Anne O'Brien - The Scandalous Duchess

‘Duty, Katherine!’ she would have said. ‘It is for you to carry the burdens. You are twenty-two years old and Lady of Kettlethorpe. When you wed Sir Hugh Swynford you took on the responsibility of your position. You will not abandon it when your feet are wet and rats scurry around your ankles. That is not how I raised you. You have the tenacity to make something of Kettlethorpe, and you will.’

I sighed, the tenacity at a low ebb, even though I admitted the truth of her knowledge of me. No, of course I would not abandon it. That was not my way, for the Queen’s principles had been lodged firmly in my heart. What I did not have was the financial resource to improve my lot.

Despondent, I stepped to the centre of my hall where a fire burned with smouldering reluctance, and turned slowly round, pushing my hood back to my shoulders. The walls were running wet in places. The haze of smoke that never cleared tainted everything with acrid stench, for which there was no remedy that I could afford. I could not even think of installing a wall chimney.

‘God will give you his grace, and the Virgin her compassion. Go to your prie-dieu, Katherine.’ Queen Philippa again, framing my face with her hands as she imparted to me her own rigorous strength.

Certainly I would go to my knees before this day was out—was not the Blessed Virgin my solace in all adversity? But on this occasion I needed coin as much as the Virgin’s blessings. I rubbed my hands together, regretting the abrasions, the ugly burn on my wrist where one of the torches, flaring, had caught me unawares. Once my hands had been soft, my nails perfectly pared. Once my gown pleased me with the soft rustle of silk damask rather than the roughness of this coarse wool, the only cloth fit for the tasks that fell to me. Silk skirts did not sit well with wringing the neck of a scrawny fowl for dinner.

I sighed a little.

Once I had been honoured, chosen as a damsel in Duchess Blanche of Lancaster’s household. I covered my face with my hands, shutting out the images of that pampered life of luxury at The Savoy Palace, for here, around me, was the reality of my present existence. At The Savoy I never had to sweep up the evidence left by a pair of doves roosting in the rafters overnight and now shuffling into wakefulness. Now I clapped my hands, frightening them into flight and further fouling of the floor.

There was one remedy, of course, to all this destitution. Duchess Blanche was dead these past three years, but the Duke had a new wife. Would there not be a place for me there, where I might earn enough to put all to rights? Where I might, in ducal employ once again, acquire sufficient money to ensure a better home for my son to inherit?

Why not? Why should I not return to the world I knew and loved? Surely, given my previous experience, there was some role that I could fulfil. Queen Philippa would have sanctioned it as an eminently practical decision for me to make in the circumstances.

I flapped my hands to disperse the smoke and a few downy feathers that still hung in the air and marched across to the stairs, to climb to my private chamber where I cast aside the heavy cloak. Lifting the lid of my coffer, I sifted through the layers of court dress, the fragile cloth sadly marked with moth and mildew however careful my attention with lavender and sage leaves, and lifted out a much treasured mirror. Opening the ivory case, dull with disuse, I wiped the moisture from the glass on my bodice and looked.

I pursed my lips.

‘Who are you, Katherine de Roet?’ I asked.

Katherine de Swynford now, of course, married and widowed. Suddenly distracted, I turned my head. Children’s voices, raised in sharp complaint, sliced through the silence, but then dissolved into laughter, and I returned to my critical survey. I considered my hair, tightly braided and pinned, dark gold with damp, and dishevelled where the pins had come adrift under my hood. Darker brows took my eye. Once I might have plucked them into perfection, but no more. A rounded face, with soft cheeks and soft lips, a little indented at the corners with my present excess of emotion. A generous mouth, quick to smile, yet any softness there was belied by a direct stare. I raised my brows a little. No one would accuse me of shyness nor, brought up as I was in the strictest canons of propriety, of frivolity, yet I enjoyed all the comfort that wealth and consequence could bring, and to which I no longer had access.

And I wished with all my heart that I enjoyed that consequence again.

It was not a plain face that looked back at me. True, such enhancements as I might have worn at court were entirely absent. Indeed, it could have been, I decided, the face of one of my kitchen maids with that suspicion of dust along the edge of my jaw where I had rubbed at it with my sleeve. The mirror was misted again, and I polished it on my hip. They said I was beautiful. That I had the look of my late mother whom I had never known. Perhaps I was, although I thought my sister had more claims to beauty than I.

What was I looking for? What had driven me to resort to my mirror? Not the symmetry of my features, but to discover the woman behind them. I tilted my chin, considering what I might see.

Honesty, I hoped. Courage, to seize the opportunity to make more of my life. Not least a determination to live as I had been raised, with integrity and good judgement. That was what I hoped to see.

And perhaps I did see it, as well as the duty to my family name and honour to the Blessed Virgin that had marked every step of my life.

So I would go to The Savoy. I would petition the Duke in the name of my previous service to Duchess Blanche, accepting that I must relinquish my pride for I had a goodly measure of it—but I would do it, for my own sake as well as that of my children. If honesty was strong in me, I must accept that life in a desolate fastness, stretching out changelessly to the end of my days, filled me with dismay, whereas life within the royal court and ducal household with friends from the past beckoned with seductive fingers.

I smiled at the prospect, yet felt my pleasure fade. Replacing the mirror in my coffer, sifting through the words that had slipped through my mind, my heart fell a little at the sheer weight of them. Integrity. Restraint. Respectability. That was to be my life. That was what I knew. I would conduct myself as a respectable widow, unless I was fortunate, one day, to wed again. Queen Philippa would be proud of my strength of will to accomplish it.

My hands, in the act of closing my coffer, paused on the open lid of it, as if reluctant to shut away that reflection of the woman behind the familiar features. How dull, how colourless my chosen life sounded, as even-textured and familiarly unexciting as a line of plainchant. And how prim and prudish the woman who would live it. Was this me? Was this really what I wanted? It was as if I had decided to exist in shades of black and grey and religious observance, when energy, with sly enthusiasm, was surging though my whole body, opening up pictures in my mind of how it would be to sing and dance again, to be courted, to flirt, to exchange kisses in the company of a handsome man who desired me.

Perhaps this was the real Katherine de Swynford, lively and frivolous, thoroughly pleasure-loving, rather than a staid widow who looked for nothing in life but allowing the beads of her rosary to slide through her fingers as she petitioned the Virgin’s grace for herself and her children. The sheer thrill of returning to The Savoy, to a position in the Lancaster household, glowed even brighter in my mind.

And then, as if summoned by my delight, there was the image of the Duke of Lancaster himself, standing in my chamber with the light behind him, as clear as if he were really there, as the sun creates a fantasy when shining through raindrops.