by Candace Robb
“Yes, he has.”
“Nan tells me that his men called on you. Did he send a message?”
“They came to tell me of Kevin. He will likely remain in the abbey infirmary for a while yet. He is healing slowly.” They had also come for the letters. She had put them off for a few days—she was having them, including their seals, copied at the Franciscan friary, in case she should ever need to protect herself against the Earl of Westmoreland. Her mother’s confessor was proving useful, and resourceful.
“We will pray for Kevin.”
“Berend will tell him—he visits him quite often.”
“Berend has been so quiet . . .” Eleanor glanced at Kate.
“Yes, he has.” He had not sought out her company since Bishopthorpe. Always busy, or too exhausted to stay up and talk. Kate missed him.
“Berend—you care deeply for him . . .” Eleanor said, then shook her head. “Forgive me. It is not my place.”
“No, it is not, Mother.”
A moment of silence. “I am sorry Simon Neville turned out to be a fraud. I did not know.”
“Simon. He could not be farther from my mind at this moment. I am not sorry I married him. He loved me, in his way. Set me up in business, in a fashion. And he gave me Marie and Phillip.”
“But they are not yours.”
“No matter. I love them fiercely. As I do Petra. And you.” Kate patted her mother’s hand.
Eleanor shook her head. “You are such a mystery to me.”
They sat quietly for a while, until Lille and Ghent came trotting up the path and settled at Kate’s feet.
“Did Sir Elric’s men say whether Westmoreland has remained at Raby?” asked Eleanor.
“He has not. He is with Duke Henry.”
“Ah. There are rumors King Richard has returned from Ireland. That he is somewhere in Wales?”
“I have heard them as well. And that his uncle the Duke of York is unable to be of much use—unable or unwilling, depending on the rumor.” Most of his army had fled to the duke’s side.
“By Christmas we may know more than rumors,” Eleanor said.
Kate thought it might be much sooner.
A rustle of silk as Eleanor turned to Kate. “Will I ever see you once you are established in Petergate?”
“I will be your landlord. And Lille and Ghent love this garden.”
“Good,” Eleanor said softly. “When will we shift houses?”
“The week before Michaelmas? Would that suit? Your lease with Lionel would need to be renewed then, am I right?”
“You have seen a copy of the deed?”
“I have.”
“Cunning. You are cunning.” Eleanor rose, smoothing her silk skirt, her silk veil. “That will suit me very well.” She bent forward to pet Lille and Ghent, her movement stiff.
Her age—Kate so easily forgot how much life her mother had seen. How much she might learn from her.
Straightening, Eleanor touched Kate’s cheek. “I am moved by your faith in the good my sisters and I will do in York. Bless you, Daughter.”
Faith had no part in her offer. Kate simply hoped the sisters continued to be a calming influence on her mother, and that the Martha House kept her too busy to seek out more troublesome schemes.
“Time to head for home.” Kate rose and proffered her mother her arm. “It is quite a climb back up to Castlegate.”
Eleanor gazed up, up. “Mother in heaven, so it is.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Had someone in the editorial department of The Economist corrected an error in a headline back in 2013, I might never had created the character Eleanor Clifford. I read “the world’s last Beguine” headlining the obituary of Marcella Pattyn and wondered.* My question led me to historian Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, who has researched and written about medieval religious movements and is presently writing a book about the beguines.† As it turns out, Marcella might have been the last beguine living in Belgium, but she was not the last beguine: in Germany the movement has enjoyed a revival in this century.‡
But the article rekindled my interest in the beguines. Who were they? They were part of a lay religious women’s movement that swept medieval Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It created an opportunity for women to lead lives dedicated to spiritual practice while still remaining in their lay communities. For some it was an alternative to marriage; for others it was a chance to test whether they truly had a vocation or were simply not yet ready to wed—the beguines took no formal vows and were free to leave; for many it was the only affordable entrance into a religious community, as established orders required a dowry.
Though many people associate them with the Low Countries, hundreds of beguine-like gatherings independently cropped up across what is today France, Germany, Italy, England, Sweden, the Czech Republic, and Spain. As Jennifer wrote for my blog: “. . . beguines were single women of any life stage enacting visibly pious and chaste lives of Christian service and community; they took simple oaths of chastity and obedience, lived according to a specific but local house rule, and were under the supervision of a house mother, elder sisters in the community, and an array of parish and civic authorities; and finally, beguines received charitable donations in exchange for prayers, memorial services, and other caritative services.”
In York there are records of houses of poor sisters, often maison dieux (hospitals), but it’s not clear which were beguine communities—they went by many names throughout Europe—and which were much more closely associated with the major religious orders, often referred to as third orders, or tertiaries, whose rules might be stricter. I use that tension between more traditional orders and beguines in this book.
The sisters and their devotion are a rich example of the medieval mind. It was a quietly private piety, available to those women who had no dowry to offer to a convent in an established religious order. In the early years of the movement, women might remain at home; but the Church in Rome distrusted any group or spiritual teacher who might encourage people to commune with God without the middleman, i.e., a priest, and it was increasingly alarmed by the lay religious movements. After the thirteenth century the Church required beguines to be part of a community, a house of such women headed by a woman of good repute and guided by a male cleric. Hence Eleanor’s search for a cleric to serve as guiding teacher and confessor for her Martha House.
Women mystics were another source of discomfort for the Church. Marguerite Porete, mentioned in this book, was tried and condemned by the Church in Paris in the early 14th century, and burned at the stake. According to her inquisitors, in her book The Mirror of Simple Souls Marguerite claimed that a soul could become one with God, and that in such a state a person might ignore all the moral rules and sacraments of the Church and do what she pleased. But that was not her message. What she actually said was that in such state a person would wish to do only good. Perhaps her two greatest sins in their eyes were that she was a woman who deigned to teach through her writing, and that she refused to retract her work. Her writings inspired another great mystic of the period whom I mention in the book, Meister Eckhart, a Dominican who was also eventually condemned as a heretic. You may not have heard of Marguerite, but it’s quite likely you’ve heard of Meister Eckhart, who is widely respected today.
Despite the Church, the beguine movement, with its message of a life of the spirit combined with charitable work in the community, prevailed.
For the situation in and around York as Henry of Lancaster returned from exile, I depended on the work of Douglas Biggs and Chris Given-Wilson.§ I found the role of Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, of particular interest. He was custodian of the realm while his nephew King Richard II was on campaign in Ireland, but Henry of Lancaster was also his nephew. From itineraries, calendars, rolls, and other official government and household records, Douglas Biggs gleaned sufficient detail for the reader to observe Edmund’s gradual shift from fully supporting King Richard to backing Duke Henry in hi
s rebellion. Edmund went about his duties through the end of June as if unaware that his nephew Henry was planning to return to England to claim his inheritance. And then Lancastrian Sir John Pelham seized Pevensey Castle and held it for Duke Henry. Edmund moved quickly to ensure that Pelham would be contained within the county of Kent, unable to spread the insurrection. Practically, in point of fact, Edmund was hobbled by King Richard’s Irish campaign. The king had taken the most effective and experienced military personnel with him, and much of the available transport such as horses and wagons. And Edmund soon discovered that Pelham’s seizure of Pevensey Castle was but the tip of the iceberg—he soon discovered that most of John of Gaunt’s estates and more important castles were being held by Lancastrian retainers for Duke Henry. This was the situation when Edmund ordered the city of York to hold against Henry. He’d managed to secure a strategic line of castles in the southeast, and was ready to move north to St. Alban’s. Messengers were sent to the king in Ireland to alert him to the situation so that he might return to defend his crown.
At St. Albans, Edmund, Duke of York, proclaimed that he had no desire to hinder Henry’s efforts to reclaim his inheritance. Still, he and the council were mustering an army to ride west and join up with the king on his return from Ireland. Henry, now claiming his inheritance as Duke of Lancaster, was also riding west, with a rapidly growing army. The most powerful northern nobles joined him. By the time Henry reached Pontefract Castle, he was making promises to his supporters that made it clear he now set his sights even higher, on claiming the throne.
Whether it was rumors of the Duke of York’s confusing partial support of Duke Henry or the news of so many barons joining him, we can never know. But soldiers paid by Edmund, Duke of York, began to desert and hie to Henry’s camp. Once it was clear he was heading west, not south to York, the soldiers mustered in preparation for a siege began to leave; it appears that most of them joined Henry.
And a group of York merchants that included William Frost and Thomas Holme, seeing which way the wind blew, sent a messenger to Duke Henry offering monetary support. The duke was promising to end royal taxation, and the merchants liked the sound of that. King Richard had leaned heavily on them for loans which they knew would never be repaid, and they hoped for better treatment from his cousin.
Time would tell.
* April 27, 2013.
† Working title, Sisters Among: Beguines and Lay Religious Women’s Communities in Medieval Germany; also by JK Deane, A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition (Rowman and Littlefield 2011), and “Pious Domesticities,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (OUP 2013, chapter 17).
‡ Cornelia Schäfer, “Sisterhoods Make a Comeback in Germany,” Deutsche Welle, DW.com, September 22, 2005.
§ Douglas Biggs, Three Armies in Britain: the Irish Campaign of Richard II and the Usurpation of Henry IV, 1397-99 (Brill 2006); Chris Given-Wilson, Henry IV (Yale 2016).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My books would not be possible without the generosity of historians working in the field. Special thanks to Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane and Tanya Stabler Miller, whose work on the beguine movement sparked my imagination, to Susan Signe Morrison for a small detail about beguines that inspired a plot point, and to Louise Hampson for help in sorting out locations in medieval York.
I am grateful to Laura Hodges, Joyce Gibb, Mary Morse, Chris Nickson, my agent Jennifer Weltz, and my editor Maia Larson for reading the manuscript and offering insightful comments and suggestions; and to my husband, Charlie, for creating a coherent family tree out of what looked like the web of a psychotic spider, for designing and updating the maps of York, for figuring out what was unclear in a troublesome scene, and, most of all, for being there for me no matter what.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR:
The Owen Archer Mysteries
The Apothecary Rose
The Lady Chapel
The Nun’s Tale
The King’s Bishop
The Riddle of St. Leonard’s
A Gift of Sanctuary
A Spy for the Redeemer
The Cross-legged Knight
The Guilt of Innocents
A Vigil of Spies
The Margaret Kerr Mysteries
A Trust Betrayed
The Fire in the Flint
A Cruel Courtship
Historical Novels (as Emma Campion)
The King’s Mistress
A Triple Knot
A TWISTED VENGEANCE
Pegasus Books Ltd.
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Copyright © 2017 by Candace Robb
First Pegasus Books cloth edition May 2017
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