The Golden Widows

by Isolde Martyn

  ‘Your great niece is thriving, Master Newton.’

  Her way of putting it clearly touched him. The young man’s grin, as he rose to his feet, could have matched Noah’s, when at last he saw the rainbow. ‘I miss playing your groom, my lady,’ he said softly, his fingers stroking the coiled brim of his hat as he looked down at her. ‘If ever I can do aught for you, send for me.’ Then he blushed beneath his tan. ‘No, that came out amiss. I meant if ever you need my help, my lady.’

  Now she was blushing. ‘Likewise, Master Newton. I mean it truly. God be with you.’

  ‘And you, my lady. I wish you a safe journey.’ He bowed over her hand and then mounted up and gave spur. Kate did not dare watch him ride away.

  That flutter of interest deep inside her was momentarily reassuring. Of course, she felt secure in flirting a little because Newton was a servant and could not gainsay her but (a really large, illuminated ‘but’) her hope was to find true love amongst her own rank. Was that likely? Oh yes, indeed, she scoffed at herself, and if she slept in a toadstool ring, the King of Elfland would come riding by, become enamoured at first sight and carry her off. An inner voice, like some nasty demon, warned her that despite being eighteen and in her prime, she had already failed. If her lack of passion had driven Will to continue tumbling Lovidia, how could she possibly excite love – and loyalty – in some other lord who could tup the whole neighbourhood if he chose. Oh, if only there was a butterfly cocooned inside her skin and ripening to emerge!

  No, wait on! She argued with herself. Newton was attracted to her, so maybe there was a man of higher rank who would be. She would find him somehow.

  ‘Who likes butter?’ Grandmother Bonville joined her, holding out a buttercup to Cecily. ‘Hold it here, poppet!’ The infant giggled. Grabbing it in her fat little fist, she jabbed it under her chin. ‘That young man thinks he is a full Bonville sometimes.’

  ‘He’s your unlawful stepson,’ murmured Kate, straightening her daughter’s petticotes. Cecily must always come first, she told herself. ‘Anyway, you don’t have to move him out of my way like an unwanted cushion, Grandmother. I’m not about to clamber into the next hayloft with him.’

  ‘If I was your age I’d be tempted. I’m tempted now.’

  ‘Madame!’

  ‘I may be over thirty years older than you but I can still admire a fine-looking lad. Bonny was always…shall we say…very attentive. Never lost his ardour. I miss him.’

  ‘Grandmother!’

  ‘Newton has his father’s looks. You’re assuming I was moving him out of your way but what about mine, girl? And if you exclaim “Grandmother” one more time…’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘Moving him? Maybe. Wait until you reach my years, young woman, and then you’ll know the answer.’ She gestured to Master Gylle to give the order to move on.

  Kate hoisted Cecily onto her arm. ‘You could marry again.’

  Grandmother sighed and put her foot in the clasped hands of a waiting groom. ‘No,’ she said, settling herself on the saddle. ‘Bonny was my great love.’

  ‘Despite his infidelity?’

  ‘Yes, Kate. Life or God, what you will, raps us on the knuckles as a reminder that there is no heaven on earth. No husband is perfect.’ She lowered her voice. ‘That’s why the Almighty created a woman in Paradise. He got things wrong on the first endeavour.’

  ‘I shall lie here soon.’

  Alice, Kate’s mother, shrouded stoutly in a black fine wool kirtle with a missal in her hand and a golden lozenge reliquary dangling against her bosom, stood in the church of Bisham Priory, the mausoleum of the Earls of Salisbury. Sorrowful lines seemed permanently chiselled into her skin and perpetual grief was rotting her from within.

  As far as Kate knew, no one had consulted God. The proclamation of an imminent shuffle from life was purposed only in her mother’s mind; any dolt could observe that Lady Salisbury’s lungs, limbs, sight and hearing were sound.

  It was possible to blame the Bisham prior and canons for encouraging such morbidity. Perhaps they were thinking of the endowment of another chantry or that the tombs of the earl and countess might draw illustrious visitors. Richard had promised to bring her father and Thomas to rest here, once he and their kinsmen had calmed the north. However, to be charitable, her mother must have been thinking of cered shrouds and other similar cheerful items long before she left Fotheringay. She had no grief to spare for the Bonville lords and showed not the least interest in being cheered up or developing a deeper friendship with her youngest now they were both widows. No confidences shared, no playing with her granddaughter or happier reminiscences washed down with a flagon of sweet wine and cinnamon wafers.

  Indeed, there had been so much talk of death since the Bonville entourage had arrived at Bisham, that Kate almost expected to encounter a hooded figure carrying a sickle around the next corner.

  Yes, a surfeit of masses for the dead and too much kneeling for the living!

  A murrain on it! Bisham was proving another instance in her life that she had rather drop in the slot of the poor box and forget about. Her sister Joan had been more a mother to her, she realised now. Curse it, they should have journeyed to Arundel to see her instead. It would have been a plaguey lot jollier.

  Aware of Kate’s exasperation, Grandmother Bonville maintained a grave face as she asked, ‘Have you decided on alabaster, Lady Salisbury? I’d rather have Purbeck marble myself but of course I am biased since my great-granddaugher here…’ she blew a kiss at Cecily, who was crawling up the steps of the chancel, ‘is owner of one of the quarries near Corfe.’

  ‘Excuse me!’ Biting her lip, Kate scooped Cecily into her arms and fled the mausoleum. Only the gravestones outside heard her laugh but she could not help herself. Sinful, disrespectful. Yes, all those things! It was either that or have a throughly good weep.

  She carried Cecily down to the river’s edge and kept a good hold on the leather reins as Cecily tottered forward and chattered incomprehensibly at the moorhens.

  Down river lay Windsor Castle and further still, Westminster Palace, though no one of consequence was at either yet. Maybe…

  ‘Katherine!’

  Seeing the two older widows waiting for her at the abbey door, she definitely felt the wriggle of something that was possibly rebellion, the temptation to rip off her dismal black apparel, but she still had four months of mourning to complete and Richard would expect her to behave like a Neville.

  ‘Mama,’ cooed Cecily.

  At least her little girl had an adoring mother and great-grandmother and knew the warmth of an embrace.

  ‘We’ll go home to Shute,’ Kate whispered, saving Cecily from muddy feet and kissing her on the nose.

  ‘Shoo.’

  ‘Shoo, yes, Shoo.’

  Elysabeth

  3rd July 1461, three days after the Feast of St Peter and St Paul

  The Great North Road from London

  It was an ignominious thing to return to your parents’ home with scarce two groats to jingle. Shame rode pillion behind Elysabeth as her little party crossed London Bridge and passed through Bishopsgate to begin their three-day journey up Watling Street. With luck, they might reach Grafton by the evening of the second day but they had sixty-four miles to cover. They would have to ask for accommodation at religious houses; they could not afford to stay at any inn.

  She was out of temper with the Almighty and St Jude, not to mention the rest of the heavenly establishment, for a whole basketful of reasons. Hastings, a lord now, had not consented to become Tom’s guardian. Added to that disappointment, finding the enfeoffees of the three manors had taken time. Two of them, Boulden and Ischam, had been accommodating but the others…The priest, William Walesby, had passed away, which had necessitated establishing he had no heirs with claim to the three manors; Sir Thomas Fynderne had been dismissed from his post as Lieutenant of Guisnes and was with the queen’s rebel army in the north, but since he had been attainted a traitor and lost al
l rights to any land, his consent was no longer needed; and Master Fylding, a cunning creature (probably in Bourchier’s pocket), had refused to enfeoffe the trust and so Elysabeth had been forced to take her case to the Chancery court. Her father, mercifully freed after the Battle of Towton, had scraped up some money for her to find a lawyer and agreed to be her fellow plaintiff, and Master Fyldyng had been subpoenaed to appear before the Chancellor, Warwick’s brother. However, there was a great queue of cases to be heard and only a fool would expect to have good news before the next Yuletide. And during all this, London (lawyers and lodgings) had sucked money from her like some monstrous leech.

  The high-stepping cost of staying in the city was mainly the usurper Edward’s fault because of his decision (or Warwick’s) to return to Westminster that month for the ladling of more holy oil, fulsome flaunting and a great dollop of pageantry – in other words, a second, less hurried coronation. Consequently, rents instantly soared higher than the carrion kites circling over the city shambles, and the Goldsmiths’ Guild, which owned the messuage by Oldbourne Hall in Shoe Lane, where Elysabeth and the boys had been living throughout May, was no less greedy.

  With her purse as exhausted as she was, Elysabeth moved her little family across to stay at the abbey of Bermondsey. She did not join the hordes of Kentish men crossing London Bridge to watch Warwick and his braggart cousin in procession, nor were her prayers that rain would soak their finery acknowledged by Heaven. God was still a Yorkist; a cloudless day had cheered Edward’s sunnes-in-splendour.

  And the treasonous sun had shone hotly all the following week burning bared flesh to lobster scarlet. Londoners and the cheeses in their cupboards sweated. Noses peeling, housewives lingered by the conduits, dabbing their throats and necks with water before they carried home their pails; beggars fought for places in the shade; and the venal trustee, Fylding, irritable, overdressed and sweaty, demanded a higher price for his consent. Only the London flies were euphoric, breeding in the dung and the filth and swarming round the fish and meat stalls like a crowd come for a hanging.

  The miasma of disease from the north bank’s stinking ditches and Southwark’s filthy tenements had begun to concern Elysabeth. Plague had not witnessed the coronation but its fellows were arriving in the city with gifts of runny flux and vomiting. And since her sons were the only precious possession Elysabeth still owned, it was time to take her boys to healthier air.

  The day they left the city, the unobliging sky was leaden towards the west. By the time her little party passed through Stony Stratford and reached the more familiar countryside of Pottersbury on the afternoon of the third day, Elysabeth and her maidservant were damp from the morning drizzle and weary from Dickon’s ‘Are we there yet?’ The rain clouds shifted fortuitously as they took the rutted track that led east from Plumpton End but the mire from last night’s downpour slowed them and sometimes the horses sank in to their fetlocks. Elysabeth finally drew rein with a sigh of relief at the Grafton alehouse and the old hermitage in the field opposite. She was almost home. Almost. Some of the village – mostly cottages belonging to tenants of her father, Lord Rivers – had darned itself over the Northampton Road but most of the dwellings, the church and her parents’ manor house lay further to the east. A woman’s call hailed her from the meadow flanking the crossroads. Grateful she was still recognised here, Elysabeth waved back.

  Turning off into the village street, she noticed changes that would have been less obvious to a stranger: fences repaired instead of renewed, a shutter hanging by a breath, proud oak trees gone, the wild wood edged by stumps, less cattle in the fields; and the straggle of tenants’ cottages shabbier than she remembered.

  The usual Friday odour of fish was seeping from the kitchen of the religious house next to St Mary’s Church and there were fresh gravestones in the churchyard. Elysabeth crossed herself with a prayer for the dead, hoping it was none from her parents’ household.

  Her family home lay beyond a thick hedgerow on a small rise where the track dog-legged and dipped away through pasture. As a manor house, it was less modest than Groby Hall, but considering Elysabeth’s mother was a duchess and had once been sister-inlaw to King Henry V, victor of Agincourt, it should have been a palace. Yet it did have a great hall large enough to seat thirty and a little gem of a chapel.

  Memories of a rumbustious childhood tumbled back into her head. It was useless to expect to recreate those carefree days. Her oldest brother, Anthony, was married and two of her sisters were in other households about to be wed, Lionel was studying canon law in Oxford yet that still left eight siblings, some she hardly knew.

  As her ambler led the others wearily into the hall courtyard, four children halted their noisy game of Touch and stared at her like curious sheep. Three had her father’s gilt hair and lithe frame and one of the girls had Duchess Jacquetta’s alabaster complexion and brown hair. These must be her younger siblings: Eleanor, Mary, Cat and Edward, strangers to her now. Outside the stable, the head groom, who had been with the family all his life, paused on his rake and peered at them.

  ‘Master Burcote,’ she called out and waved.

  In an instant, his face changed from puzzlement to delight and he was at her stirrup, grabbing the bridle. ‘Shake the bell, lad!’ he bawled at one of his underlings, and beckoned to the children. ‘Here’s my Lady Grey, your sister, come to visit. And see here! How are our fine gentlemen?’ Of course, he reached out to take Dickon from her but the boy went rigid. Since the ransacking of Astley, the child had shown a fear of strangers. Maybe the exuberance of these little aunts and uncle would batter through his shield.

  Tom slid down from his pony unsmiling and shook the small hands with such an adult air that tears prickled behind Elysabeth’s eyes. Lord Hastings’ rejection had ripped open the wounds of his father’s death and disgrace.

  Grafton, God willing, would be good for both boys.

  ‘Elysabeth!’ A chorus of male exclamations greeted her as four young men ran down the stone steps from the hall. Anthony, Lord Scales, blessedly released from captivity, gaunter but elegant as ever, even if there was a dark rub to the pleats of his mustard doublet; John, the jester of the family, bean-lean and straggling for the light, his sleeves short of his wrists; Dick, the quietest of her brothers, looking more like a stablehand in his leather sleeveless cote; and ‘Bishop’ Lionel (whether he would attain that ecclesiastical height remained to be seen), on the cusp of manhood, all blackheads and a voice that did not know whether to go high or low. Why was he home from Oxford? Was there no more money to pay for his studies?

  ‘This is a wondrous surprise, Anthony,’ she squealed as her oldest brother swung her into the air. ‘God be praised that the king has pardoned you.’

  But then an ill thought struck her. If they were all here…and she had just glimpsed Anthony’s wife coming down too. ‘Christ’s Mercy!’ she whispered. ‘Is aught wrong? There’s no funeral, is there?’ She pummelled his shoulders with the privilege of being eldest born. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, Lyssie,’ he whispered, lowering her. ‘Just holes in my purse at the moment. The new king fined me mercilessly. Give Bessie an embrace. She was not pleased at me bringing her here so soon after I was set at liberty.’

  Elysabeth swung round to greet Bessie, Lady Scales, a woman of her own age. However, hugging the young baroness was like wrapping her arms about a sackful of trowels and it was a relief to turn to her other brothers.

  ‘You have grown thinner, Mistress Tamsin,’ John was chortling as he shouldered the young woman’s saddlepack. ‘You too, Lyssie.’ The words stung. She had. Scraggy, she thought herself now.

  ‘John,’ she caught his arm before he turned to greet her sons. ‘Do not tease them yet.’ He stared at her and then looked round at Tom and Dickon, standing together and gave them a wink.

  ‘Stitches and mending needed, eh? They’ll keep. And here’s our creaky Papa, at last. Toppled from the saddle at Towton.’

  She knew her
father had been injured, either during the battle or beaten afterwards by the new king’s ruffians, but he had made light of it in his letters, yet it was still a shock to see him hobbling down the steps using a stick.

  ‘Elysabeth, sweetheart!’ Age spots dappled his cheeks and the lines of his handsome face were hewn deeper now but there were still pale gold strands in his hair and power in his arms as he embraced her.

  ‘Thank God, sir!’ she exclaimed, tears spilling as she nestled against his broad chest.

  ‘Aye, my love, netted but thrown back into the pond again, and I’m to receive a pardon from the king!’

  ‘Wondrous, wondrous news! When did you hear, Papa?’

  ‘After the coronation.’ He frowned, ‘Aye, last month. No misericord in the heavenly choir yet, my dear, not like your poor husband, eh, God rest his soul!’ He swept her towards the uppermost step where her mother waited. ‘Is this not splendid, Jacq, darling? See, who has come a-visiting!’

  He made it sound like her choice, Elysabeth thought sadly. What would her parents say when they learned she had nowhere else to go?

  ‘Darling!’ After kissing her on each cheek, her mother’s dark eyes explored her face. ‘But you are looking so fatigued, mignonne. It eez not good.’ Even after twenty-five years of living in England, her grace of Bedford’s vowels still marked her as an outsider. Young John had delighted in mimicking her behind her back until he was caught for it and locked in the cellar for the night. ‘Elysabeth?’

  ‘Saddlesore, Mama…worn out with lawyers fleecing me.’

  ‘Well, you are ’ome now.’

  Yes, she was. Arm in arm, they walked inside together, and she breathed in the familiar scents of the house: the rosewater, orris and ambergris perfume her mother wore, the meadowsweet rushes on the floor, the detestable smell of scalded milk from the nursery upstairs and the kitchen aromas of onions, dried herbs, yeast and home-brewed ale.

  There had been no stripping of furnishings by the sheriff’s bailiffs here. Elysabeth trailed her darned gloved fingertips along the great oak table, relieved the hall still boasted the sumptuous Flemish tapestries and an exquisite illuminated book that had belonged to her mother’s first husband, the Duke of Bedford. All the good pieces of furniture were reassuringly in the usual places in the withdrawing chamber: the cross-legged chairs that had been imported from Florence, the carved cup board that had once belonged to Henry Bolingbroke before he deposed King Richard, one of the Burgundian linen chests that had contained her mother’s brideclothes and on the wall hung the sword that Bedford had worn at the Battle of Verneuil.