Chapters (58)
‘Of course. But little Louis is sixteen now. He may feel he doesn’t need a regent. On the other hand, the French may not want a child king again. Perhaps its nobles would prefer a proven fighter.’
‘A one-time fighter, uncle. A poet now, you say.’
The cardinal waves his fingers, concedes the point.
Richard holds up his hands between them, placating. ‘Or a one-time fighter with an appetite for peace? Whatever, we go before our horse to market. We hear Charles is sick, not dying. But it could be useful to bring Orléans back into play.’
‘Ah, yes, a forward play.’ Cecily raises her empty glass as her tow-haired nephew steps forward to refill it. ‘French chess.’
‘The long game.’ The cardinal drinks deep, and smiles.
Before bed Cecily and Richard visit the nursery. Little Anne is sleeping. Her nurses, soft-footed, lead them to her cradle, then withdraw. When she bends to kiss her daughter’s shadowed head Cecily scents milk and the faint tang of salt. This smell was a constant in her cloistered time and, she realizes, she misses it. She’s relieved to be free, to be in the thick of things again. But she would return to that room a thousand times for such a gift as this.
‘So, my cardinal uncle wants you in France?’ she asks, still gazing on the child.
Behind her Richard sighs. ‘He does.’
‘And will you go?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to. But if a diplomat is needed, I’m a better choice than your cousin Somerset, who nursemaids the post for now.’
‘Somerset?’
‘He’s a figurehead,’ Richard assures her. ‘Talbot does the real work.’
She nods. Until his ransom last year, John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, had been a prisoner of war in France, taken in his first battle, little more than a lad. It’s been eighteen years all told, almost as long as Orléans has been in England. It’s hard to imagine the experience could have prepared him for the complex leadership of England’s most challenged governance. Cecily imagines him, a mole, blinking in sunlight.
‘And Gloucester will accept me,’ Richard says with a low, wry laugh. ‘Which makes me a rare creature indeed.’
‘And so you will keep the peace in England and make a peace in France? Now that would be a thing.’
He shrugs. ‘I’ve no wish to go but …’
She begins to think it could be done. She looks again at little Anne sleeping, imagines her married into the French royal house, then smiles at her own foolishness. Better a boy child for that. Now it’s her turn to sigh. ‘Well, if you go, I go with you.’ She feels him squeeze her hand and, turning, sees that he’s pleased.
‘I hoped you would.’
She raises an eyebrow. ‘Well, I will get no brothers for this one with the sea spread wide between us.’
