The Agincourt Bride. Joanna Hickson
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dawn till dusk. How she bore the tedium, I’ll never know but she’d grown into a docile, long-suffering little maid and I consoled myself that seaming was better than steaming, which was my unhappy lot. Since females were banned from working in the bake house or kitchens, where I might have used my skills to their best advantage, I was forced to become an alewife – the lowest of the low. I was used to hard work and fermenting barley was no harder than baking bread, but it was different when it wasn’t your own business.
The worst thing for me, living in the palace, was being constantly reminded of Catherine. I saw her face at the windows of the nursery tower, heard her laughter in the old rose garden and her footsteps on the flagstones of the chapel cloister. Only her imminent return looked set to stir me out of the deep, persistent melancholy I had been feeling without admitting it to myself.
The day after Jean-Michel dropped his bombshell, I went to the grand master’s chamber in the King’s House and, mercifully, my powers of persuasion did not desert me. Within minutes, the clerk charged with assembling staff for Catherine’s new household had agreed that I was ideally suited for work as her tiring woman and arranged for my transfer from the palace brewery. I would be on familiar ground, for she had been allocated the very rooms in which she had spent the first years of her life. We were both going back to the nursery tower. My feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground as I sped to my new post, gloating over the fact that soon, very soon, I would once more be as close as any mother to the child of my breast.
The first-floor chamber of the tower, once Madame la Bonne’s bedchamber, had been turned into a salon where Catherine and her companions would be able to read and embroider and entertain themselves and her visitors. The former governess’ crimson-curtained bed had been long ago removed and the chamber walls were hung with rainbow silks and jewel-coloured tapestries. It was furnished with cushioned stools, polished chests and tables and a carved stone chimneypiece framing a deep hearth, where a blazing fire would keep the air a good deal warmer than it had ever been in the old days. It was while I was lighting this fire a few days later, that the door opened without warning and a young lady entered and stood staring at me.
Catherine! I sank to my knees, glad to do so as my legs had turned to jelly. Dumbstruck, I gazed up at a vision of loveliness, dressed in a cornflower-blue gown, her beautiful Madonna face framed by neat little horns of netted blond hair and a filmy white veil.
‘Do not look at me, woman!’ the vision snapped. ‘I will not be gawped at by a servant.’
I flinched and lowered my eyes. A thousand times I had imagined a reunion with Catherine, but this reality jarred alarmingly. Everything looked as it should – the stylish velvet gown neatly trimmed with fur, the small oval face, the royal-blue eyes and the creamy complexion – but the sweet nature I remembered seemed to have vanished, the vibrant, loving spirit of the child had apparently withered into brittle pride. With a sinking heart I was forced to conclude that my darling, winsome girl had become a haughty mademoiselle.
‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What is your name?’
‘Mette,’ I replied, struggling to control my shock.
‘Mette? Mette! That is not a name. What is your full name?’
I was prepared to forgive the fact that she had not known me by sight, but she had known my name as a toddling infant – surely she would not forget it. But I heard the cold scorn in her voice and I neither wanted nor dared to look up and see it in her eyes. Suddenly I was consumed with anger against the nuns of Poissy. What could they have done to destroy the gentle essence of my Catherine?
‘Guillaumette,’ I gulped and had to repeat the word to make it audible. ‘Guillaumette.’
I risked a fleeting glance. Not a flicker of recognition.
‘That is better. What you are doing here, Guillaumette?’ The lady began to patrol the room, peering at its hangings and furnishings, viewing them without any visible sign of approval.
‘I have been appointed your tiring woman, Mademoiselle. I thought you might need a fire after your journey,’ I said meekly.
‘In future, if you are needed you will be summoned,’ she declared, fingering the thick embroidered canopy of a high-backed chair as if assessing its market worth. ‘Servants should not loiter in royal apartments. Remember that. You may wait below in the ante-chamber.’
‘Yes, Mademoiselle,’ I murmured and scuttled for the door, as eager to leave as she clearly was to be rid of me.
I stumbled down the stairs in a state of disbelief. Of course I had considered it possible that Catherine might not remember me after such a long period of separation, bearing in mind how young she had been when we parted, but such an evident change in character was a tragedy. I felt as if my heart was being squeezed in a giant fist.
The ante-room where I had been ordered to wait was on the ground floor, off the main entrance. It had been a bare, cold room when Louis and Jean used to have their lessons there, but now there was a brazier to warm the draught from the door and a tapestry on one wall depicting a woodland scene, with benches arranged beneath. No candles had been lit however and only a few dusty beams of twilight slanted in through the narrow windows.
Such gloom echoed my mood. Angrily dashing tears from my eyes, I cursed myself for being so foolish as to believe that my former nursling would automatically greet me with warmth and joy. She had been sent to Poissy to be educated as a princess and royalty was used to receiving personal service from noble retainers. Courtiers fought amongst themselves for the honour of pulling on the sovereign’s hose or keeping the keys to his coffers. I knew that my duty as a menial servant was to be invisible, performing the grubbier tasks in my lady’s absence and, if caught in the act, turning my face to the wall and scuttling out of sight. To gaze directly at a princess and expect her to remember the affection she had shared with me as a child, had been to defy the social order. I might harbour a lifetime’s love for the tiny babe I had suckled, but there was no rule which said she must return the sentiment. Quite the reverse, in fact. She was far more likely to have closed her mind to her neglected past and embraced her glittering present. Downcast, I nursed my injured feelings and contemplated a future which seemed once more joyless and bleak.
‘Mette? It is Mette, is it not?’
I’d been huddled on a bench in the far corner of the ante-room, too wrapped in misery to look up when I heard someone open the door. Then the low, sweet voice startled me to my feet with such an acute pang of recognition it made my very bones tingle. A hooded figure stood hesitating in the doorway, the face in shadow.
‘Yes, Mademoiselle. It is Mette,’ I whispered, my hands flying to my breast where my heart was leaping and fluttering like a caged finch.
I caught a faint hint of indignation as she eased back her hood and asked, ‘Do you not know me, Mette?’
‘Oh dear God! Catherine!’ Tears swamped my eyes and I must have swayed alarmingly, for she rushed across the room and I felt her arms go around me, supporting me as my knees buckled. We fell together onto the bench.
Even the smell of her was familiar; the soft, warm, delicate, rosy smell of her skin was like incense to me. How could I have mistaken another for her? Every inch of my body knew her without looking, like a ewe knows her lamb on a dark hillside or a hen knows her chick in a shuttered coop.
‘You are here,’ she crooned. ‘I felt sure you would be. Oh, Mette, I have longed for this day.’
We drew back from our close embrace to study each other. The curves of her brow and lips were like glowing reflections of my dreams and even the gloom of the chamber could not leech the colour from those brilliant blue eyes. I gazed into their sapphire depths and felt myself submerged in love.
‘I have crawled on my knees to St Jude,’ I cried, my voice breaking on a sob, ‘asking him to bring us back together, but I never thought it would happen.’