Hugh and Bess

by Susan Higginbotham

  “The queen was on another ship, of course, so we were all speculating as to why the king summoned us. What's the other part of the reason?”

  “He has a wedding in mind, it seems. The Lady Isabella to Louis, the new Count of Flanders. Louis doesn’t have much choice in the matter, it appears; he's only sixteen, and he's all but controlled by his people instead of the other way around. To make matters worse, the old count was slain at Crécy, before the son's eyes, so I’m not sure this bodes well for the proposed match. But we shall see.”

  Bess had been in the company of the Lady Isabella, the king's eldest daughter, at Windsor. Isabella had been not quite twelve then, but she already possessed a considerable sense of her own worth, Bess had thought at the time. Even in happier circumstances, Louis was likely to find the marriage a trying one, she suspected. “When is it to take place?”

  “No time soon; I don’t think the king has even opened negotiations yet. But enough about this. Here is the Maison le Despenser!”

  She giggled as Hugh lifted her and carried her across the threshold; up and down the street, other knights were doing the same with their ladies. When he kissed her and set her down, she looked around. She was standing in a miniature hall, backing up to a miniature kitchen. Upstairs, she discovered when Hugh guided her to a staircase, was a large bedchamber, obviously Hugh's, and a couple of smaller ones, where Bess supposed some of Hugh's men slept. “It is like a house for a doll,” she said.

  “I’m afraid you’ll find it cramped after a while, but we’re hoping the French king will see reason soon and end this.”

  She looked outside. “I have never been in a siege before. I thought it would be more—warlike. All I hear is hammering from the king's works.”

  “This is the quiet type of siege. We’re starving them out.”

  Bess had heard of such sieges, but she had never had to consider the matter so closely. She winced as the smell of cooking drifted up the staircase. Seeing her face change, Hugh said, “I’d prefer not to see them starve also, but there's no other way to take the town; its natural defenses won’t allow it. The poorest citizens were made to leave not long ago, so there’d be fewer mouths to feed. Our king gave them a meal and a safe passage through our troops.”

  “How long do you think it will last?”

  “That's entirely up to the French king. But haven’t we had enough war talk for now?” He grinned and led Bess to the bed, which was small but proved to be entirely serviceable for the purpose to which the couple put it.

  The weeks slipped into months as the siege dragged on. Most of the ladies returned to England after the Yuletide festivities, but the queen and the Lady Isabella stayed behind, as did most of the wives of the king's commanders.

  With the population of Calais starving within sight, Bess felt wretchedly guilty for her own small privation, boredom. Yet bored she was. Used to riding around Hugh's sprawling estates and directing a large household, she had nowhere to go now except into the market square or to the homes of the other wives, and the ridiculously small staff it took to run the Calais house hardly needed direction. She eagerly watched the harbor for English ships, anxious to get whatever messages had been sent from her and Hugh's estates, but the messages when they arrived were usually of the dullest sort. Hugh's experienced stewards had matters at home well in hand, it seemed. The only news of interest came from Emma: She had borne a healthy girl, named Elizabeth after Bess.

  The men in Calais were busier than the women. The English had not yet succeeded in blocking all access to the port, and occasionally a ship laden with supplies for the townspeople of Calais would slip through. From time to time the king tried to assault the town's walls, without success, and occasionally someone would head inland on a foraging raid. Still, Hugh spent most nights next to Bess in their bed, and seeing him every morning upon waking more than compensated Bess for the tedium of Calais.

  Joan of Kent had remained in Calais too, in a house the king had provided for her and Will on account of his affection for his late friend the Earl of Salisbury and on account of Will's having succeeded to his father's earldom. Like Bess, Joan had yet to conceive a child, and this, at least as far as Bess was concerned, had brought the two of them closer together in an outpost where almost all of the other married women were constantly talking of children, those who had been born and those who were on the way. When ships came in bringing new goods from Flanders or even England, Bess and Joan would run to see what was unloaded, and on the dull days when nothing new was going on in the marketplace, they would go to the building that had been designated as a royal palace and spend the day with Queen Philippa and the rest of the wives. The queen's eldest daughter, the Lady Isabella, was there too, rather to her chagrin, for her intended husband had jilted her, using the pretext of a falconing expedition to get on a fast horse and ride for dear life from Flanders into France. Fortunately, Isabella had taken this in stride; doted on by both parents and with an ample household, she had been in no hurry to exchange her very comfortable life at home for the unknown quantities of a husband, especially a husband who had some cause to bear her homeland ill will. The wives of Calais, who had been hoping for the excitement of a royal wedding to break up the tedium, were the only ones who had seemed truly affected by the broken engagement.

  Spring had arrived in Calais, and with it a growing certainty that the people inside the city walls could not withstand the siege much longer, when Bess, coming home from a dull afternoon sewing with the queen, entered her tiny hall and was stopped by a servant. “My lady, your brother the Earl of Salisbury is upstairs with Sir Hugh. He seems—agitated.”

  Bess hurried upstairs. Was Joan ill? She had not been in Queen Philippa's chambers, though that very morning she and Bess had gone to the marketplace to admire a shipment of fabric from Flanders. Nothing had seemed amiss with Joan then, except that she had had difficulty choosing between a bolt of green and a bolt of blue and had finally settled the matter in an eminently sensible way by purchasing both. “Will! What is the matter?”

  Will sat on a stool, his face in his hands. He said nothing. Beside him stood Hugh, looking as ill at ease as Bess had ever seen him in his life. “Hugh! Is it Joan? Is she ill? She was fine this morn—”

  “She is not ill.” Will lifted his head but stared off into space.

  “Will, talk to me.”

  Will made an effort to compose himself. “We had an argument.”

  “Over what?” Bess prompted when it seemed that her brother was not going to continue.

  “Over—who knows? I don’t remember—I don’t care now. All I know is that it turned into a row. We’ve had plenty of them. She said she wished she’d never married me. She's said that before too. But this time—”

  He broke down in tears. Bess knelt beside her brother and put her arms around him. Never in her life had she seen carefree Will like this. “Will. Please. Tell me. It can’t be all that bad.”

  “Oh, yes, it can be.” Will blew his nose. “She said that she's not my true wife at all, that all these years she's been married to Sir Thomas Holland.”

  Bess rocked back on her heels.

  She had passed Sir Thomas Holland that very morning. Though he’d lost an eye on this excursion to France, he was still a handsome man, his eye patch making him look jaunty rather than maimed. Dear Lord, he was Will's own steward! It was not hard to imagine her beautiful sister-in-law flirting with him, but married? Then, dimly, she remembered that night at Windsor Castle where she’d seen him and Joan caressing in a corner. She’d never mentioned it in all these years, thinking that in her inebriation her mind must have been playing tricks on her, but now she recalled every detail perfectly, Joan's leg brushing Holland's; his hand cupping her bosom as he kissed her neck; their groans as they moved closer together, thinking they were unseen in the darkness. She shook her head, as if doing so would erase the memory. Instead, more came to her: Joan's strange behavior at her wedding, her flood of tears when Bess had visited
her several years ago, her blithe acceptance of her barrenness that Bess had found so hard to comprehend. She put her arm back on Will's shoulder. “When, Will?”

  “About seven years ago, when she was twelve, she said. She swears that they married in front of a couple of witnesses, then consummated it that evening. It was not long before Holland went off to Prussia.”

  “Why did she never mention this to anyone?”

  “Damned if I know. I slapped her hard then and walked out.” He began to sob again. “I didn’t mean to hurt her, Bess.”

  “Jesus, Will!” She turned to her husband. “I had better go to her, Hugh.”

  Hugh nodded. “First I’d heard of the slapping part. Will, you’ll spend the night here. Bess will talk with Joan. Tomorrow perhaps the two of you can work this out.”

  He looked highly doubtful, though.

  “Are you here to beat me too?”

  Bess winced when she saw Joan's face. Will had not hit her hard enough to cause a bruise, but she could see a red mark on her cheek. “No, I came to see how you were.”

  “And to see if I was sharing my bed with Sir Thomas, perhaps.”

  “Maybe that too,” snapped Bess. “Where is he?”

  “He's staying with one of his friends.”

  “A good place for him,” said Bess. “Joan, I don’t wish to harm you. I only want to understand what has happened. I’ve never seen Will so miserable in all my life. Are you truly married to Thomas Holland?”

  “I married him months before I went through that ceremony with your brother.”

  She made it sound like a pagan rite. Bess held her tongue as her sister-in-law went on. “Sir Thomas knew my mother and your parents wouldn’t be happy with the marriage, so we decided he would go off and make his fortune and then claim me. So he went off to Prussia, and while he was still there, it was decided that I should marry your brother.”

  “So why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I did, to my mother. I told her that I had an understanding with Sir Thomas. She's not like your parents, Bess. She's high strung, you know that, and people say she's been like that ever since Papa died. She flew into a rage. She called me a whore and a strumpet and told me that if Sir Thomas came near me she’d have him arrested on whatever grounds she could find or invent. I didn’t dare tell her then that I’d given him my maidenhead. I was scared some harm would come to him if anyone found out. So I let them marry me to your brother. He’d never been with a woman, of course, so it was easy to pretend with him that I was still a maid. I yelped and cried a bit. My woman Matilda knew about Sir Thomas and me, so she sprinkled some animal blood on the sheet the next morning to satisfy anyone who cared to inspect it.”

  “Did you never think of Will in all of this?”

  Joan ignored the question. “Sir Thomas was gone for so long, I thought that he had forgotten me and everything would work out, except that I loved him and couldn’t love Will. But then he did come back, and he found out I was married to Will. He was angry and sad, but he said that it was best that I continue that way, since he didn’t have the money to contest the matter and because he didn’t wish to hurt my reputation. So we decided to go our separate ways.”

  “Is that what you were doing when you were making love to him at Windsor Castle?”

  Joan's lovely eyes opened wide. “You saw us?” Bess nodded coldly. “I’d had too much to drink and so had he. We were going to our chambers when we met each other outside the hall. We started kissing and then some clumsy oaf fell against us. That brought us to our senses and we parted. But it made us both start thinking that we should be man and wife after all.”

  “So he took service as Will's steward so he could see you?”

  “No! Will asked him because he had served your father well, and Sir Thomas couldn’t find a good excuse to refuse; I had nothing to do with it. How could you understand? I’ve tried to be a good wife to Will, but he's such a boy compared to Tom. And you forget that Tom is my true husband, in the Church's eyes as well as ours. Now that he has his grant for taking that Count d’Eu hostage, he is going to take the case to the papal courts. Then they shall judge me Thomas's wife. I truly believe that is why I have been barren with Will. As a punishment for deserting the man I married.”

  “Or as a punishment for deceiving Will.”

  “He's better off marrying elsewhere.”

  “I certainly believe so, and I hope he does. He deserves better.”

  Joan shrugged and stood up. “You may leave now, Lady Despenser. Pray tell your brother not to come back here tonight.”

  Hugh and Bess's house was only a few houses down from Joan and Will's. All the houses looked so much alike that coats of arms had had to be nailed to the doors so that their occupants could tell them apart. She walked wearily past the page who opened the Despenser door and went upstairs, where Hugh was waiting in the chamber as though he had never left it. “Where's Will?”

  “Sleeping in the next room. He’d had a bit of wine before you came, and he had a bit more after, enough to put him asleep. Good heads for wine don’t seem to run in your family.” Bess frowned, and he pulled her close to him. “I gather the news from Joan isn’t good?”

  “She swears that she was married to Thomas Holland when she was twelve and that she was too frightened to tell anyone when they arranged the marriage to Will.”

  “Poor thing.”

  “Poor thing! She has humiliated poor Will, shamed our family, and you call her a poor thing!”

  Hugh shrugged. “My mother was in a similar fix, did I ever tell you? She and Joan were first cousins; maybe bigamy runs in their family.”

  “Hugh!” From the next room she heard Will snore. It sounded like an unhappy snore. “How did it happen?”

  “God knows. She never said and I never dared to ask; I imagine she was ashamed of herself, poor lady. It wasn’t my father, of course, it was Sir William la Zouche and Sir John de Grey, the one of Rotherfield. You’ve met Grey here, but I guess you didn’t know how close he came to having the honor of being my stepfather. Anyway, Zouche and Grey both claimed to have married her. They fought it out for several years in the papal courts, and Grey finally stopped appealing. She was in her thirties when it happened, older and wiser than poor Joan.”

  “Poor my elbow,” muttered Bess.

  “While your brother was reasonably sober, I suggested that he send Joan back to England as soon as it can be arranged. No need to say why; he can make the excuse that the situation here disagrees with her health or that he wants her to attend to his estates. Whomever she's married to, she's best off away from both of them until this is settled. It would be awkward if she conceived a child just now. Your brother thought it was a good idea.”

  “It is, Hugh.” A little mollified, she kissed him. “But I think that you are being far too easy on Joan.”

  “It's Holland who's to blame, sweetheart. He's years older than Joan and should have known better than to get her into this mess. But with a face like that on the girl, what man could help himself?”

  Bess's look could freeze over a desert. “Of course, it's a matter of taste, and her looks never appealed that much to— Shall I sleep in the next room with Will, my dear?”

  Surprisingly, Joan made no fuss about returning to England, and her excuse of ill health was given credibility by the pale, drawn looks she exhibited on the way to the merchant ship on which she took passage several days later. Bess privately hoped that the ship was boarded by pirates, though she reflected glumly that even they too would likely be bowled over by Joan's heart-shaped face, deep blue eyes, and russet, curling hair. She would probably end up as their queen, with them piling booty on her lap.

  Will, rather to Bess's surprise, had recovered some semblance of his usual good spirits. He rode with Joan to the shore as if nothing amiss were between them, and he kissed her good-bye with affection, though somewhat gingerly. Thomas Holland, wisely, had deeply interested himself in the conduct of the siege that day a
nd was not on hand to bid his bride farewell.

  Joan's departure was scarcely commented on by those outside of her immediate family, however, for the siege was in its last gasps. Sickened, Bess had heard the rumors that the citizens of Calais were reduced to eating horseflesh, then that of the few scrawny dogs and cats that still roamed around the town. She had seen a copy of a letter that Jean de Vienne, the governor of Calais, had attempted to smuggle to King Philip. Soon, Jean de Vienne wrote, the men of Calais would be left with the choice between eating each other and walking out into the English lines to face certain death. If Philip did nothing soon, he would not hear from the men of Calais again.

  The English troops, having retrieved the letter after its carrier, trapped, tossed it into the sea, gave it to their king. Edward forwarded it to King Philip in hopes of forcing his hand. Philip had reacted by sending an army, which camped so close to Calais that its citizens, encouraged, had lit bonfires in celebration. Two peace-making cardinals had arrived as well, but failed utterly in their mission. Then Philip had offered to do battle in a space to be agreed upon between the two sides. It was a battle no one thought the French could win. Since May, fresh English troops had been pouring into the town; the wooden houses of Villeneuve-le-hardie had long since filled up. Yet Bess waited nervously for word that the site had been chosen. The English had won battles against seemingly impossible odds; so, everyone knew, had the Scots years ago at Bannockburn. What if sheer desperation carried the day and brought victory for the French this time?