Vanora Bennett - Blood Royal

When Owain asked about the riots last year, and whether they hadn’t damaged the city – destroyed buildings, caused fires – she only waved a magnificent hand and made her ‘pshaw!’ noise, as if what Owain guessed must have been a terrifying couple of weeks had been an insignificant triviality. ‘Butchers!’ she said dismissively; ‘A hangman! What damage could people of that sort do?’

But, before she let Jean show him to the bed that Jehanette had made up for him in the scriptorium, Madame de Pizan drew him across to the window, and said, more sombrely, ‘Look here.’ She opened the shutters. They squeaked. She pointed down at the dark street outside. ‘Forget the butchers. If you want to know where our civil war really began, it was right there.’

Owain let his eyes get used to the dark, enjoying the air, fresh with early flowers. Up on the left, he could see the slender turrets of the Hotel Barbette; she’d shown him that earlier, on the way here. Opposite, he could just about make out a dark space, where a house should have stood. A froth of weeds; jutting timbers. ‘Yes,’ Christine said, ‘that burned-out space. That was where it all happened: the first death in the war. When France began to destroy itself.’

Christine fell silent for a moment, looking out, forgetting the boy, remembering that moment. She’d watched the aftermath from this window: the torches, the shouting, the panic. Out there, on a cold November night seven years ago, right outside that house, the Duke of Burgundy had sent men to waylay his cousin and rival, the Duke of Orleans, and murder him.

There’d been quarrels between the two men for years before that. Louis of Orleans had a light, teasing temperament; John of Burgundy was quiet and thorough and ruthless. They could never have been close. Louis of Orleans, charming and intelligent and musical though he was – Christine’s most glittering patron, back then – had been provoking too: so many mistresses, so many orgies in bathhouses, helping the Queen steal money from the royal coffers for her entertainments.

Burgundy’s men had come to this street for vengeance only after Orleans had hinted mischievously to Burgundy that he’d had an affair with Burgundy’s own Duchess. But they’d chosen precisely this spot to do their murder because they knew how often Orleans came here. The Queen, the wife of Orleans’ royal brother, had a private house on the corner of Old Temple Street – the Hotel Barbette, with its white turrets, fifty yards away. Queen Isabeau moved there whenever her husband was mad. For years before he was killed, Orleans had spent too many of his days and nights there too, whenever she was in residence. People whispered that he must be Isabeau’s lover.

There was no end to the mischief Louis of Orleans had done, it was true. But Burgundy’s response – murdering him – was a crime so horrifying it blotted out all the pranks and tricks Louis had so enjoyed.

Shedding the blood royal was sacrilege.

God anointed a king to be the head of the body politic. A country’s fighting noblemen might be the body politic’s arms and hands; the priests its conscience; the peasantry its legs and feet. But the King was the head, to be obeyed in all things, since everything and everyone depended utterly on him to convey the will of God from Heaven to Earth. And the blood that ran in his royal veins was as sacred as the sacrament and so were the persons of his closest relatives, the other princes of the blood, whom God might choose to take the throne tomorrow if He called today’s King to Heaven. It was the blood royal that brought life to the body politic – the will of God made manifest on Earth – and anyone who shed the blood royal was going against the will of God.

Once Burgundy, a prince of the blood royal, had ignored that divine imperative, and destroyed another royal prince, like a dog, the whole contract between God and man was destroyed too. The darkness had got in.

That was why, ever since the night of that murder, the hand of every prince in France had been turned against the Duke of Burgundy – even if Burgundy’s personal magnetism was such that he’d bullied the poor, sickly King into pardoning him; even if he’d bullied Louis of Orlean’s young son, Charles, into saying publicly, through gritted teeth, in front of the King, that he forgave him too, and would not seek revenge for the death.

That was why France was cursed.

Even now that Burgundy had slunk away from Paris, it wasn’t the end. That there would be more bloodshed Christine had no doubt. Every prince who would have followed Orleans’ son Charles, if he had raised his hand against Burgundy, was taking a lead instead from his fiercer father-in-law, Count Bernard of Armagnac, who was bound by no peace promises. But, whatever the princes thought, the people of Paris still loved Burgundy. He paid his bills, unlike the more spendthrift Armagnac princes; as Christine and her son had both found, Burgundy was a better employer. Sooner or later he’d be back, with an army behind him, to trade the love that Parisians bore him for power. And then …

She leaned against the window frame.

‘Are you all right?’ A timid boy’s voice came from her side, making her jump. It was Owain Tudor; still there, staring at her with big gentle eyes. She’d forgotten all about him. She sighed. ‘Just regrets,’ she said wistfully, ‘for so many past mistakes.’

He murmured; something optimistic, she guessed. He was too young to know there were some wrongs that couldn’t be righted; some sins that would follow you to the grave. She shook herself. Smiled a brittle, social, off-to-bed-now-it’s-late smile at him, and began locking up. But perhaps his naive young man’s hope was catching. As she heard his footsteps, and Jean’s, creak on the stairs, she found herself imagining a conversation she might have, one day soon, with someone still full of hope – someone like this young Owain.

‘What are you writing now?’ he would ask.

She’d answer: ‘The Book of Peace.’ And she’d smile, because it would be true.

Owain meant to lie awake in the room where they’d made up a bed for him, and imagine himself walking through the city streets tomorrow. The room was warm, but furnished only with a huge table scattered with parchments and pens and with two long benches. There was a shelf of books on the wall. He’d imagined himself taking a book off the wall and, very carefully, putting it on the table and beginning to read it by candlelight. But sleep overcame him as soon as he threw himself down on the quilt. Instead of reading, he dreamed: fretful, regretful dreams, of woodsmoke, and stinging eyes, and the blurred outlines of rafters high up, and a woman’s arms cradling him, and a lullaby in a language he hardly remembered.

A few streets away, in the Hotel Saint-Paul, Catherine crept to her bed, shedding her sister-in-law Marguerite’s borrowed houppelande, which had made her sweat so much, leaving it on the floor with all the other neglected garments no one picked up any more. Marguerite wouldn’t notice, she thought, with childish unconcern; Marguerite spent so much time lying round crying in the Queen’s chambers at the mean way Louis treated her that she didn’t have time to worry about where her clothes were. Marguerite was always weeping; always running to the Queen for sympathy, and getting it, too. Catherine couldn’t understand why her mother was so much sweeter with Marguerite than she was with her own children. They all hated Marguerite’s father, the Duke of Burgundy; they all knew that was why Louis was so cruel to his wife. And the Queen hated the Duke of Burgundy at least as much as anyone else. But it didn’t seem to make her hate Marguerite. Struggling with the jealousy that thoughts of her mother’s public affection for Marguerite always aroused in her, Catherine thought, without really questioning why: perhaps Maman just hates Louis more than she does Marguerite’s father.