Читать книгу The Agincourt Bride онлайн | страница 5

But I am getting ahead of myself.

I have to confess that my baby was a mistake. We all make them, don’t we? I’m not wicked through and through or anything. I just fell for a handsome, laughing boy and let him under my skirt. He did not force me – far from it. He was a groom in the palace stables and I enjoyed our romps in the hayloft as much as he did. Priests go on about carnal sin and eternal damnation, but they do not understand about being young and living for the day.

I am not pretending I was ever beautiful but at fourteen I was not bad looking – brown haired, rosy-cheeked and merry-eyed. A bit plump maybe – or well-covered as my father used to say, God bless him – but that is what a lot of men like, especially if they are strong and muscular, like my Jean-Michel. When we tumbled together in the hay he did not want to think that I might break beneath him. As for me, I did not think much at all. I was intoxicated by his deep voice, dark, twinkling eyes and hot, thrilling kisses.

I used to go and meet him at dusk, while my parents were busy in the bake-house, pulling pies out of the oven. When all the fuss about ‘sinful fornication’ had died down, Jean-Michel joked that while they were pulling them out he was putting one in!

I should explain that I am a baker’s daughter. My name is Guillaumette Dupain. Yes, it does mean ‘of bread’. I am bred of bread – so what? Actually, my father was not only a baker of bread but a patissier. He made pastries and wafers and beautiful gilded marchpanes and our bake-house was in the centre of Paris at the end of a cobbled lane that ran down beside the Grand Pont. Luckily for us, the smell of baking bread tended to disguise the stench from the nearby tanning factories and the decomposing bodies of executed criminals, which were often hung from the timbers of the bridge above to discourage the rest of us from breaking the law. In line with guild fire-regulations, our brick ovens were built close to the river, well away from our wooden house and those of our neighbours. All bakers fear fire and my father often talked about the ‘great conflagration’ before I was born, which almost set the whole city ablaze.