The Duke looked startled as he took her meaning. "It is so, my Katrine?" His eyes darkened and he looked down at her anxiously.
"You aren't pleased?" she asked while her smile faded.
"Ay, I shall welcome it. You know that. But you were very ill last time, lovedy - two nights I didn't sleep and prayed until I wore down the cushions at the altar rail."
"Ah, dear heart," she whispered turning her cheek against his shoulder, for she had not known of that. When Hawise had finally nursed her through the childbed fever into full consciousness again, he had been gone from Kenilworth and on his way to Bruges to negotiate the truce - with Costanza.
"Nay, but all will go well - this time," she said quickly. "I'm a fruitful woman and shall bear you another brawny son." She could not forbear the little note of triumph, for the scale dipped heavy on the other side and she could hear voices sniggering, "What, again a Beaufort bastard! Surely shame itself must blush by now!"
He looked down at the lovely curved cheek that rested trustfully against his russet-clad shoulder, and taking her hand he said in a harsh voice, "Thank God, Katrine - you wear my betrothal ring again."
He started to tell her of the pain he felt for her and all that he would do in recompense; of his Nottinghamshire manors that he would give her and a necklet of rare Eastern pearls a Lombard goldsmith had sent word of to the palace. But she stopped him. "Nay, darling, I know, You needn't fret yourself like that. See, it's for this I had you engrave the reason on my brooch." She touched it, "It is as it is."
"Cold comfort," he said roughly beneath his breath. He drew her tight against him and they stood silent on the pier watching the quiet Thames flow by.
On the twenty-first of June in his palace of Sheen at Richmond, the old King died at last. He was in the sixty-fifth year of his life and the fifty-first of his reign, and most of his subjects felt that both had lasted too long. The glories of Crecy and Poitiers were far in the past, and many now thought that those victories were negated by the interminable warfare that succeeded them and was not yet ended. The very week of the King's death the French were harrying the coast of Sussex.
Yet even those who despised the King for his insensate lust to rule France at whatever cost to England, and for his extravagance and blind follies, were shocked by his end.
The King was alone with Alice Perrers when he was stricken with an apoplexy. She had been sitting on his bed, casting dice with him, and provoking him to delighted titters by the outrageous stakes she demanded - the Archbishop of Canterbury's mitre, the province of Gascony, the crown regalia - when the King gave a loud cry and began to gobble in his throat. His staring eyes swam with red, one lip drew up in a snarl, as half of his face was turned to stone.
Alice screamed and jumped off the bed. The King fell back on the pillows. He gave forth great snoring gasps as she watched him, horrified. She saw that he must die and that her long power was at an end. She bent quickly and pulled three richly jewelled rings from off his flaccid fingers.
She thrust the rings in her bodice and backed away trembling, then she turned and fled from the chamber, pausing only to shout at a page that he must get a priest. She ran from the palace to the river, had herself ferried over, and by bribing an innkeeper on the western bank secured a horse and set out for safety to a nook in Bedfordshire where a certain knight owed her return for many favours.
The old King died soon and alone, except for a friar that the frightened page had found. His sons and little Richard, who was now the King of England, did not reach Sheen for some hours.
England mourned courteously for the King, the people wore sad clothes, black cloth shrouded their windows, and Requiem Masses were said throughout the land. Edward's funeral procession and burial next to Queen Philippa on the Confessor's mound in Westminster Abbey were conducted with doleful pomp. The dirge-ale was drunk to the accompaniment of decorous sighs. But everywhere eyes turned with hope and rejoicing to the fair charming boy who would be crowned on the sixteenth of July.
Angers faded. The bishops checked their fulminations against Wyclif and the Duke of Lancaster, the Lollard preachers turned their sermons from the injustices done to the poor and spoke on Isaiah's text, "A little child shall lead them." The great nobles ceased their jealous strivings, and the London merchants amicably prepared to spend a prodigious sum upon their share of the coronation festivities.
On the Feast of St. Swithin, July 15, the day before the ceremony in Westminster, Richard's procession from the Tower through the City surpassed in magnificence any civic celebration ever seen.
Katherine viewed the procession from a tier of wooden benches which had been erected on West Chepe for the accommodation of privileged ladies. The Princess Joan sat on a dais, flanked by two of her sisters-in-law, Isabella of Castile, Edmund's frivolous and empty-headed wife, who was as unlike her sister Costanza as a chaffinch to a raven, and Eleanor de Bohun, the great heiress, Thomas of Woodstock's bride. Eleanor was a high-nosed girl with a mouth like a haddock, who fussed so loudly over some matter of precedence that Katherine could hear her acid complaints from where she sat at some distance from the royal ladies, with Philippa, Elizabeth and her own Blanchette. The Swynford children had been brought down from Kenilworth for this extraordinary occasion, and her little Tom by special favour of the Duke had been permitted a place in the procession amongst the nobly born boys of approximately Richard's own age.
St. Swithin, doubtless propitiated by countless prayers, had in the morning duly cleared some threatening rain clouds from the sky, and the afternoon was as dazzling as the white silk banners and the cloth of silver draperies that were festooned along the line of march.
On the Chepe the great open conduit, new-painted in blue and gold, gurgled pleasantly near the grandstand, and the heat grew such that Katherine sent a page over with a flagon to be filled. The conduit, for the three hours of the procession, ran with wine. Good wine, and even young Philippa drank thirstily before resuming her sedate composure.
Elizabeth fidgeted and yawned as detachment after detachment of the Commons walked past City wards, all garbed in white in honour of the child king.
Blanchette sat quietly beside her mother. Her wondering eyes moved from the marching men to a gold-painted canvas tower where four gold-costumed little girls of her own age were perched in the turrets and in great danger of falling out as they hung over the flimsy parapets.
The Commoners had all disappeared down Pater Noster Lane and the men of esquire rank were filing past when Blanchette leaned forward and said, "Th-there's Uncle Ge-Geoffrey," with the little stammer in her speech which had developed during Katherine's last absence from Kenilworth.
"So it is, darling!" her mother answered, staring at the rotund figure in the white linen over-robe that made him look comically like a Cistercian monk. She had not seen Geoffrey in months, for he had been again in France on King's business. As his file of esquires passed the ladies' stand, he looked up and waved at them, then peered quickly along the benches looking, no doubt, for his wife. But Philippa Chaucer was not there.
The Duchess of Lancaster would attend the coronation tomorrow and was even now en route from Hertford with her ladies, including Philippa, but a secular parade did not appeal to her.
The knights and knights banneret followed the squires, then the aldermen, and the new mayor - the wealthy grocer, Nicholas Brembre. He complacently curbed his prancing horse with as much negligent skill as any knight, while he bowed to the stand where his lady mayoress Idonia was ensconced on silver cushions at a place of honour near the Princess Joan.
"He looks almost a gentleman, except he's so greasy and sweaty," said Elizabeth of the mayor in a shrill astonished voice.