy.

The quiet life came to an end as suddenly as it had begun.

I was coming close to an age when a princess becomes useful to those around her.

The Mother Superior sent for me, and once more, thinking that I was to be mildly reprimanded or reminded of some duty, I blithely went to her.

With her was a ruddy-faced man. I knew he was a foreigner before he spoke, but in those first moments I was too amazed at the presence of a man in the sanctum of the Mother Superior to think of anything else.