FullReads

“Dame serez de mon cueur, sans debat,
Entierement, jusques mort me consume.
Laurier souef qui pour mon droit combat,
Olivier franc, m’ostant toute amertume.”

KATHARINE OF VALOIS IS WON BY A HUNTSMAN,
AND LOVES HIM GREATLY; THEN FINDS HIM, TO
HER HORROR, AN IMPOSTOR; AND FOR A SUFFICIENT REASON
CONSENTS TO MARRY QUITE ANOTHER PERSON, AND
NOT ALL UNWILLINGLY.

In the year of grace 1417, about Martinmas (thus Nicolas begins), Queen Isabeau fled with her daughter the Lady Katharine to Chartres. There the Queen was met by the Duke of Burgundy, and these two laid their heads together to such good effect that presently they got back into Paris, and in its public places massacred some three thousand Armagnacs. This, however, is a matter which touches history; the root of our concernment is that when the Queen and the Duke rode off to attend to this butcher’s business, the Lady Katharine was left behind in the Convent of Saint Scholastica, which then stood upon the outskirts of Chartres, in the bend of the Eure just south of that city. She dwelt a year in this well-ordered place.

There one finds her upon the day of the decollation of Saint John the Baptist, the fine August morning that starts the tale. Katharine the Fair, men called her, with some show of reason. She was very tall, and slim as a rush. Her eyes were large and black, having an extreme lustre, like the gleam of undried ink–a lustre at odd times uncanny. Her abundant hair, too, was black, and to-day doubly sombre by contrast with the gold netting which confined it. Her mouth was scarlet, all curves, and her complexion famous for its brilliancy; only a precisian would have objected that she possessed the Valois nose, long and thin and somewhat unduly overhanging the mouth.

To-day as she came through the orchard, crimson-garbed, she paused with lifted eyebrows. Beyond the orchard wall there was a hodgepodge of noises, among which a nice ear might distinguish the clatter of hoofs, a yelping and scurrying, and a contention of soft bodies, and above all a man’s voice commanding the turmoil. She was seventeen, so she climbed into the crotch of an apple-tree and peered over the wall.

He was in rusty brown and not unshabby; but her regard swept over this to his face, and there noted how his eyes were blue winter stars under the tumbled yellow hair, and the flash of his big teeth as he swore between them. He held a dead fox by the brush, which he was cutting off; two hounds, lank and wolfish, were scaling his huge body in frantic attempts to get at the carrion. A horse grazed close at hand.

So for a heart-beat she saw him. Then he flung the tailless body to the hounds, and in the act spied two black eyes peeping through the apple-leaves. He laughed, all mirth to the heels of him. “Mademoiselle, I fear we have disturbed your devotions. But I had not heard that it was a Benedictine custom to rehearse aves in tree-tops.” Then, as she leaned forward, both elbows resting more comfortably upon the wall, and thereby disclosing her slim body among the foliage like a crimson flower green-calyxed: “You are not a nun–Blood of God! you are the Princess Katharine!”

The nuns, her present guardians, would have declared the ensuing action horrific, for Katharine smiled frankly at him and demanded how he could be certain of this.

He answered slowly: “I have seen your portrait. Hah, your portrait!” he jeered, head flung back and big teeth glinting in the sunlight. “There is a painter who merits crucifixion.”

She considered this indicative of a cruel disposition, but also of a fine taste in the liberal arts. Aloud she stated: