TWELVE

Solace

 

 

‘There has to be a simple remedy to this, Fils,’ said his father. ‘Do let’s maintain a level of sangfroid.’

‘Very well for you to say it! She’s afraid of you: I don’t have your advantages. Father, please! Appeal to the King for clemency! Appeal to the parents to take her away!’

‘We’ll see. We’ll see,’ said Victoire. But inwardly he felt cornered and resourceless, his powers of ingenuity worn down by the constant bleat that waited in ambush for him round every corner: ‘I don’t like…!’

For two weeks he had been civil, attentive, chivalric, complimentary to the child, and fastidious in his dress. But he was not accustomed to being criticized for his greyness and shortage of hair, to being told to shave his beard, commanded to put down his dogs or asked incessantly when he meant to die and make Fils a comte. Angèle was like a needle left accidentally by a tailor in the seam of a garment.

Quite involuntarily one morning he put a thumb to Angèle’s reddened cheek and wiped off the rouge, strangely fascinated to see the natural colour underneath.

‘I don’t like men who touch!’ she said, punching him in the stomach.

‘Then you’d better take Holy Orders, my dear, and disappoint my unfortunate son,’ he said. ‘Touching’s the way of men.’ After that he adopted his usual suit of black wadding, and grew if anything more bearlike and rustic.

Angèle did not like his looks. She did not like his chateau. She did not like his gardens. She did not like the idea of marrying anyone less than a duc. She did not like soldiers. She did not like the device of the chicheface and would change it as soon as …she was able. But never again did she ask Victoire when he might see fit to die. And she avoided him at all but mealtimes. Instead, she dogged Fils’ steps and plagued him with questions about his war, writing down his answers in a little book so as to pass them on to her cousins. It vexed her terribly that he would not put a figure to the number of men he had killed or describe in detail their dying.

‘And have you raped many women? She asked.

He replied incredulously, ‘Would you become betrothed to me if I had?’

After some consideration she decided, ‘So long as they were English women. Or Peasants.’

‘Father, she has no moral sense!’ protested Fils, running his temples with the heels of his hands. ‘You must speak to the King for me!’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ conceded Victoire dubiously.

Fils dropped his voice. ‘To tell the truth, I’m burning to marry. But I’d sooner enter the priesthood than marry that …that …doll.’

‘It would be best if you waited, and married to please Louis,’ said Victoire. But he knew that already he had kept his son unfairly from marriage for five years too long. It was time to cease his search for another Ellen and to settle for a compromise between Heaven and Hell, between angel and Angèle: a woman from the middle-ground of acceptability. In his disappointment for his son he snapped impatiently. ‘Have patience, can’t you? I’ll think of something! No good comes of haste. You wench, don’t you?’

‘As much as you do,’ said Fils with crushing dignity. ‘I did on campaign, yes. But having found it was …not the local custom hereabouts, I’ve followed your example. So if you could either arrange a good marriage or a war or change the custom – I’d be indebted to you.’ Victoire’s guilt redoubled. He had assumed his son was at least taking solace with the local women.

A fortuitous summons to attend the King at Tours saved him inventing an excuse to visit Court. And before he left, he took discreet measures to ensure Fils’ happiness. He let it be known that young, personable widows who might find pleasure in the company of the Oldest Son would be welcome to dine at the chateau following church on the Sabbath. ‘Just so long as they don’t actually earn their living on their backs,’ Victoire added.

It was a luncheon which lived a long time in the communal memory of the estates. The food was manna to be wondered at – though portions were small owing to the unexpectedly large number of women who climbed aboard the wagon sent to wait outside the church. Victoire had supposed there to be some ten of fifteen young war widows on his estates, and in the event three times that number took up his invitation and arrived in the finest clothes their mothers, sisters and friends could lend them. If they were all widows, then some had carelessly forgotten the battles at which their husbands died. And if some did not earn their living on their backs, well, they received a great many male visitors at unsocial hours. The Steward installed himself in the musicians’ gallery and drew a diagram of those seated at table, crossing through certain guests with puritanical fervour. He knew the local population more thoroughly than Victoire ever could.

Only one woman was debarred at Victoire’s command – a sweet-faced, still-handed girl to whom the Steward had no objection at all. Fils was ready to protest that she was quite the best there, until he saw the depth of distress in his father’s face and noted the way his eyes travelled from this thin, dark haired fawn to the portrait of his wife on the wall. Catching his son’s eyes on him, Victoire shrugged and gave a wry grin. ‘Some things would be too much to bear,’ he said sheepishly.

Fils sat at the head of the table, being agreeable to all indiscriminately and trying not to leave his eyes on any one face for long enough to raise false hopes.

‘What are all these dirty people doing here?’ demanded Angèle de Belles-Boises, scuffing her heelless shoes through the great-hall.

’Eating. It’s a traditional feast of the agricultural year.’ Replied Victoire, hunching his bearskin round his ears. ‘It precedes the sowing of oats.’

‘I don’t like the way those women speak to Fils!’ she yowled above the cacophonous bawdy of women enjoying themselves. ‘You should put out their eyes for looking like that!’

‘They’re hoping to be touched,’ he responded deadpan. ‘It ensures prosperity in the coming year.’

‘I don’t like to be…‘said the child. But seeing the way the Comte looked at her, she swallowed down the end of the sentence and scuffed her way out again.

Fils opted for a large, handsome woman his own age, named Jeanne (after the Maid of Orleans). Victoire took her aside and rather peremptorily (because of his need to leave for Tours immediately) awarded her a pension of twenty blancs a year ‘while Fils’ use was exclusive,’ and a guarantee that any children born to her would have a paid entree to the Church.

She welcomed her good fortune with clapped hands, a little dancing jig and the cry, ‘Oh and we do so like your good son, lordship! We’d have done it for nought if he’d asked us!’ He thanked the other ladies for accepting his invitation and presented them with parcels of woollen cloth, enough for a dress apiece. Then he put on red livery, called for his horse, and rode with all speed to attend the King.

After the other candidates had gone, the rolling cart spilling their laughter and singing like grain from a haywain, Fils and Jeanne retired to the silence of the second state chamber. A sense of the sheer unmerited generosity of Life quite enveloped Fils, along with Jeanne’s arms and thighs and hair and enthusiastic peasant brawn. It was not until she interrupted his labours with a polite cough in the ear that he was aware of anything else in the world, let alone of Angèle de Belles-Boises standing beside the door watching, the little notebook open in her hand.

‘I don’t think I like oats,’ said Angèle puzzlingly.

‘Desiccated,’ said the King lying back among the pillows as though the weight of his vast nose had finally become too much for his thin neck to bear. A wicker cage under Jacques Coeur’s one-time bedcover hinted at some injury to leg or foot.

To Victoire’s dismay, he found that his invitation to Court was not part of a general summons but that he was the King’s sole visitor. And yet there appeared to be no firm reason for the summons. A name picked at random. A whim. A fancy.

This was the age when Charles ruled by arbitrary punishment and reward, trusting to a mixture of nervousness and greed to keep his courtiers to heel. A fortune would topple one day, a mignon be elected to high office the next, and it had not a thing to do with justice or desert. It simply kept men jumping, like loggers riding felled timber down the Loire.

‘Did your Majesty have a fall on the hunt?’ enquired Victoire. ‘What? No! Desiccated. I’ll swear to it. Did you hear the rumour! Alençon has a powder. He brags about it. Put it in a man’s laundry and he’s desiccated. He said it! He boasted of it! That’s the cause, I dare swear.’ He did not say it with any great conviction, and it seemed to Victoire that Charles could think of other causes for blatant agonies in his leg. Not desiccation so much as dissipation. From time to time Charles writhed with pain, and all the colour drained from his face, leaving the nose floating like an iceberg among the oceanic pillows.

‘How does that son of yours care for Mademoiselle de Belles-Boises?’

‘Ah.’ Said Victoire, and gave every impression of a man unwilling to say more.

‘Tell me! Tell me!’

Victoire recruited and disposed his words carefully, with military strategy. ‘I just wonder …no, no. That would be unfatherly of me.’

‘Say it! Say it!’

‘Well, I simply wonder …I can’t help wondering whether my son really merited such a great kindness. But maybe that’s the jealousy of a disenchanted father speaking.

‘What?! Kindness? What d’you mean, “kindness”?’

‘Oh, but the match was an instant success. The child is so very …precocious. Fils is quite besotted, he’s keen to marry her even before she’s breached – as soon as the Church will allow anyway.’

‘She’s a saddle sore! She’s an enema!’

Victoire rocked his head from side to side. ‘I own, she’s not to my taste: I never like them young and pert. But my son and I grow more unlike in our tastes every day that passes. Some days I feel it must be pure spite toward me that makes him fawn on her so. But I can barely keep ‘em apart. She’s as hot as pepper for the taste of a man.’

The King gave a cry of pain or rage or disbelief. ‘Keep him close-quartered, Gloriole! Keep him under lock and key! Keep him dry as August, Gloriole! Make’m burn!’

‘I do what I can,’ said Victoire doubtfully, ‘See them betrothed, then send the girl home.’

‘And she has such strange political views,’ Gloriole persisted, so seemingly wrapped in thought as to be deaf to the King. ‘It’s as though to defy her parents – or to please my son, I don’t know which – she’s all Louis. The child never saw your son the Dauphin, I take it? No? It’s just that she seems so devoted to the thought of him. We hear nothing else from dawn till dusk but of the eye of Dauphin, the calf of the Dauphin, the wit of the Dauphin, the thigh of …If Fils weren’t so much of an admirer himself, I’d look for him to break out in jealousy at her overpraising of the Dauphin. La! How I detest children disobedient to their parents’ politics …but I tire Your Majesty with my tedious opinions. The world belongs to the young, you’ll tell me. Men like me should dwell on Heaven and what’s past and leave the young to make the future, no matter how it rankles.’

‘Devil take their calves and their thighs!’ mumbled the King, his cartilaginous face so contorted with pain and spleen that it seemed to have no bones at all. For want of a better target for his spiteful disappointment, he launched out at the only person within reach.

‘Why don’t you sing, damn you?’

‘Sing, Your Majesty?’

‘It’s what you’re kept for, isn’t it? Grand Echanson? These titles. These posts. D’you think they’re given for nothing? Can you sing or not?’

Victoire had heard tell of favourites ruined overnight – or purges, or archaic posts abolished, of economies among the red liveries. He weighed up the easiest route to the King’s displeasure: to sing or not to sing. ‘Forgive me. Your Majesty must show forbearance…’

‘No I mustn’t! Why should I?’ demanded the King, turning this way and that in an effort to find some furrow in the bed that was not sown with pain.

‘I mean, my lord, that I would have brought a lutenist with me if I’d had the wit to anticipate Your Majesty’s wishes. What should I sing?’ (Panic suggested to Victoire that the only songs he had ever sung were psalms and marching songs. And it was not the right time for ballads of young love.)

‘Sing what you like. Sing what you like, damn your eyes.’ So, for the first time since Fils had ridden in the angle of his arm and gone to sleep to the sound of his father’s voice, Victoire sang a Touraine lullaby. In fact, he had a clear sweet voice, higher than his build implied.

 

Not for thee the twig and briar;

Not for thee the bed of bark,

Winter’s cold nor summer’s fire,

For thou art no little lark.

Not for thee the rocky byre;

Not for thee the woolly dam,

Summer’s drought nor winter’s mire

For thou art no little lamb.

Not for thee the stony cavern;

Not for thee the icy lair,

Summer’s slaughter, winter’s raven,

For thou art no little bear.

Warmer than in palace tower,

Safer than in castle wall

Shall my arms fold for thy bower,

For thou art my best of all.

 

Sullen depression clung to the King’s face these days, even when he was asleep. Hated by his mother, disowned by his father, betrayed by his friends and disappointed by his son, there was no possibility that the song held such associations for Charles as it held for Victoire. But vexation or pain or a stray eyelash had gouged a tear from the corner of the King’s eye. It ran down into the corner of his open mouth. De Gloriole checked himself dangerously short of pitying the Veryvictorious King.

Somewhere on the road the King’s chevauchée must have overtaken Victoire. For as he arrived back on his estates, he was astonished to see his own carriage approach and pass him on the Sablois-Loire turnpike. The child in the rear had spotted him and was shouting up at the coachman, ‘Don’t stop! Don’t slow down! Don’t stop! Don’t speak to him!’ At the sight of his master, the coachman naturally made as if to rein in, but Victoire waved him on, as if to say he would not dream of delaying them on their journey. The lashless small eyes that glared out at him were red with weeping, and the short nose drizzled. Angèle de Belles-Boises had received the royal command to return home. Her piercing cry of ‘I don’t like you! Victoire took, not personally, but as a generic damnation of the whole human race.

Fils was cock-a-hoop. He was free of Angèle, and he saw marriage-true marriage – no more than a word away. He could barely believe his ears when his father still forbade it. ‘To hell with the King! To hell with the Dauphin! I want a wife. I want a son. I want an heir!’ he protested.

‘And what’s so fine about sons and heirs?’ his father retorted sourly. ‘They’re wilful and obstinate and they neglect your estates once they’ve discovered free -will.’ He forbade Fils to mention marriage again. ‘Not till you can marry to please Louis without inviting Charles’s wrath. In the meantime you can vent yourself on your wench and be content.’

‘And how long will that be? Till I’m old and dry like you?’ Fils retaliated with childish pique. In his agitation he quite forgot to connect Angèle’s departure with his father’s trip to see the King, and so expressed no gratitude at all.

When he woke in the night, he found Victoire sitting by his bed. Having failed to wake Fils with small, uncertain ‘hums’ and ‘ahems’, he had settled into contemplation of the candleflame and was quite absorbed in his own thoughts. There was candle wax accumulating on the backs of his hands.

‘I’m sorry, Father,’ said Fils, making him start. ‘To sink to abuse.’

‘Don’t mention it. Don’t mention it. Perhaps I have more in common with the King than I cared to think. Some jealousies are…perennial between father and son.’

Fils was encouraged. He reverted tirelessly to his favourite subject. ‘So you’ll let me marry! Consider, Father! You did it! You risked ruin to marry! Why shouldn’t I?’ he said sitting up in bed.

Victoire frowned. ‘Because you have more to lose and less to gain. If there were a woman in prospect to match of your mother, I’d do anything to clear your way. But there isn’t. And until there is, you can rest content.’ He closed the subject by peremptorily blowing out the candle. Out of the darkness a different breed of voice said, ‘I came to tell you. If you’d just listen. I don’t think you’ll have to wait long. Something in the King’s face. I’ve seen it often enough, God knows. In the field, off it. The King’s carrying his death in him. He’s dying. Trust me.’

‘The King? Dying?’ The news held such personal promise for Fils and such novelty that his head filled excitably with amazement and wild possibilities. He was fuddled with sleep, slow to remember the implication for his father. They came back to him suddenly like a pain in the gut. But by the time he could muster some inarticulate expression of concern, of anxiety, the more solid blackness had gone from out of the thin, unshifting dark and there was no one else in the room.

Death was patient with King Charles. As months turned to years, Fils felt cheated, hoodwinked. But if Victoire seemed mistaken in his prediction, he was proved wise in his caution. The Dauphin Louis fled France for Burgundy and began to hatch hostile alliances. Charles took charge once more of the tenatory of the Dauphine, and friends of his son’s disappeared like mirages from the King’s highway. He sent dispatches, too.

Honoured Gloriole, As the King cherishes your loyalty and well-being, confine under lock-and-key any knight among your household who may think well of Our enemies. These are treacherous times. Trust not to kinship, nor hope for kindness to be rewarded with honesty. Bind fast any who have ever spoken out in favour of traitors. The times admit no bonds of love but those deep-sworn in fealty, I pray you, Gloriole, do not trust to filial obedience or a father’s soft words but to locked doors and barred windows…

So for a time, Fils lived as a prisoner at Gloriole-sur-Sablois. Flockhart was his baleful, lamenting gaoler. Every evening, to his wife and daughters, he wailed and bemoaned the terrible injustice. It was unnatural, he said, that any father should confine his son on the command of a worthless, knock-kneed French Pretender.

But Flockhart was deaf and his eyesight was failing. His wife and daughters smiled and nodded and got on with their sewing. They could not fail to notice with what ease the woman Jeanne came and went through the ‘prisoner’s’ locked doors, or how many hours Victoire spent playing chess with his ‘detainee’. It was even rumoured that ward and warder were seen hunting heron when the weather was good, and were building an ornamental barge in the cellars of the chateau.

Then, in 1461, King Charles V11, called The Veryvictorious, died at Mehun-sur-Yevre. He starved to death, too afraid of poisoners to let food pass between his pursed and embittered lips.