The Scandalous Duchess

Chapter Nineteen

Why is it not in the human condition to be satisfied with what we have?

Fear creeps in to spoil and destroy, like the first ravages of the moth in a fine wool tapestry, impossible to distinguish by the naked eye until the damage is done and the glorious hunting scene is punctured by as many holes as a sieve. So fear crept into my consciousness.

What if my lover, my dearest friend, my only heart’s desire, the glorious apple of my very critical eye, were to wed again? What if the Duke of Lancaster should take another Duchess to his marital bed?

It was a thought that I despised, but one that kept me brooding company. I could see no reason at all why he should not. It would be good political strategy on the part of King Richard to arrange it. To insist on it, if he were of a mind to exert his authority over his family.

Duchess Constanza was dead. Constanza who had, in her eyes, failed to achieve her life’s wish, had died. We had not foreseen it. How would we? There had been no rumour of ill-health, only of the end when it came, when in March at Leicester Castle, surrounded by her Castilian ladies, Constanza breathed her last of English air.

In Lincoln, I had known of her death before the Duke, for he was in France concluding a long-awaited, four-year truce with the French. What a blow it had been for him to return to this loss, full of the success of his diplomacy, and be plunged into funerary rights. Even though they had lived apart since the abandoning of the Castilian campaign, yet his respect for her, his Duchess for more than twenty years, was great. He was not a man to be left unmoved, and in moments of honesty his conscience troubled him. He had not always made life easy for her.

He had not talked to me of it and I was too careful to step mindlessly where I might not be wanted. My discretion these days was a thing of wonder.

But now the Duke was free, had been free for four months. In excellent health in mind and body, he would be an asset to any plans Richard had for a European alliance. Would the King put pressure on the Duke to wed again at his dictates? I imagined that Richard already had such a plan in his mind, so that before too many more months, the Duke would be participating in a third nuptial celebration.

I could not think of that. Not yet.

Such a prospect would bring me too much pain in a year that had seemed to bring nothing but pain. What a year of deaths it had been. Of tears and graves and mourning. A year of portents, when I had set my mind to luxuriate in my restored happiness, even during John’s absence in France, but happiness is not in the gift of Man when God takes his due. For a year in which contentment should have enfolded me, blessed me, I spent an unconscionable length of time on my knees. And so did the Duke. Death had blown in without warning, as disturbing as a summer storm.

Now I knelt in Westminster Abbey with the royal court, for Queen Anne was dead from the plague, which took no account of her rank or her mere twenty-eight years. Richard, unhinged almost to madness, had ordered the rooms of the palace at Sheen where she had breathed her last to be razed to the ground.

I allowed my eyes to rest on the rigid shoulder-blades of the Duke. Straight backed, the Duke was suffering from grief too, and not only for the passing of Duchess Constanza. The wound of desperate loss was made so much worse for him for Mary, dear, sweet Mary, Henry’s child bride, was dead at Hertford with her seventh child—a daughter, Philippa—in her arms. I was there with her, and heartbroken. Henry was inconsolable. Had he not sent her a basket of delicate fish which she loved to help her through the pregnancy? And now she was dead.

What a crippling homecoming for the Duke, to bury Constanza and Mary at Leicester, within a day of each other.

The ceremony was drawing to a close. Ahead, Richard stood, looking distracted. Was he already drawing up new marriage contracts for himself and for the Duke? All I knew of high policy was that Richard had confirmed my lord as Duke of Aquitaine and that the Duke was already preparing to sail to enforce his authority there. What if he came back with a wife, some Aquitainian beauty, as he had once returned with Constanza?

There were rumours. There were always rumours.

Be sensible, I abjured myself. Rumours can be false as often as they are true.

My abjuration had no noticeable effect.

‘Do you intend to remarry? Will you return with a new bride?’

My demands were made as soon as I stepped across the threshold of the Duke’s record chamber at Leicester on this eve of departure. I had barely taken time to greet my son John whom I had passed between stable and Great Hall.

The Duke looked up but did not stir from where he sat. Demands—other than mine—lay heavily on him, as I could see. He was harassed.

‘And a good day to you, Lady de Swynford,’ he growled.

I strode up to stand before the long trestle table that habitually occupied the centre of the room. It was covered with documents from one end to the other.

‘I hear that Richard has a new marriage arranged for you. Has he?’

‘And who would be the fortunate lady?’ The pen was thrown aside. Elbows planted on the table, the Duke rested his chin on his hands and looked me in the eye.

‘I have no idea. Would you not know before me?’

‘I expect I would. Why would I want a wife when I have you to hound me?’

‘I am allowed to hound you. I am your love.’ I smiled with deceptive sweetness. ‘I am told that you intend to wed again. For an alliance.’

‘I intend to go to Aquitaine. If I can ever manage to get the fleet together and the forces to accompany me. And Richard has his mind set on his own new wife rather than on mine.’

I was almost intrigued enough to ask who she might be, but would not be distracted. He was short on temper, but then so was I. Short on patience too. I saw documents, lists and tallies under his hand. In the circumstances he might wish I wasn’t there. I hunched a shoulder as I moved to occupy one of the stools set along the wall, as if I were a clerk waiting instructions.

‘When will you return?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. I have to get there first.’

‘When do you go?’

‘Next week. From Plymouth if I’m allowed to get on with it.’

I breathed out, no better at bearing the looming absence than I had twenty years before, for that was at the heart of my ill-humour. I would be alone, without knowledge of him, for as many months as it would take. There were plenty who would try their hand again, to rid the world of the new Duke of Aquitaine, with a cup of poison. Or a hidden dagger.

The Duke stacked the documents into a pile, then the endless lists with brisk irritability, before tunnelling his fingers through his hair. The sun highlighted more silver than I had recalled. And I sighed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, quite as irritable as he. It did not sound like an apology.

For what?’

‘For disturbing you when you might wish to be left alone. But I had to come.’

He stared at me. I knew he would wait until I had confessed all.

‘And for thinking that you would marry again without telling me.’ I scowled a little. ‘I still think you might.’

The Duke thrust aside the papers, stood and stepped round the table and in one fluid movement, lifting me to my feet, took me in his arms. He could still move fast enough to take me by surprise. Especially when I did not try very hard to escape.

‘If I take a wife, you will be the first to know.’ He kissed me gently. Then more fiercely, after which I smoothed the line between his eyes with my finger. ‘Does that settle your ill-temper?’

‘A little.’ I was almost won over.

‘Where will you go?’ he asked.

‘To Lincoln. It suits me very well. Send word to me when you can.’

‘You know that I will.’ He kissed me again. Then, ‘Pray for me,’ he said suddenly.

‘When do I ever not?’ His urgency had surprised me.

‘Pray that Richard isn’t swayed into seeing me as his enemy who has an eye to royal power. Pray for me and for Richard, Katherine. He’s not to be trusted in where he takes his advice. Who will advise him to have that good sense when I am away?’

There was no answer to the question. ‘I will pray.’

‘And pray that Henry can keep his head and not provoke Richard to something outrageous, from which there is no way back.’

‘I will.’

For a long moment he rested his cheek against mine so that we stood, breathing slowly together, his arms holding me firmly against him, and I allowed myself to hold fast to what would be a precious memory in the coming months.

‘I feel set about with worries for this kingdom,’ he said at last.

‘Then I will pray all the harder.’ I smiled in an attempt to lift the burden by whatever small amount I could manage. ‘If you kiss me. And at least pretend for the next few hours that you have time for me.’

He did. He did both.

Yet next morning when I left him to his arrangements, his embrace was perfunctory and abstracted. I would also pray that he did not return with a new bride of European importance. I could withstand it. But I would not like it.

It was January with snow on the ground yet the Duke, new returned from Aquitaine, had braved the roads to come to Lincoln with an impressive retinue. This no longer stirred any surprise in me, although his choice of travelling weather did. So what was afoot? I surveyed his arrival most deliberately from the vantage point of my parlour in the Chancery. There was the Duke, of course, swathed in heavily furred cloak and hat. A tight knot of soldiers and a sergeant-at-arms. A clerk, his confessor, a master of horse and sundry others of squires and pages.

My heart was thundering beneath the heavy volume of my houppelande.

And then my heart steadied. There was no female figure. He did not have a new wife with him. He was alone and here with me at last, filling my vision completely, and I was smiling when I drew him into my parlour, all the niggling worries of my days smoothed out like a new wool cloth. Once alone, he duly kissed my cheeks and lips in formal acknowledgement, and sank into the chair I pushed him towards. I did not bother him with personal questions or demands. It always took a little time for us to step across the divide that the months apart had created. The moments of intimacy would present themselves eventually, and would be sweeter for the delay

‘Katherine.’

That was all he said. It was all he needed to say to restore the bond that held us after a full year of separation. His eyes, full of light, full of love, rested on my face.

‘John,’ I replied in kind, pressing my palm against his shoulder, then moving quietly to pour ale. He drank deeply from the cup, before placing it on the hearth, stretching out his legs to cross his ankles before the fire. His boots steamed, so did his travelling clothes, filling the room with the pungency of horse and leather and wet wool.

‘It’s good to be still for more than two minutes together.’

I sank to a cushion on the settle opposite, prepared to wait.

Briefly his eyes closed, his face such a mask of weariness that my hands clenched hard around my own cup. It was easy to forget how the years passed and added to our tally of age, but that was all forgotten when he opened his eyes and smiled at me. They were keen and bright, not weary at all. The austere lines of his face softened into the handsome man I knew so well.

‘Well?’ I asked in response to his smile, returning it. I had missed him so very much. Everything in my world tilted back to normality.

John leaned forward, arms braced on his thighs, looking across to me. ‘Do you know what I most admire in you?’

‘My intelligence?’ I responded promptly. My hands relaxed in my lap. This was certainly the man I knew.

‘Your intelligence is unsurpassed—but no, not that.’

‘My hair.’

‘Not that either. Nor can I see it since it’s covered with that little padded creation that I understand has become the rage. I like the beads. You look like a Twelfth Night gift.’ Those eyes gleamed as they had done in the past, dispelling for ever the image of age and death. ‘I’ll take pleasure in winding your hair round my wrist later and show you how much I admire it.’

I remained suitably stern. ‘Then it must be that you admire my way with land drainage and poor crops and tenant squabbles.’

He laughed. ‘Never! You’ll never solve the drainage problems.’

‘Then you’ll have to tell me.’

‘It is your ineffable patience. And your generosity of spirit.’

I tilted my head against the high back of the settle. If only he knew. How often had I run to my window, drawn by the sound of hooves? How often had I buried myself in a frenzy of paperwork to drive him from my mind when he could not be with me?

‘I’ve been back a month and could not come to you. You never complain.’

‘Agnes would not agree with you,’ I remarked drily.

‘Which makes your even temper even more marvellous. I was summoned to present myself at court by our illustrious King.’

‘What now?’

‘Ruffled feathers all round. Richard wanted my support.’ The taut line of his jaw suggested that there was something else, apart from Richard’s obtuse refusal to see the dangers that surrounded him. ‘He wants a French alliance,’ he continued. ‘A French bride perhaps.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘I think that what I think no longer matters. My brother Gloucester abhors any such suggestion. Richard hopes I can persuade him, or at least hold the balance between the pair of them. They were at each other’s throats like rabid alaunts when I got there.’

‘Will he listen to you?’

‘Richard or Gloucester? Who’s to say? We all parted amicably enough, but I think my days of holding any influence over Richard are well and truly numbered. And then I went to Canterbury. A prayer before St Thomas never goes amiss.’

I watched his expression carefully, trying to read what he was not saying. ‘A prayer for what, exactly?’

Which he ignored. ‘Come here, my beloved.’

I knelt at his feet, as I had done so often before, expecting him to take my hands in his as a prelude to our seeking some privacy for the rest of the day, but instead he reached within the breast of his tunic and withdrew a document. I opened the single sheet without a cover as he dropped it into my hand. A letter. Or rather a copy of a letter, since it had no seals, but the signature was John’s own although the script was that of his clerk. Then I saw the superscription…I saw the crucial, particular word. Carefully I folded the sheet closed again, looked up into his face and governed my voice.

‘I knew it would happen, of course. I hoped it would not be so soon. I should be pleased for you.’ My smile felt all wrong on my mouth but I fought to keep it in place. ‘You know I will not make a fuss.’ My whole body felt full of unshed tears. It was a request for a papal dispensation to allow a marriage. ‘Richard holds you in a higher regard than you think,’ I continued. ‘Who is she?’

It would be some puissant lady from Burgundy or Aragon. Perhaps a connection of the powerful Valois family. A princess was not beyond his sights. Even an English lady whose family Richard wished to shackle to the Crown. Who was important enough for John of Lancaster, King’s son, Duke of Aquitaine?

I considered. No, it was not unexpected, but that did not mean that it did not tear at me with sharp incisors. I held out the request, to return it to him. I should be gratified that he had ridden so far to tell me of it, for of course he could not refuse if Richard insisted.

Instead of taking it, The Duke leaned forward, surprising me by closing my hand over it, holding my fingers tight closed.

‘Katherine, my dearest love.’

‘It’s all right, you know. You are too powerful to remain unwed. I have lived as your mistress for more years than I can count. You must know that a new wife will make no difference to my love for you. Has the Pope allowed it?’ If he needed a dispensation, she must be close to him in blood line. I could not think who. I sighed. I had hoped for a little respite from marital upheavals. Jealousy was no respecter of age or experience. ‘Do I know her?’

‘Katherine, my dearest love,’ he repeated. ‘My dearest and most obtuse love. It is for you.’

I searched his face for enlightenment. I did not understand.

‘It’s a request for a papal dispensation…’ he explained slowly and solemnly as if I were a want-wit. ‘For us, Katherine. To allow us to marry.’

‘For me?’ My voice squeaked. My eyes blurred with tears so that I could barely see the tenderness of his smile. I swallowed and tried again. ‘Why would you wed me?’

It was all I could think to say since, before God, it made no sense to me.

‘I would wed you,’ the Duke stated, choosing the words with care, ‘because I can think of nothing in life I would rather do. I need please no one but myself. Surely I am of an age to follow my own heart.’

I simply stared at him.

‘But why would we need a dispensation? I am no blood of yours.’

‘Because we have been more than close for too many years, even before you came to my bed. I’ll give no man the opportunity to claim that our marriage is without legality. Read it if you will.’

I read what had concerned him: the stages in our lives together that had given him pause for thought in his search for legality, primarily when he had stood godfather to my daughter Blanche, even before he had been in an adulterous union with me when he was still wed to Constanza. There were some who would question the closeness of such a long relationship. The Duke had asked that all such past impediments should be removed and papal permission granted.

Yet I could barely comprehend it. Permission to marry me, a woman no longer in the full flush of youth? A woman with no status, no standing of any importance? I looked up from the request, beyond words. He held my heart in his hands, as he knew. Why would he see the need to wed me? Princes did not marry their mistresses. Princes did not marry women of such social inequality as ours. Already I could hear the mass of voices at the royal court raised in condemnation of such an outrageously unacceptable step.

The Duke of Lancaster did not marry his daughters’ governess.

‘But you must not,’ I heard myself say.

‘Why not? I want to wed you.’

‘Are you sure?’ It was all I could manage.

The Duke huffed a breath as he cupped my face in his hands and planted a kiss on my lips. ‘Now that has to be the most foolish question I have ever heard you ask, Lady de Swynford. Of course I’m not sure. I might change my mind any minute. You’d better hurry up and take me before I renege on any promise.’

I could not laugh. ‘What did His Holiness say?’

‘Yes. He said yes.’

‘Show me,’ I said, still sifting through his astonishing statement. A papal dispensation for me to wed the Duke of Lancaster.

‘I cannot, faithless one. It was not written, but sent by word of mouth, delivered by papal courier in full regalia and jewels.’

‘Is it legal?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Does the King know?’

‘Yes. He sanctioned it.’

‘He did?’

‘He did. A little cool perhaps but I did not have to harangue him.’ With a soft laugh the Duke dropped his hands to mine again and raised my imprisoned fingers to his lips. ‘There is no legal reason for you not to agree. Only your own inclination can dictate your choice. Of course, if you decide that you cannot tolerate me after all these years. Or if you have given your wayward heart to one of my squires…’

I sat there with the letter on my lap, tears on my cheeks, even as I smiled at last.

‘I thought you would wed a lady of foreign consequence.’

‘I know you did.’

‘If you wed me, there are those who will rail against us. They’ll detest it, as degrading to your lineage.’

‘I know that too. Are we not equal to them? Will we let such judgemental minds dictate what we will do with the rest of our lives?’ He lifted me so that we stood together, the damp of his garments spreading to mine. ‘Katherine, my love. Will you wed me? I am no longer a young man—’

‘You are not old—’ I interrupted but he silenced me with a brush of his lips against mine.

‘I think you could do better for yourself if you want a husband who can spend time with you. And I committed a great wrong against you. My sins are many.’ His smile was sharply self-deprecating. ‘I would put right what has been wrong all these years. Except that it was not wrong at all, was it? It was right. It was always right. It was ordained in some strange corner of the heavens that our lives should be indivisibly entwined. Katherine, my dear and constant companion, will you wed me?’

So long. So many years. What would it be like to be finally, legitimately, united with him? I could not comprehend the enormity of what the Duke was offering me. Tears welled and fell.

The Duke’s brows arched predictably. ‘What in heaven’s name have I said to make you weep?’

‘That you could love me enough to wed me.’

‘Do you love me enough to accept?’ the Duke asked.

‘I don’t know what to say to you.’ My mind was still taken up with the shock of being wed to the Duke of Lancaster. How long would it take for me to give him the answer he desired?

‘Say yes, Katherine. Say yes. How long are you going to make me wait?’ he demanded, but I read no doubts in his gaze. He knew that I could not refuse.

‘Yes, John.’ Tears tracked down my cheeks but I was smiling. ‘Yes I will.’

This was the day.

I knelt in the familiar surroundings of Lincoln Cathedral, and I was trembling. I still could not believe that it would actually happen, but the Duke had swept all before him. Now that we had got to this point, he announced, nothing and no one would be allowed to stand in the way of our marriage. And thus we were united in the eyes of God under the kindly auspices of the Bishop of Buckingham in Lincoln Cathedral in the rain-swept month of February.

It was the quietest of ceremonies, with no outward splendour other than the robes of the Bishop who cast us all in the shade. We were astonishingly circumspect still, although this would—as the Duke had also announced, as if challenging the Almighty himself—put all to rights. The bishop inclined his mitred head in agreement.

Kneeling together before the altar, my hands were joined with his. I made my vows to him, and he to me. The blessings were given. The Duke kissed my cheeks and then my lips.

There. It was done.

The Duke raised me, Katherine, Duchess of Lancaster, to my feet.

‘Do you realise,’ he murmured as we walked from the church, back to the Chancery with no panoply of trumpets or ringing of church bells, ‘that until Richard remarries, you are the most important woman in England?’

My heart shivered a little. ‘And that is intended to make me feel more confident?’

I felt no different. Except—I stopped abruptly at the end of the nave, where one of the Duke’s pages stood ready to open the door for us.

‘What is it?’

‘Do you realise,’ I asked, ‘for the first time ever in our lives, I can take your hand and walk from this place for all to see? And even if there is gossip—and there will be—no one can denounce me for immorality.’ I looked at him, splendid in soft browns and russet and sable fur at neck and hem. Perhaps the bishop had outshone me, but he could never outshine this man who was now my husband. ‘Or yours, for that matter.’

‘You mean that we have thwarted Walsingham.’

Lightly, I punched his shoulder so that the links of his jewelled collar shivered. Not even the shadow of our nemesis could spoil my delight. ‘We will not mention his name on this happiest of days.’

‘No, we will not. And since we are able to proclaim our legal state, then we will do it with aplomb.’

He raised my hand to his lips, linked his fingers with mine and led me out into the world beyond the walls of the cathedral, where I laughed with the joy of it, the sheer foolishness of it, for there was no one to see us except for a priest much taken up with the office of the day in his psalter and a pair of chickens scratching in the garth.

Was this reality?

But of course it was, for my hand was clasped in the Duke’s and his smile was for me, as was the glow of sheer pride in his eye, whereas I was awash with emotion. How could I have ever believed that the Duke of Lancaster would be proud to make me his Duchess? I had reached my safe-harbour at last. And yet, the strangest of thoughts came to me. Once, in my youth when I had worried and yearned and doubted, this marriage would have been the embodiment of a beautiful dream, as proof of our love. A dream that could never be fulfilled. Now, older, wiser, infinitely more secure, I no longer needed marriage to act as a seal on our love. I knew it to the very marrow in my bones. Through all the partings, through all the fickle reverses and cataclysms, we had emerged with a binding as strong as death. As strong as life. Our vows before a priest could not make it any less steadfast.

Not that I would refuse my new status, of course.

I laughed again, causing the Duke to raise his brows.

‘I am so very happy to be wed to you,’ I explained.

‘Which is fortunate in the circumstances,’ he responded.

How much I had learned on this journey, which had provided no goose-feather bed of happiness but had allowed me to grow from the blinkered woman who had put love before family, before reputation, before harsh morality on that day when I had given the Duke a winter rose. Had I even realised what love would demand of me in those early, heady days? Now, holding hard to my husband’s hand, I acknowledged how much I had had to learn, of jealousy and compassion for Constanza, of fortitude to withstand bitter taunts, of trust and inner conviction when all around was black and our love would seem to be blighted. Of forgiveness, that I needed to ask from my children, and from John for ever doubting him. I had thought that love was my right. Now I knew that love could not easily be won. It had to be earned, by forging a chain as tensile as the Duke’s glittering collar. A chain that could not be shattered.

Had we not done it? We had created a love, held fast by our children and by my fingers linked now with the Duke’s on our wedding morning. The Duke and I had earned the right to love each other.

My mind returned to the present, to the busy priest and the chickens. Now I was a wife again. I was Duchess of Lancaster.

‘What do we do now?’ I asked. ‘What does a Duchess do after her wedding when there is no feast or celebration for her to attend?’

The Duke did not reply, but led me silently through my equally silent house to my own chamber. Only when the door was closed against the world that seemed in no way interested in us:

‘We will celebrate alone. This is the first time in all the years that we have legitimately shared the sheets.’

Holy and sanctified we enjoyed the legal luxury of unclothing each other.

‘I have to be grateful to the setter of fashion.’

‘Why is that?’ I asked on a breath as his fingers smoothed over my ribs from breast to thigh.

‘A sleeve without buttons is a miraculous gift.’ He groaned as I traced a similar path to his own with the nails of my right hand. ‘But perhaps I would have just torn them off. A husband’s rights after all.’

‘Because you would then, as my husband, have to purchase a new gown for me.’

‘I’ll buy you a dozen.’

His gift to me that day was beyond price, a glorious affirmation. The physical expression of our love was as powerful now as when we were young.

‘What will we do?’ I asked again, when I rose the following morning, a married woman, and broke my fast with my household, still agog with the events of the previous day. ‘Beard the court?’

I thought he might ask my wishes, but he did not. He never had. I doubted he would start now.

‘Eventually. First we go to my own lands. I wish to introduce my new Duchess to my people at Pontefract.’

‘I have no good memories of Pontefract.’

All I recalled of Pontefract were the days of fear and then increasing isolation. Of divided loyalties. My conscience still reminded me that I had refused admittance to Constanza when she was in dire need. The accusations that I had thrown at the Duke’s head in that dusty chamber still haunted me.

‘I’ll make your memories there better for you,’ he promised as he summoned one of the squires, to issue a stream of succinct orders that would take us to Pontefract where I would begin my life as Duchess of Lancaster.