The King's Women Read online

  The King’s Women

  Deryn Lake

  © Deryn Lake 1992

  Dinah Lampitt has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1992 by Hodder & Stoughton

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  The King’s Women

  Deryn Lake

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part One - Yolande and Isabeau

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Part Two - Marie and Bonne

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Part Three - Jehanne

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Part Four - Agnès

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Bibliography

  Prologue

  It was a strange quirk of fate. At the precise moment she threw a winning hand, the Queen went into labour. There before her on the marble table top lay two dice, their white inlay each showing six, while simultaneously deep in her swollen body came that faint sharp pang Isabeau knew so well.

  With an almost imperceptible sigh, the Queen of France indicated her win, cried, “Voila,” and chose to ignore the fact that her eleventh child had started on its journey into life.

  The other players noticed nothing, only the dwarf looking up slyly as a muscle twitched involuntarily in Isabeau’s cheek. “Bravo, ma Reine,” he squeaked in his high unearthly voice. “You have beaten us all yet again.”

  The Queen looked at him with dislike. “Get out you little freak, you bore me.” Then added in a softer voice, “Philippe, Jean, you may stay to attend us,” nodding in the direction of the two young fops who made up the rest of the gambling school, smiling her bright smile, drawing her full lips back to reveal small white teeth, before finally standing up.

  Her velvet gown, stitched over with a thousand pearls, flowed round her distended body so cleverly that it was almost impossible to tell Isabeau was pregnant, let alone at the end of her time. She was half Italian, half Bavarian, but in looks the Queen’s Germanic blood had been sublimated by the vivid colours of the south. Her hair was long and so black that occasionally it seemed to have an almost violet shimmer, while her eyes were brilliantly alive, flashing whenever she spoke, the deep liquid brown of topaz. But the radiant beauty which had been hers when she had been the fourteen-year-old bride of fifteen-year-old Charles VI of France, was systematically being eroded by Isabeau’s appetites.

  Standing up now, short in stature despite her high-heeled wooden shoes, the Queen contemplated just one more act of naughtiness before she went to her lying in.

  “You boys,” she said, looking at the brothers Jean and Philippe Vallier, “you pretty little dandies, pour me some wine and kiss me with your sweet rosy mouths. At once now, do you hear?”

  It was a game they had all played before and the rules were always the same. First they must go to the Hall of Rosewater, where stood braziers from which rose the pungent scents of oriental perfumes from Damascus, making the senses of all who inhaled them reel; and there they would settle the goddess of pleasure on cushions and massage her, embrace her, do whatever she wished.

  But today Isabeau only required that her garments be loosened and her back rubbed and when Jean slipped his hand beneath to fondle her enormous but wonderful breasts, he was firmly slapped away.

  “You do not want love, ma Reine?” he whispered into her ear, from the lobe of which swung an emerald as big as an eye.

  “No, a mother cannot be wanton.”

  The twins exchanged a glance, understanding what she meant, and wondering whether they should send for the Queen’s ladies.

  Isabeau read their minds. “It’s not coming yet. You can take me to my chamber in half an hour. Now please me, you sweet young creatures.”

  And that was how the royal midwives finally found her, summoned by an anxious Jean who had slipped away unnoticed while his brother expertly ministered to Isabeau’s whims.

  “Madame, you must come with me,” said Mere Jacques, marching up to where the Queen lay in ecstasy. She was the most senior of them all, the woman who had delivered Isabeau’s last four children: Marie, Louis the Dauphin, Jean and Catherine. “No more playing. You must give birth to your child.”

  No other woman in the kingdom would have risked being so direct, no other woman approaching the Queen would have dared show brown rotting teeth and a plain stem face with no hint of cosmetic artifice.

  Isabeau looked up lazily from her cushions. “Is it you, you old witch? I should have known you would come to spoil things.”

  “The sooner you get shot of it the sooner you can return to your games,” Mere Jacques answered grimly.

  “Damn you,” said Isabeau, but she allowed the twins to heave her to her feet and pass her into the midwives’ care, before tottering off on her high heels towards the Queen’s private apartments.

  Watching the great shape with its accompanying party of hens as it disappeared into the depths of the palace, Philippe grinned slyly at his brother.

  “I wonder who fathered it?” he said in a whisper.

  “It wasn’t me,” answered Jean. “You?”

  “Very unlikely.” Philippe lowered his voice even further. “Even less likely than the King.”

  The twins nudged each other, laughed silently, then went off in pursuit of further diversion.

  Three hours later, the time now being two in the morning, Isabeau, with a grunt, delivered a sickly boy into the world. Mere Jacques, believing the old wives’ tale that in its first few moments a newborn always resembles its father, scrutinised its features with a hard stare. But apart from the fact that she had never seen such a hideous baby in her life there was nothing to reveal who had sired the poor thing. It resembled neither Charles VI of France, who had once been so beautiful but who had now degenerated into a hopeless lunatic, nor his exquisite brother, the Duke of Orleans, the Queen’s most favoured lover. In fact it resembled nothing but a hobgoblin, with its bald head, big nose and staring eyes.

  “What sex is it?” asked Isabeau, wearily, from her great bed.

  “A boy, Madame,” answered Mere Jacques, and briskly sponged the infant’s eyes and nose with a damp cloth to try and make it look a little more presentable.

  “Pass him to me,” said the Queen, not with obvious maternal feeling but more with the interest she always reserved for any new pet that joined the royal household.

  “Mon Dieu, he won’t be famed for his looks!” she exclaimed. “What a creature! Where is the Lady Jeanne du Mesnil?”

  “Here, Majesty,” answered the lady-in-waiting who had already been chosen to act as the new baby’s governess.

  “Stand where I can see you. Now see to it that
the boy has enough silver plate and linen, and furs to keep him warm.” Isabeau heaved herself up in the bed a little and drank a deep measure of wine. “And tell my chief astrologer to cast omens for the child. I think he’s going to need them with that face.”

  Jeanne du Mesnil curtsied and put out her arms to take the new Count of Ponthieu from his mother, and Isabeau — after dropping an absent-minded kiss on the infant’s brow — handed him over with a sigh of relief.

  “Now I shall sleep. In the morning send the musicians and my new singer to me, they can cheer my lying in.”

  She closed her eyes and leant back on her fine lace pillows, thus dismissing all but those who were assigned to wash and perfume her body after the birth.

  In the arms of Lady du Mesnil the Count of Ponthieu, swathed in so many layers of swaddling that his ugly little face was hardly visible, stirred and his mouth opened to yell.

  “She’s coming, your nurse is coming,” soothed the governess as, after dropping a reverential curtsy to the Queen, she briskly carried the infant to the royal nursery where Jeanne Chamoisy, the wet nurse, already waited, naked but for a clean linen shift and shivering with cold as a result.

  As soon as it had been finally discovered that the Queen was in labour, the woman had been fetched from her bed, stripped and scrubbed hard, to ensure that her working-class breasts would be fit to feed a member of the royal house of Valois.

  But its newest addition had no doubt. As Jeanne bared her nipple and held the baby to it, he took the flow greedily.

  “He sucks well,” said Jeanne the governess, who knew the wet nurse from the time of the Queen’s last confinement when the Princess Catherine had also been fed by her.

  “Poor little thing,” Jeanne Chamoisy answered without thinking.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, he’s not a pretty child, is he? Not like Catty.”

  Jeanne du Mesnil looked down at the infant face, half obscured by the large sensible breast nourishing it.

  “I can’t see who he resembles.”

  “No,” answered Jeanne, and the eyes of the two women met and held for a second.

  “The maids will bring the prince to his cradle when you’ve finished feeding him. Then you may retire for four hours, unless he cries of course, in which case you will be sent for,” said Jeanne the governess, suddenly very business-like.

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “Now I shall go and see that all is prepared.” And the lady-in-waiting bustled from the room to the apartment where the two royal cots stood in readiness, and gave instructions to Lady Suzanne Rion to straighten the hangings of the one about to receive its new occupant.

  The cradles were beautiful, a work of art in themselves: made from Irish fir trees, the rich wood embellished with gold and copper, the Queen’s arms — the Wittelsbach device, the emblem of the royal house of Bavaria — carved proudly at their head for all the world to see.

  ‘Just the Queen’s arms,’ thought Lady du Mesnil reflectively. ‘Why not those of France?’

  Was this, she wondered, Isabeau’s way of covertly telling the world that her latest child was the fruit of her affair with that most elegant of princes, that formidable womaniser, Louis d’Orleans? These days the couple could not get enough of one another, delighting in each other’s company, or so it was said. And though both may have other lovers, as they most certainly did, it was claimed that these counted for nothing, that together the Queen and her brother-in-law had found a passion so sweet and rare that nobody else could ever matter again.

  Jeanne du Mesnil’s mind went to the child’s nominal father, the King of France, confined to his quarters in the palace, sometimes lucid, sometimes raving, covered with dirt. She felt a moment’s pity for the monarch, once so respected, now brought so low, seized by madness a full eleven years ago. She also felt a wave of compassion for Isabeau who in the past had loved him greatly but who, because of her husband’s lunacy, had progressively become the most debauched woman in the known world, nicknamed Queen Venus because of her wild way of life.

  And now there was another infant to add to that unhealthy excitable bunch of siblings who were the royal children of France.

  “Poor little thing,” she said, echoing Jeanne Chamoisy’s words, then turned as the sound of feet behind her heralded the arrival of the newborn prince.

  “His Highness, Monsieur le Comte, is asleep,” said the Lady Marie de Barrois importantly, and handed the minute bundle into Jeanne’s care.

  How gently she laid him in his cradle of Irish wood, how softly bent to take another look at the small face, smoothed out by sleep, how tenderly tucked him beneath a coverlet of fur to protect the babe against the raw February night, as cold as any yet in the bleak winter which held France in its bite in that year of 1403.

  Part One - Yolande and Isabeau

  One

  The most extraordinary thing about the palace known as the Hotel St. Pol was its chaotic character. No overall plan encompassed the building’s collection of individual mansions or hotels, rich and extravagant though each was. And no grand design had overseen the way in which these lavish dwellings were linked together. Instead, a sprawl of gardens, courtyards and fountains, quadrangles, cloisters, passageways and galleries, to say nothing of a menagerie, formed the connecting links between the various great houses, the whole being termed the King’s lodging, his domain, the household where he lived in his twilight world of madness.

  Yet to that frenetic group of young people who were the mad King’s offspring nothing could have been more exciting than that hotch-potch of a place where wild unhappy beasts paced tetchily in cages, and aviaries of exotic birds beat their wings against imprisoning mesh. Here was havoc, a maze, a pit of shadows where one could get dangerously lost, a place of sunshine where exuberant fountains gushed and splashed at every comer.

  Within this crazy network of mansions lay the Hotel du Petit-Musc, and it was here that the royal children dwelled. Once it had belonged to their uncle, the decadent, naughty Duke d’Orleans, but now he had gone and the house had been given over to them, principally that they might keep to themselves within its walls and not force their unwanted attention on the adult population of the Hotel St. Pol.

  Altogether there had been eleven of them but now only two remained, Catherine and Charles, aged six and four respectively. Their elder brothers, the Dauphin Louis, and

  Jean, Duke of Touraine, still lived in the palace, of course, but they were ten and nine years of age, already betrothed and no longer considered children, able now to command their own private apartments.

  As to the rest of the brood, the first had been a boy, Charles, who had died in infancy; then had come Jeanne, who had met the same fate. The first child to survive had been Isabelle, who had married King Richard II of England when she had been less than nine years old, and he already thirty. Another Jeanne had followed, this one to live and marry the heir to the Duke of Brittany when she had been little older than her sister. A Dauphin, Charles, had been born next and he had lived eight years before an untimely death. Then, in close proximity, there had been two little girls, Michelle and Marie; Michelle promised as the future bride of the son of Jean the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, Marie to be given to God, destined from the cradle to become a nun in return, or so it was hoped, for her mad father’s return to sanity. But the sacrifice had been in vain. The child still pined in a convent while the King verged between phases of wild exhilaration — a mood in which he could be highly dangerous — and desperate depression. When these times came he would lie in the dark, refuse to eat, to wash or be washed, becoming filthy and thin, covered with lice and excrement.

  Louis, the present Dauphin, had followed the two daughters, then had come Jean, and finally Catherine and Charles, Count of Ponthieu, the third boy to bear that name, it being the custom to name a living child after another dead sibling. And all the while the King had slipped further into madness, inheriting his mother’s unbalanced tendencies, loat
hed by the wife who once had loved him, served sexually by a string of prostitutes, their frequent visits organised by the Queen herself.

  But on this November day of 1407, Charles VI of France was reasonably rational, ready to receive a visit from his remaining children, and was washed, shaved, and properly dressed for the first time in months. And even while he allowed the royal barber to trim his hair, the Lady Jeanne du Mesnil was threading her way through the lower gallery which ran in the direction of the river Seine and the gardens that went down to the high wall above the water’s edge, turning right into a fountained courtyard which lay before the Hotel du Petit-Musc, then staring up at a first-floor window.

  “Are you prepared inside?” she called, then shivered as the chill autumn wind rustled the leaves that crunched, shrivelled and decaying, beneath her well shod feet.

  “Coming,” shouted a little voice in reply, and Jeanne smiled as she made her way to the stout wooden door set in an archway which served as the mansion’s main entrance, only to see it swing open before she even got there.

  The children who stood in the doorway, hand-in-hand and breathing a little faster as the raw cold air bit at their nostrils, could be seen to be brother and sister through one distinguishing feature alone, for each of them bore the long Valois nose that no amount of new blood introduced into the family seemed able to eradicate.

  In the boy’s case this nose was not only long but thick, dominating his small plain face and giving him the ridiculous comic dash of a cheerful elf. Yet nature had not been completely cruel to this ugly imp for a pair of candid eyes, the translucent greenish shade associated with clear water and streams, looked with trust on the face of his beloved governess, while a thick cap of russet hair crowned a surprisingly well-shaped head.

  The girl was very different, beautiful in the slanting pointed way of a cat. Tilting dark brows, in extreme and exciting contrast to her hair, which was deep gold and hung, thick and heavy, about her face, rose above eyes that had absorbed every shade of the colour blue. In one light they could have been described as harebell, in another hyacinth, in yet another, sky. And in her case the long nose was thin and elegant, sensual somehow, an attribute above the wide feline mouth.