ELEVEN

My God Is a Jealous God

 

 

The room was in consternation. The guests examining the sword had not seen what had happened and looked for an explanation of the general gasp. Others did not believe what they had seen. Still more laughed it off nervously: a stock joke perhaps between father and son – a domestic comedy.

Father, are you quite well?’ said Fils, with only half a voice. He was answered with a blow back-handed to the other side of his face. He fell back from the force of it and afterwards put tentative fingers to the corners of his mouth as if, like the disciple Thomas, he needed proof of the wound.

‘Faction-monger! Self-seeking puppy! Underhanded upstart! Did you suppose I was struck deaf by that cannon ball? Fancied yourself closer to your inheritance, did you? Well, see here! I’ve the use of both my arms: I can still cuff a sly sneaking son as well with either!’

This was not strictly true. The arm had not mended as flexible or as strong as before. Fils caught the left hand short of his face but allowed it to continue on its way, and held it in place against his cheek like a benison, so that Victoire snatched it away with a snort of disgust. ‘What have I done, Father.’

Beside Barnabas, Flockhart sobbed in a whisper, ‘Liars! Dissemblers! There’s been lies told! He’s been maligned. The boy’s been…‘Barnabas took a firm grip on the old man to preserve him from structural collapse, and silenced him with a shake.

Michel de Puy’s wife tried to exchange a meaningful and knowing look with her husband, but he was watching too intently to trouble with her ‘pssts’ and ‘hissts’ and nudges. He watched with the concentration of a gambler whose last penny is riding on a game of la morra. Victoire had turned his son’s back to the wall and his fists, knotted in the low, loose belt, jerked him up against the fresh paintwork.

‘Will you shame me before all your guests, Father?’

’Before all France if you dishonour my fealty and play fast-and-loose with the King’s enemies.’

A different, a comprehending murmur went through the room. Fils said nothing.

‘Word reaches me that you went to the Dauphin’s wedding. Did you think to keep it hid from me? A wedding expressly forbidden by the King? Did you think word of it wouldn’t reach me at last?’

‘So long since.’ said Fils, unresisting. ‘I all but forgot.’

‘Ay! Ay, Son! I know what you forgot! I know the weakness of your memory! In the matter of fealty your memory’s as sound as rotten wood! But I can change that. Before God, and these my friends and kin, I mean to!’

A dangerous, feverish flush came to Fils’ face as he hovered between astonishment and outrage. ‘What then? “Before God and these our friends and kin.” Will you flog me?’

Victoire picked up the Talbot sword. Some of the women screamed. The musicians stared like monkeys through the bars of their wooden cage. Flockhart broke away from Barnabas and went to push his way forward through the press, mumbling, ‘I must stop this. I must speak out for the lad. There’s some mistake!’ but somehow he tripped over the priest’s outstretched foot and tumbled down and slowed his fall by clothing at the clothing of those nearest: impatiently they shook off the interruption.

‘That’s my prerogative. But first I’ll have your apology. ‘Fore God and these my friends and kin, I’ll have your oath and I’ll have your penitence. See here?’ Victoire had crossed to the chimney breast and with the point of his sword, lifted the tapestry of the Prodigal Son to show the labelled heraldic device underneath. ‘See how your heir’s label’s blotted out! Well so it stays! Till you show me the penitence of the other Prodigal who wasted his portion on whores! And till I hear your oath made afresh to the King from whom you draw life!’ He made a sudden sabre-cut which passed so close to Fils that the point might have deepened the pleating in the maroon felt. Fils blush darkened ten-fold and he ran a hand round his neck like a man washing. The puppies set up a cacophonous barking which obliged him to shout, ‘My Oath, then! Before God and these …others.’

‘To serve the King in feu and fealty all the days of his life!’

‘God knows, I never did anything less,’ said Fils, but with the blade wavering a hair’s breadth from his face, and his heir’s blazon shrouded out of sight, he knelt and he swore. And after that he swore never more to consort with the Dauphin Louis, and added to his oaths the words of the Prodigal Son: ‘Father I have sinned before heaven and in thy sight and am no more worthy to be called thy son.’

Women burst into uncontrollable tears. Men turned to speak to one another and found their mouths still full of unchewed food, overlooked in the excitement. There was a great drinking down of wine. ‘Await my chastisement in the garden,’ said Victoire. And a man of twenty-two, who had killed the Earl of Shrewsbury in the field – bowed with stiff formality to his father and left the room, signalling his army companions to remain where they were. Victoire stayed only to deliver a peremptory apology to his white-faced guests and to beg them make free with his hospitality, before he too made for the door. Mothers swept their children out of his path: he was still carrying the Talbot sword. As soon as both men were gone, plates rattled on to the table, feet clattered across the floor and a gaping, gawping flock as single-minded as sheep pushed and pressed for a view from the several windows. Barnabas offered to help Flockhart to his feet, but the old soldier shook him off and cursed him for a boneless eel.

‘Follow me,’ said Victoire, overtaking his son and striding fast across the kitchen garden. A vine-covered trellis canopied the gradual incline down towards the walled garden. He lunged ahead into the dappled tunnel, and Fils fell in behind him, at a distance, like a kicked whelp. It would not have been hard to fall behind: the Comte was moving at such a pace.

The year’s grapes were gone and the leaves were already ragged so that their view of the house was barely marred as they descended the slope, scuffing pebbles in among the roots of the vines and skidding on the wet clay.

‘Well?’ said Fils, endeavouring to keep up without breaking into a run.

‘Well,’ returned his father.

‘Was it quite wise to call the Dauphin a whore?’ me.’

‘Is that what I did? Perhaps I did. ‘You could’ve contradicted me.’

‘God forbid!’ panted Fils. ‘I’m not so foolhardy.’

They passed between the statues of Flora and Dionysus and into the warmer, still air of the high-walled quadrangle. Out of the sight of the house. Once there, Victoire raised the Talbot sword over his head like a javelin and threw it, point-first, into the trunk of the ancient apple tree. Then he turned on his heel and caught up his son in his arms, like a heathen embracing salvation.

Round and round he whirled him, in a venting of emotion unrestrained to the point of hysteria. He said, ‘Let me look at you! Let me look at you!’ But could only hold Fils to his chest, his eyes shut so tightly that though he thought he saw the fan-trained trees of his garden it was only the espaliered veins of his eyelids.

At length Fils held him at arm’s length and said, with all the feeling in the world, ‘For God’s sake! For God’s sake! I thought you’d kill me!’ The words had a sobering effect at last.

‘Kill you? I’d as soon kill myself,’ Victoire said fondly, holding the narrow, fawn-shaped face between his hands as though to reacquaint himself with every feature. ‘By Saint Joseph, son, I’ve missed you these three months!’

They sat down together on the circular bench at the centre of the garden. ’Was there a letter, Father? Did you write to me and the letter went astray? I walked into that unwarned, you know?’

‘I didn’t dare trust to letters. I didn’t dare risk you showing anything but surprise.’

‘Well! I must’ve shown that in plenty! That and blind fright. It’s as well you can still judge your distances with a sword! I thought you’d maim me with that lunge …Well? Is there an explanation? Are you going to tell me why you as good as called me a traitor in front of all Touraine’s finest and fairest? Is the Dauphin really so dangerous a pond to dabble in?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Forgive me, but how would I know, Father? I’m barely acquainted with the man. Not well enough to go to his wedding, anyway!’

Victoire was picking dog-hairs off his breeches and did not look up for some time. ‘Show me the man who can recall who came to his wedding, and I’ll show you a liar. The Dauphin will never deny you were there. I tell you, the whole substance of the crime won’t outlive the week. All that’ll be remembered a year from now is that you’re the Dauphin’s man and I’m the King’s. They’ve seen it split us apart. With their own eyes, they’ve seen it. I invited the whole world round about. All Tours and Anjou will believe it from today onwards.’

‘As they believe their Creed,’ Fils agreed. ‘And just why exactly have they seen it? Are you ready to tell me?’

Victoire narrowed his eyes, the better to study, branch by twig by bract, each twist and gesture of the plum tree, the lemon tree, the orange. His hands clasped his thighs – as if to stop them shaking. ‘Have you heard the news of Jacques Coeur?’

‘Yes, but I hardly see…’

‘He’s banished. Exiled. His house and goods are forfeit to the Crown.’

‘So? You expect clemency for the man who poisoned the lovely Agnès and filched a million from the King’s coffers?’

‘No. Precisely. You have it. I don’t. I expect such a man in quarters and his guts in the fire and his soul in Hell. And where’s Jacques Coeur today? On Chios, under a warm sun. The man who poisoned the King’s mistress …or carried the blame for someone else who did. Someone beyond scope of the King’s justice.’

Fils drew in breath so sharply that he choked on his own saliva. ‘The Dauphin? Dauphin Louis poisoned Agnès Sorel?’

‘God knows. I only say it’s what the King believes. Whether whisperers put it into his head or solid proofs, I couldn’t say. But because of it I do know there’s a time coming when the King will split from Louis for evermore – worse than when Alençon split them. Worse than Louis’ marriage split them.’ Victoire was silent for a long while.

For three months he had mustered and organized his thoughts towards this end, but it was tiring to search out enough words to express them now. He wished Fils would simply read his mind, as he had when they played la morra. But young men of twenty-two have rarely seen enough of the world to grasp its subtleties or the sophisticated sins of the politician. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Fils struggle to think with the cynicism of middle age.

‘They’re not father and son like you and I, Fils. There’s no natural affection there. And the rancour goes deep. One day soon Louis will pass into eclipse – and all those seen to favour him will be eclipsed too. Then the King will die and Louis will come from behind his cloud – and shine on those his father put in shadow. I’m not going to let Gloriole drop between the two of ‘em. If you value your inheritance, you’ll be for Louis and I’ll be for Charles. And the whole world will think they knew it all along.

Fils digested this as best he could. ‘And what will become of you when King Charles dies, Father? If Louis thinks you’re his sworn enemy?

‘Then I’ll have the consolation of knowing you shine as bright in the new King’s eyes as I shone in his father’s.’

‘Yes, but what will become of you?’ Victoire brushed the question aside as an irrelevance. ‘And is he a man worth shining for anyway?’

‘He’ll be the King. What more is there to say? God chose him before he was born. He’ll be King.’

Fils was not convinced. ‘Are you sure? God choose a poisoner? It doesn’t speak well of the Almighty’s discretion. I mean, did God truly choose someone who’d clap his son’s crimes on an innocent man? Poor Coeur! Jesus, the man mended the whole economy of France!’

‘Ah! You remember the man’s merits all of a sudden, do you, now you doubt his guilt? Yes, poor Coeur. Now the King has an excuse to seize on a house and fortunes he’s always coveted. He’s even now melting down the spoons and candlesticks. Coeur’s bedhangings are already up around the King’s bed. That’s why I’ve stopped the building work here – for fear Gloriole takes the King’s fancy in the same way. “My God is a jealous God”, you see.’

‘And you still think he’s a fit man to rule France? A man who’d scapegoat Coeur to get his spoons? If I believed it, I really might up and side with Louis!’

‘Oh believe it, Fils.’

‘They say he takes young girls three and four at a time. And men too. Is it true?’

‘Behind the curtains he filched from Jacques Coeur, I don’t doubt it. Though you should never trouble with gossip. I thought I taught you better.’

‘And this is the man…?

‘Yes! And this is the man God made King. This is the man to whom we owe our fortune and our house. This is the man that made me. This is the man who, on my seventeenth birthday, I saw crowned at Reims and kneeled down and swore perpetual devotion to, with sentimental tears streaming down my face! And this is the man you swore allegiance to not a half-hour since. On pain of disinheritance. Because if there’s a purpose to the Universe, there’s a purpose to the Descent of Kings …You’re too young to remember. I never told you this before. But once, when you were small, I came close to rebellion. As close as you to me. And I searched my conscience and I found this one obstacle, big as Ossa. If there’s an order to the Universe, then there’s an order to the estates of man, and you and I are fixed in fealty to King Charles as others are in fealty to us. There’s no sense without it. Nor safety. And where God doesn’t bind me to him in fealty, gratitude binds me to Charles. He made me a rich man – and you a rich one after me – if you play the game as I say …Oh son, son, why trouble your head with it? I don’t understand it either. Maybe greater men need greater sins, I don’t know.’ He laid his hand on the back of Fils’ neck. ‘Just consider how they lack the consolation you and I have. We have each other. We have a common purpose, you and I. We have Gloriole – to be unto countless generations. And I’d sooner have that than all France and the ruling of it …And I’d sooner lose that than have my son hate and resent me as Louis hates and resents his father.’

Victoire stood up, recovered the Talbot sword from the tree, and trudged slowly back to the vine-covered walk, nursing the present between his hands with a tenderness akin to passion, wondering at the sheer arithmetical laws that allowed such volumes of pride to be invested in such a slight young man. He would not put the puppies in with the hunting pack. They would be house-dogs, always with him. Like Fils.

To Fils, watching from the walled garden, it seemed that his father had aged a little in the course of the last hour and that the bearskin stooped a little more under the weight of the future Victoire had irremovably sealed for himself that afternoon.

He got up and followed, walking a few feet behind as before. ‘Father!’ he called blithely. ‘It does console me to be your son and heir and to see what pains you’ve gone to for my future happiness. But if you ever show me the point of a sword so close as today – so help me but I’ll teach you your shortcomings as a swordsman! You frightened the bowels out of me with that thrust!’

The crowds watching from the windows of the great-hall witnessed an embrace then which put them in mind of the tapestry flapping in the heat from the log fire. They assumed that the Prodigal Son had been chastised and was now magnanimously forgiven. They could not possibly know – how could they? That it was the father who was asking forgiveness of the son.

Next day, Victoire was put to the inconvenience of making Confession. He pondered how to tackle the problem. There was an unusual and awkward silence in the ante-chamber to his bedroom where he and Barnabas knelt face -to-face on the hard floor. He had consolidated the posts of priest and chaplain ten years before. In the end Victoire decided to test out the ground before venturing into Confession at all.

‘And what did you make of yesterday’s proceedings, Father?’

‘Oh, a splendid party. Excellent music.’ Said Barnabas ingenuously.

‘And the rest…’

‘Ah. That,’ said Barnabas sitting back on his heels and directing his eyes a little above the Comte’s head. ‘Well it seems to me there was a great deal of theatre staged hereabouts yesterday, and I was always partial to theatre.’

Victoire too sat back. They looked like two men about to play nine-men’s-morris on the flags. ‘So transparent, Barnabas? If I am, it’ll all have been for nothing.’

Ah, only transparent to me, sir. You forget, I’ve been cleaning the glass these ten years. I’d be a wondrous failure if I hadn’t made you transparent by now – to myself, I mean.’

‘To yourself. And what about the rest?’

‘As opaque as lead, sir, if your Master-at-Arms is anyone to judge by. If you’ve a shred of pity in you, you’ll let me put Flockhart’s mind at rest at least. It seems like the sun and the moon at war to Flockhart, to think of a rift between you and Fils.’

‘That can’t be helped. You’d better shrive me for my unkindness, but while Fils and Gloriole depend on it, I’ll swear on Holy Writ that we’re at daggers-drawn, my boy and I.’

‘Then I’d better shrive you for perjury, too, sir.’ Said Barnabas with smug prudery.

‘And you’ll swear to it, too.’

‘Ah. Well. Swear to it? Well, I don’t know. I could maybe intimate it. Now and then. If you feel there’s a need.’

When wind of the homecoming and the quarrel reached the King, he could not make up his mind whether to be gratified or offended. He cherished a notion of himself as an affectionate and forgiving father, and liked to cite letters and gifts from Louis as proofs of his son’s obedient devotion. But given the renown of Victoire and Fils as the Roland-and-Oliver of the battlefields, he could not fail to be flattered. His sound advice regarding sons had after all been take to heart by the Comte de Gloriole. It was confirmation, too, that peculiar joy of theirs had indeed been baseless self-deception: paternal love had melted away in the heat of Victoire’s more natural love for his royal master. So after some deliberation Charles found a solution with three-fold benefits. He would reward de Gloriole for his loyalty, curb any genuine threat from Fils as an ally of Dauphin, and deliver a slap to the young man more lasting than the one delivered by his father.

He would marry Fils to Angèle de Belles-Boises. Dauphin Louis had declared detestation of the family, despite their eminent and unimpeachable breeding, and possibly because of their perfect loyalty to the Crown. And the child herself was so detestable and so far off marriageable age that Fils would be confined to a purgatorial ante-chamber of marriage, hard put to judge which was worse: enforced bachelorhood or the prospect of it ending in Angèle.

King Charles sent the eleven-year-old with a covering letter, urging Victoire to effect the betrothal at once and afford her ‘A period of society with Fils, that they might become thoroughly acquainted.’ Because she came without prior warning, she arrived when her hosts were engaged, up to their waists, in mending a sluice-gate on the ornamental lake.

Angèle was a trophy from the battleground of her parents’ bed. Her mother and father, finding each other too unpleasant to bear, had turned all their attentions on their daughter and lavished upon her every expense and effort to make her resemble them. She was as bellicose as her father and as vain as her mother and, in keeping with her status as a trophy, came wrapped in the hides of dead animals. The coat she arrived in was of otter fur, sleek and flat, her shoes of snakeskin, and her hat resembled the horns of an ox. The dress she had brought for the betrothal had cost the eyes of an entire peacock tail, had the gilded claws of osprey for its clasps, and had ermines crawling up its pelvis from all points of the compass like furry leeches. Even at eleven in the morning she was all flourishes and paint, too, like the plain, wood-carved madonnas that foolish peasants made gaudy and grotesque with gathers of cloth, lurid paint and jewels. Her little fists were arthritic with gemstones. She clenched them in insupportable rage as her sensibilities were subjected to the scene on the South Prospect.

Village women from the estates were sitting along the edge of the lake with their feet and skirts in the water and buckets in their laps, laughing inordinately at the efforts of their dozen menfolk to trap and evacuate fat carp into the buckets. Two white dogs continually jumping in and out of the water shook themselves over the women making them shriek and laugh all the more. Victoire and Fils were up to their chests in water, wrestling with a broken sluice-gate.

At first Angèle de Belles-Boises refused to believe that the two men labouring in the lake were indeed the Grand Echanson of the Court Royal and the heir to his estates. She preferred to believe that Flockhart was the Comte, which thoroughly embarrassed him. ‘My Lord! My lord Comte!’ he called plaintively across the water – a cry to be rescued. Victoire, thinking the Master-at-Arms’ failing eyes could not locate him among the rest, waved an acknowledging hand over his head and shielded his eyes against the glare off the water. Angèle swore obscenely.

‘Why wasn’t I met? I am Angèle de Belles-Boises! Why wasn’t I met?’ she demanded, standing imperiously on the flight of crescent steps that headed the new lake. ‘The King won’t like it when I tell him!’ As Victoire waded towards her, his shirt-tail floating out behind him, she held out the King’s rolled letter as though it, like Cleopatra’s carpet, contained the very person of Majesty. She looked him up and down and the same scowl that obliterated her blonde-lashed tiny eyes drew up her top lip to reveal small, forward-pointing dog-teeth. They put him in mind of the blades on Roman chariot-wheels. As he dried his hands on his shirt-front, she observed ‘I don’t like men who do things,’ and was most taken aback when he laughed.

‘My humble apologies, mademoiselle, for such an indecorous welcome. The sluices keep jamming open, you see. We were in danger of losing all the fish into the river. But if you want me to read that letter, you’d best come down where I can reach it. I don’t have on my breeches.’

With all the distaste of Persephone descending into Hell, she took two steps down. ‘I don’t like fish.’ she said.

His face betrayed very little of his emotions as he read. Begging her to make herself comfortable in the house, he bowed with all the civility possible while waist-deep in water, and waded back to the sluice-gate. Her voice came trailing over the water after him: ‘Those dogs! My dogs won’t like those dogs!’

The parchment trembled, and the King’s words ran like tears between Fils’ wet hands, as he in turn read the letter. Between their thighs, hopeful little fish escaped through the broken sluice – away to the Sablois and the Loire, where hungry pike and perch would cut them off in a matter of days. ‘My God, Father. What have you brought me to?’ asked Fils under his breath.

And over the lake came the shrill, incisive statement, ‘I don’t think noblemen ought to take their breeches off!’