‘I’ll make your memories there better for you,’ he promised as he summoned one of the squires, to issue a stream of succinct orders that would take us to Pontefract where I would begin my life as Duchess of Lancaster.




Chapter Twenty

‘You know the lady well,’ the Duke had advised his steward and Constable when we had first dismounted.

‘Yes, my lord.’ Sir William Fincheden, the steward—my steward now—bowed, the Captain likewise. They knew me very well.

‘Lady Katherine is now my Duchess.’ I had to admire the Duke’s not beating about the bush.

There was the briefest of hesitations.

‘Allow me to offer my good wishes, my lady.’ Sir William’s face had been impressively wooden. Why was it that stewards, in their officialdom, had difficulty in accepting my status, whether scandalous or superbly legal?

The Constable had bowed without hesitation. ‘You are right welcome, my lady.’

The Duke took my arm to lead me into the hall and nodded. ‘You will serve her, as you would serve me.’

It was in manner of a warning, of course, lightly given. It was all that was needed.

‘If my lady would accept the grace cup?’ The steward presented it to me, in my superior position on the dais, before the dishes were served at dinner.

‘Perhaps my lady would try the venison?’ The Duke’s carver was keen to show his skill.

‘Would my lady wish to cleanse her fingers?’ The newest of John’s squires knelt at my side with a finger bowl and pristine napkin.

I acquired a page, Guyon, to scurry at my heels and pick up anything I might drop. Doors opened for me as I approached.

‘If it is your will, my lady…’

‘And your head will be as big as a cabbage!’ Agnes opined as the poulterer visited me to offer a choice pair of geese for supper. I seemed to have acquired my own personal poulterer as well as a master of game and Stephen of the Saucery who was intent on proving his prowess with a wooden spoon.

I sat at the Duke’s side on the dais. I knelt beside him in the chapel. His chaplain beamed on us indiscriminately. I was able to make confession with a glad heart.

‘Would my lady wish to take the merlin or the tercel this morning?’

I had a falconer too. And a groom to hold my stirrup when I mounted. I never had to shiver in the cold until my horse was readied for me.

I was the Duchess of Lancaster, in the home of the Duke. My wishes were of supreme importance. The Duke saw nothing noteworthy in any of this, but I did, after a lifetime of monumental discretion and subtle insolence.

I did not need it for my happiness, but it proved that my new status was no dream.

The Duke was John now in my mind as well as in my speech. I could think of him as John when he was my husband, in spite of the habits of a lifetime that still clung to me, as a cobweb clings to the hem of a gown. John grew stronger away from court and its network of cunning intrigues. His languor vanished with good food and no pettish demands from Richard. The hunting was good. Yet in all those days of comfort, when my mind should have been put at ease, I was restlessly anxious.

‘Are you worried about going to court?’ John asked with an insouciance to which I should have grown accustomed but still had the power to disconcert me.

‘Yes.’

No point in dissembling. I had thought about it often, even if John had not. But it seemed that he had.

‘I will smooth your path. It will not be so very bad. Richard has never been hostile to you.’

I knew he meant it, but how would it be possible? It did not take more than a woman’s instinct to know that there were many who would resent my startling promotion. It was not Richard I feared.

‘They will be astonished. It will be no more than a seven-day wonder,’ John announced, turning his mind to the greater importance of ruffling the ears of one of his hounds.

Thus John brushed my megrims aside as a matter of inconsequence compared with a good run after a deer. How typical of a man not to see it. The inhabitants of the aristocratic hencoop would have much to say about my marriage, if I knew anything about them. They would be quick to put me in, as they saw it, my inferior place.

My daughter knew the same.

Arriving at Pontefract, Joan curtsied to me as if to the Queen of England herself before falling into my arms. The twinkle in her eye belied her stern expression as she stepped back and took stock. Married and newly widowed with two little daughters, she had lost none of her calm outlook on life.

‘So you are Duchess now,’ she observed, tucking her hand in my arm as we turned to walk indoors, out of a brisk wind that promised snow.

‘So it seems.’

‘And are you growing into your new dignities?’

‘You know your mother.’ John had arrived to kiss his daughter. ‘She still feels an urge to supervise.’

I could not deny it when he saluted my cheek, despite the audience of grooms and soldiery and a smirking huntsman, and assured me that he would return before dusk. He always had a thought for my peace of mind.

‘Go and gossip with your daughter,’ he added.

‘He looks happier than I have ever seen him, I think,’ Joan said as we watched him ride out.

‘Yes.’ My eye followed him until the cavalcade disappeared into the grey of the winter’s day. He did. The lines that had seemed ingrained on his return from Aquitaine had smoothed out. He was restored to all his old spirit. It pleased me that it might in some small measure rest on our happiness together.

‘You look happy too,’ Joan added, as if she saw the direction of my thoughts.

‘Happy? The word does not express half of what I am.’ There was nothing more to say.

Joan slid me a glance. ‘You have thought about what they will say at court, haven’t you?’

I had thought about nothing else.

‘What’s wrong, Katherine?’

Joan had returned to her own household with a new marriage on her horizon, and I had ridden out with the Duke, hawks on our fists, the hounds milling round our horses’ hooves. It was an exhilarating spring day and the rabbits were good prey. John’s face was bright with the whip of the wind, and I rode beside him, trying to match his enthusiasm, until he handed over his hawk and mine to the falconers, and pulled my mount into a little space.

I raised my brows with superlative skill. ‘Nothing. What should be wrong?’

Without replying he removed my gloves, tucked them into the breast of his tunic and proceeded to rub my cold hands between his. ‘How long have we been together?’ he asked with apparent inconsequence.

‘Twenty-four years, I think.’

‘There! And I thought you would know, to the exact date and time.’ I heard the smile in his voice as he rescued my gloves and drew them back on. Then, having completed the task, the Duke instructed firmly: ‘Then let us try that again. What troubles you, my love?’

For a moment I turned my face away so that he would be unable to see how much I had been distressed, for I now knew considerably more about the reception waiting for me in London. You are being ridiculous, I told myself. You have faced far worse than this. Are you not capable of conducting yourself with perfect propriety and seemliness at court?