Authors: Susan Higginbotham
“You would pass me to someone else?”
“Good Lord, no, not like that! But it will be lonely for you, and I thought that with—”
“No, Hugh le Despenser!”
Emma never called him “Hugh le Despenser” except when she was irritated with him. Hugh obediently subsided. Then Emma broke the silence herself. “I know you meant well, Hugh.”
“I did, Emmy, truly. I thought only that otherwise you might be tempted too, and with a husband—”
“I have a stronger will than you realize, Hugh, after all of these years. But yes, perhaps, one day I may be able to contemplate getting married to someone else. But it is not a step I can take now. You are not that easily replaced, for one thing.” She sighed. “I do wish we had had a child together, though.”
“I do too, now,” Hugh admitted. In the early days of their relationship, after their first few heedless couplings, he had fretted over the possibility of getting Emma with child. He had gone so far as to try to withdraw himself from her just in time, but she had not allowed it. “I want your child, Hugh,” she’d whispered. “Please.” Hugh, despite some misgivings, had acquiesced, as there was no danger, after all, that their child would go hungry; he or she could marry respectably or find a congenial spot in the Church. It appeared, though, that all of his misgivings had been for naught, for in all their years together, Emma had never missed a monthly course, only been late a time or two. Emma had decided that her barrenness was a punishment for her sin, though Hugh had been secretly relieved. His own mother had borne him and nine other healthy babes safely, but not all women were so lucky, and it would have been a terrible burden had Emma died giving birth to his child.
He thought of suggesting to Emma that she might be blessed with issue were she properly married, but wisely decided against doing so. Instead, Emma said abruptly, “What is your bride like, Hugh? You’ve said little about her except that she's the Earl of Salisbury's daughter and almost fourteen.”
“Bess, as she hates me to call her? A bit spoiled by Papa Montacute, it would appear, and not at all pleased with the idea of having a Despenser for a husband, if I’m not mistaken. She's a pert little thing. When she's displeased with something I say, which so far has been quite often, she wrinkles her little nose, like this.” Hugh's own nose was not one that easily wrinkled, but he demonstrated as best he could. “It's quite fetching, actually.”
“You sound half in love with her already.”
“I could be, I suppose. Whether she comes to like me is another story altogether.”
“Of course she will, Hugh.”
He shrugged and reached for her again, but it turned out that neither of them, on this last possible occasion for them to make love to each other, was truly interested in doing so. Instead, they lay in bed holding each other for a while, then dressed and saw to the details of their day's business; Hugh to that of trying to forget his misery, Emma to that of moving her last things out of Hanley Castle. By mid-morning all of her goods were packed and headed in a cart toward her house. Then it was Emma's turn to leave also. She and Hugh walked silently out to where Emma's horse, a present from Hugh, had been saddled for her. Emma's own manservant stood well away as Hugh stepped up to help her onto her palfrey. “I know you can take care of yourself, you always have,” he said. “But you know you can always turn to me if you need assistance. Me, or any of my household.”
“I know, Hugh.”
“I love you.” He swung her up on the horse.
She bent and kissed him on the forehead. “I love you, Hugh.”
He watched as she rode away, traveling the same path that he had ridden to her house on that summer's day nearly ten years before. Around him, men were coming in from the fields for their dinner, men were loading things in carts to be transported to his manor at Tewkesbury, men were waiting to see him with business and petitions. Yet as Hugh stood there in the midst of all of them, on the eve of his marriage, he had never felt more alone in his life.
iv
June 1341: Tewkesbury
IN BETWEEN LAST-MINUTE FITTINGS OF BESS'S WEDDING apparel, the Countess of Salisbury was taking the opportunity to give Bess some womanly, and motherly, advice. She had begun with the subject of the Marital Act, which as Bess understood it from her mother was something that could be reasonably enjoyable to women but which was something that men could not bear to be without. Hugh, it seemed, would be no exception to this rule. “Men are not faithful by nature, though many are,” Katharine told Bess. “You must accept it if Hugh strays occasionally. And at his age, and with you not of a condition to lie with him just yet, you must expect that he will have known women before, and may continue to do so after your wedding. As long as he does not flaunt them in front of you, you must bear this patiently.”
“What if he
does
flaunt them in front of me? Can I get the Pope to annul our marriage?” Bess had happy visions, all of a sudden, of Hugh bringing a stable of whores to dine at table with him and of a suitably furious Pope tearing their marriage contract in two. She could almost hear the satisfying rip the parchment made.
“I doubt he would do so,” said Katharine most unhelpfully. “Hugh is a decent man, after all, and not a fool. I’ve no doubt that he will treat you with all due respect.”
Bess scowled. A worrisome thought came to her then. “Mama, does Papa stray?”
“Certainly not, and it would be a sorry day for him if he did,” said Katharine.
Leaving Bess to puzzle over this inconsistency with the advice she had just been given, Katharine turned her attention to the casket of jewels sitting nearby. They had been brought to Bess the day before, an early wedding present from Hugh. Philippa, Sybil, and Agnes, Bess's younger sisters, had been goggle-eyed when they were taken out, and Bess herself had been impressed, though she’d tried to not seem so. “Have you decided what ones to wear yet?”
“I hadn’t thought of it. I thought to wear just the ones that Papa gave me.”
“And offend Hugh? Besides, child, they are magnificent.” She opened the casket and lifted a ruby brooch in one hand and a sapphire bracelet in the other. “His mother's, I suppose, and some of them perhaps his grandmother Joan of Acre's. The first Edward's daughter, you know.” Katharine held the ruby brooch up against Bess's wedding dress. As a consolation for her marriage, Bess had been allowed to select the silken fabric herself; it was a dusky rose trimmed with gold that shimmered as she moved. “It will go beautifully with your gown.”
“Do you think Hugh's mother wore them upon her marriage to Hugh's father?” Bess shuddered.
“Quite possibly; the settings look old enough. Now, don’t you get it into your head not to wear them because of that! It is not every girl who gets to wear jewels like these on her wedding day—or ever. They’re too fine to let sit in their casket because of your superstition.”
Holding the brooch herself, Bess had to agree.
The Montacute family was already in Tewkesbury, where Hugh had a manor close to the abbey founded by his mother's ancestors. Though the manor house was a good-sized one, it could hold only the bride and groom and their immediate families and servants, even with most of the servants bedding down in the great hall. With the wedding to take place in two days, the house was quickly filling up, as were the local inns. Anyone with a respectable home who could drag in an extra bed or pallet to accommodate a paying guest was doing so, and a small forest of pavilions was sprouting nearby as well. The taverns were full, and their keepers, in the highest of spirits, were heard to say that they wished the lord of the manor got married every year.
With each new relative from Hugh's family who arrived at Tewkesbury manor over the next day and a half, Bess's head swam like the fish embroidered on her new bed coverlet. Hugh's four sisters were the first to appear. The eldest was Isabel, the Countess of Arundel. Bess already knew not to expect her to be accompanied by the Earl of Arundel. The couple had married as children and had disliked each other from the start. Mortimer and Isabella had executed their fathers a week apart, and though this circumstance might have brought some couples closer together, it had not improved their marital relations. They had lived together just long enough to have a fourteen-year-old son, Edmund, who came with his mother to his uncle's wedding.
“No need to be formal,” said Isabel briskly as Bess acknowledged her sister-in-law's higher rank with a curtsey. “I am a countess for now, but I shan’t be as soon as Richard finds a higher class of woman than the doxies he usually runs with and gets the annulment he is always threatening me with. Oh, it's true, Edmund, don’t blush. But here! See what I have brought you as a wedding gift! Oh, there's the usual gold cup that you’ll receive later, but I thought you might prefer this.”
A page who had been standing in the background stepped forward and solemnly placed a ten-week-old puppy into Bess's arms. “The best of my finest bitch's new litter,” Isabel said. “Hugh said that yours had died a few months ago, and I thought you might like this one.”
Bess had indeed told Hugh during her horseback ride with him and Sybil that she was fond of dogs and that her old one had died recently, but it was something that she hardly thought he would have remembered. She cuddled the pup as it licked her nose. “’Tis so kind of you, Countess.”
“Isabel.”
Isabel was giving Bess a detailed account of her dog breeding, and Edmund had struck up an animated conversation with Bess's younger sister Sybil, when a girl of about fourteen rode up, followed by a waiting woman, a few men, and a very scruffy-looking, mud-splattered boy of about eleven. “My youngest sister, who's married into the Berkeley family,” said Isabel. “She is an Elizabeth like you, but she is Lizzie to us, and as I suppose you shall be Bess to us, that will save a great deal of trouble. Lizzie! This is Hugh's betrothed, Lady Bess.”
Elizabeth de Berkeley smiled at Bess as the boy, evidently a Berkeley page, awkwardly assisted her from her horse. Though quite womanly looking, with a full bosom and a nicely rounded rump, Lizzie still wore her curly brown hair flowing, as befitted only maidens and new brides. Was Lizzie still deemed too young to bed with her husband, wherever he might be? “Will your lord be coming?” Bess asked, realizing when it was too late to retract her question that this might be another situation like that of the Arundels.
Lizzie pointed to the boy. “My husband is right here,” she said resignedly. “Maurice will never go around a body of water if it is shallow enough to ride through.”
“Cools off the horses. And if I had gone the long way I wouldn’t be here yet.”
“
I
took the long way and arrived here at the same time as you,” said Lizzie.
“Because I waited for you, slowpoke.”
“And you have gotten yourself all dirty for Lady Bess! For shame, Maurice.”
Maurice smiled and bowed to Bess, then pointed to his wife. “She acts proper now,” he said in the tone of one making a great confidence, “but she can play at football nearly as good as a lad, I’ll tell you.”
Lizzie rolled her eyes. “Do clean up, please, Maurice. Lady Bess will think us savages.”
“They’ll be fine breeders when they reach the age,” Isabel prophesized as Hugh's servants arrived to take the new arrivals to their chambers.
No sooner had the Countess of Arundel and Elizabeth de Berkeley been accommodated than Joan and Nora le Despenser arrived. They and a third sister, now dead, had been forced by Queen Isabella to take the veil only weeks after their father's death. Isabel escaped the queen's net because of her marriage and Lizzie escaped because she was still in her mother's womb at the time. Bess's heart ached for those young nuns who had never had a vocation and who had been denied the chance of grand weddings of their own, but Joan and Nora did not seem inclined to self-pity. They ran into their brother's arms as soon as they were assisted off their horses. “I thought you would never marry!” said Joan as Hugh embraced her.
“One would think it was you who had taken vows!” added Nora.
Presently Hugh's youngest Despenser brothers, Gilbert and John, and his Zouche half-brother, William, arrived. Bess had barely learned their names and gotten a sense of their dispositions—Gilbert was boisterous, John reserved, and William studious, she decided—when a commotion was heard at the entrance of the great hall in which dinner was being served. Hugh, his soldier's instincts taking over, half rose from his seat, then relaxed as two small boys barged into the hall and ran toward the high table, heedless of anyone or anything blocking their path. “Uncle Hugh!” they yelled.
“Boys? But if you are here, your father must—” Hugh stopped as a man, smaller and with more delicate features than Hugh but clearly his younger brother, entered the hall more sedately but nearly as eagerly as his sons. “You came!”
“I wasn’t sure I should, but Anne insisted. She said that little Hugh would be fine and that I shouldn’t miss your wedding.”
“True, it was rather ill-bred of my namesake to start cutting all of those teeth right before I married. I’m glad you came, Edward.” Hugh embraced his brother and then turned toward Bess. “My lady, this is Edward, and these two ruffians”—he waved a hand toward the boys, who had been caught by the hands by a stout nurse who had puffed in after Edward—“are his sons. His eldest two sons, for his third was born just the year before. His lady is incapable of breeding anything but boys, it seems. The younger is named Thomas and the older is another Edward, I’m afraid, but as they’ll ignore you when you call anyway, it shouldn’t be a source of confusion.”