The Agincourt Bride Read Online Free PDF

entrance to the nursery as usual.
    ‘Nobody has been paid,’ one of them revealed bluntly, when I plucked up courage to ask where everyone was. ‘The master of the household has gone with the queen and taken all the clerks and coffers with him.’
    ‘Then why are you still here?’ I enquired.
    The soldier’s sly grin revealed a row of blackened stumps. ‘The royal guard is paid by the Constable of France, God be praised – and he is an honourable man.’
    ‘Unlike the royal governess,’ I muttered. ‘I have not been paid for weeks.’
    ‘Best leave then, my little bonbon, like the rest of them,’ he wheezed in a foul-smelling chuckle. ‘Fools earn no favour.’
    But how could I leave? How could I abandon four friendless and motherless children? I persuaded the guard to fetch us some bread and milk for the children’s breakfast and after the donkeys finally returned looking smug and dishevelled, I fed Catherine and left her sleeping while I sped home to the bakery and begged a basketful of pies and pastries from my mother. I told her the king’s children were starving in their palace tower.
    It was no real crisis because Madame la Bonne returned from her social engagement and the meal deliveries, mean though they were, began once more. But there was still no sign of any laundry and I was sent to the wash-house to investigate. Overwhelmed by the acrid stench of huge bleaching vats overflowing with urine and the smelly heaps of dirty linen turning blue with mildew, I filched an armful of linen napkins when I spotted them and ran. I could wash the napkins daily and keep her clean. Without a supply of clean swaddling, Madame la Bonne could no longer truss the baby up every morning, so Catherine’s limbs were allowed to kick free and strong. Meanwhile her blonde curls rioted under the little caps I sewed for her. Ironically, during those dreadful weeks of winter she grew as bonny and plump as a bear cub.
    But I felt sorry for the older children. They were cold and hungry and the only thing in plentiful supply was punishment. Whenever mischief flared, which it often did, especially between the boys, some new and vindictive retribution was devised by their governess. On several occasions I saw Jean struggling against tight bonds tying him to his chair, or Louis sitting down gingerly, his buttocks clearly smarting from a beating. I often saw his eyes glinting with resentful anger but he was only four, powerless to retaliate, and if he could have voiced a complaint, who would he have voiced it to? Perhaps the worst thing however, was the fact that their father’s oubliette was too close to the nursery tower and the inhuman noises which frequently erupted from that grim place were enough to freak young minds.
    The general belief was that the king’s madness was caused by agents of the devil. Perhaps living close to the king, Madame la Bonne had been taken over by them as well. Sometimes I was sure I could hear their wings fluttering against the door and I scarcely dared to inhale for fear of contagion.
    Jean-Michel told me that in the city taverns, out-of-work palace menials made easy ale-money telling lurid tales of black masses where sorcerers called up flocks of winged demons and sent them flying to infest the subterranean vault where the mad monarch was housed. I often heard the donkeys frightening each other with sightings of these imps. No wonder all the children had bad dreams and Jean wet his bed. As punishment, Madame la Bonne made him sleep on a straw mattress on the floor. At least she ordered the donkeys to wash his bedclothes and not me, but not until they reeked abominably.
    The winter was stormy and snow-laden and the children hardly left the nursery for weeks but somehow, with the aid of my father’s pies, my stock of family fairy-tales and Jean-Michel’s pilfered firewood, we struggled through those cold, dark days. Then, at last, the season turned, the sun began to climb in the sky and the ice