“
Lucy
knows her place, even if you do not.” Lucy jerked out of Henry’s grasp and backed away. “It is not at your side, my lord. It never has been, and I have always known it even if you forget. My thanks to you, Your Grace. By your leave.”
She did another courtesy and ran, pelting along the wall to the nearest stairs as though Henry were after her. But of course he wasn’t. He couldn’t be.
It was only when she reached the privacy of the garderobe that she let herself cry, and only when the tears were done a good while later that she slipped back into Lady Eleanor’s chamber. She sat in the dark, hiding, and by the time Eleanor chased her out again the next morning, Henry Percy was gone, sent off to do homage to the king as Baron of Alnwick, someday soon to be remade Earl of Northumberland.
And she was still a bastard maid, her virtue intact, even if her heart was not.
BY THE FOURTH
day, Eleanor’s headache had become real, a combination of apprehension, sadness, and the gloom that came rolling in as the days shortened. Good husband that he was, Richard visited her every evening, standing just inside the doorway in order to disturb her as little as possible. He grew more worried day by day, until finally he came to sit on the edge of the bed.
“I should like to help you, if you will let me,” he said. “Just tell me how.”
Finally.
“Take me home, Richard. I want to go home.”
“To Raby?”
“No. That is no longer home. I want to go back to Burwash. I cannot bear it here. The autumn is too raw, the hall too smoky. I cannot spend a winter here. Your duty to the Crown is met for this year. Ask York to release you and take me home to Sussex before the weather changes. Please.”
He sat for a moment, chewing on his lip as he absorbed her request. “Eleanor, are you breeding?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“The castellan suggested that might be what bedevils you. His wife grows restless and ill each time she is with child.” He took her hands in his. “Are you?”
The denial was on her lips when she realized he’d handed her the key. She grabbed at it. “I don’t know. Perhaps.”
His face lit with pleasure. As she looked up at him, tears welled up out of nowhere, shame at what she was doing to him combined with her ever-increasing fear for Gunnar. “Just take me home. I want to go home.”
“Of course, dearest.” He wrapped his arms around her and held her as she sobbed. For all the tears she’d shed in the years she’d been his wife, these were the first Richard had seen.
He did admirably well with them, stroking her hair, as gentle as a wife could ever hope a husband would be, and it only made her cry harder.
“Forgive me,” she hiccupped between sobs. “I cannot seem to stop.”
“
Shh. Shh.
Whether you’re with child or not, ’tis clear you need to be home. I will speak to York in the morning.”
York was reluctant, but his lady intervened on Eleanor’s behalf, and they started home as soon as the baggage could be packed and an escort arranged. As much as she wanted to see her mother, Eleanor convinced Richard to hold strictly to the great road and bypass Raby entirely. She held her breath until they reached York, well away from both Lesbury and the dene Gunnar had told her about, and then promptly told Richard her courses had started after all.
As might be expected, he was disappointed—but no more so than she had been every month for the past two years, when her bleeding only served as notice that she must suffer another month of lying with a man she didn’t want. He would surely survive more easily than she had.
With her guilt eased and Gunnar safe, her headache faded away and she began to enjoy the journey a little. The sky was overcast but dry, the hostels overflowed with travelers hurrying to get wherever they were going before the roads turned to mud for the autumn, and Richard seemed somehow less irritating than usual. If not for the presence of her father’s archers, she could almost, almost, imagine she was a good wife to a good man on her way back to a beloved home.
But the weather didn’t hold. The autumn rains finally caught them between Royston and Ware in a downpour that carried the chill of the coming winter in every drop. By the time they found shelter, the entire party, from Richard and Eleanor on down to the lowest porter, was soaked to the skin and shivering. The hostel had good fires, however, and by the time the next morning dawned clear and fair, they were all dry once more.
But as they prepared to mount, Eleanor heard Richard cough. Having struggled with her own lungs after the fire, she immediately put her hand to his forehead. “We should remain here. You can rest a few days.”
“Do I have a fever?” he asked.
“No, but—”
“Then there is no reason to rest.” Richard pulled her hand away from his forehead and pressed a kiss into her palm. “I have a kittle in my throat, is all, and ’tis less than a day to London and but another to Burwash.”
“If this is some misbegotten desire to see me home because I asked you, then please pay it no heed. Whatever was wrong with me has eased since we started back.”
“And I am glad for that.” He tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and turned to lead her toward her palfrey. “But we can be home in two days if we hurry, and I will rest far better in my own bed.”
“Are you certain?”
“As certain as I am that the Earth lies at the center of the Heavens.”
So they pushed to London, where they passed a night with the gray friars. The women were lodged separately from the men, of course, but in the still of the night, Eleanor could hear Richard’s worsening cough echo through the stone cloister. The next morning when they met at the gate, she was shocked by the dark circles under his eyes.
“You are ill. Let me send for a physician.”
“No. I cough only because London’s air is so foul. Give me the fresh air of Burwash and I will be hale soon enough.”
“When did you grow so stubborn?”
“I have learnt it from my lady wife.”
“Then you must know I am stubborn enough to hold you here.” She turned to Richard’s body servant. “Tell the Lord Abbot we need a physician and the use of a chamber for a little longer.”
“Yes, my lady.” The man rushed off without waiting for Richard’s leave, a sure sign he was as concerned as she. The physician soon arrived and, despite Richard’s protests, examined his eyes and throat and listened carefully to his chest.
“You should be bled, my lord,” he said, straightening. His guarded expression made the hair rise on Eleanor’s neck. “And you most definitely should
not
ride. The air is already chill and there will be frost tonight. It will not be good for your lungs.”
“All the more reason to leave now, so we’re home before the frost lays in.”
“Be sensible, Richard,” urged Eleanor. “We cannot reach Burwash by nightfall when we start so late. Stay here today and rest, and we can leave on the morrow. I will ask the abbot for broth and wine.”
“Why waste his wine when I am so near my own?” He turned to the physician. “This from a woman who was so anxious to return home that we rode the length of England in a fortnight.”
Guilt pricked at Eleanor for the way she’d lied to further her own ends, but there was no way to correct it now. She concentrated on doing right by Richard now, today, and folded her arms stubbornly across her chest. “Ah, but I am fickle as well as stubborn, and I tell you now, I will
not
ride to Burwash today.”
“Shrew,” said Richard with a grin, but his chuckle set off another round of coughing.
The physician frowned at the way he hacked. “My lord, I must agree with Lady Burghersh.”
“A compromise, then.” Richard wiped the corner of his mouth on his sleeve. “We will go only as far Merton today.”
“Merton? In Surrey?”
“A cousin on my mother’s side has a fine new hall there,” said Richard. “He will provide us with warm beds, and tomorrow when I show you that I am well enough, we will be poised to reach Burwash. Agreed?”
Eleanor looked to the physician and, when he nodded his acceptance, said, “Agreed. And when you show me you are well enough, I will apologize for being a such a shrew in this.”
“That alone will be worth getting well for,” said Richard, a teasing smile curling the corners of his mouth, making her think of how he’d always looked right after he’d put a toad somewhere abominable. “Now, someone kindly ready my horse.”
CHAPTER 16
ON THE FIRST
Saturday of the following April, Eleanor stood in the choir of the abbey church at Tewkesbury, and watched them transfer Richard’s body into his finished tomb.
They had never had made it to Burwash. The lung fever had worsened in the course of the short ride to Merton, and unable to continue his pretense of health, Richard had taken to bed immediately. The best physicians were summoned. When their leeches and medicines failed, Eleanor called in the village healers. Their herbs and possets and poultices eased Richard’s breathing, and for a few days, she’d thought they’d won.
But one night he had declined abruptly, sinking into a stupor as his fever raged and boils broke out over his face and chest. Terrified that he suffered from plague, his cousins and the servants refused to come near. It was left to Eleanor and Lucy to sit with him, to feed him, and to clean him when he soiled himself.
They tried everything they or anyone else knew to do, but nothing worked and they were forced to watch him fade away, until near dawn on the seventh day of October, in the year of Our Lord 1414, his dying rattles went silent. He had been two months shy of turning eight-and-ten.
And so Eleanor found herself a widow at barely twenty, and may Heaven forgive her, after these months of mourning, all she could think of as she watched the workmen slide the massive stone lid onto Richard’s tomb was that she was finally, truly, and most blessedly free.
Her childish prayers notwithstanding, she would not have wished Richard dead for all the gold in the Exchequer. But now that he was, law and custom gave her rights as widow that a maid did not have. She intended to exercise every one of them to its fullest, especially the right to marry as she chose.
She had chosen so long ago . . .
As the priest began the final prayer commending Richard to Heaven’s care, Eleanor closed her eyes, forced her thoughts back to Richard where they properly belonged, and tried to muster some wifely grief.
She failed. It simply wasn’t in her and had never been.
He had tried to win her heart, he truly had. He’d been generous and kind and had striven to please her, even abed. Yet although she had grown more tolerant of Richard and even found a measure of peace with their marriage, she had never warmed to him, had never had a heart free to give him. Whatever sadness she felt now was for the cousin who had bedeviled her as a boy, for his suffering in his last days, and for the years lost. Not a whit of it was out of the kind of love a wife was meant to have for her husband. Poor Richard. He had never had the best of her.
Now, in death, all he would have of her was this fine tomb and a Mass each day for the next year, both funded from her own purse in an effort to assuage her guilt. With no children of his body and no male relatives in the line, the barony of Burghersh passed to Richard’s younger sister, Isabel, Lady Bergavenny, whose husband would add it to his list of honors. The lands went with the title, of course, less the dower portion that was Eleanor’s to keep. It was a generous portion; her father had seen to that, the one good he had done her in all this.
“Flox crescit et mox evanescit,” said the priest, ending his prayer with the words carved on Richard’s tomb.
A flower grows and soon passes away.
“In nomine patri et filii et spiritus sancti. Amen.”
“Amen.” She crossed herself and said her thanks to the priest and father abbot. The tomb and masses were already paid for, the keys and accounts in Isabel’s hands, and her own things long since removed to the dower hall at Upton on Severn. It was done.
She stepped outside, unsteady in the giddiness of her new station, and tilted her face up to the bright spring sun. Eyes closed, she drew in her first breath as a fully free woman, sweeter than any air she’d known for years. She wanted to throw her arms out and spin like a child until she was so dizzy she couldn’t stand.
The feeling buoyed her the six and ten miles back to Upton on Severn, right up until the gate of Dunn Hall swung open to reveal the sea of red that filled her yard. Westmorland red.
No. No. No. No. No.
The metallic taste of panic filled Eleanor’s mouth. Her fingers tightened around the reins, ready to wheel her mount away, to run. Only a glimpse of her father’s big bay courser stayed her; the beast could run her mount to ground within a mile, and then what? No, she had to stay and find out what her father wanted, to play his game, whatever it was, until she could find her way clear. God’s knees, but she was tired of games.
“What can he want with you now?” fretted Lucy.