Chapter 21 Angoulême, Aquitaine, August 1370 #2
Edward died the following night having sunk ever deeper into sleep until he became unresponsive.
No amount of pleas and entreaties from Jeanette could rouse him and prayers were not solace but empty words, for God was not listening.
The red marks on his skin linked up to become deep purple blotches as the disease consumed him.
Rumours spread that it was the pestilence, and Jeanette quashed them at once, lest panic spread from hearsay, and she might have to face desertion too.
She sat numbly beside his small body in the aftermath of his final breath.
Her beautiful golden boy, her little king, whose only crown was now a heavenly one.
‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Why take him?’ If this was God’s will, it was cruelty of the highest order.
She insisted on washing his body herself in perfumed water.
She combed his soft blond hair and accompanied him to the chapel where his body was laid on a silk-swathed bed before the altar, with candles surrounding him.
She locked herself into a state of functioning self-possession and donned mourning robes of austere black wool.
Throughout the ordeal, her composure was as solid as stone – impenetrable, hard, enabling her to cope.
Edward would have to come now, and it would not be the love of his wife that called him home, but the death of his son.
Later, she went to Richard, who was playing on the floor arranging his toy warriors, not in a military way but according to their poses and their rank. Here a knight on a horse, there a foot soldier with a spear. She knelt before him – a child not yet four years old, still a baby.
‘Richard,’ she said. ‘Richard, listen to me.’
He continued to arrange his soldiers, and she waited until he had placed the last one carefully in position.
‘Edward cannot play with you any more. I am . . . He was not well, and I am very sad to tell you that he has died and gone to Our Lord Jesus Christ.’
Richard looked up at her, a frown between his bright blue eyes. ‘He’s not allowed to go,’ he said.
‘We cannot argue with God’s will,’ she said gently. ‘If God says it is our time, then we must do his bidding – we have no choice. It is not that he was not allowed to go, it is that he was not allowed to stay.’
Jeanette had no idea what Richard’s response would be – whether he would throw one of his tantrums, or retreat into himself like a snail into its shell.
For the moment he appeared to be stuck in the limbo of the enormity of the news, or perhaps it was incomprehension.
She had told his sisters earlier and they had been distraught, clinging to her and weeping while she held them tightly and kissed and comforted them, telling them it was all right to cry and that their brother had gone to be with God and his angels.
She herself was so full of emotion that she was utterly numb.
The girls had come to pray at his bier and tearfully kiss him, acknowledging that his soul had left his body and he would never smile and play with them again.
‘He will not be king,’ Richard stated, and the words in his small child’s voice ground a still deeper wound in Jeanette’s heart.
‘No, he will not.’
Richard looked down at his toys for a moment. Then he raised his head and fixed her with his gaze. ‘Then I will be king,’ he said. ‘One day.’
It was a strange concept for such a small child to grasp, and his direct stare unsettled Jeanette. ‘Yes, you shall, my love, but not for a while. Your grandfather still rules England, and your father shall inherit after him. You should not worry just now.’
‘But I will be a king, with a big crown and lots of jewels.’
‘Yes, you will.’
‘And everyone will have to obey me.’
She was too sick with grief and shock to answer his terrible response.
She knew how much Richard had adored his big brother; it was when at play with Edward that he seemed most like an ordinary little boy.
‘They will only do so if you are a good king,’ she managed to say at last. But what was good, and what was bad?
No one set out to be bad or weak or evil, but somewhere on the road they were trapped and tangled and changed.
‘I don’t want Edward to be dead. If I was king, I could order him to come back.’
Her breaking heart faltered. ‘Kings cannot do that, my love . . . I wish they could, but not even a God-given right to rule will bring about such a thing. We must pray for his soul and know that he sits at the foot of God’s throne and wears a heavenly crown.’
‘It’s not fair,’ Richard said mutinously.
‘Why can God have him and not me?’ He glared at his toy knights before leaping to his feet and kicking them with a wild swing of his foot, scattering them abroad like slingshot.
He stamped on those that landed near to his feet, before bursting into tears.
His nurse started forward, but Jeanette waved her away and took Richard in her arms herself.
He struggled and fought, pummelling her with his fists, thrashing and screaming while she held him tightly, but at last his tears softened and became heart-rending sobs.
‘I want him back . . . I want him back!’
‘So do I, love, so do I!’ Suddenly tears were running down Jeanette’s face too, but still she would not release the full torrent of her grief.
She dared not, lest she be swept away. ‘But we cannot have him, and so we must be brave and live for him. But we can help him through our prayers and good deeds in his memory.’ She rocked her son in her arms, rocking herself too.
She had to be present for others; she couldn’t close the door, for there was no one to bring her out this time.
She would just descend deeper and darker stairways until she disappeared from the light altogether, and that would be a dereliction of her duty.
Edward bowed his head over his son’s body, sobs ripping through his skeletal frame.
Five days had passed since the little boy’s death.
The weather was cold and as yet no stench of decay haunted the corpse, and any early taint was disguised by the heavy scent of incense and candles burning in the chapel around his body.
He looked so small and insignificant lying on his bier, clad in a white linen shift.
Still, silent, waxen, while outside in the castle grounds other little boys ran, shouted and played, fencing with toy spears, climbing trees, pelting each other with mud balls.
‘How can this be?’ Edward asked, his voice cracking. ‘How can this have happened if not by the will of God? I must be cursed. Have any others been stricken down?’
‘No,’ Jeanette replied, feeling cold and shaky. ‘The physicians say they have seen it before and when it strikes there is little hope of recovery, but it does not spread from one to another. I would have saved him if I could. I would have willingly given myself in his place.’
Edward covered his face, his shoulders shaking. She saw how thin his hair had become on top, the glistening of his scalp through the strands. ‘We had the victory at Nájera, we had the victory at Limoges, but it is as nothing. Why do we not flourish? Why are we being punished like this?’
‘I have no answers, my love.’
She had no comfort to give. She could not say that there would be other sons in the fullness of time for they were both beyond making them.
Last month her bleed had been scanty, and Edward had not lain with her in a long time, and was perhaps incapable anyway.
There was only Richard – one solitary, living little flame, and so very different from the child who no longer drew breath.
‘I wasn’t here when you both needed me,’ he said wretchedly.
She laid her hand on the back of his neck. ‘You would not have changed the outcome. Nothing could have saved him.’
‘What have we done or not done that God should wreak his punishment on us like this?’ he whispered.
‘God’s will is all-encompassing and we cannot know his purpose.
He gave us the joy of our son for five years and let that serve for a lifetime – and remember that even a full lifetime for an old man is still but a blink in the eyes of God.
’ The words emerged from her mouth, but they barely felt connected to her mind.
She was saying what he needed to hear, and the words were a soothing melange to herself, but deeper within, there was a wasteland.
He remained kneeling at his son’s bier, and Jeanette quietly left him to take a deep breath of air clear of incense smoke.
John of Lancaster was outside, about to enter, but stopped and drew back to let her leave.
She saw the compassion in his gaze, and her body shuddered, tears filled her eyes.
She made to brush past him, but he caught her arm and pulled her round, drawing her to his body.
‘I know what it is to lose a child,’ he said. ‘I have known the grief several times over. You have given them love and invested in them your future hopes and dreams.’
Leaning into him, Jeanette burst into tears, and he rubbed her back with the firm flat of his hand. His compassionate steadiness was a rock to which she clung as her own rock crumbled.
‘I saw him die,’ she sobbed. ‘He knew nothing at the end, he just stopped breathing, and he was gone. My beautiful son. If the world were parchment, I would tear it into little pieces and scatter those pieces far abroad, but I cannot when I have a living child to raise to kingship and a sick husband who needs my support. What am I to do?’
‘Exactly as you are doing now,’ he soothed.
‘You can come to me whenever you wish, and I will be here. Whatever you say will go no further than the space in which we speak. I was fond of that little boy myself, very fond, and I love my brother dearly. We shall both support him. You are not alone, you are never alone.’