She took off the sapphire seal ring and slipped it in her bosom.

"The Duke will manage that you have a few minutes alone together, but the time must necessarily be brief so as not to arouse suspicion. I am therefore directed to repeat the arrangements His Grace had made for you and to which he commands and also implores your final consent."

Katherine swallowed and said dully, "I am sailing tomorrow on whatever ship he has selected."

"Ay, and when you land you proceed to the Savoy bearing official letters which will grant you fifty marks at once and appoint you Resident Governess to His Grace's two little daughters, the Ladies Philippa and Elizabeth. You may send for your sister, Mistress Chaucer, and your own two children from Lincolnshire to join you at the Savoy, where they also will be provided for. You will remain at the Savoy until the Duke returns." The friar paused, before adding with biting emphasis, "When, I gather, further intimacies will continue to be suitably rewarded."

"Brother William!" Katherine jumped to her feet. "You've no right to speak to "me like that! I've already refused these arrangements. I did refuse them, though now - now-" She bit her lips until the blood surged back into them purple. "You've no right to judge! What can you know of love, or of a woman's heart? Do you think I don't suffer?"

The friar drew a long sigh. "Peace, child," he said, "peace! I don't judge you, that is for God to do. He knows what's in your secret heart. I see only a guilty love. Guilty," he repeated half to himself and gazed at her intently with his keen physician's eyes. "Nirac de Bayonne is ill," he said.

"Nirac - -" she cried in an amazement that the watchful friar knew was" innocent and unfeigned. "Why do you speak of him, now? Oh, I'm sorry he's ill, poor little scamp. He'll cure soon enough if the Duke is kind to him, I warrant."

So, I believe that I am quite wrong, thought the friar with deep relief. This girl at least knew nothing, if there were truly anything to know. Nirac had had two attacks like fits of madness, in which the Grey Friar had been called to tend him and soon discovered that these fits came from the taking of drugs obtained from some disreputable alchemist in the Basque quarter of town. During these fits Nirac had shouted out strange words and vague sinister allusions, coupled with Katherine and Hugh Swynford's names but actually nothing more than what an excited brain might invent. The friar was ashamed of the dreadful suspicions that had come to him.

He spoke more kindly to Katherine as they hurried towards the palace together.

To reach the Presence Chamber they had to traverse the palace cloisters. In the central garth a crowd of lords and ladies amused themselves, some tossing a gilded leather ball, some wagering piles of silver coins on the roll of ivory jewel-studded dice. The Princess Isabel sat on a blue velvet chair in the shade of a mulberry tree, munching candied rose petals and gossiping with Lady Roos of Hamlake. Her brother, Edmund of Langley, lounged beside her chair while he tickled the sensitive nose of Isabel's spaniel with an ostrich feather.

The Princess' sharp eyes missed very little. She spied Katherine's black-robed figure as the girl approached the Great Stairs and called out peremptorily, "My Lady Swynford!"

The girl started and glanced at the Grey Friar in distress. He said, "You must go to her," with some sympathy, for he did not like the Duke's sister.

Katherine moved slowly across the turf and curtsied to the Princess, who said, "I've heard some rumour that your knight has died, God rest his soul. I see," she glanced at Katherine's gown, "that it is so. A pity. Was it not some time ago?"

"A month, madam," said Katherine faintly. Edmund having made the spaniel sneeze looked up, his mouth fell open as he stared at Katherine. He scrambled to his feet and waving the ostrich feather cried, "And where have you been since, my lovely burde? So fair a widow should not go unconsoled." He leered at her with mawkish gallantry, and Katherine looked away, stricken by the caricatured resemblance to his brother in this weak, foolish face.

"Quiet, Edmund," said the Princess as though she addressed the spaniel. "Where are you bound now?" she pursued to Katherine, her instinctive resentment sharpening her voice, though in truth she had forgotten Lady Swynford since she saw her on the boat and had no motive but curiosity.

"To crave leave of departure from my Lord Duke, madam. It - it has been arranged that I sail home tomorrow."

"Ah," said Isabel satisfied, "back to that North Country whence you came? Some village with a silly name, a kettle in it, what was it?"

"Kettlethorpe, madam," said Katherine, and stood waiting while Isabel chortled and Edmund giggled amiably and continued to eye the girl with warmth. "Have I your leave to depart now, madam?"

Isabel nodded and crammed another fistful of sugared comfits into her mouth. Katherine curtsied again and rejoined Brother William, who had been watching the way she bore herself and thinking that she was hard to condemn as wholeheartedly as his conscience bade him do for this scandalous intrigue she had plunged into while her husband lay but four days dead. As she stood before those two Plantagenets in the garden, she had seemed more royal than they and fashioned of a finer metal. Yet she was weak, debased by the sins of the flesh, and he must guard himself from excusing her because of the beauty of her flesh: a lure devised by the ever-guileful Devil.

They entered the crowded anteroom past the yeoman-on-guard, and Brother William introduced her to the chamberlain, who said that my Lady Swynford would be received in her due turn. Katherine sat on a bench between one of the Castilian envoys and a Florentine goldsmith who held on his lap a casket of jewelled trinkets which he hoped to sell to the Duke as gifts for the bride.

The Grey Friar bowed to Katherine gravely and said, "I'll leave you now, my child, and shall pray that Christ and His Holy Mother strengthen you. Benedicite."

She bowed her head.

Her head remained bowed while those ahead of her filed into the Presence Chamber: an abbess from Perigueux, a distressed knight and his lady from the Dordogne, the Castilian, the goldsmith, a messenger with letters from Flanders. At last the chamberlain spoke her name and a page resplendent in dazzling blue and grey livery came to usher her. An unknown squire received her at the door of the Presence Chamber and opened it for her to enter.

The Duke sat in a gilded canopied chair that was raised on a low dais. On his head he wore a coronet studded with cabochons, rough lumps of emeralds, balas rubies. His surcote of crimson velvet was furred with ermine and above the gold Lancastrian SS collar his face was tired and bleak.

They looked at each other, then looked away while the Duke said in his voice of chill command, "I will see this lady alone." The squire and a clerk who had been seated at a table silently withdrew.

She stood where she was in the middle of the floor, until he reached out his hand and said, "Come to me, Katrine."

She went over to the dais and kissed his hand. He drew her slowly up against him and kissed her on the lips.

"Brother William gave you my message?"

"Yes, my lord."

"You'll not refuse again, my dear one. I must know that you'll be there, waiting for me."

"I cannot refuse again," she said in a strangled voice, "for I believe I bear your child."

"Jesu!" he cried, his eyes blazed with light. "My child! My son! You will give me a son, Katrine. Another royal Plantagenet!"

"A bastard," she said, turning her head.

"But my son. He shall never suffer from it. Katrine, now you cannot leave me! I'll give you the world and all that's in it, I'll cherish you, care for you, you'll never know a hardship or a worry! You shall see what it is to be loved by the Duke of Lancaster!"

"And in return, my lord, I give you my good name - -"

"Nay, darling, it need not be. No one need know. I'll do all to protect your good name. 'Tis fitting enough that you should be appointed Governess to my daughters, they're fond of you. And everyone knows I care for my people, that your husband died in my service and that you were" - he paused - "were beloved of the Duchess Blanche."

She looked at him sadly, thinking that men saw only what they wished to see, and that it would be no easy thing to conceal their love or the fruit of it. In truth he did not realise how they would shrink from the furtive, from a prolonged course of lies and subterfuges. In that they were alike, both imbued with reckless pride.

"I cannot see far ahead, my dear lord," she said sighing, "but I'll do as you say until you return, and I'll do my best for your children.'' And mine, she added silently, for in these last days that she had been alone in Bordeaux she had thought much with painful yearning of her true-born babies, as though to reassure them that her love for them was untouched by this other all-compelling love that had come to her, nor changed by the new baby that she carried in her womb.

A nourish of trumpets sounded from outside the window. They both started.

"The heralds practise for your wedding march," she said, the words dropping like stones on a wooden dish. "Adieu, my lord."

"Katrine," he cried. He pulled her close against him. "You must be careful* you will be safe on this journey. 'Tis the best master we have, the staunchest ship. I'll have two priests pray for your safety night and day in the cathedral. Oh my Katrine, do you love me?"

The bitterness left her eyes, she put her arms around his neck, and met his hot demanding lips with a gentle kiss. "Ay, my lord, I love you," she said with a laugh that was half a sob. "I think you need not ask."

Part Four (1376-1377)

There saw I first the dark deceptions

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.