by Anya Seton
The Duke’s favourite hounds, Garland and Echo, came gambolling through the arch, they leaped at her in greeting and she patted their narrow grey heads, while she waited.
At last she saw him on Palamon as he paused to call back some instructions to Arnold, his head falconer, who rode on towards the mew bearing the great hooded white gerfalcon, Oriana, on his gauntlet.
Each time that she saw John after deprivation, her body flamed and seemed to melt. She thought him comelier, more princely than ever, and loved him the more for the increasing reserve he showed to the world, because it heightened the rare sweet moments of their intimacy. Though he was now thirty-six, he had grown no heavier - indeed what true Plantagenet could ever be stout? His hair, cut shorter than it used to be, had dulled from gold to sun-bleached sorrel, but it was thick as ever; and while Raulin d’Ypres, the Flemish squire, held the stirrup, John jumped down from Palamon with the easy grace of his youth.
He walked to the stairs, while Katherine and Philippa curtsied. Farther up the steps John Deyncourt, Kenilworth’s constable, bowed low and cried, “God’s greeting, Your Grace.”
The Duke smiled briefly at his daughter, his eyes passed over her dress with a faint frown, then, resting on Katherine, widened in a private signal of greeting. “You look well, my lady,” he said softly, and taking her hand, bore it to his lips.
“I am, now that you’re here-” she whispered.
“The little lads?” he asked.
“Hearty as puppies. The babe has grown much since you saw him, he speaks ten words.” “God’s blood! And does he! - Henry!” the Duke, chuckling, called over his shoulder. “I’ll vow you never were so forward as your new brother. He speaks as many words as he has months! Come pay your duty to Lady Swynford!”
Today the Duke had brought his heir with him, the nine-year-old Henry of Bolingbroke, who was a thoughtful, matter-of-fact child, somewhat short for his years but sturdily built so that he did well at knightly sports. His hair and eyes were russet-toned, his snub nose was peppered with freckles. He favoured his grandfather and namesake, the first Duke of Lancaster, rather than his handsome parents, yet from them he had his character, from Blanche, a sweetly courteous dignity, from John, ambition and a lightning temper usually controlled. From them both he had pride, and consciousness of rank.
The Duke mounted the grand outer staircase to the Hall, which he had as yet but partially rebuilt, though it was finished enough to show that in grace of proportion, airiness of tinted windows and carving of stone it deserved its growing reputation as one of the most magnificent rooms in England. Usually upon his arrival at Kenilworth the Duke’s first act would be eager inspection of the work done by the master masons since his last visit; but today, though the oriel in the Sainteowe Tower had been completed, and in the Hall a window of stained glass depicting the garden from the Romaunt de la Rose had been installed since he was here, he gave these changes but an abstracted look, and Katherine saw that some matter was disturbing him.
She knew better than to question. In any case they would have no privacy until late that night, when he would come from the great White Chamber, up the hidden stairs to her solar - and her bed. Until then she must wait and do her duty as chatelaine towards all the company he had brought. She must find out whether the chamberlain had readied sleeping quarters for them all, and she was already certain that not enough of the precious spices had been doled out to season food for so many.
John at once retired to the White Chamber with Raulin in attendance. While the guests were occupied with drinking in the Hall, Katherine went upstairs to fetch the keys which unlocked the spice chest. In her solar she found Hawise industriously shaking a rowan branch over the bed and muttering some sort of charm.
“Holy saints, wench!” cried Katherine laughing. “What are you doing?” She looked at this dear maid and companion with amused affection. They had been through much together since Hawise had come back into her service before little John was born. Well-paid service now; the days had passed when Katherine must accept her maid’s own money to exist. Hawise’s present wages were equal to the Pessoners’ yearly income from fish, and the fishmonger marvelled at this, proud that his daughter had such good fortune, particularly as her husband, Jack Maudelyn, had returned of sour puzzled temper, neglectful of his looms and prone to traipse off into Kent after the Lollard preachers and come back full of their heretical mouthings against the monks, the bishops, and God’s manifest plan of rich and poor, lord and commoner.
Hawise’s stout arm continued to weave the branch over the bed, until she concluded the magic words which whistled a little through her gapped teeth before she turned and favoured her mistress with a stern look. “I’m fixing it so ye’ll not conceive again now that my Lord Duke’s back wi’ ye. Two bastards is aplenty for ye to bear, my poppet, and you so bad wi’ the milk leg after Harry, I thought I’d lost ye.”
“Oh, Hawise-” Katherine laughed, colouring a little.
“I must take what God sends, I suppose.” She bent and peered at herself in a silver-backed mirror, rubbed a little more red salve on her lips, frowned at a roughening she thought she saw on her chin.
“Ye needna fret,” said Hawise watching. “Breeding’s not harmed your looks, I’ll grant that, ye’ve still a waist like a weasel.” She spoke tartly because it hurt her to see her beloved mistress frowning at the mirror and reddening her lips like any of the lewd court women, and there were other small changes too in her lady. God blast him, Hawise thought as many times before. Since he couldn’t marry her, why didn’t he let her be! She’s too fine for this game, however many play it. It’ll kill her if he tires. Though as yet there were no signs of his tiring.
“The Duke is concerned about something, I fear,” said Katherine, gesturing for Hawise to bring her the bunch of keys from their hiding cranny beside the chimney. ” ‘Tis perhaps that the Prince of Wales is worsening and may not live the summer out? Yet that’s no new thing.”
“Nay, more like ‘tis this matter of Parliament next week,” said Hawise, who had been down to London to see her husband for Easter, and there heard much angry talk. “The Commons are in savage mood. No doubt His Grace has wind of what they’ll ask, and, by cock’s bones, they don’t see eye to eye, Commons and His Grace!” Indeed she had checked her Jack sharply for the hateful things he repeated of the Duke, but this she did not tell her mistress.
Katherine nodded, vaguely relieved. Inclination as well as good taste kept her from interest in national affairs. She was no Alice Perrers, whose greed for power and money were all but wrecking England, so they said. Katherine’s only desire was to live quietly removed from the hurly-burly of the court, to keep herself and her children from public scrutiny and receive John when he came as any lady would her rightful wedded lord who must be often absent on man’s business.
This meant ignoring a great part of his life. It also meant ignoring Costanza and that other child of his at Hertford Castle - Catalina - which meant Katherine in English. The Duchess Costanza had wished to name her child for a favourite Spanish saint, not knowing, in the summer of 1372, of Katherine Swynford’s existence. John had laughed when he told Katherine of this. It amused him that his wife should name their daughter for his mistress, all unknowing, and part of his unkind laughter had come from his anger with Costanza for producing a girl, and no suitable heir for the throne of Castile. Katherine had felt faint pity for that other woman, all the easier to feel since she had never seen the Duchess.
Costanza had heard of Katherine’s existence now, no doubt though Philippa Chaucer said there was no telling what the Duchess knew, always jib-jabbing in her own heathenish tongue to those Spaniards, but mum as a clam to her English household.
The Duke had appointed Katherine’s sister as one of the English waiting-women to his new Duchess, and granted her a handsome annuity of ten pounds. Philippa had been delighted and looked upon the appointment as heaven’s just reward for the dull years of hardship at Kettlethorpe.
That she owed this windfall to Katherine’s peculiar connection with the Duke, she accepted with brisk realism, though seldom alluding to it. Ever shrewd judge of a bargain, Philippa considered that the manifold benefits now enjoyed by all Katherine’s family nicely counterbalanced moral qualms. And she frequently thanked God that Hugh had died so opportunely, “Or you might have been shackled till Doomsday to that grumbling ha’penny husband, Katherine, and we’d all still be pigging it at Kettlethorpe.”
Philippa’s attitude had hurt Katherine, at first; she had felt her love cheapened by it, and for some time mention of Hugh gave her dull pain, like remorse, oddly mixed with anxiety.
But that was in the beginning, now when she thought of Hugh there was nothing but a blank.
Katherine rose from the dressing-stool and fastening the keys to her girdle, smiled at Hawise. “I must see to our guests. I scarce know who has come with His Grace.”
The company assembled in the Great Hall were culled from the Duke’s retainers or close friends and mostly men, of course. Katherine was accustomed to that. Still, a couple of the young knights had brought their wives, and Lord Latimer, the King’s chamberlain - a sly-eyed man, long-nosed as a fox - had his lady with him up from London. An honour so unusual that Katherine, as she received Lady Latimer’s subdued civilities, thought that his lordship must need very special favour from the Duke. And she was increasingly aware of tension beneath the surface of this gathering.
Lord Michael de la Pole was his bluff hearty self and greeted Katherine with the semi-paternal pinch of the cheek he always gave her; but then he drew to the corner by the north fireplace and, scowling, whispered with the huge glowering Lord Neville of Raby. Both barons glanced sideways at Latimer, then with deepened frowns their eyes turned to the tall priest in the black doctoral robes, as though they wondered what he did there.
Katherine wondered too, for the priest was John Wyclif, leader of the heretical Lollards. Wyclif had responded to her greeting with a slight bow and left her at once to stand by himself near the Romaunt de la Rose window, which he examined with apparent interest. Katherine too looked at the new window, admiring the blaze of emerald light surrounding the god of love and the ruby rose.
“Do you understand Love’s Garden better now than once you did, little sister?” said a voice in her ear.
She whirled around crying, “Geoffrey!” and caught his hand in pleasure. “I didn’t see you or know you were coming. I thought you at Aldgate.”
“I was. But since his Grace was so good as to include me in Saint George festivities, I came. I grow dull alone with my sinful books, my scribblings and my wool tallies.”
His hazel eyes twinkled as they always had, faintly mocking. In the months since she had seen him, he had grown stouter, and there was grey in his little forked beard. His gown was deeply furred like any prosperous burgher’s; he wore a gold chain that had been given him by the King, but there were still ink stains on his fingers and a battered pen-case hung at his neck with the chain.
“Nay, Geoffrey,” she said. “You know you’re never dull alone, you like it.”
They smiled at each other. Though Phillippa sometimes got leave from her duties to the Duchess Costanza and visited her husband in his lodgings over Aldgate, where she cleaned and clucked and harried him out of his easy-going bachelor habits, these visits sprang largely from a sense of obligation, and the Chaucers were both more contented apart. Their little son stayed with his mother, so Geoffrey lived alone.
“How goes your work at the Custom House?” Katherine asked. “Somehow I never thought to see you smothered in wool.”
“Don’t sneer at wool, my dear,” he said lightly, ” ‘Tis the English crown’s chief jewel. God bless those glittering fleeces that pour through the port of London out to a wool-hungry world. I value them high as ever Jason did. Our kingdom’d be bankrupt without them. If,” he added, frowning suddenly, and glancing at Latimer, “it isn’t so already.”
“What is it with Lord Latimer?” she asked in a low voice. “I sense unease here today, and my Lord Duke seems heavy of mind.”
Well he may, thought Chaucer. There was trouble seething over a perilous fire. No telling how far the Commons were prepared to go in attacking the crown party, in this first Parliament called in three years; but they would not tamely grant the new subsidy which would be demanded by the King. That no one who had come from London could ever doubt. They would not dare attack the old King directly, nor yet perhaps the Duke, unpopular as he had grown. But they might conceivably fly for game as high as Latimer, who was King’s chamberlain, keeper of his privy purse and the Duke’s associate as well. Doubtless Latimer was an unscrupulous opportunist who had been feathering his own nest at crown expense like many another; but they said worse of him, far worse than that.
“Why, Latimer is the butt of many rumours. What man in high place is not?” said Geoffrey to Katherine, shrugging as though the matter were of no consequence. He understood the Duke enough to know that he preferred that Katherine should be kept apart from the turmoil of his public life. In truth, Geoffrey thought that the protective tenderness his patron showed to Katherine was one of the most admirable traits in a complex character.
A rustle of attention by the Sainteowe door to the Hall, and the glimpse of a coroneted head, showed that the Duke had entered. Katherine, her eyes clearing at once from the frown with which she had asked of Latimer, hurried down the Hall to meet him.
Geoffrey settled himself inconspicuously on a cushioned window seat and surveyed the company. He looked at the radiant Katherine as she sat near the Duke, in her velvet and ermine and new jewels. So he had been right when he saw her first at Windsor and thought her destined to rise high in life by reason of her rare beauty. The drabness of her years at Kettlethorpe had after all been but a transient step. Yet this relation with Lancaster was not the role he had vaguely imagined for her either. This was too frank, too crude in its flouting of the chivalric code which demanded above all a delicate secrecy in the pursuance of illicit love. More fitting far if they had managed to conduct their love like that of Troilus and Criseyde, unsuspected by the censorious world. His thoughts played with the story of Criseyde, and almost he could see Katherine as the lovely Trojan widow.
Nay, thought Geoffrey, smiling at himself, my mind has gone a-blackberrying. And he looked at the Duke, who was now in earnest converse with Wyclif and obviously far from love-longings. It was no soft bond that linked these two, the great Duke and the reformer whose teachings now infiltrated England. This bond was indignation. Between them, though no doubt for different motives, they were agreed on debasing and despoiling the fat monks and fatter bishops who were bleeding the land.
Wyclif - so spare, so dedicated to his startling theories, of communal property, to his attacks on the Pope, to his denial of the need for confessions, saints or pilgrimages - seemed a strange colleague for Lancaster, whose orthodoxy had never been in question.
Yet they seemed to have respect for each other, thought Chaucer, and it was folly ever to listen to the slanders put out by their many enemies. The house of fame, he thought, is built on melting ice, not steel, and rumbles ever with a sound of rumours, while the goddess of fame is as false and capricious as her sister - Fortune.
Geoffrey’s hand went to the pen-case that hung at his neck and, forgetting the Duke and Wyclif, his eyes darted around the Hall. Seeing no writing materials, he slipped quietly through the North door to the office of the constable. Here, as he’d hoped, a clerk was working on the castle accounts which would be submitted to the Duke’s auditor tomorrow.
Geoffrey borrowed what he needed and huddling on a stool beside the clerk, noted the words, and the rhymes they presently suggested. ” ‘The great sound … that rumbleth up and down, in Fame’s House, full of tydings, both of fair speech and eludings, and of false and truth compound.’ “
He wrote on. The verses he had had in his head for many weeks began to shape as he wished them.
; That night when the guests had all retired, Katherine lay waiting between silken sheets for her lord to come. Her naked body glowed from the sweet herbs with which Hawise had cleansed her, her skin was fragrant with the amber scent, and she rejoiced that it was firm and fresh as it had ever been. She thought how the responses of this body had increased and that her passion now was equal to his, though for modesty she tried sometimes to hide it. Yet carnal love was no sin, she thought stoutly, if the love be true-hearted. A hundred romances had taught her this, and since no strict confessor exhorted her, she no longer felt the sense of sin. Brother Walter Dysse, the Carmelite friar, listened with placid indulgence to her infrequent confessions, as he did to the Duke’s. And she went to Mass only as an example to the children and the castle folk.
The room grew chill in the April dawn before John came, sliding without a word into her bed while her arms closed about him hungrily; but later he did not fall asleep on her breast. He lay staring up at the shadowy bed canopy that was strewn with tiny diamond stars.
She put her hand softly on his forehead, for sometimes he liked to have her stroke his hair, but he turned his head away.
“What is it, my dear heart?” she whispered. “The Blessed Mother forfend you are not displeased with me?”
“No, no - lovedy,” he drew her tight against him so that her cheek was in the hollow of his neck, but still he stared up at the canopy. He would not speak, lest the baffled rage which fermented in his soul should sound like fear.