Читать книгу The Agincourt Bride онлайн | страница 52

However, the present argument was not about who sat on what throne. This high-powered English embassy was apparently only interested in settling the dispute over territories, and in sealing the deal by acquiring a French wife for King Henry V of England, who was the great-grandson of Edward III. Well, you didn’t have to be a genius to conclude that the return to court of our king’s youngest and only unmarried daughter might have something to do with this. I decided there and then that if my darling Catherine was coming back to St Pol to be dangled before the King of England as a prospective bride, then she was going to need help – and who better to help her than her faithful old nursemaid?

Gone were the days when everything closed down if King Charles had a bad turn. From a powerful man with periodic delusions, he had dwindled into a predominantly childlike creature, only occasionally violently mad; a puppet-king to be manipulated by whoever guided his hand to sign the edicts. As a consequence, the palace was brimming with courtiers on the make, all looking to fill any official posts that might put them within reach of the pot of gold that was the royal treasury, which meant that accommodation was at a premium. If you lived in servants’ quarters, you had to earn them and therefore our whole family was employed in the royal household, even Luc.

In fact, he was the happiest of all of us, for although he was only eight, he was in his element as a hound boy in the palace kennel. He had grown into a bony-kneed, cheeky-faced lad with an affinity for animals like his father and a stubborn streak like me. I had tried hard to teach him the rudiments of reading and writing, but with an ambition to be a huntsman, he could not see the point. Alys had taken to her letters easily, but now had little time to practice since she worked in the queen’s wardrobe, where she hemmed linen from 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.