The Witch of Eye (20 page)

‘Are you
absolutely
sure, Margery?’

‘As sure as I can be, Your Grace. I would stake my reputation on it.’

‘Dear God. I’ll never be able to tell Humphrey.’

Eleanor slumped into a chair. She had never been so shocked in her life. She felt faint at the thought of what she had just heard: faint and sick to her stomach. Could this be true? If it was, then it changed everything. If the Dowager Queen was having a child, it would be the King’s half-brother or sister. She needed to think carefully before she said a word to Humphrey, if indeed she could ever bring herself to tell him. His fury would know no bounds. She must think ... think ... think ...

She needed time on her own, without Margery Jourdemayne or anyone else anywhere near her.

She waved her hand to dismiss Margery and then paused.

‘Oh, Margery ... there is something very important you must do for me.’

‘Your Grace?’

‘Find out who the father is.’

***

T
he party at La Pleasaunce was deemed to have been a huge success, attended by everyone who was anyone at the English court and graced by the presence of His Highness the King and his mother, the Dowager Queen Catherine. Half a dozen of Eleanor’s ladies were still happily gossiping about it a week later, having gathered to spend the afternoon with the Duchess in her boudoir, taking light refreshments and listening with enjoyment while Eleanor sang to the accompaniment of the psaltery. She had a charming voice.

The delightful idyll was shattered when the door opened and the Duke of Gloucester stormed into the room, scattering his wife’s ladies with no apology for disturbing them. Clutching their embroidery hoops, their musical instruments, poetry books and board games, they picked up their skirts and made a hasty retreat. His Grace clearly did not want them there. He had a face like thunder.

‘Humphrey, whatever’s wrong?’ Eleanor’s heart sank: her husband must have found out what she herself already half-knew.

‘Wrong! What’s wrong? I’ll tell you what’s damned well wrong. My late brother’s bitch of a widow is wrong. The whole damned country is wrong! Everyone has been keeping me in the dark and I will not tolerate it! I will not be made a fool of!’

‘Humphrey, Humphrey, calm down a little and tell me who you’re talking about.’

‘Who do you think I’m talking about? I said my late brother’s bitch of a widow, didn’t I? Well, that’s who I meant. The sainted Catherine. The little French
vache
who pretends butter wouldn’t melt between her soft thighs! That’s who I’m talking about! The Dowager Queen Catherine!’

Eleanor was very alarmed. Her husband’s handsome face was suffused with blood and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

‘Come, Humphrey, please sit down and tell me what has happened.’ Eleanor rose and went to the small occasional table against the wall where she always kept a tray with a flask of Burgundy wine and two goblets, in case he should call on her during the day. She poured a generous measure and handed it to him. She was even more alarmed when he shook his head in refusal and buried his face in his hands.

‘I knew nothing about it!’ he said. ‘Nothing! There was a conspiracy of silence. No one told me!’

‘Told you what?’

He took his hands away from his face and looked at her. ‘She has married,’ he said flatly. ‘The Dowager Queen Catherine has married.’

Eleanor’s hand was shaking violently. She put down the goblet very carefully then, tense as a bowstring, she perched herself on the edge of the seat next to her husband. So, it was true. She hadn’t quite believed it. And she certainly hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell her husband what Margery had told her: she would have been too terrified. But now, it seemed, he had found out for himself. Eleanor swallowed hard before she responded.

‘Married? Who has she married? When? She can’t possibly have married without your knowing ... without the King’s permission. She can’t possibly be married.’

‘Well, she is. It seems she has been married for a number of years. It must be the best-kept secret in the history of England.’

‘But Edmund Beaufort has married Eleanor Beauchamp, so who ...’ she left the sentence unfinished.

‘Oh, Edmund Beaufort has nothing to do with this. She must have let people assume she was interested in Beaufort as some sort of distraction.’

‘So, who ...’ Again her question hung in the air.

‘Does the name Owen Tudor mean anything to you?’

Eleanor stopped and thought. There was no one by that name at court. No one she knew of anyway. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Is he some foreign dignitary?’

‘Oh, he’s foreign, all right. He’s Welsh. One of those filthy, uncouth, war-mongering bastards from beyond the border. But he is certainly no dignitary. He’s her servant. Her Clerk of the Wardrobe, no less.’ Humphrey started laughing now. ‘I ask you – a clerk on her household staff! And she has married him! Has she gone mad? She
must
have gone mad! She must have been screaming for a man – any man – to pleasure her. To satisfy her carnal appetites. I knew it. Like mother, like daughter – and her mother was an absolute slut. Queen Isabeau was the greatest whore in Europe!’ His voice was rising, a note of hysteria in it.

‘Humphrey!’

‘Well, she was. Isabeau had her poor mad husband locked up and then hopped into bed with his brother, Louis. And Louis wasn’t the only one. It’s a fact. Everyone knows it. And, dear God, how many children did Isabeau have? Thirteen at the last count. She must have been screwing every night of the week!’

Eleanor turned her face away from her husband. He had struck a raw nerve. ‘Well, it doesn’t sound as though
she
needed to wear mistletoe in her garter,’ she said in a small voice.

Humphrey was suddenly contrite and he reached out to put his hand on her arm. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, my sweet Nell,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. That’s man’s talk, soldier’s talk. It has no place in a lady’s boudoir. I’m so sorry.’

Eleanor managed a tight little smile as she gave her husband’s hand a forgiving pat. There was a question she had to ask him but not just yet because she dreaded hearing the answer.

‘It’s all right, Humphrey,’ she said. ‘Try not to upset yourself any further. I’m sure there’s something that can be done. There’s a law against dowager queens re-marrying, isn’t there?’

‘There is,’ said Humphrey. ‘I got it through Parliament myself when I thought she was behaving like a dockyard cat on heat with young Edmund Beaufort. Yes, there most certainly is a law and it deals very harshly with any man who presumes to marry a dowager queen without the express permission of His Highness the King.’

‘And the King knows nothing about this?’

‘No. Yes. Oh ... I don’t know. I expect he does. Everyone seems to know about it. Except me, of course. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you. I’ll get Suffolk to deal with this Tudor fellow. He can send some of the big brutes in the royal guard to seize him and teach him a lesson he won’t forget. The Welsh bastard can kick his heels in Newgate for a couple of months. That will cure him of his ardour!’

‘Well, perhaps there’s no great harm done as long as ... as long as ...’ She hesitated. ‘Humphrey, this ... Tudor, and the Queen Catherine ... his wife ... do they have a child?’

There, the question was out.

‘Oh, yes. A few. Well, I’m not sure how many, but there are certainly two boys. Five or six years old ... I don’t know – but that’s how long it’s been going on! They’ll have to be put away, of course, while we decide what to do with them.’

‘Put away?’

‘Oh, you know, a convent or something like that. Not the Tower anyway.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘Poor, soft-hearted Nell. The little ones will come to no harm, if that’s what you’re worrying about.’

It was decidedly not what she was worrying about. Far from it. She couldn’t give a tinker’s damn what happened to the children. All she knew was that Queen Catherine had succeeded in giving birth to two sons, something she herself would have sold her soul to do. But more than that, the boys were the King’s half-brothers and if anything should happen to him, it would not be difficult to establish that they were of the blood royal: they could even prove a threat to Humphrey’s own claim to the throne. So, the further the children were sent away, the better. The King might forget about them; he could be quite absent-minded.

Humphrey would have to deal with the problem of the Queen’s children. For Eleanor, it had now become imperative for her to find a way of giving her husband a son as a matter of extreme urgency. If anything should happen to the King, his heir must have a legitimate heir of his own, for the sake of the dynasty.

As soon as Humphrey had left the room and she was sure he was out of earshot, she picked up a little bell and rang it several times with increasing impatience. She paced the room, her hands clenched at her sides, her breath coming in short gasps until Sarah came hurrying into the room. Her face a mask of fury, Eleanor rounded on the girl, gripping her arm.

‘Sarah,’ she said, ‘go to the Eye estate at once and get me Mistress Jourdemayne. Now. This instant. Bring her back with you. It is very, very urgent that she attends me immediately.’

As soon as her mistress’s back was turned, Sarah rolled her eyes to the ceiling at the prospect of yet another trip to Eybury farmhouse.

February 1437

––––––––

C
ardinal Henry Beaufort cherished his memories of the woman whose mortal remains were being laid to rest on a bitterly cold, grey morning. Harsh winter winds, blowing in off the leaden waters of the Thames, found their way under the great door of Westminster Abbey and cut like knives through even the warmest clothes: he felt grateful for his thick woollen hose and the sturdy leather boots on his feet, but his fingernails were blue with cold and his hands were almost too numb to hold his rosary.

The fact that he had never married did not mean he was not an admirer of women, far from it, and the Dowager Queen Catherine whose coffin now lay on a catafalque below the high altar was one woman for whom he had always had a great affection.

He first met her as a young bride when his nephew, King Henry V, brought her home to England after their wedding in France. He’d been instantly captivated by her beauty, her vitality and her quintessentially French charm. When custom dictated that her husband the King did not attend his wife’s coronation, it had been Bishop Beaufort who had been her guide and mentor for the occasion. Only sixteen short years ago, on a February day nearly as cold as this one, the Princess Catherine de Valois had been crowned Queen of England by Archbishop Henry Chichele in a solemn, dignified ceremony here in the Abbey, enthroned no more than a yard or two away from where her coffin now lay. The irony of that brought a lump to his throat. But he also remembered the sheer pleasure of sitting on her right at the sumptuous banquet which followed the coronation, enchanted by her attempts to express herself in English and captivated by her delight at seeing the edible sweet subtleties which decorated the high table in her honour. It had been on that day that she had begun to call him ‘My Lord Uncle’ and though he had been awarded a Cardinalate since then, her name for him had always been one of his most cherished titles.

He doted on her and rejoiced when she gave birth to her husband’s son and heir. When she was widowed so pitifully soon afterwards, he mourned with her and did his best to offer her comfort and solace. He even allowed himself the small hope that she might find consolation in the arms of his nephew, Edmund, though that wasn’t to be. Nevertheless, they remained friends, even when she confided in him the potentially ruinous secret of her clandestine love for Owen Tudor. Seeing her from time to time in the years that followed, he rejoiced with her when she found happiness with the young Welshman and he patted their children’s heads with avuncular pride. He kept Catherine’s confidences for many years without ever once betraying her. She was delightful. He was beside himself with sorrow when she became another of the legion of women who had made the ultimate sacrifice in childbed. Life could be intolerably hard on women.

Seated near Cardinal Beaufort among the official mourners at the funeral were the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. Eleanor knew it would be bone-chillingly cold in the Abbey, so she had given some considerable thought to the mourning weeds she would wear for the occasion. For warmth, she had ordered a cloak of fine black worsted to be lined with coney but edged with miniver, aware that soft white fur near the face was very becoming. Though she would do her best to give the impression that she was enduring great sorrow, she made sure the hennin on her head, richly embroidered with beads of Whitby jet, had a veil which could be drawn across to hide her face, should her mask of sadness begin to slip.

The royal mourners were seated close to the catafalque, which bore Queen Catherine’s coffin. Though she tried hard not to look at it, Eleanor’s eyes were inexorably drawn to the Queen’s funeral effigy, which lay on top of the coffin, a figure of hollowed-out wood, dressed simply in a square-necked red gown and with its hands joined in prayer. Wooden feet in gold-coloured slippers peeped out from under the hem of the gown and rested on a small carved lap dog. Under a jaunty coronet of base metal, a lifelike wig was nailed to the effigy’s head, but its painted blue eyes were dull, devoid of any expression. It looked very unlike the real Catherine, whose shrouded body lay hidden inside the coffin, embalmed with sweet-smelling herbs and unguents to disguise the odour of decaying flesh.

Eleanor was disturbed by the death of an attractive, vibrant woman of her own age, lovely enough to have ensnared a king and charming enough to have enslaved a lover to warm the cold bed of her widowhood, a man with whom she then found a love deep and precious enough to run the risk of a secret marriage. Catherine’s beauty had brought her great joy and excitement in her lifetime.

But no more. Death was the end of beauty, the end of opportunity, the end of love. Death was ugly and Eleanor would rather not be reminded of it.