Katherine

by Anya Seton

  Katherine could see little of what went on, and it was not until the Duchess had been borne into her home chapel at the Savoy and the procession was broken up at last that she saw the King. He wore a plain silver mourning crown and beneath it his lank hair shone silver too, though in his scanty drooping beard there were still some yellow traces. His lean face was deeply furrowed, his faded blue eyes were red-rimmed; as he walked with dragging steps into the chapel, no one could doubt that he felt grief, as he had felt it for his Queen so short a time ago. And yet, not six paces behind him, taking precedence of all the lords and ladies, came Alice Perrers, her head respectfully bowed, but a faint smile on her thin red lips. Her mourning robe was stiff with seed pearls, the gauzy veil on her elaborately coiffed black hair was powdered with brilliants, while the odour of musk that she exuded overlay the scent of incense from within the chapel.

  Katherine watched with disgust and wondered that the courtiers seemed to take so calmly this woman’s flaunting presence there.

  Many things shocked her that first night at the Savoy Palace. The King and his company remained for supper and Katherine from her seat at the side of the Great Hall observed the High Table with little of the wide-eyed admiration she had felt for royalty three years before.

  The supper began on a solemn enough note, the King’s confessor offered a prayer in Latin, added, extempore, some remarks about the great lady they were mourning, and ended with admonitions for all to think of the state of their own souls since mortal life was fleeting. When he had finished, the Lancaster and King’s heralds blew long dirge-like wails and the minstrels in the gallery above began a soft slow tune. But this seemly quiet lasted only until the first cups of rich Vernage wine had been drained. Then Alice Perrers, who sat next to the King, leaned towards him and whispered in his ear, whereupon his melancholy mouth curved in a smile. She leaned over and picked up a fluffy yellow dog which wore a gold and ruby collar. She danced the dog on the table and crowned it with a ruffle of bread, and a feather pulled from the roasted swan a kneeling squire presented to her. The King laughed outright and put his arm around Alice’s naked shoulders.

  At once the watchful minstrels changed to a merry tune, and a wave of ribaldry flowed unchecked along the High Table. One of the lords shouted out a lewd riddle, and all the company tried to guess it, each capping the other’s sally with a yet coarser one. Katherine could not hear all the words, but she could see the laxness of their bodies as they lolled on the cushioned benches; and she could see the King and Alice drinking together from one cup, and that Prince Thomas teased the young Countess of Pembroke by dabbling wine between her breasts and tickling her plump arms with a leering precocity.

  The interminable meal dragged on, and each course ended in a subtlety: triumphs of the confectioner’s art cunningly contrived to fit the occasion. The first one represented the Black Death with his scythe standing above the body of a saffron-haired maiden. Death’s figure was fashioned from sugar coloured black with licorice. Katherine thought it marvellous and horrible; but at the High Table they scarcely looked at the subtlety except that Alice Perrers absently broke off a piece of Death’s licorice robe and sucked it as she talked to the King.

  Katherine’s head began to ache, her stomach revolted against the highly spiced and ornamented dishes. At last she murmured an excuse and slipped out into the cold dark night. So vast was the Savoy, such a honeycomb of buildings, alleys and courtyards that she could not remember her way back to the small dorter the chamberlain had assigned to her.

  Except for the noise in the Great Hall and the bustle of servants running to it from the kitchens, the Savoy was now a sleeping city, dimly lit by a few bracketed wall torches. Katherine wandered through wrong turnings and into several dark courts before she saw anyone from whom she could ask directions. Then from a small gabled house near the state apartments she saw a tall friar emerge and knew him for a Franciscan by the grey of his habit and the long knotted scourge that dangled from his waist beside his crucifix. His cowled head was bent over a black bag. He was buckling the straps and did not see Katherine in the shadowy court until she went up to him.

  “God’s greetings, good Brother,” she said. “I regret to trouble you, but do you know the palace?” She feared that he might beg alms ‘of her as all friars did, and she had not three groats left in her pouch from the half-noble which Hugh had given her for pocket-money at Bolingbroke over two months ago. But her weariness had increased while she wandered about and she ached for rest.

  The friar looked at her keenly but could see little beneath her hood. He contented himself with saying, “Yes, mistress, I know the Savoy well.” Brother William Appleton was a master physician, and a savant, though he was still but thirty, and he stood high in the Duke’s favour by reason of his discretion, as well as his skill with the probe and lancet.

  “I’ve lost my way, Sir Friar,” said Katherine with an apologetic smile. “I’m to lodge in the Beaufort Tower, but I cannot find it.”

  “Ah,” said the friar, “mayhap you came from Bolingbroke today with the funeral train?”

  Katherine bowed her head. Suddenly tears stung her eyes and her journey seemed to her both foolish and futile. Here she had no friends and no true place, nor could she forget the horror of those days at Bolingbroke and plunge into revelry as the others had. And the Lady Blanche had no further need of naive prayers, now that she rested in her own chapel in the home of her ancestors, while six monks prayed for the repose of her soul.

  “You’re weary, mistress,” said the monk in a kinder tone. “I’ll guide you to the Beaufort Tower.”

  He led her through an arch and down some steps into the vaulted tunnel that ran along outside the ducal wine cellars, then up again towards the river into a court called the Red Rose, because in summer it was filled with roses of Provence.

  “Yonder’s your tower,” said the friar, pointing to a massive round tourelle on which were blazoned, six feet high in gold and gules, the arms of Beaufort and Artois, for Blanche’s grandmother. ” ‘Tis the oldest part of the palace and has not yet been renovated and embellished by my Lord Duke as have the buildings around the Inner Ward. Did you notice there the carvings and the traceried windows and that all of them are glazed?” He spoke at unaccustomed length because his trained eye noted the droop of Katherine’s head, he had heard the choke in her voice, and he wished to examine her a moment by the torchlight. Though the plague seemed to be over, one knew how violently it had raged at Bolingbroke, and it was his duty as physician to be watchful.

  “Yes, Sir Friar,” she said, turning her face up to him in the light as he had hoped, “all here is wondrous fair.”

  Wondrous fair indeed! he thought, startled, gazing at the pure oval of her face, the wide eyes and the sharp chiselled line of forehead and nose. Her hair glowed dark copper against the black hood. She had the lovely face of a pagan Psyche that he had seen on his pilgrimage to Rome, and though he was an austere man, and none of your concupiscent degenerate friars who had sprung up of late to disgrace the barefoot orders, yet he was a man, and had not quite subdued a sensitivity to beauty.

  “You are not feverish, my sister?” asked the friar, suddenly recollecting why he had wanted to examine her face, and he touched her forehead with his cool bony fingers.

  “Nay, brother - I’m well enough - in body. ‘Tis my heart that’s heavy. Have you heard when our Lord Duke will come?”

  “Why, very soon! For he had landed at Plymouth. A dark and bitter thing ‘twill be for him, his meeting with his poor lady, God absolve her soul.”

  “I think He has no need to,” said Katherine very low, “she was without sin. Grand merci for your guidance, Sir Friar.” She gave him a faint smile and turned to the door of the Beaufort Tower, where a sleepy porter answered to her knock.

  Brother William murmured Benedicite and walked thoughtfully back through the courtyard, his horny naked soles making no sound on the chill flagstones.

  Tired as she was, K
atherine could not sleep that night. She shared a bed with some Derbyshire knight’s fat sister, and Katherine lay on her back listening to the lady’s snores; to the gurgle of the Thames from below their window; to the periodic clang of church bells wafted upstream from London town a mile away. Here at the Savoy they had a great painted Flemish clock fixed to a tower in the Outer Ward. It struck the hours by means of little dwarfs with hammers on a gong, and she heard each hour’s end pass by.

  At four o’clock she rose and dressed herself quietly. A maidservant slept on a pile of straw in the passage but she took care not to waken her. It seemed to Katherine that, if she could be alone in the chapel with the Lady Blanche, she might be eased of her heavy heart and she might understand why she felt grief and horror now far stronger than while she had actually lived through the dreadful day of plague.

  She lit a candle at the embers of their dorter fire, went down the stone steps and let herself out into the Red Rose Court. The torches had been extinguished. It was not yet dawn and the bleak November sky twinkled with frosty stars. She walked slowly, peering with her candle, and found her way through the main court entrance into an alley, where a dog barked at her and was hushed by a sleepy voice. She went under another arch between the chancery buildings and the turreted ducal apartments and so into the Outer Ward. Beyond the barracks and the stables, the chapel lights flickered through its stain-glass windows and spread patches of blue and green and ruby on the stones outside.

  She pushed the chapel door and entered. The nave was empty. The monks who were on duty chanted their prayers far in the depths of the chancel behind the gilded rood-screen. Katherine crept up to the chancel step and knelt there, gazing from the black bier in front to the silver image of the Blessed Virgin in a niche to her right.

  As she looked back from the coffin her ear was caught by a sound from the chancel floor in the shadow of the bier. She looked more closely and gasped.

  A man in black lay prone on the tiles, his arms outstretched towards the coffin. She saw the convulsive heaving of his shoulders and heard the sound again. Between his outstretched arms his hair gleamed gold against the shadowed tiles.

  She clenched her hands on the pillar of the rood-screen trying to raise herself and run from witnessing this that she had no right to see, but her muscles had begun to tremble and she stumbled on the edge of her skirt. At once the man raised his head and his swollen bloodshot eyes flashed with fury. “Who are you that dares come in here now? How dare you gape at me - you graceless bitch -” He stopped and rising to his feet walked down beneath the rood-screen. “Katherine?” he said in a tone of wonder.

  Still on her knees she stared up at him mutely. Slow tears gathered in her eyes and ran down her face. The monks’ voices chanted louder in the Miserere, then died away.

  “Katherine,” said the Duke. “What do you here?”

  “Forgive me, my Lord,” she whispered, “I loved her too - -“

  His mouth twisted and he flung his clenched fists against his breast. “My God, my God - that she should leave me like this. These weeks since I heard I didn’t believe, I couldn’t believe - -” He turned and looked at the coffin. “Go, Katherine,” he said dully.

  She fled down the nave and out of the chapel. She did not go back to the dorter, she wandered through the courts until she came to the great terraced garden by the river. She groped her way past the clipped box hedges, down marble steps until she reached the landing pier at the foot of the garden. It was chill there from the river breeze and she shivered a little in her cloak. She crouched on a stanchion at the edge of the pier and watched the inky slow-moving waters pass, pouring themselves eternally into the sea, and she no longer thought of the Lady Blanche, or of the horrors of the plague: she prayed for the man who lay on the chancel tiles by the bier.

  The Duchess was interred at last four days later. Her marble tomb was placed in a chantry next to the high altar in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and two chantry priests were engaged to sing Masses for her soul in perpetuity. Her funeral procession from the Savoy down the Strand through Ludgate to St. Paul’s was the most magnificent ever seen in England, it surpassed even Queen Philippa’s recent obsequies in Westminster Abbey, but to the Duke it brought no comfort.

  When he returned from St. Paul’s he would speak to nobody and mounting straight to his private apartments locked himself into the small chamber that was called Avalon because its English tapestry portrayed the enchanted burial of King Arthur.

  John would not enter the great solar which he had shared with Blanche or sleep in the bed where he had once lain in her arms; and for days he would not quit the Avalon Chamber at all. During this time there was only one person whom he would admit, Raulin d’Ypres, his young Flemish body squire who brought him food which he barely touched. No one else saw him.

  Each morning in the high-vaulted Presence Chamber which adjoined the privy apartments, an anxious group of men gathered to await the squire’s word as to whether they would be received, and each day Raulin came back, his broad face gloomy as he gave them a denial. On Thursday after the Duchess’s funeral he returned to the waiting men and said, “The Duke’s Grace still vill not see you, my lords. He sits effer the same staring at the fire, except sometimes he writes on a parchment. This morning, though, he vishes Master Mason Henry Yevele sent for.”

  “God’s wounds!” cried the great baron, Michael de la Pole, who was a blunt, burly middle-aged Yorkshireman. “Then he wishes to consult Yevele on the alabaster effigy of the Duchess. If he can do that, he can spare us a moment! Has he quite forgot the war? Has he forgot the dangers his royal brothers face in France?”

  The Duke’s two highest domestic officials, his chancellor and receiver-general, exchanged weary, resigned glances. Apparently on this day too, the Duke would transact no business and the chancery affairs must wait. They shrugged and went out.

  De la Pole was devoted to his Duke, to whom he had taught many of the arts of war, but he did not understand this excessive grieving. He stalked over to the window to join Lord Neville of Raby, who was irritably tapping his foot and drumming with his dirty heavily beringed fingers on the stone sill while he stared out at a windy rainswept Thames.

  “He,” said de la Pole, frowning in the direction of the Avalon Chamber, “has not even reported to the King on our campaign in Picardy!”

  “Nothing to report, I hear,” growled Neville, “since you never joined in battle - body of Christ, why didn’t you force the French bastards to fight?” He glared at de la Pole from beneath his bushy grizzled eyebrows. A harsh North Country man was the great Lord of Raby and never one to mince words.

  De la Pole’s ruddy face darkened, but he answered temperately. “How could we, since they hid from us? We did what might be, we burned the country from Calais to Boulogne; but ill luck hounded us, and the plague there too.” He sighed, thinking of the many plague deaths in camp. “But what’s our next move to be? The Prince of Wales is sore beset in Aquitaine, Edmund piddles away his forces in the Dordogne, that hot fool of a young Pembroke will listen to nobody and holds himself a better soldier than Chandos - we must plan a new attack - yet my Lord Duke sits in there moping alone.”

  Lord Neville blew his beaked nose loudly with his fingers and wiped them on his miniver-lined sleeve. “Aye,” he said angrily,” ‘tis not of the land I wish to speak to him, ‘tis of the disposition of our ships.” Neville had just been appointed Admiral of the Fleet and as a man of fifty and an arrogant one, it irked him to wait on the decisions of a man of twenty-nine, though he was his feudal overlord. There was a stir across the room, a yeoman held open the great oak and wrought-iron door. Two friars padded in.

  “Ah, now we have the godly faction represented,” said de la Pole dryly. “We’ll see how they fare.”

  The two friars were as unlike as a grey heron and a plump hen. Brother William Appleton, the lean Franciscan physician, towered a head above Brother Walter Dysse, the Carmelite, whose snowy cope was woven of the softest N
orfolk worsted and belled out to show glimpses of an elegant tunic, and a gold and crystal rosary dangling from a paunch as neat and round as a melon. And while the Franciscan grey friar was shod only by his own soles, the Carmelite had soft kidskin shoes and wore hose of lamb’s wool.

  “Nay, brethren,” said the young body squire to them, flushing, for he was still unused to the new importance the Duke’s behaviour had thrust upon him. “His Grace vill not see you either. He says his body and soul must shift for themselves since he cares naught about them.”

  “Christus misereatur!” said Brother Walter lisping slightly as he palmed his plump white hands. “Sweet Jesu, but that is a melancholy message.”

  “He cannot help himself,” said the physician, thoughtfully, “his horoscope shows him much afflicted by Saturn. Yet, for that black bile from which he suffers he should be bled, and I have other remedies which might help, could I but try them.”

  “And how long will His Grace be ruled by Saturn?” asked Baron de la Pole walking over to the Grey Friar. “By God, I hope not long.”

  “The aspects are somewhat unclear, and yet it seems that soon Venus will ascend and mitigate the baleful Saturn,” answered Brother William carefully.

  “Venus forsooth!” cried the Baron. “Don’t prate to me of Venus, Sir Friar - it’s Mars that we need! Mars! - look now here come two more black crows!” he added as the great door again swung open: Court mourning for the Queen and the Duchess would last until Christmas and had peopled the palaces with black, which depressed de la Pole, who was fond of scarlet. The two new-comers were not Lancastrians however, and de la Pole drew close to Lord Neville, who still fidgeted by the window. Both men stiffened and watched the new-comers warily. These two noble young sprigs, the Earl of March and Richard Fitz Alan, heir of Arundel, were known to hold little love for the Duke.

  Edmund Mortimer, the Earl of March, was great-grandson to the Roger Mortimer who had been Queen Isabella’s paramour, but he had no likeness to that lusty man. This Mortimer was a weedy stripling of eighteen with pimples thick upon his beardless face. Insignificant as a stableboy, a stranger might have thought of him, except for his pale eyes, which had a cold steady gaze; but no one in the Presence Chamber thought him insignificant. He was the ranking earl, he owned vast possessions in the Welsh Marches and in Ireland, and he had recently wed young Philippa, the only child of Duke Lionel of Clarence, and thus become grandson to the King.