Katherine

by Anya Seton

  Dear Mary Mother, she thought. The misery which had receded with Philippa’s revelation in the chamber washed over her in a muddy flood.

  The Duchess was small and young. She was not ugly as they had said.

  Katherine, like one who cannot cease from pressing on an aching tooth, strained her eyes down the Hall. Young. Four years younger than I! Costanza was still but twenty-one. For all that Katherine had known this, yet she had resolutely pictured the Duchess as middle-aged, and big with a haughty maturity. She had not guessed the smallness.

  The duchess was dressed in a sombre grey. Katherine could see no jewels except her crown and a long sparkling pendant at her neck, which must be the reliquary she wore always and which Philippa said contained one of St. James’s fingers.

  Katherine looked from the glossy black wings of Costanza’s netted braids beneath the golden crown to the dark eyes below. Even at this distance, one could see that they were large and brilliant, and they seemed to gaze out with brooding intensity from the long narrow face, even when the little head tilted towards the Duke.

  Katherine, watching in anguish, saw that they spoke but seldom together. His face that she knew so well in all its moods was set into the stern mask which she passionately told herself always hid boredom. But she could not escape noting another quality she had never seen in him - deference. The

  Duke and Duchess ate from the same gilt salver, drank from the same hanap, and Katherine saw that he held back from each sip and morsel, so that Costanza might partake first, and then every motion of his body and the carriage of his head showed obeisance.

  For Christ’s sweet mercy - will he not look towards me once? Her fingers ripped a hunk from the soft, white bread and kneaded it like clay.

  “You eat nothing, my lady?” said the old clerk on her left. He looked at her curiously.

  “Nay, sir - I - I have a touch of fever.” She seized her wine cup and drained it. The thick heady vernage burned in her stomach. She picked up a breast of roast partridge, dipped it in the sweet pepper sauce, then put it down again untasted. The meal dragged on.

  Katherine sat and waited for the moment when she might be released. He had no thought for her, he had forgotten the sweetness of last night, of this very day in the barge. She drank more of the vernage, and her bitterness grew close to hatred. Ah, Katherine, where can you run to now, as once you ran from him? Where in the whole of England could you hide from him now, he who pretends to love you? Cold, cruel, heartless - so deep was she in her turmoil that she paid no heed to an announcement by the herald.

  She caught its echo only because of the buzzing of the people around her. The Duke had commanded that all those who had not previously been presented to the Queen of Castile should come up now as their names were called.

  This too, she thought - he wishes to humiliate me, to see me pay homage to his wife. And she steeled herself in anger. One by one, lords, knights, and their ladies were summoned by the chamberlain.

  Then she heard “Lady Katherine Swynford.” She walked stiff kneed down the Hall, her cheeks like poppies. There were snickers quickly checked, and she felt the slyness of spearing eyes.

  She reached the Duchess’s chair and curtsied low, touching the small cold hand extended to her, but she did not kiss it. She raised her eyes as Costanza said something quick and questioning in Spanish, and she heard the Duke answer, “Si.”

  The women looked at each other. The narrow ivory long-lipped face was girlish and not uncomely, but seen close like this one felt only its austerity. The black eyes glittered with a chill fanatic light. They seemed to appraise Katherine with the scrutiny of a moneylender examining a proffered trinket,’ and again Costanza spoke to the Duke.

  He leaned slightly towards Katherine, saying, “Her Grace wishes to know if you are truly devout, my Lady Swynford. Since you have the care of my daughters, she feels it essential that you neglect not religious observance.”

  Katherine looked at nun then, and saw behind the sternness of his gaze a spark of amusement and communion.

  Her pain ebbed.

  “I have tried not to neglect my duties towards the Ladies Philippa and Elizabeth,” she said quietly.

  The Castilian queen understood the sense of this, as indeed she understood far more English than she would admit. She shrugged, gave Katherine a long enigmatic look, waved her hand in dismissal as the chamberlain called another name.

  Katherine quitted the Hall, walked slowly across the courtyard. Oh God, I wish I hadn’t seen her, she thought; yet he doesn’t love her, I know that. No matter that she is so young and a queen, it’s me that he loves, and it does her no real wrong - and she doesn’t care - one can see it, and she cannot even bear him a son. Yet, Blessed Virgin, I wish I had not seen her.

  Throughout the sleepless night in her lonely bed, Katherine’s thoughts ran on like this.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  The Duchess Costanza that night announced to the Duke that she wished to make pilgrimage to Canterbury at once. It was for this that she had come to London. Her father, King Pedro, in her dream had directed her to go, and also told her certain things to tell the Duke.

  “He reproaches you, my lord,” said Costanza to John when they were alone in the state solar. Her Castilian women had been dismissed for the night, having attired her in the coarse brown robe she now wore to bed. Her large black eyes fixed sternly on her husband, she spoke in vehement hissing Spanish. “I saw my father stand beside me, groaning, bleeding from a hundred wounds that traitor made in him. I heard his voice. It cried, ‘Revenge! When will Lancaster avenge me?’ “

  “Aye,” said John bitterly, “small wonder he cries out in the night. Yet twice I’ve tried - and failed. The stars have been set against us. I cannot conquer Castile without an army, nor raise another one so soon.”

  “Por Dios, you must try again!”

  “You need not speak thus to me lady. There’s nothing beneath heaven I want more than Castile!”

  “That Swynford woman will not stop you?” she said hoarsely. Into the proud cold face came a hint of pleading.

  “No,” he said startled, “of course not.”

  “Swear it!” she cried. She yanked the reliquary from beneath her brown robe. “Swear it now by the sacred finger of Santiago!” She opened the lid and thrust the casket at him. . He looked at the little bleached bones, the shreds of mummied flesh and thick, ridged nail. “My purpose needs no aid from this.”

  She stamped her foot. “Have you been listening to that heretic - that Wyclif? In my country we would burn him!” Her shaking hand thrust the reliquary into his face. “Swear it! I command you!” Her lips trembled, red spots flamed on her cheekbones.

  “Bueno, bueno, dona,” he said taking the reliquary. She watched, breathing hard, as he bent and kissed the little bones.

  “I swear it by Saint James.” He made the sign of the cross. “But the time is not ripe. The country is weary of war, they must be made to see how much they need Castile. They must” - he added lower and in English -“regain their faith in me as leader. Yet I think the people begin to look to me for guidance. They say that in the city yesterday they cheered my name.”

  She was not listening. She shut the reliquary and slipped it back under her robe. “Now I shall go to Canterbury,” she said more quietly. “My father commanded it. It must be that since I am in this hateful England, an English saint is needed also for our cause. I shall see if your Saint Thomas will cure me of the bloody flux, so I may bear sons for Castile.”

  The Duke inclined his head and sighed. “May God grant it, lady.” But if, he thought wryly, ‘tis not God’s will that I should lie soon with her again, I shall submit with patience.

  He held out his hand to Costanza, and with the ceremony she exacted and which he accorded to her rank, he ushered her up the steps to her side of the State Bed. He held back for her the jewelled rose brocade curtains. She thanked him and, shutting her eyes, began to murmur prayers. Her narrow face was yellow against t
he white satin pillow, and his nostrils were offended by her odour. Costanza’s private mortifications included denial of the luxury of cleanliness, Beneath the requisite pomp of her position, she tried to live like a holy saint, contemptuous of the body.

  In the first years of her marriage she had not been so unpleasing. Though she had brought to their bed only a rigid endurance of wifely and dynastic duty, still she had allowed her ladies to attire and cleanse her properly at all times, and taken pride in the smallness of her high-arched feet, the abundance of her long black hair. She had been quieter, gentler, and though they had soon ceased, there had been moments when she showed him tenderness, had once spoken of love, which greatly embarrassed him. Only once however. And since the birth and death of the baby boy in Ghent she had become like this, indifferent to all things but her religious practices, her strange dreams and her consuming nostalgia for Castile.

  John climbed into his side of the great bed, glad that space enough for two separated them.

  He heard her whispering in the dark, “Padre, Padre - Padre mio - -” and his flesh crept, knowing that it was not God, but the ghost of her own father that she supplicated.

  Yet Costanza had no tinge of madness. Brother William had said so, three weeks ago when John had sent him to Hertford to examine the Duchess. “Disorders of the womb do oft-times produce excitable humours in the female,” the Grey Friar had reported. “I’ve given Her Grace a draught which may help her, but her Scorpio is afflicted by Saturn. That is not all that afflicts her,” added the friar with stern unmistakable meaning.

  “Her Grace is nothing disturbed by my - my association with Lady Swynford!” John had answered hotly. “She has never suffered from it, nor does she care.”

  “Perhaps not, my lord. But God cares - and the sin of adultery you live in now is but the stinking fruit of the viler crime which gave it birth.”

  “What’s this, friar?” John had shouted in anger. “Do you join my enemies in the yapping of vague slanders - or is it that your bigot mind sees love itself as such a vileness? Speak out!”

  “I cannot, my lord,” said the friar after a time. “I can but remind you that Our Blessed Lord taught that the wish will be condemned even as the deed.”

  “What wish? What deed? You babble like a Benedictine! You had better stick to leeching.”

  “Do you pray sometimes, my lord - for the salvation of Nirac de Bayonne’s soul?” said Brother William solemnly.

  Until now, when Costanza’s behaviour had reminded him of Brother William, John had put this conversation from his thought, deeming that the friar, like all the clergy, puffed himself up with the making of dark little mysteries and warnings. He had answered impatiently that no doubt Masses had been said for Nirac in St. Exupere’s church in Bayonne, since money had been sent there for that purpose. He had resented the friar’s steady accusing gaze and said, “It was not my fault that the little mountebank’s wits unloosened, or that he dabbled in witchcraft! You weary me, Brother William.”

  “Aye,” said the friar, “for you’ve a conscience blind as a mole and tough as oxhide. Beware for your own soul, my Lord Duke!”

  No other cleric in the world could have thus spoken without instant punishment, and the rage that injustice always roused in John had hardly been controlled by the long liking and trust he had for this Brother. But he had sent the friar away from the Savoy before Katherine came. Sent him far north to Pontefract Castle, where the steward had reported several cases of lung fever.

  At the thought of Katherine, John stretched and smiled into the darkness. Tomorrow night she would be here with him again, since Costanza was leaving for Canterbury. Nay - not tomorrow night, for that was sacred to the memory of Blanche and would be spent in mourning and fasting, as always on this anniversary. The next night then. He hungered for Katherine with sharp desire, picturing her as she would be now in her bed - white and rose and bronze, warmly fragrant as a gillyflower.

  The Castilian Duchess left the Savoy next morning with six of her own courtiers and a few English servants. She was dressed in sackcloth, her head was powdered with ashes and she rode upon a donkey, for that was the humble beast used by Our Blessed Lord.

  Katherine from her chamber window watched the pilgrimage move slowly from the courtyard through the gatehouse to the Strand, and her eyes shone with happy tears as she turned to her sister. “Blessed Jesu - so she’s gone again! God be thanked she didn’t stay for the Requiem Mass.”

  “The Duchess cares for no past but her own,” said Philippa dryly. “Now that I’ve a fortnight’s leave,” she added considering, “I think I’ll go back with Geoffrey to Aldgate. His lodging must be in sore need of my care. Last time he’d let an ale keg drip for days - ruined the floor-cloth - and the fleas!”

  “Geoffrey’ll meet us at Saint Paul’s?” asked Katherine, but she knew the answer. He, of all people, would never fail in respect to the memory of Blanche. Katherine too thought of Blanche with loving reverence like that one gave the saints.

  Later that morning, the Lancastrian procession from the Savoy to St. Paul’s Cathedral was led by the Duke. They were all dressed in black and all afoot. Katherine’s position was between Elizabeth and Philippa, behind little Henry, who followed his father at two paces.

  Katherine and John exchanged hurried words while the procession formed. He had bent close to her and whispered, “Dear heart, we shall be together again tomorrow,” and she had pulled her black veil quickly across her face to hide her unseemly joy.

  As they marched across the Fleet bridge and entered the City at Ludgate, the Londoners made way respectfully. The men uncovered, many of the women ducked a curtsy as the Duke marched slowly past. There were cries of “Lancaster” and “The Duchess Blanche, God rest her sweet soul!”

  At the corner of Ave Maria lane, a woman’s voice somewhat thickened with drink shouted out, “Cock’s bones, but the Duke’s a handsome kingly wight, belike he’d be no bad ruler for us after all!”

  She was shushed by a hundred whispers, but John felt a contented glow. He thought the temper of the London crowd was for him as it never had been before, and he thought that his poor brother had been right to counsel moderation in the handling of the Commons, “The Good Parliament,” the people called it now. And the sacrifice had not been too great, barring the whimperings of the old King, bereft of his Alice. The imprisoned merchants doubtless had deserved some punishment, the Lords Latimer and Neville, too. The new Privy Council which the Commons had appointed to the King was harder for John to stomach, and yet here too magnanimity might be shown; for little Richard’s sake it might be possible to conciliate and work with even such enemies as the Earl of March.

  His softened mellow spirit deepened as he walked down St. Paul’s immense nave, through the choir and to the right of the High Altar where he knelt in Blanche’s chantry beside her marble tomb. His retinue filed in. The nobles filled the choir, the rest overflowed into the aisles. Philippa, Elizabeth and Henry knelt on purple cushions at the far end of their mother’s chantry.

  The priests in black and silver chasubles commenced the celebration of the Mass. “Introibo ad altare Dei - ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam - -“

  The chanting and responses went on, but for John three words echoed and re-echoed - Laetificat juventutem meant, the joy of my youth. He looked up at Blanche’s effigy, all but her face covered with a black velvet pall. The twenty-eight candles, one for each of her years on earth, illumined the serene alabaster profile. Joy of my youth - yes. But you would not begrudge me joy now, my Blanche, you know that you’ve lost nothing that was ever yours in this new love that has come to me.

  His exaltation grew, and with it a certainty that all would go well with him from now on. His enemies would melt away, success would come in war, in peace. Castile would crumble for him like a marchpane subtlety, and he would build it up anew of strong and shining steel while all of England rang with the glory of his name, as it had once rung for Edward.

&nbs
p; “Requiescat in pace - -“

  The Mass was over, John felt exalted, cleansed, much as he had felt long ago during the sacred vigil before his father knighted him.

  He walked down the nave. Throughout the vast church his people rose from their knees to follow him. He stepped out to the porch, and stood blinking in the sunlight, still bemused, and not comprehending why there was a great crowd in the walled close. Again he heard “Lancaster,” and he threw his head up to smile at them, thinking they came to do him honour. He checked himself, seeing that there was no answering warmth in the upturned faces. They appeared shocked, some even dismayed, but the strongest impact from those gaping faces was a malicious curiosity.

  “Make way - make way!” cried Lancaster Herald, bustling out of the church and brandishing his baton and trumpet. “Make way for John, King of Castile, Duke of Lancaster, and for his meinie!”

  The crowd did not move. There were a few nervous snickers then from the midst of the rapidly swelling throng a man’s voice shouted, “Fine-sounding titles, herald! But tell us why we should make way for John o’ Gaunt, a Flemish butcher’s son!”

  John stood rooted to the pavement. The sky darkened and across the close the house roofs wavered like water. There was a roaring in his head.

  Katherine with the ducal daughters had come out on the porch in time to hear a man shout, but at first she was simply puzzled like the others. Then she saw whom the crowd was warily watching: like a great collective beast of prey, uncertain of its quarry’s next move. And the Duke did nothing, he stood as if some witchcraft had turned him to stone.

  Katherine instinctively moved nearer to him as the vanguard of his retinue began to trickle from the church.

  “Ay,” cried the same taunting voice, “John o’ Gaunt seems wonderstruck! He’s not yet read the placard what’s nailed on yonder door. The good monk there was passing, and he read it to us, my lord, so we maught all share the secret o’ your true birth!”