Of Felony; and all the counterplots,
Cruel anger, red as any coal
Pickpockets, and eke the pale Dread ...
(The Knight's Tale)
CHAPTER XVI
On the afternoon before St. George's Day, 1376, April bloomed in Warwickshire. The young lambs bleated from the pastures beyond the mere, while a hazy gold light turned the sandstone of the battlements to the colour of a robin's breast. All Kenilworth Castle, cleansed and garlanded for the festivities, waited for the Duke to come again.
Katherine sat on a sunny stone bench in the Inner Court near the old keep, lending an indulgent ear to the happy shouts of the children as they romped through the courtyards. From this bench she could watch the entrance to the castle at Mortimer's Tower and be ready when the trumpet sounded and the first member of the Duke's company should gallop through from the causeway. This time she had not seen him for two months.
She was dressed in the gown he preferred to most of the others he had ordered for her: an amber tunic beneath a clinging sideless surcote of apricot velvet, furred with ermine. Her golden girdle was inlaid with enamel plaques blazoning her own arms - the three Catherine wheels or, on a gules field. A thin topaz-studded fillet encircled her high arched forehead, her eyebrows were plucked, her lips lightly reddened with cochineal paste as the Duke liked to see them. Her dark auburn hair was perfumed with costly ambergris, imported from Arabia, that he had appropriated for her in some hastily abandoned castle on his Great March through France, three years ago.
That march had been a foolhardy deed of courage. He had forced his weakening and finally starving army through enemy territory the length of France, from the north to Bordeaux. He had exposed his own person to danger time and again, and suffered with his men. Even the French thought this chevanchee a triumphant feat, spectacular as any his brother the Black Prince had ever achieved, and yet in the end there was loss, not gain. The lands through which he marched had bowed under the trampling feet like long grass, and sprung up again when he had passed.
When John had returned to England, embittered, his dream of conquering all France and then Castile once more postponed, he had found himself the target of an angry, puzzled England. For there was unrest everywhere and dissatisfaction with conditions. The people clamoured for another Crecy, another Poitiers, but times had changed. A new and wilier king sat on the French throne, and the once great English king was senile, his policies unstable, blowing now hot now cold, obedient to the greedy whims of Alice Perrers, and caring only to please her.
Yet now there was a truce with France, a precarious amnesty negotiated by the Duke at Bruges last year. The thought of John's months at Bruges brought sharp pain to Katherine, though it was a pain to which she was well accustomed.
John had taken his Duchess with him to Flanders and there at Ghent, his own birthplace, Costanza had been delivered of a son - at last.
But the baby did not live! Katherine crossed herself as she sat on the bench in Kenilworth courtyard and thought, Mea Culpa, as she had when she first heard the news that the baby had died - for shame of the fierce joy she had felt.
My sons live, thought Katherine. She glanced up to the windows of the Nursery Chamber in the South Wing. A shadow passed behind the clear tiny panes, and Katherine smiled. That would be Hawise, or one of the nurses, tending the infant Harry in his cradle, or perhaps fetching some toy to distract little John as he ate his supper - for he was a fussy eater and prone to dawdle. Healthy rosy boys, both of them, golden as buttercups, with their father's intense blue eyes.
A high jeering singsong shattered the peace of the courtyard. "Scaredy cats! Scaredy cats! Cowardy cowardy custard, go get thyself some mustard! - Ye dursn't do what I do - -"
That was Elizabeth, of course. Katherine jumped up prepared for trouble and hurried through the arch to the Base Court. Though the Duke's younger daughter was twelve years old and near to womanhood, Elizabeth's reckless enterprises still had to be restrained before they led herself and the younger children into actual danger.
This time Elizabeth was hopping on one foot upon the slate roof of the ducal stable and clinging to the weather-vane. Tom, Blanchette and the three little Deyncourts were all cramped into various stressful positions on the slippery slates as they tried to climb up to the taunting figure above them. Blanchette, her mother saw at once, was crying while she teetered on a window-ledge, and fumbled for fingerholds in the stone gutter.
"Elizabeth!" called Katherine sharply, to the stable roof. "Come down at once!" She ran to rescue Blanchette by climbing on a mounting block and holding her arms up to the child, who dropped thankfully into them. "Little simpleton," scolded Katherine, kissing her. "When will you learn you cannot and must not do all Lady Elizabeth says?" She ran on from Blanchette and pulled down the Deyncourt children. But her own Thomas wanted no help. He turned a sulky face to his mother and said, "Let me be, lady. I shan't go to the roof, but I shall get down as I please," which was as typical of Tom at eight as it had been all his life. Never openly disobedient, but a headstrong sulky boy who reminded her often of his father, Hugh.
"Well, Bess," called Katherine to the culprit on the roof, "I told you to come down - -"
"Can't," quavered the child. Her swarthy little face had paled, she clung so hard to the weather-vane that its veering cock shook as in a high wind.
"Then be brave a few more minutes and hold tight," called Katherine more gently. She clapped her hands crying, "Groom! Here!" A stablerboy ran out, brought a ladder and soon had Elizabeth safe on the ground - safe and defiant. "I wasn't scared, I was just gammoning you, my lady."
Katherine wasted no time in dispute, Elizabeth was for ever getting into pickles from which she could not extricate herself. "Beat her!" advised Dame Marjorie Deyncourt, wife to the castle's constable. "You spare the rod too much." The Deyncourt children were beaten as regularly as they attended Mass. Five years back, when Katherine first assumed responsibility for the rearing of the Duke's two daughters, she had had recourse to frequent switchings as the only way to handle Elizabeth - Philippa needed no such measures, ever - but gradually Katherine had learned that firm kindness and the minimum of punishment better controlled the child. And John would seldom have her punished either; this giddly little daughter could always cozen him by climbing on his lap, shaking her dark curls and pouting her red lips, which were plump as cherries and gave promise of disquieting sensuality.
"Go, Bess, and find one of your maids," said Katherine sternly. "Tell her to wash you, you cannot greet your father in this state. Then stay in your chamber till you're summoned."
Elizabeth shrugged, but she went off to the castle, scuffing her feet. She liked Lady Swynford well enough and knew her to be just, but lately she had been puzzled by the situation between this lady and her father, which before she had accepted without interest. That the two baby boys called John and Harry Beaufort were her half-brothers, she knew, and that her father loved Lady Swynford she had seen often enough with jealous eyes; but no one had ever explained these matters and mention of them was shushed. Servants' gossip overheard last week had awakened her to the knowledge that there was something strange about her governess, something the tiring-women snickered about behind their hands, and Nan, the laundry maid, had cried dramatically, "Ah, me heart bleeds, indeed it do, for that poor betrayed Duchess, a-pining away at Hertford or in them North Country wilds at Tutbury. 'Tis a mortal shame."
But Elizabeth had not liked her father's Spanish wife at all, the time that she and Philippa had been taken to Hertford to call on her. The Duchess had glittering eyes like pieces of jet, while the touch of her bony hand was cold and moist as a fish. Nor would she speak one word of English. She had given Elizabeth and Philippa an unsmiling scrutiny, then turned to talk in Spanish with the Castilian ladies who hovered near. Elizabeth had been sent to play with little Catalina, who was her half-sister, too. Catalina was four years old like Lady Swynford's John Beaufort, but three months younger than he. This fact had been part of the servant's mysterious sniggers.