The Scandalous Duchess

by Anne O'Brien

  ‘I am grateful.’ I curtsied. ‘Do I take any message, my lady?’

  ‘I care not. I will not see him. He has no thought for me.’

  Which caused justice to take a hold. ‘But he does, my lady.’

  ‘How can you say that? When he has banished my damsels to some distant place of confinement? So I am punished!’

  I could think of no reply. The Duke had ordered the gossiping damsels to Nuneaton Abbey to learn discretion, but any attempt on my part to defend the Duke was superfluous—the Duchess marched out, leaving a palpable lightness in the air of the schoolroom. I inhaled sharply, pondering what I had achieved in my troubled relationship with Constanza, until I grew aware of Philippa standing quietly beside me.

  ‘Are you going to see my father?’ Without asking permission, she picked up my discarded letter, and I allowed it, since her tone was not judgemental. I let her be.

  ‘Yes. I am.’

  ‘Will you come back to us?’

  It was a question that startled me in its maturity. Philippa was old enough to understand the implications of that recent exchange, and condemn me for the choice I had made. She was no longer the little girl who had clung to my skirts when I had left the household after her mother’s death. I must tread carefully here if my authority over her, and our affection, meant anything to me. I did not want to read disdain in her youthful regard, and so I tweaked the soft folds of her coif, raising the glimmer of a smile.

  ‘Do you want me to?’ I asked lightly.

  Philippa did not answer. Instead: ‘My father says here that he has missed you.’ She looked down at the letter that was still in her hand as if she had every right to read it. ‘It does not say that he loves you. I thought he would have written that.’

  I stiffened, unable for a heartbeat to dredge up a reply, then decided that she deserved my honesty, and I her disapproval if she chose to give it. Philippa could not be cushioned from what the household knew and she had the right to respond as her growing mind saw fit, even if her disdain hurt me.

  ‘How do you know that he does?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve seen him look at you.’

  ‘And he gave you a merlin,’ Elizabeth, who had joined her sister, added.

  I raised my brows at a logic I could not follow. ‘So he did. The Duke gives many presents. He is a very generous man.’

  ‘Yes.’ Philippa picked up the point, tapping her sister on her neatly braided head with the letter. ‘He gives costly gifts. When he does not care about the receiver, he gives a silver cup, jewelled and with a cover. But to you he gave a merlin, because he knows you enjoy hunting.’ Then, after reading to the end: ‘My father says he wants you to be with him. Is it a sin, when my father is wed?’

  I regarded her steadily. ‘It is not what I would advise for you.’

  ‘I think I would want a husband of my own,’ Philippa agreed, returning to her seat and the exploits of Lancelot and Guinevere, another adulterous couple. ‘But it must make you very happy. To be so greatly loved.’

  Astonished at her calm acceptance of a relationship that might justifiably have stirred her to rank disapproval, I could think of nothing to say other than ‘Yes, it makes me very happy.’

  And, oh, it did. Deliriously happy, as it did in that moment. It had the power to stir the flames of the most intense joy that could be imagined when we were together. That it could cast me into a pit of despair when we were parted was a consequence of that love that I must accept.

  But I said none of that.

  I was packed and gone within the day, stopping only when the other Philippa, my sister—and far less accommodating of my disgraceful lifestyle—made her way to my side in the courtyard.

  ‘Will this happen often?’

  ‘When he needs me.’ I was trenchant.

  ‘And you need him.’ How blistering she could be, in so few words.

  ‘Yes. When I need him. When will I ever not need him?’ Short of time, risking a rebuff, I stepped forward and hugged her before she could retreat. And since she did not, we kissed, a sisterly reconciliation of sorts.

  ‘Give him comfort,’ she whispered.

  ‘I will.’

  Constanza’s acquiescence had instilled in me a new power, an assurance that seemed to grow within me with every breath I took, with every mile I covered towards The Savoy.

  The Savoy was uncomfortably quiet to my mind, without children’s voices, the servants solemn and soft-footed. As if there was an illness in the house. Or a death. I did not like it.

  ‘Where is my lord the Duke?’

  ‘In the library, my lady.’

  ‘I will announce myself.’

  I did not knock, and he did not hear as I opened the door, absorbed as was often the case. He sat at a table where the light fell on his work, but, unusually, it did not seem to me that he saw the documents in front of him or the contents of the coffer to his right. Rather his thoughts were far away, taken up with some planning, some regret perhaps. Some ghastly scene from events in Aquitaine. Always lithe and rangy, I thought he had shed weight that he could ill-afford, but then starvation was no respecter of rank. I walked towards him until I stood at his side as once before. And as on that first time, I placed my hand on his shoulder.

  For a long, wordless moment his gaze held mine, in its glitter a great distancing and a wealth of grief and disappointment that wounded my heart. The failed campaign had touched him heavily.

  ‘John…’ I said. There was nothing else to say.

  Then his self-command was back in place, and he smiled as if for me to be there with him was the most natural thing in the world, the most looked-for blessing. As if there were no restrictions on either our movements or our loyalties, and in the face of such a welcome I felt tears gather in my throat, and my heart seemed to be so swollen with love for him that it filled my breast so that I could scarcely breathe.

  ‘I wanted you to come.’

  ‘Yes.’ I took the liberty of touching his cheek with my fingertips, the gentlest of caresses. ‘If you recall, you ordered me to do so.’

  How sure I felt in my decision. Constanza had given me leave, not just by her dismissal but by her rejection of the Duke’s suffering in her cause. Her lack of compassion, her vicious criticisms of all he had done, her lack of interest in his present state, had presented to me the freedom I needed to leave Tutbury and be openly with him here. None of which I explained. The Duke would not see my need for permission, or even necessarily understand that guilt still had a habit of perching like a hungry raptor on my wrist. Sometimes I was impatient with that wily bird. But Constanza’s condemnation of her husband had ensured that the raptor took wing: I was free of conscience.

  The Duke had captured my hand, and was engaged in kissing his way across my knuckles in what could be construed, my fluttering heart announced, as light-hearted seduction.

  ‘I will listen, if you want to tell me how bad it was,’ I offered, still uncertain of his mood.

  ‘No.’ How wrong I had been, for there was suddenly no control at all in his face. Nothing at all of light-heartedness. Only rampant desire in the rawness of his voice. ‘This is not the time for exchanging views on English policy.’

  Standing abruptly, arms sliding around my waist, he clasped me close, his mouth hot and demanding on mine.

  ‘You will stay.’ A command.

  ‘As long as you need me.’

  ‘For ever.’ He framed my face in his hands. ‘Before God, I want you, Katherine. I want you now.’

  I shivered at his expression, at the slide of his fingers against my throat before he all but dragged me to the chamber I used at The Savoy, delighting me with his concern for my comfort in familiar surroundings despite the hot emotion that drove him.

  ‘When did you last sit at ease and laugh and talk of inconsequential matters?’ I asked, striving to keep the moment free from high drama.

  ‘Laughter? What’s that?’ He was already loosening his belt, sitting to unlace his boots
with urgent fingers.

  ‘Do you realise how long it is since we were last together?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m sure you will tell me,’ he replied, actions governed by intense need.

  ‘Almost a full year.’

  ‘Then we will celebrate our reunion. We have spent enough time apart. We will spend no more. Stop talking, and come to me.’

  Then high drama overtook us, and neither of us was in a mood to deny it as the Duke stripped me to my shift, and then took even that from me, trailing his fingers over the silvered lines of past child-bearing. They were not too disfiguring in the soft glow of costly candles whose flickering hid the worst ravages, and he knew them well anyway. I did not flinch from his appraisal.

  It was a reunion of passion, tumbled and heated with no time for soft seduction. I had no need of it, and the Duke was stirred by an inner need to re-own me. It was a statement of love and longing and joy in being together again, a rejection of the failure and despair across the sea. Pain and loss were fast subsumed beneath the fire of lust that used no words, no endearments, nothing but the slide of flesh against flesh, hot kisses on even hotter skin. We feasted on each other, a glorious celebration in the end, to prove that love could conquer all and give relief from anguish.

  What was there to say? We were together and our love could burn as brightly as the sun at noon, or as softly as the lapping of a kitten’s tongue.

  He made me laugh anyway, and I reciprocated, my lips and fingertips explored anew the ducal skin. He made me sigh too for notwithstanding the driving force, the Duke sought my pleasure as well as his own.

  ‘Allow me to caress the arches of your delectable feet. I think I have neglected your feet.’

  I was devastated by his success. My whole body was light with exultation.

  ‘You cannot imagine how I have missed you,’ he said, pinning me to the bed.

  ‘Of course not,’ I agreed. ‘I have been far too occupied to give you a second thought.’

  My eyes were wet with tears, which he kissed away with tenderness. He understood all that I would not tell him. He knew how hard it was for women to be left behind and imagine the worst.

  ‘My love for you knows no end,’ I informed him when we at last took time to draw breath.

  ‘For which I thank God,’ he replied, and he was smiling at last.

  Yet although I slid into some species of exhausted sleep in his arms, I knew that, as unconsciousness claimed me, he lay awake.

  I woke to find him gone from the bed, but he had not left me. In shirt and hose he was stretched out on the low window seat, back propped against the stonework, a little pottery bowl in his hand. I thought that he was at ease, until I realised that the scene beyond the window did not take his attention. So I had not dragged his mind from the loss of English life for long, or from whatever it was that had now placed its hand on him. Grief, I would have said, studying the stark lines. I lay and watched him for a little while, shocked to see such torment. He was eating steadily from the bowl, as if the delicacy would assuage his worry as well as his appetite.

  Eventually when I could remain apart no longer and the dish was empty—how could I enjoy my own happiness when he was clearly bleeding from some inner wound?—I wrapped one of the linen sheets round me since no other garment came to hand and walked slowly to stand at his side. But there I was even more disturbed, for although he acknowledged me with an arm sliding comfortably around my waist, a mask instantly fell into place to hide the rank despair of minutes ago. The mask was good, the muscles of his face relaxed and I followed his lead, calmly relieving him of the dish, placing it on the floor beside us, because I dare not tap the ugly depths of that distress.

  Kneeling beside him, resting my head against his shoulder and feeling the tension there that the mask could do nothing to hide, I changed my mind.

  ‘Was it very bad?’ I asked. I thought he needed to speak of it after all. He did not resist.

  ‘It was bad. Our army suffered beyond belief.’ Then: ‘I hear no good of what I did.’ Straight to the point, as ever.

  ‘No.’ I could not deny it. The loss of men and land had come in for scathing criticism, the Duke’s reputation ravaged.

  ‘My policy in France has been stripped bare. Once we ruled a mighty Empire stretching from Calais to Bordeaux. And now we hold the towns but no land to connect them. Our Empire is no more and I failed to bring England a victory…’ He looked away towards the window, as if he could absorb the grumbling complaints from the London streets even at this distance. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘How can I judge?’ I combed my fingers through his hair. Nothing I could say would make matters any better. He would have to face his demons, as the burden demanded by royal blood, but I would stay at his side as he faced them. He would not be alone.

  ‘I am of a mind…’ He hesitated. ‘I think I was wrong…’

  ‘And I never thought to hear you admit that.’ I essayed a little humour.

  And indeed the faint remnants of a frown were smoothed out by a wry twist of his lips. ‘Do you accuse me of arrogance, Lady Katherine? Many would.’ And then with a lift of a shoulder: ‘What value is there for England in such a war, to hold fast to territories so far away and surrounded by those who would take them from us?’

  Such an admission astonished me, and he saw it.

  ‘Should I not admit to it, when I am coming to believe that it is true? What do we gain, except a drain on our wealth and the death of our soldiery? The Pope is calling for negotiations and a lasting peace. I think we should do it.’

  ‘It will not be well-received,’ I ventured.

  ‘I care not. It’s a storm I must weather. I am not popular now, and the losses at Bordeaux will bring more invective down on my head, but who can harm me?’ The Duke’s sardonic smile became even more pronounced. ‘Consider the advantages. Peace will bring an increase in trade, lower taxes. We cannot continue as we are with this vast drain of money and taxation so high that it all but beggars our merchants. The stain on England’s reputation is a wound on my soul.’

  ‘Parliament will not support peace with France,’ I suggested.

  ‘God’s Blood! I’ll be damned if I let Parliament dictate my policy.’

  Which promised no good for the future when foreign affairs and finance must collide. ‘Will the King agree? To peace-making?’ I asked, to divert into calmer channels.

  ‘I must persuade him. Since my brother is too ill to hold the reins himself it’s for me to take up the banner of England’s future. I’ll do it readily, with or without Parliament behind me. They’ll follow me if they know what’s good for them.’

  And as I felt a single, solid beat of his heart beneath my hand, my presentiment that this was not the full cause of his wretchedness was enforced as the Duke turned his face against my hair and, beneath my hands, in his laboured breathing, I felt the earlier grief rush back in a torrent.

  ‘John…’ I whispered aghast.

  He shook his head but I persisted. When he might have pulled away, I held onto his shoulders so that he must look at me. It was all I could give him. And by some strange female intuition, I realised what it must be to make such pain live in his eyes. The breath continued to shudder in his lungs.

  ‘It’s the Prince, isn’t it?’

  ‘He’s dying.’

  My heart throbbed with reflected pain. His much-loved older brother, his hero, the perfect prince.

  ‘I doubt my brother will live to see our father die.’ And then because the pain had spread its tendrils much further: ‘What will England do with a child king? I doubt Richard will be more than ten years when the crown drops into his lap. What then?’

  ‘I will tell you what then,’ I replied with smooth urgency, fastening my hands tight around his wrists. ‘You will stand at Richard’s side. You will support and guide him until he is of an age to rule in his own right. You will do it for your father and your brother and because it is your duty to your name and to England. Tha
t is what will happen.’

  I could not reassure him about the Prince’s health, but I could paint a bright picture of the future in which his role would be so very important. I pressed my lips against his brow as I felt at last an infinitesimal softening in his shoulders.

  ‘You see it very clearly,’ he observed.

  ‘I see the truth,’ I replied. Here was no place for doubts, and so I lightened my tone. ‘Would you argue the point with me? I don’t advise it.’

  And the Duke’s eyes were now clearer, and his mouth curved in a vestige of a smile. ‘My thanks, Lady de Swynford.’

  ‘My pleasure, my lord,’ I responded archly, still intent on distraction because I could do no other. ‘And I have to say, you have eaten all my sweet pears.’

  ‘I have?’

  I nudged the empty bowl with my toe. ‘What do I demand in reparation? I swear you have as great a sweet tooth as young Henry, and I’ve never seen any boy clear a dish of marchpane as fast as he can.’

  He laughed, a little rough at the edges, but still a laugh. It was not from his heart, and I had perforce to accept the limitations on my powers. It was his brother who weighed heavily in his mind, and I had to allow it as I acknowledged that I could do nothing to lift the burden, and yet my heart was steadier, for the Duke had opened a new door for me, one that I had never been allowed to step through before, allowing me the right to trespass in his own emotions and fears. But only as far as he saw fit. All I could do, with gratitude that he gave me freedom to know the thoughts that troubled him, was distract and wrap him around with my love when he needed it. It was my pleasure and my heart’s delight to do so. I knew that he laid that burden down before no one else.

  Was it not a precious milestone in the journey that we were travelling together?

  ‘You should sleep now, John,’ I said.

  And he did, deep and dreamless. For the first time, I thought, for many nights. I lay awake to watch over him. Was that not the essence of love? It was for me. Sometimes it was all I could do for him. And was that not another lesson for me to learn? I had had no recognition of the inner strength I would need to draw on as the truth of our relationship was exposed. Now as our love grew, I needed to be strong for him too. For who else was there for him to turn to in grief or despair?