by Anya Seton
Katherine, held viced as in a nightmare, recognised some of these people, though their faces were crimson and slack with drunkenness. There was Dame Pernelle Swyllington, the stout matron who had protested against Katherine’s presence in the Lancaster loge at the tournament at Windsor. Her bodice was torn open so that her great breasts hung bare, and the cauls that held her grizzled hair had twisted loose and bumped upon her shoulders as she danced. There was Audrey, the Duchess’s tiring-woman, dressed in a wine-stained white velvet gown, trimmed with ermine, the skirt held bunched up around her waist, though yet she tripped and stumbled on it. Her broad peasant face was wild as a bacchante’s beneath one of the Duchess’s jewelled fillets. Audrey held Pier Roos by the hand and when the cymbals crashed, she flung herself against his chest, slavering. The young squire wore nothing but a shirt and was drunk as the rest, his pleasant freckled face drawn down into a goatish mask, his eyes narrow and glittering. A kitchen scullion danced with them, and a small pretty young woman - a lady, by her dress - who giggled, and hiccuped and let any of the men fumble her who wished; Piers, or the scullion, or the minstrels - or Simon Simeon, the steward of Bolingbroke Castle.
It was the sight of this old man, his long beard tied up with a red ribbon, his portly dignity lost in lewd capers, a garland of twined hollyhocks askew on his bald head, that shocked Katherine from her daze.
“Christ and His Blessed Mother pardon you all,” she cried. “Have you gone mad - poor wights?” A sob clotted in her throat, and she sank down on to a littered bench, staring at them woefully.
At first they did not hear her; but the piper paused for breath and the steward, turning to catch up a mazer full of wine, saw her and blinked foolishly, passing his hand before his bleared eyes.
“Sir Steward,” she cried out to him, “where is my Lady Blanche?” Her despairing voice shot through them like an arrow. They ceased dancing and drew back, huddling like sheep menaced by sudden danger. Dame Pernelle clenched her hands across her naked breasts and cried thickly, “Who are you, woman? Leave us - begone.” Piers’ arm dropped from Audrey’s waist and he shouted, “But ‘tis Lady Swynford - by the devil’s tail! I’ve longed for this! Come dance with me, my pretty one, my burde, my winsome leman-” His nostrils flared on a great lustful breath, he shoved Audrey to one side and would have grabbed at Katherine, but the old steward stepped between and held his shaking arm out for a barrier.
“Where is the Duchess?” repeated Katherine, unheeding of Piers.
“In there,” said the steward slowly. He pointed to the solar. “She bade us leave her - while we wait our turn.”
“She’s dead then,” Katherine whispered.
The steward bowed his head and through mumbling lips he said, “We know not.”
Katherine jumped from the bench and ran past them to the solar door. They watched her dumbly. Piers drew back against the others. They made no sound as she went through the door but when it closed behind her a woman’s voice cried out, “Give me the wine!”, the pipes shrilled and the cymbals crashed anew.
In the great solar it was dim and quiet. Two huge candles burned on either side of the vast square bed that was hung with azure satin. The Duchess lay there on white samite pillows. Her eyes were closed, but her body twitched, her breath was like the panting of a dog. Her arms were closed on her chest below a crucifix, the white flesh mottled from the shoulder to the elbow with livid spots. A trickle of black blood oozed from the corner of her mouth and ran on to her outspread golden hair.
As Katherine gazed down, shuddering, the purple lips drew back and murmured, “Water -” The girl poured some into a cup and the Duchess swallowed, then opened her eyes. She did not know the face that bent over her, and she whispered, “Where’s Father Anselm? Tell him to come - I haven’t long - nay, Father Anselm’s dead, he died the first-” Her voice trailed into incoherent muttering.
Katherine knelt on the prie-dieu which stood beside the bed and gazed up at the jewelled figure of the Blessed Virgin in the niche. No fear for herself entered her mind, nor did She pray that the Duchess would recover, for that would be a miracle worked by God alone. She saw that the plague boils had turned inward, and none that vomited blood ever lived. She prayed only that Ellis would bring the monk in time. She prayed while the candles burned down an inch, and the Duchess shivered and moaned, and once cried out. Suddenly Katherine’s wits cleared and she saw that she must go back outside the castle to guide the monk since he would be a stranger, nor did Ellis know of the postern gate.
She knew that it was useless to ask help of those in the anteroom. She slipped down the privy stairway that led to the Duke’s wardrobe and out on a corner of the battlements, and down to the bailey.
It was dark outside now except for the glare from the plague fire. The hooded black figures had gone and loose earth covered the ditch. Katherine sped through the bailey and out through the postern door. The fog had blown off into a fine rain, yet at first she could see nobody outside the castle walls. Then she heard the whicker of a horse over by the church and she ran there, calling, “Ellis!”
Her squire and a tall Cistercian monk in white had taken shelter from the rain in the church porch, having indeed been unable to find a way into the castle. Katherine wasted no time on Ellis and, giving the monk a murmur of gratitude, seized the edge of his sleeve. Together they hurried back into the castle and up the privy stair to the Duchess’s room.
The Duchess still lived. She stirred as Katherine and the white monk came to her bed, and when she saw the cowled head and the crucifix the monk held out to her as he said “Pax vobiscum, my daughter,” she gave a long sigh and her hand fluttered towards him. The monk opened his leather case and laid the sacred parts of the viaticum out on the table, then he motioned to Katherine to leave.
The girl crept down the stairs and turned off the landing into the little room called the Duke’s garderobe, because it was in here that he dressed and that his clothes were kept when he was in residence. It was bare now except for two ironbound coffers, a rack full of lances and an outmoded suit of armour that hung from a perch and shone silver-grey in the darkness. A faint odour of lavender and sandalwood clung to the room and there was here no plague stench.
Katherine sat on the coffer with her head in her hands until the monk called out to her.
The Duchess died next morning at the hour of Prime while a copper-red sun tipped above the eastern wolds against a lead sky. Katherine and the Cistercian monk knelt by the bedside whispering the prayers for the dying, and one other was with them - Simon, the old steward of the castle, who had recovered from his drunkenness and crept in to join them, his head bowed with heavy shame.
A little while before her passing, the Lady Blanche’s torments eased, and it seemed that she knew them. She tried to speak to the steward and though the words were not clear, they knew she spoke of her dearest lord, John, and of her children; and Simon breathed something of reassurance while the tears ran down his face. Then Blanche’s wandering gaze passed over the monk and rested on Katherine with a look of puzzled recognition. She remembered nothing of the night just gone but she felt the girl’s love and saw the anguish in her eyes. She raised her hand and touched Katherine’s hair. “Christ have mercy on you, dear child,” she whispered, while the gracious charm of this most noble lady showed for a moment in her dimming blue eyes. “Pray for me, Katherine - -” she added so faintly that the girl heard with her heart and not her ears.
Then the great room was quiet again except for the chanting of the monk. Lady Blanche sighed, her fingers closed around the crucifix on her breast. “In manus tuas - Domine -” she said clearly, in a calm, contented voice. And died.
It seemed that the Black Death, having slain the Duchess, had at last slaked its greed. The weather on that September 12 turned sharp and freezing cold, and the evil yellow fog vanished. There were a few more deaths throughout the castle, a scullion and a dairymaid, two of the guards and the head falconer’s wife; but these had all
been stricken before the Duchess died, and there were no new cases.
Of those who had danced in frenzy by the skull in the anteroom, none died of plague but Audrey, the Duchess’s tiring-woman, and she followed her mistress on the next day without ever regaining her sense from the drunken stupor which had finally quietened all the revellers.
On Piers Roos, too, the dread black spots appeared, but God showed him mercy, for the plague boil in his groin swelled fast and burst like a rotten plum; and when the poison drained away, Piers recovered, albeit he lay for months in sweating weakness afterwards.
During those days of heavy sorrow and gradually lightening fear, Katherine remained at the castle. They had sore need of help, and old Simon was distracted by the terrible responsibilities on him. Of those at Bolingbroke, thirty had died. Most of the varlets had run off in panic to the wolds and fens. There were few left to do Simon’s bidding, and none to tell him what disposition should be made of the Duchess - until the messenger he had dispatched to the King at Windsor should return.
They sealed away the Lady Blanche in a hastily made coffin and placed it in the private chapel. There the good white monk said Masses for her soul, and many of her household came to pray; and there too, every morning after it seemed sure the plague had passed, Katherine brought the ducal daughters, Philippa and Elizabeth, to light candles and kneel by their mother’s black velvet bier.
The children had all been safe in the North Tower throughout the scourge; the Holy Blessed Mother had watched out for them, since their own could not.
The baby, Henry, toddled merrily about the floor in his own apartments playing with his silver ball and a set of ivory knights his father had sent him. When Katherine first went to see him he drew back as children do, and hid distrustfully behind his nurse’s skirts, but he soon grew used to her and crowed with glee when she played finger games with him as she did with Blanchette.
The little girls occupied rooms higher up in the tower, and Katherine found them well enough in health, though Philippa was nine now and old enough to understand the terrible things that had befallen them; between the strands of lank flaxen hair, her long sallow face was runnelled with tears, and nothing that Katherine could say lightened the stillness of her bearing. Yet she remembered Katherine and seemed to find some comfort in standing silently beside her.
Elizabeth at five was noisier than ever. She harried the servants and bullied the nurses and her sister, all of whom gave into her rather than provoke a screaming rage. She was a brown little thing, all except her eyes, which were leaf-green and could flash like a cat’s. When she was told of her mother’s death, she howled loudly for a while because she saw those about her weeping; but in her visits to the bier in the chapel she found a not unpleasing importance. She liked Katherine because she smelled good and told her stories and had a low sweet voice unlike her Yorkshire nurse’s, but she cared deeply about nobody.
Katherine longed for her own children and especially when she saw little Henry, who was so near to Blanchette in age and whose baby tricks wrenched at her heart. Almost she resented him because he was not Blanchette.
But her own babies were well at Kettlethorpe and did not miss her. Ellis had ridden home with all the frightful tidings of Bolingbroke, and returned some days later with a message from Philippa, who had made him repeat it so many times that through Ellis’s voice Katherine could plainly hear her sister’s.
“You’re not to come home yet, on any account, lady,” Ellis reported stolidly. “They’re all well and wish to stay so. Dame Philippa says there’s no telling but the plague might be hiding in your clothes waiting to smite those nearest you in revenge that you are safe. She said to tell you that they’re singing Masses for the Duchess’ soul at Kettlethorpe church, and all is being done seemly there, so you need have no care for anything; but you must not return until all danger from pestilence has passed.”
They stood in the chill windswept bailey by the now lowered drawbridge, and Ellis, acting under orders, kept his distance from her.
“And what does Sir Hugh say?” Katherine asked slowly.
Ellis looked uncomfortable. Hugh had said very little beyond expressing shock at the Duchess’s death. He had always been a morose man, but lately even Ellis thought him unduly brooding and withdrawn.
“He sends you greeting,” said Ellis, “and said you may do as you please.”
Katherine nodded. That was like Hugh as he had become in the last year. It was as though he held himself away from her in all things, no longer gave her commands nor yet made clumsy efforts to gain her affection; and she thought that this was because of the thing that had happened to him. But Philippa’s advice was sensible and though it pained her it also freed her for a different obligation.
“Do you then, Ellis,” she said, “return now to Kettlethorpe and tell them I shall join the funeral cortege that’ll escort our dearest Lady Blanche to London, for this is what the King commands. And perhaps I shall remain there to do her the last honours, when she is interred, after the Duke is back from France.”
Ellis considered this and decided that it was a fitting course for her to follow and would not displease Sir Hugh.
“When will the Duke come back to England, do y’know, lady?”
She shook her head. “They say he may not yet have heard the dreadful tidings since he fights deep in Picardy. I daren’t think how it’ll be with him, when he does,” she said, remembering the look in the Duke’s eyes as he had gazed up at his wife at the tournament. “In one month he has lost both mother and wife,” she added as though to herself. The Queen perhaps he would not miss much, since they had seen so little of each other in years, but - -
” ‘Tis God’s will,” said Ellis briskly, having delivered his message and being anxious to be off. ” ‘Tis in nature that a mother dies; as for a wife, she can be soon replaced.”
Ellis’s chance and sensible words were like a spark to a hidden mine and Katherine was seized with sudden stabbing anger. “You fool, you heartless dolt!” she cried, her grey eyes blazing. “How dare you speak so? The Lady Blanche can never be replaced, nor would he want to!”
Ellis’s jaw dropped. “I meant no harm, I simply thought that -“
“God’s blood! Then stop thinking since it leads you into lunacy!”
He stood there gaping at her, and the scarlet faded from her cheekbones. “Never mind, Ellis,” she said, “no doubt I spoke too sharp. How should you who hardly knew her understand - adieu then, give them my love at home, I’ll contrive to send a message soon.”
She watched him mount his horse and cross the drawbridge, when he turned left for the village and the road across the wolds towards Kettlethorpe.
She walked slowly
Katherine buried her face in her hands on the rail and wept as she had not wept during all her time at Bolingbroke.
CHAPTER XI
The Lady Blanche of Lancaster’s funeral cortege wound its solemn way down England all through the first days of November. For the greater part of the journey her bier rested at night in the abbeys and cathedrals which had sheltered the remains of another much mourned and beloved lady some eighty years before - Eleanor of Castile, the chere reine to whose memory the first Edward had erected stone crosses at each stage of the sorrowful progress.
By this November of the Lady Blanche’s last journey, the plague had passed on. Some said that it had flown to Scotland in search of fresh victims, some that it lurked still in the wild secret mountains beyond the Welsh border, but it no longer smote England. The people gathered everywhere by the roadside to watch the Duchess’s hearse, sable-draped, and drawn by six black horses in silver harness, with nodding black ostrich plumes fastened to their heads. Folk fell to their knees and wept for this disaster which had robbed them of the second lady in the land so soon after their Queen, yet from the magnificence of the black-garbed procession with its lords and ladies, chanting monks and humble varlets, many folk drew a personal solace. During the time of te
rror and hideous death there had been no dignity of mourning, and now in the honours done the Duchess they could weep quietly for their own dead, too.
Behind the hearse rode the King’s youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock, a dark thick-set lad of fourteen whose haughty look and sulky mouth disguised his complacence at having been assigned to his first princely duty. Since Lionel was dead, and his other three brothers were fighting in France, there had been no one else of fitting rank for the King to send.
Katherine had a place in the middle of the procession behind the members of the great Lancastrian administration - the chancellor, the chief of council, and the Duke’s receiver-general, all of whom had hurried to Bolingbroke after summons by messenger.
She lived much within herself during those days of the Duchess’s procession. There was little to occupy her mind except the interest of the journey. She had no close contact with anyone she knew; rigorous etiquette ruled every phase of the progress and was enforced by the Duke’s officers. She no longer saw the ducal children except at a distance, for they rode in a chariot with the nurses behind their young uncle Thomas and far ahead of Katherine’s place in the cavalcade.
On the last night the procession stopped at Waltham, where the Duchess’ coffin rested below the shrine of the black cross, but Katherine had no wish to pay her reverence to the cross this time and did not enter the church.
On the next afternoon when the procession had turned right through Islington and nearly reached the charterhouse, there was a flourish of trumpets and a long muffled roll of tabors on the road ahead. The horses were halted and word ran back along the line that the King had come out to meet them. They all dismounted and continued on foot to the Savoy.