‘You began to love…my father? Did your faith not help you, my lady?’
‘My dear,’ the prioress said, gently removing her hand to touch Nicola’s cheek, ‘I didn’t want it to help. Can you understand that? We were a liberal-minded community then. We socialised perhaps more than was good for us with the parents of our girls, we grew worldly and rather too fond of luxury. I’m afraid I’ve never quite accepted the frugality we were supposed to embrace as if it were a virtue. Our prioress was motherly and we looked up to her, and our lives were rich with every kind of love. Perhaps your father experienced that when he visited. He had already lost his first three wives by then and he was desperate for comfort, and I was willing to give it, and to accept whatever he chose to give. We complemented each other so well—’ her voice broke as she whispered her longings ‘—and I adored him. It was wrong, I know, and I suffered penances for it, but now I believe I’ve paid the penalty in full. Now, I need to know where my child is before I leave this world.’ Huge tears poured down her cheeks and she had no strength left to stop them.
Nicola dried them for her. ‘You had a child, my lady? My father’s? Did he know of it?’
Gasping soundless sobs, the fragile body shook the words out unevenly. ‘Yes, a child…beautiful…little girl…we couldn’t…keep her.’
A child? Her father’s other daughter? The sister she would have so loved. His love-child, a secret for the rest of his life. How they both must have suffered.
Stunned by this news, Nicola mopped gently at the anguished face until it calmed, taking the glass of water that Rosemary handed to her and holding it to the sunken lips that had known an excess of loving. ‘Don’t weep, my lady. Please don’t weep any more. I shall find her for you. Is that what you wish? She’s my half-sister. I’ll find her.’ Without thinking, the assurances flowed even before the full import of them could be understood. The woman was dying and her tortured soul needed every help to find peace.
The haunted eyes, now red-rimmed, followed Nicola’s movements, anxious to tell her the rest. ‘I could not keep her here,’ she said. ‘That would have been unthinkable, for I would be elected prioress after Mother Sabina. Your father had no understanding relatives with whom he could share the child’s existence.’
Nicola could believe it. Behind her father’s kindly nature was a strong disciplinarian who would not have tolerated the idea of a mistress with bastards and the lies that would have to accompany it. He would never have revealed such a weakness in himself to his family, let alone take the child home to be reared. ‘So where did the child go, my lady? Have you any names?’ she said.
‘Only one,’ the prioress whispered, fast becoming exhausted. ‘Lord Coldyngham had a good friend by the name of…Melrose.’
Melrose? Knots slowly began to unravel in Nicola’s mind.
‘Melrose in Scotland?’ she said.
‘Yes. A Scottish family dear to him. The lady had two sons, he told me, and desperately wanted a daughter, but could have no more children. She and her husband agreed to adopt our daughter as their own. She was taken from me…away up to Scotland…and I was not allowed…any contact.’
Nicola mopped the tears again, her heart wrung with pity. ‘Hush, dear lady. Did my father give you no news of her?’
‘No,’ was the faint reply. ‘It was agreed I should put her from my mind.’
Their eyes met in a long exchange of sorrow that Nicola realised was too much to expect a mother to bear alone. To put the child from her mind. That, she knew, was asking the impossible.
‘And my father?’ she said. ‘You still saw him? Forgive me, my lady…’ she touched the prioress’s hand ‘…I have no right to ask you that.’
The hand held on to hers as a mother’s would. ‘Things could not continue,’ she whispered. ‘The prioress…the nuns…were merciful, but it couldn’t go on. He came to the church when he was in London and as long as I knew he was there, he knew that I was too. We were next door for much of the year and I could see his rooftop. That had to be enough.’
Which, of course, was why he was hardly at home with his children. ‘So you know nothing of this family…Melrose?’
‘Nothing at all. I promised not to make enquiries, not to contact them, and I have kept my promise until now. And now I think the merciful Lord will understand, and pardon me.’
‘I pray that He will, my lady. And I shall search for her and send you a message, I promise. She will be…what…thirteen summers?’
‘She was born on the fourteenth day of February, St Valentine’s Day, in the year 1460. Yes, she’ll be thirteen summers, four months, one week and three days old.’ The voice faded away at last and the deep sockets of the eyes slowly released their lids as sleep overtook her.
For some moments, Nicola stayed on her knees by the bed, watching the face and trying to accommodate the shattering news she had just heard. As usual, there was a keen sense of betrayal that this was also a part of her own life that had been withheld from her, albeit for the best of reasons. But the connection with the Melrose family was truly astonishing and must go a long way to explain the promise of marriage between the two friends. What else could it have been but to show gratitude to Sir Findlay and Lady Melrose for bringing up her father’s illegitimate daughter as their own? That must have been the reason for it.
But how could she, Nicola, now refuse to carry out her father’s wish to pay the Melroses back by sharing the Coldyngham family name? It was her half-sister’s name, too, and, until she herself married a Melrose, that connection would never be made, her father’s wish would not be honoured, and the Melroses would not be thanked as they deserved and hoped to be. But why had she never heard of a Melrose daughter? Thirteen, the child would be. How strange that they shared exactly the same St Valentine’s Day to be born, eleven years apart.
There was a sound behind her as the door opened to admit the nun and the novice bearing a tray of medicines. Rosemary and Lavender drew forward to help Nicola to her feet, to dab at her face and to adjust her long sweeping skirts. She smiled at the two keepers and left the chamber with the linen packet still on the bed. How inappropriate, she thought. Marchpane. A bundle of sweetmeats. Of all the things she might have taken.
The sounds of laughter and distant singing, birdsong and the rush of the summer breeze were heightened, and the roses shone like pearls on a bed of emeralds as they passed through the gate on to the leafy stretch of track. In a sky of intense blue, seagulls wheeled and mocked with gaping beaks, and it seemed to Nicola that a new phase of her life was just about to begin as another’s life was about to end.
Chapter Five
‘No one must know,’ Nicola told the two maids before they reached the courtyard gate. ‘Promise me you’ll not repeat a single word of what you heard just now. Promise.’
‘We promise,’ they said. ‘May the Lord strike us dead if we break our word. And anyway,’ Lavender added for good measure in case the Lord had not fully understood, ‘we didn’t hear very much, did we, Rose?’
‘Very little. She spoke soft, poor lady.’
‘Good,’ said Nicola. ‘Then it’s to be our secret. Women’s matters.’
Relieved to have some time to herself, to ponder over the prioress’s tragic dilemma and her own part in it, Nicola divested herself of the two-horned structure, hoping that a head free of discomfort would help. ‘Plait my hair,’ she said.
‘And your gown?’ said Lavender. ‘You wish to change it?’
Nicola was well into her pondering by then, so she stood like an effigy to be re-robed in a cool linen kirtle with a shorter houpplelande over it, its hem deeply scalloped and embroidered on a pale green ground. Absently, she picked up Melrose and a straw hat and went out into the sunny garden.
Partly covered by tall grasses, the door in the garden wall responded immediately to her hesitant lift of the latch and gentle pull. There through the gap was the cloister walk festooned with roses where she had walked, and there in one corner was the
prioress’s room. According to her there had been no contact for years with her lover, yet this easy access would suggest otherwise. Still dazed, Nicola closed the door and sought the turf bench where, shaded by rampant hops, she placed the rabbit upon her lap and leaned back with closed eyes to reconstruct the scene in detail, the tears, the guilt, the overwhelming misfortune of having to part with a child. The woman’s pain was still acute, after thirteen years.
It would not be the first time such a thing had happened to a nun, nor would it be the last; that part had not shocked Nicola as much as the prioress possibly believed it might. What had shocked her, and what she had managed to conceal very well, was that the man involved was her father. The gap in her life created by his long absences had affected her deeply at the time, and now that she had learned the reason, she was unsure whether to blame him more or to excuse him. He had had another daughter. He had known of Nicola’s need for a sister. Yet because of his wish to be seen as blameless in the eyes of his family, because of his pride, in short, the longed-for sister had been denied her. Surely he could have resolved the problem of guardianship? Surely he could have explained the child somehow?
I must find her, my half-sister. Her mother and I both need to know where she is. I shall have to make contact with the Melroses.
But wait, she told herself. Did they have a sister, those two? No mention had ever been made of one in her hearing and, as far as she was aware, no provision had been made for another daughter in Lord Coldyngham’s will. Would he have ignored her existence, even at that late stage? Had he simply washed his hands of her by then? Wills were usually made when death was in sight, not before. Had he forgotten his love-child by then?
So what if the Melroses had decided, for some reason, not to keep her? What then? How could Nicola search for her without disclosing the reason? The prioress had waited until the very last moment and was relying on her discretion, unable to ask anyone else for help. Promises had been made that day which must be kept, even if it meant travelling to Scotland to keep them.
Then there was the other promise. Yes, it always came back to that, didn’t it? Fergus was determined to honour his late father’s wishes and now it looked as if she also would have to do the same for her late father and to please Lady Melrose, who was not likely to know the mother’s identity. There would, after all, be no reason for Lord Coldyngham to disclose it, in view of his secrecy about the whole business. A mistress would have been shameful enough, apparently, but a nun was quite a different matter. No, he would not have told the Melroses so much, Nicola was convinced of it.
It was not hard to visualise the infant in a nurse’s arms travelling over the bumpy miles to Scotland in the spring of 1460, or the joy of Lady Melrose taking a daughter into her arms at last, then the promise of a daughter-in-law, the only Coldyngham daughter, no less. Who was the most fortunate, Nicola wondered, her father or the Melroses? Could she now continue to refuse them their due, knowing how important it was between men to pay back what one owed? If only her father could have explained, and if only she had felt content with what now seemed inevitable. But she was far from content. Wanting him was one thing; marrying him was quite another. Becoming his wife would not change him in any of the ways she had mentioned to Ramond. Even he agreed on that. It was the shortest road to distress she could imagine, yet it was the one that beckoned the strongest.
Wearing two tones of green, Nicola hoped to make herself invisible long enough for Sir Fergus to make a superficial search of the garden and then give up, as men do. But Melrose had had enough of her lap, and her leap on to the pathway towards the lettuces could hardly be missed, even by a man.
A large pointed toe stepped upon the leash, thereby preventing the threatened resignation of the gardener. (‘Give it dandelions,’ he had yelled at Lavender. ‘There’s plenty o’ them!’) Removing his extravagantly plumed hat, Sir Fergus picked the rabbit up and deposited her in it. ‘Stay there,’ he told it, adding a bunch of weeds. ‘You’re on probation.’ His dark close-cropped hair shone with the bloom of chestnuts in the sun, and Nicola was spellbound by his masculine comeliness, his easy languid movements that belied the speed and power she had seen only recently.
He came to share the bench with her, placing the rabbit-filled hat on the ground between them, and she knew by the way he angled himself towards her that, though she had done nothing to win it, she was being made the object of his attention. She found it unnerving, and her unconscious response was to hold herself rigid and silent, unable to look directly at him. Would there be sarcasm, or politeness, or a reference to her earlier outburst?
‘Better?’ he said, softly.
She looked down at her hands, then across at his.
Deliberately, he opened one out to show her the injured knuckle, and she knew by the way he looked at her that he would have liked to review her wounds also. She had checked them only that morning, listing the cut and bruises with a mixture of wonder, anger and a sneaking glow of pride. She could find no answer to his question. He was the one on probation. Was that what he had meant?
‘I had to get Patrick away,’ he said. ‘It was not how you think.’
‘So you know how I think, do you?’
‘Well, you’ve spared no effort to tell me, so far, but where Patrick is concerned you think I was overriding your wishes. George thinks it’s the best thing ever, and so does Ramond.’
‘You’ve been to see George?’
‘Certainly I have, at his offices. I’ve told him about Ramond too.’
‘And about last night?’
‘Of course. I could hardly do otherwise.’
‘So now my private affairs are common knowledge, and you both want to send me off to stay with big brother.’ She leaned her head back against the massive hop-leaves, once more unwilling to meet his eyes, all her best efforts going sadly astray. She stared out across the raised beds of blowsy red poppies, the yellow St John’s wort and the feathery fennel and thought that, had matters between the sexes been more equal, women’s wrongs would be put right with more alacrity and severity than they were at present. Now George would be sure to renew his nagging about the safety of marriage.
Ignoring her pique, he stroked the rabbit’s silky ears. ‘George has left two men with Ramond,’ he said. ‘They have orders to guard him night and day.’
‘Thank you,’ Nicola said. ‘Thank you for your help. You had no need to do so much.’
‘Yes, I did. Unfortunately I’m about to make myself unpopular again almost immediately. I am taking you to stay with George and his lady for a while. He wants you to pack your belongings and close the house up.’
Regardless of her earlier thoughts along those very same lines, Nicola saw no reason to make things easy for him. ‘Yes, I’m sure he does,’ she said, ‘but I intend to stay here.’
‘That’s what George thought you’d say. Well, listen to me,’ he said. ‘Apart from the fracas with Lord John, who will undoubtedly seek some kind of revenge, probably directed at you, there’s also the threat from Oxford, directed at any Coldyngham, if they can’t find Patrick. More than that, there are riots spreading all along Cheapside and Threadneedle Street and coming this way, midsummer foolery and apprentices all together, and already some houses on fire. You’re in danger, Nicola, and, if I have to carry you there myself, you’re going to George’s. His orders. He’s sending carts for your stuff and men to help. Or do you prefer to stay at my place on Holyrood Wharf?’
What if I agreed to that? Would you make love to me? ‘No,’ she said.
He smiled, a devastating smile that plundered her whole being and left her without a single coherent thought in her head, emptying her of every reason to fight with him. ‘You care, then?’ he said, still smiling.
I care. God only knows how I care. ‘I’m pretending to. Remember?’ She gave him no answering smile for, in spite of his efforts, it was too soon to deserve it, and the score must be evened at every opportunity. ‘The riots are surely not going
to spread as far as Bishops-gate, are they?’
‘Quite probable. There’s the Leathersellers’ Hall and the Parish Clerks’ Hall nearby, and they’ve always been targets for rioting apprentices. Come on, my lady, we must be out of here before supper.’ He got to his feet and held out a hand to her.
‘But what about the priory next door? Are they in danger too?’
‘Oh—’ he glanced at the wall ‘—I shouldn’t think so. High stone walls. They’ll be safe enough.’
Ignoring his hand, she bent to pick up the hat with Melrose asleep in it, cradling it against her. Then she walked past him into the house, muttering, ‘This is all highly inconvenient’, but thinking that it was probably to be the first move down that dangerously beckoning road.
However much she disliked Fergus’s authoritative and commanding manner when applied to herself, Nicola had to admit that there were times when it came in extremely useful. Take that afternoon, for instance, when they would certainly not have been out of the house on Bishops-gate by suppertime had it not been for his very unsubtle way with the men of her own household and George’s men who did not agree on how things were to be done. A few crude and martial-sounding threats from Sir Fergus’s deep bass, and the carts were soon stacked high, covered, and ready to go, and not another murmur was heard about who did what. It would not have been nearly so successful without him.
The carts were sent off down as far as Candlewick Street and thence along Trinity, Old Fish and Knightrider up to the Fleet Bridge and along the Strand to avoid the worst of the revels. ‘You’ll ride pillion behind me,’ said Sir Fergus to Nicola. ‘Your maids will ride behind the men.’
‘You know I can ride as well as any man,’ Nicola protested. ‘And we shall need our horses at George’s.’
His Duty, Her Destiny Page 10