Читать книгу The Agincourt Bride онлайн | страница 62

‘I am sure I was never cross with you, Madamoiselle,’ I assured her. ‘You were always a good child, and you are scarcely more than a child still.’

She raised a quizzical eyebrow at me.

‘You may not know, Mademoiselle,’ I said, crossing to the hearth to pour the warm posset into a silver hanap, ‘that while you were away there was much political upheaval and at one time the Duke of Burgundy ordered a number of the queen’s ladies to be imprisoned in the Châtelet. Mademoiselle of Armagnac was among them. It is said that their gaolers abused them and I know that they were mauled and mocked by the mob on the way there. She can have no love for commoners like me.’

Catherine gazed at me steadily for several moments before responding. ‘See how useful you are to me already, Mette,’ she remarked. ‘Who else would have told me that?’

I placed the hanap on the table beside her and began removing the pins that fastened her heavy headdress.

As I lifted away the headdress, she briefly massaged an angry red weal where the circlet had dug into her brow, then she cupped her hands around the hanap and took a sip. ‘Now I will tell you something that you may not know, Mette. Mademoiselle Bonne has recently become betrothed to the Duke of Orleans, he who was supposed to marry Michele but ended up marrying our older sister Isabelle. I went to their wedding when I was five but unfortunately she died two years later in childbirth. I prayed for her soul, but I did not weep because, as you know, I hardly knew her. The queen was at pains to tell me all about Bonne’s betrothal this evening. Apparently Louis does not allow his wife Marguerite to come to court because he hates her for being the Duke of Burgundy’s daughter, so when Bonne marries Charles of Orleans, she will be third in order of precedence after the queen and myself.’

Fast though news spread in the palace, this gossip had not yet reached the servants’ quarters. The present Duke of Orleans was the king’s nephew, heir to the queen’s murdered lover. His Orleanist cause had benefited greatly from the Count of Armagnac’s military and political support, and this marriage would be the pay-back, bringing Bonne’s family into the magic royal circle. Mademoiselle Bonne was definitely a force to be reckoned with and I feared that, by showing me favour, Catherine had already irretrievably soured relations with her.