Katherine

Katherine started and opened her eyes. She clenched her hands on the rim of the bench. "John o' Gaunt's renounced his paramour, that's what! Shipped her off to France, or some say to one of his northern dungeons. The King commanded it."

"Nay - but - -" said a woman giggling. " Tis well known he was tired of her anyway and has found someone else, the wicked lecher."

"He'll not dare flaunt his new harlot then, for a Benedictine told me the Duke made public confession of his sins, called his leman witch and whore, then crawled on hands and knees pleading with his poor Duchess to forgive him when they met up in Yorkshire."

Katherine rose from the bench and began to run. The hunchback hurried after her.

She ran north from the town towards the sea and along the banks of the river Stiffkey, until it widened at one place into a mill pond. Here on the grassy bank by a willow tree she stopped. The mill wheel turned sluggishly, as the falling waters pushed on it splashing downward, flowing towards the sea. Katherine advanced to the brink of the pond. She gazed down into the dark brown depths where long grasses bent in the rushing water. She clasped her hands against her breasts and stood swaying on the brink.

She felt a grip on her arm, a deep gentle voice said, "No, my sister. That is not the way."

Katherine turned her head and her wild dilated eyes stared down into the calm tender brown ones of the hunchback. "Jesu, let me be!" she cried on a choking sob. "Leave me alone."

His grip tightened on her arm. "You cry on Jesus' name?" he said softly. "But you do not know what He has promised. He said not that we should not be tempested, nor travailed nor afflicted, but He promised, Thou shalt not be overcome!"

A little wind rustled through the willow fronds, mingling with the sound of the river water as it splashed against the turning mill wheel. She stared at him, while a quiver ran down her back. She did not see him clearly, his brown eyes were part of the beckoning dark depths of the pond. "That was not said for me," she whispered. "God and His Mother have cast me out!"

"Not so. It is not so," he smiled at her. "Since He has said, I shall keep you securely. You're as dearworthy a child of His as anyone."

Katherine's gaze cleared and she recoiled. Now she saw what manner of man it was who was speaking to her. A hideous little man with a hump, whose head was twisted deep into his shoulders. A man with a great purple bulbous nose, scarred by pits, and a fringe of fire-red wisps around a tonsure. She crossed herself, while terror cut her breath. An evil demon - summoned by her from the hell depths of that deep beckoning water. "What are you?" she gasped.

He sighed a little, for he was well used to this, and patiently answered. "I am a simple parson from Norwich, my poor child, and called Father Clement."

Her terror faded. His voice was resonant as a church bell, and his unswerving look met hers with sustaining strength. He wore a much darned but cleanly priest's robe, a crucifix hung from his girdle.

She stepped uncertainly back from the pond, and began to shiver.

"I'll warrant," he said calmly, "you've not eaten in a long time." He opened his pouch, took out slices of buttered barley bread, and a slab of cheese done up in a clean white napkin. "Sit down there," he pointed to a flat stone by a golden clump of wild mustard. "The mustard will flavour the food." He chuckled. "Ah, I make foolish jokes that nobody laughs at but the Lady Julian."

Katherine stared at him dumbly; after a moment, she sat down and took the food.

He saw her wince as she tried to eat and brought her water from the pond in which to soften the bread. He briskly cut the cheese into tiny slivers. While she slowly ate, he pulled a willow whistle from his pouch and with it imitated so perfectly the twitterings of starlings that three of them landed at his feet and twittered answers.

Katherine's physical weakness passed as her stomach filled, but despair rushed back. She folded the white napkin and handed it to Father Clement. "Thank you," she said tonelessly.

"What will you do now?" he asked, putting the napkin and whistle in his pouch. From the bulbous-nosed, pitted face his eyes looked at her with an expression she had seen in no man's eyes before. Love without desire, a kind of gentle merriment.

"I don't know-" she said. "There's nothing for me - nay - -" she whispered, flushing as she saw his question, "I'll not go near - the pond again. But there was no answer for me here at Walsingham, no miracle was wrought." She went on speaking because something in him compelled her to, and it was like speaking to herself. "My fearful sins are yet unshriven - my love - he that was my love now despises me, and my child - -"

Father Clement held his peace. He cocked his massive head against his humped shoulders and waited.

"The cloisters," Katherine said after a while. "There's nothing else. A lifetime of prayer may yet avail to blunt His vengeance. I'll go to Sheppey, to the convent of my childhood. I've given them many gifts through the years. They will take me as a novice."

Father Clement nodded. It was much as he had guessed. "Before you enter this convent," he said, "come with me to the Lady Julian. Speak with her awhile."

"And who is the Lady Julian?"

"A blessed anchoress of Norwich."

"Why should I speak with her?"

"Because, through God's love, I think that she will help you - as she has many - as she once did me."

"God is made of wrath, not love," said Katherine dully. "But since you wish it, I will go. It matters naught what I do."

CHAPTER XXIX

At dusk of the next day when Katherine and the humpbacked parson, Father Clement, rode into Norwich on his mule, Katherine had learned a little about the Lady Julian, though she listened without hope or interest.

Of Julian's early life in the world the priest said nothing, though he knew of the pains and sorrows that had beset it. But he told Katherine of the fearful illness that had come to Julian when she was thirty, and how that when she had been dying in great torment, God had vouchsafed to her a vision in sixteen separate revelations. These "showings" had healed her illness and so filled her with mystic joy and fervour to help others with their message that she had received permission to dedicate her life to this. She had become an anchoress in a cell attached to the small parish church of St. Julian, where folk in need might come to her.

She had been enclosed now for eight years, nor had ever left her cell.

" 'Tis dismal," murmured Katherine, "yet by misery perhaps she best shares the misery of others." "Not dismal at all!" cried Father Clement, with his deep chuckle. "Julian is a most happy saint. God has made a pleasaunce in her soul. No one so ready to laugh as Dame Julian."

Katherine was puzzled, and distrustful. She had never heard of a saint who laughed, nor a recluse who did not dolefully agonise over the sins of the world. It seemed too that though Dame Julian followed the rules prescribed for anchorites, yet these allowed her to receive visitors at times, and that Father Clement had seen her often, when he wrote down her memories of her visions, and the further teachings that came to her through the spirit.

Visions, Katherine thought bitterly. Of what help could it be to listen to some woman's visions? The bleak empty years like a winter sea stretched out their limitless miles before Katherine, and she had no will to live through them. Though the frenzied impulse by the mill pond had passed.

She could not put upon her children the shameful horror of a mother who died by her own act, yet the small Beauforts would never have known. And it were better if everyone thought her dead. The Beauforts then would be less embarrassment to their father. Hawise would care for them, the great castle staffs would care for them, and the Duke, notwithstanding that he had reviled the mother, would provide for them. Tom Swynford was a nearly grown lad and safe-berthed with the young Lord Henry. There was but one child who needed her - and Blanchette was gone.

I will hide me away, thought Katherine, at Sheppey - until I die. Nor would it be long. She felt death near in the increasing pains her body suffered, in the blurring of her sight, and the dragging weakness.

Sometime before they rode through Norwich to the hillside above the river Wensum where Father Clement's little church stood, the priest had fallen into silence. He felt how grievous was the illness of body and soul that afflicted Katherine, and he knew that she was no longer accessible to him.

Guided by Father Clement, Katherine reluctantly entered the dark churchyard behind the flint church. The sky was overcast and an evening drizzle had set in. On the south side beyond the round Saxon church tower, she dimly saw the boxlike outline of the anchorage which clung to the church wall. Breast-high on its churchyard side there was a window, closed by a wooden shutter. The priest tapped on the shutter and called in his bell-toned voice, "Dame Julian, here is someone who has need."

At once the shutter opened. "Welcoom, who'er it be that seeks me."

Father Clement gently pushed Katherine towards the window, which was obscured by a thin black cloth. "Speak to her," he said.

Katherine had no wish to speak. It seemed to her that this was a crowning humiliation, that she should be standing in a tiny unfamiliar churchyard with a hunchback and commanded to reveal her suffering, to ask for help, from some unseen woman whose voice was homely and prosaic as Dame Emma's, and who spoke moreover with a thick East Anglian burr.

"My name is Katherine," she said. Through her weary pain resentment flashed. "There's nothing else to say."

"Coom closer, Kawtherine," The voice behind the curtain was soothing as to a child. "Gi' me your hand." A corner of the black cloth lifted; faintly white in the darkness a hand was held out. Unwillingly Katherine obeyed. At the instant of contact with a firm warm clasp, she was conscience of fragrance. A subtle perfume such as she had never smelled, like herbs, flowers, incense, spices, yet not quite like these. While the hand held hers, she smelled this fragrance and felt a warm tingle in her arm. Then her hand was loosed and the curtain dropped.

"Kawtherine," said the voice, "you are ill. Before you coom to me again, you must rest and drink fresh bullock's blood, tonight, at once - and for days - -"

"By the rood, lady!" Katherine cried angrily, "I've tasted no flesh food in months. 'Tis part of my penance."

"Did our moost Dearworthy Lord Jesus gi' you the penance, Kawtherine?" There was a hint of a smile in the voice, and Katherine's confused resentment increased. Everyone knew that the sinful flesh which had betrayed her must be mortified.

Suddenly the voice changed its tone, became lower, humble and yet imbued with power. Katherine was not conscious of the provincial accent as Julian said, "It was shown to me that Christ ministers to us His gifts of grace, our soul with our body, and our body with our soul, either of them taking help with the other. God has no disdain to serve the body."

For a startled moment Katherine felt a touch of awe. "That is strange to me, lady," she said to the black curtain. "I cannot believe that the foul body is of any worth to God."

"And shall not try tonight," said the voice gently. "Father Clement?"

The priest, who had drawn away, came up to the window. Julian spoke to him at some length.

Katherine was given a chamber reserved for travellers in the rectory across the alley from the church. She was put to bed and cared for by Father Clement's old servant, a bright-eyed woman of sixty, who adored him.

They brought Katherine fresh blood from the slaughterhouse, and a bullock's liver, which they chopped up raw and blended into a mortrewe with egg, they fed her boiled dandelion greens, minced so that she need not chew. They made her eat. Katherine for the first day thought this was a worse penance than any she had undergone, but she was too weak to protest or even to wonder that Dame Julian had said she should not be bled, that it was not sensible to put in blood at one place and take it away from another.

Father Clement twinkled as he told Katherine this, and she smiled feebly, wondering how it was that a man so hideous and deformed always seemed happy. He laboured tirelessly for his parish, yet was always unhurried. He never scolded, or questioned, or exhorted. There was a sunniness about him that shone through all his clean shabby little rectory.

In four days Katherine had gained strength, her pains were less, the bluish sores on her legs had ceased oozing. She began to worry about the expense that she was giving Father Clement, but he laughed at her, saying with truth that the odd things Lady Julian had prescribed for her to eat were to be had for the asking at the shambles, while the greens came from his own garden.

"Never did I think that I should he destitute as I am now," Katherine said on a long sigh. Yet it had become a dream - the glamour and the lavish bounty of all those past years. A guilty dream.

The priest looked at her softly. "Destitute? Perhaps 'tis that you've always been. For our soul may never have rest in things that are beneath itself."

"Ah, see-" she cried bitterly. "Now at last you speak like a priest. 'Tis what Brother William would have said - God keep him - that was killed because of me - he, and others."

The priest seemed not to notice. "The Lady Julian waits for you," he said quietly. "She believes you well enough to come to her today."

Katherine had thought much about the anchoress during these days of recovery, and been astonished to find a longing to speak with her again. She went back that afternoon to the little churchyard and knocked at the cell window. The voice through the black cloth told her to come in at the door which had been unlocked.

Katherine entered Julian's cell nervously, puzzled, curious. It was but six paces long and wide, and curtained down the middle with fine blue wool. There were two windows, the "parloir" window to the churchyard, and above a wooden prie-dieu a narrow slitted window that opened into the church. Through this, Julian could see the altar and take part in the Mass. There was a small fireplace, a table and two wooden chairs on the warm brick floor. The bumpy flint walls had been painted white.

A moment after Katherine shut the door, Julian came around the blue curtain. A plain little woman, neither fat nor thin, with greying hair beneath a. white coif. She wore a soft unbleached linen gown. A woman nearing forty and so ordinary that one might see a hundred like her in any market-square, except that, as she took Katherine's hand and smiled, the cell filled with the undefinable fragrance, and at the touch of the square blunt fingers Katherine felt a strange sensation, as though there had been an iron fetter around her chest that now shattered, to let her breathe a light golden air.

"So you are the Katherine Father Clement brought," said Julian, in her comfortable slow voice. She sat down in one chair and motioned Katherine to the other. "The pains're better? Can you chew? 'Twould be a shame to lose those pretty teeth, and tell me-" She asked several frank physical questions, which Katherine answered with faint amusement and disappointment. She had come for the spiritual guidance that Father Clement seemed so certain of, and Lady Julian talked of laxatives. Yet there was still the strange sense of freedom.

"This sickness that you have," said Julian, "I too had once, when I had fasted overmuch. And was in great trouble and pain, so near death that my confessor stood over me." She glanced towards the crucifix that was mounted on her prie-dieu, and said simply, "God in His marvellous courtesy did save me."

"By the visions," said Katherine, sighing. "Father Clement told me of them."

"Ay - by the sixteen showings, but I don't know why they were vouchsafed to me. Truly it was not shown me that God loved me better than the least soul that is in grace. I'm certain here be many that never had showings, nor sight but of the common teaching of Holy Church, that love God better than I."

"It's very hard to love God," said Katharine below her breath, "when He does not love us."

"Oh Katherine, Katherine - -" Lady Julian smiled, shaking her head. "Love is our Lord's whole meaning. It was shown me full surely that ere God made us He loved us, and when we were made, we loved Him."

It was not Julian's words, which Katherine barely heard, that brought an odd half-frightened thrill. Like the first time Katherine had climbed to the top of the minster tower at Sheppey and seen the island stretching out for miles to other villages and blue water in the distance, a landscape she had not dreamed of.

She stared unbelieving at the homely broad face beneath the greying hair and wimple, for suddenly it looked beautiful, made of shining mist.

"Lady," whispered Katherine, "it must be these visions were vouchsafed to you because you knew naught of sin - not sins like mine - lady, what would you know of - of adultery - of murder - -"

Julian rose quickly and placed her hand on Katherine's shoulder. At the touch, a soft rose flame enveloped her, and she could not go on.

"I have known all manner of sin," said Julian quietly. "Sin is the sharpest scourge. And verily as sin is unclean, so verily it is a disease or monstrous thing against nature. Yet listen to what I was shown in the thirteenth vision." She moved away from Katherine. Her voice took on the low chanting note of power.

"I had been thinking of my sins, I was in great sorrow. Then I saw Him. He turned on me His face of lovely pity and He said: It is truth that sin is cause of all this pain: sin is behovable - none the less all shall be well, and all shall be well, you shall see yourself that all manner of thing shall be well. These words were said to me tenderly, showing no kind of blame. And then He said, Accuse not thyself overdone much, deeming that thy tribulation and thy woe is all thy fault: for I will not that thou be heavy or sorrowful indiscreetly. Then I understood that it was great disobedience to blame or wonder on God for my sin, since He blamed me not for it.

"And with these words, I saw a marvellous high mystery hid in God, which mystery He shall openly make known to us in heaven; where we shall truly see the cause why He suffered sin to come. For He made me see that from failure of love on our part, therefore is all our travail, and naught else."

Julian looked at Katherine and smiled. "Do you understand?"

"Nay, lady," said Katherine slowly, "I cannot believe there could be so much comfort." Julian sat down and spoke again, simply and quietly.

When Katherine left Julian's cell that day, she did not know how long she had stayed, nor clearly remember the things that had been told her, but for the time she had ceased to question. As she walked out into the little churchyard, it seemed lit with beauty. She stood bemused in a corner by a dark yew tree and saw meaning, blissful meaning in everything her eye rested on: the blue floweret of the speedwell, the moss on a gravestone, an ant that laboured to push a crumb through the grass - all these were radiant, as though she looked at them through a crystal.

She picked up a black flint pebble that seemed to glow with light like a diamond, while some of Lady Julian's words came back to her. "In this same time, our Lord showed me a spiritual sight of His homely loving. A little thing like a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and I thought what may this be? And it was answered: It lasteth and ever shall, for that God loveth it."

During that moment that she held the pebble, Katherine understood this, and why Julian had said, "After this I saw God-in a point, by which sight I saw that He is in all things, be it never so little. Nothing is done by hap or adventure - if it be hap or chance in the sight of man, our blindness is the cause."

These words echoed in Katherine's mind as she held the pebble, joy shimmered through its black flint, there was joy in the grass, the yew tree, the gravestones, the moss. Slowly it faded, and a great sleepiness came over her. She dropped the flint. She scarcely could drag her heavy limbs across the alley to her chamber in the rectory. She laid herself on the bed and slept the night through. There were no dreams.

Each day Katherine went to Julian's cell and listened, each day came back refreshed by glimpses of a love she had not known existed, though the exaltation of that moment in the churchyard did not return.

She argued sometimes, at times cried out in disbelief, unable to hide her doubts, and then indeed Julian once sighed and looked sad and humble, as she said, "All this was shown to me in three ways, Katherine, by bodily sight, by word formed in my understanding, and by spiritual sight. But this spiritual sight, I can not, and I may not, show as openly as I would. I trust in God that He will of His Goodness make you take it more spiritually than I can, or may, tell it."

Humility. Katherine saw in those days how far she had ever been from truly feeling it. She saw that she had never known the meaning of prayer. Her prayers had all been violent commands and bargainings - dictated by fear.

To Lady Julian, prayer was communion. "Prayer oneth the soul with God." And it was thanking. Giving thanks even without reward. In the fourteenth showing, Julian had heard the lovely words, "I am the ground of thy beseeching." And with these blessed words had seen a full overcoming against all our weakness and all our doubtful dreads.

Katherine, ever quick to take guilt, had then berated herself for the wrongness of her former prayers, and Julian patiently repeated, "Accuse not thyself overdone much ... I am sure that no man asks mercy and grace with true meaning, but if mercy and grace have been first given to him."

There came a day when Katherine could no longer listen without pouring out all her anguish to Lady Julian. She did not know what she said, she only heard her own voice calling out the names of those who meant for her the sharpest pain - Hugh, Blanchette and John. When she said the last name, she buried her face in her hands and sobbed.

Now she saw that though she had meant her letter of renunciation, and honestly thought to spend her life in penance, yet she had not really believed that John would let her go. Always she had felt that the miracle would happen at Walsingham, in return for her suffering, in return for giving John's betrothal ring-to the shrine. She had been sure that in some way Blanchette would be restored to her, her sins forgiven, and - -

"That your old life would start again?" asked Julian smiling. "That it would by miracle become fair and clean in all men's eyes, in God's?"

"Ay - ay - I see now that I thought so. Is it any wonder that God is so angry with me?"

"Truly, Katherine, in all the showings, I saw no manner of wrath in God, neither for short time nor for long. I saw no wrath but on man's part, and that He forgives in us."

Then Katherine cried out that if God had no wrath, why should she fear sin?

And Julian answered ever patiently, "Because as long as we be meddling with what we know is sin, we shall never see clearly the blissful countenance of Our Lord. And this is to break us in twain. For we are all in Him enclosed. And He in us. He sitteth in our soul."

Thai Katherine talked of Sheppey, the convent where she would cloister herself. "- - or even to be an anchoress like you, lady. So with true prayer I might come some day to know Him as you do - and to help others."

For the first time, a hint of sternness showed in Julian's face, for the first time she referred to herself apart from the visions, and she said quietly, "When I came here, I had no one left of my own."

Katherine did not understand her meaning then, nor why she said a moment after, "It was shown to me that we may never come to full knowing of God till we know first clearly our own soul."

That night, she saw what the Lady Julian had meant. Katherine awoke suddenly from deep sleep, and the little rectory chamber seemed to be suffused with a soft iridescent light. This light was peace. It bathed her, permeated her flesh, her bones, until her being was made of light. The confusions, the gropings, the struggles for escape were all dissolved in that light. In their place came certainty - the answer so simple, so right and inevitable and so hard.

It would be hard, but now she did not feel it so, for the light sustained her, and in her heart she heard repeated the words the Lady Julian had told her, that He had said: My darling, I am glad thou art come to me: in all thy woe I have ever been with thee; now seest thou my loving.

The next morning Katherine sought out Father Clement. He was sitting in his garden under a mulberry tree, while five children from the parish capered in front of him. He was teaching them the parts they were to play at the pageant of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin next week. He acted each part in turn for them, now squealing through his huge empurpled nose, now growling in imitation of a bear, now flapping his hands on either side his hump for a crow. The children shrieked with laughter, and called him Bo-Bo, a pet name that they had for him. They did not think him hideous, nor did Katherine. She no longer saw his deformities, as she no longer heard the burr in Lady Julian's speech.

He hushed the children as Katherine walked over to them, and looked at her with gladness.

She had washed her pilgrim's weeds and borrowed a clean white coif and shift from his servant. Her hair had grown long enough so that bronze tendrils escaped beneath the coif, and curled at her temples. She was sparkling and fresh, and smelled of the lavender she had rubbed on to her skin. Her illness had nearly left her; the priest saw that she was a lovely woman.

She stopped beneath the clustering purple mulberries, and gazed long at the children. "Father," she said, "I'm going back to Lincolnshire. To the place where I should be."

"Aha?" he said, cocking his head. "And was it not that, you told me on the road here to Norwich, that you could never, never do?"

"It was," she said. "I was wrong. Father, tonight will you hear my confession? I dare to hope that - that tomorrow - at Mass-" Her voice faltered, she drew a deep breath, and

smiled tremulously into his compassionate eyes.

The next morning in the little flint-walled church, from Father Clement's hands, Katherine received again at last the Holy Sacrament. Julian kneeling by the narrow church window of her cell shared in the Blessed Communion and, watching Katherine's rapt face, humbly knew that once more God had used her as a channel to touch another soul with the message of her visions, and a glimpse of His meaning when He had said, It is I, I that thou lovest, that thou enjoy est, that thou servest. It is I that thou longest for, it is I that is all.

Exaltation would fade, the wanhope and doubtful dreads of the world would seep back, but whatever befell, Katherine would never be totally bereft again. This Julian knew.

Later that morning, Katherine set out on the road west across Norfolk, bound for Lincolnshire. She rode on Father Clement's mule. The priest and Lady Julian had lent her money for food and housing on the journey. This money and the mule would be returned after she reached Kettlethorpe.

In the leave-taking, Katherine tried to tell them of her gratitude, but they would not let her. Instead, in the tiny fragrant cell, Lady Julian had given her a hearty kiss on the cheek and much practical advice about proper diet and rest.

Father Clement, while he stood on the stone step outside his rectory, had been equally bracing. He cracked his little jokes and eased the difficult parting moment with brisk directions as to the best road and what to do when Absalom, the mule, baulked.

Katherine was turning to put her foot in the stirrup when the priest said in the same brisk voice, "And here is something that once belonged to you - will you take it now?" He held out his open hand. On the palm lay the Queen's little silver brooch.

"But I cast it away," she cried, "in Walsingham."

"Ay, and I picked it up. 'Tis yours."

She flushed. Pain had gone from the memory of that day in Walsingham, but yet there was a taint of shame. " 'Twas because of the motto I threw it away," she said.

He nodded, looking up at her quizzically, his head pressed back against the hump. "So I thought."

She stared at the brooch, thinking of the anguish she had suffered and of that moment by the mill-pond. She looked from the little lathe and plaster rectory across to the churchyard, where she could see Lady Julian's cell outlined against the blue September sky.

She reached out and took the brooch, remembering what Julian one day had said of faith: "For it is naught else but a right understanding, with true belief, and sure trust of our Being; that we are in God, and God in us." No more. No demands for proof, no promise that sorrow would be banished. Nothing but sure trust of our Being.

She pinned the brooch at the neck of her black habit, and looked down at the little humpbacked priest, at his purple-pitted nose, the bristly red tonsure on his misshapen head, the long apelike arms and the merry tender brown eyes.

"I remember what you quoted from Dame Julian's visions, that afternoon by the mill-pond," she said. "I did not know that I heard it then, but I've thought much on it since."

"And I," said the priest laughing, "do not remember what I said. This often happens with me. Alas, I fear I talk too much. 'Tis a parson's failing."

She shook her head, thinking how strange it was to feel pure affection, and how that never until she had come here had she received or given an entirely undemanding love, nor known the lack. "It was this you said, and Lady Julian has told me too. 'Our dearworthy Lord said not, Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be afflicted, but He said, Thou shalt not be overcome!" Father Clement, of all the teachings, this seems to me the most beautiful."

Glowing strength stayed in Katharine's heart that day, while she rode her mule along the fair Norfolk road towards King's Lynn. It was Michaelmas. The crisping air sparkled like a fountain, it smelled of wood smoke, and of the succulent geese that were roasting in many a brick oven for the feast. In the woods and thickets, the leaves were flecked with gold or russet; beneath the beeches and giant oaks, pigs snuffled greedily, rooting for the acorn mast, between clumps of creamy woodbine.

The following day she entered the Breckland heaths. These chalky wastes teemed with rabbits and pheasants so tame that they did not hide while the mule clopped by between the outspread brilliance of the orange gorse, the fading pink and mauve of heather.

Near Castle Acre with its hostel, where she would find night's lodging, Katherine's road crossed the Palmers' Way to Walsingham. She had been alone for some time on the westbound road, but at the crossing a band of pilgrims came along and greeted her courteously. They wore shiny tin Ws fastened to their broad hats, and lead medals of the annunciation on their chests, for they had visited the shrine and were homeward bound. They assumed that Katherine was en route there, and they vied with each other in shouting out the glories she would see.

"No wonder like it in this world!" cried a small dark woman with shining eyes. " 'Tis Our Lady Herself, you know, has taken up Her home in Norfolk, when the infidels forced her to flee from Nazareth. No one has ever been to Her but She did help. Look, Dame Pilgrim!" cried the little woman. She rolled back her grey sackcloth sleeve to show a shrunken withered arm. "See!" she cried again while her birdclaw fingers moved one after the other. "Since I was a weanling and God smote me with sickness, these fingers've not moved, but whilst I knelt before Our Lady and gazed at the Holy Milk, the miracle happened. Life tingled in my hand."

"For sure, you were most blessed," said Katherine, bleakly.

The pilgrims passed on southward, Katherine flicked the mule with her staff and continued towards Castle Acre, but the peace which had sustained her ever since Norwich was gone. She remembered this crossroads and how she passed here at dawn of the day she got to Walsingham. How certain she had been that there would be a miracle for her! The woman with the shrunken hand had said, "No one has ever been to Her but She did help." There had been no help at all, nothing but further suffering. Ay - what horror would have happened to me had it not been for Father Clement?

Then of a sudden she heard the priest's laugh, and she heard Dame Julian speaking as she had the first day in that little cell. "Katherine, Katherine - well I saw that nothing is done by hap or chance, but by the foreseeing wisdom of God. 'Tis our blindness when we do not see that."

Blindness! Once again it was as though a shutter opened. For there had been a miracle at Walsingham. The Blessed Lady had answered with a marvel as great and yet as simple as any She had wrought. What else but marvel was it that Father Clement had that day ridden to the Austin priory in Walsingham on behalf of one of his parishioners in Norwich? That he had seen Katherine drop the Queen's brooch, and understood and watched over her, that he had taken her to Julian for cure of body and spirit?

What a weary time it took to learn how homely and direct the answer was, that it needed no thunderbolts and naming wonders for Him to fulfil his promise, I will keep thee full securely. That He had as many ways of loving as there were droplets in the ocean, the ocean that was yet all one sea.

Katherine rode her mule through the sunset of the quiet rolling heaths, and her heart filled with thanking. Three times, in three different ways, the sure light had come to her: in the churchyard, in the rectory chamber and now on the Norfolk road.

The fourth day after, Katherine crossed the fens and mounted the high ridge way that led to Lincoln. Already she could see the rooftops on the distant hill, and the triple spires of the cathedral against the cloud-massed sky.

She turned off the road at Coleby and rode through the gates to inspect her little manor. She had not been near it for nine years. The reeve that her Kettlethorpe steward had put in did not know her and jeered when she said that she was Lady Swynford.

"Ye're crazed, widow. Lady Swynford don't go riding about barefoot on a mule! Why dame, Lady Swynford's the Duke o' Lancaster's doxie, and goes clothed in jingling gold - leastways she did. I've heard tell in Lincoln that the Duke's tired of her - but that's as may be, get ye gone. We've no room for tricksy beggars here. Some hostel in Lincoln'll take ye."

Katherine went on her way. Soon the clouds merged and dipped lower. It began to rain, a cold October rain that soaked through her mantle. In time she entered the familiar village of Wigford, the Lincoln suburb that lay on the near bank of the Witham. On the left, in the centre of the long high street, there was a handsome stone mansion, with elegant carved corbels, an oriel window, and above the door a shield with the Duke's coat of arms painted on it. Katherine knew this house; she had dined here with John on the miserable visit to Kettlethorpe two years ago. It belonged to the Suttons, the wealthy wool merchants whom she had first met on the road to Bolingbroke in the plague time when the Duchess died.

She looked up at the Lancaster arms. The Suttons, having none of their own, proudly blazoned those of their feudal overlord. She hesitated, unable to control a coward shrinking. Tomorrow would do as well. She still had a few pence, and could spend the night in town. One more night before plunging back into all the humiliating things that must be done. Besides, she thought with feeble self-deception, like the reeve at Coleby, the Suttons might not know her.

Katherine got off the mule and tied it to the hitching ring. Of course, the Suttons would know her: they had seen her many times. The Suttons were Lincoln's foremost citizens. They had been mayors, members of Parliament. Thomas the clerk was now Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral. They knew everything that went on in town and could best answer the questions she must ask.

She knocked. The door was opened by a liveried varlet, who did not hide his astonished disapproval at her appearance and was reluctant to admit her until she gave him two pennies, whereupon he thawed. He said that old Master John had gone to Calais on business for the staple, and Master Thomas was at the bishop's palace, that Master Robert was at home. But occupied. A deputy of woolmongers were with him.

"Tell him please that 'tis Lady Swynford, and I will wait." Katherine sat down on the wayfarer's bench in a cubbyhole beside the door.

She waited a long time. When Robert Sutton came at last, walking ponderously from his counting-house to the corner of the Hall where Katherine sat, she saw that he was embarrassed and uncertain how to greet her. Above his glossy dark brown beard, his plump cheeks were flushed. He took one scandalized look at her bedraggled robe, her feet, the wet limp coif that covered her short hair, and his eyes slid away, their thick lids lowered. He fingered the gold chain around his neck, he twitched a fold of his maroon velvet, squirrel-furred sleeve. " 'Tis a surprise, lady - -"

A very great surprise, since he had heard that the Duke had bundled her off abroad, sealed her away in some French convent. He had spent the last ten minutes, not with the woolmongers, but alone, wondering if he should receive her.

Katherine drew a deep breath and laced her hands together. The last time she had seen him, he had been deferential, charming, his eyes moist with covert desire. Now his full handsome face was wary, and he tapped his scarlet shoe impatiently. Ay, it will be like this, she thought. From now on.

"Master Robert, I shall not take much of your time. There are only a few questions I'd like to ask you. I've been a long while on pilgrimage, and know nothing of what has happened in the world."

He flushed again and hawked in his throat.

She saw that he wondered if she even knew of the Duke's renouncement and spoke quickly. "The Duke and I have parted, it was our mutual wish and decision."

He did not believe the latter, but he grunted uneasily. Her low voice softened him, and her dignity. As she spoke, he began to see glimpses of the beauty he had so enviously admired. But she must be thirty now, he told himself sharply, and a discarded mistress - and if it were money that she wanted-

"Master Robert," she said quietly, "have you heard aught of my children?"

"The bastards?" he said startled.

"The Beauforts," she answered.

He swallowed. "Why, I believe they're well - at Kenilworth." His wife, in fact, had been buzzing, since the juicy news about the Duke and Lady Swynford had filtered to Lincoln. Delighted with Lady Swynford's downfall, she had triumphantly garnered every titbit that travellers could tell them.

"How does my manor of Kettlethorpe?" said Katherine. "I know our wool goes through your warehouse."

"The manor does fairly, I think," he said frowning. "At least the clips are up to standard. By God's nails, lady," his jaw dropped, "you don't mean to come back and live at Kettlethorpe!"

"Ah, but I do," said Katherine, smiling faintly. "Where else should I go but my own manor, where my people have need of me? Where else should I bring my children, who have no honest claim on anyone else in the world?"

The wool merchant was dumbfounded. "Surely you mean to sell?" And then take the veil, he thought, far away where no one knows her.

"I will not sell the Swynford holdings," said Katherine, "that were my husband's and belong to my Swynford children - children," she repeated on a lower wavering note.

Sutton looked at her. "I heard the little maid Blanchette was betrothed to some great knight, and already she had a dowry from the Duke. She'll not need Kettlethorpe."

Katherine could not answer. She could not force herself to say, "I don't know where Blanchette is, no one knows but God. But the home she loved and that I took her from will be always waiting."

"Nevertheless," she said, "I shall live at Kettlethorpe. And now, Master Robert, I do humbly beg one thing of you."

He stiffened, crossed his velvet arms over his great barrel chest. "What is it, Lady Swynford?"

"That you will write in my name to the Duke. He has respect for you. He would not accept a letter from me. But I know that he listens to justice. Will you tell him what I propose to do, and will you request in my name that he send me my Beaufort children? Tell him that, when this is done, he shall never be troubled with me again."

Robert Sutton demurred for some time. He pointed out the practicality of her scheme. Her steward was in the Duke's pay, and would undoubtedly be withdrawn. It was folly to think she could run the manor herself, especially since her serfs were known to be unruly - why even here there had been a taint of the iniquitous revolt. Only the most violent suppressive measures had kept the villeins in their places. No doubt she understood nothing of this, having been on pilgrimage so long, but he assured her it was so. Katherine made no reply, except to say that none-the-less she would try to run Kettlethorpe herself.

Then Sutton with increasing embarrassment hinted at the discomfort of her position here; she would be ostracized. The goodwives of Lincoln would be outraged at the reappearance of so notorious a woman, and with her bastards too. Moreover, the bishop was a narrow, strait-laced man with a horror of scandal.

Katherine grew paler as he talked, her grey eyes darkened. But she remarked only that Kettlethorpe was isolated enough, and she would try to trouble no one.

Sutton ended by doing as she wished. He summoned a clerk and dictated the letter to the Duke. When he had finished, a much warmer feeling towards Katherine came over him He could not help but admire her courage, and too, a woman in her position would be grateful for a friend, for a discreet protector. Ay, it was true and unfortunate that Kettlethorpe was isolated, but not so far away that a trip might not be made occasionally. He looked sideways at the slender bare ankles, the faint outline of high firm breasts beneath the hideous black robe, at the cleft chin, the wide voluptuous mouth.

When the clerk had gone, Sutton glanced back into the Hall, saw no one there but servants laying the table. He put his damp hot hand on her bare arm and squeezed. His beard brushed her cheek as he whispered, "You can count on Robert de Sutton, sweet heart, I'll see that you get along."

"Thank you for all your kindness," she said, moving away. "I must go, Master Robert, go home."

Blessed Mary, it would be hard, she thought, as she rode Absalom across the Witham bridge and turned west along the Fossdyke for Kettlethorpe. She needed the Sutton goodwill, for business reasons, as well as for mediation with the Duke. And on the whole she had always liked Master Robert. Yet would it be possible to keep his goodwill, and still deny all the reward which she saw that he would expect?

Hard. The radiance of those revelations had inevitably receded. It shone still, but behind a veil of outer life with its niggling annoyances, worries, hurts. She was no longer simply "Katherine," she must adjust again to the various labels that the world would give her, and the demands fair and unfair that it would make.

She turned north at Drinsey Nook and saw the black forest ahead. The forest where Hugh had hunted, the forest at which she had gazed from the dank solar for so many unhappy years. Soon in the winter the wolves would howl again. She rode through the iron gates that marked the manor road. The mile-long avenue of wych-elms was unchanged; she noted the flocks grazing on her demesne lands, heard a shepherd's shout and the barking of a.dog.

Ahead on the right stood the tithe barn and the little church where lay Nichola, Gibbon - and Hugh. To the left, the shabby manor house where Blanchette had been born, where John had come that morning and saved the baby from Lady Nichola.

The bridge was up, the manor dark. When had it ever welcomed her? She pulled the mule over to the old mounting block, and stepped out of the stirrups. She stood there with her hand on a corner of the gatehouse, looking at the church, at the huddled row of cots that were the village.

You've but to call out to the gate-ward, she thought. But she did not call. She stood there until a small boy came trudging down the lane with an enormous load of faggots on his back. He started and crossed himself when he saw a black figure standing on the mounting block, and Katherine said, "Don't be afraid, lad, I'm Lady Katherine Swynford, this is my home."

The boy gave a sort of snuffling cry, dropped his faggots, and pelted towards the vill, shouting out something Katherine could not hear. That load is too heavy for a child like that, she thought, staring at the faggots. The rain changed to mist. Raw white fog curls floated up from the Trent. Her fingers gripped tight on the rough cold stone beneath her hand. She descended from the block and walked around beneath the gatehouse window. She called, "Gate-ward! Ho, gate-ward!"

There was some movement in the gate loft, a man's voice answered, but it was lost in the pound of running footsteps from the vill. A little man with flying light hair ran towards her and others followed him. "Welcome, dearest lady. Welcome. For sure I told 'em ye'd be coming back some day, would they be patient."

"Cob," she whispered. "Ay, I've come back - -"

"They've been praying for it every day." He jerked his head towards the group behind him. She could not see their separate faces, but she felt their quivering expectancy.

"When I told 'em what ye did for me, what ye'd been through in Lunnon, I told 'em ye went on pilgrimage - oh lady, they've been waiting for ye. 'Tis bad here now - not for me that am a freeman," Cob interjected proudly, "but the unfree - steward's mostly drunk. 'Tis cruel - -"

Katherine lifted her head and looked past Cob to the crowd of her silent, watchful people. "I shall try to make you all glad that I am home," she said.

Part Six (1387-1396)

"And after winter, followeth green May."

(Troilus and Criseyde).

CHAPTER XXX

On Lincoln town's high hill the raw March wind flew incessantly. It chilled bones, reddened noses, afflicted with snuffles and coughs the venerable bishop and the worshipful Mayor John Sutton as well as the ragged beggars who whined for alms in the minster's magnificent Galilee porch.

Wind or no wind - and the citizens were used to it - folk were all out in the streets, frantically nailing banners, greens and coloured streamers to the fronts of houses. It was the twenty-sixth of March, 1387, and King Richard and his Queen Anne were coming to Lincoln that night, the first time that Lincoln had ever been so honoured in the ten years of Richard's reign. The excitement was tremendous. The ostensible reason for this visit was that he and the Queen were to be admitted into the Fraternity of Lincoln Cathedral on the morrow. The actual reason, as many knew, was that Richard had set out on a goodwill tour through all his land. He had felt his popularity slipping, he had been having trouble with commons and lords alike, and with his Uncle Thomas of Woodstock, now Duke of Gloucester - particularly since his Uncle John, the Duke of Lancaster, was at long last in Castile, had been there for a year with Duchess Costanza and their daughter, and his two girls by the Duchess Blanche.

Richard's arrival affected Katherine too. During the six years since her return, she had seldom left Kettlethorpe, nor would have cared to do so now, but the King had commanded it.

On this bleak, windy afternoon, Katherine was sewing by the fire in the pleasant Hall of her town house on Pottergate, just inside the cathedral close. Her lap was filled with a sapphire velvet pool while she put the finishing gold stitches on the mantle she would wear to greet the King. Her sister Philippa sat in an arm-chair, propped with pillows, listlessly pleating a fine gauze veil. Hawise stood behind the kitchen screen pounding almonds into honey for a marchpane while keeping a watchful eye on the housemaids. Little Joan played on the hearth with her kitten. For some time there had been silence, except for Hawise's pounding and the crackle of the fire. The wind howled outside but there was no draught. A good snug house, Katherine thought contentedly.

This was the same house that the Duke had taken for her fifteen years ago when their John Beaufort had been born here, secretly. Three years ago she had decided that the elder boys, John and Harry, would benefit by spending the winter months in Lincoln, where the priests at the newly established Cantilupe Chantry took day scholars. So she had leased this house again. Whereupon the outraged citizenry had shown their displeasure by breaking into her walled close looting and beating the servants.

This was the culmination of many unpleasant incidents, which Katherine had borne with patience. In truth her burdens during these years had been even heavier than she had anticipated. Though her parting from the Duke was known to everyone, she continued to be reviled. Not only moral indignation motivated the folk of Lincoln, but resentment because of city quarrels between the Duke's constable at the castle and the town.

Katherine held herself apart, tried to administer her properties wisely and do the best thing for her little Beauforts. But the vandalism to her Pottergate house was another matter, since it had endangered the boys. She appealed by letter to the King. Richard responded promptly and gallantly, had sent a commission to investigate the charges, and fine the offenders. After that, she had been let alone. Entirely alone. Lincoln folk looked through her when they saw her on the street.

It might be because of that incident three years back, or because Richard had been intrigued by the little mystery when she met him outside Waltham and rescued Cob, or because he thought special notice of her would annoy his enemies - one never knew with Richard. In any case, he had sent word that Katherine was to dine at the bishop's palace on the morrow when the royal party would be there.

The three women in Katherine's Hall were all thinking of the royal visit. "Oh - doux Jesu - Katherine," Philippa sighed, lifting her thin, vein-corded hand and letting it fall despondently. "If only he would present you to the Queen. Then, then, your position might be better here."

Katherine put down her needle and looked at her sister with deep sorrow. Philippa faded daily. Sometimes she suffered much pain from the canker lump in her breast. Her rosy face was shrunken, her eyelids purple, feebleness had blunted her decisive nature. "But the King would not do that, you know, Pica cherie," said Katherine gently. "I don't mind, and I shall as least see her. I'll tell you all about her."

Philippa sighed again. "Anne, Anne, Queen Anne," she said fretfully. "They say she's ugly, with her fat German cheeks, her thick neck. Yet they say he adores her. 'Tis strange - and no heir either - five years - Richard, of course - one always doubted he could - -" Her voice trailed off.

Joan, who had been quiet with her kitten, suddenly looked up at Katherine with big-eyed earnestness. "Mama, why does Sir Thomas hate the King?"

Katherine laughed as mothers do when their children say something precocious, a little embarrassing. "Why, I'm sure he doesn't. What an idea!" She bent down quickly and tied a wisp of blue velvet around the kitten's neck. "There, look at Mimi, isn't she pretty!"

But Joan was not a baby, to be so easily distracted. She was eight, intelligent and practical. A dark pansy-eyed child, round and red-cheeked, she looked much as her Aunt Philippa had, years ago, though she was prettier and had her mother's wide full mouth. "Thomas hates the King," she insisted. "I heard him say so, last year when he was here. He said the King was womanish, soft-bellied and double-tongued as an adder."

"Joan!" cried mother and aunt sharply. The child paid no attention to her aunt, who was usually cross, but she had no wish to provoke her mother's rare displeasure. She hung her head and picked up the kitten.

Katherine, who was always just, stroked the dark curls. "What ever you heard, mouse, forget it. You're old enough to understand that it's dangerous - and discourteous - to say such things about our King. Come, here's a needle for you, let me see what nice stitches you can make."

She gave the delighted child a corner of the velvet mantle and some gold thread. She resumed her own stitching and thought resignedly that the remark sounded like Tom, though she scarcely saw her eldest son, and knew little of what he thought.

Thomas Swynford was almost nineteen now, and a knight. He still served Henry of Bolingbroke, and what emotions he felt seemed to be for his lord. Tom had made two visits to Kettlethorpe since Katherine had come home, had approved, on the whole, her management of his inheritance, loftily ignored his bastard brothers and sisters, and been off again. Katherine knew that he had a dutiful fondness for her, and was also much ashamed of her reputation. He was teller than Hugh had been, but he had the same dusty ram's-wool hair, the same secretiveness. They had one clash. Tom had been angry when he arrived at Kettlethorpe and found that Katherine had been freeing her serfs. She knew better than to argue with him or put forth idealistic reasons, had given him proof instead that a manor worked by free, and devoted, tenants produced more efficiently than one run on the old servile system. Tom had grudgingly scanned the accounts, and ultimately agreed.

Yes, she thought, Tom is a good enough lad. None of her children had given her real anxiety - except - The years had passed without word. All reason demanded acceptance of Blanchette's death in the Savoy - and yet the ache, the void and the question were still there.

The minster bell began to clang for vespers. "The boys will soon be here," said Katherine gladly.

"Ay." Hawise stuck her head around the screen. "And I'd best be hiding me marchpane, them lads'd steal sweeties off the plate o' God himself. Lady," she said severely to Katherine, "put by your sewing, ye mustn't redden your eyes, when ye very well know who's coming to see ye - -"

"Oh Hawise," protested Katherine, with a laugh that mingled affection and exasperation, "you make pothers over nothing."

Hawise snorted rebelliously. Stouter, redder, and nearly toothless, none the less, Hawise was an unchanging rock. Stubborn as a rock too, at times.

"Ye'll not keep him dangling, I should hope!" she cried, wiping her hands on her apron, and stalking up to Katherine.

"By the Virgin, even Katherine couldn't be such a fool!" said Philippa with sudden energy. "Not if she really gets this chance." Philippa and Hawise were at one on this issue. Since the former had come to live with her sister two years ago, these determined women had learned to respect each other.

"Why you both should think he calls here for - for any special reason, I'm sure I don't know," said Katherine, defensively, and as they both opened their mouths for argument, she indicated Joan and shook her head. "Please - -"

Hawise shrugged gathering, up the mantle. "I'll do the last stitches - sweeting, ye're not going to wear that coif! It hides your hair. I'll bring ye the silver fillet."

"Thank God, Hawise has sense," sighed Philippa, lying back on the pillows. "It comforts me to know you'll have her, after I'm gone."

"Don't, dear - that's foolish," said Katherine quickly. "You'll be better when you've taken that betony wine the leech left."

Philippa shook her head and closed her eyes.

Katherine sighed deeply. I shall have to summon Geoffrey soon, she thought. He was living in Kent and dabbling in politics. He and Philippa were happier apart, but the separation was amicable as always, and he would be deeply shocked when he heard of his wife's condition.

Katherine picked up a distaff and began to spin abstractedly while she faced another more immediate worry. What shall I do about Robert Sutton, what is best? She had no real doubt as to the purpose of the wool merchant's announced visit this afternoon. The last time she had seen him he would have declared himself had she not managed to put him off, speaking - as though casually - about his wife, who was then but two months dead. God had helped her through these years. After an embarrassing time with Robert at the beginning, when she had thoroughly dashed all of his amorous hopes, they had settled into a friendly business relationship. Not truly friendly on his part, for Katherine knew he had fallen as deeply in love with her as his cautious, pompous nature would allow.

Katherine twirled the spindle and tried to think coolly. Marriage, honourable marriage with one of Lincoln's foremost citizens. The slandering tongues would be silenced, in public anyway. The lonely struggle would be over, she would be rich, secure. And the children - would it help them? Hawise and Philippa said "Of course." Katherine was not so sure. Robert was a possessive man, her anxious eye had seen indications that he resented the children. Still, she thought, it might be that she imagined his resentment. All her inmost self constantly sought arguments against this practical decision.

Her heart cried out that she did not love him, that the thought of lying in his arms sickened her. Reason answered that at thirty-six she should be finished with youthful passions and love-longings, that stubborn fidelity to a dream long past was stupid.

By day, it was only when she saw his traits in his children that she thought of the Duke. Young John looked most like him, the tawny gold hair, the arrogant grace of movement. But Harry had his voice, deep, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes so caressing, that it turned her heart over. They all had his intense blue eyes, except Joan.

But by night, sometimes she was with him in dreams. In these dreams there was love between them, tenderness greater than there had really been. She awoke from these with her body throbbing and a sense of agonising loss.

She had had no direct communication with him in these years, but he had been just, as she had known he would. There had been legal documents: severance papers sent through the chancery, which allowed her to keep the properties he had previously given her, and made her a further grant of two hundred marks a year for life "in recognition of her good services towards my daughters, Philippa of Lancaster and Elizabeth, Countess of Pembroke." No mention of his Beaufort children, but Katherine understood very well that this generous sum was to be expended for their benefit, and scrupulously did so.

Finally there had been a fearsomely legal quit-claim in Latin which the Duke's receiver in Lincoln translated for her. Its purport was a repudiation of all claims past, present and future which might be made on Katherine by the Duke or his heirs, or that she might make on him. Merely a matter of form and mutual protection, explained the receiver coldly, and added that His Grace with his usual beneficence had ordered that two tuns of the finest Gascon wine be delivered at Kettlethorpe as a final present.

So that was how it ended, those ten years of passionate love. A discarded mistress and her bastards, well enough provided for; a repentant adulterer who had returned to his wife. A common tale, one old as scripture. The Bishop of Lincoln had not failed to point this out in a sermon, with a reference to Adam and Lilith, and a long diatribe about shameless, scheming magdalenes. This sermon was preached at Katherine during the first hullabaloo after her return.

Later the bishop's sensibilities had not been so delicate when Katherine leased the house on Pottergate from the Dean and chapter for a sum double its worth; but she no longer attended Mass in the cathedral, she went instead to the tiny parish church of St. Margaret across the street.

She could not have endured the cruel humiliation that continually assailed her without the memory of Lady Julian, and the golden days in Norfolk. "This is the remedy, that we be aware of our wretchedness and flee to our Lord: for ever the more needy that we be, the more speedful it is to draw nigh to Him." These words always helped, yet on this problem of Robert Sutton she had received no answer. The serene certainty which she had come to rely on after prayer failed her in this.

That afternoon, in anticipation of the wool merchant's visit, Katherine kept her three boys with her. Though they were wild to get out on the exciting streets to watch the preparations for the King's procession, she had asked them to stay awhile, partly because they gave her protection, partly to observe closely how Robert would treat them.

John understood at once. The moment she mentioned her expected visitor, he drew his mother away from the younger boys and putting his hands on her shoulders looked steadily into her face. "Are you going to consent, my mother?" he asked. He was almost fifteen, taller than she was now, broad-shouldered and manly in his school uniform of grey cloth. But she knew how he longed to change it for armour, how he longed for knighthood and deeds of valour, for the life he saw his legitimate half-brothers lead, Henry of Bolingbroke and Tom Swynford.

"Johnny - I don't know," she said sighing. "What shall I do?"

" 'Twould make it easier for you!" he said slowly. Under the new golden fuzz his fair cheeks flushed. "I can't protect you as I would." He gulped and flushed redder, began to twiddle with the flap of his quill case. "But I will! Wait, you'll see! I'll earn my knighthood some way. Mother, I can best all the lads tilting at the quintain. Mother, let me enter the Saint George Day's tournament at Windsor, let me wear plain armour - no one shall guess that I'm - I'm-" Baseborn. He did not say it, it hovered in the air between them.

"We'll see, dear," she said, trying to smile. John's dreams were impractical, but he should at least be attached to some good knight as squire, someone who would honour his royal blood and not take advantage of his friendless position.

And the two other boys. She looked at Harry, sprawled on his stomach by the fire, reading as usual. He had ink on his duckling-yellow forelock, ink stains and penknife cuts on his grimy hands. A true scholar was Harry, with a keen shrewd mind beyond his years. He gulped knowledge insatiably, and yet retained it. He was determined to go to Cambridge, to Peterhouse, and train for minor orders at least; any further advancement in the clergy would take great influence - and money. A bastard could not advance in the Church without them. Bastardy. How often had she tried to console the elder boys as they had grown into realisation of the barrier that held them back from their ambitions, pointing out that they were not nameless, that their father had endowed them with a special badge, the Beaufort portcullis, and a coat of arms, three royal leopards on a bar. She reminded them that William of Normandy, England's conqueror, was not true-born. These arguments seemed to comfort the boys. At least they had both ceased to distress her with laments. But they were thoughtful of her always. In their different ways, they loved her dearly.

Tamkin was still too young to fret about his birth. He was a happy-go-lucky child anyway, and at ten lived in a boy's world of sport and play. A healthy young puppy, Tamkin, and at the moment engaged in teasing Harry by rolling dried acorns across his book. This ended in a scuffle, and then a rough-house. Chairs were overturned, the floor rushes flew about the pommelling, shouting whirl of arms and legs when Robert Sutton walked in.

"By God, lady!" he cried above the rumpus, " 'Tis like the mad cell at the Malandry in here! Your lads show you scant respect."

Tamkin and Harry disentangled themselves abruptly. They stood up panting, red-faced. "We mean our lady mother no disrespect, Master Robert," said Harry arranging his torn tunic, and eyeing the wool merchant coldly.

Robert, glancing at Katherine's watchful face, changed his tone. "Good, good. I'm sure you don't. Boys will be boys, ha? I've brought you lads something." His full swimming eyes veered to include John who stood very stiff and quiet beside his mother. "It or they rather, are in the courtyard, waiting for you."

"Oh what, what?" cried Tamkin jumping up and down.

"Go and see," said the merchant benevolently.

John and Harry gave him a restrained, considering look, but they went off with their excited little brother.

"My best hound bitch, Tiffany, has lately whelped," Sutton explained to Katherine, sitting down opposite her. "I've brought each of your lads a pup. The strain have the keenest noses in Lincolnshire."

"That's very good of you, Master Robert," said Katherine with sincere gratitude. The boys had no blooded hunting dogs, and made do with the Kettlethorpe mongrels.

"And I've brought Joan a yellow singing bird that came from the coast of Fez. She must keep it warm and tend it well."

"Ay - and thank you. It'll delight her," said Katherine.

He was not normally perceptive, but with regard to Katherine this middle-aged passion that had come to him made him observant. He saw a shadow in her lovely grey eyes, and a tightness about the mouth which still retained the curves of youth. He put his pudgy hand on his velvet-draped knees and leaning forward said anxiously, "What troubled you, just then, sweetheart?"

He is good, she thought, he is kind, if the boys are jealous they'll get over it. I'll say yes, but I must be frank with him in all things first.

"It was this," she said speaking with effort. "I had a child - once - who loved singing birds - Blanchette - -"

"To be sure, and I remember the little red-haired maid, years ago at Kettlethorpe," said Robert heartily. "Too bad she died, God rest her soul." Pity it wasn't one or more of the bastards died, he thought. Ah well, one must take the rough with the smooth.

As Katherine did not speak but gazed into the fire, he said on a brisker note, "You must forget the past. It does no good to brood."

"No, of course not." She turned and looked at him. At the sleek curls of beard on his well-fed jowls, at the network of tiny purple veins in his cheeks, at the heavy gold chain around his massive crimson velvet shoulders, at the badges of office on his arm - former mayor, member of Parliament, master woolmonger - at the heavy-lidded, slightly bloodshot eyes that answered her gaze with kindling eagerness.

"It does no good to brood," she repeated, "and I'll try to forget the past."

"I'll make you!" he cried thickly. "Katherine, you know what I've come to say. We're not children. You shall be Mistress Sutton. By God, you shall be mayor's wife next year - when Father's out and I'm re-elected. You shall hold your head up in this town, and be damned to all of them. They dare not gainsay a Sutton. I'll not say I haven't thought twice about it, and my father and brother - well, no need to go into that, they'll do what I tell 'em to. We Suttons stick together and they have to admit 'tis not as though you came to me penniless. Nay - I've shown 'em that the Beauforts are provided for, and you have property, a tidy parcel. You'll soon see how your manors'll flourish when I've full control. Not but what you've acted cleverly enough for a female. As you know, I was against your freeing the serfs - but it's not worked out so badly, I'll admit, long as they pay their rents. But you can get more out of the manors than you do. There's a new breed o' Cotswolds I shall try at Kettlethorpe, I think the pasturage near Foss-

dyke'd suit 'em and-" It occurred to him that, women being what they were, this was perhaps not the most effective of wooings. He cleared his throat and said, "Well, 'tis no secret to you that I've long wanted you in my bed, and if you'll come no other way, I'm willing to wed." Katherine laughed.

The merchant was divided between delight at the pretty sound of it and a natural annoyance.

"What's so funny?" he said stiffly. " 'Tis not, my dear, as though you had noble blood, to be sure you'll be plain Mistress Sutton, instead of 'Lady' - but I hardly think - -"

"Nay, nay - Master Robert," she put her hand on his knee, "I've no thought like that, I come of simple yeoman stock, and will be grateful to be Mistress Sutton - -"

"Then you will?" he cried. He lumbered to his feet and caught her up around the waist. He kissed her hotly, hard and insistent.

'Tis not so bad, she thought. He smelt of pomade and cloves; the feel of male strength and of desire, after so long a chastity, was not disagreeable. As he kissed her, her pulses quickened a little. Ay, I might learn to love him, at least enough - she thought. I shall try.

Next day the royal procession to the cathedral justified all Lincoln's hopes of gorgeousness, it also justified mounting rumours of Richard's unbridled extravagance, but today nobody bothered about that.

John Sutton, the mayor, in his scarlet robes came first, his aldermen followed, and the guild members with their banners, and the Church dignitaries, culminating in the bishop, ageing now, but as haughty, tight-mouthed and supercilious as ever. These were familiar sights to Lincoln and hardly worth standing out in the cold for; but the King and Queen and their retinue were another matter. Never had anyone imagined such a dazzle of cloth of gold, of pure silver tissue, such yards of ermine to trail in the muddy streets, such flashing of jewels.

Thanks to Robert Sutton's influence, Katherine watched from a bench in the minster nave as the procession moved sedately along between the clustered marble columns towards the north-east transept and turned left for the chapter house, where the ceremony would take place.

She watched with emotions more painful than she had anticipated when familiar figures marched by. Michael de la Pole, whom she had seen so often with the Duke. He was Richard's adviser now, had been created Earl of Suffolk, had been Chancellor of England, but there was trouble, how grave she did not know, except that he had been recently ousted from his chancellorship, and disgraced by the Lords in Parliament. He looked old, she thought with a pang, his shoulders stooped under their ermine cape, his hair was white as the ermine.

And Lord Neville of Raby, the fierce North Country warrior: he looked not only old but ill, his steps dragged and he leaned heavily on the arm of his stalwart good-looking son, Ralph.

Next came a giggling, mincing group of young men in skintight hose that showed their thighs, and more, and who wore velvet shoes with points a half yard long - Richard's contemporaries and cronies; and the Bohemian lords and ladies who had come over with Queen Anne. And young de Vere, once Lord Oxford, Richard's favourite, whom he had created Duke of Ireland.

At de Vere's faultlessly handsome face, Katherine gazed with revulsion. Even at Kettlethorpe she had heard of de Vere's incredibly stupid conspiracies against the Duke, three years ago, the subtle plans to have John poisoned, the foul story of a mad Carmelite friar who had been subjected to hideous torture as de Vere's scapegoat. Ay, there was perversion of all sorts dwelling behind those tinted beardless cheeks, the gold-powdered curls, the tall slender body that bore itself so haughtily in violet brocade which gave forth a wave of scent as he passed.

Was it not in great part because of the dark silken influence de Vere had always had on Richard that the reign that started so auspiciously ten years ago had now degenerated into quarrels more violent than any known in Edward's time, and that Richard so soon had come to be loathed by most of his people, peers and commons alike?

And yet perhaps Queen Anne might save him, many hoped so.

The royal couple came on alone, after an interval. Katherine and all those crowded into the nave fell to their knees.

Richard had filled out, and blurred. The apple-blossom cheeks were plump, there was roundness beneath the tunic that was so thickly crusted with gems that one could not see the gold beneath. Even the white hart badge on his chest was made of pearls. Queen Anne was equally ornate, and at first glance, because of the horned moon headdress, she appeared to tower over her husband. She was no beauty, certainly. This daughter of the Holy Roman Empire would, in a kirtle, have passed for any stout healthy farm girl, but her face was kind, and as she whispered something to Richard, her smallish eyes sparkled agreeably.

They were so young, Katherine thought, only twenty, both of them, their characters not yet all formed. It might well be that this pleasant-looking young woman would prop the too delicately bred Plantagenet flower.

When the royal couple disappeared down the nave, Katherine stood up and stretched her cramped legs, noting that some of Richard's meinie had not gone into the small chapter house but were walking back into the nave to wait.

She wandered down the nave towards the Galilee entrance and paused in the transept beneath the rainbow shower of light from the round glass window called the Bishop's Eye. She had always loved this cathedral, and thought it the most beautiful in England with its west front of warm apricot-coloured stone, its wealth of carvings, some humorous, like the preaching fox in the wooden choir stalls or the tiny imp hidden in the stone foliage of the retro-choir, some inspiring like the musical angels or St. Hugh's shrine. The cathedral had gracious dignity that inspired a reverence peculiarly its own. Yet since the bishop's unkind sermon she could never feel welcome here, fancying that even the sacristans and chantry priests stared at her sardonically.

Today there were so many strangers that she did not feel conspicuous. While she gazed up at the Bishop's Eye, someone spoke her name. She turned and saw that it was Michael de la Pole.

"Why, God's greeting, my lord," she said uncertainly. She had met none of the Duke's close companions since the parting.

"Lady Swynford," said the old earl smiling. "Fair as ever, I see." He sighed, she saw that his blear eyes held a dragging weariness. " 'Tis good to see something that doesn't change."

"Oh, my lord," she protested, "indeed I have."

He shook his head. "I'm not being gallant, lady - if you remember, pretty speech was no art of mine. You look no older than you did six - ay, six years ago at Leicester Castle - by the Mass - that seems another life, another world."

"It was," said Katherine quietly. "For me."

Never during the long association with this woman had Michael quite understood the Duke's passion for her, but suddenly he did so now, perhaps because he had himself been suffering.

"My lady," he said, smiling ruefully, "I've the infirmities of age, alack - d'you know of a good nearby tavern where my page can go for wine? My belly shrinks and gnaws unless I keep it filled."

She nodded. "But my lord, if you would consider - my house is there, a few steps away - if I might offer you - -?"

"The very thing! An hour's quiet will hearten me - immeasurably. Yet, lady," his sunken eyes glimmered with a bitter light, "are you sure you wish to receive a man who has been accused of embezzlement, of cowardice, a man dismissed from office in disgrace?"

"You ask this of me?" said Katherine. They looked at each other half smiling, with a poignant understanding, before they turned and went together out of the cathedral and across the close to her house.

Hawise and Philippa were vastly fluttered by the arrival of the great Earl of Suffolk; little Joan caught the excitement and stared at him with awe, but the boys were all out enjoying the freedom of this gala day.

Katherine mulled wine herself over the fire for de la Pole while they settled down comfortably in the two cushioned chairs. He drew a sigh of relief. "This is good. Quiet. It takes youth, and strength, and - the wariness of a stoat to be around the King."

Philippa and Hawise had tactfully withdrawn, taking Joan with them. The two were alone in the pleasant room where the fitful sunlight glowed on Katherine's plain well-polished furniture, on the fresh sweet-smelling floor rushes. She picked up a tapestry square and began to stitch, thinking that he might prefer not to talk.

He watched her awhile, wondering if she ever thought of the old life and how things went with her here in Lincoln. She had changed, he thought, not her features, but in the atmosphere she emanated. There had used to be an undertone of intensity, of striving about her, now she seemed peaceful: serene and deep as a mountain tarn.

"Lady Swynford," he said suddenly, "do you ever think of the Duke?"

Her needle paused,, quivered, then plopped through the canvas, trailing its load of crimson wool. "It would do no good if I did, would it?"

"Nay - those times are long past, and well passed, I suppose, yet I don't doubt he thinks of you."

She raised her head. In the grey eyes the pupils enlarged slowly. "I'm sure you're wrong, my lord, unless it is with hatred."

"Hatred?" De la Pole was astonished. "Oh, he was very angry for a while up there in the north when you disappeared, 'twas natural enough. But it was not hatred that made him build a chapel to Saint Catherine near Knaresborough."

Katherine put down her tapestry and stood up; her chair scraped on the hearthstone. "Chapel to Saint Catherine?"

"Ay - in fulfilment of a vow he made to her for your safety through the revolt."

She turned to the fire, pressing her fingers on the mantel's rim. "When did he erect this chapel - not after he publicly renounced me - and returned to the Duchess?"

De la Pole frowned. "Why yes, I'm sure it was, quite a while after he was reunited to the Duchess at Knaresborough. But my dear, there was no public renouncement that I know of. I was with him for some months at that time, and I don't believe he ever spoke your name."

"Yet all England gossiped of how he had reviled me - calling me" - she paused, went on steadily - "calling me witch and whore; this I heard that summer in Walsingham."

"And believed it?" cried de la Pole. "By God, lady, didn't you live long enough at court to discount slander? 'Tis the Benedictine chroniclers have been putting out all manner of lies about him - and why? Because of his association with Wyclif, because of the persecution he briefly gave their monasteries after that embroilment in the changeling story, because he has always favoured the friars - Christ only knows the reason for malice - but you should have known him better than that."

"Ay - I should. Perhaps I did. But I have heard no direct word from him - since then."

De la Pole shook his head, and sighed. "Need I tell you of his pride? And more than that, I believe he saw as you did, that it was best you two should part."

Katherine began to walk up and down across the hearth, she bent to poke the fire, she moved an andiron, she poured more wine into the mulling pot. "My lord, I almost wish you hadn't told me this," she said at last: "I do not wish to think of him - too softly."

Ay, perhaps I should not have mentioned him, thought the old earl. Meddle, meddle - 'tis all it seems to me I do nowadays, at least so my enemies think. A lifetime of service to the Duke, to the crown, and at the end nothing but hatred and ingratitude. Gloucester was the real enemy, and Arundel of course. Impeachment, accusations. Michael had suffered both. They said he was nothing but a tradesman, a Hull merchant far too rich to be honest. They said he was a coward because he had influenced Richard towards peace, towards making an end of this senseless, crippling war with France. And now it would soon be exile. No doubt of that. And his one staunch friend, far away in Castile.

"How is it with the Duke?" said Katherine. She had sat down again and picked up her tapestry. She bent her face low over it. "He is gaining at last his long ambition, isn't he? The Castilian throne he so much wanted."

"By the rood, I fear not," answered de la Pole sadly. "At least not as he wanted it. His daughter will sit there, not he."

"Daughter?"

"You've not heard of the marriages?"

She shook her head. "People do not speak to me of him."

"Why, Philippa and Joao I were married last month in Oporto, she is now Queen of Portugal."

How strange, Katherine thought. Philippa the grave, sedate, virginal girl who had longed for the cloister, now wedded at twenty-six, and a queen in a far-off land.

"And little Catalina," said de la Pole, "she is to marry Enrique of Castile, I believe. It is she who will sit on Castile's throne in her parents' stead - and that will mean the end of war at last."

The end of the Castilian dream at last, Katherine thought. Not in failure, but not in glory either. There must be humiliation for John in this denouement. The prize achieved by compromise, by dynastic marriages, but never really his. Always second, she thought, never first. All his life.

"Oh, he still fights," continued de la Pole, who had been following the same thoughts. "He hasn't given up yet. But we hear that his army is fearfully afflicted, there's some disease runs through them and kills. The messenger said that the Duke himself was very ill with-Nay, lady, I talk too much, a tongue-wagging old man," he added quickly, seeing the look in Katherine's eyes. "He'll recover. He has great strength."

She put down the tapestry and said in a choked voice, "My lord, forgive me if I leave you for a time." She walked from the Hall and upstairs to her solar, where for some moments she sat alone.

When she came down again, she found that Master Robert Sutton had arrived to escort her to the banquet. He and de le Pole were standing at the hearth making polite conversation.

The earl came up to her at once and took her hand. "I've trespassed too long upon your kindness, my dear lady, and must hurry back to my duties by the King. Forgive me," he added lower, "for talking so much." He kissed her hand. "It's been good to see you again. God bless you."

He went out, while Robert turned to Katherine with complacence. "It seems my Lord of Suffolk thinks well of you, sweet. Were he not so old, I'd be jealous. You might," he continued, brightening, "through him even be presented to the Queen. He still has influence with Richard. Did you think to ask him? Maybe we should announce our marriage at the banquet after all."

"No," said Katherine slowly. She sat down and indicated the other chair so lately quitted by de la Pole. "Robert, I cannot marry you. Forgive me."

The wool merchant's ruddy cheeks paled, he stared at her. "Katherine, what whim is this! I ne'er thought you a woman for sly tricks and coquestry."

"It is no trick, or coquetry. It is that I was a fool to think I could forget the past-" She hesitated a long time while he looked at her with dismay and dawning anger. "It is this, you see," she said at last. "For me, it's not the past - it's still the present. Call it folly, madness if you like - but it seems I am so made that I can give myself to no other man."

He argued with her, he stormed at her, he pled with her. Tears filled her eyes, finally she wept in contrition, in pity; but she could not accede. During the moments alone in her chamber, the certainty had come to her at last. For her there could be no comfortable fresh start, no easier way permitted in the following of her destiny. The love that she had felt, she would always feel, and in itself it brought dedication, regardless of return. Without de la Pole's revelations she would not have married Sutton, that had been a temporary clouding. But the thought of John suffering, in danger, had hastened the realisation.

When Sutton left at last, furious and acid-tongued, she sat on alone in the Hall, nor did she attend the King's banquet. She sent word that she had been taken ill.

CHAPTER XXXI

The feast of St. Catherine - November 25, 1395. Katherine awoke at Kettlethorpe in an unusual mood of depression and unaccountable loneliness. The old solar was far snugger than it used to be, she had gradually achieved modest comfort in her home. The walls were hung with Lincoln-made tapestries, there were bear-rugs and sheepskins on the plank floor. The wooden shutters had been replaced with casements of leaded glass, and the remodelled fireplace made it possible to warm this room that used to be a vortex of draughts. Nevertheless, Katherine shivered when she awoke and listened to the hissing of sleet on the windows. She found in herself a dismal reluctance to face the day: a holiday for all her manor folk, who had planned profuse festivities in her honour.

There was to be a procession, and a Catherine dance and spinning contest for all the village maidens, and a speech given by Cob, who was a great man in Kettlethorpe now, a sort of unofficial mayor. Her tenants would bring her little gifts; at the end there would be feasting in the Great Hall, while she sat on the dais and was crowned with a prickly wreath of pine and holly that Cob's children had made for her. These ceremonies were heart-warming. They had occurred every year, with increasing elaboration, since her return. It would be ungrateful indeed not to rejoice at the affectionate respect that they evinced.

But on this morning her head ached dully. While she waited for Hawise to come in with the morning ale, she could think only of worries. Two of her best ewes showed signs of murrain, the shepherd had sent to the witch of Harby for a charm to prevent the plague from spreading. That was one worry. Janet was another.

Janet Swynford, Tom's wife, who would soon be here from Coleby with the twins, to do her mother-in-law honour. Born a Crophill of Nottingham, Janet was precisely the right wife for Tom, self-effacing, thrifty and plain as an iron pot, so that there was no danger whatsoever in leaving her at Coleby alone during the lengthy periods that Tom was off serving his Lord Henry of Bolingbroke. But Janet talked interminably in a thin martyred whine, and she bored Katherine. The year-old twins were sweet; Katherine longed to enjoy her only grandchildren, but they were delicate, little Hugh coughed incessantly, Dorothy had a weak stomach.

Katherine, who had borne and raised six healthy children, continually choked off advice that Janet would plaintively resent - and ignore.

Ah well, a familiar enough problem, and not worth fretting over. Joan's unhappiness was far more harrowing. Joan, her baby, was now sixteen, and a widow. Not that Joan had loved the fat shabby old knight to whom last year she had been so briefly married; but she had endured the discomforts gladly in return for the improved standing he gave her and the glimpse of the great outer world that poor Joan so longed for. Sir Robert Ferrers had taken his little bride to Leicester Castle and the gay household of Henry's wife, Mary de Bohun. Joan had had a few weeks of excitement before her own widowhood and Countess Mary's death thrust her back to her mother and Kettlethorpe. Worse than that, during that brief, brighter time the girl had fallen desperately in love - with Ralph Neville of Raby, the handsome young Lord of Westmorland, son to the old warrior who had died soon after his visit to Lincoln with Richard.

An impossible love. The Nevilles of Raby did not marry bastards. Bitter heartache for Joan, to which Katherine applied the standard palliatives as best she could: so young; she'd get over it; some other suitable husband would turn up, and she would certainly forget young Neville when the babies came.

Joan had gazed at her with the round pansy-purple eyes and said quietly, "Did you, Mother? Did you ever forget my father even while you bore the Swynfords?"

The shock of that was still with Katherine, and the fear of the girl's instinctive comparison, which Joan had seen and allayed most painfully. "Nay," she had whispered in a choked voice. "I shall never be Neville's paramour, though he begged it. Do you think I, who know what it is to be baseborn, would inflict that on another human soul? Ah, forgive me, Mother - -"

They had both turned away in tears, nor referred to it again.

This new unhappiness of Joan's had awakened the dormant pain for Blanchette. Fourteen years without word. Requiem Masses were said for her in the church here on June 13, the day she disappeared, and yet Katherine had not quite accepted her death.

It was true that life was harder on women, but why, Katherine wondered, should it be her oldest and youngest children that seemed marked out for special suffering? To this question, as to many others there was no answer.

I am the ground of thy beseeching. How shouldest thou not then have thy beseeching? Ay, she believed that. Many times comfort had been given her, and a glimpse of grace. Yet there were arid spaces like now when the light dwindled into greyness and she fell into the sloth and doubt which Lady Julian considered the only true sins.

The door to the outside staircase flew open with a bang. Hawise came in on a stinging blast of cold air. "Cock's bones, but 'tis fine weather for friars!" She slammed the door shut and blew on her fingers. "No matter, sweeting, 'tis your saint's day, and I've laced your ale wi' cinnamon special as ye like it. Bless ye!" She leaned over the bed and gave Katherine a kiss. "Peter, what a long face! What's a matter?"

"I don't know - I've got the dumps." Katherine tried to smile. "Hawise, do you know how old I am?"

"I ought to." Hawise poured steaming ale into a cup and poked at the fire embers. "I've not lost me memory yet, let alone that all the kitchen folk're busy painting red ribbons 'round forty-five candles for your feast tonight."

"Forty-five," said Katherine flatly. "Jesu, what an age!"

Hawise came bade to the bed holding out a rabbit-lined chamber robe. "Well, ye've not gone off much, if that's any comfort. Cob was boasting only yestere'en that the Lady o' Kettlethorpe is the fairest woman in Lincolnshire."

"Cob is partial, bless him," said Katherine with a rueful laugh. She looked down at her long braids, thick as ever but lightly frosted with silver, while at her temples she knew well that there were two white patches springing up with startling effect against the dark bronze.

"Ye're still firm as an apple," said Hawise casting a critical look as she enfolded Katherine in the chamber robe. " 'Tis all the work ye do, Saint Mary, I'd never've believed it in the old days - brewing, baking, distilling, churning along wi' the maids - running here, running there, tending to the cotters - gardening, even shearing. Lord what busyness!"

"Well, I've had to," said Katherine bleakly. There had been a bad couple of years after Sutton withdrew his advice and support. She had run the manor entirely alone, but they struggled through to modest profit again. Sutton's outraged feelings had eventually been soothed by marriage with the daughter of a wealthy knight. And it all seemed very long ago.

She went mechanically through the process of washing and dressing, allowed Hawise to bedeck her in the gala robe of deep crimson velvet edged with squirrel and fasten the bodice with the Queen's brooch.

"Seems strange too," said Hawise, adjusting the clasp, "what coffers full o' jewels I used to rummage in afore we'd find one to your liking - and now there's naught to wear but this thing."

Katherine sighed and sat down by the fire. "So much has changed," she said sadly. "Hawise - I think of my poor sister this morning, God rest her soul. So many deaths - -"

"Christ-a-mercy - lady-" cried Hawise crossing herself.

"What a way to talk on your saint's day!"

"What better day?" said Katherine. "Since I am thinking of them - -" She fell silent, staring into the fire.

Ay, o' one death especial, thought Hawise as she shook her head and started to straighten the bedsheets. The Duchess. Last year had come a strange smiting on the highest ladies of the land, the Lollard preachers had seen God's vengeance in it, and folk had been afraid. Between Lent and Lammastide, they died, the three noblest ladies in England. Queen Anne, she died of plague at Sheen Castle, and the King had gone out of his mind with grief. Mary de Bohun, Lord Henry of Bolingbroke's countess, had died in childbirth, Christ have mercy on her, thought Hawise, remembering the frightened twelve-year-old bride at Leicester Castle the winter before the revolt.

And the Duchess Costanza had died, here in England, of some sickness in her belly, they said. When the news got to Kettlethorpe, Lady Katherine had been very quiet for many days, her beautiful grey eyes had taken on a strained, waiting look, but nothing had happened at all, except that the Beaufort children had all been sent fresh grants through the chancery. In truth, through the last years, the Duke seemed to have taken a concealed interest in them; at least he had not interfered with the marked favour and help that his heir Henry had occasionally shown them.

But, thought Hawise, tugging viciously at a blanket, wouldn't you think the scurvy ribaud might have sent my Lady some kindly word, at last? Instead he had gone off to Aquitaine again as ruler. And was still there, God blast him, and why hadn't she taken that Sutton when she had the chance, though to be sure he might not have made her happy. Men, men, men, thought Hawise angrily, then seeing that Katherine still sat in dismal abstraction, she went up to her coaxingly. "Read some o' those merry tales in the book Master Geoffrey sent ye, now do. They always cheer ye."

Katherine blinked and sighed. "Oh Hawise - I fear 'twould take more than the tales of junketing to Canterbury to cheer me today - poor Geoffrey - -" He was having a hard time, she knew, though his letters were philosophical as always, yet he was in financial difficulties, his health not good, and he was lonely in the Somerset backwater where he had been consigned as Royal Forester. I wish I could help him, she thought. Perhaps when the accounts are all toted up, there may be a shilling or so to spare here - -

"Hark!" said Hawise suddenly, pulling a wry mouth. "There's my Lady Janet with the twins." They both listened to the familiar clatter of hooves in the courtyard, and heard the peevish howling of babies.

"Yes," said Katherine rising and reaching for her mantle. "The day's festivities most merrily commence."

That's not like her, Hawise thought gloomily, while she continued to straighten the solar, that dry bitter inflexion from one who had shown of late years a nearly constant sweetness and courage. Hawise paused by the prie-dieu and picking up her mistress' beads said a rosary for her. Still dissatisfied, she hunted through Katherine's dressing coffer until she found a little brass pin which she threw into the fire with a wish, and felt better. "Cry before breakfast, sing before supper," she quoted from Dame Emma's collection of comforting lore.

Hawise's prayer and wish were granted, though not before supper and by nothing as simple as cheerful song.

The villagers had finished their feasting, the boards had been cleared, and stacked with the trestles in the corner of the Hall. Cob had made his speech. He had sent hot colour to Katherine's cheeks, mist to her eyes with his eulogies, and her tenants had cheered her exuberantly. Two ne'er-do-wells from Laughterton had even brought her some back rent that she had despaired of getting, and there had been copious donations of apples, and little cakes baked by the village wives.

Now Katherine sat on in the hour before bed strumming her lute, while Joan sang and Janet listened vaguely. The twins were asleep in their cradle by the hearth. Hawise sat by the kitchen screen mending sheets. The house carls had all gone off to the village tavern to wind up the day. The forty-five big candles still burned, and shed unusual brilliance in the old Hall.

"I wonder where my brothers all are tonight?" said Joan in a pause between songs. "Lord, I wish I was a man."

Her mother's heart tightened. So dreary for the child here in this middle-aged woman's household, such tame distractions to offset the cankering hidden love.

"Well," said Katherine lightly, "we know Harry's studying in Germany and Tamkin is supposed to be at Oxford, though I wouldn't count on it." She smiled. Tamkin was no scholar like Harry, who had already risen further in the Church than had ever seemed possible. There could be no doubt that their father's secret influence had helped them all. This had often comforted her. Young John had achieved at last his great ambition and been knighted, after he travelled with Lord Henry to the Barbary Coast. A lovable fellow Johnnie was and had made his way as a soldier of fortune, despite the hindrance of his birth. Even Richard liked him - so far anyway - and had taken him with the army to Ireland last year.

"I don't know where Thomas is," said Janet suddenly in her plaintive whine. "I hope he gets home for Christmas; he never lets me know anything."

"Poor Janet." Katherine put down the lute and sighed. "Waiting is woman's lot. I don't suppose I'll see my Johnnie for many a long day, either."

Janet's small pale eyes sent her mother-in-law a resentful look. A blind mole could see that Lady Katherine preferred her baseborn sons to her legitimate one, and Janet considered this shameful. Her discontented gaze roamed around the Hall, which was larger and better furnished than Coleby's. She indulged in a familiar calculation as to how long it would be before Tom inherited. But Lady Katherine seemed healthy enough and looked, most infuriatingly, ten years younger than she was, a manifestly unfair reward for a wicked life.

"I think I'll go to bed," said Joan yawning. "With you, I suppose, Mother?"

Katherine nodded. The arrival of guests always meant switch of sleeping quarters. Janet, nurse and twins would occupy Joan's usual tower chamber - that had once been Nichola's.

Hawise put down her mending and began to blow out the candles. There were still twenty to go when the dogs started to bark outside. The blooded hound, Erro, that Sutton had given young John over eight years ago had been lying by the fire with his head on his paws. A dignified aristocrat, Erro, who did not consider himself a watchdog, and usually ignored the noisy antics of his inferiors. It was therefore astonishing to have him raise his head and whine, then leap up with one powerful bound and precipitate himself uproariously against the door.

"Strange," said Katherine running to hold his collar. "There's only one - Sainte Marie, could it be?" she added joyously.

And it was. Young John Beaufort came into the Hall on a swirl of soft snow. He caught his mother in his arms, kissed her heartily. "God's greeting, my lady! Sure your saint might have sent better weather to a son who's been hurrying to you these many days!"

He kissed his sister, Hawise, and, less enthusiastically, Janet, before quieting the ecstatic Erro, who barked fit to raise the dead in the churchyard across the road. John stood by the fire while the women fluttered around him removing his mantle, brushing snow from his curling yellow hair, unfastening his sword, and the gold knight's spurs of which he was so proud, heating ale for him in the long-handled iron pot over the fire.

"Oh dearling," Katherine cried, quivering with pride - surely there was no comelier young man in England - ''and you remembered your old mother's feast day! Johnnie, this is the pleasantest surprise, the goodliest thing that's happened to me in an age. I thought you abroad!"

"Well, I was." He sank into a chair with a grunt, held his steaming red-leather shoes towards the fire. "Until three weeks ago. In Bordeaux. Mother-" He turned and looked directly into her face. "I was not the only one there who remembered your saint's day."

Katherine's look of contented pride slowly dissolved, to be replaced by tenseness. She said slowly, "What were you doing at Bordeaux, Johnnie?"

Hawise's hands, which had been rubbing lard into John's wet shoe-leather, suddenly stilled. Janet ceased jiggling the twin's cradle and raised her head, not understanding the odd tone in her mother-in-law's voice. Joan looked from her mother to her brother and began to breathe fast.

"I was summoned by my father!"cried John triumphantly. "I spent a week with him and have brought you a letter from him. He wanted it to reach you today."

In Katherine's head there was a rumble like far-off thunder, while she felt a peculiar coolness as though the snow outside were melting through her veins.

"So you have met the Duke again," she said speaking from the depths of the coolness. "How does he seem?"

John's surprise that she did not at once ask for her letter was shared by Joan and Janet, but Hawise understood. She returned grimly to the shoe-leather and thought, Now what does that accursed Duke want?

"He's very tired, I think," said John, "and lean as - as Erro here, anxious to be back. His work is finished in Aquitaine, and Richard has summoned him home, much to Gloucester's fury, I believe."

"Ah - -" said Katherine.

"By God," said John eagerly, "of course, that stinking Thomas of Woodstock wants our father's grace kept out of the country, so he can have free hand with Richard and the foul plottings and warmongerings that Father holds in check. Richard's fed up for the time and is pro-Lancaster now."

"Ah - -" said Katherine again. "Far off as we are here, we've not followed court policies, or the King's whims. The Duke of Gloucester, that was Buckingham when I knew him, I thought to be in favour."

"Well, he's not now, and I think the King's afraid of him. That's why he wants Father's help. Mother," said John unbuttoning his surcote and pulling a parchment from his breast, "don't you want your letter? I'm in a fever to know what's in it!"

"And I," whispered Joan, putting her hand on Katherine's arm. Katherine took the letter and looked at the superscription: Lady Kateryn de Swynforth, Kettle thorp, County of Nicole," in John's own decisive heavily stroked black writing. It is fourteen and a half years since I have seen this writing, she thought. But it looked quite unchanged. She turned the letter over and examined the crimson imprint of his privy seal. In this there was change. The royal arms of Castile and Leon no longer occupied the dexter half. So he admitted at last the extinction of the great Castilian myth. Yet his daughter Catalina sat on the throne. He and Costanza had accomplished that much.

"Lady mother," said her son beseechingly, "for the love of Christ, read it! He told me nothing of what he wrote, and my father's grace is not a man one can question - yet he seemed pleased with me. He watched me joust and seemed very pleased."

Katherine smiled faintly. "You shall know soon what's in the letter." She rose. Under the disappointed looks of her children, she retrieved her mantle from the perch and went out into the snow, up the outside stairs into her solar. She bolted the door and put the parchment on a table while she replenished the fire. When the flames burned well, she went to her prie-dieu and knelt for some time. Then she lit a candle at the fire and placed it carefully on its iron pricket. After a while she picked up the letter and sat on a stool by the hearth. Her fingers were cold as the icicles that hung from the thatched eaves when she at length broke the crimson seal.

There was no greeting. It began abruptly, in French, as he had always written to her.

Recently I visited Chateau la Teste in Les Landes. Poignant memories were aroused of a time long ago. I am weary of many things, each day my life becomes more irksome to me, and in the light of this weariness I view some bygone actions differently from what I used to. I shall be back in England at Christmas time, and I wish to see you again. I beg of you to forget all past bitterness, to look courteously across the great chasm that opened between us, and to grant my request. I also wish to see Joan, who is with you, I understand. Harry, I have summoned from Germany and should be on his way home. Our Thomas I shall visit at Oxford before I come to Lincolnshire. John, who has brought you this letter, will remain with you until I arrive, about the first of the year. He is a son to be proud of. You have done well with him, and with the others too.

God and His Blessed Mother have you in their keeping.

John, Duke of Lancaster

Bordeaux, November 5,1395

"So - -" said Katherine aloud, putting down the letter. She repeated a sentence slowly: "Je vous emprie d'oublier toute l'amertume du passe - -" Yes, bitterness should be forgotten. She no longer felt bitterness, but there was a sharp reluctance. It's too late, much too late for us to meet again. Middle-aged people - almost old. John was fifty-five. She could not hinder the children, since their father was at last taking an open interest in them. But as for me, she thought - far better if I'm not here when he comes. She could go to Janet at Coleby. Ah, let me alone - she said to the letter, looking at the words "Chateau la Teste dans les Landes . . . des souvenirs poignants": the round room in the donjon tower, the sea air, the mewing of gulls - and ecstasy that can come but once.

She had made a new life; usually there was content. She had learned the pleasure of little things: the glint of May sunlight on a cluster of bluebells, the smell of white bread she had herself baked, quiet companionable talk with some of the village wives, whose pungent humour she had learned to appreciate.

Had she not earned freedom from turmoil? From fear and pain? The letter brought both. Fear not only of emotional upheaval, but of practical troubles. She had gradually become acceptable to Lincolnshire, time had somewhat regularised her position. The old buzzings and scandals would inevitably start up again upon the Duke's visit. Worse than that was the fear of anticlimax. Far better to keep the memory of a great love - as it had once been - than have it cheapened for ever by disillusionment. Indigne - she thought in the French word - unseemly, even perhaps ridiculous. No, she would not meet the Duke.

She persisted in her decision until the arrival of Harry on Christmas Eve. He had been studying at Aachen when his father's summons reached him, had hurriedly embarked from Holland and just landed at Boston. He arrived in a state of bright-eyed excitement. "What does this mean, Mother? Before God, I can't understand it, but surely it can't be for ill tidings he's summoned us!"

A large forceful young man of twenty, Harry had become; sleek as a pigeon in his plum-coloured cleric's robes. He had a hearty laugh, a fine resonant voice obviously made for the pulpit and a quick legal mind. In time he dissuaded Katherine from her flight, saying that she had no right to anger or baulk their father in any way, since it might prejudice him against the children. John and Joan, who were inclined to humour their mother, had not used this argument, but Katherine saw the truth of it.

When Janet eventually went back to Coleby without her, Katherine had achieved resignation much strengthened by inner certainty that she was doing right. Glimpses of the light returned to her during that Christmastide, the channel of communication which had seemed blocked ran clear again and gave her serenity.

She noticed that her three children often gathered in corners whispering, and looking at her with excited speculative eyes, but the whispers stilled at once when she came near, and no hint of their purport reached Katherine. She had no idea that, led by Harry, her Beauforts were allowing themselves an incredible hope. One so preposterous that they were ashamed of it, even while they could not help referring to it in broken phrases: "If - -"; "Could it be?" "But Blessed Christ, it's impossible - -"; "Nay, his letter was cold, there was nothing to build on. He means nothing like that." Katherine, to quiet their clamorous questions, had shown them the letter.

When a herald came on New Year's Day to announce the Duke's arrival on the morrow, Katherine was far calmer than her children. She looked at the Lancastrian arms on the herald's tabard, at the blue and grey of his trunks, at the falcon badge embroidered on his blue cap - the familiar panoply of Lancaster - and thought how long it was since she had seen it. Once she had been borne along on a raging current that all those symbols stood for, and she vowed that she would not permit that turbulent river to submerge her again.

The next morning, she was touched and a trifle exasperated by Joan's hovering anxiety. "Mother, let me do your hair, Hawise is clumsy at it! Mother, please wear the gold brooch Sir Robert left me, it looks far better than that silver thing. Oh Jesu, if you only had a new gown, he'll think you so old-fashioned in that sideless surcote, and shoes are far more pointed now in London - at least," she added slowly, "they were when I was there nineteen months ago." She sighed.

Katherine looked at the pretty dark head, the charming face that was bleak with longing, and said gently, "You shall make me as splendid as possible, darling, but truly it's of no consequence, one way or the other."

Joan picked up a vial of lavender water, fiddled with the lead stopper, and said, "It is because of his love for you, and yours for him, that we exist at all - isn't it?"

Katherine was startled and confused. "That was a very long time ago, Joan," she answered with some difficulty. "Human love dies. You must face that, dear - -" She bit her lips, for she saw that Joan was crying, quietly, proudly, big tears slipping down her pink cheeks.

Long before the court dogs began to bark, they heard the winding flourish from Lancaster Herald's trumpet as the Duke's cavalcade turned off the highway on to the manor road. At the well-remembered sound, Katherine's heart at last took up a hard-measured pounding, while Joan ran up to the tower-roof to watch the approach over the sparkling white-gold snow, down the avenue of bare-branched wychelms.

Katherine walked slowly across the courtyard and the drawbridge to stand by the old mounting block. Her two sons held back nervously in the court, where Joan joined them, saying, "Tamkin came with him. O Blessed Mary, make everything go well!" She crossed herself and lifting her beads began to whisper a rosary. Her brothers drew close to her. The three stood waiting.

The Duke reined in his black stallion when he came to the church. A watchful squire ran up and held the horse. The Duke dismounted. He was not armoured, he wore an enveloping violet-coloured mantle trimmed with ermine; an intricately draped furred hood concealed most of his face. As he advanced towards her across the trodden snow, Katherine curtsied deeply and said, "Welcome to Kettlethorpe, my lord."

He pulled off his jewelled gauntlet and took her bare hand in his. "Am I truly well come, Katrine?" he said in a harsh thick tone.

She raised her eyes to his face. Deep new lines on the forehead, lines from the nostrils of the long nose to the corners of the set, thin-lipped mouth. Grey hairs in the tawny eyebrows above eyes of a quieter blue; sad, questioning eyes. A long white scar ran from left ear to forehead and had puckered the eyelid. Dear God, so much change, she thought. Yet it was still the face she had so greatly loved.

"You are well come, my lord," she repeated evenly, though she felt the touch of his hand like a burn. "Our - the Beauforts await you most eagerly."

He glanced where she did through the gatehouse to the courtyard, where his children were grouped by the Hall door. "Ay," he said, "and I've brought Tamkin. But I should like to see you alone first."

"Why for, my lord?" she said drawing back her hand. "What have we to say alone now?"

"Katrine, I beg you!"

" 'Tis not so easy to be alone at Kettlethorpe," she said with a faint cool smile.

"The church?" he suggested. " 'Twill be empty at this hour?"

She inclined her head and preceded him through the lych-gate. The church had been decorated with holly and evergreens for The New Year; the nave, which was the village hall in winter, was still cluttered with small tables from the "church ale" and fair they had held here yesterday; the rushes were strewn with candle wax, nut-shells, crumbs. Five children stood by a thatched stable which enclosed crudely painted home-made figures of the nativity, and loudly disputed whether the Baby were smiling or not.

The Duke glanced at them, removed his draped headdress and said, "Farther up in the choir - surely 'twill be quieter." He walked around the rood screen.

Candles burned before the statue of the Blessed Virgin, and a wall painting of Saints Peter and Paul, the church's patrons. Four long tapers flickered in a small chapel Katherine had built behind the Swynford choir stall. They shone on a tomb with the brightly tinted effigy of a knight in armour.

The Duke paused by the tomb and looked down at the knight, at the boarhead crest on the helm, the shield with three boars' heads on a chevron, the bearded face, which bore little resemblance to the original since it had been carved in Lincoln from Katherine's description, only a few years ago. Slowly the Duke crossed himself. "May God comfort and keep his soul," he said, and turned to Katherine, who stood at the entrance of the chapel, her hood pulled far over her face.

"Katrine," he said, "is this to stand between us, forever?"

In the moments during which she did not answer, the voices of the children in the nave rose louder until one cried "Hush!" in a frightened voice; there was a scamper of feet and the west door banged, leaving silence.

"There is far more than Hugh that stands between us, my lord," she said into the silence.

He made a gesture, impatient, resigned, letting his hand fall slack. He left the tomb to stand beside her in the aisle. Suddenly he raised his hand and brushed back her hood, staring down at her face, into the wide grey eyes that met his steadily, without bitterness; but neither did they soften under his long gaze, they held detachment, a watchful calmness that daunted him. He reached out his finger to touch the white streaks at her temples. "Age on you has but added swan's wings to your fairness," he said wryly, "while I'm grizzled and hacked like an old badger - -"

"You do yourself injustice, my lord. Badgers are hunched, lumpy creatures, while you are still straight as a lance." She spoke in a light social tone, as he had heard her chatting with knights of his retinue long ago. She replaced her hood, and glanced down the nave towards the door, obviously checked only by the courtesy from suggesting that they leave.

In that instant, John forgot that he was Duke of Lancaster, while his last doubt vanished. From the deepest springs of his being, words bubbled to his lips, so that he stammered like a page-boy. "Katrine - Katrine - you make this so hard - my God, is there nothing left for me at all? We can't be forever thinking of the dead. We're getting old, 'tis true, but we're still alive - and if you feel nothing more for me - if too much has passed since we were together - then think of our children, for them at least it's not too late - -"

He stopped, trembling - his close-shaven cheeks had turned a dull brick-red, he was breathing fast, painfully.

Katherine swallowed, she saw his flushed pleading face through a fog and spoke with remote sad scorn. "Is some bargain still necessary between us, to aid my children's advancement? Has our age, at least, not removed incentive to further shame!"

He gasped, and stared at her. Then he clenched his fist, banging it on the wooden rim of the choir stall. "Christ, Katrine! I'm asking you to marry me!"

The dusky little church, the candlelight, the evergreens spiralled around her.

"It must have occurred to you?" he said with more control, astonished at her dazed face. "Surely when Costanza died - and now when I've summoned all our Beauforts here - Katrine, I could not come sooner - the King sent me to Aquitaine - -" He had entirely forgotten the doubts and uncertainties he had felt, how he had not been entirely sure until he saw her again.

"It did not occur to me," she said in a wooden voice. "After your Duchess died, I hoped for a word from you, then even that desire passed. I received you today for our children's sake.

There's much you can do for them - if you will-" She could not think, there was no feeling but shock, and dislocation.

"What better can I do for them, than have them legitimated?" he said, half smiling. "This, Richard has agreed to in the event of our marriage, and the Pope will confirm it."

"Legitimated," she repeated, "legitimated - I've never heard of that. Jesu - the stain of bastardy cannot be wiped out!"

He nodded slowly. "It can." Legitimation was an unusual procedure. There had in fact never been a precedent entailing circumstances quite like these. But English law permitted it; this he had verified. "With the King decreeing their legitimacy in the temporal realm, and the Pope as Christ's vicar in the spiritual, how can anything in heaven and earth then gainsay their true birth?" he said gently.

Her face crumpled like a child's. She raised her twisted hands to her mouth and walked rapidly down to the nave, seeking to be alone - to integrate herself. This sensation was as shattering as pain, indistinguishable from it.

After a time, he came down and stood beside her. "Katrine," he said touching her shoulder, "it is necessary that we be married first, you know. I trust this is not too great a hindrance. Have you any thought for me - as well as the children?"

"I don't know yet," she said, staring at the rushes. "I can't realise. My lord - the Duke of Lancaster does not wed his paramour, and one of common stock - how could the King countenance this?"

"Well, he has," said John dryly. Richard at present would countenance far more than that to please his eldest uncle and annoy his youngest one.

"I thought you hated me," she said. "Your love was over long ago."

"You yourself decreed our parting. I hated for a while. Then I saw that you were right. I made Costanza as happy as it was in her nature to be happy, but you've never been far from my deepest thoughts. I swore once that I'd love you till I die, it seems that I'm so made, that I must keep my vow - Katrine, can you doubt this? My dear, I have had other mistresses, other bastards too, years ago - so has every noble in the land. I am offering you marriage, and the true birth of our children."

She rose slowly from the chair and looked up into his face, into the sad, questioning, eyes.

Katherine and John were married, very quietly, on January 13, beneath the stone carvings of the angels in the retro-choir of Lincoln Cathedral. A January thaw had set in during the days of waiting since the Duke had come to Katherine at Kettlethorpe, but on the marriage morning snow blew again over the fens from the North Sea and slapped softly against the cathedral's tinted windows while four junior vicars clustered around a lectern and chanted the office.

The subdean, John Carleton, celebrated the Nuptial Mass. The Duke had requested that the bishop should perform the marriage, and the bishop had refused. "For which," the Duke said with the old glinting icy look, "he will soon be exceeding sorry." His gaze rested speculatively on Harry. "Old Buckingham shall see how unchristian have been his many insults to my lady. It's high time Lincoln had a young and intelligent bishop, don't you think so, Harry?"

Harry's rapturous agreement was but one more note in the combined Beaufort joy. They lived now in bewildered glamour. A sorcery as marvellous as any of Merlin's was transforming all four of their young lives. During the ceremony while they knelt on velvet faldstools behind their parents, they were giddy with exultation. That very morning a letter had arrived from the King, who sent his blessings and said that, as soon as the legitimations were confirmed by the Pope, John Beaufort was to be created Earl of Somerset, Harry to be appointed Dean of Wells Cathedral in transit to a bishopric, Tamkin to be knighted; and as for Joan - - Already her father, upon discovering her despairing love, had opened negotiations with young Neville, the Lord of Westmorland - an excellent alliance. Without a doubt there would be another wedding soon. Joan had been ill from joy and as she watched the tall figures of her parents at the altar, there was such a shaking in her chest that she could not follow the service.

At noon the nuptial bells pealed out over Lincoln, and Katherine arose from her knees to find herself the Duchess of Lancaster. Her children, unable to contain themselves, were surging around St. Hugh's shrine, while Joan sobbed hysterically. Katherine saw the awed face of Mayor Robert Sutton, who hovered in the aisle with an alderman. She saw Hawise's massive shoulders quivering, her face buried in a new scarlet silk skirt, and as realisation came to Katherine, she swayed and caught at the altar rail. Blessed Christ, she thought, in terror. Against the triptych behind the crucifix she saw the lovely face of the Lady Blanche - and the enigmatic dark look of Costanza.

The Duke's strong hand closed on her arm. "Kiss me, Katrine," he said. She raised her mouth blindly. He brushed her lips with his and whispered, "Don't look back. We must be happy for the little time that's left."

He pulled her hand through his arm and they turned from the altar. They walked together down the steps, stood on a cloth-of-gold rug, while their children ran to them weeping, kissing their hands and their cheeks. Emotion almost too great to be borne and fortunately broken by a small, hoarse, crowing cheer.

Everyone looked around for the source of the cheer, which was Cob o' Fenton. He ran out from behind a pillar, flung himself to his knees while clutching a fold of Katherine's gown.

"Oh lady - I couldn't help cheering. Ye said the manor folk could come. Lady - that is, Your Grace - we're all here, down in the nave. Oh lady, this is a great day for Kettlethorpe!"

"A great day for Kettlethorpe?" cried Harry Beaufort, throwing back his head and gulping. "Oh in truth, by God, a great day for Kettlethorpe!" Suddenly they all dissolved in wild laughter. The Beaufort boys gasped and wheezed. They thumped little Cob on the back, who did not understand but grinned and chortled happily. The Duke and Katherine laughed.

Robert Sutton, watching from the aisle, was shocked, but the peculiarities of great folk must be tolerated. He smiled feebly and stared at Katherine as he had throughout the ceremony. A beautiful woman still, regal-looking in her green velvet and ermine and a silver-gilt veil covering her hair. "Christ's wounds!" Robert muttered suddenly to his alderman. "Do you know what this day's work makes of her? - until King Richard marries himself that little French maid in France - this makes her" - he nudged his fat chins towards Katherine - "first lady of England!" His jaw dropped while he assimilated his own discovery.

"So it does," said the alderman thoughtfully. "Well, it's small wonder she wouldn't marry you, old trout, what a comedown that woulda been!"

Master Robert did not hear, he was walking ponderously towards the ducal party, whose laughter had died down. With some difficulty he heaved himself to his knees and kissed Katherine's hand. "My homage, Your Grace," he said in a toneless, deliberate voice. "Your liegeman, in life and limb - -" Under Katherine's startled gaze he methodically completed his feudal oath due to the rulers of Lancaster.

By tacit consent, Katherine and John, for their wedding night, avoided all the places where they had previously been together. Until the snow started, they had thought to ride to his nearby castle of Tickhill, but since that was now impossible, he commandeered rooms in the constable's quarters of Lincoln Castle. The flustered constable sent his men scurrying hither and yon around Lincoln to find furnishings worthy of this occupancy, but the result at such short notice was not impressive.

" 'Tis not what I wanted for you, my Katrine," said John looking around the two small rooms, with their hastily hung arras, crude rugs, squat oaken bed.

"What does it matter?" she said softly, smiling. "It's true one should not look back too much - but I find now that I can't help remembering the hundreds of nights we've spent together - and in so many different places."

They sat at a small table before a rather smoky fire; neither had eaten of the food a squire had brought them, nor drunk of the claret.

Hawise had dressed Katherine in a plain blue chamber robe, to which John had fastened a brooch he had ordered from a Lincoln goldsmith. It was enamelled in full colours with her new blazon, the de Roet Catherine wheels impalling the royal lilies and leopards of England. Never shall I get used to that, she thought. She looked down at the brooch and shook her head. "I pray you'll never regret giving me the right to wear it," she whispered.

"I never will, lovedy."

He knew what a furore this marriage would cause in England, and in all Europe. He had weighed the disadvantages coolly enough before he saw her again; now he did not care. Since Blanche's death there had been no other woman for him - though he had tried hard enough to forget Katherine. And even Blanche - that had been different, to Blanche he owed his power, his enormous wealth, there had been loving gratitude. When he died, he would be buried beside her in St. Paul's as she had long ago requested, but now, for what time was left, he would please his heart at last. He watched Katherine as she sat across the table from him, her graceful head a little bent, gazing into the fire as she so often did, and wondered if part of the enduring love he had for her sprang from the fact that she had given him nothing but herself. She had brought him no wealth, no power, no hope of foreign thrones. Always with her, he had been the donor.

A dreamy contentment came to him, an absence of strain. But I'm happy, he thought in amazement. When have I ever been happy before?

"Come here to me, darling," he said. When she obeyed, he drew her down on to his lap, with her cheek in the old place against his shoulder. "How shocked our children would be, if they saw us," he said smiling into her soft hair. "They think us too old for this - I've thought so myself. Now I don't." He kissed her hard on the lips. "It's not like Chateau la Teste," he said, "that it can't be - there's not youth - nor the fierce heat of passion - -"

"Thank God, it's not Chateau la Teste," she whispered. "We paid for that, John - both of us - and others - -"

He was silent, his arms tight around her. The snow hissed and slapped on the horn windows; distantly from the castle ramparts the night-watch called out some challenge.

"Yet I believe you were no less my wife then, than you are tonight, Katrine," he said in a wondering voice.

CHAPTER XXXII

Katherine dined in the Great Hall at Windsor on the July night of the banquet to the French envoys who had come over to arrange final details of the meeting between the French and English kings.

In October, Richard would take formal possession of his eight-year-old bride, Princess Isabelle of France, and ratify the treaty of alliance at long last to be sealed with the ancient enemy - much to the fury of Gloucester and his warmongers.

Katherine sat on the dais to the right of the King's throne. She was encased in stiff cloth of gold so burdened with necklaces, bracelets, clasps, rings and the heavy jewelled coronet of Lancaster, that natural movement was impossible, even if the meticulous ceremony which Richard exacted had not made any impulsive action unwise. Richard reserved the right of impulse for himself.

The King was dressed in a new tunic of white brocade peppered with diamonds. His yellow hair was tightly curled and scented, his little tufted beard did not quite conceal the softness of his small pointed chin. At the moment he was idly toying with a jade butterfly the French nobles had brought as a gift from their King. The butterfly had originally come from the mysterious dragon land of Cathay, and as Richard's plump almond-white fingers caressed the soft jade and his polished pink fingernails ran along the exquisite lines of the carving, he smiled at the butterfly as though it were a loved child. He ignored a dish of roast larks and ginger fritters which a kneeling squire presented to him. The squire continued to kneel, and the King to caress his bauble.

On Katherine's other side sat her Duke, imperturbably, frigidly courteous, while he made small talk with Eleanor de Bohun, his sister-in-law. But the Duchess of Gloucester was far too angry to be civil in return, though from fear - of the King, whose sparkling malicious eyes darted her way now and then, of Lancaster who had that very morning corrected her behaviour towards Katherine with a controlled but menacing wrath - she managed to grunt, and say "Ay so" and "No doubt" occasionally.

When news of the Duke of Lancaster's extraordinary marriage had burst on England, it had caused a furore as great as John had expected, though the outcry was not all hostile. From cot to castle the news had been mouthed voluptuously, but many of the commons and middle class had been amused, even pleased. Their hatred of the Duke had gradually given place to hatred of Richard and his favourites. They had come to consider Lancaster as the only sage restraining hand on his nephew's headlong rush into mad extravagance and contempt for his people. Moreover, the Duke's elevation of a woman who was born a commoner appealed to popular sentiment, while most feminine hearts were touched by the romantic apotheosis of a fallen sister.

The noble ladies at court were not so tolerant; while Eleanor, upon realising the magnitude and implications of the news, had gone into an actual frenzy, beating her breast, tearing her hair and shouting for all to hear that her heart would burst with grief and shame if she were asked to give precedence to such a lewd baseborn Duchess! Which had delighted Richard, who detested his aunt nearly as much as he hated and feared his domineering Uncle Thomas. By all means, let Eleanor's heart burst, he said, and so much the better, but until it did she would have to witness the exaltation of the new Duchess of Lancaster. Not only here in England, either, but in France, where Katherine was soon to travel with the King and court and, as first lady of England, take official charge of the new little Queen.

The night was warm, the banquet tedious, the minstrels played listlessly. Richard yawned, put down the jade butterfly, and said to the quiet gold-clad figure on his right, "Why do you continually glance down the Hall towards that table near the door?"

Katherine started, then smiled. She answered frankly in her low sweet voice. "I am seeing there, Your Grace, a dazzled little convent girl of fifteen who wears an ill-fitting borrowed gown, and stares up at this High Table and its line of glittering Plantagenets as though they were the Holy Angels ranged beside God's throne."

"Ah yes," Richard smiled, after a puzzled moment. "And now you're one of them. It must be very strange."

"I pinch myself and still can't believe it! 'Tis thanks to you, Your Grace, and to my dear lord - -" She looked at John's averted head, seeing that he had given up struggling with Eleanor and was talking around her stiff back to Mowbray, the Earl Marshal, who was an enemy. Or had been. Mowbray had lately made his peace with John, whom he had consistently denounced during John's absence in Aquitaine.

With the exception of Gloucester, who had refused to come to this banquet and remained at his castle of Plashy, pleading ill health, the court had taken its tone from Richard and welcomed Lancaster with ostensible rejoicing. But beneath the scent of costly perfumes and strewn flowers in this Hall, the air was thick with hidden enmity. One had but to look at the King's ever-present bodyguard ranged along the walls, enormous armed ruffians imported from Cheshire, whose white hart badges apparently gave them unlimited licence to rape, steal and murder, unchecked. All England was afraid of them, and no King before Richard had thought such protection necessary. God shield us, Katherine thought.

But in time the banquet would finish, and she and John would be alone. She anticipated each night when they were freed from court duties as eagerly as she had long ago. Now it was not for bodily passion that she yearned, though they were still tenderly responsive to each other. A different bond had become more satisfying. He might be discouraged, irritable, tired - and sometimes she thought with fear that he seemed to be losing strength, sudden lassitude would overpower him - but yet, when the door of the great Lancastrian state suite was closed at last, a warm deep content came to them. There was no need for talk or love-making, they were at rest.

Richard, while he played with his golden fork and nibbled a slice of porcupine seethed in almond milk, had been considering Katherine's explanation of her glances down the Hall. It was charming as a variant of the old tale of the prince and the beggar maid; and pleasing as an example of the omnipotence of anointed kings.

And those who dared challenge that divine power would bitterly repent their folly! His lids drooped as he glanced down the Hall towards the ranks of helmeted heads - his Cheshire archers. Two thousand of them in here and outside in the court, waiting, always ready. Had I had them sooner, he thought - his hand trembled on his fork, the two tines rattled on the golden plate.

Now and again fears swooped down like vampires in the night, especially since Anne had died. She had held them at bay. The vampires must be fought alone now and exterminated cunningly, one by one, Gloucester, Arundel, and there were others - who had thought themselves strong enough to defy a king. And had succeeded for a time. They had exiled the one beloved friend, de Vere, who died over there alone in France; they had exiled good old Michael de la Pole, who also died; they had actually murdered Simon Burley, the kind tutor of his childhood. By the Blood of Christ, who was to know for sure that they had not murdered Anne? Plague could be caused by witchcraft, poison could counterfeit plague - -

Be careful, said a voice in Richard's mind. Don't let them guess what you are thinking. Remember those suave watchful Frenchmen over there. Wait until after the marriage with little Isabelle, until we are at peace with France - and then - -

He turned suddenly to Katherine, mustering all his eager boyish charm. "I'm much interested in what you said of that night here thirty, it is, years ago. Ay - a year before I was born. Whom were you sitting with?"

Katherine was startled, unpredictable as a cat, one never knew where he would pounce next. "Why," she said, "it was with my sister Philippa, Your Grace, and her betrothed, Geoffrey Chaucer."

"Chaucer?" said the King raising his plucked golden brows, and twirling the stem of his goblet. "Have you seen the scurrilous verses he dared to write to me?"

Katherine had seen them. Geoffrey had imprudently taken it upon himself to chide the King for "lack of steadfastness" and it was no wonder that he had been reduced to a penury that she had immediately relieved, with John's help, when she became Duchess.

"Geoffrey's getting old," she said uncomfortably, "and is in poor health. He served His Grace, your grandfather, most loyally."

Richard laughed and took a sip of iced wine. "Oh, I forgive him, because of the pleasure some of his poems have brought me." And he shrugged, dismissing Chaucer. "Tell me," he said smoothly, "that day in Essex when I was putting down the revolt and you were on pilgrimage, what was the vow you made?"

This was so unexpected that she coloured. Jesu, he forgets nothing, she thought, every detail, every smallest thing. Every slight too, Christ pity him. For there was pathos in Richard, one felt the misery of his distrusts and deep uncertainties; sometimes there was a plaintive frightened sweetness about him. She had come to see this in the last months. But he was undisciplined, childish, vengeful - and dangerous. John was in high favour now, but if - - She dismissed these rushing thoughts and answered with the only part of the truth it was safe to tell him. "I had a daughter, Your Grace, Blanchette - you remember I asked of her that day? She was injured, disappeared when the rebels fired the Savoy. I took the pilgrimage in hope that Our Lady of Walsingham would find her for me."

"Ah," cried Richard, his eyes lighting, "those whoreson serfs. I soon dealt with them, didn't I? Well, did Our Lady send you Blanchette?"

"No," said Katherine slowly. "I've never heard what happened to her."

"And there's pain still, after all these years?" asked Richard curiously.

"Time never entirely heals the loss of a child, Your Grace," said Katherine incautiously. The King's round pink and white face hardened. The Plantagenet glint flashed in his pale blue eyes.

Richard's failure to produce an heir, and the choice of his new Queen, whose age made it impossible that she could even be bedded for years, was the common whisper of England. Anything that Richard might construe as the obliquest reference to his peculiarities was unwise.

He paid her back at once by smiling his small purse-lipped smile and saying, "Alas, I have as yet no way of knowing these parental sensibilities, have I, my lady? Young Mortimer is still my heir. 'Tis pity indeed," he said softly, watching her closely, "that your new husband's good and prolific Henry of Bolingbroke may not succeed."

Blessed Mother, thought Katherine. The sudden claws, the threat that jumped out when all was most charming. She cast about for politic answers and instinctively rejected them for frankness.

"Henry has never coveted the throne, Your Grace, any more than has my dear lord his father, and this you know right well by long years of proof."

Richard stared at her, astonished by positive rebuttal. Of late, and barely recognised, for he was fond of his Uncle John, there had been growing in Richard a dislike of Henry: so solid and masculine a man, so excellent a soldier and jouster - and so popular with the people. "I've never doubted my Uncle of Lancaster's loyalty, no matter what they said," he murmured half to himself, looking beyond her to the Duke.

"Nor need you doubt his son's, Your Grace." Katherine smiled, still a lovely warm smile, with white teeth and a hint of her youthful dimple. In both the smile and her sincere voice, there was for Richard something maternal and reassuring.

She was nearly of the age at which he best remembered his mother, the Princess Joan, and that memory brought ease.

With one of his characteristic volte-faces, Richard laughed and patted Katherine's hand. "I shall believe you, my fair new aunt," he said mischievously. "At least for tonight! God's blood, but the minstrels play badly. This banquet bores me." He stood up, shoving his plate away. like released bowstrings, the two hundred diners jumped to their feet and waited. The Cheshire guard sprang to attention.

Richard airily waved the Flemish lace handkerchief he always carried. "Clear the Hall. There shall be dancing now!"

The half-eaten food was whisked away. The subtleties not yet presented were returned to the kitchens.

Richard looked up at Katherine, who topped him by some inches, crying loudly, "My first dance of course will be with the Duchess of Lancaster." He winked at the Duke, as Eleanor gave an unmistakable anguished choke.

On the day after the banquet, the Lancasters travelled back to Kenilworth to enjoy a few days of privacy before leaving for Calais and the state meeting there with the Dukes of Berry and Burgundy - more preliminaries to peace with France.

As the ducal retinue cantered along the side of the mere towards Kenilworth, Katherine looked ahead at the red sandstone battlements with fervent relief. This was the castle which in the old days had always been home to her, its warm ruddy fabric was interwoven with memories of her children's babyhood, and of the more peaceful stretches of her love.

The watch had seen them. The trumpets blew a salute, and the Lancaster pennant ran hastily up on the Mortimer Tower. The Duke's retinue pulled their horses down to a walk, and Katherine presently said to John, "Oh my dear lord - how delicious it will be to rest here a few days."

He placed his hand on the jewelled pommel to turn and smile at her. "Your new duties are exacting, lovedy! And I fear it won't be all rest now. There's Saint Pol to be entertained. The tenants have planned celebrations for you, and all the chancery officials are here, since we have much business to discuss before going abroad."

"Oh well - I know - but that's all simple compared to court life. Sainte Marie, but these last few days at Windsor were gruelling. 'Be gracious to the Sieur de Vertain, but remember that he's outranked by Saint Pol Remember that Lady Arundel will repeat everything I say to Gloucester, and Lady Salisbury to her husband, who will tell the King, and above all be careful what you say to the King.' I never knew how hard it was to be a great lady - -"

"You do it superbly, Katrine," said John with sudden seriousness. "I've been very proud of you and of the way you ignore malice and slander."

She blushed and said quietly, "Malice and slander are accustomed things to both of us, darling. One learns to live without their hurting overmuch."

"Ay," he said, "they never disturbed me but once - that foolish changeling story. Ah, Katrine - never during the long time of our separation did I quite forget what your love did for me then."

They both fell silent as they rode through the two gates and under the raised portcullises of Mortimer's Tower into the base court, where they were greeted by the usual confusion of scurrying stable-boys, barking dogs and children. It was a different set of children now who ran in great excitement down from the inner court, escaping from nurses and governesses to precipitate themselves perilously near the rearing, snorting horses. These were John's grandchildren, Henry's brood, who summered at Kenilworth. Little Henry of Monmouth, nine years old, did not wait for the Duke to dismount, but swarmed up the flank of his grandfather's great charger, and sure of indulgence, wedged himself between the pommel and the Duke crying, "Grandsir, Grandsir, did you bring me the peregrine you promised? Did you, my lord?"

John smiled at Katherine over the child's head. "Here's a naughty mannerless lad, who thinks of nothing but falconry! Get down', you little savage, get down, you'll find out in good time." He scooped the boy out of the saddle and deposited him on the flags. "Now stand back and show the Duchess and me proper courtesy."

"Ah, but not too much ceremony, my lord," said Katherine laughing, as the boy, who had no awe of his grandfather, made a pert face. "It's good to have a pack of rowdy children around again!"

She glanced up at the weather-vane on the stable roof remembering the day Elizabeth had clung to it - Elizabeth, now at last married none too happily to the John Holland of her earliest passion, the King's lustful unprincipled half-brother. Katherine walked through the arch after the Duke and saw the stone bench by the keep where Philippa had said gravely on that same day, "Nay, I don't mind that my father should love you - but I pray - pray for your souls."

Philippa was now Queen of Portugal with five children of her own. She had written Katherine a gentle affectionate letter of congratulation upon receiving news of the marriage.

There had been another child on that old mossy stone bench that day. Katherine had an instant vision of the upturned dark grey eyes and dismissed it sharply. It was morbid to dwell on the one sorrow when the other five children were secure now in positions never imagined in her most daring dreams.

The next morning, when Katherine awoke early in the State Bed of the White Chamber, John still slept. He needed more rest than he used to, and though she tried to deny it to herself, nor ever let him guess that she noticed, she knew that his heart was tiring. He must mount stairs slowly, or struggle to breathe; at times his mouth had a pinched bluish look, and there was an oppression in his chest.

Yet on this summer morning he looked well, the deep grooves on his forehead and cheeks were smoothed by sleep, the scarred eyelid less puckered. He was thin but still hard and muscular, the hairs on his chest were golden as they used to be, though his head was streaked with grey. He slept tidily without sound, the fastidiousness that she loved in him never failed. She thought of what Elizabeth had said when she saw her father in Richard's coronation procession, "He's never slobbery, no matter what," and, smiling, kissed him on the shoulder, then slid out of bed and summoned Hawise.

Hawise was a person of consequence now, and not sure that she liked it. She had four waiting-women under her, besides a score of maidservants, and her new position required that she dress in heavy flowing woollen robes no matter what the temperature.

Katherine gestured towards the garde-robe, and the woman went in there so as not to disturb the Duke.

"I've brought ye spiced hippocras the butler sent up," said Hawise crossly, putting a chased gold ewer down on the toilet-table. "We're all far too grand to drink honest English ale of a morning anymore."

Katherine laughed. "Don't tell me you miss Kettlethorpe, my lass?" She swallowed a cupful of the cool sweet wine and began to wash herself with rose-water.

"Not sure I don't," grumbled Hawise, mixing powdered coral and myrrh for the tooth cleaning. "Doesn't take five women to wait on you, when I've done it well enough alone these donkey's years - that Dame Griselda Moorehead, Dame Muttonhead I call her, telling me it's her right and privilege to attend ye at your bath, that I know naught of etiquette. I'll right-and-privilege her, may Saint Anthony's fire burn me if I won't. 'Fishmongress' she calls me, as though Father's trade was aught to be 'shamed of!"

"Have some hippocras," said Katherine pacifically, putting the cup in Hawise's reluctant hand. "'Tis really delicious. We must both put up with changed conditions for ill or well - I suppose."

"Ah sweeting," cried Hawise, her broad freckled face crinkling, "ye know I don't mean it. God's belly, there's not an hour in the day I don't gi' thanks for the marvellous thing what's happened to ye - when I think o' the black past - well, let be - we won't think of it."

They looked at each other, while the memory of all the years they had shared together hovered between them, then spoke of trifling matters while they proceeded with Katherine's elaborate toilet. John wished her to be always richly dressed, and to wear the new jewels he had given her. He took great pride in her mature beauty and liked her to enhance it by the artful application of unguents, rouges and perfumes.

After Hawise had adjusted a light seed-pearl coronet over a veil of rosy gauze, Katherine glanced into the bedchamber and said, "My dear lord sleeps late, I'm afraid I should wake him. He must sign those letters to the King before the Comte de St. Pol starts back for Windsor."

"Let His Grace rest, poor soul, he seemed mortal weary yestere'en." Hawise had indulgence now towards the Duke and did not even mind his teasing her for her jealous wardship of her mistress.

Katherine nodded, walked rapidly through the passages of the Sainteowe Tower into the beautiful Great Hall which John had now completed. It was crowded with retainers, lords, knights, squires and their ladies, all waiting for her to come so that they might sit down to eat. As she entered, the men bowed, and the ladies curtsied. The chamberlain ushered her unctuously to the dais, where her own squire, kneeling, presented her with a damask napkin.

"Good morning Roger," she said smiling at him, while the company seated themselves. "You look very merry, you won at dicing last night?"

The lad blushed, and bit his lips to keep from laughing. "Dame Fortune favoured me, Your Grace," he admitted.

He's like his grandfather, she thought - Roger de Cheyne with the bold wooing eyes, the pretty chestnut curls - -my first love, I suppose, or I thought so - Jesu, how long ago. Thirty years. She thought of the tournament, the knight with the nodding iris stuck in his helm - poor Roger who was killed so shortly after that at Najera. Blessed Mother, how many were dead that had witnessed Saint George's tournament at Windsor? She crossed herself, and turned abruptly to the French nobleman on her right, the Comte de St. Pol, "Vous vous amusez bien ici en Angleterre, monsieur, ca vous plait?" She embarked on the courteous chit-chat which was constantly required of her now.

"Parfaitement, madame la duchesse," replied the count, delicately wiping his long black moustaches, and thinking that despite the scandal of this marriage, the new Duchess had far better manners than most of the English barbarians and the further advantage of speaking pure French - which he would report to his own King Charles in good time.

The stately breakfast proceeded. Katherine longed to go out to her pleasaunce where the peaches were ripening and the new Persian lilies were in bloom, but she allowed herself no impatience. It would be hours before she could enjoy the garden. There must first be interviews with the chamberlain and the steward. She must arbitrate a quarrel between the village and castle laundresses, she must dictate answers to a dozen letters, and as most of them were begging letters, there would be conference first with the clerk of her wardrobe.

When she rose at length, a page came up to say that two nuns had just arrived at the castle and craved an audience. "Certainly," said Katherine, wondering which convent it was this time that required a benefice. "Tell them I'll receive them presently." And hoped that whatever it was they wanted, she could manage to gratify them herself from her privy purse without bothering John.

By the time she had finished her necessary morning routine, it had grown very warm, and she sent a page to the nuns to convey them to the oriel of the Great Hall,, where a faint breeze blew through the opened window. John was up at last and had gone to the chancery office with St. Pol. Except for her own women who were embroidering and spinning by one of the empty fireplaces, the Hall was deserted for the present.

Katherine seated herself in a carved gilt chair and surveyed the-two nuns with polite indifference as they bowed before her. White nuns, Cistercians, shrouded in snowy wimples and habits, a tall one and a short one. The former turned away at once and seemed to be examining the embroidered Venetian wall hanging. Katherine had had only a glimpse of a pale unsmiling profile.

The short nun began to talk in a weak insistent voice, her heavy-jawed, middle-aged face twitched with nervous little smiles. "Most kind of you, Your Grace - forgive this intrusion, really I hardly know how to explain it. Oh, I'm the prioress of Pinley - a very small foundation, you know where we are? Only a few miles from here, near Warwick - but of course we're not on Lancastrian land. Your Grace wouldn't know us - -"

What is all this about, Katherine thought, faintly amused. "Is there some help I can give you, my lady prioress?" she said, glancing in some perplexity at the rigid white back of the other nun, whose marked withdrawal was surely peculiar.

"Well," said the prioress, chewing her lips, "I don't rightly know. It's Dame Ursula there who would come. She's my sacrist and librarian, not that we have many books, I think it's maybe that she wanted, wondered if - but Dame Ursula, she talks so little, sometimes we think she's very odd, though not the way she used to be - -"

Katherine raised her eyebrows and drew them together.

"Oh," said the prioress, "she's quite deaf, I doubt she can hear me."

But it seemed that the other nun had heard. With a slow almost languorous motion she turned and looked full at Katherine, whose heart began to pound before her mind knew any reason for it, who gazed blankly at the triangular wedge of face enclosed by the white wimple, then at the slate-grey eyes that looked at her with hesitant enigmatic question.

"You do not know me?" said the tall nun quietly in the flat toneless voice of the deafened.

Katherine stared again. She pushed herself up from the chair, gripping the armrests. She tried to speak, but the blood drained from her head, she fell back sideways - and slipped off the chair.

The blankness lasted only a few moments, though it was long enough for the page on hearing the prioress' frightened cry to have summoned Catherine's women. When she opened her eyes, she had been laid on the rug, Griselda Moorehead was sponging her forehead with wine, Hawise was burning a feather beneath her nose and there was a chorus of female speculation: "What happened? The Duchess swooned - but she never does - what can be amiss?"

The prioress had drawn back and was wringing her hands, crying that it was not fault of hers, that she didn't know what happened, that Dame Ursula - -

Katherine pushed Hawise and Griselda aside, she struggled to her elbow and saw that the tall white nun knelt by her feet, the wimpled head was bowed and there were tears on the pale cheeks.

"Go away please, everybody," said Katherine in a shaking voice, "all but Dame Ursula. I'm sorry I was so foolish. The heat, perhaps - -" The women reluctantly obeyed her. Hawise made after them after she had helped her mistress to her feet and shot a long startled unbelieving look at Dame Ursula, who continued to kneel with her head bowed.

When they were alone, Katherine bent down, took the clasped thin trembling hands in hers. "Blanchette," she whispered. "Oh, my darling - I always knew - Dear God, I knew you'd come back - -"

The nun raised her head at last. "I had to see you again," she said through stiff pale lips, "I could no longer live with my hatred."

There were only two people in the castle who understood why the Duchess was closeted in her bower all that day with the Cistercian nun. These were the Duke and Hawise, who saw to it that she was not disturbed, while the mystified prioress was made welcome in the Hall.

The mother and daughter could not speak much for a long time. They wept together quietly and after a while they prayed on Katherine's prie-dieu. It was only bit by bit that Katherine comprehended her daughter's story. Blanchette was unaccustomed to talking, and her deafness, result of the scarlet fever, had increased her withdrawal into an interior world which satisfied her.

She made this clear: the convent life contented her, she wished for no other, there was no doubt that she had a true vocation. She was grateful to the nuns, who had sheltered the wild half-demented child who had come to them fifteen years ago, and who had accepted her as a novice later, though she had no dowry and pretended that she did not know her name. "I never told anything about myself," said Blanchette. "I couldn't. My soul was eaten up with fear, fear and hate.

Mother," she took a sharp breath and looked deep into Katherine's eyes, "did I hear wrong that day in the Avalon Chamber?"

It was as Katherine had suspected all these years, the added pain that had lain at the core of her anguished bereavement. Blanchette had misinterpreted the Grey Friar's accusation and had believed that her mother had deliberately poisoned her father.

Speaking distinctly, her lips slowly forming each word, Katherine effaced this horror for Blanchette at last. And the grave twenty-nine-year-old nun received the truth and understood, as the frightened child could never have.

It was the news of the marriage which had stirred Blanchette from her long self-containment. She had begun to remember her mother's love for her, to see Katherine as a woman who could never commit the hideous crime that the child had believed in. "And - I thought, I felt, that you could not have married the Duke if it were true."

Later Blanchette, speaking with even greater effort, told of how she had escaped from the Savoy; though that time was for her now a dim fantastic memory. From the Avalon Chamber she had run to hide in the falcon mew. "How long I don't know, the hawks in there frightened me; I had forgotten you, forgotten what was happening to the Savoy. I thought only of my green linnet in its cage upstairs."

She had gone back up the secret stairs to the Privy Suite to find her bird. The suite was filled with smoke and the roar of approaching fire. The bird lay dead on the bottom of its cage which the rebels had tossed in a corner of the Duchess' garde-robe. As Blanchette picked up the cage, the passageway burst into flames behind her, and she jumped from the window into the Thames. The wooden cage had held her up until a boat came by. It was rowed by a Fleming, who was flying from the massacre of his people that was taking place in London. He hauled Blanchette on board with him and rowed on desperately up the river.

"I don't know where he put me ashore, "said Blanchette," or where I wandered for some days - but I think I was trying to get here to Kenilworth, to you as you used to be. One of the Pinley serfs found me lying exhausted in a field, he brought me to the convent. They thought me daft for a long time, I would not talk and could hear but little, while in my heart was - oh Blessed Christ - -" She turned from her mother and clasping her long delicate hands on the white wool of her habit stared out through the window to the placid mere.

"Ay," she said after a while, "it was He and His love that held me, when all other love was twisted into hate." She got up and kneeling down by Katherine looked up into her face. "Mother, I shall be an anchoress. Ay - I've thought much about it, but I had to be free of hatred first. A cell dedicated to God where I shall never more see the outer world."

"No, darling, no!" Katherine cried below her breath. "I can't give you up again." She had been thinking of what might still be done for Blanchette to make up to her for the youth she had missed. Of how, by special dispensation, Blanchette might visit Kenilworth from time to time, that she might even travel to Kettlethorpe as she had once longed to do.

Blanchette did not hear the protest, but she saw her mother's recoil. "It's right for me to become a recluse," she said gravely. "God has stopped up my ears, so that I may better hear His voice. By His grace, my prayers will be stronger help to others than aught else I can do. You must not doubt this, Mother, for I know it is so."

I know it is so. What dear-bought treasured certainty that was. It seemed to Katherine that above Blanchette's halting voice she heard the Lady Julian speak. "I saw full surely that it needs be that we should be in longing and in penance until the time that we be led so deep into God that we truly know our own soul."

This had happened to Blanchette, she could not doubt it. For this child of hers, the sanctified life of a recluse was right, as it would have been wrong for Katherine, who had so desperately wished to renounce the world during the time of rebellion and anguish in Norfolk.

Katherine leaned down and kissed her daughter's forehead, while she thought with humble gratitude of the guidance that had sent her back to the long years of struggle and humiliation. Of the grace that had been shown in the end to help her children to their birthright, to ease the lot of her manor folk at Kettlethorpe - to give of herself to John.

The women spoke but little more together, nor had need to. They went to vespers together in Kenilworth's chapel, and afterwards kissed each other a long tender farewell. They would meet once more at the convent when Katherine came back from France, before Blanchette's final enclosure.

The prioress had watched all these extraordinary happenings with popping eyes, and was told the truth before the two nuns set forth with their servant back to Pinley. She was also told to keep silence on Dame Ursula's identity, a promise which she gave the more readily when she realised the advantages resultant upon the Duchess of Lancaster's new interest in the little priory. Blanchette's original Deyncourt dowry should be paid them at once and there would be other rewards for the Christian kindness they had shown the girl.

The Duke stood beside Katherine in the courtyard, while they watched the two white figures disappear through the Mortimer Gate. He looked down at his wife's face and said softly, "I believe this has given you more happiness than I have ever done. I think I'm jealous of that look in your eyes."

"Ah, my dear love," she said, turning to him, "don't you see that it's more than thanksgiving for the safety of the child I so deeply wronged? It's that this means forgiveness, at last - we are forgiven all that we've done to harm others. I feel it."

He could not share her certainty, though during the months that they had been together again he had often been touched by the quiet fearless faith, which she had never used to have.

This day he had received sinister news. A rumour that his brother of Gloucester had been overheard making bloody threats against the King. Whom I shall protect as always, God help me, John thought bitterly. He had pity for his unhappy, confused nephew, and certainly Richard had no one else, left who could protect him now.

Yet during the past night, John had had a frightful dream of Richard. In the dream the King's plump girlish body had been clothed in a leopard's hide, and the cruel yellow eyes had been covertly watching Henry, John's first-born and heir. Treachery. The word had been on John's lips when he finally awoke this morning. The dream-fear faded soon,-but it merged into a haze of sadness and foreboding. He had lain in bed for some time, thinking of the failures in his life, the injustices and stupidities, and of the clouded threatening future.

He had meant to tell Katherine, the voicing of his thoughts to her would bring relief, but now he could not damp the great joy that had come to her.

When the two nuns had gone, she had moved instinctively towards the pleasaunce gate and he followed her silently. They walked into the evening quiet of the privy garden. Bees hummed still over the white Persian lilies and the clove gillyflowers, whose fragrance had deepened in the summer dusk. Against the warm brick wall espaliered apricot and pear trees held up green hands studded with golden fruit. The crystal waters of the fountain splashed softly into a mossy marble basin, near the carved oak bench where Katherine and John-sat down together and gazed out across the mere. Swans glided by with their cygnets, the fringing rushes quivered under the evening breeze.

The sweetness of the garden had begun to lull John into Katherine's mood of deep unexpectant peace, when suddenly from the castle ward behind them there erupted the shrill fanfare of a trumpet; dogs barked, and there were shouts of greeting.

Katherine stirred, rousing herself reluctantly. "Now who could that be arriving?"

John's far-sighted eyes had seen a galloping horseman streak by along the causeway. " 'Tis a King's herald," he said in a down-dragging voice. "Richard will have some new idea for the French envoys, or. discovered some new conspiracy - or worse - I don't know - Katrine; I have a foreboding - there's danger ahead."

She turned to him on the bench, seeing the tight lines of his mouth, the discouragement in his eyes.

"It may be so, darling," she said slowly. "It may be that there is danger - -" She paused and said more softly still, "There was no promise, that we should not be tempested and travailed - but there was a promise." She smiled and did not go on as she saw that he was not really listening. She put her hand over his, and waited until his clenched fingers relaxed and clasped hers. Hand-fasted they sat looking out across the darkening lake into the forest beyond.

Presently comfort came to him, and he thought that she had always given him of her strength though he had never quite realised it until now.

Glory had passed him by; fame too perhaps would not endure; it might well be that the incalculable goddess would decree ill fame as his due. Perhaps there might not be included in his epitaph the one tribute to his knighthood that he knew he deserved:"II fut toujour bon et loyal chevalier."

But whatever the shadowed years might bring, as long as life should last, he knew that he had here at his side one sure recompense and one abiding loyalty.

AFTERWORD

The following year, 1397, Richard effected the murder of his Uncle Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, at Calais, while Lord Arundel was beheaded for treason. Shortly thereafter, Richard cruelly and inexplicably exiled Henry of Bolingbroke.

John, Duke of Lancaster, died a natural death on February 3, 1399, at Leicester Castle, with Katherine by his side. They had been married three years. Upon the Duke's death, Richard wantonly confiscated all the Lancastrian estates and heritage, and Henry soon returned to England to fight for his rights.

By popular acclaim, Richard was forced to abdicate in favour of his much-wronged cousin, who thereupon became King Henry the Fourth of England, while Richard was imprisoned in Pontefract Castle, where he soon died. Katherine's son Thomas Swynford was at that time constable of Pontefract and it was said that by starvation he murdered Richard.

After her Duke's death Katherine returned to Lincolnshire, where she lived quietly four years and died on May 10, 1403. She was buried by the High Altar in Lincoln Cathedral, where her son Henry Beaufort, later cardinal and chancellor had duly become bishop. Katherine's tomb is there now, with that of her Joan.

From the Beauforts, the royal line of England is descended. Through John Beaufort (Earl of Somerset, Marquis of Dorset), who married Richard's half-niece, Katherine became the ancestress of Henry the Seventh, and the Tudor line, also of the royal Stuart line of Scotland. Through Joan and Ralph Neville of Raby (Earl of Westmorland), Katherine was great-grandmother to Edward the Fourth, and Richard the Third.

Surely John of Gaunt and Katherine de Roet, the herald's daughter, fulfilled the ancient prophecy, "Thou shalt get kings though thou be none."

Table of Contents

Katherine

ANYA SETON

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Part One (1366-1367)

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

Part Two (1369)

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

Part Three (1371)

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

Part Four (1376-1377)

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

Part Five (1381)

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

Part Six (1387-1396)

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

AFTERWORD