Katherine (39 page)

"How goes your work at the Custom House?" Katherine asked. "Somehow I never thought to see
you
smothered in wool."

"Don't sneer at wool, my dear," he said lightly, " 'Tis the English crown's chief jewel. God bless those glittering fleeces that pour through the port of London out to a wool-hungry world. I value them high as ever Jason did. Our kingdom'd be bankrupt without them. If," he added, frowning suddenly, and glancing at Latimer, "it isn't so already."

"What is it with Lord Latimer?" she asked in a low voice. "I sense unease here today, and my Lord Duke seems heavy of mind."

Well he may, thought Chaucer. There was trouble seething over a perilous fire. No telling how far the Commons were prepared to go in attacking the crown party, in this first Parliament called in three years; but they would not tamely grant the new subsidy which would be demanded by the King.
That
no one who had come from London could ever doubt. They would not dare attack the old King directly, nor yet perhaps the Duke, unpopular as he had grown. But they might conceivably fly for game as high as Latimer, who was King's chamberlain, keeper of his privy purse and the Duke's associate as well. Doubtless Latimer was an unscrupulous opportunist who had been feathering his own nest at crown expense like many another; but they said worse of him, far worse than that.

"Why, Latimer is the butt of many rumours. What man in high place is not?" said Geoffrey to Katherine, shrugging as though the matter were of no consequence. He understood the Duke enough to know that he preferred that Katherine should be kept apart from the turmoil of his public life. In truth, Geoffrey thought that the protective tenderness his patron showed to Katherine was one of the most admirable traits in a complex character.

A rustle of attention by the Sainteowe door to the Hall, and the glimpse of a coroneted head, showed that the Duke had entered. Katherine, her eyes clearing at once from the frown with which she had asked of Latimer, hurried down the Hall to meet him.

Geoffrey settled himself inconspicuously on a cushioned window seat and surveyed the company. He looked at the radiant Katherine as she sat near the Duke, in her velvet and ermine and new jewels. So he had been right when he saw her first at Windsor and thought her destined to rise high in life by reason of her rare beauty. The drabness of her years at Kettlethorpe had after all been but a transient step. Yet this relation with Lancaster was not the role he had vaguely imagined for her either. This was too frank, too crude in its flouting of the chivalric code which demanded above all a delicate secrecy in the pursuance of illicit love. More fitting far if they had managed to conduct their love like that of Troilus and Criseyde, unsuspected by the censorious world. His thoughts played with the story of Criseyde, and almost he could see Katherine as the lovely Trojan widow.

Nay, thought Geoffrey, smiling at himself, my mind has gone a-blackberrying. And he looked at the Duke, who was now in earnest converse with Wyclif and obviously far from love-longings. It was no soft bond that linked these two, the great Duke and the reformer whose teachings now infiltrated England. This bond was indignation. Between them, though no doubt for different motives, they were agreed on debasing and despoiling the fat monks and fatter bishops who were bleeding the land.

Wyclif - so spare, so dedicated to his startling theories, of communal property, to his attacks on the Pope, to his denial of the need for confessions, saints or pilgrimages - seemed a strange colleague for Lancaster, whose orthodoxy had never been in question.

Yet they seemed to have respect for each other, thought Chaucer, and it was folly ever to listen to the slanders put out by their many enemies. The house of fame, he thought, is built on melting ice, not steel, and rumbles ever with a sound of rumours, while the goddess of fame is as false and capricious as her sister - Fortune.

Geoffrey's hand went to the pen-case that hung at his neck and, forgetting the Duke and Wyclif, his eyes darted around the Hall. Seeing no writing materials, he slipped quietly through the North door to the office of the constable. Here, as he'd hoped, a clerk was working on the castle accounts which would be submitted to the Duke's auditor tomorrow.

Geoffrey borrowed what he needed and huddling on a stool beside the clerk, noted the words, and the rhymes they presently suggested. " 'The great sound ... that rumbleth up and down, in Fame's House, full of tydings, both of fair speech and eludings, and of false and truth compound.' "

He wrote on. The verses he had had in his head for many weeks began to shape as he wished them.

That night when the guests had all retired, Katherine lay waiting between silken sheets for her lord to come. Her naked body glowed from the sweet herbs with which Hawise had cleansed her, her skin was fragrant with the amber scent, and she rejoiced that it was firm and fresh as it had ever been. She thought how the responses of this body had increased and that her passion now was equal to his, though for modesty she tried sometimes to hide it. Yet carnal love was no sin, she thought stoutly, if the love be true-hearted. A hundred romances had taught her this, and since no strict confessor exhorted her, she no longer felt the sense of sin. Brother Walter Dysse, the Carmelite friar, listened with placid indulgence to her infrequent confessions, as he did to the Duke's. And she went to Mass only as an example to the children and the castle folk.

The room grew chill in the April dawn before John came, sliding without a word into her bed while her arms closed about him hungrily; but later he did not fall asleep on her breast. He lay staring up at the shadowy bed canopy that was strewn with tiny diamond stars.

She put her hand softly on his forehead, for sometimes he liked to have her stroke his hair, but he turned his head away.

"What is it, my dear heart?" she whispered. "The Blessed Mother forfend you are not displeased with me?"

"No, no - lovedy," he drew her tight against him so that her cheek was in the hollow of his neck, but still he stared up at the canopy. He would not speak, lest the baffled rage which fermented in his soul should sound like fear.

It was Raulin, his stolid Flemish squire, who had given him a hint of what they said in London. John had listened in contempt, unmoved at first, so ridiculous were the slanders. Corruption, disloyalty, designs against his brother, the dying Prince, against little Richard, the heir apparent - this was but monkey talk, the spiteful chatter of the rabble which would never dare say these things to his face. But then Raulin went on "Another thing they visper, Your Grace - ach - such folly, 'tis not vorth repeating."

But John had commanded him to speak, knowing that he would be better armed to protect the crown for the coming fight in Parliament if he knew all their preposterous weapons.

"Some cock-and-bull tale that Your Grace is a changeling, not of royal birth."

"Bah! How feeble" - John had laughed. "Their other inventions are better. What more do they say of this? What particulars?"

" 'Tis all I heard," said Raulin, "no von beliefs it."

John had shrugged and spoken of something else, but in his stomach it was as though a cannon ball had gutted him, and his whole body trembled inwardly like that of the child who had first heard the word "changeling" nearly thirty years ago. Beneath his intercourse with others, beneath his joy at seeing Katherine, he had been trying to turn cool logic on this shameful fear. The King of Castile and Leon, the Duke of Lancaster, the most powerful man in England, to be overwhelmed by a vague whisper, to feel like a whimpering babe - cowering in terror of treachery, and injustice and loss. Last night he had dreamed of Isolda, and that he, a child again, looked up to her for comfort; but her grey eyes held naught but contempt and she sneered at him saying, "And did you believe me, my stupid lordling, when I said Pieter had lied? He did
not
lie, and you are hollow, empty as a blown egg, no royal meat within you."

"My dearest, what
is
it?" cried Katherine again, for the muscle of his arm jerked and the hand that had lain along her thigh clenched into a fist.

"Nothing, Katrine, nothing," he cried, "except I shall deal with my enemies! The hellish monks and the ribauds of London town - I'll crush them till they crawl on their bellies, snivelling for mercy; and I'll show none!"

She was frightened, for she had never heard him like this, and she said timidly, "But great men such as you, my lord, always have enemies and ever you have been above them - just and strong."

"Just and strong," he repeated with a bitter laugh. " 'Tis not that they call me - ay - do you know what they think, Katrine? They think I have no loyalty to my father and my brother. They think I plot to seize the English throne. The curse of God be on the fools!"

He shut his mouth, scowling into the darkness. His father and his brother - the idols of the nation, both feeble, ailing, moribund and at loggerheads just now. The Prince of Wales, frantic to conserve the kingdom for his son, little Richard, and to soothe the dangerous unrest of the English people, had called this Parliament and caused it to be subtly known that he would back the Commons in its attack upon the corruption around the doddering King. The Prince from his sick-bed looked to John for support in this. The King too, caring only to giggle and toy with Alice Perrers, yet looked with childish faith to John to spare him discomfort and uphold the divine rights of the crown. Mediator, scapegoat! John thought violently. I bow my head to obey them both, to fight for what they each demand, and hear myself called traitor for my pains.

Yet this injustice but bred a clean contemptuous anger, not like that other squirming shameful fear which he now subdued again, helped by the unquestioning love of the woman beside him. What use to fear a vague slander which might well have been a chance shot and a not uncommon one in history, when fears were felt for the rightful succession? Doubtless, as Raulin said, few knew of it and none believed it.

He breathed deeply and turning to Katherine, kissed her. "By Saint John, my love," he said in the light tender voice he kept for her alone, "I've been tilting with a phantom. I'll cease my folly."

She understood nothing of this, except that his dark mood had passed and that in her he found comfort.

But while he slept at last in her arms, it was as though his distress had passed to her and she suffered that there was so much of his life she did not know.

CHAPTER XVII

St. George's Day was a happy one at Kenilworth. The Duke was his gayest, his most charming.

For two days and two more nights John and Katherine knew poignant joy, poignant in that it must be so brief; then on Friday morning the horses were again assembled by the keep, and the heavy carts and wagons lined up below in the Base Court, while varlets scurried to them from the castle bearing travelling coffers.

At six, Lancaster Herald blew a long plaintive blast of farewell. Katherine, standing on the stairs, bade them all Godspeed - to little Henry of Bolingbroke, who, of course, returned to London with his father, to Geoffrey on his bony grey gelding, to the Lords Neville and de la Pole on their brass-harnessed destriers; to Lord Latimer, whose long vulpine nose was red from the chill morning wind as he stood beside his lady's litter. And to John Wyclif, the austere priest, who alone of this company had held himself apart from the merrymaking. Not discourteously, but as one whose thoughts were elsewhere, and whose interest lay only in moments of earnest converse with the Duke.

They had all mounted before the Duke turned to Katherine, who waited with bowed head, holding out to him the gold stirrup cup.

"God keep you, my love," he said very low, taking the cup and drinking deep of the honied mead. "It'll not be long this time, I swear it by the Blessed Virgin," he added in answer to the tears in her eyes. "You know I ache for you when we're apart."

She turned away and said, "Do you stop now at Hertford?" This question had been gnawing at her heart, and she had not dared voice it.

"Nay, my Katrine," he said gently, "I go straight to London to be ready for Parliament, you know that. You may be sure the Queen Costanza's no more eager for my company than I for hers."

She did not know whether he lied to her, out of kindness, but her heart jumped at the cold way he spoke of his Duchess, and she looked at him in gratitude, yet lifting her chin proudly, for she would not be a dog fawning after a bone for all the watching
meinie
to see.

He kissed her quick and hard on the mouth, then, mounting Palamon, cantered through the arch.

On the twenty-ninth of April, shortly before the hour of Tierce, as the Abbey bells were ringing, the King opened Parliament in the Painted Chamber at Westminster Palace. Then he seated himself on his canopied throne, while his sons disposed themselves according to rank on a lower level of the dais. But the Prince of Wales lay on a couch, half concealed by his standard-bearer and a kneeling body squire. The Prince was a shocking sight. His belly was swollen with the dropsy as his mother's had been, his skin like clay and scabrous with running sores. Only his sunken eyes at times shone with their old fierce vitality, as he turned them towards the King, or to his brother of Lancaster, or out past the bishops and lords to the crowd of tense murmuring commoners at the far end of the long hall.

King Edward held himself erect at first and gazed at his Parliament with something of the calm dignity of his earlier years; but gradually he drooped and shrank into his purple robes of state. His palsied fingers slipped off the sceptre, and his face grew wrinkled and mournful like a tired old hound's. Except when he glanced towards the newel staircase in the corner behind the dais and saw the painted arras quiver. Then he brightened, and tittered behind his hand, knowing that Alice was hidden there on the turn of the stair.

The Duke of Lancaster sat on a throne too, one emblazoned with the castle and lion, for was he not - however far from his kingdom - the rightful ruler of Castile and Leon? Next sat Edmund of Langley, his flaxen head nodding with amiable vagueness to friends here and there amongst the lords, while he cleaned his fingernails with a little gold knife.