‘No, John,’ I spoke at last. ‘No more waiting. If I had intended to say no to you, I would not have come to your chamber and made myself the gossip of choice of the whole household here at Hertford. Take me to bed, John. Take me to bed, my dear love, and heal all my wounds.’

No, we were not as young as we were, but neither were we old. Less supple perhaps, less beautiful to the eye, so many new wounds and abrasions for John, whereas my hips and waist bore witness to the passing years. But here were so many caresses and responses to revisit, so much to recall and renew to bring us back to the pleasure we had once known in each other’s arms. I had never forgotten how the Duke could make my blood run hot, and I was not disappointed, for there was no reticence between us. How could there be? We were confident and demanding in our passion, devouring each other with infinite and exquisite slowness, before naked desire destroyed all self-control. My lack of breath had nothing to do with age. Nor for him. Until finally lack of stamina dictated that we rest, my head cushioned on his breast.

‘Would you not look for a younger woman in your bed?’ I sighed with happiness, daring him to agree.

‘You are my younger woman.’

Still that last little seed of fear remained. He was not his own man. Would England claim him again and snatch him from me?

‘John—if you regret this, if you turn away from me again, I don’t think I can live with it.’

‘I have no regrets. I will never let you go.’

His kisses made me weep.

‘Must we confess?’ I remembered the heart-wrenching confessions. How could I confess a sin when I would repeat it again within the day?

‘If you wish it.’ He smoothed the tears away. ‘But you are my true love. I cannot believe that God will punish us for this. We harm no one. We love in true spirit.’

I sniffed, and smiled, still disbelieving that we shared the same small space, breathed the same air and would never be parted again.

The Duke leaned forward, and sniffed my hair. ‘It smells of…?’

‘Of ambergris. Joan’s perfume.’ I laughed as I realised. ‘It is an aphrodisiac, so it is said.’

‘Shall we prove it?’

And, oh, it was. It worked its magic on all our senses. Or perhaps we did not really need it. I would have loved him on a bed of straw in my stable at Kettlethorpe.

‘You will be my love. But circumspectly,’ he said when he could. ‘We will not be reckless again. We will not ride through the streets together.’

There was nothing circumspect in our behaviour for the next hour.

We were renewed. Reborn. We gave permission for our minds to touch, to slide, to enmesh one into the other when we were parted, as we gave sanction for our bodies to become one again when time and duty smiled on us. It was a strange moment of transition from estrangement to reconciliation, marked by tentative steps at first.

We had hurt each other. How cruel the wounds we had inflicted on each other. Now we had to learn to step together again, in trust, in renewed loyalty. In harmony, picking out the same notes from the troubadours’ songs of requited love.

‘I regret our time apart with every drop of blood in my body,’ the Duke said.

‘It was a living death,’ I replied. ‘Without hope. Without happiness.’

But now, grasping our permission to bloom, our love would not be gainsaid. Soft as a blessing, fervent as a nun’s prayer, it healed our wounds.

‘You are the music that stirs my heart to weep at the beauty of it,’ he said.

‘And you are the succulent coney that enlivens my winter frumenty.’ I would not allow him to be solemn for long.

‘And there was I thinking that you preferred venison,’ he growled, lips against my throat.

‘Only when I have a rich patron to provide it.’

‘Patron?’ His brows lifted splendidly.

‘Or lover.’

‘So I should hope. Now why is it that you remind me of a plump roast partridge?’ And there was the gleam that I had once thought never to see again.

As his brows winged at my culinary flight of fancy, and his hand slid over my hip, my blood warmed and my heart beat hard. I relented, and gave him kind for kind. ‘You, my dear man, are the sweet verse that awakens my mind to love’s glory.’

Our souls were replete in each other, as smoothly close-knit as the feathers on the breast of a collared dove.




Chapter Nineteen

Fear creeps in to spoil and destroy, like the first ravages of the moth in a fine wool tapestry, impossible to distinguish by the naked eye until the damage is done and the glorious hunting scene is punctured by as many holes as a sieve. So fear crept into my consciousness.

What if my lover, my dearest friend, my only heart’s desire, the glorious apple of my very critical eye, were to wed again? What if the Duke of Lancaster should take another Duchess to his marital bed?

It was a thought that I despised, but one that kept me brooding company. I could see no reason at all why he should not. It would be good political strategy on the part of King Richard to arrange it. To insist on it, if he were of a mind to exert his authority over his family.

Duchess Constanza was dead. Constanza who had, in her eyes, failed to achieve her life’s wish, had died. We had not foreseen it. How would we? There had been no rumour of ill-health, only of the end when it came, when in March at Leicester Castle, surrounded by her Castilian ladies, Constanza breathed her last of English air.

In Lincoln, I had known of her death before the Duke, for he was in France concluding a long-awaited, four-year truce with the French. What a blow it had been for him to return to this loss, full of the success of his diplomacy, and be plunged into funerary rights. Even though they had lived apart since the abandoning of the Castilian campaign, yet his respect for her, his Duchess for more than twenty years, was great. He was not a man to be left unmoved, and in moments of honesty his conscience troubled him. He had not always made life easy for her.

He had not talked to me of it and I was too careful to step mindlessly where I might not be wanted. My discretion these days was a thing of wonder.

But now the Duke was free, had been free for four months. In excellent health in mind and body, he would be an asset to any plans Richard had for a European alliance. Would the King put pressure on the Duke to wed again at his dictates? I imagined that Richard already had such a plan in his mind, so that before too many more months, the Duke would be participating in a third nuptial celebration.

I could not think of that. Not yet.

Such a prospect would bring me too much pain in a year that had seemed to bring nothing but pain. What a year of deaths it had been. Of tears and graves and mourning. A year of portents, when I had set my mind to luxuriate in my restored happiness, even during John’s absence in France, but happiness is not in the gift of Man when God takes his due. For a year in which contentment should have enfolded me, blessed me, I spent an unconscionable length of time on my knees. And so did the Duke. Death had blown in without warning, as disturbing as a summer storm.