The Queen’s guardian climbed into the saddle, extended his hand and pulled the servant boy up behind him; then he spurred his horse down into the dry grasslands towards the coast and Cadiz. Lázaro turned his head to look for the last time at the castle of Medina Sidonia sitting high on the hillside. It was the one place he had found happiness. Now all that lay ahead was the promise of being hunted and, one day, when he failed to watch the shadows, being killed.

PART THREE

BETRAYAL

CHAPTER THIRTY

The battle at Cocherel was won the day before the twenty-six-year-old Dauphin was anointed King of France in the cathedral at Rheims. The elaborate ceremony masked how diminished a country France had become. The English had humiliated his late father. The country was torn apart by routiers’ claws. So little remained of what had been the greatest nation in Christendom, beaten to its knees and humiliated: the Dauphin Charles was determined to seize it back and destroy the English hold on his beloved France.

He was radiant. The rays of sunlight embraced him. His coronation robes glowed as if the Almighty had touched him. As if God himself had beatified him. It was the rebirth of France. The newly crowned King, the pious Charles V, was a man of culture who loved art and literature and who schemed with the instinct of a foraging sewer rat.

*

Weeks later, when the joyous celebrations had waned, Simon Bucy, the late King’s senior adviser, a man who had once led the French Parlement, stood waiting to be acknowledged. The young King seemed not even to see that he was in the same chamber, but that was little different from when Charles was Regent, ever distracted by teeming thoughts clamouring for his attention. Bucy knew that over the years the young Charles’s mind had squirmed with intrigue. He was a thinker. Not like his father, who reacted emotionally to events. No, Bucy thought, Charles would always look as far as the horizon and see what road they should take to reach it.