The Scandalous Duchess

by Anne O'Brien

  ‘Yes.’

  No point in dissembling. I had thought about it often, even if John had not. But it seemed that he had.

  ‘I will smooth your path. It will not be so very bad. Richard has never been hostile to you.’

  I knew he meant it, but how would it be possible? It did not take more than a woman’s instinct to know that there were many who would resent my startling promotion. It was not Richard I feared.

  ‘They will be astonished. It will be no more than a seven-day wonder,’ John announced, turning his mind to the greater importance of ruffling the ears of one of his hounds.

  Thus John brushed my megrims aside as a matter of inconsequence compared with a good run after a deer. How typical of a man not to see it. The inhabitants of the aristocratic hencoop would have much to say about my marriage, if I knew anything about them. They would be quick to put me in, as they saw it, my inferior place.

  My daughter knew the same.

  Arriving at Pontefract, Joan curtsied to me as if to the Queen of England herself before falling into my arms. The twinkle in her eye belied her stern expression as she stepped back and took stock. Married and newly widowed with two little daughters, she had lost none of her calm outlook on life.

  ‘So you are Duchess now,’ she observed, tucking her hand in my arm as we turned to walk indoors, out of a brisk wind that promised snow.

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘And are you growing into your new dignities?’

  ‘You know your mother.’ John had arrived to kiss his daughter. ‘She still feels an urge to supervise.’

  I could not deny it when he saluted my cheek, despite the audience of grooms and soldiery and a smirking huntsman, and assured me that he would return before dusk. He always had a thought for my peace of mind.

  ‘Go and gossip with your daughter,’ he added.

  ‘He looks happier than I have ever seen him, I think,’ Joan said as we watched him ride out.

  ‘Yes.’ My eye followed him until the cavalcade disappeared into the grey of the winter’s day. He did. The lines that had seemed ingrained on his return from Aquitaine had smoothed out. He was restored to all his old spirit. It pleased me that it might in some small measure rest on our happiness together.

  ‘You look happy too,’ Joan added, as if she saw the direction of my thoughts.

  ‘Happy? The word does not express half of what I am.’ There was nothing more to say.

  Joan slid me a glance. ‘You have thought about what they will say at court, haven’t you?’

  I had thought about nothing else.

  ‘What’s wrong, Katherine?’

  Joan had returned to her own household with a new marriage on her horizon, and I had ridden out with the Duke, hawks on our fists, the hounds milling round our horses’ hooves. It was an exhilarating spring day and the rabbits were good prey. John’s face was bright with the whip of the wind, and I rode beside him, trying to match his enthusiasm, until he handed over his hawk and mine to the falconers, and pulled my mount into a little space.

  I raised my brows with superlative skill. ‘Nothing. What should be wrong?’

  Without replying he removed my gloves, tucked them into the breast of his tunic and proceeded to rub my cold hands between his. ‘How long have we been together?’ he asked with apparent inconsequence.

  ‘Twenty-four years, I think.’

  ‘There! And I thought you would know, to the exact date and time.’ I heard the smile in his voice as he rescued my gloves and drew them back on. Then, having completed the task, the Duke instructed firmly: ‘Then let us try that again. What troubles you, my love?’

  For a moment I turned my face away so that he would be unable to see how much I had been distressed, for I now knew considerably more about the reception waiting for me in London. You are being ridiculous, I told myself. You have faced far worse than this. Are you not capable of conducting yourself with perfect propriety and seemliness at court?

  But despite all good sense, my belly would not tolerate food and sleep was a fitful thing with difficult dreams. I tried to hide it beneath a facade of smooth conversation and a loving spirit. I thought I was successful. The royal court could hold no terrors for me. If I could play the mummer through John’s public rejection of me and the ignominy as a whore at Walsingham’s hands, I could preserve a smiling equanimity as the wedded and bedded Duchess of Lancaster. Well, I thought I could.

  But now my reply to my husband was stark enough because the truth was unpalatable.

  ‘I have it on official authority that I am a mean, lowborn woman, not fit to fill the shoes of the sainted Blanche or the courageous Constanza. Sorry,’ as he frowned, ‘I did not mean it to sound quite like that.’

  ‘I know you didn’t. And who says that of you?’

  ‘The royal and courtly hen-roost.’

  He grunted, his hand closing warmly around mine again, undoubtedly in comfort. ‘And who specifically?’

  ‘The Duchess of Gloucester, the Countess of Arundel. Others—anyone with an ounce of royal or aristocratic blood from as far back as…’ My teeth snapped shut. I was having difficulty in keeping my temper. ‘They are women I did not see as enemies. Once the Countess of Arundel and I exchanged experiences on how to dose a sickly child. She was pleased enough to accept my help then, with a dose of boiled tansy roots to dispel worms.’

  ‘Worms?’

  The Duke had a tendency to laugh at inappropriate moments. I grimaced at the banality of my attack. ‘But now the Countess of Arundel and her like are sharpening their tongues and their talons. Perhaps they are not hens at all but hawks.’ I looked over to where my new merlin hunched on her perch with her fellow raptors. They were all prettier than the Duchess of Gloucester. ‘Or bitches!’ I added. ‘Even the Countess of Hereford has joined their ranks, so I am informed.’

  And that wounded me more than all the rest. I had thought her to be my friend, my daughter named for her. How could we share the suffering at Mary’s deathbed, as well as the joy at the birth of Mary’s sons, and then she disown me?

  John laughed. ‘It’s the marriage then. As we thought.’

  ‘No need for you to laugh. You are denounced too.’ Oh, the gossip, carefully expurgated by Joan, I had no doubt, had been detailed enough and Agnes had been bullied into repeating it for me. ‘You are guilty of defying convention, putting me above every woman in the realm, when I am not fit…’

  I took a breath, entirely ruffled, angry with their ability to make me feel unworthy. Of course they would hate me. John had made me pre-eminent over every last one of them. But I ought to have the presence to withstand their hostility. That was the problem, of course. I had not expected quite such a degree of virulence from women I knew well and who knew me.

  ‘It does not matter.’ His fingers were smooth as they stroked the soft leather over my wrist where my blood thundered.

  ‘It might.’ I worried at it, like a loose thread on a sleeve. ‘Men of power and title do not marry their mistresses. Oh, John—we should have foreseen this. Now I am condemned as an upstart while you are castigated as a fool…’

  ‘I am?’ I could just make out the little lines of a frown, not masked by the shadow of the velvet folds of his fringed and elegant chaperon. He never took kindly to criticism, but I might as well warn him.

  ‘You are a fool, they say, because you could have made a grand marriage for profit or alliance.’ I would not tell him that the epithet fool had come from the lips of his own brother of York. ‘But don’t despair. They’ll forgive you, with your high blood and noble rank. Whereas I will always be a woman of questionable morals and tainted blood, from a family of low degree. My reputation is tarnished beyond repair. You are a fool, but I am and always will be little better than a whore who has been raised beyond her station.’

  I watched as John’s brows registered astonishment at my bitterness and at the vicious detail of my informant.

  ‘Where did you get all of this?’

&nbs
p; ‘From those who write and gossip. It’s too good a scandal not to spread, isn’t it? I seem to have been causing a scandal for most of my life.’ My voice, caught on an excess of emotion, was whipped away by the stiff wind. ‘I’m sorry. I know you’ll say it’s not worth such a fuss—and yet it hurts me.’

  ‘I presume it’s Walsingham?’

  ‘Who else? He gossips worse than a woman. And to more effect, unfortunately.’

  ‘His words cannot hurt you now. You are my wife.’

  I was not soothed at all. ‘And because I am your wife, the Countess of Gloucester and her coterie will take their revenge, to prove to me that I am not superior. Do you know what angers them most? Well, you did warn me of it, didn’t you? That until the King weds again, you have made me the most pre-eminent woman in the land. The court women of my acquaintance are preparing to take a stand against me, to show me how inferior I am.’

  ‘Which is not so. Your family is entirely respectable.’

  ‘But not sufficiently noble for you!’

  ‘You can withstand that. What can they do to undermine your confidence? You know to an inch how to go on at court. What Queen Philippa did not know about court etiquette could be written on one of your very pretty fingernails. You cannot be tricked or undermined. You cannot be humiliated, or your behaviour made to appear inappropriate.’

  Which only repeated what I had told myself. And yet:

  ‘Do you know what they are saying?’ His compassion for my situation I thought to be waning, as would any man’s after such a deluge of hopeless misery from a woman who claimed to have superior intelligence. So I would shock him into seeing the fear that lived with me.

  ‘The Duchess of Gloucester,’ I announced, ‘says that for them to acknowledge me as Duchess of Lancaster would dishonour them.’

  My nails dug into John’s hand. I was only aware of it when he flinched and changed his grip. The thought of the revenge they were planning, and such a particular one, had me in its maw.

  ‘They say they’ll never enter a room or attend a ceremony where I am present. They will turn their bejewelled shoulders against me. Can I tolerate that? They will refuse to sully their feet by walking on the same paving, refusing to consort with me, of so base a birth. And’—I took another breath—‘they say that our marriage is not even sanctioned, that the word from the papal mouth does not grant a full dispensation. He has to actually write it down in sanctified ink to achieve that. And until it happens we are still living in a sinful union!’

  There were tears on my cheeks, from anger more than grief that they had discovered the power to undermine my contentment. With legitimacy and respectability I had hoped for acceptance. The papal dispensation, which now apparently did not even exist, had been the bedrock of my position. But my marriage was not papally blessed. I was still a whore. I would be persona non grata for ever.

  I scrubbed at the persistent tears with my sleeve.

  Throughout which performance, John remained irritatingly undisturbed, as if this final dart aimed at our happiness was not news to him.

  ‘This is what will happen, my dear love. We will approach His Holiness again, with a dozen purses of gold if we have to, and he will use his sanctified ink to our pleasure.’ He leaned across the divide between our mounts to kiss my cheek. ‘Richard will welcome you to court, where he will present you with garter robes. Which of the hencoop will dare raise a voice against you when the King sees fit to acknowledge you?’

  I would not be soothed. I did not want to be the centre of everyone’s hatred. I recalled having to stand against Constanza, living in her household when she despised every breath I took. I did not want to go through all that again, under the eye of every meddlesome, gossiping, blue-blooded court cat at Windsor or Westminster.

  ‘I think I am too old to face this,’ I said, not liking the despair I heard in my voice.

  John wisely, but infuriatingly, decided to tread on safer ground by adopting an authoritative tone. He snapped his fingers to alert the falconer.

  ‘You are my wife and my Duchess, Katherine, with all the authority that is mine now invested in you. No one will humiliate you. Your position in my household and at court is beyond question or debate. That’s the end of the matter as far as I am concerned. There is nothing to stir up the surface of the placid waters of your life.’ He stretched out his wrist on which sat a juvenile merlin, looking as ruffled as I had been instructed not to be. ‘Now take this raptor and let’s see how well she flies. Imagine every coney to be the Duchess of Gloucester, if you will.’

  No, I did not doubt him, and because I loved him and regretted laying my troubles at his feet, I managed a smile to please him and put his heart at rest, as lovers will, even those of long standing. Particularly those of long standing. The merlin settled her feathers and flew well. Perhaps the coneys did have a look of the Duchess of Gloucester with her furred collars.

  But when I slept that night I dreamed that I was standing alone in my striking garter robes, all blue and gold with the heraldic motif pre-eminent on my shoulder, in the centre of a vast room. Around the perimeter, little groups smiled and nodded. There was not one face I knew. And then as the edge of my vision faded, there were no faces at all.

  ‘John!’ I called out in my dreaming.

  But he did not hear me. He was not there either.

  ‘I am nobody,’ I informed him, my desolation keen, as we broke our fast.

  ‘You are everything to me,’ he replied.

  We had been staying briefly at John’s lodge at Rothwell to the west of Pontefract, a more intimate establishment where the hunting was good, but now I was late for our departure. They were waiting for me, to begin the journey to Windsor. I hurried through the hall, down the steps where I knew that one of my pages would be holding the mare John had selected for me to ride on this first of many long stages—and I stopped, so abruptly that another page, closely shadowing me, trod on my hem.

  ‘Forgive me, my lady.’ He bent to pick up the cloak he had dropped, hastily brushing dust from its folds.

  I barely noticed. My attention was completely snared, and I blinked.

  John was there in the courtyard, clapping his squire on the shoulder, walking slowly towards me as I stood statuelike on the step, coming to a halt at the foot of the stair. He turned to take in the scene that had made my eyes widen in astonishment.

  ‘By God, it’s eye-catching,’ he observed with a grin. ‘I wager this won’t leave you cold…’

  I was speechless. I stood and looked. And looked.

  ‘I’ve rarely known you with nothing to say.’

  ‘Have you done this?’

  ‘Of course. Who else? For your pleasure, my lady.’ He took my unresponsive hand and led me forward. ‘You are not no one, Katherine. How would I choose a woman who had no merit? You never were. You never will be. Here is your own heraldic achievement to proclaim to the world that Katherine, Duchess of Lancaster, is a woman in her own right.’

  The whole courtyard was a blaze of red and gold, from the curtains of my litter, if I chose to use it for some portion of the journey, to the bridle and saddle cloth of my riding horse. The pennons carried by my escort displayed the same emblem, the ostlers who rode the heavy horses that pulled my litter were encased in red and gold tabards. John’s blue and white was totally eclipsed.

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  Continuing to grip my hand as if I needed to be steadied in the face of such startling opulence, John led me to my horse. The ostlers were grinning too.

  ‘Do you approve?’

  ‘You have done this? For me?’ It was all I could seem to say.

  ‘Well, you were not satisfied with my poor heraldic achievements of Lancaster and Aquitaine, now you have your own.’

  And a warmth, as if emanating from the sumptuous red and gold, closed round my heart, dispelling in that moment so many of my fears.

  ‘You wanted your own identity,’ John went on to explain. ‘I thought you
would find St Katherine more than appropriate…?’

  That was the gold that filled my vision. The three golden wheels of St Katherine, glittering on a red background, to create my own coat of arms. My very own, not quartered with John’s or Hugh’s. My own, Katherine de Roet, Katherine de Swynford, proclaiming my own identity even if I was also Duchess of Lancaster. And he had chosen my own saint whom I honoured more than any other, the virgin martyr St Katherine of Alexandria, who refused to allow her Christian faith to be broken on the cruelty of the spiked wheel.

  And I laughed as I realised.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It is like the Roet wheels,’ I said. My own father’s emblem.

  ‘As it should be,’ John agreed. ‘Transmuted into gold for a daughter of Roet and a bride of Lancaster named Katherine.’

  I thought about John’s choice of St Katherine for me: virtuous, erudite, devout, nobly born. I could not have chosen better for my own emblem. Bold and courageous too when her principles were challenged. And now her emblem was mine. This was truly a moment for rejoicing.

  ‘I am honoured,’ I managed when I had marshalled my thoughts again.

  How could he have read my mind so well? And I knew the answer: he loved me. John loved me and would go to the ends of the earth to ensure my happiness.

  Before helping me to mount: ‘One moment.’

  Opening the purse at his belt he extracted two livery badges. One he pinned to my collar, a gleaming golden Katherine wheel enamelled with red, while the other he attached to the grey fur that formed the upturned brim of his hat.

  So he too would proclaim my livery.

  His fingers were gentle against my jaw as he adjusted my collar, his countenance lit with his smile that was beautifully forbearing. ‘So let us be gone and startle the populace from here to Windsor with our glory. They’ll think it a papal visitation and ring the church bells.’

  What reassurance that blaze of colour and gilded wheels gave me. Foolish? Undoubtedly. But I rode to Windsor with confidence and St Katherine’s courage high in my heart and her wheels bright in my armorial for all to see.