Katherine

The five golden arrows were called Beauty, Simplicity, Frankness, Companionship and Fair-semblance. Did these indeed make the blissful wounds of love? Katherine wondered, disappointed. She could not picture those arrows ever wounding her heart, nor yet the five black ones that were shot from a crooked bow - Pride, Villainy and Shame, Wanhope and Inconstancy. To none of these did she feel herself vulnerable either.

So I don't understand this sort of love, and never will, she thought, sighing, and how foolish to think that it existed, since The Romance of the Rose was only a dream; Geoffrey had said so in the beginning. Real life was here in this Hall and imbued with quite different qualities - such as duty and endurance. The poem was like the jewel-toned tapestries of fairy beasts and misty glades that she had seen at Windsor, while life was like the rough grey yarn Philippa spun from the distaff. Yet - she thought suddenly, caught by a fleeting glimpse she could not quite perceive - the tapestry, too, exists. I saw it.

"You frown, Katherine!" said Geoffrey laughing, and folding up his parchments, "The Romaunt wearies you?"

"Nay, Geoffrey - it pleased me - but I think it sad that I can never find such a beautiful garden, or hope to pluck the one red rose the dreamer yearned for."

"It may be you will yet, Katherine," said Geoffrey softly.

"Katherine will what?" Philippa had been mentally rearranging the Hall, stacking the .trestles on the south wall instead of the north, putting up a more convenient torch bracket. "What red rose? Oh, I see - the poem - Geoffrey, in truth I think it sounded better in French, more elegant. The Queen's minstrel, Pierre de Cambrai, used to recite it to us - English is no tongue for poetry."

"I expect you're right, my dear," Geoffrey said. He fastened the clasp on his pouch and stood up, stretching his legs. "Rhyme in English has much scarcity, and I am but an indifferent maker."

Katherine started to protest, out of courtesy, and because she had enjoyed the poem; but she saw that her opinion would touch him no more deeply than had Philippa's. For all his merriness and kindness, she felt in him an encircling wall behind which his true self dwelt alone, little affected by the outside world which it viewed with smiling detachment. And she admired this trait which was like the self-sufficiency she had fostered in her own heart. There was but one thing that could threaten hers, she thought. She glanced at little Tom and then down at the curly head against her arm. If I have these safe, she thought, what need of more?

CHAPTER X

It was the eleventh of September before Katherine set out on her journey to Bolingbroke. She had been unwilling to go until Tom was properly weaned. Then Blanchette had had some brief childish complaint that required her anxious nursing, but soon the little girl was hale as ever, so that Katherine left her to Philippa without anxiety, though with many a pang.

Hugh, too, was better, his bowel gripes and flux lessened, though the other weakness that troubled him so bitterly had not improved. Katherine thought of this matter as she rode with Ellis along the Lincoln road to Bolingbroke.

Since the birth of little Tom, and for some months before that, Hugh had not been able to claim a husband's rights, and she felt guilt that a circumstance which disturbed him so profoundly should be to her a heartfelt relief. Freed from his clumsy, hurried importunities, she could minister to his other needs with far more tolerance. It was otherwise with him: he scarcely spoke to her unless he must, and in the rare times when she had caught him looking at her, he turned his head quickly away, but not before she had seen his bewildered anger and humiliation.

But today she need think of no troublesome things, it was joyous to be going on a journey, the wind blew in her face and she hummed as she spurred Doucette into a gallop, while the disapproving Ellis pounded along at the requisite three paces behind her. "My lady, slacken!" he called finally, "there's a party up ahead!" She pulled in Doucette. This narrow road through Bardney to Bolingbroke was not much frequented and they had met nobody but a tinker and two journeymen woodcarvers who were bound for Lincoln Cathedral to seek work on the new choir stalls.

The road ahead was blocked by a plodding procession of heavy carts piled high with wool-sacks and drawn by oxen. An oxherd ran back and forth with his goad between each pair of carts, and despite Ellis's shouts to make way, neither the oxen nor the herds budged an inch.

Three well-dressed horsemen rode ahead of the carts and one of them, hearing Ellis's shouts and seeing a young woman, called a command to the nearest oxherd, who stolidly passed it back. In due time the oxen hauled the carts to one side. "I could have ridden through the field around them," said Katherine to Ellis as she edged past the carts.

"Oh, no, lady," Ellis was shocked, "not seemly to give the road to peasants. You must remember your rank."

Ay, thought Katherine, I suppose I must, for I'm out in the world again. She arched her neck, patted her hair and replaced her blown riding-hood as she came up to the three horsemen.

The elder was a merchant and obviously a man of consequence. His surcote was a garnet velvet, parti-coloured with saffron. He wore a high-crowned glossy beaver hat, a jewelled dagger at his belt, and his iron-grey beard was neatly forked. "God's greeting, lady," he said in gloomy tones. "We regret we have impeded your way." He turned from her. Flicking his horse's reins, he resumed his slow amble.

Katherine was so accustomed to startled interest in men's eyes that her courteous disclaimer faltered. She glanced at the other two riders, and the youngest, having just taken a good look at her, checked his horse and guided it beside Doucette. "Are you travelling far, fair lady?" he asked, and the warmth in his tone restored her assurance. He too was finely dressed in velvet and a beaver hat, but his forked beard was chestnut brown.

"We go to Bolingbroke," said Ellis crowding up repressively, "and must be on our way, good sir."

"Why, we go there too!" cried the second merchant. "Best that you stay with us, there are outlaws in the forests on the wold."

"I've heard of none," said Ellis stiffly, "and I know well enough how to protect my lady. Allow us to pass."

"Wait, Ellis, we'll ride with them a little." Katherine had talked to no one outside of Kettlethorpe for so long, and Ellis was so dull a companion that she longed for novelty. "Do you also go to see the Duchess, sir?" she asked.

"Ay," he nodded and his smooth pink face grew as gloomy as the other merchant's had, "to ask her help, though we're bound later," he said with sudden force, "for that thrice-cursed town of Boston, may the foul fiend snatch it!"

"And what has Boston done?" said Katherine, trying not to laugh. She glanced at the third horseman, who was dressed in cleric's robes; his face sunk beneath his black and purple twisted hood, was dismal and long-mouthed as were his fellow travellers'.

"But we are Lincoln men! We are the Suttons, lady," cried the young merchant, "so you need not ask what Boston has done."

"Indeed, sir, forgive me, but I do not know."

"Why, they've stolen our staple! The stinking whoresons, vilely wheedling and lying, they've persuaded the King - or more like they've bribed that infamous concubine of his - to wrest the staple from Lincoln and set it up for themselves."

"Ah, to be sure," said Katherine. Hugh had indeed mentioned that the King had moved the staple from Lincoln to Boston and that it meant grave loss for Lincoln. No longer would all the wool and hides and tin of the country pass through Lincoln for export, no longer could she be the premier cloth town of the north-east, nor its commercial centre. By royal command, she had been debased. Katherine, knowing that this year at Kettlethorpe they would have trouble enough to support themselves and no surplus whatsoever to sell, had thought little of the news. But she looked sympathetically at the three gloomy men and said, "Do you think the Duchess can help you, sir?"

The young merchant hunched his shoulders. "We can but try. The Duke is our friend, we know him well. We hold manors under him near Norfolk and he has often dined at our house outside Lincoln."

Katherine considered this with interest. Mention of the Duke ever gave her a warm and trustful feeling since the day of Blanchette's birth, though he seemed to her incalculably remote. It was a little like the way one felt about God, a being all-powerful, stern but merciful (if one could catch his ear), yet naturally so engaged in vast enterprises that one would never dare to intrude one's self.

The Suttons were wealthy burgesses and one of Lincoln's most prominent families. Master John, the older one, was the father, these the two sons, Robert, and Thomas the clerk. Master John had been Mayor of Lincoln last year and now held a seat in Parliament. They belonged to a class she had never met, landholders, civic dignitaries and prosperous merchants, entirely pleased with themselves and their station, and yet neither noble nor knighted. They did homage and paid fees for the lands they held under the Duchy of Lancaster but otherwise they were toughly independent, awed by nothing, and Katherine was startled by the way Master Robert spoke of the King. "Taxes, taxes, taxes so the old dotard may satisfy his leman, or satisfy his itch to rule in France, as though we hadn't enough to do at home. First, it's a tax in wool, and then it's a tax on wool, and who's to pay the piper but us woolmen? Though never fear, we're not so dull as not to get round that a bit - eh, father?" He nudged master John, who grunted morosely.

"How may that be?" asked Katherine;

Robert Sutton was delighted with so attentive and pretty a listener. He winked at her and chuckled. "Why, pass the tax on, as it were. Lower the price we pay for the wool. Our tax goes up? Then the price we pay the peasants goes down and down and down."

"Yes, I see," said Katherine thoughtfully, "but couldn't they refuse to sell to you?"

"No other way to sell! We woolmen stick together, and with the staple, all wool must come to Lincoln - but we've lost the staple, curse it, unless the gracious Duchess can change the King's mind. Why do you go to Bolingbroke, lady?"

For the same reason you do, I suppose, to get something from the Duchess, Katherine thought with sudden shame. And yet that was not wholly true.

"I go to pay my loving homage," she said slowly. "Sir Hugh Swynford, my husband, is the Duke's man."

"Oh ay?" said Master Robert, "Swynford - of Coleby and Kettlethorpe? Have you much pasture? I don't seem to remember any lots of your wool."

"We seldom have surplus, and this year none at all. Most of our sheep were drowned in the flood. Nor had we many."

It was scarcely past midday and the sun had been glowing fitfully from behind dark-massing clouds. Now wisps and curls of mist began to float by and lie white in the hollows. On the wooded upland of the wolds the tree-tops reared above a bank of lemon-grey vapour.

"Yon's an uncanny light ahead," said the young cleric, speaking for the first time. "Fog looks yellow as saffron, and I ne'er saw fog at midday so far inland." He pulled his silver beads tip from his girdle and fingered them uneasily.

"Nay, Thomas!" cried his elder brother, laughing. "For you've seen little of the world at all. All things amaze you. My brother," he said to Katherine, "is but just come home from Oxford where I'll vow he never stuck his long nose outside Merton close, so bookish is he."

Katherine smiled but she too felt a mounting discomfort. The air was thick and still as though it held thunder, and when they reached the wolds and began to climb through heavy yellow mist, they heard the long-drawn hooting of an owl in the unseen forest.

"What can that be that hoots by day, except a soul in purgatory?" said Thomas, and he crossed himself. One by one the others followed suit, but Robert said, " 'Tis only that the fog has fooled the bird to thinking it is night."

They walked the horses along in silence after that, all of them watching the rutted way, for they could see ahead but a few feet. They mounted higher and the mist cleared, though they saw that it lay thick as tawny wool below them across the fens to the south-east and in the cup where Bolingbroke must lie.

When they began the descent, at once they plunged back into the fog. The shouts of the oxherds behind them grew muffled and distorted and seemed to come from all directions. Otherwise there was an eerie stillness until Master John broke it. "I smell smoke," he said. He drew off his embroidered gauntlets and nervously chafed his gouty fingers.

They all sniffed the thick unmoving air. Yes, there was smoke, but in the faint pungency Katherine caught a trace of another odour, a fetid sickening fume that touched in her some uneasy memory.

"I smell nothing but the fog - Christ's maledictions on it," said Robert. " 'Twill be luck an' we can keep the road."

They plodded on in the still, yellow half-world - trees loomed up of a sudden on either side of them and as suddenly disappeared. It grew warmer and the strange stench grew stronger until they all felt it sting their nostrils. Then through the fog appeared an orange glow and they heard the crackle and hiss of flames and came upon a bonfire in the centre of the road. The fire burned off some of the fog. They could see no one about, but small houses and an alestake showed that they had entered Bolingbroke village. The fumes came from the fire; its oily suffocating smoke writhed upward and drifted through the air.

"It smells of brimstone," cried John button, pulling up his horse and coughing. "Why do they build this here! God's body, but this stink may harm my wool."

"There's another fire down over there," said Katherine, "by the castle wall, I think." She too coughed, her eyes watered. The horses snorted and, tossing their heads, began to trot, trying to rid themselves of the discomfort. No other living thing moved in the village street and, held by dazed uncertainty, they let the horses have their will. The road led around the castle walls and the dry moat. They reached the barbican and saw the great wooden drawbridge was raised flat against the portcullis. The air was clearer here, the horses stopped, and their riders stood staring up at the looming mass of wall when suddenly the mist lifted.

"Jesu, look!" cried Ellis hoarsely. He pointed with his whip.

"God shield us," whispered Katherine. On the bottom of the drawbridge was painted a red cross four feet high. And now she knew that she had smelled a smoke stench like this eight years ago in Picardy.

"There's plague in the castle!" cried John Sutton, his voice quavering. "We must turn the wool-carts - Robert, hasten, stop them - don't let them come nigh here!"

His son gave a cry and galloped down the street into the fog.

"We must get 'round the village away from this contagion," muttered Master John. "Lady, d'you know of another road - do you, young squire?" He turned distractedly to Ellis. "Oh weylawey, there's naught but misfortune and disaster for me lately. Thomas pray to Saint Roch - to all the saints - for sure you have the Latin they can understand."

The young clerk started and dragged his eyes from the plague cross that glistened red as blood through the mist, his trembling fingers reached for his beads.

"Come, Lady Katherine, come," whispered Ellis. He snatched at Doucette's bridle. A shutter opened in the guardroom of the gatehouse and a man's helmeted head showed at the window.

"Now who be ye what gabble and jangle out there?" the guard called out. "For sure ye see that we've no welcome to give ye at Bolingbroke except the kiss of the Black Death."

"Blessed Virgin, what has happened?' cried Katherine, clasping her hands tight on the pommel.

"Sixteen of us are dead, that I know of - God shrive them, for a priest has not! The chaplain died a-first, five nights gone, the friar after him."

"Unshriven!" She heard the wail from the two Suttons behind her, and the sudden panic clop of hooves as their horses were spurred.

Ellis grabbed her arm, and she shook it off. "The village priest!" she cried to to the window. "Get him!"

"How may we? Since he's run off to hiding like the rest of the vill!"

"What of the Duchess and her babes?"

"I know not, mistress, for since yestere'en I've not quit the guardroom and I've barred the door." The voice in the window cracked into high-pitched laughter. "I've barred the door 'gainst the plague maiden and her red scarf and her broom. She'll not get in, to bed wi' me."

"Come away, lady - come--" Again Ellis seized Katherine's arm, his face had grown yellow as the smoke.

"No," she said, though her heart beat slow and heavy. "I cannot. I'm going in. Belike I'm safe from the contagion, Philippa said so, but whether or no, I must go in to the Duchess."

"You're mad, lady - Sir Hugh would kill me if I let you go -

She saw that he meant to drag her off by force, his hand clenched on her arm so she near overbalanced in the saddle. Deliberately she called on anger.

"How dare you touch me, knave!" she said, low and clear. "How dare you disobey me?" And with her free hand she slapped him hard across the face.

Ellis gasped. His hand fell off her arm. His mind floundered in a coil of fear and uncertainty.

She saw this and in the same clear voice said, "You need not enter the castle with me, I release you from your duty, but this you must do. Ride fast to the abbey at Revesby, it's the nearest as I remember. Bring back a monk, at once! In the name of the Trinity, Ellis - -go!" Such force did she put in her voice, such command in the look she gave him, that he bowed his head. "The road to Revesby lies that way," she said pointing, "then to the west." He tautened the reins and spurred his horse.

"Guard! Ho, guard!" Katherine called turning to the castle. The helmet showed again in the window. "Lower the bridge and let me in!"

"Not I, mistress," again the man let loose a gust of laughter. "I'll not budge." His tone changed as he pushed closer to the window. "What, little maid, and do you lust to join our sports in here? By God's bones, the Black Death holds merry dances! The postern gate is open since 'tis through there the castle varlets fled." He leered down at her.

Katherine guided Doucette along the dry moat past the south tower to a footbridge that led across to the postern. She dismounted and tied the mare loosely to a hazel bush that it might graze. She unbuckled her saddle pack and hoisting it in her arms crossed the footbridge. Between the batterns on the low oak door another red cross was painted and beneath it in straggling letters, "Lord have mercy on us."

She went through the unlocked door into the bailey. On the flagstones near the well another plague fire burned. An old man in soot-tarnished blue and grey livery threw handfuls of yellow sulphur on the smouldering logs. He raised his shaggy head and looked at her dully. Two other figures moved in the bailey. They were hooded and masked in black cloth and they held shovels in their hands. The flagstones had been lifted from a section of the western court near the barracks and she saw that a long ditch had been dug into the earth. Beside the ditch there stood a high-mounded bumpy pile covered by bloodstained canvas, and the stench from this pile mingled with the fumes from the fire.

Katherine tried to turn her eyes away from the mounded pile but she could not. One man seized a little hand-bell and, jingling it, muttered behind his mask. He put the bell on the ground, and the two hooded figures silently dragged a limp thing with long black hair from out the pile and heaved it into the ditch, where one blue-spotted wrist and hand protruded for a moment like a monstrous eagle's claw, then slowly sank from sight.

Katherine dropped the bag she carried. She ran stumbling towards the private rooms at the far end of the bailey. She reached the foot of the stone staircase that led up to the Duchess's apartments. Here it was that she had stood laughing at the mummers' antics with the two little girls in that Christmastime three years ago. She looked back into the smoke-filled silent courtyard and saw the hooded figures fumble again beneath the canvas on the mound.

Her stomach heaved, while bitter fluid gushed up into her mouth. She spat it out and, turning, began to mount the worn stone steps. As she rounded the first spiral the hush that held the castle was broken by the sudden tolling of a bell. Muffled though it was by the stone walls around her, she knew it for the great chapel bell and she clung to the embroidered velvet handrail while she counted the slow strokes. Twelve of them before the pause - a child then, this time - somewhere in the castle and dimly through the knell she heard a long far-off wailing.

At once much nearer sounds broke out from above her, a wild cacophony of voices and the shrilling of a bagpipe. She listened amazed; in the discordant sounds she recognised the tune of a ribald song, "Pourquoi me bat mon mart?" that Nirac had taught her, and many voices were bawling it out to the squealing of the pipes and the clashing of cymbals.

As Katherine mounted slowly the noise grew more raucous, for it came from the large anteroom outside the Duchess's solar, and the door was ajar. There were a dozen half-naked people in the room, all of them in frantic motion, dancing. Nobody noticed Katherine, who stood transfixed in the doorway. Despite the fog heat, a fire was blazing on the hearth and the painted wall-hangings were illuminated by a score of candles. On the table, which had been pushed to the wall, there was the carcass of a roast peacock, a haunch of venison and a huge cask of wine with the cock but half shut; a purple stream splashed down on the floor rushes which had been strewn with thyme, lavender and wilting roses. To the falcon-perch beside the fireplace, a human skull had been tied so that it dangled from the eye-sockets and twisted slowly from side to side as though it watched the company who danced around and around upon the rushes. They jerked their arms and kicked their legs. When the minstrel who held the cymbals clashed them together, a man and a woman would grab each other convulsively and, kissing, work their bodies back and forth while the rest jigged and whirled and called out obscene taunts.

Katherine, held viced as in a nightmare, recognised some of these people, though their faces were crimson and slack with drunkenness. There was Dame Pernelle Swyllington, the stout matron who had protested against Katherine's presence in the Lancaster loge at the tournament at Windsor. Her bodice was torn open so that her great breasts hung bare, and the cauls that held her grizzled hair had twisted loose and bumped upon her shoulders as she danced. There was Audrey, the Duchess's tiring-woman, dressed in a wine-stained white velvet gown, trimmed with ermine, the skirt held bunched up around her waist, though yet she tripped and stumbled on it. Her broad peasant face was wild as a bacchante's beneath one of the Duchess's jewelled fillets. Audrey held Pier Roos by the hand and when the cymbals crashed, she flung herself against his chest, slavering. The young squire wore nothing but a shirt and was drunk as the rest, his pleasant freckled face drawn down into a goatish mask, his eyes narrow and glittering. A kitchen scullion danced with them, and a small pretty young woman - a lady, by her dress - who giggled, and hiccuped and let any of the men fumble her who wished; Piers, or the scullion, or the minstrels - or Simon Simeon, the steward of Bolingbroke Castle.

It was the sight of this old man, his long beard tied up with a red ribbon, his portly dignity lost in lewd capers, a garland of twined hollyhocks askew on his bald head, that shocked Katherine from her daze.

"Christ and His Blessed Mother pardon you all," she cried. "Have you gone mad - poor wights?" A sob clotted in her throat, and she sank down on to a littered bench, staring at them woefully.

At first they did not hear her; but the piper paused for breath and the steward, turning to catch up a mazer full of wine, saw her and blinked foolishly, passing his hand before his bleared eyes.

"Sir Steward," she cried out to him, "where is my Lady Blanche?" Her despairing voice shot through them like an arrow. They ceased dancing and drew back, huddling like sheep menaced by sudden danger. Dame Pernelle clenched her hands across her naked breasts and cried thickly, "Who are you, woman? Leave us - begone." Piers' arm dropped from Audrey's waist and he shouted, "But 'tis Lady Swynford - by the devil's tail! I've longed for this! Come dance with me, my pretty one, my burde, my winsome leman-" His nostrils flared on a great lustful breath, he shoved Audrey to one side and would have grabbed at Katherine, but the old steward stepped between and held his shaking arm out for a barrier.

"Where is the Duchess?" repeated Katherine, unheeding of Piers.

"In there," said the steward slowly. He pointed to the solar. "She bade us leave her - while we wait our turn."

"She's dead then," Katherine whispered.

The steward bowed his head and through mumbling lips he said, "We know not."

Katherine jumped from the bench and ran past them to the solar door. They watched her dumbly. Piers drew back against the others. They made no sound as she went through the door but when it closed behind her a woman's voice cried out, "Give me the wine!", the pipes shrilled and the cymbals crashed anew.

In the great solar it was dim and quiet. Two huge candles burned on either side of the vast square bed that was hung with azure satin. The Duchess lay there on white samite pillows. Her eyes were closed, but her body twitched, her breath was like the panting of a dog. Her arms were closed on her chest below a crucifix, the white flesh mottled from the shoulder to the elbow with livid spots. A trickle of black blood oozed from the corner of her mouth and ran on to her outspread golden hair.

As Katherine gazed down, shuddering, the purple lips drew back and murmured, "Water -" The girl poured some into a cup and the Duchess swallowed, then opened her eyes. She did not know the face that bent over her, and she whispered, "Where's Father Anselm? Tell him to come - I haven't long - nay, Father Anselm's dead, he died the first-" Her voice trailed into incoherent muttering.

Katherine knelt on the prie-dieu which stood beside the bed and gazed up at the jewelled figure of the Blessed Virgin in the niche. No fear for herself entered her mind, nor did She pray that the Duchess would recover, for that would be a miracle worked by God alone. She saw that the plague boils had turned inward, and none that vomited blood ever lived. She prayed only that Ellis would bring the monk in time. She prayed while the candles burned down an inch, and the Duchess shivered and moaned, and once cried out. Suddenly Katherine's wits cleared and she saw that she must go back outside the castle to guide the monk since he would be a stranger, nor did Ellis know of the postern gate.

She knew that it was useless to ask help of those in the anteroom. She slipped down the privy stairway that led to the Duke's wardrobe and out on a corner of the battlements, and down to the bailey.

It was dark outside now except for the glare from the plague fire. The hooded black figures had gone and loose earth covered the ditch. Katherine sped through the bailey and out through the postern door. The fog had blown off into a fine rain, yet at first she could see nobody outside the castle walls. Then she heard the whicker of a horse over by the church and she ran there, calling, "Ellis!"

Her squire and a tall Cistercian monk in white had taken shelter from the rain in the church porch, having indeed been unable to find a way into the castle. Katherine wasted no time on Ellis and, giving the monk a murmur of gratitude, seized the edge of his sleeve. Together they hurried back into the castle and up the privy stair to the Duchess's room.

The Duchess still lived. She stirred as Katherine and the white monk came to her bed, and when she saw the cowled head and the crucifix the monk held out to her as he said "Pax vobiscum, my daughter," she gave a long sigh and her hand fluttered towards him. The monk opened his leather case and laid the sacred parts of the viaticum out on the table, then he motioned to Katherine to leave.

The girl crept down the stairs and turned off the landing into the little room called the Duke's garde-robe, because it was in here that he dressed and that his clothes were kept when he was in residence. It was bare now except for two ironbound coffers, a rack full of lances and an outmoded suit of armour that hung from a perch and shone silver-grey in the darkness. A faint odour of lavender and sandalwood clung to the room and there was here no plague stench.

Katherine sat on the coffer with her head in her hands until the monk called out to her.

The Duchess died next morning at the hour of Prime while a copper-red sun tipped above the eastern wolds against a lead sky. Katherine and the Cistercian monk knelt by the bedside whispering the prayers for the dying, and one other was with them - Simon, the old steward of the castle, who had recovered from his drunkenness and crept in to join them, his head bowed with heavy shame.

A little while before her passing, the Lady Blanche's torments eased, and it seemed that she knew them. She tried to speak to the steward and though the words were not clear, they knew she spoke of her dearest lord, John, and of her children; and Simon breathed something of reassurance while the tears ran down his face. Then Blanche's wandering gaze passed over the monk and rested on Katherine with a look of puzzled recognition. She remembered nothing of the night just gone but she felt the girl's love and saw the anguish in her eyes. She raised her hand and touched Katherine's hair. "Christ have mercy on you, dear child," she whispered, while the gracious charm of this most noble lady showed for a moment in her dimming blue eyes. "Pray for me, Katherine - -" she added so faintly that the girl heard with her heart and not her ears.

Then the great room was quiet again except for the chanting of the monk. Lady Blanche sighed, her fingers closed around the crucifix on her breast. "In manus tuas - Domine -" she said clearly, in a calm, contented voice. And died.

It seemed that the Black Death, having slain the Duchess, had at last slaked its greed. The weather on that September 12 turned sharp and freezing cold, and the evil yellow fog vanished. There were a few more deaths throughout the castle, a scullion and a dairymaid, two of the guards and the head falconer's wife; but these had all been stricken before the Duchess died, and there were no new cases.

Of those who had danced in frenzy by the skull in the anteroom, none died of plague but Audrey, the Duchess's tiring-woman, and she followed her mistress on the next day without ever regaining her sense from the drunken stupor which had finally quietened all the revellers.

On Piers Roos, too, the dread black spots appeared, but God showed him mercy, for the plague boil in his groin swelled fast and burst like a rotten plum; and when the poison drained away, Piers recovered, albeit he lay for months in sweating weakness afterwards.

During those days of heavy sorrow and gradually lightening fear, Katherine remained at the castle. They had sore need of help, and old Simon was distracted by the terrible responsibilities on him. Of those at Bolingbroke, thirty had died. Most of the varlets had run off in panic to the wolds and fens. There were few left to do Simon's bidding, and none to tell him what disposition should be made of the Duchess - until the messenger he had dispatched to the King at Windsor should return.

They sealed away the Lady Blanche in a hastily made coffin and placed it in the private chapel. There the good white monk said Masses for her soul, and many of her household came to pray; and there too, every morning after it seemed sure the plague had passed, Katherine brought the ducal daughters, Philippa and Elizabeth, to light candles and kneel by their mother's black velvet bier.

The children had all been safe in the North Tower throughout the scourge; the Holy Blessed Mother had watched out for them, since their own could not.

The baby, Henry, toddled merrily about the floor in his own apartments playing with his silver ball and a set of ivory knights his father had sent him. When Katherine first went to see him he drew back as children do, and hid distrustfully behind his nurse's skirts, but he soon grew used to her and crowed with glee when she played finger games with him as she did with Blanchette.

The little girls occupied rooms higher up in the tower, and Katherine found them well enough in health, though Philippa was nine now and old enough to understand the terrible things that had befallen them; between the strands of lank flaxen hair, her long sallow face was runnelled with tears, and nothing that Katherine could say lightened the stillness of her bearing. Yet she remembered Katherine and seemed to find some comfort in standing silently beside her.

Elizabeth at five was noisier than ever. She harried the servants and bullied the nurses and her sister, all of whom gave into her rather than provoke a screaming rage. She was a brown little thing, all except her eyes, which were leaf-green and could flash like a cat's. When she was told of her mother's death, she howled loudly for a while because she saw those about her weeping; but in her visits to the bier in the chapel she found a not unpleasing importance. She liked Katherine because she smelled good and told her stories and had a low sweet voice unlike her Yorkshire nurse's, but she cared deeply about nobody.

Katherine longed for her own children and especially when she saw little Henry, who was so near to Blanchette in age and whose baby tricks wrenched at her heart. Almost she resented him because he was not Blanchette.

But her own babies were well at Kettlethorpe and did not miss her. Ellis had ridden home with all the frightful tidings of Bolingbroke, and returned some days later with a message from Philippa, who had made him repeat it so many times that through Ellis's voice Katherine could plainly hear her sister's.

"You're not to come home yet, on any account, lady," Ellis reported stolidly. "They're all well and wish to stay so. Dame Philippa says there's no telling but the plague might be hiding in your clothes waiting to smite those nearest you in revenge that you are safe. She said to tell you that they're singing Masses for the Duchess' soul at Kettlethorpe church, and all is being done seemly there, so you need have no care for anything; but you must not return until all danger from pestilence has passed."

They stood in the chill windswept bailey by the now lowered drawbridge, and Ellis, acting under orders, kept his distance from her.

"And what does Sir Hugh say?" Katherine asked slowly.

Ellis looked uncomfortable. Hugh had said very little beyond expressing shock at the Duchess's death. He had always been a morose man, but lately even Ellis thought him unduly brooding and withdrawn.

"He sends you greeting," said Ellis, "and said you may do as you please."

Katherine nodded. That was like Hugh as he had become in the last year. It was as though he held himself away from her in all things, no longer gave her commands nor yet made clumsy efforts to gain her affection; and she thought that this was because of the thing that had happened to him. But Philippa's advice was sensible and though it pained her it also freed her for a different obligation.

"Do you then, Ellis," she said, "return now to Kettlethorpe and tell them I shall join the funeral cortege that'll escort our dearest Lady Blanche to London, for this is what the King commands. And perhaps I shall remain there to do her the last honours, when she is interred, after the Duke is back from France."

Ellis considered this and decided that it was a fitting course for her to follow and would not displease Sir Hugh.

"When will the Duke come back to England, do y'know, lady?"

She shook her head. "They say he may not yet have heard the dreadful tidings since he fights deep in Picardy. I daren't think how it'll be with him, when he does," she said, remembering the look in the Duke's eyes as he had gazed up at his wife at the tournament. "In one month he has lost both mother and wife," she added as though to herself. The Queen perhaps he would not miss much, since they had seen so little of each other in years, but - -

" 'Tis God's will," said Ellis briskly, having delivered his message and being anxious to be off. " 'Tis in nature that a mother dies; as for a wife, she can be soon replaced."

Ellis's chance and sensible words were like a spark to a hidden mine and Katherine was seized with sudden stabbing anger. "You fool, you heartless dolt!" she cried, her grey eyes blazing. "How dare you speak so? The Lady Blanche can never be replaced, nor would he want to!"

Ellis's jaw dropped. "I meant no harm, I simply thought that -"

"God's blood! Then stop thinking since it leads you into lunacy!"

He stood there gaping at her, and the scarlet faded from her cheekbones. "Never mind, Ellis," she said, "no doubt I spoke too sharp. How should you who hardly knew her understand - adieu then, give them my love at home, I'll contrive to send a message soon."

She watched him mount his horse and cross the drawbridge, when he turned left for the village and the road across the wolds towards Kettlethorpe.

She walked slowly

Katherine buried her face in her hands on the rail and wept as she had not wept during all her time at Bolingbroke.

CHAPTER XI

The Lady Blanche of Lancaster's funeral cortege wound its solemn way down England all through the first days of November. For the greater part of the journey her bier rested at night in the abbeys and cathedrals which had sheltered the remains of another much mourned and beloved lady some eighty years before - Eleanor of Castile, the chere reine to whose memory the first Edward had erected stone crosses at each stage of the sorrowful progress.

By this November of the Lady Blanche's last journey, the plague had passed on. Some said that it had flown to Scotland in search of fresh victims, some that it lurked still in the wild secret mountains beyond the Welsh border, but it no longer smote England. The people gathered everywhere by the roadside to watch the Duchess's hearse, sable-draped, and drawn by six black horses in silver harness, with nodding black ostrich plumes fastened to their heads. Folk fell to their knees and wept for this disaster which had robbed them of the second lady in the land so soon after their Queen, yet from the magnificence of the black-garbed procession with its lords and ladies, chanting monks and humble varlets, many folk drew a personal solace. During the time of terror and hideous death there had been no dignity of mourning, and now in the honours done the Duchess they could weep quietly for their own dead, too.

Behind the hearse rode the King's youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock, a dark thick-set lad of fourteen whose haughty look and sulky mouth disguised his complacence at having been assigned to his first princely duty. Since Lionel was dead, and his other three brothers were fighting in France, there had been no one else of fitting rank for the King to send.

Katherine had a place in the middle of the procession behind the members of the great Lancastrian administration - the chancellor, the chief of council, and the Duke's receiver-general, all of whom had hurried to Bolingbroke after summons by messenger.

She lived much within herself during those days of the Duchess's procession. There was little to occupy her mind except the interest of the journey. She had no close contact with anyone she knew; rigorous etiquette ruled every phase of the progress and was enforced by the Duke's officers. She no longer saw the ducal children except at a distance, for they rode in a chariot with the nurses behind their young uncle Thomas and far ahead of Katherine's place in the cavalcade.

On the last night the procession stopped at Waltham, where the Duchess' coffin rested below the shrine of the black cross, but Katherine had no wish to pay her reverence to the cross this time and did not enter the church.

On the next afternoon when the procession had turned right through Islington and nearly reached the charterhouse, there was a flourish of trumpets and a long muffled roll of tabors on the road ahead. The horses were halted and word ran back along the line that the King had come out to meet them. They all dismounted and continued on foot to the Savoy.

Katherine could see little of what went on, and it was not until the Duchess had been borne into her home chapel at the Savoy and the procession was broken up at last that she saw the King. He wore a plain silver mourning crown and beneath it his lank hair shone silver too, though in his scanty drooping beard there were still some yellow traces. His lean face was deeply furrowed, his faded blue eyes were red-rimmed; as he walked with dragging steps into the chapel, no one could doubt that he felt grief, as he had felt it for his Queen so short a time ago. And yet, not six paces behind him, taking precedence of all the lords and ladies, came Alice Perrers, her head respectfully bowed, but a faint smile on her thin red lips. Her mourning robe was stiff with seed pearls, the gauzy veil on her elaborately coiffed black hair was powdered with brilliants, while the odour of musk that she exuded overlay the scent of incense from within the chapel.

Katherine watched with disgust and wondered that the courtiers seemed to take so calmly this woman's flaunting presence there.

Many things shocked her that first night at the Savoy Palace. The King and his company remained for supper and Katherine from her seat at the side of the Great Hall observed the High Table with little of the wide-eyed admiration she had felt for royalty three years before.

The supper began on a solemn enough note, the King's confessor offered a prayer in Latin, added, extempore, some remarks about the great lady they were mourning, and ended with admonitions for all to think of the state of their own souls since mortal life was fleeting. When he had finished, the Lancaster and King's heralds blew long dirge-like wails and the minstrels in the gallery above began a soft slow tune. But this seemly quiet lasted only until the first cups of rich Vernage wine had been drained. Then Alice Perrers, who sat next to the King, leaned towards him and whispered in his ear, whereupon his melancholy mouth curved in a smile. She leaned over and picked up a fluffy yellow dog which wore a gold and ruby collar. She danced the dog on the table and crowned it with a ruffle of bread, and a feather pulled from the roasted swan a kneeling squire presented to her. The King laughed outright and put his arm around Alice's naked shoulders.

At once the watchful minstrels changed to a merry tune, and a wave of ribaldry flowed unchecked along the High Table. One of the lords shouted out a lewd riddle, and all the company tried to guess it, each capping the other's sally with a yet coarser one. Katherine could not hear all the words, but she could see the laxness of their bodies as they lolled on the cushioned benches; and she could see the King and Alice drinking together from one cup, and that Prince Thomas teased the young Countess of Pembroke by dabbling wine between her breasts and tickling her plump arms with a leering precocity.

The interminable meal dragged on, and each course ended in a subtlety: triumphs of the confectioner's art cunningly contrived to fit the occasion. The first one represented the Black Death with his scythe standing above the body of a saffron-haired maiden. Death's figure was fashioned from sugar coloured black with licorice. Katherine thought it marvellous and horrible; but at the High Table they scarcely looked at the subtlety except that Alice Perrers absently broke off a piece of Death's licorice robe and sucked it as she talked to the King.

Katherine's head began to ache, her stomach revolted against the highly spiced and ornamented dishes. At last she murmured an excuse and slipped out into the cold dark night. So vast was the Savoy, such a honeycomb of buildings, alleys and courtyards that she could not remember her way back to the small dorter the chamberlain had assigned to her.

Except for the noise in the Great Hall and the bustle of servants running to it from the kitchens, the Savoy was now a sleeping city, dimly lit by a few bracketed wall torches. Katherine wandered through wrong turnings and into several dark courts before she saw anyone from whom she could ask directions. Then from a small gabled house near the state apartments she saw a tall friar emerge and knew him for a Franciscan by the grey of his habit and the long knotted scourge that dangled from his waist beside his crucifix. His cowled head was bent over a black bag. He was buckling the straps and did not see Katherine in the shadowy court until she went up to him.

"God's greetings, good Brother," she said. "I regret to trouble you, but do you know the palace?" She feared that he might beg alms 'of her as all friars did, and she had not three groats left in her pouch from the half-noble which Hugh had given her for pocket-money at Bolingbroke over two months ago. But her weariness had increased while she wandered about and she ached for rest.

The friar looked at her keenly but could see little beneath her hood. He contented himself with saying, "Yes, mistress, I know the Savoy well." Brother William Appleton was a master physician, and a savant, though he was still but thirty, and he stood high in the Duke's favour by reason of his discretion, as well as his skill with the probe and lancet.

"I've lost my way, Sir Friar," said Katherine with an apologetic smile. "I'm to lodge in the Beaufort Tower, but I cannot find it."

"Ah," said the friar, "mayhap you came from Bolingbroke today with the funeral train?"

Katherine bowed her head. Suddenly tears stung her eyes and her journey seemed to her both foolish and futile. Here she had no friends and no true place, nor could she forget the horror of those days at Bolingbroke and plunge into revelry as the others had. And the Lady Blanche had no further need of naive prayers, now that she rested in her own chapel in the home of her ancestors, while six monks prayed for the repose of her soul.

"You're weary, mistress," said the monk in a kinder tone. "I'll guide you to the Beaufort Tower."

He led her through an arch and down some steps into the vaulted tunnel that ran along outside the ducal wine cellars, then up again towards the river into a court called the Red Rose, because in summer it was filled with roses of Provence.

"Yonder's your tower," said the friar, pointing to a massive round tourelle on which were blazoned, six feet high in gold and gules, the arms of Beaufort and Artois, for Blanche's grandmother. " 'Tis the oldest part of the palace and has not yet been renovated and embellished by my Lord Duke as have the buildings around the Inner Ward. Did you notice there the carvings and the traceried windows and that all of them are glazed?" He spoke at unaccustomed length because his trained eye noted the droop of Katherine's head, he had heard the choke in her voice, and he wished to examine her a moment by the torchlight. Though the plague seemed to be over, one knew how violently it had raged at Bolingbroke, and it was his duty as physician to be watchful.

"Yes, Sir Friar," she said, turning her face up to him in the light as he had hoped, "all here is wondrous fair."

Wondrous fair indeed! he thought, startled, gazing at the pure oval of her face, the wide eyes and the sharp chiselled line of forehead and nose. Her hair glowed dark copper against the black hood. She had the lovely face of a pagan Psyche that he had seen on his pilgrimage to Rome, and though he was an austere man, and none of your concupiscent degenerate friars who had sprung up of late to disgrace the barefoot orders, yet he was a man, and had not quite subdued a sensitivity to beauty.

"You are not feverish, my sister?" asked the friar, suddenly recollecting why he had wanted to examine her face, and he touched her forehead with his cool bony fingers.

"Nay, brother - I'm well enough - in body. 'Tis my heart that's heavy. Have you heard when our Lord Duke will come?"

"Why, very soon! For he had landed at Plymouth. A dark and bitter thing 'twill be for him, his meeting with his poor lady, God absolve her soul."

"I think He has no need to," said Katherine very low, "she was without sin. Grand merci for your guidance, Sir Friar." She gave him a faint smile and turned to the door of the Beaufort Tower, where a sleepy porter answered to her knock.

Brother William murmured Benedicite and walked thoughtfully back through the courtyard, his horny naked soles making no sound on the chill flagstones.

Tired as she was, Katherine could not sleep that night. She shared a bed with some Derbyshire knight's fat sister, and Katherine lay on her back listening to the lady's snores; to the gurgle of the Thames from below their window; to the periodic clang of church bells wafted upstream from London town a mile away. Here at the Savoy they had a great painted Flemish clock fixed to a tower in the Outer Ward. It struck the hours by means of little dwarfs with hammers on a gong, and she heard each hour's end pass by.

At four o'clock she rose and dressed herself quietly. A maidservant slept on a pile of straw in the passage but she took care not to waken her. It seemed to Katherine that, if she could be alone in the chapel with the Lady Blanche, she might be eased of her heavy heart and she might understand why she felt grief and horror now far stronger than while she had actually lived through the dreadful day of plague.

She lit a candle at the embers of their dorter fire, went down the stone steps and let herself out into the Red Rose Court. The torches had been extinguished. It was not yet dawn and the bleak November sky twinkled with frosty stars. She walked slowly, peering with her candle, and found her way through the main court entrance into an alley, where a dog barked at her and was hushed by a sleepy voice. She went under another arch between the chancery buildings and the turreted ducal apartments and so into the Outer Ward. Beyond the barracks and the stables, the chapel lights flickered through its stain-glass windows and spread patches of blue and green and ruby on the stones outside.

She pushed the chapel door and entered. The nave was empty. The monks who were on duty chanted their prayers far in the depths of the chancel behind the gilded rood-screen. Katherine crept up to the chancel step and knelt there, gazing from the black bier in front to the silver image of the Blessed Virgin in a niche to her right.

As she looked back from the coffin her ear was caught by a sound from the chancel floor in the shadow of the bier. She looked more closely and gasped.

A man in black lay prone on the tiles, his arms outstretched towards the coffin. She saw the convulsive heaving of his shoulders and heard the sound again. Between his outstretched arms his hair gleamed gold against the shadowed tiles.

She clenched her hands on the pillar of the rood-screen trying to raise herself and run from witnessing this that she had no right to see, but her muscles had begun to tremble and she stumbled on the edge of her skirt. At once the man raised his head and his swollen bloodshot eyes flashed with fury. "Who are you that dares come in here now? How dare you gape at me - you graceless bitch -" He stopped and rising to his feet walked down beneath the rood-screen. "Katherine?" he said in a tone of wonder.

Still on her knees she stared up at him mutely. Slow tears gathered in her eyes and ran down her face. The monks' voices chanted louder in the Miserere, then died away.

"Katherine," said the Duke. "What do you here?"

"Forgive me, my Lord," she whispered, "I loved her too - -"

His mouth twisted and he flung his clenched fists against his breast. "My God, my God - that she should leave me like this. These weeks since I heard I didn't believe, I couldn't believe - -" He turned and looked at the coffin. "Go, Katherine," he said dully.

She fled down the nave and out of the chapel. She did not go back to the dorter, she wandered through the courts until she came to the great terraced garden by the river. She groped her way past the clipped box hedges, down marble steps until she reached the landing pier at the foot of the garden. It was chill there from the river breeze and she shivered a little in her cloak. She crouched on a stanchion at the edge of the pier and watched the inky slow-moving waters pass, pouring themselves eternally into the sea, and she no longer thought of the Lady Blanche, or of the horrors of the plague: she prayed for the man who lay on the chancel tiles by the bier.

The Duchess was interred at last four days later. Her marble tomb was placed in a chantry next to the high altar in St. Paul's Cathedral, and two chantry priests were engaged to sing Masses for her soul in perpetuity. Her funeral procession from the Savoy down the Strand through Ludgate to St. Paul's was the most magnificent ever seen in England, it surpassed even Queen Philippa's recent obsequies in Westminster Abbey, but to the Duke it brought no comfort.

When he returned from St. Paul's he would speak to nobody and mounting straight to his private apartments locked himself into the small chamber that was called Avalon because its English tapestry portrayed the enchanted burial of King Arthur.

John would not enter the great solar which he had shared with Blanche or sleep in the bed where he had once lain in her arms; and for days he would not quit the Avalon Chamber at all. During this time there was only one person whom he would admit, Raulin d'Ypres, his young Flemish body squire who brought him food which he barely touched. No one else saw him.

Each morning in the high-vaulted Presence Chamber which adjoined the privy apartments, an anxious group of men gathered to await the squire's word as to whether they would be received, and each day Raulin came back, his broad face gloomy as he gave them a denial. On Thursday after the Duchess's funeral he returned to the waiting men and said, "The Duke's Grace still vill not see you, my lords. He sits effer the same staring at the fire, except sometimes he writes on a parchment. This morning, though, he vishes Master Mason Henry Yevele sent for."

"God's wounds!" cried the great baron, Michael de la Pole, who was a blunt, burly middle-aged Yorkshireman. "Then he wishes to consult Yevele on the alabaster effigy of the Duchess. If he can do that, he can spare us a moment! Has he quite forgot the war? Has he forgot the dangers his royal brothers face in France?"

The Duke's two highest domestic officials, his chancellor and receiver-general, exchanged weary, resigned glances. Apparently on this day too, the Duke would transact no business and the chancery affairs must wait. They shrugged and went out.

De la Pole was devoted to his Duke, to whom he had taught many of the arts of war, but he did not understand this excessive grieving. He stalked over to the window to join Lord Neville of Raby, who was irritably tapping his foot and drumming with his dirty heavily beringed fingers on the stone sill while he stared out at a windy rainswept Thames.

"He," said de la Pole, frowning in the direction of the Avalon Chamber, "has not even reported to the King on our campaign in Picardy!"

"Nothing to report, I hear," growled Neville, "since you never joined in battle - body of Christ, why didn't you force the French bastards to fight?" He glared at de la Pole from beneath his bushy grizzled eyebrows. A harsh North Country man was the great Lord of Raby and never one to mince words.

De la Pole's ruddy face darkened, but he answered temperately. "How could we, since they hid from us? We did what might be, we burned the country from Calais to Boulogne; but ill luck hounded us, and the plague there too." He sighed, thinking of the many plague deaths in camp. "But what's our next move to be? The Prince of Wales is sore beset in Aquitaine, Edmund piddles away his forces in the Dordogne, that hot fool of a young Pembroke will listen to nobody and holds himself a better soldier than Chandos - we must plan a new attack - yet my Lord Duke sits in there moping alone."

Lord Neville blew his beaked nose loudly with his fingers and wiped them on his miniver-lined sleeve. "Aye," he said angrily," 'tis not of the land I wish to speak to him, 'tis of the disposition of our ships." Neville had just been appointed Admiral of the Fleet and as a man of fifty and an arrogant one, it irked him to wait on the decisions of a man of twenty-nine, though he was his feudal overlord. There was a stir across the room, a yeoman held open the great oak and wrought-iron door. Two friars padded in.

"Ah, now we have the godly faction represented," said de la Pole dryly. "We'll see how they fare."

The two friars were as unlike as a grey heron and a plump hen. Brother William Appleton, the lean Franciscan physician, towered a head above Brother Walter Dysse, the Carmelite, whose snowy cope was woven of the softest Norfolk worsted and belled out to show glimpses of an elegant tunic, and a gold and crystal rosary dangling from a paunch as neat and round as a melon. And while the Franciscan grey friar was shod only by his own soles, the Carmelite had soft kidskin shoes and wore hose of lamb's wool.

"Nay, brethren," said the young body squire to them, flushing, for he was still unused to the new importance the Duke's behaviour had thrust upon him. "His Grace vill not see you either. He says his body and soul must shift for themselves since he cares naught about them."

"Christus misereatur!" said Brother Walter lisping slightly as he palmed his plump white hands. "Sweet Jesu, but that is a melancholy message."

"He cannot help himself," said the physician, thoughtfully, "his horoscope shows him much afflicted by Saturn. Yet, for that black bile from which he suffers he should be bled, and I have other remedies which might help, could I but try them."

"And how long will His Grace be ruled by Saturn?" asked Baron de la Pole walking over to the Grey Friar. "By God, I hope not long."

"The aspects are somewhat unclear, and yet it seems that soon Venus will ascend and mitigate the baleful Saturn," answered Brother William carefully.

"Venus forsooth!" cried the Baron. "Don't prate to me of Venus, Sir Friar - it's Mars that we need! Mars! - look now here come two more black crows!" he added as the great door again swung open: Court mourning for the Queen and the Duchess would last until Christmas and had peopled the palaces with black, which depressed de la Pole, who was fond of scarlet. The two new-comers were not Lancastrians however, and de la Pole drew close to Lord Neville, who still fidgeted by the window. Both men stiffened and watched the new-comers warily. These two noble young sprigs, the Earl of March and Richard Fitz Alan, heir of Arundel, were known to hold little love for the Duke.

Edmund Mortimer, the Earl of March, was great-grandson to the Roger Mortimer who had been Queen Isabella's paramour, but he had no likeness to that lusty man. This Mortimer was a weedy stripling of eighteen with pimples thick upon his beardless face. Insignificant as a stable-boy, a stranger might have thought of him, except for his pale eyes, which had a cold steady gaze; but no one in the Presence Chamber thought him insignificant. He was the ranking earl, he owned vast possessions in the Welsh Marches and in Ireland, and he had recently wed young Philippa, the only child of Duke Lionel of Clarence, and thus become grandson to the King.

"I'm here," he announced in a high "grating voice, "to see Lancaster. I have a message for him." He glanced at the friars, then at the two barons. His companion, Fitz Alan, nodded agreement and spread his stubby hands to the fire.

"No doubt you do," said de la Pole, "but he's not to be disturbed."

"By God's bones, indeed he's not!" growled Lord Neville. Whatever bickering they might indulge in amongst themselves they were at one against outsiders.

"I come," said Lord March imperturbably, "from the King. He summons the Duke to Westminster at once, for conference. He's to accompany me now. Kindly have me announced." March's spotty little face was smug, and the two barons were silenced. No one might disobey a summons from the King, not even a favourite son, but de la Pole thought that a more agreeable messenger might have been chosen. No doubt the choice was Alice Perrers' doing. She blew now hot now cold on this courtier or the other as her subtle mind conceived it to her advantage, and the King did as she wished.

Raulin departed on this new errand to the Avalon Chamber, and the company settled to wait for his return. The little earl hunched himself in a gilded chair before the fire and shivered, for his skinny body was always chilly. He stared enviously at two huge Venetian candlesticks which flanked the fireplace. They discontented him with a pair he had recently ordered for himself, as the Savoy discontented him with his own city mansion, and that knowledge that, while he owned ten castles, John of Gaunt had more than thirty. His thoughts turned to the heir his countess was expecting. There at least he bettered the Duke. This babe, whatever it was, stood nearer to the English throne than Lancaster or any get of his.

"That churlish squire takes long to return," he said to Fitz Alan who was munching a handful of raisins and spitting the seeds out at an andiron. "That Fleming - why must Lancaster ever show favour to foreigners!" March reached for a raisin, then thought better of it. Two of his teeth were rotting and sweetness hurt them. "By Saint Edmund!" he began peevishly, "the Duke forgets my rank, this is outrageous -" He stopped, for Raulin returned slowly through the door and came up to him, bowing.

The squire fixed his eyes on a tapestry behind the earl's head and said without inflexion, "My lord, His Grace sends his love and duty to the King and prays His Majesty to bear with him. He cannot come now but vill anon."

De la Pole watching from the window could not hold back a chuckle at the little earl's expression. March got off the chair and drew himself as high as he could. "D'you mean to tell me it took all this time to produce this insolent message!" he shrilled at the squire, who closed his lips and stared stolidly towards the wall. It had taken no time at all for the Duke to give that message, the time had been taken by another matter which caused Raulin much hidden amazement.

"Well, my lord," cried de la Pole cheerfully, "you've had your answer!" His own discontent with Lancaster had melted into pride. The Duke was afraid of nothing, not even his father's famous Plantagenet temper, and de la Pole gave thanks that he owed his homage to the Duke instead of to this pimpled bantling, or any other overlord.

One by one they departed until the Presence Chamber was emptied of all but the squire. Raulin waited until there was no one on the stairs, then sped out into the courtyard and, obeying the Duke's orders, made for the Beaufort Tower.

The porter told him that Lady Swynford was not within. Her mare had been saddled and brought, and she had left some time ago.

"Did you hear naught of vere she might've gone?" pursued Raulin who knew nothing about the woman he was seeking and whose competent Flemish brain was mystified by the dark urgency his master had shown.

"I might of," the porter paused and picked his nose thoughtfully, "were't to my interest."

Raulin opened his purse and held out a quarter-noble. The porter bit it and said, "My Lady Swynford did ask the way to Billingsgate, summat abaht fishmongers it were - fishmongers wi' a fishery French name - Poissoner - Pechoner - she wanted to see."

Raulin, finding that the porter could give no other information, set off for the City on what seemed an unlikely quest. But the Duke had forbidden him to return without this Lady Swynford. He rode to town and down Thames Street towards the Bridge and began to make dogged inquiry.

Katherine had spent the last days in growing dejection. Her grief and horror had worn themselves out at last and she had stood amongst the hordes of mourners in St. Paul's and felt only sadness. Since then, she had been planning how to get home, but there were material difficulties. She had not enough money for the journey, nor did she dare set off without escort. The wisest thing would be to get a message to Hugh that he might send Ellis for her. But that would take time. In that vast Savoy Palace she felt as lost and forgotten as in a wilderness. The ducal children had been taken with their household to the country air of Hertford Castle, and most of the Bolingbroke people had dispersed after the funeral.

The decision to go to Billingsgate and seek Hawise had been impulsive, and once she had thought of it, she lost no time and set off in a chill and windy drizzle.

In three and a half years the Pessoners had changed very little except to grow rounder and noisier. An herb-strewn fire roared on the hearth, where some of the children played at rolling apples. Master Guy was not to be seen for he was counting cod in his warehouse next door. The low-raftered Hall smelt of fragrant smoke and fish. Hawise was standing at the dairy-room door vigorously pounding the dasher in a large butter churn when one of the young Pessoners let Katherine in.

Hawise gawked for a moment, her bare freckled arms dropped from the churn, then a wide happy gap-toothed grin spread over her big face. "God's beard!" she cried, " 'tis Kath - m'lady Swyhford!" She rushed across the Hall and folding Katherine in her arms kissed her heartily on the mouth. "Sit down, sweeting, sit down - I'm that joyed to see ye! Be'eht we, Mother? When I dropped the porridge ladle this morning I knew we'd have a lucky caller, but I never dreamed of you, love!" She pulled Katherine down beside her on a settle and beamed at her with so much affection that Katherine felt a pricking of gladness behind her lids.

Dame Emma bustled over with a pewter platter of honey cakes and sugared ginger. "Welcome, welcome, eat hearty o' these, lady while I mull some ale for us. We'll have crabs too," added Dame Emma comfortably, "a bobbin' o' their little pink cheeks in the ale."

Katherine laughed, basking in the warm kindly atmosphere and the goodwife's conviction that food was life's most important matter. She turned to Hawise with girlish eagerness and cried, 'Tell all! How has it been with you, this long time?"

"Ay, but first of you," said the older girl, sobering to glance at Katherine's black gown. " 'Tis worn for the Duchess - nothing else, I pray?"

"Nay. We're all well at Kettlethorpe. I've two babies, Hawise!"

"And I one" - Hawise let out a snort of laughter and ran to the court calling. "Jackie, Jackie - come hither, imp - for ever playing wi' the old sow, he is - 'tis that he's but a piglet himself-" She hauled her offspring into the Hall and cuffed him gently on the ear, then wiped him off before presenting him proudly to Katherine.

Jackie was two years old and a true Pessoner, being fat, cheerful and sandy-haired. He grabbed a fistful of honey cakes and plumped himself on the rushes to enjoy them while his grandmother bent down to add a sugar bun to his hoard.

"Ay, he's Jack Maudelyn's right enough," said Hawise, seeing that Katherine did not like to ask, "and he was born in wedlock too, though only just. Father held out stubborn long, the dear old goat."

"Is Jack still weaver's prentice?"

"No prentice now, nor yet weaver neither. He went for a soldier to make us a fortune in booty, we hope. He's a fine archer, is Jack, and he joined the free companies under Sir Hugh Calverly. They fight for England now that we're at war again, to be sure."

"To be sure," said Katherine smiling. "So your man is gone, and you've come back home to wait like many another."

"Is't the same with you, lady dear - your knight abroad too?"

"Not now," said Katherine, turning her face away. But feeling that her curtness rebuffed Hawise, she made an effort and while they drank their hot pungent ale and sat close together on the settle, she told a little of what had passed with her since Hawise had waved tearful good-byes beneath the porch of St. Clement Danes on the wedding day.

In truth, there seemed not much to tell, nothing momentous at all except the recent time of plague at Bolingbroke and that Katherine slid over quickly. Yet during tile bare recital of her years at Kettlethorpe, she noted that Hawise looked at her with shrewd sympathy, and when Katherine had done, Hawise said, "Have ye no woman there wi' you save those North Country hinds?" The London-born Hawise spoke as though Lincolnshire folk might be horned and tailed.

"Well, now for a while there's Philippa too, you know," said Katherine laughing.

"In truth." Hawise gave a sceptical twinkling glance but from politeness said no more. She had seen something of Dame Philippa while Master Geoffrey still lived in London with the Chaucers, and Hawise thought that Philippa was not a woman to give over the mastery of any household she was in and wondered how it would be when Katherine went home. Again as she had when they had first met, the girl aroused in Hawise a tender feeling. Having no beauty herself she felt no envy, but only a desire to serve it, and she recognised as had no other person except Geoffrey a bitter loneliness in Katherine that muted her shining fairness as dust films a silver chalice.

She could see that Katherine had had enough of living in splendour at the Savoy, and being intuitive as well as practical, she guessed that there was some embarrassment about getting back to Kettlethorpe. She was turning the matter over in her mind when there came another rap on the door.

" 'Tis doubtless the master o' that herring ship to see Father," she said to Dame Emma as she hastened to open it.

Raulin d'Ypres stood upon the doorstep and asked in his guttural voice, "Does anyone here know uff a Lady Swynford?"

Hawise, noting the Lancaster badge on the young man's black tunic, drew back and looked at Katherine, who stood up in surprise. "I'm Lady Swynford."

The squire bowed. "Please to come vit me to the Savoy. Someone vishes to talk to you, my lady."

"Who does?" said Katherine, in surprise.

The squire glanced at Hawise and Dame Emma and the tumbling children, then back to Katherine's puzzled resistant face. "May I speak vit you alone, my lady?"

Katherine frowned and turned to Hawise, who looked troubled. Hawise reminded herself that she did not know the ways of court folk, but a blind mole could see something out of the way in this. "Shall I call Father to rid you of him?" she whispered in Katherine's ear.

Katherine looked back at the stolid squire. He met her gaze and stared down pointedly at the Red Rose embroidered on his breast. How strange, she thought, what could that mean? Most of the men in the palace below knight's rank wore that badge. "Well, come over here," she said, stepping into the empty dairy-room, and as the squire followed, she added, "What is this coil?"

"His grace vants you to come to him, my lady," said Raulin very low.

She lifted her head, the pupils of her eyes dilated until the greyness turned as black as her gown. "The Duke?" Raulin bowed.

"Why does he send for me in secret?" She pressed her hands tight against her breast to still the jumping of her heart, but she stood very quiet leaning against the milk table.

"Because since the funeral he has seen nobody but me, nor does he vish to, my lady, except now - you."

The colour ebbed slowly back into her face and still her great eyes stared at the squire in question, in disbelief, until he said brusquely, "But lady, hasten. It is already long since I vas sent to find you."

Katherine moved then, she walked back into the Hall and reached up to the perch where Hawise had hung her wet cloak. "I - I must go," she said to the anxious Pessoners. "But I'll see you very soon."

"Not bad news-" cried Hawise, quickly crossing herself.

"Lady, ye look so strange!"

"Not bad news," Katherine took a quick breath, smiled at Dame Emma and kissed Hawise, but it seemed as though she did not really see them. When the door had closed behind Katherine and the squire, Hawise turned frowning to her mother. "She was happy here afore wi' us. What can that gobble-tongued outlander've said to throw her into such a maze? 'Twas like she wandered in a fearing dream and yet feared more to wake."

"Fie, daughter," said Dame Emma, adding cinnamon and nutmeg to the hare she seethed over the fire. "Ye make too much o' naught. Do ye get on wi' the churning."

Hawise obeyed, but as she pounded slowly in the churn, her cheerful face was downcast and she sang a plaintive little song that she had heard on London streets.

Blow, northern wind, fend off from my sweeting.

Blow, northern wind, blow.

Ho! the wind and the rain they blow green pain,

Blow, blow, blow!

CHAPTER XII

Katherine and Raulin rode back to the Savoy in silence until they had passed beneath the great Strand portcullis into the Outer Ward, and dismounted at the stables. Then Raulin said, "This vay, my lady," and led her towards the river-side, nearly to the boat landing. In the west corner of the court, between the barge-house and the massive wing which housed the ducal children's apartments, there was a low wooden building surmounted by a carving of a large flying hawk. This building contained the falcon mew, and one of the falconers stood always on guard to prevent strangers from entering, or any sudden happening which might upset his high-strung and immensely valuable charges.

Raulin nodded to the falconer, skirted the mew and plunged suddenly into a dark passage that lay hidden between it and a stone water-cistern. Here was a small wooden door which he unlocked. "But the privy apartments are in the Inner Ward," protested Katherine nervously as he motioned her up narrow stone steps that were hollowed from the thickness of the wall.

"This leads to them," said Raulin patiently. "His Grace does not vish that people see you. It vould make talk."

Katherine swallowed, and mounted the steps. They ended on the next floor in a narrow passage that ran along the inside wall of consecutive chambers and ended in another wooden door. This door was concealed by a painted cloth-hanging. Raulin pushed it aside and they emerged into the Duchess' garde-robe, a small oblong chamber.

Behind another painted hanging they entered the darkened solar; narrow chinks of light around the edges of the closed shutters showed that the vast bed had been draped with a black pall. They went through another chamber where the Duchess' ladies had used to sit and two more rooms until they turned a corner towards the river into a square tower. Here was the Avalon Chamber.

Raulin knocked on the carved oak door and gave his name. A voice said, "Enter!" Raulin held the door, then shut it after Katherine, and went away.

Katherine walked in quietly, her head lifted high, her cloak clutched around her. The Duke was sitting on a gold-cushioned window-seat gazing over the river towards the rocks and stunted trees of Lambethmoor. He did not move at once, and she stood on the woven silk rug that covered the tiles and waited.

He was clothed in plain black saye, without girdle or mantle, the tight-fitting cote and long hose moulded his lean muscular body and were unrelieved by trimming. He wore no jewels except the sapphire seal-ring that Blanche had given him. His thick tawny hair was cut short below his ears, and he was cleanshaven. This startled her, for it made him seem younger, and when he slowly turned his head towards her, she saw that his chin was square and had a cleft like her own.

"You summoned me, my lord?" she said, for he did not speak but stared at her with a remote brooding look. His skin had lost the sunbronze that it had shown when he came to Kettlethorpe, and it was stretched taut across the sharp Plantagenet cheek-bones, the narrow cheeks and long high-bridged nose. His mouth, wide-curved and passionate, was drawn thin at the corners like his father's, and his heavy eyelids seemed as though they would never wholly lift again to disclose the vivid blue beneath.

She knelt, as was seemly, and taking his hand, kissed it in homage. While she knelt, her cloak loosened and her hood fell back. He touched her curling rain-dampened hair. " 'Tis the colour of carnelians," he said, "the gem that heals anger. Would that it might heal sorrow -" He spoke as though to himself, in a low faltering voice. His hand fell back on to his thigh, and she raised her head, wondering. Through every fibre in her body she had felt that light touch on her hair.

His gaze slid slowly over her face, then rested on the cream and umber tiles which floored the chamber. "I sent for you, Katherine, that I might thank you. Old Simon of Bolingbroke told me what you did for - for her. You shall know my gratitude."

Her cheeks stung with heat. She jumped up from her knees and pulled the cloak around her. "My lord, I told you that I loved her. I want no reward - no payment!"

"Hush! Leave be, Katherine. I know you're not venal. I've thought of you much these last days, thought of how you were with her at the end - while I - on the day she died- - " He broke off and, getting up, walked to the fireplace.

The day she died, he thought, September twelfth, the day when the French had tricked and fooled him, drawn him into battle formation and then sneaked off into the night laughing at the gullible blundering English. A bootless costly mockery had been the whole campaign, and through no fault of his; but he guessed well what they said of his generalship here at home. Blanche would have known how to soften the humiliation.

"Katherine," he said abruptly, "I cannot rid me of my grief. Each day it worsens, and yet I must rid me of it and take up my heavy duties."

She looked at him mutely. She could find no words of comfort, she did not know what he wanted of her; but she felt a closeness between them that had never been before.

"Put off your cloak and sit down," he said, smiling faintly. "You stand there like a hart that scents the hunter. I think you need not fear me."

She flushed. "I know, my lord." She walked across the room and hung her cloak on a silver perch that projected from the inner wall. It was a room of beauty and luxury such as she had never imagined. Two of the plaster walls were powdered with a pattern of gold stars and tiny flowerets like forget-me-nots. The hooded fireplace was of green marble deeply carved into medallions and foliage. The elaborate gilded furniture had been made by master craftsmen in Italy, the canopied bed was hung with ruby velvet embroidered with seed pearls, and ruby glowed again with amber and azure in the blazons of the leaded window-panes. On the east wall hung the great Avalon tapestry in dark and mysterious greens. Deep in the woven forest, the Blessed Isle of Avalon rose palely, shining through a mist, and the figures of King Arthur and his queen lay bathed in a moony light. Tall and fateful in his druid's robes the wizard Merlin stood below the royal dead and pointed to far-distant hills on which there was a fairy castle floating.

"Ay-that tapestry pleases me much," John said, following her gaze. "Merlin's castle puts me in mind of one I saw in Spain, after our victory at Najera." His sombre look lightened for an instant. Always at the thought of Castile he heard the shouts of triumph and rejoicing from his men and saw the face of the messenger who had brought him news of his son's birth to augment the thrill of victory.

"You were happy in Castile?" Katherine ventured. "You and the Prince of Wales righted the great wrong done the Castilian king."

"But, God's wounds, it didn't last!" he cried with sudden anger. "Don't you know what happened at Montiel last March? King Pedro foully murdered by his brother the bastard, who sits again upon the throne he had no right to!"

"Who has right then, since the poor king is dead?" she asked after a minute, thinking that it might be anger was better for him than brooding grief and that this coil about far-off kings could not touch him too nearly.

"The heiress is the king's daughter, the Infanta Costanza," he answered more quietly." 'Tis she who is the true Queen of Castile." He thought of the times he had seen the exiled princesses at Bordeaux. Costanza was a skinny black-haired wench who must be about fifteen now: two years ago he had been amused at the haughtiness of her bearing and the vehemence of her Spanish as she had thanked him for the aid given to her father. "Pedro was often a cruel and crooked man," John said. "His promises were writ on water, but what matters that, for he was also the true-born anointed king - King of Castile."

He spoke the last three words with a solemnity that puzzled Katherine, as though they were a charm or incantation, and yet she thought he scarcely realised this himself or that for a moment he had forgotten his grief. He sighed and turned from the tapestry. "Merlin had many prophecies about my house," he said listlessly. "They've come down by word of mouth throughout the centuries - Blanche cared naught for such things - she cared only for the things that came from Holy Writ." He flung himself down in a chair by the fire and leaned his forehead on his hand.

"My lord," said Katherine softly, "do you remember how she looked on the day of the Great Tournament at Windsor three years ago - so golden fair and laughing when you rode up to the loge? For sure, she will look thus in heaven while she waits for you."

He raised his head and said, "Ah, Katherine, you know how to comfort! So few know that I long to talk of her that's gone. Instead they start and look away and speak of foolish things to distract me - yet here is one other that understands."

He got up and went to the table, which was littered with vellum books and official missives which he had not glanced at. He picked up a folded parchment on which the seal and cords had been broken and opened the letter. "Listen," he said, and read very slowly:

"I have of sorrow so great wound

That joy get I never none,

Now that I see my lady bright,

That I have loved with all my might,

Is from me dead, and is agone.

"Alas, Death, what aileth thee

That thou should'st not have taken me,

When thou took my lady sweet,

That was so fair, so fresh, so free.

So good, that men may well say

Of all goodness she had no meet.

"Right on this same, as I have said

Was wholly all my love laid

For certes she was, that sweet wife,

My suffisaunce, my lust, my life,

Mine hap, mine health and all my bless,

My world's welfare and my goddess,

And I wholly hers, and everydel."

He sighed and put the parchment on his lap. "The maker has said it for me and with true English words. The maker is your brother-in-law, Katherine."

"Geoffrey!" she cried.

"Ay, I too was amazed for I had thought him a shrewd nimble little man, apt on King's service but not of temper or feeling to write like this."

"Geoffrey is deep of feeling, I believe," she said, and thought that the verses had been written perhaps to soothe his own sorrow as well as the Duke's, for she remembered the look in his eyes when he beheld the Lady Blanche. "Is he back then?" she asked wondering that she had not seen him.

"Nay, at Calais on a mission. He says that he is writing more of this poem and with my permission will call it 'The Book of the Duchess,' which I've most readily granted. Katherine, you see new reason why I'm grateful to you and your kin."

"It is joy to serve you, my lord." She lifted her face and smiled at him. For John it was as though a shutter had been flung open, and the noon light had rushed in. He had never truly seen her beauty before nor had he ever seen a smile like that, compounded of a luminous tenderness in the grey eyes, and yet in the lift of her red lips, the short perfect teeth and the dimple near her voluptuous mouth there was a hint of seduction. His nostrils flared on a sharp breath and his thoughts darted hither and yon in confusion. Why had he summoned her today, who had he forgot that she had angered him back at Windsor, forgot that her eyes had once reminded him of anguish and betrayal? Why had he let her share in his grief now and kept her with him in this warm intimacy when a purse of gold would have amply repaid? Why must she sit there now in her clinging black gown that showed the outline of each round breast and the curve of the long supple waist? His eye fell on the pouch she carried at her girdle. It was of painted leather blazoned with the Swynford arms. He stared at the three little yellow boars' heads and said angrily, "Have you no blazon of your own, Katherine?"

Her tender smile faded. She was puzzled by the sudden harshness of his tone though well aware the question covered something else. "My father had no blazon," she said slowly. "He was King-of-Arms for Guienne, you know - he was knighted only just before his death."

He heard the quiver in her voice, and his anger vanished under the impulse to protect that she alone of all women had ever roused in him. He had indeed forgotten her low birth and the consciousness of the great gulf between them brought a subtle relief.

"But you may rightfully bear arms," he said in a light tone. "Come, what shall they be?" He motioned her over to the table where he sat down and picked up a quill pen and smoothed out a blank parchment. "You are too fair and rare a woman to be lost beneath those Swynford boars' heads," he added with a certain grimness. "You name was Roet, was it not?" She nodded. "Well, that means a wheel," and he drew one on the parchment. They both stared down at it. Then John said, "But stay - it must be a Catherine wheel, of course, since it is yours!" And he added small jagged breaks to the wheel, as it always was in St. Catherine's symbol.

Katherine watched as he started afresh and drew the shield, then placed three Catherine wheels inside it, for three, he thought, made better balance and he had much feeling for all things in art. He drew with bold vigorous strokes and took pleasure in this small creation, which made a neater play on her name than many another of the nobles' canting arms - Lucy with his luce's heads, or that fool of an Arundel with his hopping hirondelles, or martlets. For like this most blazons had been chosen, and in making an individual badge for Katherine he felt that he bestowed on her a special gift and one far more lasting than the money he intended to give her.

"The field shall be gules," he said, touching the shield lightly with his pen, "the wheels or, for those colours suit you. Lancaster Herald shall enter this in the Roll of Arms tomorrow."

"Thank you, my lord," she cried, truly delighted, as much for the interest that he had shown as for her own promotion to armiger, and as she leaned over to look more closely at the little shield, the warm flowery scent of her body assailed him. He glanced sideways, at her unconscious face so near his that he could see the separate black lashes on her lowered lids and the down on her cheeks. She moved a little, and he felt her soft fragrant breath.

He shoved the parchment, quill and sand pell-mell across the table and jumped to his feet. She turned in fear, thinking him angry again; and as she looked up into his eyes, her hands grew cold with sweat and her legs began to tremble.

"Jesu -" he whispered. "Jesu -" He pulled her slowly towards him and she came as one who walks through water, each step impeded, until she leaned against him and yielded him her mouth with a low sobbing moan.

They stood thus pressed together in a mindless wine-dark rapture while the last reflected light faded from the Thames outside and vesper bells rang faintly down the river. The fire died down. A log cracked in two, and flames leaped up again. She felt him lift her in his arms and her heart streamed into his. She had no strength to pit against his will and her own need, yet as he laid her on the ruby velvet bed her hand turned against his chest and she felt the sharp pressure of her betrothal ring.

She twisted from him wildly and flung herself off the bed, "My dearest lord, I cannot!" She sank to her knees by the bedpost and buried her face in her arms. He lay quiet as she had left him, and watched her, while his breathing slowed in time, and he said very low, "I want you, Katrine, and I believe you love me." He spoke her name in the soft French way - as she had not heard it since her childhood and so piercing sweet it sounded to her that the meaning of his other words came slowly.

Then she raised her head and cried with bitterness, "Ay - I love you - though I knew it not till now. I think I've loved you since that time in Windsor pleasaunce you beat off Hugh, who would have raped me, and it's for that, that I am married."

The fire hissed in the silent room, and against the wall below water lapped from the wake of a passing boat. John stirred and put his hand on her arm. "I'll not force you, Katrine - you shall come to me of yourself."

"I cannot," she repeated, though she dared not look at him. "Dear God, you know I cannot. Ay, I know adultery is so light a thing at court, but I'm of simple stock and to me 'tis sin so vile that I would hate myself as much as God would."

"And hate me?" He spoke low and gentle.

"Sainte Marie, I could never hate you - my dear lord, don't torture me with these questions, ah let me go" - for his hand had tightened on her arm and he bent his face close to hers. She gathered all her strength and cried, "Have you forgot why we are both in black!"

He drew back sharply and got up off the bed. He went to the fire and twisting a rush lit the tapers on the table and in the silver wall scones. He came back to her and lifted her roughly to her feet. "I scarce know what to think," he said, "except that I must forget you, it seems." His hands dropped from her shoulders. His blue eyes had gone hard between the narrowed lids, and he spoke with chill precision. "You have yourself reminded me that there are ladies of the court will help me to forget all manner of grief, and who will not think it shame to be desired by the Duke of Lancaster."

A spear-thrust of pain streaked through her breast, but she answered as steadily as he, "I've no doubt of that, Your Grace. As for me I must return to Kettlethorpe at once."

"And if I refuse permission - what would you say?"

"That such a thing would ill befit a man reputed one of the most chivalrous knights in Christendom."

They stared at each other in a struggle that racked them both, and she clung to the sudden enmity between them as a shield.

He turned first and walking from her to the window stood looking out at the night-darkened Thames. "Very well, Katherine, I shall arrange your escort back to Lincolnshire. You'll receive word at the Beaufort Tower. You still shall have no cause to reproach me for ingratitude."

She said nothing. Now that he no longer looked at her, her face grew anguished, she gazed at the tall black figure by the window, at the haughty set of his shoulders, the implacability she felt in his averted head. She ran to the perch and seized her cloak and was out of the door and had shut it behind her before he understood. He turned crying, "Katrine!" to the shut door. Then, staring at it, he sank down on the window-seat as she had found him. His eyes, still grim, travelled from the door to the hollow on the ruby velvet coverlet where they had lain together so briefly and where he had been shaken by a passion such as he had never known. "There's a fire been lit that's not so easy to put out," he said aloud. He got up and going to the table picked up Chaucer's poem. He gazed at it, and made a strange hoarse sound. He put the poem carefully to one side. After a moment he began to rip the seals and tear the cords on the neglected official missives, his ringers moving with sharp violent jerks.

Katherine fled through the rooms behind the Avalon Chamber as she had come, passing Raulin as he sat in a recess waiting for summons. He cried "M'lady!" but she did not hear him and he was left to his own startled thoughts.

Through the Duchess's dressing-room and down the stairs and out behind the falcon mew, Katherine ran, until in the Outer Ward she forced herself to slower steps and pulled her hood far down over her face. She went to the stables and ordered Doucette saddled. She flung herself on the mare and set forth through the great gate and down the Strand to London. The Savoy was hateful to her, nothing would induce her to return to the Beaufort Tower, and from instinct she fled back to the only warm unstressful affection she had ever known.

Hawise herself opened the door to Katherine's knock and her glad cry of welcome faltered as she got a good look at the girl's face.

"May I stay here tonight?" whispered Katherine, clutching Hawise. "Just tonight. I must leave for home at dawn."

"For sure, love, in my bed, and longer than that. Here, Mother, gi' me the wine" - for Katherine had begun to shiver uncontrollably. Hawise flung her strong young arm around Katherine's waist and held a cup to the girl's lips.

The Pessoners crowded around, kindly, murmuring. Master Guy rocking on his heels by the fireplace boomed out, "Hast seen some goblin, my little lady, that has 'frighted you? You're safe enough here, for the smell o' good fresh herrings affrights goblins!" and he chuckled.

"Hush, clattermouth," snapped his wife, and beneath her breath she said, "God's nails, mayhap 'tis some breeding cramp, poor little lass," for she had seen that dazed glassy-white look on the face of many a woman that was to miscarry of a child.

"Come to bed, sweeting," said Hawise with firm authority. "You look fit to drop and soaked through too." She marshalled Katherine up the loft stairs to the sleeping-room over the fish-shop and sharply quieted two of the younger children who poked their heads up from bed. She undressed Katherine and wrapped her in a blanket and put her in her own bed, where little Jackie slept on the far side.

Katherine sighed, and her shivering stopped. "Thank you," she whispered. Hawise sat on the bed and held the candle near.

"Can you tell me, dear?" she said, her shrewd eyes scanning the upturned face, the bruised trembling lips. " 'Tis a man?" she said. "Ay, I see it is. And he has used ye ill?" she added fiercely.

"Nay -" Katherine turned her face into the pillow. "I don't know. Blessed Virgin, give me strength - I love him - I must get home - to my babies, to Hugh - I cannot stay so near - -"

"Whist, poppet!" Hawise stroked the girl's arm. "You shall get home. Has't been arranged?"

"Nay, I'll go alone - I want no arrangements. I want nothing from him. I'll sleep in abbey hostels - they'll give me food - I must go as soon as it's light."

"And so you shall, but not alone, for I'll come wi' ye."

Katherine, distracted, beset by fear and desperate yearning, did not understand at first, then she drew herself back and looked into Hawise's face. "God's love, and would you come with me, in truth?"

"Methinks ye've need of a good serving-maid, m'lady," said Hawise twinkling.

"But I've no money, until I get to Kettlethorpe!"

"So I've guessed. I've silver enow put by to get us there, ye can pay me later, so ye needna look high-nosed about it."

"May Christ bless you!" Katherine whispered.

The Pessoners were all up to see the girls start out. After the first protests against their daughter leaving them, the good-hearted couple had given in, and last night Master Guy had hired a horse from the livery stable down the street and routed out one Jankin, his best prentice, telling him to make ready to escort my Lady Swynford and Hawise at least until they might catch up with some safe company that was also Lincoln-bound. Dame Emma packed a hamper full of cheese; new-baked loaves and a leg of mutton, then crammed the corners with saffron cakes before she helped Hawise make up a bundle of her own belongings. "And what o' Lady Swynford's gear?" asked the good dame, knowing that Katherine had fled to them with nothing but her cloak.

" 'Tis left at the Savoy; she said 'no matter,' there wasn't much, and she's in such a dither to be off, she'll not send for it."

So the Pessoners all stood and waved cheerily on the doorstep. Little Jackie waved to his mother as gaily as any, for Dame Emma had promised him that he should have a gingerbread man for his breakfast.

Hawise rode pillion with Jankin on the hired horse, and Katherine preceded them on Doucette, who had been well curried and fed at the livery stable. Jankin was a great gangling lad of fifteen, strong enough to hoist a hundredweight of cod on to the scales and canny enough to haggle with fishermen at the dock, and he was delighted with this expedition. He and Hawise chattered as they rode along Bridge Street to Bishops-gate, but Katherine rode in silence. Now that she was safely off, each of Doucette's hoofbeats was like a hammer on her heart. If I should never see him again, she thought, Blessed Mother, how could I live, and yet it was the fear of seeing him again which had driven her to this desperate haste. The fear that if he were there so near her she might have crept back to the Avalon Chamber, beseeching, begging - I was wrong, my darling, my dearest lord, nothing matters to me but you, forgive me, take me - -

There in the London street she winced and gritted her teeth, clenching her hands on the pommel. During the night when she had slept a little, she had thought herself in the Avalon Chamber lying in his arms with his mouth on hers, she had heard again each dark shaken tone of his voice and in her dream he told her that he loved her - each time as she wakened she saw only the coldness of his eyes before he turned from her at the end and remembered that from him there had been no talk of love, but only desire. Then shame would flood her that she had dared to dream that he spoke of love while the Lady Blanche stood there between them, and bitter shame that she had cried out to him her own love. Yet it is true, God help me, Katherine thought, and such an anguish came to her that she jerked on Doucette's reins and stopped the mare in the middle of the road while she gazed back past London spires to where the Savoy lay.

"What is't, m'lady?" asked Hawise anxiously as she and Jankin jogged up. Now that she had become Katherine's servant she thought it seemly to use respectful address before others.

Katherine started. "Nothing," she said, trying to smile. "Can you go faster? We should be past Waltham at the nooning."

For to stop again in Waltham she could not bear. The twice she had covered this North road before she had thought herself unhappy, but it had been nothing like this.

It grew colder, the sun gleamed once or twice, then dwindled. The horses' hooves rang out on the freezing road. Their fellow travellers - friars, pedlars, merchants, journeymen and beggars - all huddled themselves deep into whatever covering they wore and omitted greetings to each other.

When they were three miles short of Ware, light snowflakes drifted down and melted on their cloaks. They were hungry and the hired horse stumbled from weariness. They stopped at an isolated alestake that thrust its long bush across the highway. They hitched the horses under a lean-to shed, and Jankin stayed to see that a tattered little knave watered and fed them while the two women entered the tavern with the hamper.

"God's nails!" muttered Hawise, frowning; "have they no brooms in Hertfordshire!" The low smoky room was littered with mouldering straw which had matted on the trampled earth with strewn bones, eggshells, apple peel and chicken droppings from the hens that clucked under the one greasy table. Behind a trestle piled with kegs and flagons the alewife stood, her arms akimbo, staring malevolently. Two men sprawled at the table. They were black-bearded except where a running sore had bared the jaw of the younger one. They were clothed in sheepskin and torn leather breeches. Their feet were wrapped in filthy rags. Their heavy oak staves leaned against the wall. They had a long knife which they silently passed back and forth to cut chunks from a grey-furred loaf of dark bread they had brought. They glanced from Hawise to Katherine, then at each other. One picked a louse off his knee and cracked it between his fingernails.

"You will share our food?" said Katherine faintly. "For sure I can eat none," she whispered to Hawise. The stink of the alehouse sickened her, and she loathed these ugly evil people.

"Why not?" said he of the running sore, grabbing at the hunk of mutton Hawise held out, "for are we not all created equal in the sight o' God? Did He ordain that you s'ld eat while we go empty?"

"What manner o' babble is that?" said Hawise briskly. "If ye are beggars ye can feed at th' nearest abbey."

"Phuaw!" the man spat through his yellow teeth. "Mouldy bread and a slice o' cheese the rats won't touch, whilst the monks sit on their fat arses swilling capon."

"Come, we must go," said Katherine rising. "Leave them the rest of the food." The two men watched intently while Hawise paid the alewife for the sour brew that they had hardly touched. The men stood watching while the trio mounted. Their eyes rested on Doucette and the brass-studded leather saddle, the carved bone stirrups.

Katherine flicked the mare, they started north again at as fast a trot as the hired horse could manage. "A pack of ribauds," said Hawise. "They'd thievery in their eyes."

"Suppose they come after us, and waylay!" cried Jankin eagerly. He burned for battle, and now that the unease of the alehouse was over, he felt disappointment.

"How would they, numskull - they've no horses!"

"A short cut," answered Jankin, considering. "They'd know of one through the fields; they might hide in yonder green wood and then jump out-"

"By the Mass, Jankin, you've too much fancy!" Hawise rapped him angrily on the skull with her knuckles. "D'you wish to frighten our lady?" But she frowned.

"I believe the foul creatures are runaway serfs, outlaws of some kind," said Katherine shuddering. She drew Doucette close to the others.

They entered the wood where trees grew close to the roadside. The snow, which had stopped, began to fall again in lazy, aimless flakes.

"There's something moving in th' thicket there," cried Jankin, pointing unsteadily. With fast-beating hearts they looked, then Hawise said, "Naught but a stray hound!" and kicked their horse again. They were near out of the wood when they heard noises behind them. The pound of galloping hooves. Turning, they saw four helmeted men bearing down on them full-tilt, shouting and waving their arms.

"What now!" cried Hawise. "Do they mean to run us down?" Jankin yanked their horse off the road, and Katherine swerved Doucette so hard that the little mare pranced angrily. But the men pulled up in a flurry of flying clods and jingling harness. A cold stillness descended on Katherine; on each of them she saw the Lancaster badge.

"Ho! men-at-arms, what would you of us?" cried Jankin in a high dauntless voice, while Hawise cried, "Saint Mary! That first one is th' outlandish squire came for my lady yesterday!" and new fear smote her. Katherine sat her horse stiff and straight as though she'd been carved from the oak behind her, and whatever these new-comers had in mind, 'twas plain Jankin could avail nothing against spears and swords and armoured men.

"My Lady Swynford!" cried Raulin, riding directly up to Katherine and wiping his sweating face on a corner of his surcote. "A fine race you haff run us, by my fader's soul, ve haff pounded the road since Tierce!" He spoke with annoyance. Tracking down this extraordinary young woman to Billingsgate yesterday had been simple compared to the difficulties today when he had found she was not at the Beaufort Tower.

"What is it you want?" Katherine, angry at herself for the joy she had felt when she saw the badges, spoke with extreme coldness.

"His Grace promised you escort, I belief - yet you did not vait. He sends letters too."

"Letters for me?" said Katherine faintly.

"Not for you, lady. For your husband, Sir Hugh, and for officers at Lincoln Castle."

Hawise looked sharply at the squire, then at Katherine, thinking: His Grace? The Duke of Lancaster? What is this? when suddenly she guessed the truth and was so startled she nearly fell off the horse.

"These men," said Raulin, indicating the sergeant and two soldiers behind him, "are your escort to Lincoln."

"By Saint Christopher, I'm glad to hear that!" exclaimed Hawise. She had begun to think Jankin far too slender a defence against the hazards of the road. She winked companion-ably at the sergeant, who winked back, grinning.

"Ay, we're glad of escort," said Katherine, but her irresolute heart was heavy again. He had kept his promise, nothing more. As it should be, of course.

Raulin dispatched the rest of his business quickly for he was weary of running about the country after my Lady Swynford.

He repeated the instructions to the sergeant, saw that he put the ducal letters for Lincoln safely inside his hauberk, and then agreed to take the deeply disappointed Jankin back to London with him. Raulin consigned Hugh's letter to Katherine's keeping and said, "There is vun more thing. His Grace send you this." He held out stolidly a triangle of parchment, smaller than the palm of his hand. Katherine took it and turned it over. It was the shield the Duke had drawn for her, her own blazon; the three Catherine wheels had now been painted gold against the field of scarlet.

Oh, what does it mean? she thought. Was it a special message to remind her of that contented moment when they had leaned together on the table and he had drawn this for her? Did it mean forgiveness? Or was it only that he wished to be rid of all thought of her?

She could not know, but after they had said farewell to Raulin and Jankin, and the two women rode with the soldiers on to Ware, she found opportunity to secretly kiss the shield and slipped it in the bosom of her gown.

It was on a fine sunny morning that they rode through the suburban village Wigford, then across the Witham on the High bridge and through the city walls under the great arch of Stonebow and so into Lincoln town.

"God's teeth, could they find no steeper hill to build on?" laughed Hawise, gazing up what seemed to be a perpendicular climb to the castle and the minster above. "Folk here must be goats!" All through the journey her town-bred scorn of the provinces had been leavened by a bright-eyed interest in new sights. "Bustling little place," she added approvingly. It was market day. The narrow streets were lined with booths, and thronged with chaffering goodwives, most of them dressed in the scarlet and green cloth for which Lincoln weavers were famous.

"No bustle like there used to be afore they took the staple away," said the sergeant, who had been to Lincoln before. "Couple years back there'd be a reg'lar Tower o' Babel here wi' heathen sailors from the German ocean an' traders from Flanders an' Florence all a jib-jabbering away like a hassel o' magpies. Tis quiet now."

"A deal better than those dreary fens, forsooth. Hark! There's music!" cried Hawise cocking her head. They had climbed up through the Poultry with its squawking tethered produce, past the skin market at Danesgate, and here in an open court the tanners' guild was rehearsing for its procession on St. Clement's Day. Fiddles, pipes and tabors had the tanners, and they scraped and whistled and drummed while one of their number, dressed in violet Papal robes to represent their patron saint, leaped up and down in rhythm and juggled with a large tin anchor which stood for the instrument of St. Clement's martyrdom.

At a fresh spurt from the fiddlers and a loud tattoo on the tabors, the juggler threw his anchor high and missed it as it fell. It rebounded on the paved courtyard and bounced into the fish market just ahead, clattering down beside a woman at a stall.

Doucette shied and, while Katherine quieted the mare, she heard a familiar voice raised in sharp protest. "Have care, you clumsy jackanapes! You nearly broke my toe!"

The juggler sheepishly retrieved his anchor, while Katherine leaned over the mare's head and called "Philippa!" and then seeing a tiny figure clutching at the woman's skirts, Katherine jumped off the horse. She scooped Blanchette up in her arms, and rained kisses on the little face that screwed up in protest.

The child started to cry, but as Katherine crooned love words to her, and laughed and held her close, the little pink lips stopped quivering. Blanchette put her arms around her mother's neck.

Philippa had been standing by the fish stall pinching a large glassy-eyed mackerel, while a Kettlethorpe lad teetered behind her with a wicker basket already filled with honeycombs, leeks, stone jars and leather shoes. Philippa flopped the mackerel into the basket, walked up to Katherine and said calmly, "By Sainte Marie, enfin te voila! I've been wondering when you'd get back. Don't start spoiling that child again, the instant you get here."

Katherine set Blanchette down and embraced her sister, seeing that the weeks she had been gone and lived through a lifetime of terror, death, anguish and despairing love, had been placid fast-flying routine for those at home. "And little Tom, Philippa," she said urgently, "is he all right?"

"Of course he's all right. Both babes grown fat and obedient, I've seen to that. Are all these people with you, Katherine?"

She pointed at the three soldiers and recognised Hawise with astonishment. "Why, it's the Pessoner lass!"

Katherine explained briefly that Hawise had come to be her servant for a while and that the Duke of Lancaster had sent escort, at which Philippa nodded with satisfaction, and turned to accompany Katherine and the others up to the castle. Katherine set her delighted little girl upon Doucette, and holding her in the saddle walked beside the mare.

"Hugh is in town today too," Philippa said, puffing hard, for the climb was steep and she had gained much weight now in her sixth month of pregnancy.

"How is Hugh?" asked Katherine quickly.

"Better in health, though grumpy and worried to death over the manor dues. He couldn't pay them at Michaelmas. He can't pay 'em yet. Twice he's been to Canon Bellers in the close to beg for time on Kettlethorpe, and now to the Duke's receiver in the castle about the Coleby rents." Philippa glanced at the men and Hawise, then lowered her voice. "Did you get something substantial from the Duke or Duchess - God rest her soul?"

Katherine shook her head and such a shut, chill expression of warning hardened her beautiful face that Philippa's disgusted expostulation died unspoken. Instead she gave a weary sigh and said after a moment, "Then I don't know what's to be done. Hugh's borrowed all he can from that Lombard in Danesgate. The Duke's receiver, here, John de Stafford, is a mean hard-bitten man who threatens seizure of your lands and chattels." She did not add that she herself had been helping all she could and that the money expended on these market-day purchases had come from her own pension, but Katherine heard the sigh and put her arm around her sister's shoulders. "I'm sorry, rn'amie,", she said sadly. "The sergeant there has some official letter to deliver to this Stafford. Perhaps I should go too and beg him for time."

"It might help," agreed Philippa, sighing again. "I believe he doesn't like Hugh. Bite your lips to make them red, and here" - she patted a coppery tendril of Katherine's blown hair into place.

They had reached the East Gate of the castle walls, and the gate-ward did not even look up as their party streamed through. The castle bailey contained a dozen buildings including the shire house arid the jail, the residence of the constable and the Duchy of Lancaster's offices; and there was a constant coming and going of people on business.

They inquired of a hurrying clerk and walked the horses over to a low building that stood between the ancient Lucy keep and the shire house. The Lancaster coat of arms was nailed above the door, and lolling on a bench beside two tethered horses sat Ellis de Thoresby, Hugh's squire. He greeted Katherine with some warmth, having conceived admiration for her courage in the time of plague at Bolingbroke. Katherine, though she concealed it, was startled at his unkemptness. His shock of greasy hair hung tangled to his shoulders beneath a moth-eaten felt cap. His rusty tunic was threadbare at the elbows and his once yellow hose were profusely patched. Katherine, used now to the sleek elegance of the Lancastrian retinue, was shocked into awareness of their own shabbiness.

Sir Hugh was inside, Ellis told them, had been there for some time, pleading his case with the Lancastrian receiver for Lincolnshire.

"Well, I'm going in too," said Katherine resolutely. The sergeant followed her, holding his letters stiffly in front of him.

One was for Oliver de Barton, the castle's constable, and had something to do with quarters for the sergeant and his men and an exchange of guards, but the content of the other letter to the receiver he did not know.

They walked through a roomful of scribbling clerks who stared at Katherine and made loud smacking noises behind their hands, and across to a door guarded by a page. While the page opened the door to announce them, Katherine heard an angry shouting voice within. "I'll not pay the Coleby rent because I haven't got it yet, and be damned to you! You know bloody well I've not been able to collect from the villeins since the crop failures."

"I know very well, Sir Hugh," interrupted a dry rasping voice, "that your Coleby manor is grossly mismanaged, but 'tis no concern of mine. Mine is to procure your feudal dues to the Duchy of Lancaster, which I shall do - we have several methods -" He turned irritably in his chair. "Well, what is it, what is it?" he said to the page and peered at Katherine and the sergeant in the doorway.

"Hugh," she said, running to him and putting her hand on his arm. She saw startled gladness soften his angry eyes. He made as though to kiss her, then drew back and said awkwardly, "How come you here, Katherine?"

"And who are you that comes here?" Stafford had a small toad-face, with low sloping forehead and unwinking eyes, which regarded Katherine disagreeably.

She said with her most charming smile, "I'm Lady Swynford, sir. I - I cannot think that you'll be too hard on us, for sure a little more time and Sir Hugh will find - -"

"No more time at all," said Stafford, banging his small ink-grimed hand on the table. "Nor does it help your case, Sir Hugh, to drag in a wheedling woman. Tomorrow noon I'll have the rents, that's final. I've been too slack already in my duty to His Grace of Lancaster."

At this the sergeant, who had been listening open-mouthed, cast a look of embarrassed sympathy at the flushed and worried Katherine, and by way of creating a diversion said, "Here, sir, here's a letter to you from His Grace, sent from the Savoy, sir. I've just come from there as escort to my Lady Swynford, sir."

Stafford took the parchment and examined the seal. Many such documents came to him from the chancery and he started to put it aside and dismiss the Swynfords, when he noticed the small privy seal next the large one and frowned. This he had seen but twice before, and it meant that the letter was sent directly from the Duke and sealed with his own signet ring. At the same time, he captured the echo of the sergeant's words,

"escort to my Lady Swynford - from the Savoy - -" He glanced up quickly at the tall girl in the black hood, at the truculent knight whom he thoroughly disliked. A poor tenant, and a poor knight also, since it was well known the Duke had not called him back into service.

Stafford broke the seals and cords on the parchment, read it slowly while a deep mauve tint travelled up his flabby cheeks. He cleared his throat and read it again before saying to Katherine, "Do you know the purport of this order?" She shook her head and her heart beat fast. It was plain that Stafford did not believe her, but he turned to Hugh and said in the tone of one gritting teeth over a hateful duty. "My Lord Duke sees fit to rescue you from your embarrassment, it seems."

He glanced down at the parchment and read the official French aloud in a clipped tight accent. "We, John, Son of the King, Duke of Lancaster, etc., make known that from our especial grace and for the good and loving service which Lady Katherine Swynford, wife of Sir Hugh Swynford, has rendered to our late dearly beloved Duchess, whom God assoil, we do give and grant to the said Lady Swynford until further notice, all issues and profits from our towns of Waddington and Wellingore in the County of Lincoln to be paid at once upon receipt of this letter and thereafter in equal portions at Michaelmas and Easter. In witness, etc., given, etc., at the Savoy this twenty-seventh year of King Edward's reign."

Stafford looked up. The woman seemed astounded, and also as though she were going to weep. The knight looked puzzled and uneasy, obviously straining to understand the unfamiliar French legal words. "What does it mean?" he muttered, biting his lips.

"It means," said Stafford shrugging, "that your wife's revenues from the Duke's towns which he has granted her will pay your rents at Coleby and Kettlethorpe, I should judge, with plenty to spare. That's what it means."

"Huzzah!" cried the sergeant from near the door and met Stafford's glare imperturbably.

Hugh glanced at Katherine and then at the paved floor. "It is most generous of the Duke," he said.

"There's a postscript," said Stafford, tapping the parchment with an irritable finger, "which provides that whenever Sir Hugh Swynford shall be absent from home on knight's service one of the Duke's own stewards shall be appointed to ride to Coleby and Kettlethorpe to render assistance and manor supervision to Lady Swynford, the costs to be met by this office."

Ah, I have been well repaid - thought Katherine, with a bitter pang. The great powerful hand had been bountifully and negligently extended to rescue them. We're only little people, she thought, like the serfs, and what are we but serfs too? She glanced at the grim toad of a receiver. Had chivalry and justice not outweighed the anger that the Duke had felt for her when they parted - there would have been distraint, and punishment. Swynfords would have lost their horses, stock, all chattels - possibly imprisonment too, and the Duke would never have heard of it. But now they were safe.

"Tomorrow at noon," said Stafford, rising, "you will receive the moneys due you from this grant and will then pay your Coleby rent with interest. I give you good day, sir and lady."

The Swynfords walked out through the roomful of clerks and scarcely heeded when the sergeant congratulated them and took his leave to report to the constable. There was no one in the stone passage outside and before going into the court where Philippa and the others waited, Hugh suddenly stopped and looked at Katherine. His hand clenched on his sword hilt, his square face whitened. "For what of your services, my lady, has His Grace of Lancaster seen fit to bestow such reward?" he said, his voice croaking like a rook's.

Her grey eyes met his steadily and with pity, for now she knew what unanswered love was - and jealousy. "For none but what the grant said, Hugh, that I served the Duchess Blanche." She pulled her beads out from her purse and kissed the crucifix. "I swear it by the sweet body of Jesus and by my father's and mother's souls."

His gaze fell first and he sighed. "I cannot doubt you." He leaned towards her. She showed none of her inward shiver as he kissed her hungrily on the lips, but she felt sick fear. Was he then cured of the impotence that had afflicted him? Holy Blessed Mother, she thought, I could not endure it. But she knew she must endure it, if it were so. To escape from his rough grasp she made a business of putting her rosary back in her purse and saw the Duke's letter. "Here," she said quickly, "this is for you, from the Duke. I had forgot in all that trouble in there. Shall I read it to you?"

He nodded, flushing. She broke the seal and scanned the letter. "It's an official order for you to report for knight's duty in Aquitaine. You're to join the company under Sir Robert Knolles, until the - until the Duke arrives himself - ah, that gladdens you!" she cried, for his face had brightened as she had not seen it in years.

"Ay, for I've been ill content to sit at home while others fight, you know that, and I've worried much that the Duke did not want me; it seemed a slight, a punishment, for what I know not. Yet I've but a slow mind and can't follow his."

Nor can I, thought Katherine. I don't know what he really feels towards me or Hugh.

" 'Tis not that I wish to leave you, my Katherine, but see he has relieved my mind by providing proper stewardship for you - not, thank God, one quartered at Kettlethorpe like that foul Nirac was after you bore Blanchette. Ay, 'tis of his godchild that he thinks no doubt in these grants to you, his godchild named for his poor lady. 'Tis of that he thinks."

"For sure it is, Hugh," she said gently. I shall never dwell on the Avalon Chamber again, she thought - it's finished. All debts are paid, all has been decently resolved. It shall be as though it never happened.

"Come, my husband," she said smiling. "We have much good news to tell Philippa." They walked arm in arm from the passage into the sunlit court.

Part Three (1371)

"O Love, to whom I have and shall

Be humble subject, true in mine intent

As best I can, to you Lord give I all

For evermore, my heart's lust to rend ..

(Troilus and Criseyde)

CHAPTER XIII

In the dusk of Saint John's Day, June 24, 1371, three portly, middle-aged men enjoyed the freshening air in the cloisters of the Abbey of St. Andrew at Bordeaux, which was now the Duke's royal palace. Two of the men were great lords of Guienne; one, Jean de Grailly, the powerful Captal of Buch, and the other, Sir Guichard D'Angle, who owned vast tracts in Saintonge and Angouleme. They were both tirelessly loyal to their English overlord and had resisted the blandishments of the French King, though many of their fellow nobles had not. The third man was the big English baron, Michael de la Pole, whose taste for action had been well gratified since he chafed and cooled his heels while awaiting the Duke of Lancaster nineteen months ago in the Savoy.

"Fine stirring deeds of arms today at the jousting!" said de la Pole enthusiastically. "Our Duke covered himself with glory against the Sieur de Puissances, unhorsed him, pardieu!" The baron spoke in dogged Yorkshire French because it was more fluent than the Guienne lords' English.

"Aha," said the captal, belching pleasurably and rolling his tongue around a sip of wine, "he's almost the knight his brother is."

"Better, far betterl" cried de la Pole, instantly annoyed. This was an old argument. The captal and Sir Guichard had been the Prince of Wales' men and though they had obediently transferred homage to Lancaster last January when the Duke took over Aquitaine from the sick and shattered Prince, de la Pole felt that they consistently underrated him.

"Sainte Vierge!" said the captal obstinately. "Lancaster can't hold a candle to his father! Or his brother Edward, the Perfect Gentle Knight."

"Perfect Gentle Knight be damned!" cried the baron, glaring. "Look at Limoges! Was that the action of a perfect knight? Women, children massacred without mercy while the Prince lay gloating on his litter - blood, screams, tortures - the whole town slaughtered, except the few our Duke saved. What sort of knight is that?"

Sir Guichard D'Angle interposed, sighing, "Some demon seized upon the Prince, his illness is destroying him."

"And his line," said the baron solemnly. The three men were silent, each thinking of the death of little Edward, the Prince's oldest son, here last winter. After the aged King and ailing Prince of Wales, the heir now to the English throne was Richard, a child of four so fair and frail that he seemed made from gossamer.

"Lancaster is dangerously ambitious!" said the captal, following the natural train of thought. "I feel in him a ceaseless urge to rule, a lust for power greater even than the power he has - fires barely held in check-"

"Yet they are held in check," cut in de la Pole. "I know him far better than you do. On his loyalty to his brother, ay, and his nephew, little Richard, I'd stake my life and soul." He lowered his voice and, motioning the page to stand farther off, whispered behind his hand, "I believe 'tis not the English throne he covets."

"Ha-ha-ha!" Sir Guichard exploded into laughter half malicious, half indulgent. "Parbleu, man baron, do you think you tell us news! It was I planted it in his head, though the idea found fertile ground. He has thought much about Castile."

"Has he then made formal suit to the Infanta?" said de la Pole, discomfited and a trifle hurt that the Duke had withheld his confidence.

"Nenni - I think not yet. Something seems to hold him back. A moody man and broods much, unless he's fighting."

"He needs a woman," said the captal, shrugging his massive shoulders. He up-ended his gilt cup to let the last of the wine trickle down his throat. "Unhealthful to live like an anchorite, it must be months since that Norman whore went to his bedchamber at Cognac."

"And came out again so soon, one wonders there was time for sport," said Sir Guichard chuckling. "But soon he'll have a woman in his bed. The exiled and penniless Costanza'll not keep him waiting, once he asks her. 'Tis the best marriage she could ever hope for. All very well to be rightful Queen of Castile, but reigning is another matter when the throne's already filled. Our Duke will have a hard task to get himself upon it."

"I think this marriage might be ill judged," said the captal, shaking his head. "It will throw the weight of Castile definitely to France. Do you think the bastard King will do nothing to save his throne, when he hears the Duke's plans? We've trouble enough holding Aquitaine as it is. . . . He'll simply embroil England in yet another war." He rose and hitched his gilt-bossed girdle below his vast belly. "But whatever we think, the Duke will do as he pleases. C'est un veritable Plantagenet"

On the second floor of the Abbey, John sat on a stool in the garde-robe of his private apartments. He was naked, and Raulin was scrubbing off the sweat the grime from the tournament with a handful of lint dipped in hot rose-water. Nirac de Bayonne hovered near with a razor and basin, waiting to shave his master. By the door to the ante-room, Hankyn, the Duke's chief minstrel, softly plucked a gittern while he sang a plaintive love tune from Provence.

John was tired, and he had twisted a muscle in his shoulder while steadying the heavy lance that had prised the Sieur de Puissances from his saddle. Nor had the shoulder quite recovered from the sword wound it had received at Limoges.

John shut his eyes and allowed his thoughts to drift. On this day his lieutenancy of Aquitaine was ended, he was no longer bound to sit upon the lid of the boiling cauldron his brother had abandoned to him; no longer bound to fight his brother's battles at his own costs as he had been doing for months. Again, as always in this struggle with Charles the Fifth, there was a stalemate. There had been victories, there had been losses; the French king fought a war of niggling attrition that disgusted John.

But there was a bold and brilliant step awaiting. A glorious chivalric deed blessed by God and rewarded by a prize so dazzling that John's scalp tingled and his mouth grew dry when he thought of it. Last night he had dreamed that he knelt in the cathedral at Burgos - the gleaming white limestone cathedral where he had given thanks for Najera and the birth of his son - and in the dream, he had felt the touch of the sacred oil as the archbishop anointed him and he had felt, vivid as in waking, the holy pressure of Castile's golden crown.

I shall send Guichard d'Angle to the Infanta tomorrow, John thought, as he lifted his face that Nirac might shave him, and he said, "Nirac, when you were in Bayonne last month, you said you saw the Infanta Costanza at Mass? The rightful Queen of Castile, that is."

"Si fait, mon duc, she was near to me as Hankyn there," Nirac pointed to the minstrel.

"How did she look?" said John as though absently.

"Shabby, 'er mantle was worn, 'er shoes-"

"Not her clothes, dunderhead! Her person!"

"Boney," said Nirac promptly, shaving the golden beard with deft strokes, "breasts flat as plates, white skin, black hair, long upper lip on a mout' not made for smiling, nor, parbleu, for kissing. Castilian eyes - big, black, angry. She is tres devote, they say she wears hair shirts so she'll not forget 'er father. I think she may be a little mad. Her young sister Isabella is much prettier."

The Duke frowned and Nirac, seeing he had made a mistake, added quickly, "But the Infanta Costanza is vairy young, scarce seventeen, she'll improve sans doute, and I could not see clear, la cathedrale was dark."

There was a long silence in the garde-robe except for the tinkling of the gittern. John allowed himself to be dressed by Raulin, lifting his arms into the white silk shirt, stepping into the short linen braies to which the long skin-tight yellow hose were fastened with points. The topaz velvet tunic was dagged into leaflike curls at hem and sleeves and buttoned with pearls. When he was ready dressed, the squire and varlets stepped back expecting him to walk into the antechamber, where some of his gentlemen awaited to invest him with his ducal crown and the regalia of Aquitaine. But he shook his head and breaking the long silence said to Raulin, "Leave me, all of you - except Nirac."

John walked to the open window and gazed out through the soft southern dusk across red-tiled roofs to the curving Garonne. The river shone like pewter in the twilight, and two English ships with pennants fluttering above the crow's-nests were moving downstream, bound for home.

John watched the ships a moment and then he said, "Nirac!" The little Gascon was waiting, his bright lizard eyes on his master's face. "Do you remember the Lady Swynford of Kettlethorpe?" said John, turning slightly from the window.

"Sainte Vierge! 'Ow should I forget! Belle et gracieuse, la dame Catherine." Nirac paused, then added, "I do not forget 'er knight - that Swine-ford, either."

John lowered his eyes and looked at Nirac as though he would rebuke this Impudence. But instead he said slowly, "Knolles makes good report of Swynford, he's fought fiercely and been wounded twice."

"But 'e recovers, parbleu! Nirac did not add, What a pity! though his tone implied it, because he was puzzled by the Duke's mention of a lady he had thought forgotten long ago, and mystified as to the tenor of these remarks; but yet he felt he need not hide his hatred of the Saxon knight who had so outrageously humiliated him at Kettlethorpe.

"Swynford arrived here at Bordeaux yesterday with the rest of Knolles' disbanded company," said the Duke. "He's bedridden from a leg wound. I sent him Brother William to bleed him and apply poultices."

The Duke's own physician for this swine of a knight, thought Nirac, more than ever mystified since he knew that the Duke had not seen Swynford in all these months in Aquitaine. The knight had been attached to Knolles' savage company up north where the fighting had been hardest, most vicious, most dangerous. As he thought this, a light flickered in Nirac's mind, but he was not sure. He glanced quickly at the Duke, but the blue eyes were veiled.

"I am going to ask for the Queen of Castile in marriage - all will be quickly arranged thereafter," said the Duke in the same remote voice. He raised his hand to quell Nirac's burst of excitement. "It is proper that my royal duchess should be provided with English ladies here to attend on our marriage. I shall send off escort and messengers to summon them. You, Nirac, will return to Kettlethorpe and fetch my Lady Swynford."

"Ah-ha?" said the little Gascon, somewhat enlightened, but still uncertain; for Raulin, of course, had never mentioned the episodes with Lady Swynford at the Savoy, and Nirac knew that four years had passed since the Duke had been to Kettlethorpe. But his master's next word left no doubt. In an instant the austere control vanished from the sharp-etched handsome face, and John said passionately, as one who cannot help himself, "I must see her again before I marry."

So - thought Nirac - it is like that. But surely this desire was easily satisfied - and why then all this tohu-bohu about the husband? He saw from the softened look upon the Duke's face that he might venture a question, and he said, "Mon due, then you will want to send Sir Hugh out of Bordeaux before she comes?"

John's lips tightened, then he gave a half-angry laugh. "I fear she wouldn't come unless it were to join her husband."

"Merde! You mean she's virtuous?" cried Nirac, astounded, and seeing assent in the Duke's silence, understood at least that he had quite misread the situation when he had been at Kettlethorpe. "Oc," he added thoughtfully, "she 'as spirit and strength, cette belle petite dame - I saw it when I was there."

John having once broken through the barrier he had erected against Katherine, now felt great desire to go on talking of her, and to question Nirac for any memories of her during those months the Gascon had spent at Kettlethorpe. Yet he resisted it. He was ashamed of his longing, ashamed that he had not forgotten her as he had willed himself to do and that the calculated slaking of his lust with two court ladies and the Norman whore had left him disgusted and uncured.

It angered him to suspect that she should disobey his summons - though rightly so, no doubt, considering what had passed between them - if he tried to bring her here solely under guise of serving his new Duchess. Swynford's authority must be invoked as well. By humiliating subterfuge, Hugh must be made to summon Katherine himself, his wound would serve as excuse. But there'd be no trouble managing Hugh, thought John, he'd be pleased enough at the honour done his wife in the appointment to lady-in-waiting and pleased enough to see her too, God rot him.

And when Katherine came - what then?

John turned and slammed the shutter on the window so hard that Nirac, who had been watching him anxiously, jumped.

Well, when Katherine came and he saw her again, he would be cured. No woman on earth had the beauty and the appeal he had gradually endowed her with since she ran from him in the Avalon Chamber. Doubtless by now she had grown fat or scrawny, her peasant blood would tell as she grew older, the earthy vitality which had first offended him at Windsor would do so again, as crudeness always had offended him. He would see the blemishes - her rough chilblained hands, the black mole on her cheek-bone, the breathless headlong way she sometimes talked, even the sudden quiet dignity that came to her in stress could be seen as a ridiculous pretension - in short, he would be cured.

"I'll give you complete instructions tomorrow," he said to Nirac and walked out of the garde-robe to the chamber where his fidgeting retinue was waiting.

On the tenth of August the Grace a Dieu, four days out of Plymouth, ran into heavy seas past Finistere in Brittany, and the tricksy Biscayan winds hurled themselves at the little ship and threatened to blow her back to England. The master had been through worse weather on his many voyages between the home ports and Bordeaux, and after a few hearty curses he ordered the sail lowered and the sea anchor put out. He checked on the steersmen at the rudder, then retired to the castled poop with a keg of strong ale, prepared to ride out the storm until the Blessed Virgin should send them a north or westerly wind to blow them again in the right direction.

Though it might well be that St. James would take as much interest as the Blessed Mother in this voyage, since besides the party bound for Bordeaux at the Duke of Lancaster's orders, there were ten pilgrims for the holy shrine of St. James of Compostela in Spain. These pilgrims had been stuffed in the hold with the freight and were constantly and abominably seasick, but their fares represented extra profit on the voyage and the Duke's receiver at Bordeaux would be pleased.

In the wainscoted, tapestried cabin below the castled poop, the women were seasick too. The Princess Isabel de Coucy lay in the largest bunk and groaned, occasionally raising a saffron face to vomit into a silver basin held for her by one of her sniffling, retching women. Lady Scrope and Lady Roos of Hamlake lay together in another bunk and each time the Grace a Dieu wallowed and slid over a wave Lady Scrope clutched her companion and whispered wildly, "Blessed Jesus, save us, we shall all be drowned!" Lady Scrope was Lord de la Pole's sister, but she was a timorous little wisp of a woman, quite unlike her brother.

For Katherine there was no bunk at all, she and a squire's lady were assigned two pallets on the broad-beamed floor. Katherine was a little frightened by the storm, though it exhilarated her too, and she longed to be out on deck away from the stench of vomit and other odours resultant upon the day and night confinement of eight women in so small a room, but the captain had barred the door so that his valuable passengers might come to no harm by running about the heaving deck or tumbling overboard.

There being no help for it, Katherine lay as quietly as possible on her pallet. Her head was turned away from the unpleasant sights and sounds behind her and she braced herself as best she might against the ship's rolling pitch. She had not been seasick in these days since leaving Plymouth, and she was not so now. This small superiority over the Princess Isabel gave her satisfaction. The Princess had been unremittingly patronising from the moment of their meeting at Plymouth Hoe, before they ascended the gang-plank into the Grace a Dieu.

The King's daughter had been a spoiled beauty in her youth, famous for her caprices and wanton extravagance. Now at forty she was no longer a beauty, though she considered herself one. She was fat and moustached and dark, for she took after her mother Queen Philippa's people. Isabel's hair, though sedulously dyed with walnut juice and vinegar, had turned a streaky grizzled brown. And her cheeks, though rouged with cochineal, were mottled with liver spots. Katherine's pity might well have been aroused had the Princess' manner been pleasanter, for it was known to all on the ship that Isabel had seized avidly upon this opportunity to cross the sea so that she might try once again to find her runaway husband, the Lord Enguerrand of Coucy, who was many years her junior.

Isabel had twice before this tried to find him, in Flanders, and in Holland; but her elusive lord had always fled before she came. Now it was rumoured that he lived in Florence, and Isabel, in talking to Lady Roos in the cabin, was frank enough about her intentions. "Since I'm suffering this frightful voyage to please my brother of Lancaster and attend his wedding, I shall demand that he give me escort and safe conduct on my way to Italy later." Though she spoke to Lady Roos, no one in the cabin could ever escape that loud penetrating voice, except now - thought Katherine gratefully - when it was diminished into groans.

An enormous wave hit the ship, which mounted, shivered and plunged with a shock that knocked Katherine against the bulwark. Lady Scrope screamed again, crying on St. Christopher, St. Botolph and the Blessed Virgin to save them, for the ship would surely sink.

Katherine thought it quite probable. She clutched her beads tight against her breast and tried to stem growing panic with Aves and Paternosters, while her thoughts beneath ran in confused images of home, especially of the day Nirac came with the puzzling letter from Hugh, dictated to a scrivener and summoning her to Bordeaux, "at the Duke's command". Her first feeling had been of anguished shock at the news of the Duke's intended marriage. The violence of this feeling had distressed her deeply, for gradually throughout the placid days at Kettlethorpe, alone with her babies and Philippa, she had almost trained herself not to think of the Duke except as her feudal overlord whose bounty had much eased their life. The day after receipt of Hugh's letter she had reasoned herself from that first anguish into resignation and relief. For now that the Duke was marrying the Queen of Castile, there could be nothing more between them, ever, and she need not fear that seeing him again might upset her hard-won equilibrium. Her second thoughts were of conscience-stricken concern for Hugh. Nirac was extremely uncommunicative about the extent of Hugh's wounds or indeed on any matter pertaining to Bordeaux, so that she knew little beyond the sparsely worded letter.

But there was no question of her refusing to go. Philippa settled that at once. Dual command from husband and Duke must be obeyed. Philippa had her own baby now, also a little Tom, and had been at Kettlethorpe so long that she felt she owned it. Chaucer, still coming and going on official business, was glad enough to leave her there.

So Katherine had set forth on her journey with Nirac, stopping two days in London with Hawise, whose Jack had returned from France and claimed her. The affection between the two women was even stronger than it had been before the months Hawise had spent at Ketdethorpe, and Hawise had shed many hearty tears at parting from Katherine. "Ay, my sweeting, God shield ye on this voyage - I'll keep a candle burning to Saint Catherine for ye, night and day - I had a dream last night - nay, I'll not say it - -would I could come wi' ye, my dear lady."

But here Jack Maudelyn had frowned very black and said his wife had had enough of strampaging about and must abide in London at her own hearthfire, and he muttered something more beneath his breath about the scurvy whims of lords and ladies. Jack was not the merry hobbledehoy he'd been five years ago on May Day. His years in the army had changed him, he had become rough-tongued and brutal, a malcontent, disinclined for steady work. Though he was a master weaver now, he had scant interest in his loom, but much in his guild privileges and he spoke often of the City's rights, making angry allusions to "royal rogues and tyrants" who must be taught better if they dared to infringe on these rights.

Again the little ship quivered and plunged. The wind blew harder. The master abandoned his keg of ale and lost his fortitude, when he glimpsed through the driving rain squalls a dark mass of rock and tiny specks of moving light around its base. If that were the Isle d' Ouessant and they were blown upon its shores, the bloodthirsty wreckers waiting on the beach would dispatch whatever souls the waves spared. And even if they escaped the island, the Grace a Dieu could not long survive this pounding. Her seams were parting, and the naked sweating men in the hold had shouted that the pump no longer kept down the rising water.

The master crossed himself and touched the wooden image of the Virgin that was carved on the mast, then, lurching and floundering through green water on the deck amidships, he unbarred the cabin door and stumbled in on a great blast of howling wind and rain. The women raised their heads, staring at him in terror, while the candles in the swaying horn lamps guttered, then flared up.

The master's bearded cheeks were pale as the women's as he said, "Noble ladies, we're in great danger. I doubt we'll outride this storm wi'out a miracle. Ye must pray and make vows."

Lady Scrope screamed and wrung her hands. "Which saint," she cried, "which saint will help?"

The master shook his head. "I know not. We mariners pray to the Blessed Virgin of the Sea - in the hold they pray to Saint James - mayhap your own patrons will intercede for you. But without a miracle we're doomed."

The women stared at him yet another moment, then the Princess Isabel pulled herself to her knees on her bunk crying wildly, "I vow my ruby girdle and my gold hanap to you, Saint Thomas a Becket, if you will save me, and I vow to Saint Peter that I'll make pilgrimage to Rome as well."

Katherine knelt with the rest, bracing herself between the thwart and a bolted-down chest. Through her mind like a shout ran passionate words: Don't let me die, yet, don't let me die, for I have never really lived! Quick as light she felt a fearing shame that she could have so wicked and untrue a thought at this moment when her soul was in peril, and she clasped her hands crying silently, Sweet Saint Catherine, save me! But her thoughts would not compress themselves into the vow. Candles, yes, and money, yes - but she felt that Saint Catherine would not save her just for these. For what, then? Suddenly in this moment of danger she saw into a dark corner of her heart she had kept hidden, and she made her vow.

The miracle was wrought, by which saint or all of them together there was no means of knowing, though the master gave credit to the Blessed Queen of the Sea. At any rate, just as dawn broke over the bleakly distant shore of Brittany, one of the mariners had seen a strange light in the sky and pinkish cloud beneath it shaped like a lily. This was a sign that their prayers were heard, for the wind died at once and they had drifted to the lee of the baleful little Isle d' Ouessant, where the water was calmer, and yet the outgoing tide kept them off shore while they caulked their leaks and pumped the hold dry. On shore the frustrated wreckers danced and shook their fists at the ship, but they dared not try to board because of the cannon mounted on the decks and the archers who ranged themselves along the rail.

By noon a gentle wind had sprung up from the north, the Grace a Dieu's great painted sail filled, and the ship resumed her course for Bordeaux.

Four days later, on the vigil of Our Lady's Assumption, the Grace d Dieu sailed up the broad Gironde with the afternoon tide arid veered south into the narrower Garonne while the village church bells along the banks rang for the beginning of the festival. It seemed excessively hot to the Englishwomen, who were seated on deck beneath a striped canopy. They had never seen a sun so white and glaring, or river water so turbidly yellow, and even Princess Isabel's insistent voice was stilled.

In anticipation of the landing at Bordeaux, all the ladies had dressed in their best; which entailed furs and velvets far too warm for the climate. Katherine's best was of dark Lincoln green with a sideless apricot surcote trimmed with fox. The cauls which confined her hair on either side of her face were woven of gold thread, which deepened the tone of her glossy bronze hair as they accented the golden flecks in her grey eyes. She knew that no colours suited her quite so well as the richness of dark green and gold, and she was happy in the possession of becoming clothes, but she had, as always, little consciousness of the challenging quality of her beauty.

Now at twenty the last angles of extreme youth had softened into rounded bloom, and she moved with languorous grace. Her beauty had an exotic flavour far more vivid than when Geoffrey Chaucer had first sensed it at Windsor. It was this flavour that caused Princess Isabel's angry whisper to Lady Roos, as she watched Katherine, who stood by the rail leaning her chin on her hand and gazing out at the strange white plaster houses, gilt crosses and red roofs of this new land.

"That woman's no true-born of that herald de Roet! She's some bastard he got on a Venetian strumpet - or mayhap Saracen. Look how she holds her hips!"

"To be sure," said Lady Roos, striving to please, "and her teeth are most-un-English - so small and white."

"Mouse teeth!" said the Princess, angrily pulling her lip down over her own teeth, of which several were missing." 'Tis not that I mean! But her effrontery - I shall tell my brother of Lancaster that I find her most unsuitable choice for a waiting-woman - though in fact I believe she's invented that tale as excuse to worm her way over here, that and the pretty story of a wounded husband! I've seen a great deal of the world, and I can scent a designing woman quick as smell a dead rat in a wall, I can alway - s - " The Princess's suspicions were cut short by a rushing of mariners and archers to the starboard rail amidships and a chorus of halloos, while the watch in the crow's-nest dipped the Lancaster pennant and raised it again on the mast.

The Princess heaved herself up from her chair and went to the rail. "Why, 'tis John - come to meet me!" she said complacently, peering down at the approaching eight-oared galley. Her younger brother was standing in the prow, his tawny head brilliant and unmistakable in the sunlight.

Katherine had discovered this fact some five minutes earlier when the galley first glided in sight down the river, and the sudden violent constriction in her chest stopped her breath. Her first instinct was flight - down to the cabin. She controlled herself and remained where she was. Sooner or later this moment must be met, and she armoured herself with the certainty of his indifference to her.

The galley drew alongside and the Duke ascended the ladder, followed by the Lords de la Pole and Roos. The Duke jumped lightly on to the deck and smiled at the assembled mariners and archers. Katherine, watching from above, saw Nirac dart out from the crowd of men and, kneeling, kiss his master's hand. The Duke said something she could not hear but Nirac nodded and drew back with the others. Then the Duke came up the steps to the poop deck and walking to his seated sister, kissed her briefly on both cheeks, while the other ladies curtsied. There was a further flurry of greeting when the other gentleman clambered up. De la Pole greeted his sister, Lady Scrope, and Lord Roos his wife, while Katherine still stood rooted in the angle of the rail.

The Duke turned slowly, negligently, as though without intent until he saw Katherine. Across the heads of the fluttering, chattering ladies their eyes met in a long unsmiling look. She felt him willing her to come to him, and her lids dropped, but she did not move. After a moment he covered the space between them, and she curtsied again without speaking.

"I trust the voyage was not too disagreeable a one, my Lady Swynford," he said coolly, but as she rose her eyes were on a level with his sunburned throat and there she saw a pulse beating with frantic speed.

"Not too disagreeable, Your Grace," she said and rejoiced at the calm politeness of her tone. She felt the slight hush behind them and saw the Princess' watchful stare; lifting her voice a trifle she added, "How does my husband? Have you heard, my lord?"

"Better, I believe," John answered after a moment, "though still confined to his lodgings."

Katherine again meeting his gaze saw the colour deepen beneath the tan of his cheeks. "I'm longing to see Hugh and care for him," she said. "May Nirac guide me to Hugh's lodging directly we disembark?"

A strange almost bewildered look tightened the muscles around his eyes, but before he answered a strident voice called imperiously, "John, come here! I've much to tell you - you've not heard yet the peril we were in on this wretched ship - the King's Grace, our father, has sent special message - and how long are we to be kept sweltering here in this infernal heat?"

"Ay, Nirac shall guide you, Lady Swynford," he said, then turning to his sister laughed sharply. "Your commands, my sweet Isabel, plunge me back into the happy days of my childhood. In truth, you've changed but little, fair sister."

"So I'm told," said the lady nodding. "Lord Percy said but t'other day, I looked as young as twen - , as several years ago. By Saint Thomas, what's that caterwauling?" She broke off to glare indignantly around the deck. A medley of voices had arisen from all parts of the ship. A confusion of sound at first, until led by the high clear tenor of the watch, it resolved itself into a solemn melody, a poignant chant carried by some forty male voices.

"It is the hymn of praise to the Virgin of the Sea," said John. " 'Tis sung on every ship of all nations when port is safely reached - for see, here is Bordeaux." He pointed to the white-walled town curving around its great crescent of river, and dominated by the high gilt spires of the cathedral.

Here is Bordeaux, echoed Katherine's thought, and the words blended with the great swelling chorus of the Latin hymn the men sang: "Thanks to Thee, Blessed Virgin, for protection from danger, thanks to thy all abiding mercy which has saved us from the sea - -" She shivered in the violent sunlight, staring at the garish savage colours on the river-bank: the white and scarlet houses, the purple shadows, the brilliant yellows, crimsons, greens of vegetation shimmering in heat beneath a turquoise sky, and she thought with foreboding of how far away was the cool misty Northland, and all safe accustomed things. She fastened her attention on the city in front of her so that she might not turn again to look at him who stood behind her on the deck.

CHAPTER XIV

Hugh's lodgings were two rooms over a wine-shop in an alley behind the cathedral. Nirac duly guided Katherine through the town from the pier, while a small donkey laden with her two travelling chests ambled with them. She had managed to avoid the Duke entirely, even taking it upon herself to tell Nirac of the Duke's permission and order Nirac to accompany her.

This order Nirac received with an enigmatic shrug and smile, "Comme vous voulez, ma belle dame" and she thought that the faithful, amusing little Gascon whom she had known so well in England had somehow changed here in his native land. She chided herself for thinking him suddenly sinister and secret, like the twilit town that turned blank walls to the street and hid its true life from passers-by.

It was not until they mounted the littered stone stairs above the wine-shop that Katherine thought of the angry treatment Hugh had shown to Nirac long ago at Kettlethorpe and wondered if the Gascon still resented it, but then she thought that if he did it would not matter; stronger than any other thing in life for Nirac was his adoration of the Duke, and that feeling would check all others.

"Are you sure this is it?" she asked dubiously as they stood on a cramped landing and she knocked at a rough plank door. There was no sound from within.

"La cabaretiere said so, madame," answered Nirac who had inquired from the shopkeeper.

Katherine knocked again, then pushed open the sagging door, calling, "Hugh."

He lay on a rough narrow bed and had been dozing. The single shutter was closed against the heat, and in the dim light he blinked at his wife, who lit the doorway like a flame. Then he struggled to his elbow and said, uncertainly, "Is it really you, Katherine? But it's early - Ellis left to fetch you but a short time ago - we heard the ship was sighted in the river. Who's that behind you, is it Ellis?"

"No, Hugh," she said gently, going to the bed and taking his hand, "it's Nirac, the Duke's messenger. I hurried straight to you and have missed Ellis."

His hand clung to hers, it was hot and dry. His unshaven face was haggard between the matted wisps of his crinkled hair, and in his voice she had heard the querulous note of ill health. On a stool by the head of the bed there was a pile of torn linen strips, a bleeding basin and a small clay cup. Flies buzzed in the stuffy sour room, the dingy hempen sheet on which Hugh lay was wadded into lumps. She bent over and kissed him quickly on the cheek. "Ah, my dear, 'tis well I've come to nurse you. The Duke said you were better, are you?" She glanced at the bandaged leg, which was propped on a straw pillow.

"For sure 'e's better!" cried Nirac heartily, coming forward to the bed and bowing. " 'Is Grace's own leech 'as cared for 'im, an' now 'e 'as the best medicine in the world!" He smiled at Katherine, his bright black eyes were merry and charming, and she wondered what had made them seem sinister before.

Hugh said, "Oh, it's you, you meaching cockscomb. I'd forgot all about you." His dull gaze wandered from the Gascon to Katherine. "Ay, I'm better, the wound's near done festering. I'd be up now save for the griping in my bowels, it weakens me."

"Alack!" she said, " 'tis the flux again? But 'twill pass - you've got over it before."

He nodded, "Ay." He made effort to pull himself from the self-centred lethargy of his illness, yet in truth her beauty daunted him; and though he had much wanted her to come, now he felt the old discouragement and humiliation which always sought relief in anger.

"Now you are here," he said crossly, "I trust you're not too fine a lady to fetch us up some supper and wine from the woman's kitchen down below. Or has the Duke's appointment turned your head?"

Nirac made a faint hissing sound through his teeth, but she did not hear it as she answered, "I'm here to care for you, Hugh. Come, don't speak to me like that," she said smiling. "Don't you long for news of home - of our children?"

"I leave now, madame," said Nirac softly, and he added in swift French, "I wish you joy of your reunion." He was gone before she could thank him for his long care of her on the journey.

Through the rest of the day Katherine tended her husband. She took off her fine green gown and put on a thin russet kersey which she wore for everyday at Kettlethorpe; in this she tidied and cleaned the two bare little rooms. She made Hugh's bed, washed him and re-bound his leg, hiding her revulsion at the look of his wound, which was puffed high with proud flesh and oozing a trickle of yellow pus. But Hugh said it had much improved, and Ellis, when he returned from his fruitless errand to the ship, also agreed.

Gradually Hugh grew gentler, as the first shock of strangeness wore away. They slipped back into the groove inevitably worn by their five years of marriage. After they had supped and were more at ease and glowing from the delicious Gascon wine, Ellis sat by the window with his back turned to them, tinkering with some buckle on his master's gear, and Katherine curled up on the bed chattering of the babies - how lovely little Blanchette had grown and that she could sing three songs - here Hugh smiled proudly, seeming more interested than at the news that Tom could talk plainly and sit a horse alone and was near as big as his sister.

Katherine told many items of home news, particularly that the new flocks on the demesne farm were flourishing and that the Lincoln merchants, the Suttons, had been helpful with advice. She also told Hugh about the birth of Philippa's baby, proudly adding that she had done most of the midwifery herself, with Parson's Molly to assist. "But Philippa had an easy time - the babe popped into the world like a greased pig from a poke," she laughed, "not like the struggle I had to birth Blanchette."

"Ay, but you're no more like your sister than Arab filly is to plough horse, my Katherine," said Hugh gruffly, not looking at her but fumbling for her hand. He pulled her down so that her bright face rested against his coarse woolly beard: She held herself tight so as not to draw back, and thought of the three violent and unhappy nights in which he had once more claimed her during their last brief time together at Kettlethorpe when she came home from the Savoy and before he left to join Sir Robert Knolles.

Hugh thought of those nights too, and cursed the physical debility that once more unmanned him, knowing that without the vigour of drunken haste, a paralysing doubt would set in - and fear, and then he would hate her and the lovely body which he well knew he had never truly possessed.

"I thought I had got you with child, before I left," he said, releasing her suddenly.

She sat up with an imperceptible sigh of relief. "Nay," she said lightly. "It didn't happen, doubtless because 'twas, the dark of the moon then. Hugh, tell me of the fighting you've been through, tell me how you got this" - she touched the bandaged leg. "Here I prate on of silly humdrum things at Kettlethorpe while you've done many a dangerous deed of arms."

She led him on to talk of the one subject which he understood, where he felt himself always sure, and under her admiring questions he expanded, words came to him more easily, his scowl vanished, and when he started to describe a hand-to-hand encounter with a Poitevin knight, in which the latter had cravenly cried for mercy, he actually laughed.

It was thus that Brother William Appleton found them when he pushed the door open and padded in on his bare feet. "Deo gratias!" cried the Grey Friar, standing at the foot of the bed and surveying his patient with kindly surprise. "Here is betterment indeed! Truly a wife is God's gift. Benedicite, my Lady Swynford." He placed his hand on her head. "How was the voyage?" He dropped his sack of drugs and instruments on the floor and smiled at Katherine.

"We had a great storm and I was much afraid," she said, hastening to pour the friar a cup of wine, "but our Blessed Lady and the saints vouchsafed a miracle and we were saved. It was a most wondrous and humbling thing." Her voice trembled, and Brother William glanced at her keenly, thinking that though she seemed made for the pleasures of the flesh, there yet was a sense of spiritual striving about her, and a healthiness of mind and body which pleased him who spent so much of his time with the sick. "Ay, it is a humbling thing when Heaven's mercy shields us from danger" - he nodded his long cadaverous head - "and we may be sure God sends us every chance for salvation - how do you find your husband?"

"Most grateful to you, Sir Friar, he says you saved his leg and maybe his life."

"Well, well - I've some skill but 'tis not all my doing. His stars were propitious." As he spoke the-friar deftly unbound Hugh's leg, and scooping a green ointment from a little pot plastered the wound. " 'Tis made of pounded watercress," he explained to Katherine, who exclaimed at the colour. "A balm the wild Basques use in their mountains, and ignorant as they are - barely Christians - they know much of simples. I've healed many a wound on the Duke's men-at-arms with this."

"How soon do you think I can get about, Brother?" asked Hugh through clenched teeth as the friar probed and pulled back the proud flesh.

"You can hobble a bit now, since it seems your dysentery's lessening. Did you take all the bowel-binder I left you?" He peered into the clay cup on the stool and shook his head. "Lady, you must see that he takes this each time before he eats. Camphorated poppy juice alone will heal the flux."

"I'll see that he takes it. Sir Friar," she said smiling, and held the cup for him to fill it with a black mixture.

"We must have you strong and able to attend on the Duke's wedding, Sir Hugh," said Brother William, fishing a rusty lancet from the bottom of his sack and motioning to Katherine to hold the basin for the daily bleeding.

Hugh thrust out his pallid gnarled arm and said with a hint of pride, "Katherine has been appointed brideswoman to the marriage."

"I know," said the friar with a faint chuckle, "you've told me many times." He had learned that and much more during the days of high fever that Hugh had suffered after he first came to Bordeaux, and in addition the friar had served as Hugh's confessor. So there was little he did not know about this man and his groping, clumsy brain, his grossnesses and sulky angers, his inability to adjust himself to others, his superstitious fears, and yet with all this, his bitter, humiliating, pathetic love for this beautiful woman.

Poor souls, thought the friar, applying styptic and a wad of lint to the bleeding arm-cut. Yet, no doubt, they would rub along somehow, no worse off than many a man and wife, until finally all passions died, and age or philosophy would bring surcease.

"Have you seen the Infanta Costanza?" said Katherine very casually while pouring the blood from the little basin into a slop-jar. "Is she fair?"

"They say not," answered the friar. "Remember, my Lord Duke desires her to be spoken of as the Queen of Castile - nay, I believe she is not fair.

He saw a strange little quiver pass over Katherine's mobile face, and having much observant knowledge of women, thought it came from gratified vanity and was amused, for from this foible she had seemed quite free; but he said nothing more. He gave them blessing and departed to visit another of the Duke's sick fighting men, his mind quite at ease about Hugh.

Katherine slept mat night on a straw mattress on the floor beside Hugh's bed, and Ellis slept as usual on a pallet near the outer door. In the soft grey dawn, Katherine rose and dressed to go to early Mass before the great crowds would come later. She yearned for the blissful comfort of the act of communion, when the sweet body of Jesus should enter into her own body and strengthen her, and she hoped that in the cathedral she might find a shrine to St. Catherine too. She felt great need to kneel before her own particular saint and refresh the moment of transcendent gratitude she had felt on the ship.

Hugh grunted sleepily as she told him where she was going, and she saw that he had improved in the night, his fever was gone and he breathed quietly.

In her green and gold gown, to do honour to the festival, and a fine silk-hooded mantle, Katherine slipped downstairs past the wine-shop into the cobbled street. It was hotter than it would ever be in England, but she gave thanks for the morning freshness and hurried to the cathedral, which was but a block away.

The great west doors of the cathedral were wide open, the organ tones vibrated through the still air, while a line of peasants and rustics filed into the church bearing herbs, roots and fruits for blessing at the Virgin's shrine. Two mutilated beggars lolled on the cathedral step, and waving ulcerous stumps of legs and arms whined at Katherine, "Ayez pitie, belle dame, l'aumone, pour l'amour de Dieu-" She opened her purse and cast them silver pennies, then into the extended hat of a faceless leper she flung more of her silver, crossing herself as he mumbled "Grand merci" and shuffled away, shaking his warning clapper.

The hideous mutilations of the beggars and the leper had shaken her and before entering the cathedral she paused to collect herself. An ancient Bordelaise in high fluted cap and white apron was spreading baskets of flowers on the steps and Katherine walked over to her, at once assuaged by the lovely unfamiliar flowers - gaudy peonies, jasmine, fat red roses and huge lilies, all strangely shaped and more highly perfumed than any she had ever known.

As she leaned down to buy a bunch of jasmine, she noted vaguely that a tall pilgrim stood on the step a little way off, leaning on his staff. She finished her purchase; holding the jasmine against her cheek and sniffing delightedly, she turned again towards the cathedral. The pilgrim turned too and mounted the steps. He carried a scrip covered with cockleshells, and he was muffled to the mouth in a sackcloth, his large round hat pulled down low on his forehead so that little of his face showed. Katherine, assuming that it was one of those who were en route for St. James Compostela, gave him an indifferent glance. She walked into the cathedral porch, pausing to peer ahead into the dark nave and locate the candle-seller amongst all the booths and hurrying celebrants.

She felt an urgent hand on her arm and turned in astonishment to see that it was the pilgrim who had clutched her. He raised his head a little so that she might see his eyes and said, "Katrine! I must talk to you."

"Sweet Jesu! My lord!" she cried, so astounded that she dropped the jasmine sprays all over the worn stone paving.

"Hush!" he said sternly. "Come with me, I know a place where we can talk."

She bent over and picked up her jasmine, slowly, fighting for time to collect herself and marshal her resistance.

"I command it," he said, then with a swift change of tone, "nay - I beg you, I beseech you - Katrine."

She bowed her head and began to walk, following him a few paces behind. They went down the steps, across the busy "Place" and up a street to a little inn, Auberge des Moulins. He took a key from his scrip, and unlocking a low door in the pink plaster wall, motioned her to enter. It was the small inn garden to which he had brought her. It was planted with a few flowers and many herbs and furnished with wine-stained trestle-tables and benches.

"We'll not be disturbed here," he said, flinging off his hat and loosening the sackcloth cloak, "I've bribed the aubergiste lavishly. My God, Katrine," he added with a wry laugh, "look to what straits you've brought the ruler of Aquitaine - skulking in sackcloth, bribing frowsy scoundrels for a place of assignation - like a wenching sergeant - you should be proud of your enchantments!"

"What have you to say to me, my lord?" She leaned against the trestle-table because her knees shook, but her grey eyes were fixed on him steadily and their gaze held warning, yet she thought that, in the coarse brown sackcloth, he had never seemed so handsome or so princely.

"What have I to say to you?" He broke off, biting his lips. Since before Prime he had been waiting near the cathedral, knowing that she would come to Mass, and praying that she would be alone. Yet if that dolt of a squire Ellis de Thoresby had accompanied her, the meeting would still have been managed. Since the sight of her on the ship yesterday, she had obsessed him to a point beyond reason - almost beyond caution.

He turned on her suddenly, with violence. "I love you, Katrine. I want you, I desire you, but I love you. I feel that I cannot exist without you. That's what I have to say to you."

The garden walls melted. A rushing wind lifted and hurled Katherine into a void, a wind - no, a river of fire. An agonising painful joy in the whirling and rushing of this river of fire -

He threw himself down on the bench and seized her cold hands, looking up at her white face. "My dear love," he said softly, humbly, "can you not speak to me?"

"What can I say, my lord?" Her eyes fastened themselves on the blue flower of a borage plant near his foot; she stared at the little blue star while the fiery river throbbed and scorched in her breast.

"That you love me, Katherine - you told me so once."

"Aye," she said slowly, at last, "nothing has changed since then. Nothing. And I am still Hugh's wife - however much I - I love you."

He gave a sharp gasp and bending his head covered her hands with kisses. "Sweetheart!" he cried exultantly, and put his hands on her waist to pull her down to him. She stiffened and shook her head. "Nay, but there is one thing changed since we two were in the Avalon Chamber - then you mourned a wife but lately gone, and now you are betrothed to one who will soon be yours."

"There's no love in that, it has naught to do with us. You know that I must marry again, for England - for Castile."

"Yes," she said tonelessly, "I know."

She raised her eyes and tears slid quietly down her cheeks. "I cannot be your leman, my lord. Even if for love of you I could so shamefully dishonour Hugh, yet I cannot, for I have made a sacred vow."

"A vow?" he repeated. His hands dropped from her waist. "What vow, Katherine?"

"On the ship," Katherine said, each word dragging forth with pain. "Saint Catherine saved my life, for that I made the vow-" She stopped and swallowed, looking past him at the sunny wall. She went on in a whisper, "To be true wife, in thought, in deed, to my husband who is the father of my babies."

Outside the garden, the cathedral bells began again to clang for the commencement of another Mass, while nearer from the "Place" a burst of horns and clarions heralded the beginning of the mystery play, and nearer yet inside the inn there was a shout of drunken laughter. At last John said gently, reasonably, "My foolish Katherine - and do you think the whole ship was saved because you made this vow?"

"I don't know," she answered in the same muted voice. "I only know that I made it and will keep it unto death."

Unto death. The words rang irrevocably in his ears, even while a hundred persuasions sped through his mind. Arguments that might move her, perhaps the contentions of John Wyclif, how that saints and miracles and vows were but ignorant superstitions invented by venal popes and hypocritical monks to gull the simple folk. But he loved her, so these things he could not say, for he did not quite believe these heresies ' and there was a commandment in the Bible - one the Blessed Jesus too had affirmed - and he knew well that even John Wyclif would never condone adultery. And stronger far than the new logic of the Lollards were the teachings of his childhood. Grinning fiends, devils and the obscene tortures, damnation eternal, awaited those who sinned. For himself he did not care, but her he could not endanger. He turned his head away and did not speak.

"Now you will hate me again!'' she cried on a sobbing breath. She could no longer maintain the frozen stillness of her body; though she had renounced him, she could not bear that he should never look at her again with passion - and the new tenderness. "Dear my Lord, my heart will break if you hate me, and the last time too we parted in anger-"

He shook his head. "I love you, Katherine - and while you're near me, I feel that your wish is mine." He stopped, thinking that this had never been true of him before. There had been no such testing with Blanche, nor need for conscience. "Yet I know myself -" he cried with sudden violence. "I shall not stay so tame, so conquerable-" He took a quick step towards her, then halted. "Go, Katherine - go," he said, and hot tears sprang into his eyes.

She fled from the garden and through the "Place" to the cathedral. The Mass had just begun; she pushed her way through the people to a confessional where she murmured so rapid and confused an account of temptation and contrition in her northern French that the inattentive priest made little of it and granted quick absolution. Then she ran up to the choir, as near the High Altar as she could get. She knelt on the tiles. She heard no word of the Mass, but when she received the Holy Wafer on her tongue a sad peace came to her and she thought that glimmering around the Crucifix she saw a glow of benignant light.

While Katherine was at Mass, John of Gaunt, the pilgrim in sackcloth, strode with bowed head through the streets of Bordeaux to the palace-abbey, oblivious of interested glances or occasional timid questions, "God speed, Sir Pilgrim, art thou bound for Compostela or for Canterbury? Or mayhap the Holy Land?"

The Bordelais were gay today, the women dressed in scarlet shawls wore flowers and combs in their hair. There was dancing in the streets and festival music spangled the warm air. But John saw and heard nothing.

He entered the abbey, not surreptitiously by the side door as he had slipped out, but through the main gate, flinging his pilgrim hat in the face of the astounded gate-ward, as the man questioned him. "Forgive me, Your Grace," babbled the gate-ward, when he recognised the Duke, "I had not known you -" John strode on and through the Grande Salle, where a dozen varlets were scurrying with gold silk napery, silver saltcellars, mazers, hanaps, spoons, laying the great tables for dinner.

The salle opened on to the cloister garth, where a group were seated under the cool arcades. A Moorish dwarf, scarce two feet high, amused them with tumbling tricks and sly songs piped in such a squeaky voice that the Princess Isabel was rolling with laughter. So convulsed were all the lords and ladies - when the dwarf, who had a chained popinjay and a monkey with him, announced that he would perform a marriage between the two little beasts and, placing them on a miniature bed, forced the monkey into the liveliest imitation of amorous commerce with the squawking popinjay - that nobody saw the Duke until he had passed through the cloister and was mounting the steps that led to his apartments. Then Isabel jumped and said, "Could that be Lancaster? What an extraordinary garb!"

"It was, madam," said Michael de la Pole. "Some private penance maybe."

"Nonsense! He's no more pious than that monkey there. It seems to me he's acting very strange, I thought so yesterday, and to go out now, when Edmund has arrived in his absence - not that one ever considers Edmund much, to be sure-"

The baron, who knew the insistence of the royal lady's discourse and was not interested in her opinions on the personalities of her brothers, asked a hasty permission to withdraw, since he wished to speak to the Duke.

He found the Duke in his solar, being dressed by his squires, while that little Gascon, Nirac, hovered around and clucked over him like a hen. Edmund of Langley, the Earl of Cambridge, lay sprawling on the jewelled coverlet of the State Bed, eating figs and watching his brother with his usual expression of amiable vacuity. Edmund had come overland down from Calais with a large force of his men and arrived an hour ago.

"Greeting, baron," Edmund said to de la Pole, biting into another fat green fig. "God's blood, but it's hot here in the south, I always forget that when I'm in England."

De la Pole bowed, acknowledged the greeting, and said, "My lords, I hope I don't intrude? There are certain arrangements about the wedding, my Lord Duke, that need your immediate attention."

John turned his head, and the baron was startled at the suffering look in his eyes, a look of actual wanhope, or despair, thought the baron, who was not imaginative. Bad news then? But what? Unless Cambridge had brought it. A glance at Edmund dispelled that thought. The earl's sensibilities were none too keen, but he certainly was not the bearer of ill tidings.

Edmund had spent most of his thirty years docilely obeying and admiring all three of his elder brothers, but particularly this one who was so near him in age, and of whom he was a paler, smaller copy, as though fashioned from John's leftover tints which had been insufficient and consequently diluted. Where John's hair was a vigorous ruddy gold, Edmund's was silvery flaxen and sparse; the unmistakable Plantagenet strength of long nose and chin and cheek-bone had in Edmund blurred to softness.

"I'll attend to you presently, baron," said the Duke in a singularly flat voice. "Edmund tells me that His Grace, our father, approves that the Queen of Castile's sister Isabella be given to him."

" 'Struth," said Edmund, swallowing his fig and licking his fingers. "High time I got me some wife, they say the little Infanta Bella is grown quite appetising, fifteen years old and firm as a plum." He giggled happily. "She'll suit my sweet tooth."

"Your marriage to her will make doubly sure our claim to the throne of Castile," said John sternly.

His brother at once drew his face into earnest agreement. "To be sure, to be sure."

"A double wedding then, my lord?" asked de la Pole in some surprise, thinking of the little time that was left - only a month - before the Duke's nuptials, and the multitudinous details which must be settled. There were still indentures and contracts to be signed, some of the exiled Castilian envoys from Bayonne were even now waiting below for audience with the Duke, nor had the final decision been made as to the locale for the ceremony.

"No double wedding," said John, holding his hands out over a silver basin that Nirac might pour rose-water on them. "Edmund can marry the Infanta later. Gentlemen," he glanced at his brother, the squires, Nirac and finally the baron, "before I receive the Castilians, or consult with you, Michael, I wish food - and I've not yet communed. Raulin, where is Brother Walter?"

"He vaits in the chapel, Your Grace," said the Flemish squire, fastening the last buckle on the Duke's gold and sapphire girdle, before adjusting it low on the hips.

The Duke nodded and quitted his solar for the narrow passage that connected it with the private chapel.

Nirac slipped unobtrusively out of the room and followed his master, unheard and unseen. It was he who had procured the pilgrim clothes and he alone, who knew where the Duke had gone this morning,, and though in this last hour there had been no privacy, and thus no way to find out what had happened, Nirac had been more shocked than the baron at the expression of his master's eyes. He intended to find out once and for all the Duke's true inward wishes. And he availed himself of a discovery long since made.

In the days of the monks the private chapel had adjoined their infirmary. A square peephole had been made in the wall to the right of the altar so that the bedridden monks might participate in the Mass. A painted hanging of the Day of Judgement now covered the peephole but through the cloth one could hear all that took place. Nirac flattened himself to the wall behind the arras on the infirmary side and listened.

As he expected, the Duke was confessing to the Carmelite friar, Brother Walter Dysse, who travelled with him everywhere. At first the Duke's voice was low. Nirac could hear little, though in the pauses the plump friar's soothing voice lisped about "sins of the flesh - lustful thoughts - deplorable but human, God would easily forgive - true repentance -"

"But I'm not repentant!" The Duke's voice rose suddenly high and passionate. "I love the woman - she is my life - all my bliss. I care naught what you say, Brother, nor fear God in this -"

"Then, why do you confess to me, my lord," said the unctuous voice reasonably, "since you wish no ghostly counsel? Yet I feel God is not wroth - come, I'll grant you absolution-"

"Ay, you're a man of the world, good friar, 'tis no doubt for your comfortable nature I keep you for confessor." The Duke's voice had a bitter mocking edge. "Were I to tell you I had abducted, ravished this woman, had forced her to adultery, what would you say then?"

There was a pause, Nirac could hear the rustling of garments as though the friar had shifted on his seat, and he pictured how the plump white hands would smooth each other, and how Brother Walter's little mouth had pursed as he heard the soft voice answer. "With a few penances - my lord - contrition, of course-"

" - and if I told you I had murder in my heart - murder for the stupid clod that stands in my way - what then? Still a few penances, still absolution?"

There was a longer pause. Nirac, straining at the hole, clenched the edges of the wall with his little brown hands, for the Duke went on harshly, "Nay, I cannot do it! You need not rack your conscience for a compromise. The husband is my liege man and feal to me, and he is sickly - wounded - hating him as I do, yet I've helped him heal of his wounds, but my God, why does he not die?"

Nirac silently withdrew from behind the arras. Alone in the disused infirmary, he laughed softly from pure joy. "O Sainte Vierge, je te remercie de ta grande bonte!" he whispered and made a reverent sign of the cross.

In the mid-afternoon, while the Duke dined in the Grande Salle with the English, Aquitainian and Castilian nobles, Nirac set forth for the alley behind the cathedral. The little Moorish dwarf trotted beside him swinging the popinjay in its cage, while the chained monkey scampered along the ground.

Everywhere they passed, the people crowded around laughing at the monkey, poking and feeling of the dwarf and urging that he do tricks, but Nirac. would not let his charges pause until they came into the courtyard below the Swynford lodgings. There, Nirac told the dwarf to wait, while he clambered up the stone steps to the first floor.

Katherine opened to Nirac's knock. Her pale strained face lightened when she saw him perky and grinning on the threshold.

"Morbleu, but 'tis dark and morne in 'ere!" cried Nirac bowing to Hugh who was up, sitting on a chair beside a table littered with the remnants of dinner, his injured leg propped on a stool. Ellis had gone out to make them some small purchases at the fair. "One should be gay on this jour de fete" continued Nirac, noting Ellis's absence with satisfaction. "I've brought you somesing to amuse you, pour vous distraire."

"That was kind of you, Nirac," said Katherine smiling. "It's a bit dismal in here, but Hugh is so much better, I believe he'll soon be out."

"Ah bon !" Nirac looked now neither at Hugh nor Katherine, his quick eyes ran around the rooms, resting on the flagon of wine, then on the clay cup of medicine by the bedside. "The good Brother William prescribes fine drugs for you, hein?" he said. "They make you well, Sir Knight?"

Hugh grunted quite amiably. He didn't like Nirac, but he realised how dull it must be for Katherine cooped up here, and if the little jackanapes amused her-. Also he was free from

pain in the leg or gripes in the belly for the first time in weeks. "To be sure, the Grey Friar knows his craft," he agreed, "and my lady sees that I take his swill." He glanced at the clay cup which contained the black camphorated poppy juice. Nirac nodded, then turning quickly said to Katherine, "But are you not curious to know what I 'ave brought you?"

"A new song?" she smiled, knowing Nirac's many gifts, "or maybe a comic figure you've carved?"

"Nenni - belle dame ! Those would not make you laugh so much. Come to the window."

Their only window gave on to the courtyard and Katherine leaning out cried, "Oh, what is it? A manikin! Is he real? And the green bird, and a little beast jumping on the ground - oh, Hugh, you never saw so droll a sight!"

"But 'e may see it, madame. See, we'll 'elp 'im to the window, 'e can sit there and watch."

Hugh was himself curious, and while Katherine supported his leg Nirac shoved the chair over so Hugh might see out, then Nirac said, "But you, madame - you must see them close and 'ear the dwarf's so foolish jokes. Do you go down and I'll stay with Sir Hugh."

She hesitated, but Hugh said, "Go along Katherine, tell him to do a trick. I saw a monkey once in Castile could juggle nuts like a Christian. Ask him can his monkey juggle."

Katherine ran downstairs into the courtyard, where already a small crowd had gathered around the dwarf, who began to tumble across the courtyard like a leather bouncing ball.

Hugh leaned far over the sill to see and hear what he could, and when the monkey strutted and stamped its feet and slapped its tiny hands on its backside in imitation of the dwarf, Hugh let out a hoarse guffaw.

Nirac's business took only a minute. The Gascon murmured excuse, to which Hugh paid no attention, and walked into the bedroom to relieve himself into the slop jar, then with a lightning motion he snatched a leaden phial from within his tunic, and emptied grey-white powder into the clay cup which was still half filled with Brother William's drug. The alchemist had said the powder was antimoine, as is monk's-bane, but would answer Nirac's specifications even though the recipient be no monk. Nirac did not touch the cup, but with one eye on Hugh's back, he stirred hard with a little stick he had brought. The powder swirled and disappeared into the black mixture. He slipped the stick and empty phial into his tunic and walked back to the window, crying over Hugh's shoulder, "Ah, but 'ow droll - mordieu! The monkey and the popinjay they marry - see! Tis that trick make the Princess Isabel scream with mirth." Nirac's voice trembled, a sudden brief fit of shaking seized on him and passed. Hugh noticed nothing.

When the dwarf had run through all his repertoire, Katherine came back, her face flushed with laughter, and cried, "Ah, Nirac, how good of you it was to give us such a treat!"

Hugh nodded, still smiling a little. "Ay, gramerci," he said. " 'Twas courteously done. Here's silver for the dwarf" - he fumbled in his purse and held out some pennies.

Nirac hesitated only a moment before he took the money. "I must return to 'is Grace," he said, looking at Katherine. " 'Is Grace cannot do without Nirac Always 'e look for me, depend on me."

"To be sure," she said indulgently, but the happy flush faded and the gnawing pain she had forgotten for a few minutes returned.

"Le bon Dieu vous bemisse" said Nirac, still looking at Katherine, who was faintly surprised at this solemnity, but ever a creature of quick moods, the Gascon then grinned, executed a sweeping flourish of farewell, and trotted out of the door with his usual nimbleness.

"Strange little man," said Katherine, straightening up the table and rubbing off the wine stains with a cloth. "He's always been kind and pleasant to me, yet much as I've seen him, I feel I know him hardly at all."

"Bosh - these Gascons!" said Hugh. "There's naught in them worth knowing. Damn the man - he should have thought to wait and help me to bed. I grow weary."

"Ellis'll be back soon," she said soothingly, "or maybe I can manage if you lean on my shoulder. Nay, but there is Ellis."

The young squire clumped in and flung a basket on the table. He too had been enjoying himself, he had tilted at the quintain with a group of other squires on the outskirts of town, and then seen a most wondrous bull-baiting - no scurvy little sport such as it was in England but a pulse-stirring contest in which three bulls had been stabbed and four men gored. Ellis was full of it, and Hugh asked interested questions, while Katherine unpacked the basket. Ellis had brought them peaches and figs and a loaf of flat white bread imbued with garlic. Later she would get hot pork sausage up from the kitchen of the wineshop and refill the flagon for their supper. Soon this day will have passed, she thought, and the next will pass too. She would forget this morning in the garden of the inn - seal it over with wax as the bees sealed over frightening intruders in their hive. As she thought thus sensibly, grey misery enveloped her, and her lips formed words that were pushed up from the place where her mind had no control. "My dear love," she whispered, and going to the pitcher where she had placed the crumpled, withering but still fragrant sprays of jasmine, she buried her face in them.

Katherine prepared the supper. She intended to get a serving-maid to help her in a day or so, but in the meantime increased leisure for thought would be no boon.

When the vesper bells chimed out from the cathedral, they all listened for a moment and Katherine said to her husband, "Our meal is ready, Hugh - can you relish it? See what fine fruit Ellis has brought us, there's naught like that in England."

"Ay," said Hugh. "I've appetite. Give me the wine, my dear. 'Tis not so good as honest ale, but it serves."

She started to pour for him, then stopped. "Your potion, Hugh," she smiled and shook her head, "first you must have your draught."

She gave him the day cup. He took it grumbling but swallowed nearly all the contents. "Phaw!" he said with a wry face, "filthy stuff. I'll take no more of it."

"Oh, come," she said as she would have said to Blanchette,

"it's not so bad-" She took the cup and gazed into it idly, wondering as women always have, that men who delighted in blood and slaughter should be so finicking in little things. She sniffed it, thinking the smell of camphor not unpleasant, and out of curiosity would have tasted it, but seeing that there was little left and there was no knowing exactly when Brother William would return with more, she put it down, and she and Ellis served their supper.

Shortly after they had blown the candles out and Katherine still lay sleepless on her pallet, she heard Hugh give a heavy groan; then he cried out sharply. She started up and stumbled to him in the darkness. "What is it, Hugh, what's the matter?"

"I had a dream," he muttered in a thick hoarse voice. "I dreamed the pooka hound was baying for me - 'twas at Kettlethorpe - the pooka hound with fire-red eyes, it's baying near Kettlethorpe - I heard it -"

She put her hand on his forehead, which was clammy, and said, "Hugh dear - 'twas naught but bad dream, and the pooka hound does not bay for Swynfords, don't you remember? It was of the old days - -"