His exaltation grew, and with it a certainty that all would go well with him from now on. His enemies would melt away, success would come in war, in peace. Castile would crumble for him like a marchpane subtlety, and he would build it up anew of strong and shining steel while all of England rang with the glory of his name, as it had once rung for Edward.
"Requiescat in pace - -"
The Mass was over, John felt exalted, cleansed, much as he had felt long ago during the sacred vigil before his father knighted him.
He walked down the nave. Throughout the vast church his people rose from their knees to follow him. He stepped out to the porch, and stood blinking in the sunlight, still bemused, and not comprehending why there was a great crowd in the walled close. Again he heard "Lancaster," and he threw his head up to smile at them, thinking they came to do him honour. He checked himself, seeing that there was no answering warmth in the upturned faces. They appeared shocked, some even dismayed, but the strongest impact from those gaping faces was a malicious curiosity.
"Make way - make way!" cried Lancaster Herald, bustling out of the church and brandishing his baton and trumpet. "Make way for John, King of Castile, Duke of Lancaster, and for his meinie!"
The crowd did not move. There were a few nervous snickers then from the midst of the rapidly swelling throng a man's voice shouted, "Fine-sounding titles, herald! But tell us why we should make way for John o' Gaunt, a Flemish butcher's son!"
John stood rooted to the pavement. The sky darkened and across the close the house roofs wavered like water. There was a roaring in his head.
Katherine with the ducal daughters had come out on the porch in time to hear a man shout, but at first she was simply puzzled like the others. Then she saw whom the crowd was warily watching: like a great collective beast of prey, uncertain of its quarry's next move. And the Duke did nothing, he stood as if some witchcraft had turned him to stone.
Katherine instinctively moved nearer to him as the vanguard of his retinue began to trickle from the church.
"Ay," cried the same taunting voice, "John o' Gaunt seems wonderstruck! He's not yet read the placard what's nailed on yonder door. The good monk there was passing, and he read it to us, my lord, so we maught all share the secret o' your true birth!"
Katherine, utterly bewildered, looked where the crowd did and saw Benedictine monks hovering near a recess of the church porch. Their faces were sunk deep in their black cowls. As she looked, the monks vanished, slipping through a side door into the church.
The crowd roared, half with laughter at the disappearing monks, half in the jeering excitement with which they would pelt stones at miscreants in the stock. Yet some were uneasy. The Duke's motionless figure was uncanny. He stared over their heads as though weird signs were painted on the western sky.
Their spokesman shouted out once more, but in less certain tone. "Will ye not read the placard, m'lord? 'Tis on Paul's door behind ye. It tells strange tidings o' a noble lord what holds his head so high!"
Katherine's heart began to pound. She noted something familiar in the voice and stood on tiptoe to peer into the crowd. She saw a broad red face, a sandy thatch of hair beneath a peaked cap, with the badge of the weavers' guild. My God, she thought, 'tis Jack Maudelyn! She glared down at Hawise's husband with some confused idea of quelling him, when Lord de la Pole rushed out on the church porch, crying, "Christ's blood, what's ado here! What's this mob?" His shrewd eyes darted over the scene, and he drew his sword, shouting, "A Lancaster! A Lancaster! Come forth to your Lord!"
Inside the church there were startled answering cries. The great doors were flung wide. The Duke's knights and squires came running out, fumbling at their sword hilts.
The crowd wavered and pressed back against the wall, then as though a cork had been drawn they poured, stumbling, scrambling, through the churchyard gates, and fled up Paternoster Lane.
"Shall we after them, Your Grace?" cried a young knight eagerly.
The Duke made no answer. He had not moved on the step while his retinue surrounded him.
De la Pole sheathed his sword. "No," he said to the knight. " 'Twould not be seemly here on this day of mourning. 'Tis no doubt some prentice prank. They've done no harm - -"
He faltered as he got his first direct look at the Duke. "God's bones, my lord - you've not been wounded?"
The Duke's face was grey as the church stones and beaded with moisture. His lips were drawn in like an old man's.
Katherine too stared at her lover's face, and she ran to him crying, "My darling - why do you look like that? They were but silly japes the man called out."
He pushed her aside, and walking to the church door, shut the half his men had opened. On the door dangling from an iron nail hung a large square of parchment. It was inscribed in English in a fine writing suggestive of the cloisters. The Duke clasped his hands behind his back and read it slowly.
Know men of England, how ye have been wickedly deceived by one who incontinently plots to seize our throne. The Duke of Lancaster is no Englishman, but a Fleming. He's none of royal Edward and Philippa's blood, but a changeling. For ye must know that in Ghent, the Queen's Grace was delivered of a son that a nurse overlay. In fear of her lord the King, the Queen did send to find another infant of the same age. It was a butcher's son, and fie whom ye now call John of Gaunt. This secret did the Queen confess to the Bishop of Winchester, on her deathbed, so it is said.
The Duke drew his dagger from its jewelled sheath. Its hilt was enamelled with the lilies and leopards, tipped with a ruby rose of Lancaster. He thrust the dagger through the parchment and left it quivering there.
He turned to his bewildered courtiers. He saw none of them, nor Katherine, nor his children. His face became one only his fighting men had seen, as his lips drew back in a terrible smile. "They shall learn whether I am Edward's true-born son."
That night at the Savoy uneasy speculation hummed. In the kitchens and cellars the varlets whispered together, and the men-at-arms in their barracks. The chancery clerks and the chapel priests buzzed as unceasingly as did the Duke's squires, or the knights and lords who headed his retinue. The Duke had gone to Havering-atte-Bower to see the King. He had put off his mourning clothes and ordered his fastest horse to be saddled. Galloping as though Beelzebub's own fiends pursued him, he had set off for Essex. He had chosen none of his men to accompany him, nor spoken to anyone: he had gone alone. This, a circumstance so unprecedented and foolhardy, that Lord de la Pole, anxiously frowning, spoke of it in the Great Hall that night. "God's wounds! Who can guess what's in his mind? He's like a man bewitched!" He spoke to Sir Robert Knolles, another old campaigner who had served with the Duke for twenty years.
Sir Robert gnawed on his grizzled moustache and cried staunchly, "Why, he will avenge this insult to his honour. What man can blame him?"
"Yet such paltry nonsense," answered de la Pole. "They've whispered far worse of him than this farradiddle about a butcher's son, or even that he plots for the throne."
"Whispered, ay," said the old knight, "but this was written down."
De la Pole was silent. He himself, who could read a little, had awe of the written word, but to the common folk writing was a sacred oracle.
"By God!" cried de la Pole, angrily banging his hand on the table. "No one who saw him today could doubt him a Plantagenet! D'you remember Prince Edward's face at Limoges massacre? No mercy, and no quarter when the fury's on them."
"But that was war," said Sir Robert. "His Grace can hardly massacre the whole of London."