‘He did.’
‘Did he threaten you in any way?’
‘No, never.’
‘Were you frightened of him?’
‘No, he was very kind.’
The young man at his side scribbled away, presumably committing my answers to his long sheet of parchment.
‘And you agreed to marry him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you understand what he meant by marriage?’
I laughed. ‘Oh Master Heath, all girls know what is meant by marriage. We are brought up to think of little else. It is the most important moment in any girl’s life. Of course I knew what he meant.’
He coughed slightly as if this might be a point of disagreement between us.
‘My brother has a daughter who is just twelve years of age, a pretty girl and the apple of her mother’s eye. She is betrothed to a neighbour’s son but I do not think she fully understands what marriage entails; she is barely out of the nursery. How old were you, Lady Montagu?’
‘I was thirteen.’
He said nothing but I noticed a slight lifting of his eyebrows as if to have contracted a marriage like this I had been nothing but a wanton.
I was taken through my meeting with Otho and our hurried walk through the streets of Ghent, the house in the narrow street, the woman with her grubby linen cap, the dark stairway and the little attic room.
‘This marriage took place when?’
I tried to remember the exact day. ‘It was just after Her Grace gave birth to the king’s son, John. The king was in England so the princes of the alliance came to see the queen but she was still in her bed. And it was the season of Lent, I remember that.’
He tutted and asked who else was present. I told him about the woman of the house and how she had been brought upstairs. Master Heath wanted to know exactly what words Thomas and I had used when we promised ourselves to each other and he kept asking what Sir Otho Holand was doing and if I was frightened.
No man can understand how a girl feels at her wedding. Of course I was frightened but not in the way he meant.
‘And when Sir Otho and the woman left?’
‘Sir Thomas locked the door.’
‘To stop you from leaving?’
‘No, to prevent anyone from coming in. The streets were full of men. We could hear drunken shouting, and there was fighting. It was a sensible precaution to bar the door.’
‘What happened then?’
I blushed. I couldn’t tell this man I had only just met about that night with Thomas so I said nothing.
‘I’m sorry to have to ask you these questions, my lady, but the tribunal needs to know exactly what passed between you and Sir Thomas Holand that night. He took you to bed?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he had carnal knowledge of you? You understand what that means?’
I turned my head away and whispered, ‘Yes, he did.’
‘I have to be certain there is no doubt in this matter, so I must ask you again: did he penetrate your woman’s parts? Did you bleed?’
Holy Mother of God! Did these men wish to crawl beneath the sheets of a woman’s marriage bed? Was every thrust, every sigh, every gasp of pleasure to be picked over and discussed in detail by a group of elderly men who knew nothing of a woman?
‘Yes, Master Heath. The answer to your question is yes and yes. He took me into his bed as a maid and when he had finished with me I was no longer a maid. You cannot doubt that Thomas Holand is my husband.’
‘I may not doubt it, my lady, but I can assure you, the tribunal will. In a case like yours, all the advantages accrue to Sir Thomas. He was poor, you would one day likely be rich. He was an obscure knight of no particular importance; you were the king’s cousin. He was a man no longer in the first flush of manhood: you, if you will forgive the observation, were and still are extremely beautiful. Of course he wanted to marry you.
‘The question the tribunal will be asking is how he persuaded you to marry him. If Sir William cannot prove the marriage never took place then his attorney will look for trickery or force and in that way seek to have the marriage set aside. That is why I have to know everything so that if necessary I can counter his arguments. If you tell me you married Sir Thomas Holand willingly and in full knowledge of what marriage entails then I believe you but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the tribunal will.’
He sat back and conversed with his clerk who was struggling manfully. He had several rolls of written notes and fingers stained from base to tip with ink. He never looked at me but from time to time I noticed his ears grow red at the very nature of Master Heath’s questions and the plainness of my answers.
‘After your marriage, later that autumn, Sir Thomas left to go on Crusade. Is that correct?’
‘Yes, he wished to demonstrate his devotion to the Church.’
‘He told you he would return and yet three months afterwards you went through a form of marriage with Sir William Montagu.’
‘My mother persuaded me that my marriage to Sir Thomas was not a true marriage. She said, with no priest, it couldn’t be. She told me I was a fool and had been tricked and said I must marry William Montagu. She said I owed a duty to my family and they would be greatly displeased if I did not marry where I was bid.’
‘She used force?’
I thought of the blows and the slaps and how she had stamped on my fingers.
‘She chastised me, Master Heath, in the way a mother does to a disobedient daughter; that is all. If you wish to be certain you may ask her yourself.’
He shook his head. ‘Sadly, the dowager countess is not to be called as a witness.’
‘Why not?’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps she knows things Sir William would rather not have brought to the tribunal’s attention. It would not help him if Sir Thomas could level an accusation that you were coerced into marriage with Sir William by your family. You see, my lady, undue force by your mother could result in your marriage to Sir William being set aside.’
‘I doubt if any man would consider what my mother did to me as undue force. It was painful, yes, but at the time I considered my pain a deserving punishment for what I had done.’
‘And so you married Sir William Montagu and later you lay with him and he had carnal knowledge of you?’
I gave him a wistful smile. ‘It was a very grand marriage, Master Heath. If you care to look in the priory’s Great Book of Bisham you will find me. They write everything down. There can be no doubt about that marriage, surely? The king and queen were there, hundreds of people saw us married. No-one can question the validity of my marriage to Sir William.’
He smiled as if I was a boy who has made a simple but crucial error in his schoolwork. ‘But what if you were already married to Sir Thomas Holand?’
‘Then I would have two husbands.’
‘No, Lady Montagu. That is not possible. Neither God nor the Church allows a woman to have two husbands. Not at the same time. It would be an abomination.’
‘Is that what I am? An abomination?’
‘No, my lady. But only one of your marriages can be valid.’
‘So how do I know which one is valid? How do I know which one to choose?’
This time he smothered a laugh at my words.
‘You don’t, my lady. It is very simple. If you are married to Sir Thomas Holand you cannot be married to Sir William Montagu, Conversely, if you are married to Sir William Montagu you cannot be married to Sir Thomas Holand.’
I looked at him, incomprehension written all over my face. ‘But I may not choose?’
‘No. The tribunal will, in due course, inform you which of your two husbands is your husband in the eyes of the Church.’
It seemed to me as if we were no further on than we were at the beginning but M
aster Heath seemed satisfied.
‘How long do I have to wait?’ I asked.
‘It won’t be quick, my lady. Even in ordinary times the tribunals of the papal courts are known to be slow but with the dreadful happenings in Avignon and travel being so difficult I don’t even know when the next hearing will be.’
‘Has something happened in Avignon?’
His face paled and his voice dropped to not much more than a whisper. It was as if he didn’t want to say what had to be said.
‘Sickness, my lady. We hear rumours of a terrible pestilence which spreads and multiplies. It creeps like an evil spirit from house to house and has no mercy. Four hundred dead in a single day, as if one infected man can infect the world.’
I could barely believe what he was telling me. Surely it was impossible.
‘Imagine, my lady. Whole villages with no-one left alive. The sick dying too fast for the living to bury them and bodies flung into the river as the burial pits are full. Bishop Bateman tells me the Holy Father has withdrawn into his inner rooms to pray and is kept safe with huge fires burning day and night.’
‘Are we in danger here?’
‘No, my lady.’ He gave a small smile at the ridiculousness of my question. ‘We are in no danger. This is a punishment for the Valois king. It is his lands which are being ravaged and his people who are dying in their thousands. It is a sign of God’s disfavour to Philip of Valois. We are perfectly safe here.’
11
The Pestilence 1348-9
He was wrong. We were not safe. Nobody, no matter how exulted their position, no matter how loved or cared for, no matter how rich and powerful they believed themselves to be; nobody was safe.
William attended a royal tournament at Canterbury and returned with sad news; the queen’s baby had died. But there was no time to grieve because within weeks a message from Lady Catherine told us Joanna was dead. Joanna, the fair-haired cherub who was her mother’s favourite, the little girl I had comforted in Antwerp the night of the fire, the sweetest and dearest of all the queen’s daughters. She had set out for Castile in the spring but had never reached her destination. She had died in a village near Bordeaux in the heat of the summer and been hurriedly buried. The messenger from Gascony said it was “la morte bleue”, the pestilence, and my cousin had lost two of his children within the space of a single heartbeat.
Death was creeping close but the horrors had barely begun. When I looked into William’s eyes I could see mirrored, my own fear: God’s anger had reached out and touched one of our own and an enemy even more terrible than the Valois king and his armies could be heard howling at our gates.
‘You may dine in the hall tomorrow,’ said William in a clipped voice. ‘You will no longer be guarded and you will be treated in every way as my wife and mistress of the house. Your ladies may return. I have no desire to distress either of us any further and we will not discuss this matter again.’
I fell to my knees and took his hand.
‘Oh William. Thank you.’
He raised me up and kissed me. ‘We will talk no more about it. It is over.’
He didn’t mention the tribunal in Avignon, or his own attorney, or the one he had appointed for me whom I had never seen. He never once mentioned Thomas Holand or the marriage which was supposed to have taken place between us. He didn’t refer to the inquisition I had endured at the hands of his family or the journey made by Lady Catherine to the papal court. He behaved as if none of it had ever happened.
Perhaps it was finished. Perhaps Master Heath’s submissions had been in vain and Thomas had lost. Perhaps I was truly William’s wife and would have to remain here forever. Perhaps, God forbid, William had given orders to have Thomas killed and I would never know.
The following month William began receiving alarming reports from his tenants in the south west: stories of a strange sickness, of a man dying so quickly there was no time to summon a priest, of whole families stricken in the space of a few days. One man said the stench of the afflicted was as foul as the pit and his master had warned the villagers to use charms to protect themselves from the vileness of the Evil One.
Tales followed of people with black swellings in their armpits which oozed bloody pus, a seething fever, a racking cough and searing pain. Men spat blood and vomit and their excrement and piss were blood-stained and blackened. It was, the horrified messengers said, as if they were putrefying from within.
Fear spread like a winter chill across the land. A letter from William’s uncle, Bishop Grandison, confirmed what we dreaded most. This was, he conjectured, the great mortality which had overtaken Avignon. Like his brother in Christ, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, he had ordered processions every Friday to pray for protection from this disease. He said there was much terror amongst the citizens of Exeter and the towns had ceased to welcome travellers. He exhorted us to pray.
That same night William came back to my bed and wordlessly took me in his arms, placing his lips against my hair.
‘I am afraid,’ he whispered.
‘I too,’ I said, laying my hands on his chest and wishing we had been better friends. If I was to die I couldn’t bear for it to be here, alone and in the dark, unloved and unforgiven.
‘I have ordered the gates barred but my uncle says the very air is corrupted and how can I deny entry to the air we breathe?’
I moved closer and kissed the skin of his cheek, feeling the roughness of his beard against my face. ‘Do you think we should leave Bisham? Go north?’
‘No. I think we will do better here.’
‘My maid tells me the king has gone to Calais. One of the men heard it proclaimed in Great Marlow.’
William gave a short laugh. ‘Royal business. The king won’t flee. He has already decided on his next great tournament and ordered me to attend. He wishes his knights to be seen as not afraid. But I am. I am afraid.’
I lay in silence not knowing what to say for I too was afraid. I thought of the pestilence stealing its way up from the river, slinking along the narrow lanes and spreading its evil breath through cracks in the shuttered windows of every house.
‘Can London be safe?’
‘My mother writes that one of the lay sisters has died in agony. She says the city is full of panic. Foreigners are being sought out for killing and their bodies thrown in the river.’
I grasped the fur coverlet and pulled it up until we were half-buried beneath its heavy warmth, as if by doing so I could keep us safe from harm. I slipped my arms around him and caressed the coarse hair at the nape of his neck. I could feel his mouth on my skin and hear the uneven threads of his breathing as he began to shiver. Slowly I stroked his naked back beneath his nightgown.
‘I would wish to die as a good wife, William,’ I said quietly. ‘If it would bring you comfort we could forget the past and live as if there is nothing but this one moment which God has given us.’
I slid my leg between his and pulled his head down to mine. I sought his lips and kissed him as if he was truly a beloved husband and I, a loving wife, and from somewhere amidst our terror of what was to come we found a joy in our coupling that night we had never found before.
‘I love you,’ he murmured, half-asleep, perhaps not even sure who it was he held in his arms.
‘And I, you,’ I said tenderly, closing my eyes and praying that tomorrow morning would come as I truly could not bear the thought of dying in the dark.
Throughout that winter we learned a new way of living, one which acknowledged the precariousness of what we had, where death might strike at any time and the only breath we could be certain of was the one we took that moment. Each night we said our prayers and carefully composed ourselves for sleep knowing we might never wake, fearing the pestilence would claim us in the hours of darkness.
A maid left my chamber to nurse her sick mother and w
hen she didn’t come back I learned the whole family had perished. More terrible were the two village boys seen talking to a passing pedlar, found next morning beneath the trees, their bloated purple-marked bodies lying as they’d died, doubled-up in agony, unwatched, unloved and worst of all, unshriven.
During those short dark days, the elderly village priest came regularly to inform William of the spiritual and physical well-being of his flock. In the priory the canons redoubled their prayers but according to our chaplain some of the younger brothers were already refusing to tend the dying, fearing they too would be struck down. They cited a man’s breath as the probable source of his infection which was ridiculous, as stupid as believing a man’s look could kill. And yet, who could know?
When I found William on his knees before his father’s tomb weeping hot tears of remorse for his failures as a son, I knew just how afraid he really was. He may have been a great soldier on the field of battle and lord of Bisham to our neighbours, but here, in his own house where there was nowhere to hide, he found himself impotent against an invisible foe and that knowledge utterly terrified him.
‘I cannot see this enemy,’ he cried. ‘I do not know how to defeat him. You taught me how to fight, my father, but you never warned me that danger might come creeping like a wet fog across the fields.’
I murmured words of comfort but, in truth, there was no comfort to be had for any of us.
We passed what should have been a merry Christmas at Otford, watching the king’s games and exchanging gifts. William, not knowing what else to do, began to follow my cousin’s example, holding feasts and increasingly rowdy gatherings for his friends to show he was unafraid. As the weeks went by, the entertainments grew wilder, the music more frantic, with drinking, dancing and displays of debauchery which shocked me so much I refused to attend.
‘Each day is precious,’ William declared, leaning drunkenly against the door of my chamber with a jug of wine in his hand. ‘Join me, pretty wife, because I want you. I have forsworn whoring for Lent.’
The Fair Maid of Kent Page 31
