Authors: Susan Higginbotham
It was not the most satisfactory of couplings. Fair as Bess was, the events of the last months had told on Hugh in more ways than one, and he found himself having to concentrate all of his mental efforts upon becoming aroused. Once he managed that, there was the new problem that with Emma, he’d had the great advantage of not knowing that he was taking a virgin; with Bess, he could do nothing without worrying that he was frightening or hurting her. Holding onto Hugh as determinedly as she might a troublesome horse, Bess took the loss of her maidenhead stoically enough, with a dignified little yelp of pain, after which Hugh was far too quick to achieve satisfaction, regrettably at the very instant that he sensed Bess beginning to relax a little underneath him and even to make a small noise that suggested interest, if not satisfaction. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. You’re so beautiful that I was too quick. Next time will be more pleasurable for you. I promise.”
“I thought it lasted quite long enough,” she said politely.
He chuckled and rolled off her, then guided her so that she lay in the crook of his arm. “Well, at least we’ve given Alice her self-respect back. She’ll be able to tell all and sundry that we’ve consummated the marriage at last.” Their lovemaking, awkward as it had been, had made them much more at ease with each other, and they both were well content as they lay curled up together, listening to the rain that had begun to fall heavily outside. They had been lying that way for some time when Hugh raised up. “Bess. I almost fell asleep just now.”
“So did I. It's pleasant lying here.”
“I’m afraid if I do I might frighten you.” He stared up at the bed canopy. “Since—since my brother died I have these nightmares, like I used to have in the years after my father died. My pages tell me I scream like the devil himself was beside me some nights, that I wake them. I feel bad enough about inflicting myself on them. I don’t want to do so with you.”
“It will not frighten me. If I wake I will fall back asleep, that's all.” She touched his cheek. “Tell me about your brother, Hugh. Perhaps that will help.”
“What's to tell? I saw him fall. There wasn’t a thing I could do to help him. I’d trained him well, and he was fighting as ably as any of us. I didn’t even know it was him until later.” Hugh sighed. After a long pause, he said, “Bess, I feel so guilty.”
“Because you couldn’t keep him from harm?”
“No. He would have been humiliated if I’d tried to keep him from harm, thought of himself as less than a knight. There was nothing I could do. No, Bess.”
“Then why, Hugh?”
“Back in Brittany, I thought that it should have been me who died; I’m more expendable. No children, just land and a wife who didn’t care for me.” He stopped Bess's indignant squawk of protest with a kiss, which she returned shyly. “I see now that I was wrong about my wife. But I still feel guilty because I’ve been given another chance and he wasn’t. His family meant everything to him, and him to them.”
They were silent for a long time. “Hugh, you must suppose the Lord meant something in taking him. It is not your fault that you were spared.”
“Yes, I will have to try to think that.” He sighed. “By the way, was it you who invited Anne and her boys to stay here?”
“Yes. She and I enjoyed each other's company when I visited her last year, and I knew you would not want her to mourn Edward all alone, especially with the baby on the way.”
He winced, thinking of that meeting with the Earl of Salisbury during which he had even suspected his wife of wishing for his death. “I’ve been very unfair and ungenerous to you in my thoughts over the last couple of months, Bess. You’ve deserved much better from me.” He reached for her again. “Will you forgive me if I promise to improve in the future, sweetheart?”
In answer, she kissed him, this time less shyly. Hugh in turn began moving his hands over her body, with none of the hesitation he had shown before. “Hugh!” she whispered as his hand went to her inner thigh and began to roam about.
He felt her begin to respond to him at last, just as he realized how intense his own longing had become. “The last time was for Alice, sweetheart. This time is for ourselves.”
vii
January 1344
BESS WHISPERED TO HER SISTER-IN-LAW, “I DO NOT THINK you should call the dowager queen Isabella an old trout, Joan.”
“But she's old, and she looks like a trout when she pinches her lips together as she's doing now. Therefore, she is an old trout.”
“I think that's what they call a syllogism, Joan,” said Bess, impressed for the moment. Then she added, “But I also think you have had too much wine. In fact, I am sure of it. You mustn’t have any more.”
“Oh, go to the devil, Bess.”
“I’ll drink yours so you can’t have any more.” Bess seized Joan's wine cup and drained it in a gulp, then leaned back, glowing with virtue as well as with wine even as Joan waved at a page to bring her some more.
Fond of tournaments since boyhood, the king had summoned all of the great and what seemed to be most of the lesser men of the land, along with their ladies, to Windsor Castle for a week of feasting and jousting. Bess had arrived with Hugh only that afternoon and had barely had time to unpack before the king had sent them a message: All of the ladies were to be entertained at a great feast just for them, with the men to be entertained in less grand style elsewhere. Each lady had been led into the hall by the king himself. Bess had been thrilled when the king commented on how lovely she was looking and on her new gown, which Bess's dressmaker had barely had time to finish in time for her to bring to court with her. The fact that the king had been heard to make such gallant comments to every woman he had escorted had not detracted from her pleasure in the least.
For many of the ladies, the king's greeting had been quite a few cups of wine ago. Bess herself had had one or two more than usual, she would be the first to admit, but she was in far better condition than her sister-in-law and could therefore drink another with impunity, she decided. She beamed at the page who was filling her own cup, then winked at him. “I wish Hugh were here,” she said after the page moved to another boisterous row of ladies.
“You always wish Hugh were here,” said Joan. “Is he that good of a husband? I mean, where it matters?”
“What a question!” Bess glared at her wine cup. “Yes,” she said, and giggled.
The last months had been happy ones for Bess. There had been no wars to take Hugh away from her, and when he went to Parliament soon after his return from Brittany, he’d taken Bess with him. In London they had stayed at his splendid home on the waterfront, where Bess could watch the ships coming and going from her window seat by day and spend her nights in Hugh's arms. She could not believe there had been a time when she had been cold to him as a wife. What a fool she had been!
Only one thing marred her happiness: She had not quickened with child. After those first few weeks of their reunion, when she and Hugh had made up for lost time by making love nearly every night, she had been certain that she would conceive and had been stunned to find her monthly course arriving at its accustomed time. She had not missed a month since then, except for one when she had been slightly late, and then as if to taunt her, her course had lasted longer than usual. Hugh had found her crying in her chamber that month. “Sweetheart. You are still very young. You will conceive yet.”
“But what if I never do? What if I am barren?”
“Then we must learn to live with that.”
“You won’t cast me aside?”
“Bess! What rot. I love you. You know that.”
“But you married because you wanted heirs…”
“Bess, I do. I won’t deny I’ll be disappointed if we have no children. But the land will stay in the Despenser family in any case. With Edward's four boys and my brothers, there's no chance that an outsider will inherit it. And if there were, well—you would still be my lady wife and my true love. Now come. Dry your eyes and let's go riding. When you’re at last great with child, I won’t let you on a horse, you know.”
She had obeyed. But each month she still felt the same hope, and then the same disappointment. The latter had been especially keen just a few days before when Emma, who soon after Hugh's return from overseas had married one of Hugh's knights, had been delivered of a fine boy. Bess and Hugh, the godparents, had given the couple some glistening plate as christening gifts, and Bess had embroidered a beautiful swaddling blanket for the child, but with each stitch, her heart had ached. When would she sew things for her own baby?
Joan had not conceived either, but she did not seem overly bothered about it. “There's time,” she had said offhandedly when Bess had brought up the subject delicately much earlier in the evening.
Bess sighed and took another long drink of wine, then followed Joan's eyes up to the dais where they kept roaming. As Joan had noted, up there were not only Queen Philippa and her oldest daughter, the Lady Isabella, but Isabella's rarely seen namesake, the dowager queen. None of the younger ladies in the great hall could keep from looking at her for long. Not only had she been an adulteress, which was wicked enough, but there were rumors that she had been a murderess as well, conniving with her lover to kill the poor imprisoned second Edward. The present king claimed that Mortimer alone had been responsible, but Bess had her doubts, and Joan had none whatsoever. “After all, she ordered that my own father be executed,” she whispered, discreetly for a change.
“But she looks so beautiful,” Bess whispered back. In fact, she could no longer make out the queen's features that distinctly, but earlier in the evening, she had noted that Isabella's face, though not a young one—she was in her late forties now—was still a very handsome one, notwithstanding the occasional trout-like expression she did assume when gazing in the direction of the giggling younger ladies. “I just can’t believe she could kill her own husband.”
“And speaking of Hugh, you know what she did to Hugh's father!”
“Hush, Joan. Here comes the king.” Bess took a big gulp of wine to give her courage to face the king, of whom she was a bit shy.
Having dined with the men after seating the ladies, Edward had returned and was now strolling up and down the lines of tables, chatting and occasionally bestowing kisses on his prettiest female subjects. Bess had seen him talking with her mother up at the row of countesses near the dais, a row that was decidedly more somber and sober than the row on which Bess was sitting, designated for earls’ daughters and the wives of the richer lords. Perhaps the nearby queens had had a dampening effect on the countesses, Bess thought. She was grateful that the countesses were seated at such an angle that her mother and Joan's could not see their daughters.
The king ambled over. Though an amazing variety of food and wine had been carried to the ladies, it appeared that the men had had plenty at their feast as well, for when Edward bent and put one arm around Bess and the other around Joan, his breath smelled as strongly of wine as did Joan's. “Fair ladies,” he said. “Are
you
enjoying yourselves?”
“Very much, your grace,” said Bess, though the “your grace” sounded strangely even in her ears like “your glace.” She giggled and tried it again. “Your glaze. I am delighted to be here, and have been enjoying the entertainment extremely well.”
The king laughed and patted her hand. “Why, Bess, I suspect you’ve been enjoying my wine as well as my minstrels. I wager your Hugh will have his hands full tonight.” He turned and kissed Joan, who, however, turned her face so that she kissed the king on the lips. “My,” said Edward. “Young Montacute is a lucky man.”
“I always wanted to do that,” said Joan as the king moved away.
Jealous, Bess drank a consolatory cup of wine and made a conscientious effort to focus her attention on the court fool, though it was difficult to do with the room spinning and the fool multiplying himself before her eyes. She could not have said afterward how she managed to get up when the tables were moved for dancing, or how she found herself in the midst of a group of people dancing, the lords having come in to join the ladies. Even more baffling was how she ended up dancing with the king himself, leading him in a country dance picked up from some of Hugh's tenants. Difficult as she found it to walk in her state, she was somehow able to dance easily, so much so that a clapping little crowd gathered to watch, surrounding her and Edward and shielding them from the view of the throng in the hall. Only when the music stopped did she stumble into the king, who laughed and took her in his arms. “Do I get
my
kiss now?” she asked as she caught her breath.
“Your kiss?”
“You kissed Joan and not me. And I am as loyal a subject as she. It is unwise to play favorites, your glaze.”
“True. How remiss of me,” said Edward. He bent and kissed her on the lips, hard. “You’re delectable,” he whispered, not particularly softly. “Absolutely delectable.” He smiled at her and stood back. “Is my subject pleased now?”
“Very much so.” She curtseyed deeply and fell into the king again when she struggled to her feet. “I’m eager to serve you in every way,” she said.
“I’ll remember that,” promised Edward. He kissed Bess again, then carefully set her on her feet a little ways off and turned to another partner. Bess accepted a cup from a grinning page and took a large drink from it. Then she gasped as someone put an arm around her and began hustling her away, having wrenched the cup out of her hands first. “Gilbert!” she said indignantly, recognizing her abductor as one of her brothers-in-law. “The feast has not ended yet!”