by Anne O'Brien
Relief spread through me, sweet as honey. I sighed imperceptibly. All the fears that had pinioned my mind in recent weeks so that I could not think, could not plan, could not envisage the future, fell away. I would no longer be dependent on the limited revenues from the Swynford estates at Kettlethorpe and Coleby. I would have money to spend on critical refurbishments. My children would lack for nothing.
‘Thank you, my lord,’ I said for the third time in as many minutes. I seemed to have lost the capacity to form any other response, and for a moment I was touched with a pale amusement. I had not been known for lack of conversation. ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘I cannot tell you how much that will mean to me.’
‘Is Kettlethorpe very bad?’ he asked. He knew my situation.
‘You have no idea, my lord.’
And with the relief I raised my eyes to his, to discover that he was watching me closely, so that I felt the blood rise to heat my cheeks, and my relief became overlaid with a layer of uncertainty. Perhaps he was waiting for a more effusive sign of my gratitude. After all, I had no claim on him, no tie of duty or blood. Some would say he had done quite enough for me and my family.
Could it be that he thought me unfit for the position I sought? Damsels in royal households were chosen for their elegance and beauty as much as for their practical skills, women worthy in appearance and demeanour to serve the lady. I had done my best. My dark robes were as fine as I could make them, with no remnant of Lincolnshire mud. As for my hands and face, all that could be seen in the all-enveloping shrouding, I had applied the contents of my stillroom with fervour to remedy the effect of Kettlethorpe’s demands. I did not think the Duke would judge me too harshly, knowing my circumstances. And yet his eye had the fierce focus of a raptor.
To deflect the appraisal I launched into what I thought he wanted from me.
‘I cannot express my thanks enough, my lord. I feared for my children, living in hardship. I thought I should not come to you, because although I no longer have a claim on your generosity, Hugh was in your service, and you were good enough to stand godfather to my daughter Blanche. I knew that you would want Hugh’s son, Thomas, to do well in the world, and before God, there is little to give him anything but the most slender of incomes from the Swynford estates. Thomas is still so young and I have not the experience to manage the land well—or the money to do it, of course…’
My words dried. A minute ago I had been impossibly tongue-tied: now I was ridiculously garrulous. Had he not said that he would employ me? My problems were at an end and I could be at peace, but my heart continued to bound like a squirrel caught in a trap as the huntsman approached with a predatory gleam in his eye.
I thought that there might be such a gleam in the royal Duke’s eye, then chided myself. Most likely it was nothing but a shaft of light through the glazed windows, or simply amusement at my lapse into trivialities.
‘Forgive me, my lord,’ I found myself saying yet again. His reply was plain. ‘You have asked pardon enough, my lady. You did right to come to me. I will arrange that you take up a position as damsel in my wife’s household.’
He hesitated, the pause drawing out to fill the room. There was no doubt that he was frowning. Apprehension built again, a wad of sheep’s wool to dry my throat.
‘No,’ he said. The harshness of his tone unnerved me. ‘That is not what I want…’ And stretching out a hand towards me, he added: ‘I had forgotten how very beautiful you are. Your face has a grace, a translucent loveliness beyond my recall. And if you deigned to smile at me once in a while, it would illuminate every corner of the room.’
Which robbed me of the ability either to smile or to make any coherent response at all. Not understanding why the Duke should flatter me so highly—or was it flattery?—simply hearing the denial of what he had offered barely a minute ago, I took an uneasy step back, rejecting the thought that he might actually expect me to place my hand in his, and replied to the least shocking part of his speech.
‘Forgive me for being importunate, my lord.’ I forced my voice to remain uninflected. ‘I should leave. Until you have decided where I might be of service. Perhaps at some point in the future. I am sure that with the coming of drier weather in spring the problems of Kettlethorpe will not seem so overwhelming.’
I closed my lips, angry that I had been drawn into such a show of weakness. I would not beg. I would not make more excuses. It not being in my nature to ask again where I had been refused, I curtsied, a brisk farewell. ‘I am grateful that you received me, my lord.’ I turned to walk towards the door, pondering at this strange outcome. The Duke did not have the name for being a man who played fast and loose with the sensibilities of his dependents.
‘Don’t leave, Katherine.’
It was not a request. Suddenly it was very personal, and I halted.
‘Don’t go.’
I looked back over my shoulder but did not turn, my sole thought to depart from that room and the humiliating refusal he had just handed to me.
‘But you said that you did not wish to arrange a position for me, my lord.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Then what do you want, my lord?’
An inappropriately peremptory question perhaps, but by now I admitted to profound irritation. His dark hair might lay feathered against brow and cheek, curling immaculately against his neck; his elegant figure might express the epitome of earthly authority; he might be the proudest man I knew; yet he was still a man, prone to strange moments of inconsistency. And, as if to prove me right, he spoke the words that undermined every tenet I had been raised to honour.
‘I don’t want you as governess to my children. I don’t want you as damsel for my wife. I want you. I want you for my own.’
He did not attempt to moderate his voice to any degree, a voice used to issuing commands on a battlefield, in the cut and thrust of Parliament or in fiery debate with merchants over the extortionate level of taxes. The words reached me, with perfect clarity in their meaning.
‘I want you, Lady Katherine de Swynford.’
Now, slowly, every sense suspended in shock, I turned to face him, unable to lower my gaze from his.
‘I want you.’ He strode forward, and before I could thrust them behind my back he had clasped my hands in his. ‘Do you understand what I am saying? I want to kiss you, and I don’t mean a formal salute to your undoubtedly pretty fingertips.’ Which he instantly executed with neat precision. ‘I want to take you to my bed.’
Those fingertips lay nerveless in his clasp, my lips parted, but no words issued. Every sense, every feeling, seemed to be frozen in shock. In outrage when he raised one hand as if he would touch my cheek. I stiffened, anticipating what must surely be a caress. Then he simply ran his fingers along the edge of my veil, putting to rights its elegant fall. And I exhaled slowly, until he demanded:
‘I think you are not averse to me?’ He made of it a question. ‘Katherine…’ There was the exhalation, the familiar impatience that I recognised so well, but his voice and face were as smooth as the silk I had once worn, as I had hoped to wear again. ‘Will you come to me? You are a widow, owing loyalty to no man. You are without a protector. Will you give yourself into my keeping and allow me the honour of being your lover?’
Now I looked at him in sheer disbelief. John of Lancaster, the perfect knight, the most honourable and chivalrous of King Edward the Third’s sons, newly wed to Constanza of Castile a matter of months ago. And I, at twenty-two years widowed and of good repute, raised by his royal mother to uphold all the precepts of piety and virtuous dignity. And he was asking me if I would be his leman.
‘You stir my loins, Katherine de Swynford.’
Well, that pronouncement I could not mistake. The words slammed into my understanding. Was the Duke exerting some droit de seigneur, demanding my compliance? I did not wait the length of a breath to consider and select a reply; there was only one word I could say.
‘No.’ It was as flat a denial as I coul
d summon.
‘Is that a considered refusal?’
‘Yes. My answer is no.’
‘Why not?’
I flushed. His brows indicated that he was surprised. ‘No,’ I repeated. ‘I don’t need to consider it.’ And bracing myself, for John of Lancaster had a chancy temper, I added, in case he had not taken my meaning: ‘My answer is without qualification. No, my lord, I will not. How could you ask it of me?’ I tugged my hands from his, thinking that perhaps I should escape before the torrent was released.
It was too late.
The Plantagenet prince lifted his chin as if he could not envisage a refusal, and then as I tensed against the verbal assault that would assuredly fall on my head, he gave a shout of laughter that reverberated from the walls.
Which was inexplicable. Was he mocking me? I bridled.
‘I see nothing to laugh at,’ I remarked coldly.
On which he stopped to draw in a breath, his eyes still gleaming with whatever it was that had moved him to a show of mirth.
‘You have a way with words, Lady Katherine.’
‘Because I said no?’
‘Exactly. I could not possibly mistake your sentiments, could I?’ He seized my hand again, and before I could stop him, saluted my fingers with a perfect propriety, at the same time as he executed a courtly bow.
‘I will have to make do with that after all,’ he observed, running his thumb across my fingertips.
‘And that is all I will offer you, my lord,’ I responded. That my hand tingled was not to be considered.
The Duke laughed again, but briefly. Whatever humour he had discovered in my predicament, or his own, had fled.
‘It seems that I have been too previous in my request. Now it is my turn to ask pardon. Forgive my insensitivity.’ He paused, his expression grave, the tendons of his jaw stark. And then a gleam appeared in his eye as he added: ‘But I should warn you, Lady Katherine. I will not be denied. It is not in my nature to accept so determined a rebuttal.’
And as he strode from the audience chamber, as his footsteps faded, as he crossed the antechamber beyond and took the stairs to the upper floor, I was left to wonder if I had imagined the whole unnerving incident. But when I heard his final parting shot, delivered to me and echoing from the well of the stairs, there could be no denying his meaning. There was no misinterpretation on my part of the whole of that inexplicable episode. His final words, which had floated back to me as clearly as if he had been standing in the room, had been quite as unambiguous as all the rest.
I sank down where he had left me, onto a stool that had been pushed with its companion against one of the walls. Hands clasped together, so tightly that my knuckles showed white against my dark skirts, I stared at the tapestry on the facing wall, a masterpiece in silk and wool.
Of all the tapestries in the superbly appointed Savoy palace, why did it have to be this one, with its frivolous portrayal of courtly love, a lady and her lover languishing in a field of blossoms beneath a flowering tree, while silky rabbits frolicked at their feet. He held a hawk on his fist; her arms were entwined around his neck, her hair mingling with his as he reclined in her arms. His stitched eyes were admiring; her red lips were full of longing. I imagined they were not wed, or in any way concerned about the sinfulness of their relationship. They looked untrammelled by any pious demands on their virtuous behaviour.
‘I wager you would share your lover’s bed without any holy water sprinkled over you,’ I informed the red-haired wanton, crossly.
I thought that she smirked as I imagined her reply. ‘And would you be prepared to languish in the arms of a lover, Katherine de Swynford?’
I most certainly would not. I was no Alice Perrers, infamous royal mistress, who shared the King’s bed with bold impunity, careless of the vilification. My behaviour must be beyond criticism. I must be able to kneel at my prie-dieu or before my priest with a clean heart. How could the Duke have so demeaned himself, and me, to offer me such an outrageous position? I was no wanton.
I want to kiss you.
He had had the temerity to make such a request of me, clad as I was in full widow’s weeds from chin to toe to indicate my deepest mourning. If my dark robes had not heralded my state to the whole world, the all-enclosing wimple and long veil should have been as obvious as a slap in the face to any man with ulterior motives. I was no loose harlot, willing to accept any position offered at court to secure my future comforts.
Flexing my fingers, I smoothed the black cloth over my knees. Hugh had been dead so short a time, struck down in the Duke’s own service in Aquitaine. Did the Duke think I would soil my husband’s memory by leaping into his bed—or that of any man—at the first opportunity? I could not comprehend any action of mine in the past to give him the opinion that I would care so little for my reputation, or for God’s judgement on what would be a blatant act of adultery.
Adultery.
The harsh judgement shivered over me and as my outrage built, I pondered all I knew of the Duke. A prince with a reputation for high-minded courtesy and chivalry, he had adored his first wife, Blanche, and was plunged into desolation by her untimely death three years before. He would never have strayed from her side. And now he had a new wife, a marriage of three months’ standing, and the prospect of a new child and a new kingdom to rule if he could enforce Constanza’s claim to Castile in his own right. A man of ambition, the Duke would do nothing to jeopardise the authority in that distant kingdom if he wore its crown. He would not take a mistress within three months of bedding a new wife.
It was all beyond sense. The Duke of Lancaster was not the mindlessly pretty, disreputable young man of the tapestry whose sole concern was dalliance.
And yet, at the same time I was forced to acknowledge that the puissant Duke of Lancaster, raised in royal indulgence from his cradle, was the possessor of a will as strong as cold steel. I will not be denied, he had said. It is not in my nature to accept so determined a rebuttal.
It was an uncomfortable thought.
And my next proved to be an even more disconcerting companion.
Was the fault mine? Had I, however inadvertently, however cleverly cautious I had considered myself to be, encouraged the Duke to think that I would welcome so impious a request? I could not imagine that I had dropped so careless a word, made so flirtatious a gesture, just as I was certain that I had never led him to believe that I would step so far beyond seemly behaviour. Inappropriate desires and longings, even if I had them, were to be held under restraint and confessed only before the priest.
I cast my mind back over the three years since I had left the household on Duchess Blanche’s death, when we had all been deluged in mourning black, overwrought with grief. The only occasion on which I had seen the Duke was two years ago at the interment of Queen Philippa in Westminster Abbey, when he had pinned a mourning brooch to my bodice. Hardly an occasion for unseemly flirtation.
So perhaps I had misconstrued the whole of the past hour, making my present tumbling concerns entirely irrelevant. But of course, I had not misconstrued it. I would have been witless to put a wrong interpretation on his parting shot
And I don’t like you in widow’s weeds, he had informed me from a distance. They don’t become you. If I were your lover I would clothe you in silk and cloth of gold.
No, I was under no delusion about that: so intimate, so personal a comment on how I looked, what I wore and how he would remedy it. What right had he, when custom demanded that I wear mourning for a year? Vanity—assuredly a sin—lit a little flame of anger, as I spread out my skirts, disliking the weight of them in the voluminous amount of material, fretting that my wimple and veils leached colour from my skin. I knew I did not look my best, and was woman enough to regret it.
But how dare he remark on it?
And why had he laughed at my refusal?
I was furiously unsettled, for my future was still dependent on the Duke. He had not yet made an answer to my request. Had he changed his mi
nd entirely in the face of my flat rejection?
With a swish of my hated widow’s weeds I turned my back on the couple deliriously in love, wishing the smug lover buried under his blossoms, and strode off to return to normality and the company of those I knew, a household for whom I had a deep affection. A good bout of common sense and feminine gossip would do the trick. As for the lovers, the cunning rabbits would soon eat up the blossoms—and then where would they be?
I made my way to the royal nurseries.
Feeling an urge to knock on a door that I would once have walked through without a second thought, I resisted. Opening it, I walked through. How familiar the scene was: nurse and chambermaid, governess and damsel and sempstress, all intent on the burden of care of the three precious Lancaster children. Once as damsel to Duchess Blanche I had been one of this number, and would wish to be so again. There, at their lessons, were three little girls, two of them with royal blood, all much grown since I last set eyes on them: the ducal daughters, Philippa and Elizabeth at eleven and eight years, eyes trained seriously on their psalters—although it had to be said that Philippa showed more concentration than her sister who cradled a tabby kitten on her lap—while Henry—how he had grown!—all of four years old now, stood at the side of a lady who was engaged in explaining to him the illustrations in a book. And then there was the third little girl, whose age I knew precisely…
For a moment I simply stood and watched the scene in all its busyness, my heart so overburdened with love that tears welled. It had been an emotional day, one way or another. I swallowed and took another step.
‘Good day, my lady.’
I curtsied.
The lady with the book looked up, expression arrested between irritation and then gradual recognition. The book was slowly closed and placed out of Henry’s reach. The lady exhaled slowly.
‘Katherine, as I live and breathe…’