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widened their shutters and looked for trade. There was the scent of flax and dye, fuller’s earth and tanning hide. From the north-east quarter came the hammer of armourers, and cheese-hawkers cried in the streets of fine Brie and Champagne. In the Cité, the artists and illuminators and parchment-sellers went about laden with rainbow scrolls.
    So Paris came to life in its three divisions the food markets of La Ville to the north; the artists and scholars in the Cité mingling with lords and dukes; and in the south, L’Université. Some students were in the street where Isabelle rode and gazed at her admiringly, dispersing under the warning looks of. her escort. She rode on, greeting people, courteous and correct.
    To a priest she bowed. ‘ Dieu vous gart .’
    To a workman struggling with a ladder in her path: ‘ Dieu vous ait, mon amy .’
    And to the young Charles of Orléans, who came on her as if by chance:
    ‘ Dieu vous donne bone matin et bonne aventure! ’
    ‘May I accompany you?’ His eyes drank her up, from her cobweb coif to her little shoes of Cordovan morocco. He was tall and fair like his father, but without Louis’s vacillating eyes; his own were steady and clear. In his pocket he carried yet another excellent poem to ‘Madame’.
    ‘Not this day, my lord.’ She shook her horse’s belled bridle. ‘We go to the Sainte-Chapelle to pray, my sister and I.’
    She smiled, leaving him; she knew him to be kind and unspoiled at fifteen years old, and how ardently he desired her. She recognized that his father was in thrall to Isabeau, but she remembered that while she, Isabelle, was a hostage in England, Louis had offered to meet the English king in single combat for her sake. And on her return three years earlier he had loaded her with presents, just as Jean sans Peur had ordered great celebrations which she, bereft and heartsick, could not enjoy. She trusted neither Burgundy nor Orléans. Her father she thought of with uneasy affection and pity, her mother with loathing. The one she could both love and trust was gone, his starved body smashed by Bolingbroke’s assassins in the dark of Pontefract, then lapped in lead so that his wounds were hidden, his heart rotting in England’s earth.
    Now, dismounted, they were entering the Palais precincts under delicate ribbed arches, crossing the court to where the twin chapels of the Sainte-Chapelle rose one above the other like a stone flower stretching to heaven. The great upper window was dark, and gave no intimation of the beauty within. She thought: so is a soul concealed under flesh. Only when the flesh is shattered can the soul be seen. Dead, he must have been fairer even than in life.
    Into her mind, clear as ever, came the face of King Richard of England, seen for the last time in the precinct of Windsor before his departure for Ireland. He was tall and, sitting on the roan Barbary, his head seemed to touch the sky. He had turned his face to her with a threefold look of love, father and priest and lover in one. They had made their farewells yet he had dismounted, like some royal and gentle bird, and come back to her, lifting her small figure against his breast.
    ‘Adieu, Madame, Adieu, until we meet again!’
    She would have shed tears as he kissed her again and again, yet even at twelve years old, something told her: you are a woman, a wife and a queen. It was he who had wept. But now grief dragged at her, killing the sunlit grace of the Sainte-Chapelle; and because she was still and for ever ‘Madame’, with the vein of adamantine which had sustained her over the years, she composed herself; ascending the Palais staircase with Katherine, passing by the royal apartments. She could hear her father’s voice; he was conferring with his ministers, sounding entirely rational, strong. For how long would it last? She dared not think about it. The royal chapel was designed exclusively for those of the blood; Odette drew back. Two large figures, male and