Georgette Heyer (3 page)

‘A herald!’ shouted Thomas.

‘Whose?’ panted John.

Thomas was not sure. It was an important part of any young bachelor’s education to learn to recognise at a glance the shield, the colours, and the badges of a gentle family, but it was not an easily-mastered lesson, and he was not six years old, after all. He said: ‘Well, I only saw him a hand-while. They have taken him in to Mother.’

‘Perhaps he has brought a letter from my lord,’ said Kate, in the voice of one resigned to disappointment.

The lordings discarded this suggestion as unworthy. A herald would certainly be employed on such an errand, but it was more likely that this one had been sent to warn the Countess of the arrival of some distinguished visitor. A dizzy thought entered John’s head, perhaps because Thomas’s mannikin had brought Cousin Richard to his remembrance. ‘Do you think it is the King?’

Thomas stood spellbound for a moment. It was impossible that children of quick in-wit, living in a large household, should not have grasped from the clapping of servants that Cousin Richard was not universally held in high esteem, but in their eyes he was a magnificent personage, distributing largesse with a lavish hand, and indulging small cousins in a manner as gratifying to them as it was displeasant to their preceptors. He was said to hold exalted ideas of his state; but whenever the children had been in his company it had been with a conscience-stricken effort that they had remembered to say ‘Sire,’ and ‘Pleaseth it your Majesty,’ as they had been taught. Even Harry forgot the deference due to Cousin Richard when Cousin Richard called him his little nuthead, and played at kyle-pins with him, and pretended to hold him in awe, because (he said) he thought he must be the Henry of whom it was long ago prophesied that he would achieve such greatness that the world would be lit by the rays of his glory. It seemed strange that anyone so full of merry japes could have so many enemies.

The children suspected that even Father was not overly fond of Cousin Richard, although he always spoke of him with reverence. Yet there had been a time when Father had actually taken up arms, not, indeed, against Cousin Richard himself, but against the Earl of Oxford, who had been the King’s dearest friend. He and the Earl of Nottingham had joined forces with the older Lords Appellant, the King’s uncle of Gloucester, and the Earls of Warwick and Arundel, had led an army to the gates of London, and had been admitted, and had thrust their way into the royal palace of the Tower. Old Wilkin, who had been in the service of the family for longer than anyone could remember, said that their leader, Great-uncle Thomas of Gloucester, had soothed the King’s mind by showing him the army drawn up on Tower Hill. The lordings knew what such ambages as that meant, and none of them wanted to hear more of a story that was so discomfortable. It was splendid to hear how Father had routed the steerless Earl of Oxford at Radcot Bridge; but when it came to hearing that Great-uncle Gloucester had threatened the King with deposition it was no longer splendid. None of them liked Gloucester, who was an overbearing person, nearer to Father in age than to Grandfather, whose brother he was, and generally on bad terms with both of them. He had ruled the country for a year; but he had demeaned himself so intemperately that moderate men were driven off from their allegiance to him, and hardly anyone was sorry when Cousin Richard took the government back into his own hands.

That was another of Cousin Richard’s japes: the children never wearied of that tale. They could picture Cousin Richard, playing with one of his jewels, perhaps swinging to and fro the sapphire which he sometimes wore round his neck, and suddenly unsensing his Council by asking them how old he was. When they told him that he was two-and-twenty, he thanked them, and said that he thought he was now old enough to govern for himself. Then he had taken the Great Seal away from my lord of Arundel, and had given it to the Bishop of Winchester, and nobody had dared to withsay him.

That had all happened in the year of John’s birth, and no one had tried since then to wrest the government from Cousin Richard’s hands. There was a good deal of grutching at his rule, but he had never brought back the favourites the Lord Appellant had made him banish, so the chief grievance they had held against him had disappeared. He had new favourites now: contemptible foppets, according to Bel sire, but a source of entertainment to the lordings. Some of them wore piked shoes so long and pointed that the toes had to be attached by silver chains to their garters; some had short pourpoints with dagged sleeves trailing on the ground; some affected hoods twisted to look like coxcombs or rabbits’ ears; others preferred tall hats, with peacocks’ feathers stuck up beside the crowns; and not one of them would dream of having a mantle lined with any less costly material than taffeta.

‘Oh, I do hope it may be Cousin Richard!’ exclaimed Thomas.

‘Not when my lord is from home!’ said Kate.

‘Grandmother?’ suggested John, not hopefully.

Thomas’s face fell. A sister of my lord of Arundel and a Bohun by marriage, Grandmother was a very great lady, and one who set store by manners and learning. When she came to stay at Kenilworth the children went about on tiptoe; and if they so far forgot themselves as to fall into one of their hurlings the sight of her tall figure in its widow’s weeds was enough to make them spring apart, smoothing tumbled raiment, and trying to look as if they had not been fighting at all.

‘No, no!’ said Kate. ‘It is only a month since my lady of Hereford left us!’

They brightened. Grandmother spent much of her time with Mother, her younger daughter, when Father was away, but she would hardly return to Kenilworth so soon, particularly when she had left it for Pleshy to visit her elder daughter, Great-uncle Gloucester’s wife.

At that moment Harry came strolling up. When his brothers shouted to him that someone had arrived, he said: ‘I know. Who is it?’

‘A herald,’ answered Thomas. ‘Well – a messenger, anyway!’ Harry cocked an eye at him; he reddened, and added: ‘I only saw him a paternoster-while!’

Harry grinned. Kate, seeing the Steward, ran to intercept him. ‘It is not my lady of Hereford, is it, good Master Greene? Is it a message from my lord?’

‘A’God’s half, woman, don’t spill my time with asking questions!’ he replied testily. ‘My lady of Hereford, indeed! It is M. de Guyenne, coming with a great company, no later than tomorrow!’

His words carried across the court to the ears of the children. Harry let a shout, and flung his cap in the air; Thomas began to caper. ‘Bel sire!’ shrieked the noble lordings.

4

A visit from Cousin Richard would not have seemed to them an event of so much importance. Cousin Richard was the King, but he could not govern his realm without Bel sire’s support. He had thought, once, that he could, and had been glad to see Bel sire set sail to fight in Spain, for he was jealous of him, and ever and again suspected him of plotting to seize his power, though why he should do so was obscure. Perhaps it was because his favourites never ceased to drop poison in his ears; and perhaps he knew, at his heart-root, that he had nothing to fear from Bel sire; for although he had several times fallen into one of his fits of rage merely because some brew-bale had hinted that Grandfather was imagining treason, these never endured for long; and when he found himself beset by the Lords Appellant he had not hesitated to recall Bel sire from Spain. Bel sire had been in favour with him ever since: he even wore Bel sire’s collar of SS; and he had created him Duke of Aquitaine for life.

Many people supposed that it was these distinctions which were the cause of the enmity between Bel sire and my lord of Arundel, but old Wilkin knew better. ‘Nay, nay!’ he said. ‘M. d’Espagne could not forgive the Earl the death of his friend Sir Simon Burley: that was what began the garboil! Yea, I warrant you! For when the Lords took arms against the Earl of Oxford and the other rush-bucklers about the King, my lord of Arundel would have Sir Simon’s head with all the rest, no force!’

So many of Bel sire’s old servitors still called him M. d’Espagne that the lordings knew quite well whom Wilkin meant, and merely corrected him, saying: ‘M. de Guyenne,’ to which he paid no heed, because he was too old to master newfangled titles. He had first followed Grandfather to Spain ferne-ago, with Great-uncle Edward, the Black Prince, who was Cousin Richard’s father, and had parted his life so long ago that he was no more real to the lordings than Sir Theseus of Athens. It was sleeveless to remind Wilkin that Bel sire had relinquished his claim to Spain to his daughter, their aunt Katherine, when he had married her to the King of Castile’s son, because the only thing Wilkin ever found to say of the Queen of Castile was that he remembered her as a puking infant.

‘Yes, it was my lord of Arundel that would have Sir Simon’s head off, mark me!’ Wilkin said. ‘My lord of Derby, your noble father, would have spared him, and the blessed Queen was three hours upon her knees, begging that he might not be headed. And my lord of Arundel said to her: “M’amie, look to yourself and your husband: you had much better!” Ah, he is an orgulous man!’

The lordings nodded. They knew that my lord of Arundel had grown so orgulous that he had lately dared to marry the Earl of March’s sister, without license. He had had to pay a large fine for his presumption, and no one had been more indignant at his conduct than Bel sire. To make matters worse, the new Countess of Arundel had behaved rudely to Dame Katherine Swynford, Bel sire’s mistress, and that was an affront Bel sire would not readily forgive. It was true that the Countess was of the blood-royal; but, as Mother told Harry, when he ventured to enquire into these matters, so were other ladies, notably Aunts Philippa and Elizabeth, whose governess Dame Katherine had been, and who always conducted themselves buxomly towards her.

And to crown the rest there had been a rising in Cheshire only a month or two ago, which Cousin Richard had sent Bel sire to quell; and Bel sire was making no secret of his belief that my lord of Arundel was behind the insurrection.

‘Let the Fitzalans look to themselves!’ said Wilkin. ‘Out of dread, M. d’Espagne will take order to them!’

The lordings thought it must go ill with Arundel if Wilkin were right, for they could not conceive of anyone more powerful than Bel sire. The chain of his castles stretched across the land, from remote Kidwelly, in the Welsh Marches, up and up to Dunstanburgh, which was so far north as to be almost in Scotland. Bel sire himself could not recite the full tale of them; and the children, coached by his retainers, who knew them all so much better than he did, could never carry more than a bare dozen in their heads. There was Grosmont; Kenilworth, which they considered their own; Hertford, Bel sire’s favourite; Leicester, Bolingbroke, where Father had been born; Tutbury; High Peak; Chester; Halton; Liverpool; Clitheroe; Pontefract; Knaresborough: all these, and many more besides, garrisoned by the men in Lancaster blue-and-white; to say nothing of the manors, the franchises, and the advowsons which were dotted all over England.

People called him M. d’Espagne before he relinquished his claim to the throne of Castile; they called him M. de Guyenne now that he was Duke of Aquitaine; but when his herald announced his coming in full state he named him John, by the grace of God, Duke of Lancaster, Duke of Aquitaine, Earl of Lincoln and Leicester, Baron of Hinckley, Lord of Beaufort and Nogent, of Bergerac and Roche-sur-Tonne, Lord High Steward of England, and Constable of Chester.

And some spoke of him familiarly, by the name of his birthplace, Ghent, or their English version of it, and called him John of Gaunt.

5

In all that great household only Mother remained undisturbed by the news of Bel sire’s coming: everyone else, from the Marshal down to the meanest kitchen scullion, was thrown into such a state of agitation that one might have supposed that the visit was as unwelcome as it was unexpected. It was not, of course. The Marshal might wring his hands over the state of the Great Hall; the head cook inform the Clerk of the Kitchens that no mortal man could devise and execute subtleties for the high table in one day; the Yeoman of the Cellar declare by the faith of his body that if my lord Duke should call for a cup of muscadelle he would be totally undone; and the Gentleman Usher demand where he must finding lodgings for the ladies, if my lord Duke, as was all too probable, brought a bevy of them in his train; but no one acquainted with these persons doubted that they were all of them a-charmed by the prospect of several days of unremitting toil and contrivance.

The only thing which caused the Countess anxiety was the demeanour of her sons. She gathered the three elder ones about her, and reminded them of the things they must and must not do. M. de Guyenne was a haughty prince, but he showed another face to his grandsons, and could be trusted to encourage them to take all manner of liberties with him. But, like many other indulgent grandparents, he would be more than likely to censure their parents for malapert behaviour which he had himself invited. So the Countess warned her sons that they must not speak until spoken to; and must then stand still, not allowing their eyes to wander, not forgetting to bow to their grandfather, and not forgetting to call him Bel sire. M. de Guyenne belonged to the generation that clung to the Norman–French which was falling into disuse, and this would please him.

‘And at table,’ pursued the Countess, ‘take heed that you lay the bones on the voider, and wipe your mouths before you drink! Don’t leave your spoons in the dish, or dip your meat in the salt, or lean on the table!’

‘Shall we dine in the Hall, madam?’ asked Thomas eagerly.

‘Yes, you and Harry,’ replied the Countess.