She chuckled like a fat hen disturbed from her nest.
‘Countess, do you know why he was killed?’
Her eyes widened and bulged like a startled animal. ‘Killed? Oh yes, but, my dear, that was after we came back to England. A terrible, terrible time. My husband didn’t know who to trust, it was truly dreadful.’
‘His Grace said my father discovered Lord Mortimer’s secret.’
‘Ah, Lord Mortimer. Now there was an evil rogue for you. A charming man but what a rogue. I can see him now, smiling and dangerous. He had your mother and dear Isabella like that.’ She held her hand gripped into a fist. ‘And of course poor Isabella’s son, His Grace, caught like a fly in their web.’
She stopped and smiled at me. ‘You’d never think to look at us now, how much we suffered in those years.’
‘Lord Mortimer’s secret?’ I prompted her. She was like all old ladies, prone to ramble on and forget what she was supposed to be talking about.
She narrowed her soft old eyes, until they almost disappeared into the pouches of skin, and dabbed at her lips with a cloth. ‘Lord Mortimer had a dozen secrets and each one more dangerous than the next. I warned Isabella but she was beyond listening. She believed he loved her but he was like all men and loved only himself.’
‘Which of his secrets would my father have known?’ I asked.
‘Oh secrets, secrets! Everyone had secrets in those days, girl. We learned to keep our mouths shut and our secrets close to our chests.’
She tapped her handsome bosom as if she had half a dozen stuffed down her gown but I thought with a loose tongue like hers I wouldn’t trust her with anything of importance.
I felt the old frustration of being lost in a maze where everyone else knew the thread which led to the centre but no-one would tell me. If I didn’t know what the secret was, I would never know why my father was killed and if my cousin could have saved him.
‘I hear you’re married to the Montagu boy,’ she said. ‘Not clever like his father from the look of him, but perhaps he warms your bed nicely.’
I murmured something about how much I had been honoured by my marriage and how good my husband was to me; the sort of words which meant nothing.
‘Montagu did well for himself. None of us would have marked him down to be given an earldom but of course the king was in his debt. In and out of the royal chambers all the time, he was. Now there was a man who knew everyone’s secrets.’
‘Sir William?’ I was astounded. It had never occurred to me that my father-in-law might know.
‘Silent as a weasel and crafty as a fox. You never knew where he was hiding or what he’d heard.’
‘What could he have heard?’
But Countess Jeanne had had enough. She licked her lips and sniffed,
‘What do you want to know about all that old stuff? It’s past and gone and of no interest to anyone now. Even Isabella has forgotten and I expect your mother has too. Nobody wants to remember those days. Leave it behind and don’t ask because nobody will tell you.’
With that she patted me on the arm and made me turn so she could admire my gown some more. She touched my hair with her podgy fingers and asked to see my new slippers and proceeded to tell me a long involved story about her husband’s earlier indiscretions with a woman called Maud Nerford.
‘He wants a divorce but as I told him the last time we discussed the matter, marriage is indissoluble in the eyes of God. Once a man and a woman give their consent freely, the bond is forged and cannot be broken. When he married me I became his wife and I shall remain his wife until God releases one of us.’
I felt a trifle unsteady as I walked away. I had given my consent freely when I’d married Thomas Holand and I wondered what God must think of my marriage to William. Had we tried to break an indissoluble bond and if it was indissoluble, how could William be my husband?
I knew what I had to do. On our return to Bisham I would beg an audience with my father-in-law and ask him what had happened all those years ago. He was fond of me and would, I thought, tell me the truth. I needed the honesty of his words because I was certain everyone else was lying.
Perhaps I had been right that summer at Framlingham when I believed my cousin was a murderer, perhaps it was to his advantage that my father was killed; perhaps it was not Lord Mortimer’s secret which was being protected but my cousin’s. But I could think of no secret which could be so dangerous that it must be kept hidden at all costs, even at the expense of my father’s life.
Next morning there was jousting. William looked every inch the sturdy fighter as he took the field against a burly young man who rode in Lord Henry’s train. William needed to do well if he was to be noticed by Edward and yet he showed no trace of nervousness. I was immensely proud of him and had told him so early that morning as we attended Mass.
His tournament armour was new and had been commissioned at huge expense but he looked so brave and so handsome I thought I might even have forgone my rose-coloured silk if he had needed the money. Beneath his breastplate he carried a small wisp I had cut from my sleeve and I prayed it would bring him luck. I had planted a kiss lovingly on the silk before I gave it to him and would have liked to kiss his mouth but thought it would be more prudent to smile sweetly.
‘Your William rides like a man determined to win,’ Alice remarked after my husband had won yet again.
‘No he doesn’t,’ said Margaret who always liked to disagree with Alice. ‘William rides like a man with only one idea in mind and that’s the total annihilation of his opponent. Look how his horse never veers off course and how even at the last moment his lance remains steady and true to the target. He has the courage of a true fighter.’
My father-in-law was next and a cheer from the crowd greeted one of their favourites, the man who’d been at the king’s side since before I was born and who even now in middle age was a ferocious adversary. His opponent was an insignificant knight from Suffolk, all drooping shoulders and thin legs, who looked puny beside the mighty Earl of Salisbury.
I watched in admiration as William’s father was strapped safely into his armour and prepared to take to the field. His glossy black horse draped in the Montagu colours stood pawing the ground and shifting its hindquarters, impatient to be off. The earl’s squire passed over the helm and checked it was properly secure before helping him into the saddle.
My father-in-law looked magnificent with the burnished metal of his armour gleaming brightly and the vivid red plumes on his helmet bobbing majestically in the cold winter air. He acknowledged receipt of his weapons and his shield with a brief nod, weighed the lance in his hand and once satisfied with the balance peered through the eye slits fixing his opponent’s position. His squire checked the stirrups and made last minute adjustments to the harness and at last the earl was ready.
I heard the trumpet sound and the herald call the names and saw the horses sidestep and turn and stand and at the signal gather their hooves together and begin their headlong thundering down the course. I heard the noise of lances clashing onto shields and the roar of the crowd and a moment of utter silence before the upswelling groan. He was off his horse! The Earl of Salisbury had been felled.
‘Holy Mother of God!’ cried Margaret, ‘He’s down!’
My father-in-law lay in the mud. He didn’t move.
‘Holy Virgin, keep him safe,’ I whispered.
The earl’s squire and two of the Montagu grooms ran across the grass and the lowly knight brought his horse back and dismounted, joining the small knot of people gathered round the figure on the ground. I waited to see him sit up and be helped to his feet but nothing happened.
William came, still half-buckled into his armour. A man was sent running and returned a moment later with two others carrying a board.
‘They’ll carry him back to his pavilion,’ said Alice.
‘It’s only a fall, he can’t be badly hurt, it’s not as if it’s a mortal wound or anything like that.’
But she was wrong.
He lay flat on his back, his eyes closed and his breathing shallow. His armour had been unstrapped and his arms and legs seemed straight and unbroken and there was no blood but he didn’t move and he didn’t open his eyes and he didn’t speak. William spoke urgently to his father’s unresponsive body on the litter while Lady Catherine and Elizabeth stood nearby, weeping.
‘Should they move him onto the bed, make him more comfortable?’ I whispered.
‘How would I know?’ Elizabeth said. ‘What if he has broken some part of himself; they might damage him further.’
At that moment the royal physician arrived with his books and cups and proceeded to force a way through the crowd of onlookers to where the earl lay.
‘He will he live, won’t he?’ I asked Edward’s friend, John Chandos who had come to see how matters stood.
He sighed, rubbing the side of his cheek in a distracted way. ‘I pray so, Mistress Montagu, I do pray so, but I’ve seen many men fall in that way, apparently grievously injured yet with not a mark on them and they have all died. A knight from Bordeaux once told me they bleed inside, however impossible that may sound.’
‘But the bleeding might stop.’
He said nothing.
‘It was only a fall,’ I protested. ‘There was no wound and the physician found no broken bones. Surely he’ll live?’
We took him home to Bisham.
Over the next week dozens of people gathered at his bedside: his mother, his wife, both his brothers, his brother-in-law, three of his sisters and all his children, and me, his only daughter-in-law. Every one in the household wept as if tears could heal whatever afflicted the earl. His daughters were inconsolable but Lady Catherine stood stony-faced, unmoved by grief except for a single tear which trickled down her cheek. Every so often she gently wiped it away.
When we knew there was no further hope the senior men of the earl’s household and his chaplain and his confessor commenced the sombre formalities of dying. At the very end it fell to Bishop Simon to impart to his brother what was required of him by the living and to receive from his lips any secrets which could in no wise be heard by anyone not sanctioned by God or by the Montagu family.
‘In manus tuas Domine,’ murmured Bishop Simon, leaning close to his brother’s lips, hoping to catch a last word.
‘Commendo spiritum meum.’
But he was too late. Dawn was breaking over Quarry Wood and the Earl of Salisbury had stopped breathing. He had commenced his final journey alone into eternity and all our prayers had been in vain. He hadn’t spoken from the moment we’d left Windsor ten days earlier and had never once opened his eyes, yet I was certain he knew he had come home.
That night William and his brother kept vigil over their father’s body and within two days every inch of Bisham from the great hall of the Temple knights to Lady Catherine’s pretty solar was draped in black cloth. The earl’s embalmed body lay in the chapel on a black velvet bier surrounded by dozens of candles and an army of weepers and I grieved at the sight.
He had been a good man and he had been kind to me. I hadn’t expected him to die so soon and whatever secrets he carried, the secrets he might have imparted to me, died with him and I would never know what they were.
The funeral three weeks later was an agony of mourning. The Montagu chaplain read the eulogy and Bishop Simon spoke eloquently and at length of his brother’s magnificent achievements and virtuous life. Bishop Grandison officiated at the Mass and I heard the sorrow in his voice, knowing that his brother-in-law, his great friend of over twenty years, was dead.
Every one of the earl’s close companions was there: all the envoys he had served with on the king’s foreign missions and the knights he had fought with in Scotland and Flanders and Castile, all the men of importance from miles around. The pages and grooms and yeoman of the household crowded by the chapel door and in the silences all I could hear was the aching sound of loss.
Only one person was missing and that was the king.
‘He couldn’t come,’ said Lady Beaumont. ‘The Montagu quarrel was public and very bitter and concerned the king. Words were said which could never be unsaid, terrible words, heard by others. There was so much talk and for him to come would only have made matters worse. It was better for him to stay away.’
‘But he was his closest friend,’ I protested. ‘They’d always been together. They loved each other.’
Lady Beaumont sighed. ‘It was a tragedy. Lady Catherine tells me she will retire into the seclusion of a life of prayer.’
‘She’ll take the veil?’ In my darkest moments I’d thought Lady Catherine might pace the chambers of Bisham for the rest of my married life, a martyr to her suffering, and mine.
‘A vow of chastity. She says there is no place for her at court now her husband is dead and she is most certainly right. What could be worse than to be publicly spurned by the king? He’d have to ignore her. You do see that don’t you?’
I did. My cousin wouldn’t risk his royalty for anyone. He hadn’t risked his good name for me and he certainly wouldn’t do it for Lady Catherine. Whatever meagre feelings he had once had for her, she had caused gossip and distress and tarnished his good name abroad and I knew he would not be pleased.
That night William returned to my bed for the first time since his father’s death. He looked suspiciously at the slippery silk of my nightgown and placed his hand firmly on my defiantly slim belly.
‘It is imperative you give me a son, Joan.’
This was an order which I would disobey at my peril.
‘I understand, William. I too pray for a child.’
‘Why haven’t you conceived? We’ve been lying together for two years. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing’s wrong with me. I take the greatest of care of my soul as you know and I follow your mother’s advice in this matter as I do in all things.’
‘My sister tells me Arundel’s wife was fourteen when his son was born and Northampton’s wife barely fifteen. They were younger than you. And I’ve not neglected you.’
‘No, William, you’ve been very attentive.’
‘So why?’
William was impatient but I had no answers for him. It was a mystery why some women were blessed and others were not. Without a single word, he reached for the hem of my nightgown, prepared to force a child on me if he could. Obediently I rolled onto my back and spread my legs. This was William’s own particular battleground and I had long since learned that tender kisses were not part of his armoury. A quick surrender was the best possible tactic for a wife faced with total subjugation.
It was six months since the death of William’s father and this was the last day Lady Catherine would walk the halls of Bisham pretending she was the chatelaine.
For someone about to enter a life of prayer and simplicity I thought she was taking a great too many chests of fine gowns and choice linen veils, not to mention all those fur-trimmed cloaks and that magnificent silver-bound coffer overflowing with rubies and pearls. But the Montagu jewels were not leaving Bisham; those she had reluctantly passed over to William to be given to me.
To my dismay she had commanded the two best hangings from the solar, insisting they were personal gifts from her husband and needed for her new home. When I protested to William, he said the house in the outer precinct of the London convent where his mother was to live out her widowhood was large and naturally he wanted her to be comfortable.
Throughout the morning dozens of corded boxes containing enamelled ewers, bowls, napery and other items necessary for this comfort were carried down the steps to be loaded onto the wagons and I began to wonder if William and I would be left with anything.
‘T
he dowager countess desires your presence, my lady,’ grovelled one of Lady Catherine’s elderly women.
I presumed the crones would disappear behind the convent walls with my mother-in-law as I certainly didn’t want any of them in my chamber.
‘Lady Catherine!’ I swept an elegant reverential curtsey, thinking with glee that this would be the last time. By this evening she would be gone and Bisham would be mine, mine and William’s.
She was seated in the best chair dressed in her widow’s garb looking grey, tired and barely half the woman she had once been. The sheen on her skin was gone and the lines round her eyes and her mouth had deepened, sinking into the flesh, giving her the appearance of a wizened old woman. But those eyes had lost none of their glitter and the look she gave me was one of pure, undiluted hatred. I hastily crossed my fingers.
‘I shall not see you again,’ she said, honouring me with no greeting. ‘After today you will be dead to me. You may be my son’s wife but I shall no longer regard you as my daughter-in-law. For what you have done I can never forgive you. You may look to God for forgiveness but my prayers will not aid you in your quest.’
Her whole body quivered with such fury that I stepped back in alarm wondering which of my particular sins had given rise to this vituperative attack.
‘You killed my husband as much as if you had plunged a dagger into his breast. But for you, he would still be alive.’
‘I did nothing, my lady.’ I protested, thinking she had run mad.
‘Nothing was it?’
She beckoned me forward until I stood within her reach. Beneath the cloying perfume which permeated the heavy folds of her widow’s weeds I could smell hatred on her breath. She thrust out her hand. On her finger gleamed a huge emerald the size of a pigeon’s egg.
‘My husband gave me this on the day he was raised to his earldom. It was the culmination of everything we had worked for all those years, the bringing of our family close to the king. You should understand that every single thing I have ever done was intended to further the honour of this family. My lord and I beggared ourselves, throwing ourselves in the way of dangers you could not even imagine, to ensure we always came first. It was what my husband wanted.
The Fair Maid of Kent Page 18
