He held out his hand to Costanza, and with the ceremony she exacted and which he accorded to her rank, he ushered her up the steps to her side of the State Bed. He held back for her the jewelled rose brocade curtains. She thanked him and, shutting her eyes, began to murmur prayers. Her narrow face was yellow against the white satin pillow, and his nostrils were offended by her odour. Costanza's private mortifications included denial of the luxury of cleanliness, Beneath the requisite pomp of her position, she tried to live like a holy saint, contemptuous of the body.
In the first years of her marriage she had not been so unpleasing. Though she had brought to their bed only a rigid endurance of wifely and dynastic duty, still she had allowed her ladies to attire and cleanse her properly at all times, and taken pride in the smallness of her high-arched feet, the abundance of her long black hair. She had been quieter, gentler, and though they had soon ceased, there had been moments when she showed him tenderness, had once spoken of love, which greatly embarrassed him. Only once however. And since the birth and death of the baby boy in Ghent she had become like this, indifferent to all things but her religious practices, her strange dreams and her consuming nostalgia for Castile.
John climbed into his side of the great bed, glad that space enough for two separated them.
He heard her whispering in the dark, "Padre, Padre - Padre mio - -" and his flesh crept, knowing that it was not God, but the ghost of her own father that she supplicated.
Yet Costanza had no tinge of madness. Brother William had said so, three weeks ago when John had sent him to Hertford to examine the Duchess. "Disorders of the womb do oft-times produce excitable humours in the female," the Grey Friar had reported. "I've given Her Grace a draught which may help her, but her Scorpio is afflicted by Saturn. That is not all that afflicts her," added the friar with stern unmistakable meaning.
"Her Grace is nothing disturbed by my - my association with Lady Swynford!" John had answered hotly. "She has never suffered from it, nor does she care."
"Perhaps not, my lord. But God cares - and the sin of adultery you live in now is but the stinking fruit of the viler crime which gave it birth."
"What's this, friar?" John had shouted in anger. "Do you join my enemies in the yapping of vague slanders - or is it that your bigot mind sees love itself as such a vileness? Speak out!"
"I cannot, my lord," said the friar after a time. "I can but remind you that Our Blessed Lord taught that the wish will be condemned even as the deed."
"What wish? What deed? You babble like a Benedictine! You had better stick to leeching."
"Do you pray sometimes, my lord - for the salvation of Nirac de Bayonne's soul?" said Brother William solemnly.
Until now, when Costanza's behaviour had reminded him of Brother William, John had put this conversation from his thought, deeming that the friar, like all the clergy, puffed himself up with the making of dark little mysteries and warnings. He had answered impatiently that no doubt Masses had been said for Nirac in St. Exupere's church in Bayonne, since money had been sent there for that purpose. He had resented the friar's steady accusing gaze and said, "It was not my fault that the little mountebank's wits unloosened, or that he dabbled in witchcraft! You weary me, Brother William."
"Aye," said the friar, "for you've a conscience blind as a mole and tough as oxhide. Beware for your own soul, my Lord Duke!"
No other cleric in the world could have thus spoken without instant punishment, and the rage that injustice always roused in John had hardly been controlled by the long liking and trust he had for this Brother. But he had sent the friar away from the Savoy before Katherine came. Sent him far north to Pontefract Castle, where the steward had reported several cases of lung fever.
At the thought of Katherine, John stretched and smiled into the darkness. Tomorrow night she would be here with him again, since Costanza was leaving for Canterbury. Nay - not tomorrow night, for that was sacred to the memory of Blanche and would be spent in mourning and fasting, as always on this anniversary. The next night then. He hungered for Katherine with sharp desire, picturing her as she would be now in her bed - white and rose and bronze, warmly fragrant as a gillyflower.
The Castilian Duchess left the Savoy next morning with six of her own courtiers and a few English servants. She was dressed in sackcloth, her head was powdered with ashes and she rode upon a donkey, for that was the humble beast used by Our Blessed Lord.
Katherine from her chamber window watched the pilgrimage move slowly from the courtyard through the gatehouse to the Strand, and her eyes shone with happy tears as she turned to her sister. "Blessed Jesu - so she's gone again! God be thanked she didn't stay for the Requiem Mass."
"The Duchess cares for no past but her own," said Philippa dryly. "Now that I've a fortnight's leave," she added considering, "I think I'll go back with Geoffrey to Aldgate. His lodging must be in sore need of my care. Last time he'd let an ale keg drip for days - ruined the floor-cloth - and the fleas!"
"Geoffrey'll meet us at Saint Paul's?" asked Katherine, but she knew the answer. He, of all people, would never fail in respect to the memory of Blanche. Katherine too thought of Blanche with loving reverence like that one gave the saints.
Later that morning, the Lancastrian procession from the Savoy to St. Paul's Cathedral was led by the Duke. They were all dressed in black and all afoot. Katherine's position was between Elizabeth and Philippa, behind little Henry, who followed his father at two paces.
Katherine and John exchanged hurried words while the procession formed. He had bent close to her and whispered, "Dear heart, we shall be together again tomorrow," and she had pulled her black veil quickly across her face to hide her unseemly joy.
As they marched across the Fleet bridge and entered the City at Ludgate, the Londoners made way respectfully. The men uncovered, many of the women ducked a curtsy as the Duke marched slowly past. There were cries of "Lancaster" and "The Duchess Blanche, God rest her sweet soul!"
At the corner of Ave Maria lane, a woman's voice somewhat thickened with drink shouted out, "Cock's bones, but the Duke's a handsome kingly wight, belike he'd be no bad ruler for us after all!"
She was shushed by a hundred whispers, but John felt a contented glow. He thought the temper of the London crowd was for him as it never had been before, and he thought that his poor brother had been right to counsel moderation in the handling of the Commons, "The Good Parliament," the people called it now. And the sacrifice had not been too great, barring the whimperings of the old King, bereft of his Alice. The imprisoned merchants doubtless had deserved some punishment, the Lords Latimer and Neville, too. The new Privy Council which the Commons had appointed to the King was harder for John to stomach, and yet here too magnanimity might be shown; for little Richard's sake it might be possible to conciliate and work with even such enemies as the Earl of March.
His softened mellow spirit deepened as he walked down St. Paul's immense nave, through the choir and to the right of the High Altar where he knelt in Blanche's chantry beside her marble tomb. His retinue filed in. The nobles filled the choir, the rest overflowed into the aisles. Philippa, Elizabeth and Henry knelt on purple cushions at the far end of their mother's chantry.
The priests in black and silver chasubles commenced the celebration of the Mass. "Introibo ad altare Dei - ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam - -"
The chanting and responses went on, but for John three words echoed and re-echoed - Laetificat juventutem meant, the joy of my youth. He looked up at Blanche's effigy, all but her face covered with a black velvet pall. The twenty-eight candles, one for each of her years on earth, illumined the serene alabaster profile. Joy of my youth - yes. But you would not begrudge me joy now, my Blanche, you know that you've lost nothing that was ever yours in this new love that has come to me.