The Scandalous Duchess (36 page)

‘Soon,' I reiterated, my smile for him, not the Duke. I spun on my heel to carry the baby away, managing a few steps before:

‘Madame de Swynford.'

I halted, but did not turn.

‘My thanks. For coming here.'

‘I was invited,' I replied, addressing the space before me. ‘The Countess of Derby had need of me. I could do no other, my lord.'

‘Is the Countess of Hereford with her daughter?'

‘Yes. I will tell her that you are here.'

It was an agony as I took myself and the baby away from that cold impassivity. I reminded myself that he would be
gone within the week. We had no relationship. What need had I to know what he was thinking?

And there was the Countess of Hereford, standing just beyond the doorway, where she had been all along. She nodded as I passed. Did she consider that we had been in need of a chaperone? That we might have fallen into each other's arms and renewed our illicit affair?

How wrong she was. Henry and the baby had been chaperone enough. If the Duke of Lancaster and I had been alone on a deserted moor, he would not have touched me, nor I him. Neither of us was of a mind to do so. The Duke saw his path to the future at the side of Duchess Constanza, whilst I, unable to either forgive or forget, would walk mine alone.

And yet…

And yet there was one thought that accompanied me to my solitary chamber. I loved him. I loved him still. In spite of everything, I would always love him. I might rant and fume, but when the Duke had walked into that room, it had been impossible to deny that, for me at least, the distance between us had fallen away. The passion that had bound us was not dead.

It should have been a time for rejoicing. A new heir for Lancaster. The beginning of a new generation of Plantagenet princes to become, one day, owner of Kenilworth and all the power that was attached to it. A banquet was planned. A mass was held. Toasts were drunk.

The celebrating was short-lived. The child died after four days of life, succumbing to a virulent fever that refused to respond to any remedy that we knew. All was despair.

Mary wept. Henry was desolate.

And between the Duke and I there existed a yawning distance.

It was his obvious wish to avoid me.

Sometimes, when he behaved with the cold propriety worthy of the Archbishop of Canterbury rather than an erstwhile lover, I felt as if I carried a leper bell.

But then my own response in his company was that of a nun who had foresworn the company of all men.

If anything could have made it clearer to me that our estrangement was absolute, it was printed and illuminated on vellum in those brief days at Rochford Hall. The Countess's constant and not always subtle presence was an irrelevance. There was nothing to say between us. We did not try.

Sometimes, almost drowning in my loss, regardless of my furious denial of him, I wept at my inability to reach him, or his desire to respond to me. I wished I was not there. I wished the Duke had not accompanied Henry. My only joy was that Thomas Swynford was there, in the retinue of his new liege lord. How proud Hugh would have been of his son.

The Duke gave no acknowledgement of me. It was an icy distancing on both our parts.

Except for that one shocking, inexplicable explosion of temper.

Our paths crossed, as it was impossible for them not to cross, in the rabbit-warren of Rochford Hall's chambers and antechambers. My thoughts with the grieving Mary, my feet on a return from the stillroom with a bowl of dried herbs guaranteed to impart serenity and ease of heart, I stopped abruptly at the sight of the familiar figure just stepping
through the opposite doorway, and immediately made to retreat. I was weary and drained by the excess emotion at Rochford, and was beyond verbal fencing.

The Duke too stopped, mid stride, face blandly indifferent. I might have been a servant, caught out where I should not have been.

‘If you will excuse me, my lord,' I retreated another step. It would be simple to escape. One more step and I would be free of the room and him. I was becoming adept at it.

‘There is no need to run away,' he remarked, his voice carrying clearly across the room.

I flushed. It was exactly what I had planned to do.

‘I had no thought of flight, my lord,' I replied. Then could not resist. How illogical is the female mind? ‘Since you do not seek my company—nor have you for a se'enight—I am merely relieving you of it.'

I took another step in retreat. The door to my escape was close at my side.

‘I would say that you, for your part, have been remarkably invisible, Lady de Swynford.'

His tone was as dry as dust. I ignored it. And, with a surprising spurt of temper, I also ignored the threatening rumble of thunder beneath it.

‘I am surprised that you have noticed, my lord.'

It was like casting a torch onto a stack of timber at the end of a summer drought. His face blazed. So did his words, a blast from the fires of hell. How had I ever thought him to be unmoved by our close confinement? They were delivered with the precise exactitude of an arrow loosed from a bow. The arrow was aimed at me.

‘Do you think I have found it easy to preserve a distance
between us, when you are in my line of sight day after day?' He was approaching me slowly, inexorably, with the graceful step of a hunting cat, and his words cut me to the quick. ‘Do you think it was a matter of no moment for me, to make so public a confession of my sins? Do you think it gave me any satisfaction, having grovelled in the dust of Berwick, to have Walsingham pawing through the grubby corners of my life to extract what he would consider a mortal sin? And then to have him smile on me, on
me
, a royal prince, and grant me absolution so that England might once again rest in God's good grace? Do you think these last months have had no impact on my soul? By God, they have, Lady de Swynford! There has been no self-satisfaction in any of this for me.'

I blinked at the sheer glitter of fury in his face. I had seen the Duke in the grip of such passion before but never aimed at me, only at a recalcitrant Parliament, or overambitious courtiers who questioned his right to exert power. Never had I been the object of such rage, and because my patience was a finite thing, I retaliated in kind, deliberately to hurt. As he had hurt me.

‘Oh, no, I'll never accuse you of self-satisfaction, John,' deliberately using his name when I had vowed that I never would. ‘How could a man as proud of his Plantagenet blood as you appreciate having to bare your suffering soul before the masses of England? I know that your arrogance has no rival anywhere in England.'

‘Arrogance?' His nostrils narrowed on a fast intake of breath.

‘I remember your one and only communication to me at Pontefract,' I reminded him. ‘You
must not leave until I
can come to you
, you said. Not forgive me. Not I have done you a great wrong.
Katherine de Swynford is a vile temptress
, you said—'

‘I did not say that.'

‘They say you did. A vile temptress, amongst other epithets that I choose not to recall.' I recalled every one of them, as if engraved on my heart. ‘What I do recall is that I was no enchantress. It was you who demanded that I share your bed.'

‘I did not demand.'

‘You hunted me remorselessly.'

His temper flared again, bright as the sun on a dagger blade at dawn. I think I had hoped that it would. Experiencing far too much of his cold dignity, it would please me to stir him into wrath. A blast of emotion would be no bad thing.

‘Before God, woman!'

‘As I see it, you should be eminently satisfied, John. Restored to the bosom of God's grace, and Walsingham's, of course. Reunited in marital happiness with your Duchess. How could you have tolerated me for so long, when all the advantages for you were to deny me and return to the moral fold of legal matrimony? I hear that Castile is once more on your horizon, with Constanza's blessing. How magnanimous she is in her victory. Was it worth her kneeling in the dust to beg your forgiveness?'

Oh, how my rancour leached out, to coat us both.

His shoulders became rigid, his whole body poised to repel my attack. ‘Cynicism does not become you, Katherine.'

‘I have learned that it becomes me very well.'

‘And you misjudge me.'

‘I think not. I judge what I see and hear. I have heard no regrets from you. Two tuns of wine delivered to my door do not buy you a dispensation. And then, of course, the quitclaim.' I had to take a breath. Even the thought of it stirred me to immoderate speech. ‘Did you really have to do that? You had already beaten me to my knees. There was no need to batter me about the head with a legal denunciation and formal separation.'

That brought him to a halt.

‘That was never my intention.'

‘No? To issue me with a legal binding that I have no further claim on you or your heirs, nor you on me. Did you expect me to come begging?' I saw him raise his hand, and spoke to stop him. ‘No, I am not in a forgiving mood. Perhaps God is more forgiving than I. How could you do it? How could you?'

Which failed to quench his anger but instead goaded him once more into action. With three strides he was in front of me, his hands gripping my wrists without mercy. The bowl of
potpourri
that I had been carrying, that I had been gripping through all this brutal exchange, fell to the floor, shattering, the cloud of dried herbs scattering over my skirts and the floor. Over him too.

‘What would you have me do?' he demanded. ‘Do I allow England to suffer God's anger for the sake of my personal happiness? Or yours? Do I? You know as well as I the problems the King faces. Failure to hold onto England's possessions abroad. Rebellion and unrest at home with peasants raising their hands against Church and State. A young king who has neither the age at fifteen years nor the experience to take it in hand? Richard needs me. England needs me.'
Colour had risen to mantle his cheekbones. ‘Richard needs me, without blame, to be strong for him to offset the influence of men such as Robert de Vere who would seduce him from his duty. He will not listen to me if my soul is black with sin, or if the country turns against me. I had to repent. Would you blame me for that? Would you have Richard fall even further under de Vere's control, or some other unworthy favourite who will snatch power from his stupidly generous hands?'

Even though my wrists ached with the strength of his fingers banded around them, I considered his impassioned plea. Honesty, reluctant but necessary, coloured my reply, but there was no warmth in it.

‘You have every justification in doing what you did. My own happiness, as you say, is nothing compared with the glory of England. How could I have thought that it might be? I consider it unfortunate that I should be cast in the role of the sacrificial lamb.'

For a moment he looked away from me, towards the far door, where footsteps sounded. Then when they faded, his eyes bored into mine again.

‘Do you think that I do not rail against God? Against the unfairness of it? Do you believe that my love for you was a mere charade? Do you not know that it still burns within me, every minute, every hour? Would you have me do nothing to protect you from those who attack me? Am I really so selfish as to place my own desires before your safety?'

As one question followed another, each driven home with the strength of a sword thrust, I held his gaze, all thought suspended, this new idea intruding like the point of a needle into fine linen, to add another, more complex stitch to
overlay the first. Yet still I replied bleakly, holding onto my sense of ill-usage because it was the only familiar emotion in the whole of this morass that threatened to drag me down and suffocate me. ‘I have no idea. I no longer know what you think or do. It is no longer any concern of mine, of course. You are quit of me.'

He looked as if would like to shake me, only to be rejected.

‘No. I regret that you no longer see it as your concern.' The fires of temper were banked, the chill of frost reappearing. ‘I have constructed a magnificent fortification between us, have I not?'

‘Yes. It is a formidable structure. You should be proud of it.'

‘It serves its purpose. It achieves what it was intended to achieve.'

I did not understand his meaning.

‘You are bruising my wrists, my lord.'

Immediately his hands fell away. ‘Forgive me. I have hurt you too much already.' His expression was stony, his restraint palpable, and with the briefest of inclinations of his head, the Duke left me to stand alone, but not before I had glimpsed what could only be raw emotion in his eyes.

I watched him go, thoroughly unhappy, thoroughly unsettled, all my resolution to withstand the power of the man I had loved—still loved—undermined. If nothing else was clear to me, this one fact was. The Duke was as unhappy as I.

In pure reflex, to offer comfort, in spite of everything, I stretched out my hand to him, but his back was turned. He did not see me.

‘John!'

Nor did he hear me.

Thus ended our only conversation at Rochford Hall. Angry, accusatory, trenchant in its tone, before retreating into frigid withdrawal. Perhaps I deserved no better. Perhaps it was time I stepped back, away from him, allowing both of us to continue our lives in calmer waters.

Beyond weariness, I knelt to collect the pieces of the dish, which seemed a meaningless task when the floor was strewn with the dried herbs, so I simply sat back on my heels and surveyed the results of our discussion. Why had he been so very angry? He so rarely in my experience allowed emotion to rule to this degree, and yet his temper had bubbled like an untended cauldron, blistering me with its power. Grief at the child's death? It would have touched him deeply, but not for him to blast me with such venom, and hold me as if he had no sense of the fragility of my flesh within his grip. The marks were faint, but I could see them. I could still feel his power as he had heaped his anger on my head.