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female, flanked the Chapel door; above them was a formidable angel with a book.
    ‘Who are they?’ said Katherine.
    ‘Adam and Eve, before their fall. Now, walk as the nuns taught you. Head held up, eyes downcast. My good girl! she said lovingly.
    Doux Jésus , the English shall not have her! Sooner my own heart’s blood … Fury stung her. Wrong to come to this most holy place with wrath and vengeance. She stood, letting the hatred burn and cleanse and evaporate.
    Emissaries had come from England to Compiègne, daring to ask for her hand in marriage with the Prince of Wales, Bolingbroke’s son, and some of the French councillors had acceded, swayed by the thought of the lost dowry, but she had sworn in their hearing to destroy herself, for better the ultimate heresy than a union with the son of Richard’s murderer. And now it was Katherine whose life and fortunes were weighed in this alliance, whose destiny could be dictated … God send my father well for ever, for when he is himself, he must be totally against this vile design …
    ‘Belle, why can’t Jacquot come with us?’
    The little dog was sitting at the foot of the monumental staircase.
    ‘Call him, then.’
    Katherine clapped her hands and Jacquot came, scrambling, slipping upwards, like a ball of flax,
    ‘Dogs have souls,’ said Isabelle.
    Mathe. She remembered him well; a stern wolfhound as big as a yearling calf. She and Richard had ridden in the forests of Windsor and Eltham with Mathe loping beside them. At night he would lie by the bed, watchful (although there was nothing to watch but affection), ready to tear the life from intruders. Would that Mathe had been at Pontefract! But then he was already forsworn.
    ‘Henry of Lancaster came into the chamber and desired the king’s abdication. Richard gave up the crown and took it back again, only to relinquish it again. You recall how the dog was wont to place his paws about King Richard’s neck then roll and bare his belly in subservience to the sovereign? When Bolingbroke came that last time, the dog rose and embraced his neck and abased himself. He knew.’
    She had forgotten who had told her.
    They thought I was too young to love him! they said he married me, a child, so that his body could ever be faithful to the beloved dead Anne of Bohemia. But my childish love encompassed Anne’s and drowned it as the sea drowns a river. No, my Dickon. Your murderers shall never have my sweet sister, not while I live.
    Like its lower counterpart, the royal chapel comprised a single nave of four bays and a seven-sided apse. Light streamed through the rose window, striking the free-standing clusters of colonnettes with their statues of saints and the low wall with its three-cusped blind arcades. The figures of St Louis and Jeanne de Bourbon were frozenly forbidding, he with his orb and sceptre, she with stone blossoms on her marble gown. Yet when the light poured in they were redeemed by breathtaking colour that lay equally upon their rigid forms and those of Isabelle and Katherine; the brilliant apple-green of chrysoprase, the sober milk of chalcedony, the rich dried blood of sardonyx flushing to cardinal red, then mellowing to garnet and rose, and brightening in the crown of Christ to gold. As a cloud darkened the window, red dominated: blood, wine, cerise, filling the shapes of the robe, the crown, all the men and beasts lovingly limned within the glass. Then the sun came again to light not only the pigeon’s-breast texture of the opaline Caen stone but the primary colour of window and chapel in a final glory. Red, the red of sunsets and claret, a comforting, loving red, as if one stood inside a ruby. The upraised faces of the two princesses were rosy under it and the little dog’s fur warmed like a peach.
    Isabelle pointed to the altar, where candles burned, lighting the gems on a square reliquary.
    ‘Look!’ The most holy things are here.’
    The relics of the Passion, pledged to St Louis by Baldwin of