Читать книгу The Agincourt Bride онлайн | страница 7
Men don’t feel these things the same as women though, do they? After an hour or so, he dried his eyes, blew his nose and went back to the stables. There was no funeral. I wanted to call the child Henri after my father, but when the priest came it was too late for a baptism and Maître Thomas took the tiny body away to the public burial ground for the unshriven. I know it is foolish but all these years later I sometimes shed tears for my lost son. The Church teaches that the unbaptised cannot enter heaven but I do not believe it.
It must be obvious already that I was an only child. Despite ardent prayers to Saint Monica and a fortune spent on charms and potions, my mother’s womb never quickened again. Perhaps because of this, when my baby died she thought I might have lost my only chance of motherhood so, when she could no longer bear the sound of my sobbing, she walked along to the church and asked the priest if there was any call for a wet-nurse.
It so happened that Maître Thomas had a brother in the queen’s household, and later that day the appearance in our lane of a royal messenger brought all the neighbours out to gawp at his polished ebony staff and bright-blue livery with its giddy pattern of gold fleur-de-lis. When my mother answered his impatient rap, he wasted no time on a greeting, merely demanding imperiously, ‘Does your girl still have milk?’ as if he had called at a dairy rather than a bakery.
The first I knew of anything was when my mother’s moon-face rose through the attic hatchway, glowing in the beam of her horn lantern. ‘Come, Mette,’ she said, scrambling off the ladder. ‘Quick, get yourself dressed. We’re going to the palace.’
Still befuddled with grief, I stood like a docile sheep while she squeezed my poor flabby belly and leaking breasts into my Sunday clothes and pushed me out into the daylight.
The route to the king’s palace was familiar from my frequent love-trysts with Jean-Michel. We walked east along the river where the air was fresh and the sky was a bright, uncluttered arc. In the past I had often lingered to watch the traffic on the water; small fishing wherries with fat-bellied brown sails, flat-bottomed barges laden with cargo and occasionally, weaving between them, a gilded galley bedecked with livery, its crimson blades dripping diamond droplets as it ferried some grandee to a riverside mansion.