Katherine

by Anya Seton

  The ceremony took place in the Great Hall and Katherine stood watching at one side of the dais where the paupers, looking both proud and frightened, were seated on benches, and tittered nervously as the great Duke of Lancaster commenced the washing of their dirty scabrous feet.

  The Duke was dressed in a humble russet tunic devoid of ornament. Two squires held silver basins of warmed rosewater, and Robin held a towel. The Duke smiled gravely at his paupers and worked quickly and conscientiously. He made the sign of the cross on each foot, then kissed the toes, while murmuring the words of humility.

  Upon dismissal the owners of the feet went on to material rewards. On a table by the kitchens stood vats of broken meats and bread, from which the paupers were permitted to fill large sacks, and at the door the Duke’s almoner doled out pieces of maundy silver.

  When the ceremony was concluded and the gratified paupers had begun to gabble and bicker amongst themselves, the Duke came to Katherine and said, “Shall we visit the mew, sweet heart? Twill smell far better than in here, and we must see how your little merlin does.”

  Katherine assented gladly. Falconry had become a passion with her, and she was as eager as the Duke for her merlin to be trained, so that they might ride out again to hawk in Moorfields.

  Arnold, the Duke’s head falconer, met them at the door of the mew with a finger to his lips, and the sad tidings that Oriana had some puzzling ailment. The great white northern falcon had drooped upon her perch for days, she had refused gobbets of raw meat, and even tiny new-born rabbits with which Arnold tempted her.

  John, instantly concerned - for his royal gerfalcon had no peer in England, and aside from his affection for her, was worth nearly two hundred marks - had framed a question as to her medication, when he was interrupted by Brother William Appleton.

  The Grey Friar on his mule had trotted through the gatehouse into the Outer Ward and on seeing the Duke standing at the door of the mew, dismounted and walked over. “My lord,” he said gravely, gazing at the Duke from beneath his pointed black cowl, “it is done. The ship sailed from Pevensey on Monday.” He glanced coldly at Katherine.

  She saw John draw a long shaking breath while he said very low, “Chained in the galleys?”

  “Even so, my lord. He’ll not trouble you again.”

  “And the Benedictine monks?”

  “Have been stringently disciplined by their prior.”

  John sighed once more, and into his eyes there came a vague look, as though he listened to an echo. “Good,” he said at length. “You’ve done well, and I thank you.” He clapped his hands together once, then let them drop, and turning to Katherine said, “Wait here, lovedy. I must see Oriana, but ‘twill disturb the birds if you come too.”

  He entered the mew with Arnold, and the Grey Friar made as though to leave, but Katherine cried out, “Brother William, I beg you!”

  The friar paused and examined her. She wore a new gown of emerald brocade so lavishly furred with ermine that it befitted royal rank, and the gold fillet that bound her hair was jewelled and scalloped like a noble’s coronet. “Lady Mede,” he thought angrily. “Pride be painted here and pomp of the world.” It was Alice Perrers that Long Will satirised in his Piers Plowman as Mede, the corrupt courtesan - yet here was another such, and worse, by reason of the crime which had exalted her.

  “What do you wish, Lady Swynford?” he said with fierce emphasis on her surname.

  She felt in his gaze some deeper meaning than the abhorrence of an ascetic friar for the sin of unhallowed love. He frightened her, but she persisted urgently. “This man of whom you spoke to the Duke, the one snipped in the galleys, is it Pieter Neumann? I’ve a right to know,” she added sharply, as his lips tightened, “for my dear lord’s sake. Ay, I know you think me worthless and lewd, but by the Holy Blood at Hales my love for him has not harmed him, it may even be that it has helped him at times.” She ended on a note of quivering hurt.

  The friar, opening his mouth to cry that no good could come from evil, and that she was a fool to think her love had caused no harm, yet did not speak. The candid innocence of her eyes restrained him, and he felt that there was still some good beneath this wicked flaunting beauty. After a moment he said curtly, “It was Pieter Neumann, deported on a ship bound for Cyprus where he’ll remain in exile - if he survives the voyage.”

  “But he was in sanctuary - -“

  “And stayed there the allotted forty days,” answered the friar seeing that she knew more of this matter than he had supposed. “All was done with due regard for the laws of sanctuary. I myself was present at his hearing, and have just seen that the sentence of banishment was duly executed.”

  “Bishop Courtenay didn’t try to save him?” she asked.

  “No,” said the friar startled. “Courtenay’s now ashamed of his tool, and rightly so.”

  “Did the Duke not see Pieter?”

  The friar hesitated, but again he answered her. “No - I believe he did not trust himself.”

  “God in his mercy be thanked,” said Katherine. “My dear lord is then truly and honestly rid of his fardel.”

  She spoke with simple fervour and more to herself than the friar, but Brother William was softened. He bent close and spoke in a tone he had not used to her since the night of Hugh’s death. “My child,” he said earnestly, “Rouse yourself before it’s too late. I believe you have the strength!”

  “Rouse myself?” Her mobile face hardened and she stepped back from the friar.

  “Give up the Duke - and this unclean love of yours! Uncleaner than you know - -” His sunken eyes blazed a warning, then he checked himself.

  “Ay, to you all earthly love’s unclean,” she said bitterly. “You threaten me with hell, I suppose. It may be so - but I don’t believe it. I have come,” she said looking at him defiantly, “to believe only in myself, and my love.”

  He shook his head and looked at her with sadness. “You speak foolishly, Lady Swynford. Disaster will come to teach you better. Nor do I mean hell fire - but in this life - disaster!” he repeated on a sharper note and suddenly he clutched his crucifix.

  As happened sometimes during his strict Lenten fasts, strange dreams had come to him of late, dreams so vivid that almost, in his pride, he had thought them holy visions. But the dream last night must have come from Satan, so full of senseless horror had it been, of glaring bearded faces gibbering, of the smell of smoke, and blood. When he had said “disaster” now, he remembered that he had seen Katherine’s tearful tender face bending over him in his dream; and that she and he had been linked together in fear.

  “Christe eleison” he whispered, much disturbed by the memory of this dream and the foreboding that had come with it, disturbed too that he should have dreamed of Katherine, for it was long since the devil had injected a woman’s face into his sleep.

  “Benedicite” he muttered, abruptly, and walked rapidly away towards the chapel.

  Katherine waited by the mew for the Duke to come out and the discomfort Brother William had aroused in her soon melted in the warm spring sunshine. Presently she wandered towards the mossy old bargehouse. Clumps of violets and the yellow celandine had rooted in scanty pockets of earth between the stones, and she touched the little flowers as she passed. Through the water gate she could see an arch-shaped bit of the

  Thames glinting sapphire beneath the warm blue sky where rooks cawed and wheeled towards their nests in the elms across the river. She walked down to the landing and breathed softly. The air smelt of new-turned earth and the budding greenwood.

  When the Duke, having finished inspecting Oriana, walked up behind her on the pier she had a lapful of violets and like an absorbed child was flinging them into the river to watch the little purple specks go bobbing away over the ripples while she sang in her sweet warm voice, “Oh Lenten is come wi’ love to town, sing hi! sing hey!”

  He laughed and kissed the top of her bent head. “Moppet,” he said, “you’ve forgotten your weight of years and many
children?”

  Katherine giggled and rising from the step saw that no one watched except the old bargemaster. She flung her arms around John’s neck and kissed him heartily. “Many children, my lord, but not yet a full bevy,” she whispered against his ear.

  The Duke looked startled as he took her meaning. “It is so, my Katrine?” His eyes darkened and he looked down at her anxiously.

  “You aren’t pleased?” she asked while her smile faded.

  “Ay, I shall welcome it. You know that. But you were very ill last time, lovedy - two nights I didn’t sleep and prayed until I wore down the cushions at the altar rail.”

  “Ah, dear heart,” she whispered turning her cheek against his shoulder, for she had not known of that. When Hawise had finally nursed her through the childbed fever into full consciousness again, he had been gone from Kenilworth and on his way to Bruges to negotiate the truce - with Costanza.

  “Nay, but all will go well - this time,” she said quickly. “I’m a fruitful woman and shall bear you another brawny son.” She could not forbear the little note of triumph, for the scale dipped heavy on the other side and she could hear voices sniggering, “What, again a Beaufort bastard! Surely shame itself must blush by now!”

  He looked down at the lovely curved cheek that rested trustfully against his russet-clad shoulder, and taking her hand he said in a harsh voice, “Thank God, Katrine - you wear my betrothal ring again.”

  He started to tell her of the pain he felt for her and all that he would do in recompense; of his Nottinghamshire manors that he would give her and a necklet of rare Eastern pearls a Lombard goldsmith had sent word of to the palace. But she stopped him. “Nay, darling, I know, You needn’t fret yourself like that. See, it’s for this I had you engrave the reason on my brooch.” She touched it, “It is as it is.”

  “Cold comfort,” he said roughly beneath his breath. He drew her tight against him and they stood silent on the pier watching the quiet Thames flow by.

  On the twenty-first of June in his palace of Sheen at Richmond, the old King died at last. He was in the sixty-fifth year of his life and the fifty-first of his reign, and most of his subjects felt that both had lasted too long. The glories of Crecy and Poitiers were far in the past, and many now thought that those victories were negated by the interminable warfare that succeeded them and was not yet ended. The very week of the King’s death the French were harrying the coast of Sussex.

  Yet even those who despised the King for his insensate lust to rule France at whatever cost to England, and for his extravagance and blind follies, were shocked by his end.

  The King was alone with Alice Perrers when he was stricken with an apoplexy. She had been sitting on his bed, casting dice with him, and provoking him to delighted titters by the outrageous stakes she demanded - the Archbishop of Canterbury’s mitre, the province of Gascony, the crown regalia - when the King gave a loud cry and began to gobble in his throat. His staring eyes swam with red, one lip drew up in a snarl, as half of his face was turned to stone.

  Alice screamed and jumped off the bed. The King fell back on the pillows. He gave forth great snoring gasps as she watched him, horrified. She saw that he must die and that her long power was at an end. She bent quickly and pulled three richly jewelled rings from off his flaccid fingers.

  She thrust the rings in her bodice and backed away trembling, then she turned and fled from the chamber, pausing only to shout at a page that he must get a priest. She ran from the palace to the river, had herself ferried over, and by bribing an innkeeper on the western bank secured a horse and set out for safety to a nook in Bedfordshire where a certain knight owed her return for many favours.

  The old King died soon and alone, except for a friar that the frightened page had found. His sons and little Richard, who was now the King of England, did not reach Sheen for some hours.

  England mourned courteously for the King, the people wore sad clothes, black cloth shrouded their windows, and Requiem Masses were said throughout the land. Edward’s funeral procession and burial next to Queen Philippa on the Confessor’s mound in Westminster Abbey were conducted with doleful pomp. The dirge-ale was drunk to the accompaniment of decorous sighs. But everywhere eyes turned with hope and rejoicing to the fair charming boy who would be crowned on the sixteenth of July.

  Angers faded. The bishops checked their fulminations against Wyclif and the Duke of Lancaster, the Lollard preachers turned their sermons from the injustices done to the poor and spoke on Isaiah’s text, “A little child shall lead them.” The great nobles ceased their jealous strivings, and the London merchants amicably prepared to spend a prodigious sum upon their share of the coronation festivities.

  On the Feast of St. Swithin, July 15, the day before the ceremony in Westminster, Richard’s procession from the Tower through the City surpassed in magnificence any civic celebration ever seen.

  Katherine viewed the procession from a tier of wooden benches which had been erected on West Chepe for the accommodation of privileged ladies. The Princess Joan sat on a dais, flanked by two of her sisters-in-law, Isabella of Castile, Edmund’s frivolous and empty-headed wife, who was as unlike her sister Costanza as a chaffinch to a raven, and Eleanor de Bohun, the great heiress, Thomas of Woodstock’s bride. Eleanor was a high-nosed girl with a mouth like a haddock, who fussed so loudly over some matter of precedence that Katherine could hear her acid complaints from where she sat at some distance from the royal ladies, with Philippa, Elizabeth and her own Blanchette. The Swynford children had been brought down from Kenilworth for this extraordinary occasion, and her little Tom by special favour of the Duke had been permitted a place in the procession amongst the nobly born boys of approximately Richard’s own age.

  St. Swithin, doubtless propitiated by countless prayers, had in the morning duly cleared some threatening rain clouds from the sky, and the afternoon was as dazzling as the white silk banners and the cloth of silver draperies that were festooned along the line of march.

  On the Chepe the great open conduit, new-painted in blue and gold, gurgled pleasantly near the grandstand, and the heat grew such that Katherine sent a page over with a flagon to be filled. The conduit, for the three hours of the procession, ran with wine. Good wine, and even young Philippa drank thirstily before resuming her sedate composure.

  Elizabeth fidgeted and yawned as detachment after detachment of the Commons walked past City wards, all garbed in white in honour of the child king.

  Blanchette sat quietly beside her mother. Her wondering eyes moved from the marching men to a gold-painted canvas tower where four gold-costumed little girls of her own age were perched in the turrets and in great danger of falling out as they hung over the flimsy parapets.

  The Commoners had all disappeared down Pater Noster Lane and the men of esquire rank were filing past when Blanchette leaned forward and said, “Th-there’s Uncle Ge-Geoffrey,” with the little stammer in her speech which had developed during Katherine’s last absence from Kenilworth.

  “So it is, darling!” her mother answered, staring at the rotund figure in the white linen over-robe that made him look comically like a Cistercian monk. She had not seen Geoffrey in months, for he had been again in France on King’s business. As his file of esquires passed the ladies’ stand, he looked up and waved at them, then peered quickly along the benches looking, no doubt, for his wife. But Philippa Chaucer was not there.

  The Duchess of Lancaster would attend the coronation tomorrow and was even now en route from Hertford with her ladies, including Philippa, but a secular parade did not appeal to her.

  The knights and knights banneret followed the squires, then the aldermen, and the new mayor - the wealthy grocer, Nicholas Brembre. He complacently curbed his prancing horse with as much negligent skill as any knight, while he bowed to the stand where his lady mayoress Idonia was ensconced on silver cushions at a place of honour near the Princess Joan.

  “He looks almost a gentleman, except he’s so greasy and sweaty,” said
Elizabeth of the mayor in a shrill astonished voice.

  “Hush, Bess,” said Katherine sharply. “Gentlemen sweat too, in heat like this.”

  “Not my father’s grace,” retorted Elizabeth pointing proudly. “He’s never slobbery, no matter what.”

  Katherine bit her lips against a laugh, for Elizabeth was quite right. The lesser earls and barons had passed by and Richard’s uncles, led by the Duke, had appeared at the curve by Chepe Cross. In cream velvet trimmed with silver and riding on a snow-white horse, John gleamed as immaculate as an archangel. His brothers, the pale slouching Edmund, and the swarthy bull-faced Thomas, seemed to Katherine like a couple of nondescript rustics by comparison.

  She had no opportunity to admire John as she wished or to respond properly to the bow he sent in their direction, for as the little King approached in a blare of herald’s trumpets and the rattle of drums, the ladies surged to their feet amidst cheers and roars of “Long live Richard!”

  The small girls in the canvas castle were prodded from below and in a sudden frenzy began to fling out gold florins and tinsel leaves across the King’s path. Someone hidden in the tower pulled a string so that a canvas angel with jerking arm brandished a crown over Richard’s passing head.

  The boy looked up, startled, laughed, a high fluting tinkle audible even through the tumult of his acclaim.

  The ten-year-old Richard was pink and white and delicate as an apple-blossom. His thistledown curls were yellow like a new-hatched chick. His shoulders seemed too slight for the vast white and brilliant-studded mantle they had draped on him, albeit he sat his horse sturdily and pricked it angrily with his golden spurs of knighthood when the beast lagged.