Georgette Heyer (34 page)

Young James had then been in his twelfth year, a red-headed, stocky boy, with freckles, and fearless brown eyes that stared sturdily into King Henry’s. He was not frightened; he was in a passion of rage; and very pugnacious. But if you had been taught to be mannerly towards your elders it was a feat beyond your power to treat with rudeness a man of King Henry’s years and exalted position. Besides, King Henry had four sons of his own, and he knew how to handle spirited imps. Young James, who hated Englishmen, found himself telling the King all about his life at St Andrews, what his studies had been, what disports he liked best, and how much he wanted to become skilled in feats of arms. ‘You shall be,’ King Henry promised, liking the eager boy.

He told the infuriated Scots that if education was what they wanted for the Prince he was better qualified to supply this than King Charles of France, which was unanswerable, because Charles the Well-Beloved was seldom in possession of his wits, and he himself was the most lettered king in Christendom. He said that James should receive careful instruction, and he kept his word. The boy was allowed to retain the young squire who had accompanied him to England; he was placed in the custody of a governor, supplied with tutors, as well in knightly exercises as in book-learning, and given every opportunity to disport himself with hawks and hounds.

The news of his capture had dealt King Robert his death-stroke. Before three months were out, the Prince had become the King of Scotland, and a doubly potent weapon in King Henry’s hand. Beyond a certain point, Albany, now Regent, dared not go, for fear of having a most unwanted King sent back into Scotland. This dread weighed far more with him than did the continued detention of his own son Murdoch of Fife in England since his capture by Harry Hotspur at Homildon Hill eight years before; and it was a threat held always over his head. Not, John thought, that King Henry had the smallest intention of sending James back to Scotland. He was neither so witless nor so conscienceless. James was useful only as a potential danger to his uncle; and once across the Border the life of such an untried stripling would not have been worth a day’s purchase.

John hardly knew him, but Humfrey had met him once or twice, and said that he was a boy of decided parts, quickwitted, fond of books, and bidding fair to become an accomplished jouster. John had had a glimpse of him three years ago, when he had been taken to watch a wager by battle in the lists at Nottingham. John had not himself been sitting in the royal gallery, but below it, in the Constable’s siege, but Harry had told him afterwards that James had hugely enjoyed the entertainment – to the extent of having to be reproved for laughing so loudly. No one had blamed him for laughing, of course, because it had been quite the most japeworthy combat ever seen in the lists. It had been between two elderly men of Bordeaux, one of whom had accused the other of having incited him, seven years earlier, to treason. Each was bursting with rage against the other; nothing would do for either of them but to fight it out in the lists; and very doughtily they had fought, if a trifle stiffly, first riding several courses against each other, and then waging the battle on foot. From the moment that John cried: ‘Lasseir les aler!’ and the two old men charged furiously against each other, the crowd took them to their hearts, and broke the strict rule of silence at a tournament, cheering both of them impartially. When treason was the cause at issue, the vanquished was dragged by the heels from the lists by the Constable’s officers, and hanged, but the King had not allowed the entertainment to end so unhappily. When it was plain that the combatants were tottering on their thin shanks, he had shouted Ho! and had announced them both to be leal men and true, which pleased everyone but the King of Scots, who was young enough to think this a tame ending to the affair. ‘Will not the Lord John drag one of them away to be hanged?’ he demanded.

‘It’s not a thing he does himself,’ said Harry gravely. ‘We only let him drag people out of the lists by their heels on his birthday.’

‘No, but his officers!’ James cried, knowing that Harry was laughing at him.

‘You know,’ remarked Thomas, ‘such a kill-cow as you would have had splendid disport in France! What a pity you didn’t go there after all!’

It was, in fact, extremely fortunate for James. With the death of Duke Philip of Burgundy, and the accession of his son John to his power, all semblance of order had vanished from the land. The Burgundians and the Orleanists, each striving to become supreme, grew daily stronger and more outrageous. The King was diswitted; his gross German Queen was said to live in open concubinage with his brother of Orleans; and all over the land a state of anarchy flourished. Those who visited the country brought back the most hair-raising accounts. There had been nothing comparable to it in England since the time of King Stephen, when, if the chronicles were to be believed, the barons threw up strongholds without licence, pursued private quarrels with every circumstance of ferocity, and behaved towards their tenantry like so many Paynims. English ambassadors told of unheard-of luxury and magnificence amongst the nobly born in France, and of such poverty amongst the humble as had shocked them beyond description. Only the nobly-born had any rights, they said. The poor had not even the right to hold their own half-acres inviolable. No French lord would think twice about invading the dwellings of his tenants, or of throwing the wretched creatures out to starve, if he happened to want the land on which their hovels stood. He was never confronted by a slow-thinking, obstinate country-fellow, who proved, in a long, rambling tale, stuffed with irrelevant details, that his fathers had enjoyed some tiresome right or other since time immemorial. He never had to decipher interminable letters from a harassed steward, informing him of what John Daw deposeth, and what witnesses he bringeth to support his contention, and how Margery Nokes remembers the day, because it was the very day on which she delivered her neighbour Brown of her fifth son, that lost a leg in the French wars; and he certainly never had to own himself baffled in an encounter with one of his hinds.

As for the Dukes of Orleans and Burgundy, upon the accession of the Fearless to his father’s ducal cap, Louis of Orleans took for his device a knotted stick, with the motto
Je l’envy
, which was an expression used in dicing, and signified,
I defy you
; and the Fearless promptly countered with a carpenter’s plane (for the shaving off of the knots on Orleans’ stick) with a motto of two Flemish words, also culled from the dice-table:
Hic houd
, which meant,
I hold it
.

Thoughtful Parisians, perceiving these portents, lost no time in providing themselves with weapons of defence; no person of kind-wit ventured into the streets after dusk; and the more timorous barred their doors and shuttered their windows as soon as the shadows began to lengthen.

No one was really surprised when, on a chill November night, in 1407, one of the rival dukes gruesomely met his end in the Rue Barbette.

Louis of Orleans had gone to pay a ceremonial visit to Queen Isabeau, lately brought to bed of a child in her hotel in the Rue du Temple, fast-by the Porte Barbette. In spite of the fact that the infant (which, it was freely asserted, was of the Duke’s own begetting) had survived for only one day, the meeting was a merry one, the royal lady and her brother-in-law sitting down to supper in the best of spirits. But a false message had been brought to Orleans, telling him that his presence at the Hotel St Pol, where the King lay, was instantly desired. Still in merry mood, he set forth, scantly attended, his oiled locks bare to the winter sky, a song on his lips. He was set upon by masked men, who erupted from an empty house, smote down his followers, dragged him from the saddle, and literally hacked him to death, even going so far as to cleave his skull to the teeth. They ran away after that, dropping caltraps in their wake to discourage pursuers, and for several days no one knew who was the instigator of this brutal murder.

‘And they would hardly imagine that it could be Burgundy, would they?’ said Humfrey, listening in wide-eyed innocence to this tale.

It was Burgundy, of course, and within a very few days he had fled from Paris to his own province of Artois. According to the accounts received in England, he boasted dreadfully of the deed, once within his own domains, so that anyone might have supposed him to have struck Orleans down with his own hand. But he was popular with the Parisians, and by Shrovetide in the following year, back he came to the capital, at the head of a thousand men-at-arms – a circumstance which perhaps accounted for the pardon he received a month later. However, he apparently felt none too sure of his safety, for he instantly began to erect a fortress in the heart of the city.

The new Duke of Orleans was a youth of sixteen years. Report said of him that he was an accomplished boy, with gentle manners, a strong leaning towards the poetic, and a melancholy disposition. This did not sound as though his cousin of Burgundy, a ruthless and a seasoned schemer, eighteen years his senior, would find in him a formidable opponent. He seemed, moreover, to have been born under an unlucky star. A year before his father’s murder, he had been married to a most unwilling bride, a lady older than himself, and a widow, still, and while life lasted, mourning her first husband. Madame Isabelle, daughter of Charles the Well-Beloved, and Queen Dowager of England, wept during the marriage ceremony, and continued to weep throughout the jollifications which followed it. It was an unnerving experience for the youthful bridegroom; and hardly had he succeeded in reconciling Madame to her lot than he was plunged into all the turmoil of his father’s abrupt taking-off. Not only did he fail to obtain vengeance on the murderer: he saw him pardoned for the crime; and he found himself with two women on his hands who extracted from the tragedy the last ounce of drama. Madame Isabelle, who really seemed to enjoy an excess of grief, was driven, with her mother-in-law to demand justice of the King, through the streets of Paris, in an open chariot, both ladies draped in sable weeds, and weeping without stint, to the admiration of all beholders. After this, the Dowager Duchess draped her hotel as well as her person in black cloths, and, in superb disregard of the fact that she had enjoyed little of her murdered husband’s society for several years, devoted the rest of her life to extolling his virtues, mourning her loss, and exhorting her children never to rest until they had avenged his death. A year later the young Duke himself was mourning the loss of his spouse: Madame Isabelle was brought to bed of a maid-child, and parted her life within the hour. Decidedly, it did not seem as though Charles of Orleans was destined to be fortunate.

However, in this year of grace, 1410, he had found a second wife, and his prospects seemed to be rosier. His father-in-law, the Count of Armagnac, was a forceful person, and soon appropriated to himself the leadership of the Orleanist party. He was so forceful that it was not long before the country was plunged in civil war, a state of affairs perfectly agreeable to the English, but quite ruinous to the wretched people who suffered its depredations.

No: France was not at all the sort of place to which a father would wish to send his son for safety. King James had been more fortunate than he knew.

3

Thinking of Madame Isabelle brought his sister Blanche to John’s mind. Blanche too was dead, and in childbed. When this tragic news had reached the King, nearly a year ago now, he had let a dreadful cry, and had fallen into bitter weeping, saying over and over again: ‘Both my little maids! both, both!’ Those about him had reminded him that Philippa was on life, but he would not be comforted. He had never felt happy in Philippa’s marriage to Eric, King of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and often he spoke of her as though she were dead. If she had shown only the smallest dislike of the contract, he would have broken it, for the reports his servants had brought him from Denmark were of a rude court, and of a bridegroom of uncertain character. But Philippa was not afraid. She wanted to be a queen; and the tears she had shed at parting from her father, and her brothers, at Bishop’s Lynn, four years ago, had been quickly dried. The scanty tidings that had from time to time been received from her made her brothers say that it was well for her she was of a hardier temper than her sister. Her husband proved to be a man of few morals, with an inordinate liking for liquor.

They bade King Henry take comfort from the knowledge that Blanche had had no such trials to bear. If her life had been short, it had been happy; and rarely had a princess found in marriage so much love as Bavarian Louis had lavished upon her.

The Queen bade him consider how much more blessed was his state than hers. His four sons were around him, but all seven of her fair children had become as good as dead to her, since she never now set eyes on them. Heaven knew how hard it was for her to appear cheerful under such circumstances, but she did it, because it was her duty, and her dear lord must follow her example.

But King Henry would not be comforted. His doctors said that his grief was responsible for the growth of his malady. No one was in a position to dispute this, and certainly the King’s health had seemed to be worse during the past year; but, looking back over the years which had elapsed since Scrope’s execution, John thought that he had never been in good point in all that time. But he recalled, also, that the first signs of the mysterious disease had shown themselves a full year before that date, and he continued to turn a stony face upon any man unwise enough to speak within his hearing of the Archbishop’s bane.

For a year after his recovery from that strange seizure at Green Hammerton, the King had continued in fairly good health. It had not been until the end of the following year that he had become so ill that he had thought himself upon his bed-mortal, and had drawn up his Will. His condition was then so alarming that Thomas had been recalled from Ireland, where he had resumed his lieutenancy; and Harry had received special permission from the Council to remain at his father’s side. A meeting of the Council had been cancelled; the King, who had been carried from Eltham Palace to his manor at Greenwich, was rumoured to be at his last end. It was here that he dictated his Will; and it was here that King Richard’s ghost haunted him.