The Court of the Midnight King: A Dream of Richard III (6 page)

“And curst be trolls, elves, goblins and fairies upon the earth, and hypogriffs and Pegasus in the air, and all the tribes of mer-folk under the sea. Our holy rites forbid them. And cursed be all doubts, all singular dreams, all fancies. And from magic may all true folk be turned away. Amen.”

Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter

Katherine’s father lived longer than any could have predicted. Sustained on the warmth of his household’s love he lingered, opening his eyes each new morning to smile at his wife and daughter.

There came a day when Katherine was fifteen and John died at last. He had endured the chill hardships of winter, only to cease on a full-throated May morning. Stillness lay on the house: wordless shock. The eyes of Thomas Copper, Martha, Nan, Tom and all the servants hung with tears. Villagers came weeping to the hall to pay their respects.

Eleanor alone was calm. She ministered to the others, her face a gentle mask, her pale hands betraying only the slightest tremor.

The tiny village church stood in a circular churchyard, upon a far more ancient site where five old tracks of power met and crossed. Within, Father Dunstan kept two altars. The Christian one was richly gilded with an image of Iesu on the cross. The older one was a block of pitted stone, engraved with spirals. Eleanor was determined that the old altar would not be destroyed as long as she lived. Statues of the Blue Virgin and the Dark Mother faced each other across the dusty space. Here John was entombed beneath a stone effigy of himself in armour. Friar Bungay, Dame Eylott and Bridget Marl – priestess of the London Motherlodge – attended the service, the only outsiders Eleanor wanted. Christian prayers were said, blessings of divine Auset given. The villagers trod both paths as it suited them and saw no conflict in this.

“He said it was King Edward’s triumph that kept him alive so long,” Eleanor told Katherine later, when the mourners were gone. Kate saw grief and suppressed fear in every stiff line of her body. “If Henry and Marguerite had won, so John said, his spirit would have faded and died with Henry’s wits. Instead, Edward came to breathe life back into the land. Is it so, Kate? Did your father truly think life issues from the king’s divine appointment, and not from the Earth, the heartbeat of the Serpent Mother? He was my soul’s companion, ah, but still a man.”

She stared without focus at the arched brightness of a window. Something broke inside Kate. She flung herself out of the house, away from the oppressive atmosphere, out into the wild cool air of the herb garden. There she fell behind banks of feverfew and wept her heart out.

###

A year passed. Eleanor sent out no messengers, so news of Lady Lytton’s widowhood travelled slowly. Indomitable, she continued to nurture her estate as ever. Like the abbess of a holy house, with a great bunch of keys at her waist, she was constantly busy with every matter of the estate and village. No concern was too small for her attention.

Lytton Hall had long been a sanctuary for waifs: peasant girls who found themselves with child, nuns outcast from their order for some transgression; Eleanor turned no one away. Nan had been an unwanted infant. Martha was a healer driven from a village near Nottingham with accusations of witchcraft.

And then Edith Hart, a grey spectre haunting the house.

Edith was gone now. She’d survived four years after coming to them. The Lancastrian who’d confiscated her estate smartly switched allegiance the moment King Edward took the throne. Since Edith refused to challenge him, her lands were lost. Without her sons, she no longer cared.

Eleanor had tried to rally her spirit, but all Edith wanted was peace, to mourn in the safety of her friend’s domain until she faded away.

Katherine often saw her ghost wandering the corridors of the house, or seated in corners like a mass of cobwebs. She still heard Edith’s voice whispering the unpalatable truths that she and Eleanor wanted to deny.

“The only sure way to protect this place is for Katherine to marry,” she’d said before she died. “She needs a good strong lord to keep you safe. She needs sons to secure the title and estate for all time. Otherwise this jewel will be snatched from you, as mine was.”

“I do not wish to marry,” Katherine had answered, then nine or ten years old. She tried not to lose her temper with Edith, who was sad and frail. “Good lady, I want no husband to command me. My mother and I do perfectly well as we are.”

Eleanor had also reacted with fire. “Edith, I know of no such ‘good lords’. I was lucky with John, for we loved each other and he respected my path. But husbands die. Sons guarantee nothing – yours did not!”

Edith’s face turned to ash. Eleanor had caught her hand and said, “Forgive me. But it’s true. Our only certainty is the sacred earth, our secret ways into the hidden world. That’s our source of strength. Not self-seeking arrogant nobles who would buy and sell us like sheep!”

Katherine was watchful and perceptive. Even at ten, she suspected her mother was angry because Edith had touched a raw truth. Now, at sixteen, the ghostly warnings were ever more insistent. However steadfastly she and Eleanor ignored the problem, it would not go away. Without a husband, she thought, without his shield and his armour, his title and his knights, we are naked… and Mama hates this! And so do I.

Among the sisterhood of Auset, most of Eleanor’s friends kept silent on the matter. Only Anne Beauchamp, the Countess of Warwick, confronted her.

“You should think about a husband for Katherine,” she told Eleanor at every Motherlodge gathering. “You have your principles, but we must be realistic. We can’t live entirely in the hidden realm. Unless we conform to the outer world, we won’t survive. My daughters know that. Choose her a husband, before one is imposed upon you!”

###

There was turmoil in the outer world, as always. Edward’s victory hadn’t stopped the fighting. Marguerite, in exile, hadn’t ceased trying to reinstate Henry as king, and she had a half-grown son to promote, Edouard of Lancaster, Henry’s heir, whom some said was not Henry’s child at all.

When told of his son’s birth, so the story went, Henry was astonished and remarked that the conception must have been effected by an angel, since he had no recollection of it.

Kate still laughed every time she thought of this.

The conflict grew worse. On their travels to York and to Nottingham for Motherlodge meetings, Eleanor and Katherine gathered news. King Edward and the Earl of Warwick – the Kingmaker who’d placed Edward on the throne – had quarrelled.

Kate asked her mother what the quarrel was about.

“Politics,” Eleanor answered flatly. “I like the Countess of Warwick well enough but I don’t trust her husband. The earl thought he could manipulate Edward like a puppet, but Edward has a mind of his own. He married the wrong woman, a commoner, Elizabeth Woodville, instead of the foreign princess Warwick had arranged. Warwick was furious. So now he plots to create a different king instead, one who is more easily bullied.”

“Who?” Kate asked in amazement.

“I don’t know,” Eleanor said thinly. “The one woman who might know the truth, the countess, has not shown her face since this began.”

“There’ll be more fighting, I suppose,” said Kate.

“Dear, it’s never really stopped.”

Within her mother’s demesne, it was hard to imagine nobles at war in the outside world. Here, life was peaceful. Spring was in full bloom, as warm as summer. Kate rode her dapple-grey mare Mab up to Lytton Edge, where lines of rock swept above them like the crumbled ruins of a Roman fortress; over the heathery slopes of Bride Cloud and down into the oak-veiled chasm of Lytton Griffe. Along the banks of the surging Melandra she went, across the Sheepwash Bridge, through heavily-scented avenues of may trees. Impossible to imagine anything disturbing this sweetness.

This morning, she’d visited a sick villager, a man who’d fallen from a cart and impaled himself on a stake. The wound was healing now, thanks to the skills Kate had absorbed from her mother. Brews of certain herbs for cleansing, others to ease pain, honey ointment for healing. Incense to encourage kind elementals and repel the less savoury ones. The man had joked about battle wounds, and she wondered how she would feel if his wound was a sword-thrust. She thought about Raphael.

“There’s something worse than having to marry,” she said to her mare. “What if a woman grew fond of her husband, and he rode off to be killed in battle?”

Sweat prickled her skin, made her head itch under her hennin of green silk. Impatiently she tore it from her head. The fluttering veil made Mab dance nervously. Kate let her gallop.

Arriving at the house in disarray with her hair loose, the mare skittish and sweaty beneath her, she was shocked to find visitors in the stable yard. There were a dozen horses, clad in bright leather and silver. What did this mean? Conquest? Theft?

A handful of men stood about, as magnificent as dukes in violet, gold and green; and they were only the esquires, judging from the way they joked with Eleanor’s grooms. They all went quiet and stared as she rode into the yard.

Katherine bristled. She’d meant to walk Mab around to cool her, but she couldn’t do so under their scrutiny and it would look peculiar if she rode away again. Tom was already there, waiting to take the mare from her.

“Who are they?” she whispered.

He shook his head, nervously excited. “Lady Lytton’s asking for you, my lady.”

“Cool Mab down, will you?” she said, slipping from the saddle. The strangers bowed, but their stares burned with too much speculation. Unnerved, she swept away with head high, into the cool interior of the house.

Inside, Martha and Nan intercepted her, and rushed her up the servants’ stairs to her bedchamber. Nan was guilelessly excited, Martha tense. They undressed her, sluiced her hot body with rose water and stuffed her into the best dress she had, a gown of deep blue velvet embellished with gold net. A hennin was pressed on her head, her black hair tucked beneath the structure of golden satin and lace-froth. The two little horns, Kate thought on seeing her reflection in a glass, gave her a devilish aspect. Her eyes looked storm-blue and furious. She was hardly the demure gentlewoman the visitors would be expecting.

“Martha, who are they?” she asked for the third time. “Why must I be trussed up to meet them?”

“Lady Lytton will tell you. It’s not my business.”

“Don’t slide out of this. You must know!”

“Your distant cousin,” Martha whispered, thin-lipped. “Thomas, Lord Stanley. But I didn’t tell you.”

When Katherine entered the great hall, she found her mother entertaining in high estate – as high as they could manage. Four visitors sat in chairs around the fire as the table was readied for the noon meal. She’d thought their house luxurious, with its softly-faded glow of red and bronze, tapestries, and a firegrate the size of a small kitchen. Now, as a backdrop to the visitors’ glory, she realised how shabby it was. The tableware was dark with age and dented, and they had tapers instead of good candles. She noticed the mended patches of her mother’s brown velvet gown. All their finery was long sold, at first to finance the late Duke of York’s armies, later to support her mother’s waifs.

“Here is my daughter Katherine,” said Eleanor, rising. “She shares my duties, ministering to the sick.”

“A worthy cause of delay,” said one of the men as they all stood to greet her with chivalry.

Eleanor projected an aura of grandeur, almost her priestess-self. Katherine felt foolish, annoyed and apprehensive. Her eyes blazed upon each man in turn. There was an older lord with black hair, a neat moustache and beard, his face narrow but handsome and pleasant enough. The younger one had unkempt curly hair and a rosy, eager face that shone in the firelight. They wore the finest cloth, cream and blue and red, slashed and shaped in fashions she’d never seen before. Gold chains hung upon them, bearing the white rose and other emblems. They dripped riches like honey from the comb.

They’d brought a cleric with them; a bishop in dull earth-colours rather than ceremonial silver and saffron. He had a neat little face in a round head, a neck so short and broad that his double chin rested directly on his chest. His thin dark hair was oiled to a high shine. He smiled, appraising Katherine from small brilliant eyes like a polecat’s. Although his garb was modest, there were jewels on his fingers, and the Lamb badge on his chest was made of pearl and diamond, with rubies to represent the blood.

He had a companion, a thin stooped priest dressed in ochre. His face was cadaverous, especially when he smiled.

“Your daughter’s virtues, my lady, are highly praised and most praiseworthy,” said the senior lord. “As are yours.”

“It is flattering of you to say so, my lord,” Eleanor said stiffly. “Katherine, greet kindly your cousin Thomas, Lord Stanley, to whom we have the honour to be related on my father’s side.”

As the older lord kissed her hand, she sensed his condescension. He was beautifully groomed, and smelled of an exotic, subtle perfume.

“Our dear friend, Bishop Morton,” said Stanley, stepping aside to present her.

As protocol required, Kate kissed the Lamb symbol. “Your Grace.”

“His assistant, Dr Fautherer…”

The man in ochre grasped her fingertips for a brief moment. The touch sent a shudder through her. His hands were parchment-dry, like lizard skin.