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Her brother spoke about him mockingly in the early days of summer: a drunkard, a wastrel, full of cheap wine and low conjuring. “He has spent all his days wandering in taverns, making boon companions of procurers and a fat magician,” he said, scornful. “He disdains a warrior’s work and a wizard’s, both.”
“The only wind he can raise emits from his nethers,” said one of her brother’s followers, and they all laughed, although so far as Catherine knew, they none of them could so much as stir a pennant at a tourney themselves.
“Surely I have heard it said he fought well against his father’s enemies,” she said.
“Oh, I have heard nothing of him in that case, but that he took an arrow in the face and contrived not to die of it,” another of the courtiers said. “Remarkable to be sure!”
“His father’s shame,” Charles said, when they had finished their mocking, “and this is what we are meant to fear. If he comes at all, we will put him and his flock of scabrous hangers-on to the wing.” He looked at her as he spoke, half wanting her to tell him what he would not ask, but she kept her head bent down over her sewing and did not meet his eyes.
#
He came, of course.
Six months later, after summer was over, after Harfleur, she was by the window of her favorite sitting room, looking out at the last leaves and the grey-brown earth, when abruptly the wind crept around the glazing and into her ears, whispering of mud and death and screaming horses.
She rose and went to stand shivering by the fire, angry with her own uselessness; her gift could show her only that which was nearly certain, and it was too late to send a warning: they would be fighting in the morning. And most likely no one would have listened, anyway. They usually found excuses not to hear her.
So, she told no one. Three days later, poor scared Alice crept in at dawn to wake her with news of the defeat and ruin at Agincourt. Catherine nodded silently, seeing again the standards trampled in the bloody ground.
#
She met him at last only three years later, at Meulan, the castle’s great hall still drafty and cold despite the winter breaking into spring. As he came into the room, her mother was whispering urgently in her ear, pressing her hand. Catherine didn’t listen; she already understood well enough the part she had to play, the grim faces that went with the effusive greetings, and her brother nowhere to be seen.
She had dreamed and dreamed, all these three years long, while he marched across France; she had seen Caen, Louviers, Rouen, all the fallen fortresses and cities, and then at last she had also seen the Duke of Burgundy slain on a bridge in Montereau, blood running in a dark stream away from his body, and her brother standing pale and ghastly over the corpse. She had risen in the night again and again, to warm her chilled hands by a banked fire, each time feeling as though she saw a shadow climbing the wall, of someone approaching her, someone coming near.
He was very tall, and his face indeed badly marred: a deep socketed scar where the arrow had pierced the cheek, and hard eyes above it. But they met hers with a soft uncertainty, looking away, as though he did not wish to like what he saw, until he was certain who she was, and that she was his: his prize, won on the battlefield in blood and iron, with a kingdom for her dower.
She bent her head before him, making her courtesy as her mother presented her. “Monseigneur,” she said, her voice falling into complete silence; all had hushed. When she looked up again, he was looking at her very differently, an eager, hungry light unleashed: he had granted himself permission. She thought abruptly her brother had been utterly wrong: this man had never made a friend of anyone without deliberate choice, had never allowed himself the license to be a fool — a license that all the world would have given him freely.
She was led away swiftly after the polite exchanges, but she felt his eyes lingering on her back until she was through the doorway and out of their reach. “Will you have some hippocras, my dear one?” Alice asked, anxiously, when they had left, leading her to a sitting room. “Come and warm yourself, after that drafty room. How tall he is! I do like a man to be tall.”
She kept speaking, her voice a welcome running river, friendly and gurgling. Catherine sat down in the chair by the fire, and looked down into her arms and saw a child lying there, with a cap of dark downy hair and a face blurred by uncertainty, swaddled in blankets so thoroughly she could not tell if it was a boy or a girl.
Alice’s hands holding the cup of hot wine broke through the vision like a hand reaching through water, ripples carrying the baby away. “My dearest, are you well?” she said, softly, reaching out to close Catherine’s nerveless hands around the cup. “Did he — what did you think of him? If you did not like him — I am sure —”
She trailed off. They both knew it was a lie.
“Well,” Alice said, “there is no sense worrying about what may never come to pass.”
Catherine laughed a little, with a gasp. At least, she thought — at least, she’d seen the child. She’d been holding it: those had been her own hands. She wouldn’t die of it. She reached up and touched her own hair, golden beneath its cap. Her mother came into the room, carrying her jewel-box. “We must dress for dinner,” she said briskly. “Alice, go and bring the blue dress— and you should drink another cup of wine, child. You need a little more color in your cheeks.”
#
There was a breathlessness in Troyes the next spring, a hard tense anxiety all around her, while the great lords spoke through letters and in back chambers, and the rest of them all sat and waited. It did not touch her, though all the ladies in waiting glanced at her often, over their sewing and their chatter, and even her mother looked at her from time to time. But none of them asked her.
They all knew about her gift, of course; it had come early, as the strong high gifts did, and as a child she would laugh and clap her hands and run to the door eagerly before Alice had even come through it. But no-one wished to think on it very much. They did not ask her counsel, except as she grew older, sometimes a lady would contrive some way to be alone with her for a moment, on a balcony perhaps or drawn into an alcove, and there afraid and whispering would ask whether —
And sometimes Catherine would see that lady staring sightless at her up from a dark curtained bed, her face wrought into twisting shapes, and low murmuring voices in the distance full of resigned grief. And then that lady went away pale and drank pennyroyal tea or flung herself down stairs, and sometimes died of that; but mostly did not.
That was all the use her gift had been so far in her life — and then her confessor had stopped that, too; had told her she meddled with God’s will, though he had no answer for it when she asked him why it should not be God’s will for her to see it and tell the women. She had resolved she would speak anyway, but the confessor had spoken to Alice, too, and Alice cared more for her immortal soul than for the lives of any number of ladies: she began to watch like a hawk, and there were no more such private moments.
Catherine had not been alone with anyone since then; she had scarcely even been alone with herself. Alice usually slept at the foot of her bed, or with her when the nights were cold. She had certainly never been alone with a man, and they did not leave her alone with him, either, but Alice and her mother went to the far corner of the room and stood there watching, out of a quiet word’s earshot. Poor Alice was biting her lip and wringing her hands, one against the other; her mother frowned more, worried about other things.
She looked away from them at him, and found him watching her intently. The year since they had met had not changed him greatly: his face a little more lean, the scar a little faded. He took her hand. “We will be married on Friday,” he said, forthright. “How like it you, my lady?”
There was only one answer to make to that, of course, but he was trying to be kind. “I like it well, my lord,” she said.
A quick brief smile touched his mouth. “You speak English well,” he said.
“I have studied it a long while,” she said. And she had heard it sometimes spoken in her dreams, even before she had learned the name of it.
“Yes,” he said, and she darted a look up at him; there was some meaning there in his tone, which she did not follow. “Perhaps you knew?”
She flinched a little in his grasp, her hand making an instinctive attempt to leap loose: not from fear, only startled. No one had spoken so plainly of it, and with so little unease. But he kept hold of her hand, smiling. “Tell me, my lady Kate,” he said, her name crisp and short and already familiar in his mouth, his deep voice, “with your clear eyes: will you give me many sons, who can see a long road ahead?”
He was half-teasing her, not cruelly, but he looked at her and saw a girl, she supposed, something slight and trivial. She was France to him, but not really; he had won France by the sword and the spur, and a hail of black-fletched arrows, low-magicked to find the joints in armor. She was only the polish on his crown, the trimming of legitimacy on his long trailing cloak: incidental, even if desirable.
This was nothing new to her; she had lived with the understanding all her life. But she found she did not want to be incidental to him.
“There will be a child,” she told him, “born in winter, when the snow is on the sill.”
His hand tightened on hers abruptly. She felt the strength of his grip, hardened by the weight of a sword, and did not flinch, looking straight at him. “That is well, my lady,” he said softly, after a moment.
#
They were married in the cathedral, and Philip of Burgundy — England’s ally now, for his father slain upon a bridge in Montereau — feasted them afterwards in the castle: a long interminable meal, sitting beside her new husband and knowing but not-knowing his touch upon her arm, his lips on her throat. Alice and her mother had filled her brimful with advice, some of it contradictory, and she had answered them only distractedly; even as they spoke to her, the world faded and she saw only the drawn curtains of the bed, heard him laughing beside her.
It was strange for a moment when he finally slid in beneath the covers next to her, when it was at last happening truly in the world, and not through a vision. She put her hands on his chest, trying the solid warmth of him. He watched her quietly with his eyes intent and dark, and let her fingers wander over him. Her breath came stuttering. The bed was lavishly clothed, and he was so very warm.
“Shall we have this off?” he said softly, touching the silk over her breast, the richly embroidered nightgown, and she nodded. He threw off his own gown also, and swiftly bent to put his mouth upon her nipple; she gasped as he sucked it hard and quick, and then he was tumbling her back against the pillows, his hand moving between her thighs.
She shivered, arched, pressed into the heel of his hand; she caught at his dark hair, short and soft between her fingers. He moved with decision, not careless of her but sure, and he slid his thumb against her gently, maddeningly, back and forth. She grew wet and slippery and dazed, as though there were some kind of magic in his touch, and dimly she realized there was: not any great working, but a faint humming touch that woke all her body.
She blushed hotly, and he laughed. “Have I shocked you, my lady?” he said, gently mocking, and she hid her face against his shoulder as she came shuddering against his hand. She was shocked, not for any sort of modesty, but because it seemed a world away from what she thought of as magic, magic for a king, at least; it seemed closer kin to the servants’ charms that could heat a bowl of soup or cool a glass of wine.
Afterwards, he flung back the covers; she was not cold at all, though the air outside was yet cold and damp with spring rain. The fire in its hearth roared up when he looked at it and crooked a finger. He gently drew his fingers over her body, trailing circles around her hard-peaked nipples and over her belly, dropping his head to nuzzle at her now and again. All the tangle of advice on how to satisfy him or how to endure seemed equally useless. She let her head fall back against the pillows, drunk on pleasure and forgetting to be shy; she only made impatient noises when he took too long to touch her again; it seemed even too much trouble to talk.
She did try to squirm away when he first kissed her thighs, and then between
them. “Why, Kate,” he said, “no shrinking now.”
“Je n’ai pas — I have not — I am not afraid!” she said, half losing the English words in indignation and shivering. “I am — I am —” She lost the rest of them as his tongue slid into her, her breath going to gasps. He laughed into her even as he licked again, his cheek hot against her thigh as she cried out.
Then abruptly he moved up the bed, leaning over her, and as she stared up at him blurry and too overwhelmed to think, he pressed into her. Her knees drew up instinctively to either side of him, cradling him between her thighs, and she braced herself against his chest. There was no great pain, nothing like she’d been prepared to endure, and the hard thickness of him felt strange and splendid inside her.
“Ah,” he said, half under his breath, holding himself still, and she echoed it softly back, “Ah,” and then he began to move, setting off small sharp jolts of pleasure where he pressed against her, as they rocked and shuddered together, as at last he spilled deep in her.
She stroked his hair afterwards, as he slept; she didn’t feel tired at all. There was a brightness in her mind, as though a light had been shone into dark corners, and as she lay in the dark close room half-dreaming she saw roads spilling away in all directions, long shining paths like ribbons trailing away, full of crowns and swords.
#
In the morning he was awake before her, up and moving among his lords in waiting, speaking with quick decided command: they were moving on Sens. “And after that, we take Montereau,” she heard him telling Philip, “and we will put your father’s remains to rest in proper state.”
She did not see her new kingdom for seven months more: seven months of marching conquest for him, of intriguing and whispers for her. Suddenly her ear had value: Henry came to her as often as he could, between the grinding sieges one after another, and made no secret of his affection. The wives of great lords courted her; the noblemen also. It felt strange to be so sought-after, and distasteful also, somehow. Henry laughed when she spoke of it to him once at night, and said, “And now you know, perhaps, why I liked to find my company in taverns, before my state grew too large.”
He said it cheerfully, half a joke at his own slantwise reputation, but something rang true and bitter there. She stroked his forehead. Better indeed to have friends who, if they wanted anything, wanted a little money, and had not the skill to truly disguise their more subtle motives.
On the first of February at last they sailed for England, a bitterly cold, wet journey, and at Dover she was startled to see a great crowd of men come wading into the icy water to meet their longboat and lift Henry bodily out of it, carrying him cheering wildly towards the shore; and then more of them were reaching over the side for her, with hard strong hands but their faces beaming, crying out, “Three cheers for the Queen!”
Alice gave a squawk of protest, but Catherine felt with perfect clarity that she could not shrink and yet lay claim to the name; she drew a deep breath and reached back to them, and let them lift her to their shoulders, and carry her racing up the shore in Henry’s wake.
The coronation took a month to arrange, and yet seemed instantly over; and then Henry took her on a pilgrimage all across the country. She was happier in England, she found, perhaps because they were together, perhaps because the country itself was happier. She could not help but see the dreadful contrast, riding through England on the way to become its queen, between the well-tended fields, the prosperous wide flocks, and the state of her own country.
Her father had gone mad before she had even been born, and it seemed to her she did not remember a time of peace; it was all too ordinary to see fields lying fallow and orchards growing wild, to look out of her carriage and see peasants fleeing towards a nearby tower or city wall, afraid of her escort. Her sight had no ordinary bounds on it, but these things had lain invisible to her.
She had understood the politics of her marriage: putting a polite face upon the English conquest and bringing an end to the plunder; her mother had seen no way for her brother to make France whole again, not after he had lent himself to the murder of the Duke. But now Catherine felt the urgency of it, what they had lost and the shame of it.
Henry made love to her in York on the third day of April, and when she woke the next morning, she had seen her son’s face. Henry kissed her and perplexed his court by rejoicing openly, and having a Te Deum sung. But in June he left her to his brother the Duke of Bedford’s care, and sailed again for France and war. For the long weeks of separation, she stood by a window with a hand on her belly, trying to see what was ahead: trying to see an arrow, a sword-stroke, that might cleave the future she had begun to want; trying to see him come back home again safe.
She saw neither.
She was delivered in December, and truly felt it as deliverance: two days of agony until the sudden blessed cessation; then, after a little while half-senseless, she was awake and Alice was there, settling her carefully against pillows, the fire crackling, and Catherine looked down at her son. Her heart stuttered in a way she had never seen nor imagined. He was so small, so strangely creased, so perfect. She closed her eyes, anxious to see him older, anxious to see him in his father’s arms, and did not; she saw him playing with a button-eyed doll, saw him riding a pony of indeterminate color under Bedford’s eye, saw him a young man with a blurred face kneeling at an altar; she never saw him with his father.
She opened her eyes again, and bent to kiss the downy head and nuzzle its softness; he squirmed against her, and she gave him her breast, though of course he had a wet-nurse waiting; she felt abruptly jealous of him, of every moment. “He’s lovely, my dearest,” Alice said. “He will do splendidly, I am sure of it.”
“He will,” Catherine said. “Alice, please send for Bedford.”
“Oh no, dearest, you don’t need to see him now,” Alice said. “I’ve shown him the babe, he knows all has gone well, he has gone to write to your lord. You can sleep the night —”
“No,” Catherine said. “Go and get him.” By tomorrow it would be too late: Bedford was eminently calm and sensible, but at the moment he was full of delight and enthusiasm for her achievement, and he would put in her plea to Henry to let her join him, and only add a postscript telling Henry she was just having a woman’s fancies. By morning he would not put the request in at all, and would chide her for asking; he would tell her to have a better care for her son, and trust her husband the warrior king to look after himself.
She kissed the baby’s head while Alice went. “Will you come to France with me?” she said to him softly, half making a lullabye out of it. “Will you be well there?”
He opened his blue eyes and made a small blind gurgling noise, and in the hearth the fire roared suddenly; she laughed and kissed him again, breathing in his soft skin. “We will go together,” she said, “and change all the world.”