Читать книгу The Agincourt Bride онлайн | страница 49

We were both devastated, remembering the strong woman she had once been, but we were also thankful that her suffering was over. In some ways she was lucky to die in her bed, for at that time life in Paris was perilous and cheap. People were murdered simply for wearing the wrong colour hood or walking down the wrong alley. Bodies were found in the streets every day with their throats slit or their skulls cracked like eggs.

One freezing November night it was none other than the Duke of Orleans himself who was hacked to death, set upon by a masked gang in the Rue Barbette behind the Hôtel de St Antoine. He had been a frequent visitor at a mansion there, in which a lady, widely believed to be the queen, had been living for several weeks. As royal guards swarmed through the streets seeking the duke’s murderers, news spread that the corpse’s right hand had been severed at the wrist. Blue-hooded Burgundians declared this to be proof positive that Orleans had been in league with the devil, who always claimed the right hand of his acolytes. White-hooded Orleanists maintained, meanwhile, that the only devil involved in this murder was the Duke of Burgundy who, rather giving credence to this claim, abruptly quitted his coveted position of power beside the king and fled to Artois, destroying strategic bridges behind him. That left a power vacuum, which for the citizens of Paris was the most dangerous situation of all. In the gutters the body count mounted nightly.

My father knew the baker who delivered bread to the heavily guarded house in the Rue Barbette and it was he who told us that the lady the Duke of Orleans had visited so frequently and foolhardily had given birth to a baby and had only just survived. After the murder she too fled, no one knew how or where. The house was just suddenly empty. A few weeks later, a royal pronouncement told us that Queen Isabeau had given birth to another son, stating that the boy had been baptised Philippe and died soon afterwards.

My father and I wore brown hoods and kept our mouths shut. We managed to stay alive, but it was a daily struggle to keep the ovens fired. The brushwood we burned had always been collected by fuellers in the countryside, but desperate gangs of bandits and cut-throats made the gathering of it too dangerous. Flour supplies were another problem as factional armies were constantly on the move around Paris, purloining food stocks as they marched. Fortunately, Jean-Michel was often able to ‘divert’ sheaves of dry furze and sacks of flour to the bakery from supplies shipped in by barge to the royal palace. Yes, I am afraid we took to filching royal assets as freely as Madame la Bonne had done. It was the only way to survive.