The Agincourt Bride. Joanna Hickson

So when I first clapped eyes on her she looked like an angry parcel, screaming fit to burst.

      I did not take to her at first and who could blame me? It was hard being presented with all that squalling evidence of life, when only a few hours ago my own newborn babe had died before I was even able to hold him.

      ‘You must be brave, little one,’ my mother said, her voice hoarse with grief as she wrapped the tiny blue corpse of my firstborn son in her best linen napkin. ‘Save your tears for the living and your love for the good God.’

      Kindly meant words that were impossible to heed, for my world had turned dark and formless and all I could do was weep, great hiccoughing sobs that threatened to snatch the breath from my body. In truth I wasn’t weeping for my dead son, I was weeping for myself, swamped with guilt and self-loathing and convinced that my existence was pointless if I could not produce a living child. In my grief, God forgive me, I had forgotten that it was He who gives life and He who takes it away. I only knew that my arms ached for my belly’s burden and desolation flowed from me like the Seine in spate. So too, in due course, did my milk – sad, useless gouts of it, oozing from my nipples and soaking my chemise, making the cloth cling to my pathetic swollen breasts. Ma brought linen strips and tried to bind them to make it stop but it hurt like devil’s fire and I pushed her away. And so it was that my whole life changed.

      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.

      He worked hard and drove his apprentices hard also. He had two – stupid lads I thought them because they could not write or reckon. I could do both, because my mother could and she had taught me – it was good for business. All day the men prepared loaves, pies and pastries at the back of the house while we sold them from the front, took orders and kept tallies. When the baking was finished, for half a sou my father would let the local goodwives put their own pies in the ovens while some heat still remained. Many bakers refused to do this, saying they were too busy mixing the next day’s dough, but my father was a kind soul and would not even take the halfpenny if he knew a family was on hard times. ‘Soft-hearted fool!’ my mother chided, hiding a fond smile.

      He was not soft-hearted when she told him I was pregnant though. He called me a whore and a sinner and locked me in the flour store, only letting me out after he had visited Jean-Michel’s parents and arranged for him to marry me.

      It was not very difficult. No one held my lover at knife-point or anything and afterwards Jean-Michel said he was quite pleased, especially as it meant he could share my bed in the attic above the shop. He had never slept in a real bed because until he went to work at the king’s stables, where he dossed down in the straw with the rest of the boy-grooms, he had slept on the floor of his father’s workshop with his three brothers. The Lanières were harness-makers and operated from a busy street near Les Halles, where the butchers and tanners plied their odorous trades, making leather readily available. With three sons already in the business, there was no room for a fourth and so, when he was old enough, Jean-Michel was articled to the king’s master of horse. It was a good position for he was strong and nimble, but also kind and gentle-voiced. Horses responded to him and did his bidding.

      The royal stables were busy day and night and inevitably the apprentices got all the worst shifts, so after we married we only shared my bed when he could wangle a night off. Otherwise it was a tumble in the hayloft or nothing – mostly nothing as I grew larger. When my father sent a message that my birth-pains had started, Jean-Michel rushed from the palace, hoping to hear the baby’s first cry but instead he wept with me in the mournful silence.

      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.

      It was in these leafy suburbs close to the new city wall that many imposing town-houses had been built by the nobility. The highest tower in Paris was to be found there, rising brand-new and clean-stoned above the Duke of Burgundy’s Hôtel d’Artois. In the shadow of the ancient abbey of the Céléstins lay the impressive Hôtel de St Antoine where lived the king’s brother, the Duke of Orleans. Neighbouring this, however, and overlooking the lush meadows of the Île de St Louis, was the king’s magnificent Hôtel de St Pol, the largest