by Anne O'Brien
‘Are you angry?’ he asked abruptly.
We were, for that one moment, alone.
‘No, my lord,’ I reassured him quickly, smiling lightly, as I smoothed what I thought must be a particularly unyielding expression from my face. How well Queen Philippa had schooled me. ‘There is nothing to disturb me except gratitude for your kindness.’
‘I will send for you,’ he said with a shadow of a frown.
I was not to be allowed to slip into my old skin after all. His appraisal, agate-bright, was direct and uncompromising. I met it the same way, until he gestured for me to precede him from the hall, adding imperiously:
‘You will come to me.’
I opened my mouth, to refuse, or so I thought, until, fleetingly, he touched my arm. My adroitly composed refusal promptly fled, my willpower compromised by the slightest pressure of his fingers against my tight-buttoned sleeve. I think I looked at him in horror.
‘You give me no peace. Why should that be?’ he demanded.
I could find no reply at all to that.
I walked on, conscious that the Duke’s footsteps did not follow me, until a prickle of awareness snatched at my attention. I was being observed from the little knot of newcomers just arrived at the outer door.
There, muffled in furs, eyes cool and searching on my face, a cage of singing finches much like my own in her hand, was Philippa. My sister. I smiled, and kept my smile lively, even though I did not enjoy the judgemental quality of her expression. Philippa was not smiling.
In my own chamber, before she could descend on me, I put the rosary away in my coffer. Caught between sister Philippa and the Duke, I must tread carefully.
‘Where is he then, Philippa?’
‘I have no idea. Picardy, the last I heard.’
As I seated myself on my bed, my sister began to divest herself of her furs, placing them carefully over a polished settle, sweeping her hand down over the lustrous skins. She was not without means, but she took care of her possessions with a neat exactitude I recognised from our shared childhood. Her voice now, in maturity, was clipped with displeasure. ‘A military expedition, so I’m led to believe, but why he should feel the need to go when…’ She hissed her irritation. ‘I am, as usual, kept in the dark. He gave me the finches to keep me company and sweeten my mood.’
‘Very poetic,’ I observed, not daring to laugh.
‘Poetic, but useless,’ she remarked, uncharitably I thought. But then, I was not wed to Geoffrey Chaucer. I did not think that it was an experience I would enjoy, despite his erudition and clever way with words.
Philippa had arrived eventually at my chamber, leaving me much relieved that what I had thought to be a censorious stare had proved to be nothing of the sort, when she had laughed and fallen into my arms. Or perhaps she was keeping the censure for later. I knew my sister well.
‘I am so very pleased to be back here,’ she announced. After Duchess Blanche’s death, when her household was disbanded and I had gone to Kettlethorpe, my sister had taken up residence in the Chaucer family property in Thames Street. ‘It was becoming very cramped. I’ve brought the children too, as you saw.’
As I had. Elizabeth and another Thomas, their ages matching with Margaret and my own son.
Philippa’s eyes glinted. ‘Are you pleased to see me?’
‘Delighted. I’ll happily hand the Duchess over to you, and all her starchy women, while I lurk in the background. Do you speak Castilian?’
‘No.’
‘A pity.’
‘Is she like Blanche?’
‘She is nothing like Blanche.’
‘So I presume we’re going to Tutbury. Or Hertford.’
‘If Queen Constanza can be persuaded that that is where she wishes to go.’
‘So it’s like that, is it? Do you come too?’
‘I am appointed as a damsel with you. Just like old times.’
Except that it was not, and never would be, no matter what the outcome of the promised conversation with the Duke.
Philippa must have seen some shadow of my torment. ‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded.
‘Nothing.’
‘Missing Hugh?’
‘Yes.’
‘I saw the Duke being very solicitous.’
‘The Duke is always solicitous,’ I replied, more quickly than was perhaps wise.
‘To have a tête-à-tête in the Great Hall, with his wife’s damsel?’
So I had been right about the censure. Philippa had been saving her well-sharpened arrows. Perhaps, divorced from court, dissatisfied with the restrictions on her life because of her perennially absent husband, she had been storing them up for such an occasion as this. It behoved me to keep my wits about me. I might be an innocent party in this situation, but guilt had a habit of encroaching on the edges. I grimaced at the image that sprang to mind, like fat around a bowl of mutton pottage.
‘The Duke is solicitous of everyone, as you well know,’ I responded. ‘He has my eternal gratitude. Without this position, Kettlethorpe would sink beneath the floods.’
‘You look well in the role of Lady of Kettlethorpe.’ The sharp assessment was still there in her eyes. ‘I envy you.’
‘As a widow? With a ruinous estate?’
‘No one would know. You look very sleek and smart.’
I laughed, smoothing the rich fur edging. ‘I was asked to put aside my widow’s weeds.’
‘By the Duke?’
‘Yes. It would not have been appropriate.’
‘I see!’
The twinkle in her eye drove me to employ diversionary tactics. ‘Being a widow has its problems.’
‘I see none!’
‘It has still to be decided who will administer the estates. Since Thomas is a minor, and Hugh a vassal of the crown, they have reverted to the King. The wardship of Thomas could be sold to anyone. Our finances are worse than you can ever imagine. You’re lucky to have a husband with a steady income.’
Philippa found my plight of no great importance compared with her own miseries. ‘I may as well be a widow, the amount of time I spend without him.’
‘But you are financially secure. I had to come begging.’
‘Kettlethorpe as bad as ever?’
I recalled Philippa’s single brief visit there, her pointed comments and her rapid departure, and replied sharply, ‘Worse. Is Geoffrey as bad as ever?’
‘Worse.’
We laughed, not unkindly. It was an old exchange and so we settled into gossip, now that we had established our old relationship: Philippa sharp and brittle, critical of the world, I more tolerant. I was the elder by little more than a year, yet it was not always obvious. Philippa sometimes proved to be the more worldly wise.
I sat and watched her as she told me about the doings of her two children. We were close, neither of us having any memory of our mother, and barely of our father, Sir Gilles de Roet, a knight from Hainault, who had died there when I was three years old, having given us into the tender care of Queen Philippa to whom he owed his service. We had a brother, Walter, taken to soldiering like my father, dying in the retinue of Edward of Woodstock at the battle of Poitiers, and an elder sister, Elizabeth, who, a nun in a monastic house at Mons, had gone from birth to death without my knowing her.
So, to all intents and purposes alone in the world, Philippa and I owed everything to the kindly and maternal Queen: our raising, our education and our position in the household of Duchess Blanche when we were very young, as nothing more than cradle-rockers to the two tiny daughters. Without parents we had clung to each other, and although our lives had taken different directions, the closeness remained. But that did not mean that I was not careful around my sister’s caustic tongue.
‘Are you happy?’ I asked, interrupting a long list of complaints about Agnes, Geoffrey’s ageing mother, who still occupied the Thames Street house.
‘As much as I ever am. I don’t think it is in my nature to be satisfied. Perhaps if I had wed a handsom
e knight like you.’ A twist of bitterness curved her lips.
‘Your husband is a man of great worth.’
‘Yes. I know.’
‘His writing brings him great fame.’
‘True.’
‘You have your children.’
‘And they are a blessing. But I’ll have no more.’
I paused, considering whether to ask why she was so adamant, and decided against it. ‘Geoffrey cares for you,’ I observed instead.
‘Geoffrey is entirely indifferent to me. He has never written a poem to my beauty or my fine eyes. All he does is condemn what he calls the entrapment of marriage.’
I laughed.
‘Don’t laugh! Do you know? He owns over sixty books. He’d rather spend time with them than with me.’ She chuckled as I continued to laugh at her complaint but there was a sadness there that touched my heart. ‘I am just dissatisfied. It will be better at Hertford.’ She rose and walked to the window to look out over the Thames. ‘What about you, Kate? Do you have an eye to another husband?’
‘I have only been a widow for a matter of months.’
‘A lover then.’
‘Philippa!’
‘You’re too pious for your own good. You had not seen Hugh for—how long before his death?’
‘Sixteen months. And I am not pious.’
‘I know you better than you know yourself. You would have to say a full decade of paternosters before leaping into a lover’s bed.’
‘I would not!’
But I would, as I knew only too well, as I was thrown into a puddle of doubt. My conscience was a strong force within me, and sin was not something to be lightly cast aside, as I was finding to my cost when all my strictly held tenets of living seemed to be hanging by a thread in the face of the Duke’s campaign. If I took this step to please him, if I went to him when he summoned me, the thread would be cut as cleanly as if I were finishing the edge of a girdle. I could not hold to any pretence that it would not matter. It would. If I stepped, I must accept the guilt and the condemnation.
‘Katherine.’ Philippa nudged me. ‘Where were you?’
‘Nowhere.’ I knew my cheeks were flushed. ‘You were saying?’
‘That I could take a lover…’ Philippa mused.
‘Geoffrey might mind.’
‘Geoffrey might not even notice. So, have you set your eye on anyone?’
Another diversionary tactic was needed. ‘Speaking of Geoffrey, does he talk to you about court matters?’
‘Sometimes. Why?’
‘I’m interested in the Duke’s ambitions. He’s now addressed as Monseigneur d’Espaigne. Does he truly seek the crown of Castile?’
Does he love the Queen? That is what I wanted to know. Has he wed for love, as he wed Blanche, for the passion that was between them? Or was Constanza a pawn in a foreign alliance, a means to a political end because he saw the crown of Castile as a jewel on his horizon?
‘Geoffrey thinks so,’ Philippa replied carelessly. ‘The Duke has ambitions. It has always been so for him, to seek power. It was once mooted that he become King of Scotland. Now it’s Castile. A chance for a kingdom of his own.’ She shrugged, displaying her own lack of interest. ‘He’s an ambitious man. It’s no surprise. Why are you so interested?’
‘I am not.’
‘Well, he would not remain unwed for long, would he? He only has one son to step into his shoes. Perhaps he fell in love. Love at first sight.’
‘Perhaps he did.’
It confirmed only what I had thought.
‘Geoffrey says he gave her a magnificent wedding gift. A gold cup fashioned as a rose with a white dove on the lid. Sounds like a lover’s gift to me.’
So it did to me. Which made everything so much worse. His invitation to me was the prelude to a mere dalliance, and I would not comply.
You will not comply anyway! My conscience lectured.
‘And she is strikingly beautiful, I hear. Enough to entrap the heart of any man.’
‘Yes, she is.’
Philippa had convinced me.
‘Enough of Constanza.’ Philippa stood, looking round appreciatively at the spacious accommodation reserved for me. ‘Do I share this room with you, or do I have a Castilian damsel to entertain? Let us go and discover, and find my children. By the by, I have been granted an annuity of ten pounds by the Duke in token of my service.’ The slide of her eye was piercing. ‘It’s good to be appreciated. What are you paid? Are you worth more than I?’
I shook my head, quick to lie. How easily half-truths and deceptions leaped to my lips these days. ‘How could I be?’
Another confession that I must make. I was relieved I had packed away the rosary. I would not have liked to explain that gift to her.
Chapter Five
‘Robert!’ I called out as I turned a corner in the early dusk. ‘Robert Rabbas! Where are you, in God’s name!’
It was cold enough to turn the Thames to ice.
Shivering, infuriated, fingers so frozen I could barely bend them, I held my hood close beneath my chin. Why was there neither sight nor sound of a squire or a page or even a household servant when one was most needed to carry out a burdensome task? And why had we been blighted by a basket of green wood which did nothing but smoulder and smoke and give out no heat, when the weather was at its bleakest, driven in by March winds from the north?
Our plans to transfer the whole household to Hertford had gone awry, when Henry, the Lancaster heir, was struck down with a fever. Cross and fractious, sometimes weeping with pains in his joints, his little body alternated between burning heat and intense cold. With concerns for the health of her unborn child—for might it not be the plague?— Duchess Constanza was not to be persuaded that this was a childish ailment and expressed the desire to leave London immediately for the Duke’s castle at Hertford. Within a day she was packed into a palanquin with her ladies and Philippa in attendance and they departed, the Duke accompanying her before returning to London to re-engage with the King and Prince Edward in planning for the campaign against the French for the New Year. It was expected that the Duke would lead the forces.
He had not sent for me. In the circumstances he might well leave England with nothing resolved between us.
Meanwhile we remained at The Savoy, the young people and their household, expecting the fever to run like wildfire through the rest of the children before it wore itself out. It was agreed that we would follow to Hertford when the danger was passed.
I was not sorry, as I sat and bathed Henry’s forehead and heated limbs with common henbane boiled in wine. The large furry leaves might look uninviting but they were of sound reputation in cooling inflammations, I consoled myself. I could hear Constanza’s voice raised in Castilian complaint even as the ducal party rode out of the gate, and silently wished my sister well as I decided that it would be a relief to be free of the Duke’s presence.
Yet living in such a milieu as The Savoy, in the world of the Duke’s own creation of art and wealth, it was hard not to sense his presence, even when he was miles away. At the turn of a stair, there he might be. Kneeling in the chapel, riding his bay stallion into the courtyard, sitting at supper in the Great Hall. Even though he did none of those things, it seemed that I might catch that glimpse of him if I looked carefully enough.
I would not give in to temptation. I would not look.
Better that he is not here! I reprimanded myself.
So now with hoar frost forming on the insides of the glazing and the fire making little impact, we had wrapped the children as warmly as we could in furs and bedcovers and sent for fuel two hours ago, until spurred by righteous anger I had volunteered to chase it up. Thomas Haselden, Controller of the Duke’s Household, was nowhere to be found. Sir Thomas Hungerford, our steward, had travelled with the Duke and Constanza to Hertford. Somehow the smooth running of the household had got out of kilter, and approaching the hour for supper as it was, the servants would be busy in the kitchens, but t
hat was no good reason for us to freeze to death. Elizabeth had developed a cough, exacerbated by the acrid smoke, and I suspected Blanche would follow suit. Even Alyne, usually stalwart, had taken to her bed, feeling her age in her bones, she said. Lady Alice was considering the tenor of her complaint to the Duke when she next set eyes on him.
The shadows here in the inner courtyard were thick and deep in the corners, but as I strode on, there was a movement. Emerging from the side door in the far corner came a dark-clad figure with a bundle under his arm. He would do very well for my errand. I raised my hand to draw his attention. I also raised my voice again.
‘Robert, is it?’ The figure was tall enough to be the lanky page who had brought us the basket of unseasoned logs. ‘We have need of fuel in the schoolroom. Would you arrange it?’
He paused. Hesitated. Bowed.
‘I have already requested more wood. Four hours ago.’ A little exaggeration would not come amiss.
The figure remained motionless. I raised my voice a little more so that it echoed back at me off the dank stones.
‘Fetch some if you please. And don’t just pass the message to someone else and forget about it. It is too cold for the children. And not unseasoned wood either!’ I added, as he disappeared within.
I returned to the schoolroom.
‘Any success?’ Lady Alice shivered in the draught with the opening of the door.
‘It has yet to be seen,’ I replied, thinking that the temperature was little different inside than out. The children looked pinched, and yes, Blanche was coughing, her eyes red-rimmed. Only Henry, newly recovering and already beginning to resent the curb on his freedom, looked full of energy. As I stooped to tuck a fur bedspread more firmly around Philippa, the door behind me was shouldered open.
‘Fuel, mistress,’
‘And about time too!’
‘I came as fast as I could, mistress.’
I swung round. There, placing a basket of logs beside the sulky fire, with an impressive flexing of arm and shoulder muscle, was the Duke. Swinging his short cloak back over one shoulder, he applied himself to brushing twigs and dust from his hands, beating the residue from his tunic.
