"Look, my little lord," whispered Isolda, "do you see where you are?" He nodded, wondering.
"Then listen and remember always. Pieter most damnably lied. I swear it. Holy Saint Mary and Saint George and the Blessed Body of Christ are my witnesses. You are the King's son and were born to the Queen in March eight years ago on the eve of Lady Day, and I received you into my own hands as you came from your mother's womb."
John looked up, awed, into her shining grey eyes. He understood what she said, but the strangeness of the place and her urgency overpowered all else.
"Pieter wanted to hurt you," she said, putting her hand on his head. "In years to come there may be many people who try to harm you because of envy, and they will tell lies, many lies. You must be too strong for them, my sweet lordling, and yet you must be merciful, because you're strong - will you remember? And will you vow it?"
He nodded solemnly. Her white face seemed to shimmer in the dusk and her eyes looked down at him with anxious love. He held his arms up to her as he used to do when he was a baby, and kneeling on the cushioned altar step, she gathered him close.
"But you'll be with me always," he had whispered confidently. "You'll keep them from harming me?"
"I will," she cried, "I will - I'll never leave you."
How long they knelt there by the altar rail together he did not know, but that was the last time he saw Isolda.
She put him back in his own bed with his brothers, and the next day when he looked for her they told him she was ill. When she died three days later, there could be no concealment. Even the smallest children knew that there was plague in the castle; besides Isolda two knights died of it, and five squires and many scullions and maidservants. The stench of burning corpses hung over the castle, and the world was a jangle of church bells, handbells and the beating of tin pans to break up the thick, deadly air.
The royal family was spared, all except the Princess Joan, who died of plague at Bordeaux on the eve of her marriage to the heir of Castile, but the strange hysteria of plague-time so permeated Windsor that John scarcely understood what had happened to Isolda, who had promised never to leave him, nor felt reassurance from that hour with her in the chapel. Both shocks had been too violent for a child to absorb. Fear and loss and a sense of injustice attacked him in nightmares for years. In these dreams it was as though Isolda had betrayed him by her death when he so needed her, and he would see her urgent eyes fixed on him in the darkness until he called to them, when they shut against him and dissolved into the black eye-sockets of a skull.
Palamon stumbled suddenly, and the Duke, jerking up the jewelled reins, made a sound of exasperation, not at the horse but at himself. What was he doing wandering in the forest, when they awaited him at Windsor for the Garter feast? Why had the pleasant mood left by the acclaim at the jousting and the plans for Castile been so stupidly shattered by a memory of childish fears touched off by Piers' chance word? It's that de Roet maid, he thought in anger, but on this instinctive anger he now turned a cooler look, having recognised part of the cause. It was not her fault that her grey eyes were like someone whose memory was laced with bitter pain. Nor, doubtless, was it her fault that she was possessed of a troubling beauty. And yet he still disliked the girl.
That clod of a Swynford's welcome to her, he thought, and turning Palamon he rode out of the forest.
CHAPTER V
Katherine and Hugh were to be married in London, and as soon as possible. Hugh said that as there were no families on either side to be consulted, no jointure or dowries to be arranged, there was no reason to wait. All the more since he was useless for fighting until his broken hand mended, and wished to visit his Lincolnshire manors before he left for Bordeaux with the Duke's forces. No this was the natural time for a bridal trip.
These practical arguments deceived nobody. Everyone from the page-boys to Katherine herself could see the jealousy that possessed him, and the fever to get the girl alone away from everyone.
Katherine accepted the imminence of her fate without further protest, and had little time to realise it, for the last days in Windsor were filled with the bustlings of departure. The King and his train left immediately for Westminster, where Parliament would sit on May 4, while the Queen decided to return to the healthier air of Woodstock.
Katherine saw no more of the Duke or Duchess of Lancaster. Their great household was on the move, even before the King's, as they set off for the Savoy Palace, and Blanche had many things to think of besides Katherine. At the Savoy, the Lancasters kept regal state with an establishment of six hundred people: barons, knights, squires and servants, besides the feudatories from all over England who were beginning to assemble in response to the Duke's call to arms.
Hugh wished to be married at St. Clement Danes, a little church near the Savoy where the priest was a Lincolnshire man, and Katherine's wishes, of course, were not consulted. Hugh went down to London some days ahead to make arrangements and left Ellis de Thoresby behind at Windsor to guard Katherine and conduct her to London with Philippa.
The Queen was a trifle better. When Philippa applied for leave of absence so that she might accompany her sister and see her married, the Queen, after granting permission, expressed a desire to meet Katherine at last. So on Katherine's final day at Windsor, Philippa guided her sister to the Queen's apartments.
From this interview Katherine received an impression of sadness and suffering. The Queen's room was darkened, quiet. A physician and the two most favoured ladies hovered near the fire while the Queen's secretary, a young Hainaulter in clerical robes named Froissart, sat at a high desk scratching on parchment by the light of a single candle.
The Queen lay in a huge four-poster bed hung with gold brocade and gaudily painted with her ostrich-feather badges. The coverlet was of blue velvet embroidered with the Queen's motto, Ich wrude muche. And she had indeed laboured hard all her life, to produce her twelve children and rear the nine who survived infancy; she had laboured to help the King, and for the advancement of her adopted country, but now she could no longer labour at anything except the daily struggle to exist in a prison of bloated aching flesh.
Katherine knelt to kiss the swollen hand extended to her. The fingers were taut and white as veal sausages, and the girl repressed a shudder. She raised her eyes to the mountainous figure under the coverlet, saw the balloon face with its small features nearly hidden by the puffed cheeks. But the sunken brown eyes looked kindly on the girl while the wheezing voice spoke in guttural French.
"So, la petite Katrine de Roet, you've already found yourself a husband! A brave knight! Your papa, whom may God absolve, would be very proud."
"Yes, madam," Katherine whispered and would have said more but the Queen turned fretfully, beckoning to her physician. "Maitre Jacques, it gives me no relief yet." The Queen pointed to her belly, where the physician had applied both leeches and hollow needles in an endeavour to drain off the dropsical waters.
"It will, madam, it will in time," he said gravely, and he held against her nostrils a wad of wool saturated with the brain-soothing juices of lettuce, poppy and henbane. The Queen inhaled, sighed, and closed her eyes. She had forgotten Katherine, and the girl looked at her sister, wondering if they should go, but Philippa shook her head. She knew the wandering habits of the Queen's mind these days, and she had no intention of letting Katherine leave Windsor without a wedding present if she could help it.