The Scandalous Duchess

by Anne O'Brien

‘And on my patience!’ I responded as my sister’s barbs got the better of me.

  Lady Alice, falling back to walk with us, clicked her tongue. Philippa stalked off ahead. I sighed.

  ‘I promise to offer up two novenas in penance,’ I remarked, but with a wry smile.

  Lady Alice laughed. ‘But your sister is right. Something is troubling your equanimity.’

  ‘Nothing that a good night’s sleep and a cup of warm ale would not cure. If the Duchess can allow me out of her sight for an hour or two.’

  ‘Perhaps she will become less demanding when the Duke arrives. It will be good to see him.’

  I lay on my bed, the hangings drawn back to allow even a breath of air. I wished with all my heart that the Duke would come.

  ‘I present to you your daughter, my lord.’

  The Duke had arrived at Hertford.

  But I did not want this. I did not want to be in this formal audience chamber with the newest royal child in my arms, under the combined eyes of a nursemaid, a servant, a liveried page and William de Burgh, the chaplain, but the office had been given to me. Since Constanza remained secluded in her chambers until she was churched, it was decided that I should be the one to present Katalina, now two weeks old, to her father.

  I did not want to do this at all.

  I had once shivered at that brutal word hypocrisy. Here it stared me in the face, that I, the mistress, should present the child of the legitimate wife to her lover.

  My excuses were ignored, rolled over like a charge of cavalry, my suggestions for one of the Castilian damsels to have the honour swatted away. Mistress Elyot declared herself too busy. And at least, she added, with a jaundiced eye to the damsels, I could speak good French when I conversed with my lord, which was more than…

  I pondered the wisdom of handing the child to Philippa, but she would want to know why I was reluctant and I could not say. Philippa had waved me on, although she was not entirely pleased at what was considered an honour for me.

  So there I stood in the audience chamber with the babe in my arms. Uncomfortable with the whole situation, I governed my features and acted out the pretence, taking as my pattern Master Ingoldsby’s formidable austerity to me when faced with some conundrum.

  The Duke entered, having been informed by Robert Swillington, the Chamberlain, that one of the damsels would present the new child. Even though he had the appearance of a man just emerged from an edgy diplomatic bout, he took in the scene with one sweeping survey, and there was no hesitation as he strode in with perfect sangfroid. Yet I spoke immediately to give him fair warning that I was the damsel.

  ‘Your daughter, my lord. She is two weeks old and thrives. Duchess Constanza is in good health and is eager for your visit.’

  How well I had learned my announcement.

  How well his features had settled into enigmatic lines. I was merely a servant, no different from young Henry Warde, the page at his heel.

  He stopped before me, and I offered the swaddled bundle in case he wished to hold her, watching as his gaze dwelt for a moment on the child, then lifted to me. My hands trembled as if the little body weighed heavily, until the Duke took her in his arms, as I knew he would, his face softening as the baby yawned.

  ‘Tell the Duchess that I look for her churching and her return, if you will. Tell her I will send a gift.’

  He touched the dark curls that escaped the little linen coif, and bent to press his lips to the infant’s forehead.

  ‘The Duchess wishes her to be called Katherine, my lord,’ I stated carefully, adding: ‘After St Katherine, you understand.’

  My words brought a wry twist to his mouth. ‘I will not argue against it, although it would not have been my choice.’

  ‘The Duchess calls her Katalina.’

  ‘Which is good. My thanks to you all for the care of my wife.’

  The nursery maid curtsied, the chaplain beamed and I continued to stand with my rigidly schooled expression.

  Such a multitude of emotions expressed between us, without any evidence on his face or mine, yet his were clear to me. I saw his pleasure, after his initial disappointment, as with any man, that the child was not a male heir for Castile. The tenderness with which he supported the child. His surprise that the babe should be called Katherine. And a thought touched me to awaken all my insecurities and the green glitter of jealousy that sparkled through my blood. I had no history with this man to call on when uncertainty struck. I had no place in this family. The Duke, with only one son to his name, would desire more children with his wife. They would of necessity continue to share a bed and the intimate act of procreation. Which I must accept, however hard it might be.

  Unaware of the lurch of dismay that began to build beneath my sleekly buttoned bodice, the Duke said: ‘Tell the Duchess that I send her felicitations on this happy birth of our daughter.’ He glanced up. ‘But she wishes it was a son, of course.’

  ‘Yes, my lord. She hopes for more children, an heir for Castile.’

  He gave the child to the nursery maid, not to me, but it was to me that he spoke. ‘Will you talk to me? About the Duchess? Tell me how she has fared.’

  All the time that he was speaking he was unpinning a sapphire from the shoulder cape of his hood, dextrously transferring it to his daughter’s wrappings.

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  And then the calmly beautiful chamber with its carved hammer-beams and lightly plastered walls was empty, apart from the two of us, and the atmosphere was not calm at all. We simply stood apart, not talking, not touching, the long drawn-out weeks of our separation formidable between us.

  It will always be like this, a voice warned in my mind. It will never get better. How could it when you will live most of your lives apart, snatching moments that are tainted with guilt and anticipation of loss?

  I waited for him to speak first.

  ‘Smile at me.’

  I smiled. The muscles of my face felt stiff, unused.

  ‘Speak to me.’

  ‘You are right welcome, my lord.’

  ‘Not like that.’ His voice was unexpectedly harsh. He did not smile at me. ‘Speak to me as a beloved to her lover.’

  The time and space between us had been too long. It had created a chasm in my mind and I was not able to step easily across it, for ranged on the opposite side, standing closely with the Duke was Constanza with the child in her arms. Our love was too new for me to rest on it. I had no safe harbour, no anchorage that would hold me fast and secure. How could I survive without some continuity of touch, of speech? Of shared kisses and soft endearments? I had nothing. It was as if I felt my way blindly through a maze.

  ‘I cannot…’ I said, fretfully. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘It is not easy, is it?’

  So he understood. And his understanding was as soothing as a bowl of hot frumenty on a cold morn. ‘No, it is not easy.’

  ‘Be brave, Katherine.’

  ‘I am trying.’

  ‘The child does not stand between us, any more than Constanza does.’

  ‘But sometimes my heart betrays me and I can see no path for my feet to follow.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  So I did, as we stood in the centre of that sumptuous room. ‘I fear that you will come to love them more than you need me. And that I will be rejected.’

  ‘Katherine…’

  I raised my hand in quick denial. ‘I know you will say that it isn’t so. I know what I must not ask of you…’

  ‘Because it is not so. Have I not proved to you?’

  ‘I cannot bear that we are apart for so long.’

  ‘Yet it must be.’

  He took a step and touched me, drawing the back of his forefinger along my throat to where my blood beat heavily. It was the first time that he had touched me, in public or in the privacy of his rooms, since I first shared his bed all those weeks ago at The Savoy.

  ‘You look tired. And paler than I recall.’

  ‘We have all suffered from the h
eat.’

  ‘How I have missed you…’

  ‘And I you.’

  I thought he might have held me, but approaching footsteps made him look up and draw back. By the time the Chamberlain pushed open the door, we were standing a good distance apart, I by the door, the Duke on the dais.

  ‘My lord.’ He bowed with the briefest of glances at me. ‘Forgive me. A courier from the Prince at Kennington. He says it is urgent.’

  ‘I will come. Ensure that the man has ale and food.’

  ‘Of course, my lord. It has been done.’

  The Duke made to follow, but stopped when he drew level with me and, for form’s sake, I curtsied with lowered eyes.

  ‘Prudence is a heavy burden,’ he said in response.

  I looked up, for once not even trying to hide my despair. Did I not know it? It was like balancing on a sword edge suspended over that chasm that I found so difficult to cross. Agonising for the feet to do the walking: fatally agonising to fall into the depths. Yet this was how we must live. I could not show him how gravely I had missed him in all those weeks apart. I could neither speak nor act, but must exist on these crumbs of conversation, when all I wished to do was to announce to the world: ‘This is the man I love.’

  ‘What is it?’ He searched my face.

  ‘Nothing,’ I whispered.

  ‘It is not a sin, Katherine.’ It was as if he had read my concerns.

  It is a love greater than I can sometimes bear. But I could not speak of it.

  ‘Come with me to London.’

  ‘I cannot.’

  ‘Yes, you can.’

  He left me without explanation. Why did he need to explain? Sometimes his conceit unnerved me.

  The Duke’s plan was a simple one. Far simpler than if he was planning a military campaign, I supposed, and put into operation with all the high-handed self-belief I had come to expect. I, as one of the Duchess Constanza’s senior damsels, he decreed, should be given the office of presenting this royal granddaughter to King Edward.

  With my court dress and my jewels packed, I was provided with a litter and outriders. A complete household of nurses and servants, so many for so small a person, accompanied the baby Katalina in her own litter, but I travelled in solitary luxury. Nothing was lacking to my comfort, from a welter of cushions to the spiced wine. I knew where the order had originated. On arrival, as Katalina was settled with her entourage into The Savoy nursery, I turned towards the room I had once shared with Philippa.

  ‘No, my lady.’ Sir Thomas Hungerford was standing at my shoulder.

  Perhaps I was expected to remain nearer the child. There was always Alyne’s room.

  ‘If you will accompany me, my lady.’ The steward had a certain stern disapproval about him, but he gestured expansively towards the ducal apartments. ‘My lord ordered that you should be housed here, in recognition of your service to the Duchess.’

  And he pushed open the door into one of the guest chambers.

  All I could think of was the contrast. Here all was opulence, luxury, comfort. My manor at Kettlethorpe was a peasant’s hovel in comparison.

  And so there I was settled, with two servants of my own to answer to any whim, leaving me with no role other than to enjoy the accommodations, for I was made free of the family rooms. I had no responsibilities except to feed my own pleasure. I could walk in the gardens, sit in the Duke’s library with his collection of books, venture out into the city with an escort, as I awaited the royal summons to take Katalina to the King.

  It was not the only summons I looked for. My blood sang with the anticipation, my heart scurrying like the rat in my undercroft at Kettlethorpe, as if I were some lovelorn girl.

  Within a day of my arrival, the Duke came.

  I had a week with him, seven whole, endless days that stretched before me, a se’enight of such magical sweetness, my heart was suffused with it. I did not think that I had ever known such untrammelled happiness as in those days, for we were still new lovers, still caught up in the glory of it, still untouched by the outside world.

  How did we use it, that precious freedom? Were we discreet?

  Without exception, for we both knew the importance of that discretion. In public we were never alone. We met in company. We dined in company. No slight was cast on the position of the Duchess, on my own reputation, nor on the Duke’s joy in the birth of a daughter. Any guest who visited in those days was brought to the nursery to admire this child who was heir to the throne of Castile. I curtsied as any good damsel should. The Duke took the child from me as he had done on that first day, to commend her beauty.

  ‘You will know Lady Katherine de Swynford,’ he introduced me to his brother Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, and his wife who, a valuable ring glittering on every one of her fine-boned fingers, regarded me as some species of upper servant. ‘Her care of my wife is beyond praise.’

  ‘Lady Katherine.’ Gloucester saluted my hand. ‘I knew of your return to my brother’s household.’

  ‘And I am honoured, my lord.’

  All seemly and formal, as it should be.

  But the nights…

  Where was the seemliness, the formality, of my nights? For when I dismissed my maidservant, the Duke came to me. And then he was the Duke no more.

  ‘John…!’

  I laughed as he kissed my shoulders, for I could call him by his name, which I could never do in the Great Hall or the public chambers. Even in my thoughts he was the Duke, as he had always been, royal to his fingertips.

  ‘Say that again,’ he ordered.

  ‘John.’ And I delighted in softening my voice until I made of its single syllable a caress.

  ‘I never thought that I would hear you call me by my given name so effortlessly.’

  Which brought to me how few people did so, outside his immediate family. Not even Constanza in my hearing chose to make use of such intimacy.

  ‘I will call you John,’ I repeated, for my pleasure and his. I stood at the foot of my bed in my shift, my court robes discarded, and whispered his name again as he drew me into his arms.

  ‘I cannot believe how much I have missed you.’ His lips were hot where my blood beat hard at the base of my throat. ‘Should I not be able to control my appetites? But with you I cannot.’ He cupped my cheeks so that I must meet his eyes. ‘Do you suppose Gloucester would have been shocked if I had kissed you at supper?’

  ‘No, but his Duchess might. She would have called for my excommunication at least,’ I said.

  Before he kissed me, I watched myself reflected in his gaze, saw my smile, the glow in my own eyes. I saw the planes of his face alter, tighten, as he read the desire in mine.

  ‘Will you lie with me? Will you lie with me, that we might—just for this night—and perhaps tomorrow—forget the world beyond these four walls?’

  ‘I will.’

  Ah, yes. We forgot the world. Or I did, and I think the Duke did too for those enchanted days when he conducted business from The Savoy yet found time to walk in the gardens when he knew he would meet me there with the child. The presence of the nursemaid who acted as unknowing chaperone could not stem the happiness that filled me from my pleated hair to the soles of my shoes.

  ‘I want you,’ the Duke said, his lips against mine when the night was ours again and the pleats were all undone.

  And so he proved it with a tenderness that belied his sometime reputation for harsh and impatient judgement, wooing me with soft words and compelling kisses. Until, with an unapologetic slide into male ribaldry, he ordered me to remove my shift:

  ‘Before I fall into pieces with longing.

  ‘I have a gentle cock,

  Croweth me day:

  He doth me risen early,

  My matins for to say…’

  And he tumbled me into his bed. The world was ours, to do with as we wished. I was entirely seduced.

  At the end, when I must return to Hertford, when an embrace would have been too painful, too indulgent, he simply hel
d my hands.

  ‘Always know, even when we are apart, when time does not allow me to touch your thoughts over the miles that separate us, that you are held close in my mind. Nothing will separate us. We are made to be together.’

  Our road stretched out before us without blemish. There were no personal gifts, no public displays of affection. I did not need them. I read his hunger for me in every careful choice he made to give me seven days of perfect delight. This would be my life, cared for and cherished, even in the servant-cushioned silence between us as we rode through the streets of London. The lengthy absences I could tolerate, my uneasy life at Constanza’s side I could support. The Duke’s ownership, wrapped around me, was a thing of beauty beyond compare.

  ‘Walk with me,’ he invited, for those final moments in the garden.

  And for me the world stood still, the air hot on my skin, the sun blinding my eyes.

  ‘I will walk with you,’ I replied.

  That is where it happened, that exact moment where I slid from being captivated by the Duke’s unquestionable glamour into the powerful clutches of pure love. I might speak of its intensity, I might read the romance of it, but I had never known it.

  Walk with me, he said.

  Until that moment, I had been tiptoeing in the safe shallows of love. Now I fell into its depths. I would walk with him until the day I died, of necessity matching my footsteps to his. Yet although the intensity of that moment was hammered into every element of my body, I did not speak of my shattering conversion, for I thought the Duke would not understand. I was content simply to enjoy his proximity amidst the scented shrubs.

  When I began my journey back to Hertford, my horizon was cloudless despite the farewell we had been forced to make. I was effortlessly, thoughtlessly, happy.

  I curtsied before Duchess Constanza, my hands clasped around the little jewelled casket quite secure. My mind was equally secure in the decision that had been forced on me since my return. My heart had plummeted to somewhere in the region of my gilded court shoes.

  ‘We are pleased to see you, Lady de Swynford.’

  How formal she was, even in her confinement, even with my intimate services to her. She had still to be churched and there was an air of restlessness about her slight figure. Her eyes remained fixed on my face, to my discomfort.