Katherine bowed her head. Suddenly tears stung her eyes and her journey seemed to her both foolish and futile. Here she had no friends and no true place, nor could she forget the horror of those days at Bolingbroke and plunge into revelry as the others had. And the Lady Blanche had no further need of naive prayers, now that she rested in her own chapel in the home of her ancestors, while six monks prayed for the repose of her soul.
"You're weary, mistress," said the monk in a kinder tone. "I'll guide you to the Beaufort Tower."
He led her through an arch and down some steps into the vaulted tunnel that ran along outside the ducal wine cellars, then up again towards the river into a court called the Red Rose, because in summer it was filled with roses of Provence.
"Yonder's your tower," said the friar, pointing to a massive round tourelle on which were blazoned, six feet high in gold and gules, the arms of Beaufort and Artois, for Blanche's grandmother. " 'Tis the oldest part of the palace and has not yet been renovated and embellished by my Lord Duke as have the buildings around the Inner Ward. Did you notice there the carvings and the traceried windows and that all of them are glazed?" He spoke at unaccustomed length because his trained eye noted the droop of Katherine's head, he had heard the choke in her voice, and he wished to examine her a moment by the torchlight. Though the plague seemed to be over, one knew how violently it had raged at Bolingbroke, and it was his duty as physician to be watchful.
"Yes, Sir Friar," she said, turning her face up to him in the light as he had hoped, "all here is wondrous fair."
Wondrous fair indeed! he thought, startled, gazing at the pure oval of her face, the wide eyes and the sharp chiselled line of forehead and nose. Her hair glowed dark copper against the black hood. She had the lovely face of a pagan Psyche that he had seen on his pilgrimage to Rome, and though he was an austere man, and none of your concupiscent degenerate friars who had sprung up of late to disgrace the barefoot orders, yet he was a man, and had not quite subdued a sensitivity to beauty.
"You are not feverish, my sister?" asked the friar, suddenly recollecting why he had wanted to examine her face, and he touched her forehead with his cool bony fingers.
"Nay, brother - I'm well enough - in body. 'Tis my heart that's heavy. Have you heard when our Lord Duke will come?"
"Why, very soon! For he had landed at Plymouth. A dark and bitter thing 'twill be for him, his meeting with his poor lady, God absolve her soul."
"I think He has no need to," said Katherine very low, "she was without sin. Grand merci for your guidance, Sir Friar." She gave him a faint smile and turned to the door of the Beaufort Tower, where a sleepy porter answered to her knock.
Brother William murmured Benedicite and walked thoughtfully back through the courtyard, his horny naked soles making no sound on the chill flagstones.
Tired as she was, Katherine could not sleep that night. She shared a bed with some Derbyshire knight's fat sister, and Katherine lay on her back listening to the lady's snores; to the gurgle of the Thames from below their window; to the periodic clang of church bells wafted upstream from London town a mile away. Here at the Savoy they had a great painted Flemish clock fixed to a tower in the Outer Ward. It struck the hours by means of little dwarfs with hammers on a gong, and she heard each hour's end pass by.
At four o'clock she rose and dressed herself quietly. A maidservant slept on a pile of straw in the passage but she took care not to waken her. It seemed to Katherine that, if she could be alone in the chapel with the Lady Blanche, she might be eased of her heavy heart and she might understand why she felt grief and horror now far stronger than while she had actually lived through the dreadful day of plague.
She lit a candle at the embers of their dorter fire, went down the stone steps and let herself out into the Red Rose Court. The torches had been extinguished. It was not yet dawn and the bleak November sky twinkled with frosty stars. She walked slowly, peering with her candle, and found her way through the main court entrance into an alley, where a dog barked at her and was hushed by a sleepy voice. She went under another arch between the chancery buildings and the turreted ducal apartments and so into the Outer Ward. Beyond the barracks and the stables, the chapel lights flickered through its stain-glass windows and spread patches of blue and green and ruby on the stones outside.
She pushed the chapel door and entered. The nave was empty. The monks who were on duty chanted their prayers far in the depths of the chancel behind the gilded rood-screen. Katherine crept up to the chancel step and knelt there, gazing from the black bier in front to the silver image of the Blessed Virgin in a niche to her right.
As she looked back from the coffin her ear was caught by a sound from the chancel floor in the shadow of the bier. She looked more closely and gasped.
A man in black lay prone on the tiles, his arms outstretched towards the coffin. She saw the convulsive heaving of his shoulders and heard the sound again. Between his outstretched arms his hair gleamed gold against the shadowed tiles.
She clenched her hands on the pillar of the rood-screen trying to raise herself and run from witnessing this that she had no right to see, but her muscles had begun to tremble and she stumbled on the edge of her skirt. At once the man raised his head and his swollen bloodshot eyes flashed with fury. "Who are you that dares come in here now? How dare you gape at me - you graceless bitch -" He stopped and rising to his feet walked down beneath the rood-screen. "Katherine?" he said in a tone of wonder.
Still on her knees she stared up at him mutely. Slow tears gathered in her eyes and ran down her face. The monks' voices chanted louder in the Miserere, then died away.
"Katherine," said the Duke. "What do you here?"
"Forgive me, my Lord," she whispered, "I loved her too - -"
His mouth twisted and he flung his clenched fists against his breast. "My God, my God - that she should leave me like this. These weeks since I heard I didn't believe, I couldn't believe - -" He turned and looked at the coffin. "Go, Katherine," he said dully.
She fled down the nave and out of the chapel. She did not go back to the dorter, she wandered through the courts until she came to the great terraced garden by the river. She groped her way past the clipped box hedges, down marble steps until she reached the landing pier at the foot of the garden. It was chill there from the river breeze and she shivered a little in her cloak. She crouched on a stanchion at the edge of the pier and watched the inky slow-moving waters pass, pouring themselves eternally into the sea, and she no longer thought of the Lady Blanche, or of the horrors of the plague: she prayed for the man who lay on the chancel tiles by the bier.
The Duchess was interred at last four days later. Her marble tomb was placed in a chantry next to the high altar in St. Paul's Cathedral, and two chantry priests were engaged to sing Masses for her soul in perpetuity. Her funeral procession from the Savoy down the Strand through Ludgate to St. Paul's was the most magnificent ever seen in England, it surpassed even Queen Philippa's recent obsequies in Westminster Abbey, but to the Duke it brought no comfort.
When he returned from St. Paul's he would speak to nobody and mounting straight to his private apartments locked himself into the small chamber that was called Avalon because its English tapestry portrayed the enchanted burial of King Arthur.
John would not enter the great solar which he had shared with Blanche or sleep in the bed where he had once lain in her arms; and for days he would not quit the Avalon Chamber at all. During this time there was only one person whom he would admit, Raulin d'Ypres, his young Flemish body squire who brought him food which he barely touched. No one else saw him.
Each morning in the high-vaulted Presence Chamber which adjoined the privy apartments, an anxious group of men gathered to await the squire's word as to whether they would be received, and each day Raulin came back, his broad face gloomy as he gave them a denial. On Thursday after the Duchess's funeral he returned to the waiting men and said, "The Duke's Grace still vill not see you, my lords. He sits effer the same staring at the fire, except sometimes he writes on a parchment. This morning, though, he vishes Master Mason Henry Yevele sent for."