Thomas glanced at the stool. A platter with the remains of some bread and cheese rested on it; Catherine’s invitation had not extended to joining the family for the evening meal. Well, it was well past dusk now, and his chamber was growing chill.
Time, indeed, to join Lancaster and Katherine for the evening.
As he left the room, noting well the guards placed at intervals down the outside corridor—Lancaster was evidently ensuring Thomas didn’t make his own plans to journey north— Thomas wondered what had become of the Lady Margaret.
HE SOON found out.
Lancaster’s private apartments were situated just behind and up from the main hall, and when the guards outside the main door nodded him through into the main chamber, the first person Thomas saw was Margaret.
She sat in the shadows of a leaping fire—its flames had attracted his eyes before anything else—on a stool, her hands occupied with the ever-present needlework to be found close to any noblewoman, and, for the first time since Thomas had met her, wearing something other than the patched gray gown. Katherine, who had known her own youthful years of poverty and neglect, had given Margaret one of her own gowns—Thomas remembered Katherine wearing it—of lemon linen, embroidered about its hem, sleeves and neckline with cornflowers. It suited Margaret’s coloring, and its lines somewhat concealed her growing pregnancy.
“Thomas, come join us.” Lancaster spoke from a dais set against a soaring arched window filled with delicate stained glass. Katherine was at his side in a smaller chair than Lancaster’s all-but-throne, her hand resting gently on his arm, and a smile still on her face.
Katherine, Thomas thought, looks as if she were the most contented woman in Christendom.
There was a low table before them, water and wine ewers set upon it, with goblets, and platters of figs and dates. At one end was a chessboard and pieces, and here Bolingbroke sat relaxed upon a stool, a pawn turning over and over in one hand.
A young woman sat to one side of him, her cheeks flushed. She had Katherine’s deep auburn hair and sparkling gray eyes and Thomas recognized her instantly as Joan Beaufort, bastard daughter of Lancaster and Katherine.
And, presumably, Thomas’ next aunt.
There were several other figures who sat or stood beyond the immediate family circle on the dais; like Margaret, they were minor nobles who served the Lancaster family.
Thomas bowed his head in greeting, and began to move to the chair next to Katherine that Lancaster indicated, when a youth stepped forward from a curtained
doorway set in the rounded right wall of the chamber.
Thomas halted, then bowed his head—a little lower this time. “My lord Richard,”
he said, “it has been many years since we have last conversed, and in this time I find you have turned from a boy into a man.”
Richard, the eighteen-year-old only child of the Black Prince and his wife, Joan of Kent, moved forward to take the chair.
He was tall and slender—no doubt he would eventually mature into the well-muscled form of most Plantagenet men—and fair of hair, but it was his face that most caught Thomas’ attention. Richard shared the thin, sensitive features of his Uncle Gloucester, and that boded ill, fot he would one day be King of England, and England would not well enjoy the narrowness of vision and intolerance that so often went with those features.
“Thomas,” Richard said, pausing briefly to look Thomas up and down. “You look quite the inquisitor in those robes and with that sour look upon your face. Have you come to condemn us all to hell, then?”
Thomas froze, then forced a smile to his face. “I am come here in goodwill, Richard, and shall condemn none of you to hell unless you so force my hand.”
Lancaster and Katherine laughed, but Hal looked carefully at Thomas’ face, and then dropped his eyes to the piece he held in his hand.
“We must be careful what we say,” Lancaster said, winking at Richard, “lest Thomas hand all our names to the Holy Office of the Inquisition.”
Richard smiled, hard and cold. He sat down in a chair and reached for a piece of fruit. “I think this is not a jesting matter, uncle. Thomas’ friends do have a habit of ending up in the flames.”
Thomas, as all the members of Lancaster’s household, froze into a shocked stillness. Margaret, not privy to the story of Alice, merely looked bewildered.
Nevertheless, she could see the effect the comment had on everyone else, and she lowered her head to her needlework.
“If my presence so disturbs you,” Thomas said, “then perhaps I should leave.”
“No,” said Richard, waving his half-eaten apple about languidly, “do stay. Perhaps you can entertain us with tales of what penitent peasants whisper in the confessional.
Is it true, Thomas, that some peasant men like to fornicate with cows?”
“Richard!” Lancaster said, staring intently at his nephew.
“Forgive me,” Richard said to Thomas. “I have spoken out of turn.”
He did not sound in the least penitent, and his eyes still contained a spiteful glow.
Thomas bowed, accepting the words of apology, and moved to a stool that Hal had pulled out from behind his own. He hoped that Richard would have many years to grow into a more magnanimous maturity before he finally succeeded both his grandfather and father …
But Edward was old and ripe for death, and the Black Prince was middle aged and ill!
Richard was, in all likelihood, closer to succeeding to the throne than anyone would wish.
And here he was in Lancaster’s court rather than his grandfather’s.
As the group fell into a gentle—if slightly forced—debate about the merits of the various hawks in Lancaster’s stable, Thomas studied the duke with deep interest.
Lancaster had ever been known for his ambition … how much had it rankled in him that he was a fourth son, not a first? The two brothers between himself and the Black Prince were both dead… and between Lancaster and the throne stood only the prince and his son Richard. Was Lancaster only minding the throne for his nephew, or did he intend to seize it from him?
IT WAS well past Compline—Thomas had heard the bells of St. Paul’s ring out faintly— when Lancaster and Katherine rose.
As they left the chamber, Lancaster paused and turned to Thomas.
“At midday,” he said, “I and my household will escort King John to Westminster to be greeted by my father. Thomas, it will be a lengthy and grandiose occasion, and I expect you will be happier here. Do not think this a rebuff, Tom, for you will be welcome among my household for the Christmastide feasting in the Painted Chamber … but for now, it is best you stay within these walls.”
And then he and Katherine were gone.
CHAPTER THREE
Matins on the Thursday before the Nativity of
Our Lord Jesus Christ
In the fifty -first year of the reign of Edward III
(predawn 23rd December 1378)
— THE NAMELESS DAY —
— I —
JOHN LIFTED BACK a heavy wave of hair from Katherine’s brow, and, smiling sweetly, kissed her mouth.
God, be I was glad beyond measure to once again have her in his bed and house.
They had made love, passionately, each as desperate as the other, and now were languid and loath to sleep.
The months apart had been too long.
“I have sent messages to my father,” John said, his mouth only barely clear of hers. “We shall be wed on Saint Stephens Day, and in his chapel.”
Tears filled Katherine’s eyes. She was of only minor nobility and the honor that John did her, and the love that be showed her, in making her his duchess moved her deeply. She lifted her hands, and caressed his face.
“There will be many who will not be pleased,” she said.
“Then they can be damned!”
“Shush, beloved!” But Katherine giggled anyway, and John lowered his head and kissed her with as much passion as the afternoon they’d first bedded some twenty-five years previous.
She playfully disengaged herself. “My lord, you shall get me with child again!”
John laughed. “If you got with child again at your advanced age, my sweet cherished woman, then the pope would declare it a miracle!”
For a while there was nothing but sweet murmurings and caresses between them, then, as they stilled again, Katherine sighed.
“Tired of me already, beloved?” John said, a decided edge to his tone. “Oh, nay! I was but thinking of the Lady Margaret.”
“One of the greatest peers of the realm shares your bed, and you can think of nothing but a minor lady?”
Katherine smiled, relieved that his tone had slid back into banter. ” The greatest peer, my darling lord. No, I was thinking of Margaret because of what we’d said about me getting with child.”
She paused, knowing they both remembered back to that afternoon twenty-five years ago. Her husband, Hugh de Swynford, had only recently died, and Lancaster had taken advantage of her widowhood to finally coerce her into his bed. He had gotten her with child that afternoon—their first, Henry—and for many years afterward all had lived with the pretense that Henry had been Hugh’s posthumous son.