Hugh and Bess

by Susan Higginbotham

  “Emmy. You are well?”

  “Yes, Hugh. Very well.”

  “Your family?”

  “Very well too.”

  “Alice?”

  “Here, lamb. I’ve not washed your shirts for twenty some years to leave you now.”

  Hugh smiled, then closed his eyes. For a moment, Bess thought that he had slipped away from her. Then he whispered, “Bess.”

  “Yes, Hugh?”

  “Sweetheart. Promise me something?”

  She knew what he wanted. “Yes. I will never remarry, Hugh. I will take a vow of chastity. I—”

  He almost chuckled. “Listen first. Do. Remarry.”

  “Remarry! How dare you ask—”

  “Bad time to bicker,” Hugh said weakly. He grimaced, then said, “A waste. Too young, too sweet and fair. Please, Bess. Promise me.”

  “All right,” Bess said almost grudgingly. “But I won’t like it.”

  “Same old Bess.”

  She could hardly understand the words he was saying before his voice trailed off. To ease her aching back, Bess stood. She gazed at her husband. The torments the dowager queen and her lover had visited upon his father's and his grandfather's bodies could hardly have been worse than those the pestilence had wreaked upon Hugh, she thought. The pustules had spread over his body, which was covered with bluish splotches; his flesh was wasted; his breath stank. Three days before he had been a handsome man, how handsome Bess had never realized until all was destroyed. Bess sat again. She placed her hand over her husband's and said into his ear, “I love you. You were my perfect, gentle knight.”

  His lip twitched upward and he tried to grasp her hand. In a moment or two, he was gone.

  William Beste said a prayer. Bess sat frozen in her spot next to her dead husband, ignoring the weeping Emma and Alice as they made their way out of the room when Beste finished. Then the chaplain said quietly, “If you wish to rest a bit, my lady, I will find someone to lay him out. There are some people about who are willing to do so, for a substantial price, of course.”

  “No.” Bess did not take her eyes off Hugh. “I am not ready to leave him alone, particularly with some loathsome creature who has been waiting for him to die.”

  “He is not alone, my lady. He is with God—”

  “God?” Bess's eyes filled with tears, but she controlled her voice to say firmly, “I tell you, Father, I believe that your God has deserted us, and all of England. If He has not, then He should be merciful enough not to begrudge me my last moments with my husband. Leave us in peace.”

  Alone, she remained where she had been, clutching Hugh's hand even as it grew cold and rigid in her grasp. A lifetime ago, it had been a warm, strong hand that covered hers as she and Hugh sat together at Will and Joan's marriage feast. Had someone told the foolish girl at that banquet that eight years later, she would give anything in the world to have Hugh sitting beside her again, she no doubt would have laughed them to scorn.

  For an hour or so she sat there, too grieved to shed any tears but the large, slow type that dripped one by one on Hugh's bare chest. Then the door banged open and Beste, accompanied by Alice, hurried into the room. “My lady? Forgive me, I know you wish for solitude, but your friend has been stricken. She was found wandering around the bailey in a daze, trying to find her way home. I doubt there is anyone there to tend her even if she could reach it. And to be forthright with you, I believe that the pestilence is coming upon me as well. I have seen enough of it to know the early signs.”

  Bess released Hugh's hand and rose.

  “Alice, bring Emma to my chamber and put her to bed, and I will tend her. And Father, go to your chamber and lie down. I will take care of you as you took care of Hugh and others.”

  As the others left the room, she went back to Hugh and gently brushed a strand of hair off his forehead. “Everything I do from now on is for you, my love,” she told him, taking his hand for the last time. “And I promise you, no one in your household will suffer and die alone if I can help it. You can trust in me.”

  April 1349 to January 1350

  AT WINDSOR CASTLE, WILL, EARL OF SALISBURY, PREENED in his new robe, powdered with little blue garters. “How do you like it, sister?”

  “It suits you well,” Bess said absently, though she was not even looking at her brother but at her wedding ring. Recalling herself, she added, “Particularly with your new beard.”

  Will grinned and stroked it. Unconsciously, he ran his hand over his leg to make certain that the garter just below his knee had not disappeared during the few minutes that had passed since he last checked it.

  Bess had a habit these days of talking to Hugh in her head, and she’d had a fine conversation with him about the king's ridiculous new scheme, which as far as Bess could tell was simply another excuse for men to dress up in matching robes and joust. “Order of the Garter?” she had asked Hugh. “Could he have found a sillier name?”

  “Order of the Breech-cloth,” Hugh had suggested. Then, “Now, now, Bess. Remember the motto. Honi soit qui mal y pense.”

  Bess scowled. Yet she could not deny that if Hugh had been alive and wearing one of the silly garters on his leg, she’d probably not have found it ridiculous at all.

  She would have gladly forsaken the St. George's Day festivities at Windsor had Will not begged her to come. Their mother, no longer in the best of health, was disinclined to travel these days, and with the Pope still at the business of deciding whether Joan of Kent was Will's wife or Thomas's, Will had had no lady to bear him company. So Bess, being free, had accepted the king's invitation to come to Windsor, even though it meant traveling through a landscape where many of the inns were shuttered and where entire towns were empty of inhabitants. For although one couldn’t tell it from anything at Windsor, save for the mourning robes of Bess and a handful of others, the pestilence had not yet abated.

  Weeks before, Hugh and Bess had taken one last journey together, Bess riding on the palfrey Hugh had given her on their wedding day, Hugh inside a wooden coffin, jouncing in a cart traveling to Tewkesbury Abbey, Hugh's last resting place of choice. There, Bess at least had had the relief of seeing Hugh's body properly cared for: encased in lead, enclosed in a heavy oak coffin, and laid just north of the high altar, surrounded by candles provided by Bess. With the pestilence keeping so many on their own lands, Hugh's funeral mass had been sparsely attended outside Bess's own household, save for the monks, some paupers who received alms for the occasion, and a few of the braver tenants, but the simple, dignified service was one that Bess thought would have pleased her husband. And when times were better—if times were ever better—she would raise a beautiful monument to his memory, she had promised Hugh as the last strains of the monks’ chanting died away.

  Emma would have no tomb. Within hours of being stricken, she had died in Bess's arms. Bess had had her friend's body dressed in the rich Easter robes Bess had ordered for her, wrapped in fine linen, and taken to the mass grave outside Hanley's village church, where the bodies of Emma's husband and children had already been placed with those of a score of other villagers. Standing at the edge of the open grave, weeping and twisting the little ring Emma had given her years before, Bess had been the sole mourner and, as she whispered a prayer for the dead, in a way the sole priest. Many of the fallen of Hanley had not received even that much ceremony.

  A dozen of the household at Hanley Castle had died, including William Beste and the faithful Alice. Bess had helped tend to them all, expecting, and partly hoping, each time she covered yet another dead face that someone would soon be doing the same for her. But she had remained in perfect health. It was grief, not illness, that had caused her to grow markedly thinner and to drag herself around with a weary step.

  Almost before Hugh was cold—or at least it seemed to Bess—the king's escheators had arrived to take charge of his land, since Hugh's heir, his brother Edward's oldest boy, was but twelve years old. Bess knew this was necessary, as Hugh, like the other barons
, had held his lands of the crown, and they would have to be administered by men of the king's choosing until Edward came of age. Still, she mightily resented the presence of the men swarming over Hugh's estates: poking through Hugh's account books, measuring his land, even counting up his sheep. Most odious of all was their habit of looking sidelong at Bess's belly, to see if she was bearing Hugh's child. Even after Bess herself was in no possible doubt—her monthly course started a few days after her arrival at Tewkesbury—she said nothing to enlighten them. “Let them figure it out for themselves,” she muttered to Hugh.

  By the end of February she was back at Hanley Castle, where the king had deemed she should stay until her dower was assigned to her. Even there she was beset by the escheators, though, and it was perhaps as much to escape them as to be with her brother that she had decided to travel to Windsor in April. Besides, Will had reminded her, her presence there was bound to speed along the dower process.

  Will was now looking at her critically. “Are you wearing that to dinner?”

  Bess glanced at her mourning robes. Somewhat ill-fitting to begin with, they had grown more so as her appetite continued to lessen. “My new man does the best he can, but he lacks the skill and speed of Michael Taylor. He died a few days after Hugh.”

  “Maybe mine could help. Or perhaps the Lady Isabella—”

  “I don’t care for help,” Bess snapped. Seeing her brother's hurt expression, she said more mildly, “I don’t need it in any case. I could have warts on my nose and foul breath and still not want for male company. Every man here who is unmarried or widowed, or who has a son or a brother or a nephew or a friend who is unmarried or widowed, or a wife who is ailing, has been paying particular attention to me. They know more about the lands I will receive, down to the last hedgerow, than I do.”

  “Well, one can’t blame them for trying. I’d try for you if you weren’t my sister.” Will sat heavily on the bed, Hugh's traveling bed that he had willed to Bess. “And it appears that I will soon be on the market for a wife myself.”

  Thomas Holland, like Will, had been made a Knight of the Garter. Rather tactlessly, Bess thought, the king had invited the bone of their contention to the festivities as well. Joan's months of relative isolation had not lessened her beauty in the slightest, and though she had conducted herself as demurely as the subject of papal marital litigation ought to, she was still the center of attention. Even the king could not keep his eyes off her, and his eldest son, Edward, was no better. “You think the Pope will rule against you?”

  “My proctor wasn’t hopeful. And what if he rules for me? Could Joan and I ever hope to live together normally?”

  Bess had been wondering this herself. She patted her brother on the arm. “Joan has always been flighty, but I do believe her to be honorable. If she were to be adjudged your wife, I think she would abide by the ruling. But perhaps it might be just as well if Holland gets her. You can start afresh.”

  “Yes, with a girl far too young to have got herself into such a situation. One who's been in a convent, perhaps. A moated convent.”

  “And she never bore you children. Perhaps your next marriage will be more blessed.”

  “It's a thought. What of you, sister? Shall you remarry?”

  She shook her head. “It is far too soon to think of it.”

  “Well, shall I escort you to dinner?”

  Bess watched as a group of dancers twirled around in a carol, growing wilder by the moment. Merry as the festivities had been five years before, when Bess had flirted with her king, they were downright raucous now.

  She was standing in the same hall in which she had stood those five years ago. Edward had built a round house especially to hold the Round Table he had announced so grandly in 1344, but no feast had ever been held there, the demands on the king's purse having brought the work to a halt long ago. Bess wondered idly if the project would ever be resumed. She doubted it. Why bother to build when all those in this room could be dead within days if the pestilence came to Windsor or to any royal castle it pleased?

  A man passing through the crowd greeted her, and Bess stared back coolly. Bartholomew de Burghersh, yet another new Knight of the Garter, was in excellent spirits these days, though he was trying to contain them around Bess. Just a couple of years ago, he’d arranged to have his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, marry young Edward le Despenser. Instead of the moderately prosperous young boy whom Burghersh had bargained for, he’d ended up with the future Lord of Glamorgan, thanks to the pestilence and Bess's failure to bear Hugh a child. Bess was not surprised to see that twelve-year-old Edward had not accompanied Burghersh to the Garter festivities, though she knew from Anne le Despenser that the boy loved to watch jousting and constantly talked of the day when he could take the field as a knight, like his father and like his uncle. Sir Bartholomew was not about to risk losing his rich little son-in-law to the pestilence by having him travel about, she thought bitterly.

  Bess saw him glance, as surreptitiously as possible, at her belly. In a carrying voice, she announced, “You need not worry yourself, Sir Bartholomew. I am not with Hugh's child. Your prize catch is quite safe.”

  Ignoring Burghersh's protestations, she pushed through the crowd, not bothering to apologize as she trod on toes and even on the hand of a man had stooped to retrieve a lady's purse. Reaching its fringes at last, she found herself face to face with Joan of Kent, standing decorously with a couple of lady friends. Looking into Joan's beautiful face, her rosy complexion contrasting with Bess's own sallow appearance, Bess suddenly felt a flash of pure hatred. Why could not God have done the most convenient thing and taken Thomas Holland instead of Hugh?

  Appalled at the level she was sinking to, wishing death upon a man who had done her no harm and who might well be Joan's lawful wedded husband, she turned without having spoken a word to her former close companion and continued to press through the throng. Free of the crowd at last, she stopped to catch her breath only to find Guy Brian beside her. “What the devil do you want?” she demanded.

  “Well, for one thing I was interested in knowing the identity of the lady who almost broke my hand.”

  He held it out to her, and Bess flushed with remorse. “I beg your pardon.”

  “And I also thought you might be ill and in need of assistance.”

  “I am not with child, and I do not have the pestilence; I know well the signs of both. So no one at Windsor has anything to fear from me.” Her own rudeness took her aback. “Sir Guy, I do beg your pardon again. I—”

  Instead of finishing her sentence, she began crying. Sir Guy hesitated, then drew her against his shoulder as she wept. “There,” he said gently after she had finally quieted. “Better?”

  She nodded and drew back. “I feel so foolish.”

  “I think perhaps you needed to do that.”

  “Sir Guy, I do apologize for your hand.”

  “Nothing is broken, though you have a good strong foot, my lady.”

  “I suppose I should beg pardon of Sir Bartholomew and my sister-in-law Joan too.”

  “Indeed? You were quite busy in there, it seems.”

  “I am not usually horrid like that, truly. It is just—” She dabbed at her nose. “It was a mistake coming here; I should have stayed away. I shall go to my chamber before I insult anyone else or break down and cry again.”

  “Do you have a page to take you there, my lady?”

  “Somewhere.” She looked around. “He is the son of a tenant who died. He has much to learn yet about his duties.”

  “Mine shall find him for you.” He gestured to a boy who was standing at some distance from him. “Find Lady Despenser's page for her. She wishes to retire for the evening. Here, Lady Despenser. Sit and rest.”

  She settled on the bench he indicated. Guy—about Hugh's age and a bit larger in build, though by no means stout—joined her, then said, “I heard, of course, of Sir Hugh's death. Please accept my condolences. He was a fine knight and will be sorely missed.” />
  “Indeed he will be.” She sat in silence for a while, grateful that Sir Guy was not one to chatter idly just for the sake of hearing his own voice. Then she surprised herself by saying, “I know many have lost much more than I have—all of their relations and friends, instead of one man. Yet telling myself that makes it no easier to bear. And then I feel thoroughly ashamed of myself for wallowing in self-pity, even anger as I was just now. I was so vile in there.” She thought of young Edward le Despenser, who had written her a very kind note after Hugh's death, and sniffled. It was not the poor boy's fault that he was Hugh's heir.

  “If you wish I will make your apologies for you.”

  “Thank you. I think I should make them myself in the morning, though.”

  “May I say something without sounding trivial, I hope? I know how it is to grieve, my lady, but I also know how it is to recover. There will come a day when your heart will be lighter, though you may not believe it now.”