The Tudor Bride (36 page)

King Henry began to look quite enthusiastic and he leaned on the wall to get a better view of the action, but Catherine was not so easily mollified. ‘Perhaps the Duchess of Gloucester is not aware that it is lèse-majesté to touch the king without his express permission,’ she said, ‘otherwise I am sure she would not do it.’ She waited until Eleanor had removed her hand, slowly, from her son’s arm and then she bent down to speak in his ear. ‘I have arranged for the choir to sing before the feast, Henry. They have a new motet to perform for you. Shall we continue our walk to the Upper Ward and listen to them?’

‘Or shall we stay and see our splendid English knights defeat the French Pretender’s mercenaries?’ suggested the duke with man-to-man cheerfulness, pointedly leaving his arm lying around the king’s narrow shoulders. ‘After all, it is only priests and women who prefer music to fighting.’

Henry looked up at Gloucester in puzzlement. ‘Is it, uncle?’ he asked innocently. ‘I did not know that. My lady mother told me that my father liked music.’

Gloucester said airily, ‘So he did, Henry, so he did – but he liked fighting better.’ With his hand firmly on the boy’s back, he eased his nephew nearer to the drawbridge that led to the tower entrance. ‘See, the portcullis is rising. Our knights have entered the gate. Another French castle surrenders to English forces.’ The sound of trumpets hailed this splendid ‘victory’.

Henry clapped his hands with glee and shouted, ‘Hurrah! Well done the knights of St George!’ Then he turned to his mother, his face wreathed in smiles. ‘Now we can go and hear the choir, my lady.’

‘It is painful to me, Mette,’ Catherine confided with a sigh when I brought her bedtime posset. ‘I will never be allowed to share with my son the pleasures of the mind. Surely a king should be able to engage as much with poetry and music as war and strategy.’

‘And yet according to his duchess, the Duke of Gloucester is a man of scholarly intellect, Mademoiselle.’

Catherine made a dismissive noise. ‘Tcha! Eleanor’s level of intellect is to dabble with herbs in order to fashion love potions. How else did she manage to snare Humphrey into marriage?’

‘Well, now that she is a duchess she will have to watch out for competition,’ I remarked with a little wink. ‘They say that if a man marries his mistress, it creates a vacancy.’

I was gratified then to see Catherine display a genuine burst of amusement. ‘Oh, Mette,’ she gasped. ‘Thank goodness we can still laugh – and thank goodness we go back to Hadham and Owen tomorrow!’

C
atherine’s wedding to King Henry eight years before had involved a gilded litter borne by high-stepping white horses and an archbishop in a fabulously embroidered cope and mitre to preside over the ceremony at the church of St Jean au Marché in Troyes. By contrast, her wedding to Owen Tudor took place among a small group gathered at the studded oak door of St Andrew’s church in Hadham. There were the bride and groom, a group of loyal friends and the grey-bearded village priest. Instead of liveried royal guards holding back a mob of excited citizens wildly cheering the royal bride and groom, there was a small group of curious locals murmuring amongst themselves in the churchyard as they watched two strangers make their marriage vows.

Agnes and I were the only people to have witnessed both ceremonies and I remarked to Agnes on the difference in Catherine’s demeanour on the two occasions. In Troyes she had been a nervous girl, overawed by the charismatic king she was marrying and almost overwhelmed by the clamour and glamour of it all. Now she was a woman in love with the handsome man at her side, maturely beautiful in a simple wired veil and understated gown of blue flower-patterned linen. Not wishing to appear anything more than an esquire’s wife, her only jewellery was a plain silver brooch set with a stone of polished crystal, given to her by her bridegroom on her wedding eve. Owen had brought it back from a trip he had made to her Anglesey dower manors and to visit his family while she was at Windsor over Easter.

To everyone’s surprise he had also returned accompanied by two of his cousins, sturdy young men called John Meredith and Hywell Vychan, who he assured us were loyal and discreet companions from his youth with useful fighting and hunting skills. Catherine was too much in love with Owen to question the wisdom of bringing strangers into the tight-knit community of her household, but I had serious qualms about them. It occurred to me that two strapping young men might stir up trouble in the locality and misunderstandings could easily flare due to a general English mistrust of Welshmen and their own lack of fluency in the English tongue. I feared the worst and hoped for the best.

The village priest, Father Godric, was a man of Saxon origin as his name and appearance suggested, with deep roots in his native Hadham soil. Above his grizzled beard his cheeks were red-veined and weather-worn, evidence of his preference for taking God into the fields rather than spending his days in the shadowy precincts of the church. This reassured Catherine and Owen that there was little likelihood of him mixing with people of note, to whom he might speak of their wedding. When the bride and groom had made their vows and Owen had pushed a plain band of Welsh gold firmly onto Catherine’s finger, Father Godric carefully pronounced their unfamiliar names in his rustic English.

‘I hereby declare that Owen Tudor and Catherine de Valois have made vows of marriage in front of witnesses and are now regarded by the Church and the laws of England as man and wife. May God bless their union and let no one come between them.’

Although there was no sign that Catherine’s name struck a chord with anyone in the crowd, common humanity caused a ragged cheer to rise from the churchyard when the newly joined couple kissed. A more subdued chorus of congratulation was to be heard from those of us gathered in the church porch but as we were trooping down the nave for the nuptial mass, Owen’s cousins broke into a spontaneous hymn of praise, demonstrating that Owen was not the only Welshman blessed with the gift of song. Before the Mass began, the priest laboriously inscribed a record of the marriage in the battered parish book, making sure to ask the bride and groom how to spell their names as he did so.

Catherine’s Hadham wedding breakfast was also a modest affair compared to her royal marriage feast. However, prior to the event, Owen and his cousins had enjoyed several days’ hunting in the Hadham park, so that the tables groaned with an abundance of game of all kinds including venison, since Geoffrey had negotiated a contract with the bishop which included the right to take a number of deer. The dishes presented to the newlyweds were not grand, but the new cooks, hired in the town of Stortford five miles away, proved adept enough at roasting and grilling and the manor garden supplied plenty of salad vegetables to augment the store of roots still edible from last year’s crops. There was even wedding mead, fermented from honey found in the bishop’s cellars.

We made our own music. Owen played his harp a little, but during our impromptu concerts at Hertford we had discovered that Thomas Roke played the fiddle, while the newcomer, Hywell Vychan, proved to be quite an expert on the pipes. When those two struck up a merry jig, we launched into the simplest kind of country carolling when everyone joined hands and danced around in a circle singing – and in this case of course we danced around Catherine and Owen, who swayed and swirled in each others’ arms performing their own graceful wedding
pas de deux
. They looked happy and relaxed, laughing as if they had not a care in the world, even though, by making their wedding vows, they had defied the law of England and the might of parliament and the council of regency.

At Catherine’s insistence there was no ceremonial bedding ritual; indeed she and Owen stayed to enjoy the music and dancing until the fire died and the lamps guttered and the whole company decided it was time to retire. Her costume was so simple that she hardly needed help with undressing, but she wanted me there as she prepared for bed because, as she said, ‘You will remember how frightened and nervous I was when I married King Henry, so it is only right that you see how joyfully I approach my marriage bed with Owen.’

Her eyes sparkled as she discarded the filmy veil and coronet of spring flowers she had worn to be married. ‘I believe this is the happiest day of my life, Mette! Perhaps I was not born to be a queen after all, but the wife of a simple soldier-man who loves me.’

It did my heart good to see her so blithe. ‘May God bless your marriage bed, Mademoiselle,’ I said wholeheartedly.

‘I believe He will, Mette. I pray that He grants me and Owen a whole tribe of little Tudors! Who knows, one day the king may be glad to find that he has brothers and sisters to love and support him in his lonely task.’

I smiled and shook my head at her with matronly reproof. ‘You should not tempt fate, Mademoiselle. I know you wish you had not had to marry without his grace’s knowledge, but you must be careful for your own safety and even more so for Owen’s. The marriage must remain a secret and so must any children who may be born as a result.’

But Catherine’s happiness could not be tempered. ‘Oh yes, I know. But I do not want to think of that now.’ She reached up her hand and tore off the delicate silk nets which had secured her hair so that it tumbled down around her shoulders in a gleaming fall. ‘I just want to think of loving my gorgeous, handsome Owen!’

Right on cue, Owen walked into the room dressed only in a robe and causing the blood to rush to my cheeks; his handsome face was creased in the widest possible smile as he went to Catherine. ‘My truly ravishing queen!’ he said.

I have to admit to a slight sense of shock at Catherine’s reaction, for I had not fully realised until then how much this new love of hers had unfettered her reserve. She seemed to melt into his arms and he swept her up without effort, turning to call to me. ‘Do not worry, Mette, I believe I can find my way around my queen’s lacings and fastenings. God give you a very good night.’

Out of habit I bobbed a curtsy, even though Catherine was blissfully oblivious, and made a hasty exit. Unlike her first wedding night, this time I could go to my own bed confident that she would have no need of me.

Those first weeks at Hadham were an idyll for the newlyweds. May lived up to its reputation as the merry month, bringing almost unbroken sunshine and only the occasional shower to refresh the bursting buds. Blossom frothed on the fruit trees and in the hedgerows, bluebells carpeted the woods and bright yellow irises speckled the river’s backwaters. It was an earthly paradise for two people who were discovering the delights of being released from a lifetime of restriction into a world of passionate freedom. They rode together in the vast hunting park, they roamed the river meadows picking wild flowers and weaving them into circlets and necklaces for each other and they spent hours in the butts giggling and laughing as Owen tried to teach Catherine the rudiments of archery. After she had struggled to haul the bowstring even halfway to her chin, she watched open-mouthed as his long-bow sent ten arrows crashing into the centre of the target before she could count to fifty. The rest of us went about our daily tasks, made cheerful by the constant presence of their happiness.

For a week or so I shared the mood of euphoria, but gradually the fever of spring began to work on me also and my thoughts turned to my own loving limbo. Geoffrey had attended the secret wedding at Hadham church and the subsequent marriage feast, but there were still unspoken thoughts and unfulfilled desires between us when he left for London at dawn the following day, leaving only the lingering promise of a few ardent kisses on my lips.

He left Mildy at Hadham, invited by Catherine into her inner circle now that the two remaining Joannas had returned to their families in the north. Theirs had been a sad parting, but one of mutual convenience. In all conscience Belknap and Troutbeck could not put their weddings off any longer and for her part Catherine was not confident of their ability to keep her marriage to Owen a secret. It was Mildy who stirred my thoughts about her father with an innocent question, posed some days later as we foraged together for wild herbs in the river meadow beyond the bailey wall. ‘Is there no love between you and my father after all, Mette?’ she asked, dropping a bunch of pungent wild garlic into her basket.

I thought I detected disappointment in her voice and suddenly found myself rushing to reassure her. ‘Oh yes, there is love but no loving relationship, if that is what you mean. Why? Would you like there to be?’

She replied without hesitation, her small freckled face uncharacteristically solemn. ‘Well yes, I would. And so would Anne. We want him to be happy.’

I rubbed a young sorrel leaf between my fingers and sniffed its sharp, lemony scent. ‘And you think I would make him happy?’

‘Yes, I do. Has he not told you himself?’

‘Not in so many words.’

Mildy tossed her copper curls. In the clement weather and the relaxed ambience of Hadham, she had left off her customary white coif and let her bright and luxuriant hair flow freely down her back and I cannot have been the only one to marvel at its arresting colour. ‘For a lawyer who makes witnesses tremble, my father is remarkably shy when it comes to expressing emotion,’ she said.

I pursed my lips in doubt. ‘To be honest I think he has been distracted by the queen’s situation and my own concern for her welfare.’

Mildy screwed up her face impatiently. ‘Queen Catherine is oblivious to anything except Master Tudor at present, is she not? No one needs to worry about her.’

I laughed at her irreverence. ‘Tell me – what is your opinion of their romance, Mistress Vintner?’

‘I think they suit each other and she deserves some joy. Not that they give a fig for my opinion! And do not think to change the subject, Madame.’ She refrained from wagging her finger at me, but the action was in her voice. ‘We were talking of your romance with my father.’

I found myself blushing like a girl. ‘I have not heard it called that.’

She threw up her hands in a gesture I found hard to interpret, then her gaze fell on something at her feet. ‘Oh look, an omen!’ Crouching down, she plucked at a creeping plant half hidden among the grasses and stood up to show me a dainty multiple flower-head, each tiny white-ish flower with a distinctive yellow dot on the lower petal. ‘This is eyebright. You should make a concoction with it, Mette, and bathe your eyes. Then you, too, might see what is obvious to everyone else.’