Hugh and Bess (26 page)

  Isabella clapped her hands. “You look splendid. And put some more pins in your hair if you’re worried.”

  Bess gazed downward. For once in her life, she was larger in the chest than she would have preferred. “They can tell I have a bosom! I can’t pass as a boy.”

  “Silly, you’re not supposed to. They’re supposed to know we are ladies.”

  “Then I can’t see why we can’t ride wearing our beautiful new gowns,” said Bess. She had had several new ones made for the summer, in the tighter style that was all the rage at court these days, and was a bit resentful that she had not had the chance to show them off properly. Indeed, some ladies wore their new gowns so tight that they had had to sew fox tails within their robes to conceal their rears, but Bess had not been this daring, or desirous of explaining to Hugh the appearance of fox tails in her household accounts, not to mention on her rump.

  Isabella sighed, clearly giving Bess up for a lost cause. “It's the sport of it, my dear.”

  Beside her, Bess's sister-in-law Elizabeth de Berkeley admired her own legs. They were slightly plump and not at all boyish, but Isabella had been running out of willing ladies, so Lizzie, who had just recently consummated her marriage to young Maurice de Berkeley, had been recruited by Bess herself. Pleased with the slenderizing effect of the hose she was wearing, she adjusted them before asking Isabella, “How is the Lady Joan getting on abroad, my lady?”

  Joan, the king's second daughter, was on her way to marry Pedro, the heir to the throne of Castile. She was staying for the time being in Bordeaux. “She is well,” said Isabella shortly, a bit peeved at the conversation turning from her own scheme.

  “I would be terrified.”

  “Of Bordeaux?”

  “Why, of the pestilence, of course,” said Lizzie, widening her dark eyes, duplicates of her brother Hugh's. “Is his grace the king not concerned? It is running all through the Continent, my father-in-law's men tell him. It is dreadful. People drop dead while you are speaking to them, I hear. And they develop the most horrid black spots in places like—like the groin.”

  Bess said, “Entire cities of people have died, they say.” She shuddered. She had still been in Calais when a merchant had told a strange story of a terrible disease that was ravaging the East, a place that was so far off that it was not quite real to her. Then, just a few months before, the news had come that ships had brought not only rich spices but also a deadly cargo to Italy and France. Since then, the pestilence had even spread to Avignon. The presence of His Holiness there had been no protection against its ravages. If the pestilence could nip at the heels of the Pope himself, what hope was there for anyone else in its path?

  “Enough, both of you!” said Isabella. She scowled at them. “Of course my father has heard of this, but why dwell on it? What an unpleasant topic of conversation.”

  “It is all we talk about at Berkeley.”

  “Well, Berkeley!” Isabella waved a pretty hand. “Out there in the middle of nowhere, I suppose you have no other means to pass the time than to talk of such matters, but here at court we have more pleasant things with which to occupy ourselves. In any case, I am sure my father's men will have the good sense to avoid it. It is surely only a matter of watching where one goes.”

  “But what if it comes here?” Bess asked. “As it came to Italy and France?”

  “I must insist that we change the subject,” said Isabella firmly. “We were speaking of my younger sister. I only wish that I were with her, for she has magnificent wedding garments, and it is a pity that no one here will be able to see her in them. They will quite put anybody else in Castile to shame, I expect. The embroidery alone is a wonder to behold. One of her gowns is embroidered with lions, and the other with wild beasts and wild men.”

  “Wild men?” muttered Lizzie to Bess. “Just like we have at Berkeley.”

  “And in Wales.” Bess snickered.

  The Lady Isabella said in a freezing tone, “Are we ready, ladies?”

  Outside Windsor Castle, their horses, held by pages, awaited them. Bess mounted her horse and had to admit that breeches made the ride a far more pleasant one. They lined up in orderly rows, Isabella of course by herself at the front in a cap that was richer than the rest of the ladies’. At a sign from Isabella's servant, they trotted out onto the field where the tournament was being held. It was in the same area where Bess's father had been fatally injured, and she had to brush away a tear as it stung her eye.

  Following Isabella, they trotted from one end of the field to the other, close enough to hear the spectators’ exclamations and laughter as they realized that the riders were not the young men they appeared to be from a distance. Having made two passes, Isabella rode up to the royal dais. Taking garlands off the shoulder where she had been carrying them, she bent and draped one around the neck of the king, who laughed indulgently, and then put a second around the neck of her eldest brother, the Prince of Wales.

  The rest of the ladies followed suit with the knights standing near the king. Bess made a point of wreathing her brother William, then looked around for Hugh, a task made somewhat difficult because of her mask, which did not fit very well and was constantly slipping so as to obscure her vision. Spotting her husband at last, she tossed the garland around his neck while the knights around him applauded. If Hugh recognized his wife, he made no sign of it. To avoid making her identity known, she flung her next wreath around the neck of Guy Brian, a knight of modest means who had distinguished himself in the king's service, having born his standard at Crécy. Bess had met him at Calais but knew him only superficially.

  The king stood as the ladies, having completed their task, turned their horses back toward the castle. “Stay—lads,” he called.

  Isabella shook her head. “We go from whence we came. Fare thee well.”

  Back by the stables, they dismounted, collected their women's clothing, and went to their separate chambers to dress. Bess with the aid of an attendant had stripped down to her shirt, breeches, and hose when Hugh came in. “My lady,” he said as the attendant made her exit, “So it
was
you. I am shocked.”

  “Oh, it was just a prank of the Lady Isabella's—”

  “Shocked to see how fetching my wife is in shirt and breeches,” said Hugh, and pulled her against him.

  Bess was shocked herself by the intensity, and the originality, of the coupling that followed. As she had physically matured, Hugh had gradually ceased to treat her during love making as something that might break easily, but this…“I’ll have a pair of breeches made for me at home if you like,” she offered later as she leaned gasping against the wall where Hugh had taken her, to her most intense satisfaction ever.

  “Better not.” Hugh nuzzled her neck. “Wouldn’t want to shock the tenants.”

  Not long after the Windsor tournament, in late June or July, a thoroughly unremarkable-looking vessel pulled into the port of Melcombe Regis. Its cargo was unloaded like that of any other ship; its crew went into the local inns and taverns and brothels to drink and brawl and wench about just like the crew of any other ship. No one would remember what goods were on board, or from exactly whence it came, but no one would ever forget what it had brought, something for which no merchant had bargained or sold.

  Four days after the ship dropped anchor, a man in Melcombe became ill and died. Then another sickened and died. Then another.

  The pestilence had come to England.

  Hugh and Bess had scarcely arrived at Cardiff in late July when a royal messenger, clad in black, arrived. “My lord, my lady. I bear sad news. The Lady Joan, the king's daughter, is dead.”

  “Dead?” echoed Bess. Like her mother the queen, the Lady Joan was not the least bit ethereal, but robust and glowing with health. “What on earth was ailing her?” Then she remembered Lizzie's words at Windsor. “You cannot mean—”

  “Aye. The pestilence. Caught up with her at Bordeaux.” “How? Could no one keep her in a safe place?” “There are no safe places over there now, my lady. The poor lass didn’t stand a chance.”

  Bess thought of pretty, fourteen-year-old Lady Joan, provided with every necessity for her marriage by her doting father, her large and devoted household utterly powerless to protect her against the pestilence. She wiped at her tears as the messenger said, not without a certain grisly relish, “It's no respecter of persons, the pestilence, that's for certain. It’ll kill who it pleases, when it pleases, be it a peasant's son or a king's daughter. And rumor has it that it's reached England.”

  “Where?” Hugh asked.

  “Here and there along the coast, my lord. So they say, anyway. Could be true, could be not true. Myself, I’m in no hurry to find out, for I reckon that if it's true, we’ll know it sooner than we hope.”

  Elizabeth de Burgh's chaplain, preaching in his lady's private chapel at Usk in September, blamed the pestilence on all manner of human folly, but with a most particular emphasis on the tournaments and on the modish clothing that had been so prevalent lately. As the aging lady did not attend tournaments, and her expensive, luxurious robes were all in the fashion of ten years before, she nodded rather complacently as he elaborated on his theme. Her younger houseguests, however, who included Hugh and Bess, looked disconcerted. By the time he was finished, Bess felt almost personally responsible for bringing the pestilence to England. For there was no doubt now that it had arrived, showing its hand in one town, then another, and very slowly widening its grasp. How wide that would prove to be could only be guessed.

  “Do you really think God would visit this upon us because we wore our robes too tight?” Bess demanded of Hugh that night as they lay in the bed they shared at Usk.

  “No. I think God is pleased as anyone else when they flatter pretty little rumps like yours.”

  “Hugh! I am serious.”

  “So am I. I’ve no answers, sweetheart. I can just remember when I was a little boy, there was famine here. There’d been terrible rains, almost constant; nothing could grow. People thought God was displeased then, and finally one day the rain stopped, just as it’d started, without anyone having done anything to please God as far as I could figure out at the time. The peasants who died then were probably no better or worse than those who lived. It all seemed random, somehow. Since then I’m inclined to leave the whys and wherefores to wiser heads than mine.”

  “It's almost as if I think a soldier must feel, waiting for the enemy to attack.”

  “No. It's worse, far worse. War's never seemed so simple as it does now. There are rules, strategies, preparations that can be made. This is different. There's nothing we can do but wait and hope we are spared.” He stroked her hair and held her closely against him. “That's not entirely true, though. There is one thing we can do, perhaps.”

  “What?”

  “Hide from it, just find someplace to wait out the pestilence. It goes away, they say, sooner or later. Stock one of our castles with as much provisions as possible and have the bare minimum of servants there. Let no one into the castle gates. In other words, act as if we’re under siege. But—”

  “But you can’t do that. I know, Hugh.”

  He started, and she wondered if he realized what she was realizing, that they had reached the point in their marriage where they knew each other better than anyone else in the entire world. “No, I can’t. I’ve spent nigh on twenty years rebuilding our family's honor. What would happen if I shut myself away from all those who depend on me now? All that trust I’ve worked to gain would be gone. I’d look as if I were leaving them to their fate. I can’t do that, not for my own sake, not for my family's sake.”

  “You are right.”

  “All we can do is carry on as usual.” He fidgeted with a ring that Bess had given him. “I said
we
, but it's different in your case. You’re so young, and a woman. If you were to shut yourself away—”

  “No. We are man and wife, lord and lady. I stand by you, and by our tenants.”

  “I knew that you would say that,” Hugh admitted. “Though I also hoped in a way you wouldn’t.” He shrugged. “Then it's settled. We take our chances.”

  Hugh was right; the pestilence as it gained strength over the next few months was far less predictable an enemy than an army. It would visit one village and leave only a handful of people alive, then skip the next village altogether, then wreak havoc on the next. Some households were untouched; in others, entire families would be wiped out, or worse, one person might be left alive, having lost all those dear to him or her.

  Each morning, the Despensers awoke to the news that another place had been struck. Winchester, even after its bishop had advised that all process barefoot around the marketplace, saying prayers of penance. The Isle of Wight, where Hugh as a young man had walked hand in hand with Emma. Bristol, the third largest town in England, where Hugh had been imprisoned and his grandfather executed. “Serves them right,” Hugh muttered before crossing himself and retreating to their chapel, where Bess later found him on his knees praying dutifully, if not fervently, for the town's deliverance. His prayers were to no avail; the town was devastated.