Hertford Castle, Summer 1428 #3
I go to my room, and I crawl – dressed as I am – under the covers of my untouched bed.
The sheets are sleekly cold, taut across the wool mattress.
I despise myself for weakness, but I cannot stand, I cannot speak, and I could not possibly sit a horse or dine in the woods or dance in the evening or do any of the things that I thought I would do today, my face bright with a secret, a bubbling laugh behind everything I said.
Now, I cannot speak for fury and grief and heartbreak.
I cannot think, either. When my maid comes in, I say that I have women’s pains, which covers a multitude of troubles, including dying inside.
She comes back in the evening with a tray of food, and I tell her I want nothing but for her to leave me alone.
Nobody sends a message – not the duke, who will be furious that he cannot command the man he chose for such favour, nor Owen ap Maredudd, who can offer me nothing if he will not offer marriage.
I am in such a state of grief and anger that I cannot sleep; nor rest. I spend all day and all night walking from my bed to the window to look down at the glassy moat or out to the hills and the blank sky above them, and I cannot think what I should do now.
I am helpless as a river of tears washes through me.
I keep thinking I must have cried myself out, but then the racking sobs start again and shake me with grief.
I don’t know how to bear the loss of him.
Only now that he has refused me – publicly refused me – do I realise that I have loved him from the moment I first saw him, running up the stairs at Windsor.
Even in Hainault, as I looked around for richer men, I still dreamed of him.
All these months, I have been secretly counting on marrying him.
And – worst of all – I never thought he would look at another woman.
I cannot imagine him with another woman; I cannot believe he would choose anyone over me.
I am sure he must have been trapped by someone; he must have been tricked into giving his word.
But how could that happen? When I try to imagine her ensnaring him, when I try to imagine him making love and conceiving a child with her, I have to vomit into the washing bowl.
And at the same time, I don’t blame him.
He always told me it was love, not marriage, for us, and I always agreed.
Even while we were passionate lovers, I was hoping for a better marriage: an English lord or even a wealthy Hainault burgher.
I never thought that he too might be planning a different future for himself; I never dreamed he had a lover other than me, let alone that he would think of marriage to anyone but me.
I heard him speak of freedom; but I never thought that he could be free of me.
Two days pass, and I cannot get off this wheel of longing and anger and bewilderment; but on the third day, I wake in the morning light, and for the first time, I see the clouds and the sunlight outside.
I sit up in my rumpled bed, and the clear morning sky lifts my spirits.
For the first time, I am not sick with grief, but I feel hungry.
I know I will survive this. I will get up today; I will find my way back to my life.
But I am strangely uneasy as my bare feet touch the wooden floorboards, as if I might not be strong enough to walk.
I do not know this woman who has woken dry-eyed after days of crying.
I do not know this woman who has to somehow rise up from such a total defeat.
I am strange to myself, as if I have been destroyed and have to be rebuilt.
I send for breakfast, and my maid brings me bread rolls and pats of yellow butter, some slices of beef, and a mug of small ale.
I eat and drink, and then I step away from the table and look out of the window again.
The view is of the distant hills, dark holly and yew set among the springing green of beech trees.
Along the river valley, the hay meadows look almost wet with new growth, and in the higher fields, the barley is silvery green.
Cows and sheep are confined behind thick hedges, white with mayflowers.
I open the window and I can hear the nesting birds calling one to another.
But the air does not warm me; the long trilling cry of the blackbird does not make me smile.
I feel dry and empty, as if I have cried out all the living waters of my body and vomited up my love.
I feel like a clean cold shell, stone like the snail at Margery Jourdemayne’s door, empty of any life.
I call for my maid to come and take away the tray and fill a barrel of hot water for me to take a bath.
I tell her to lay out my new gown of cream and yellow, and a hennin with a veil of cream silk.
I was going to wear it on my wedding day.
I might as well wear it at once; I know I will never marry anyone now.
I lie in the soapy water and let my hands wander over my body, as if checking for injury: the sleek muscles of my thighs, the slim roundness of my belly, the firmness of my breasts.
I am twenty-seven; I will not be this beautiful forever.
My face and body are a currency that devalues every year.
I first thought I would marry for advantage, and then I thought I would marry for love.
Now, I must think only of myself. I will never love again; I am finished with it.
Perhaps I will feel lust – it may be that I can even like a man as a husband; I might be able to respect him.
But I will never again risk falling into such despair that I would rather die than wake without him.
I will never feel loss like this again. I am hard as stone and bitter as gall; but no one shall know it but me.
At the thought of this, I have to pull the drying sheet towards me as I sit in the scented water and pat my face dry again and say, ‘I can bear this,’ so softly, that not even I can hear myself.
I had thought I was the penniless heroine of a love story.
But now I know the stories are fairy tales, designed to make women think we are important, that our beauty is worth something, that love will change our lives.
But when men say they can’t say no to you, they lie.
All men can say no; all men will say no if it suits them.
Love changes nothing in a man. It is worthless.
I drop the drying sheet and lie back in the water. ‘I will not bear it,’ I say in a quite different tone. ‘I will not suffer like this, for a man like him. He should be the one that is suffering.’
Nobody will ever know that Owen ap Maredudd was once my lover and is now my enemy, and he will regret the day he rejected me.
As soon as I am up and dressed, I shall start to rebuild my life, find a way to get my dowry, find a way to restore my reputation.
I will rise up from this, as I did from my mother’s deathbed, untouched and stonily determined to get my own way.
I will never think of Owen ap Maredudd but to plan how to make him regret his stupidity.
I will make him sorry that he did not take my hand from the duke as Roger Bolingbroke witnessed my humiliation.
As I am – beautiful and twenty-seven, poor, and without a protector – I can do nothing to repay Owen for the hurt he has given me.
I gave him my youth and my beauty – everything I had – for love, and they bought me nothing.
Youth and beauty and love have failed me.
I need other powers. I will need more than these to be revenged upon him, even if my revenge is nothing worse than unremarked bullying: treating him as a stupid servant, sending him running on petty errands, complaining of him as a fool.
Even to achieve these little slights, I have to command him.
I will have to be wife to a great man to complain of him; I have to win power to humble him.
I sink under the hot bath water and feel it seep through my hair to my scalp and think: how can I rise to a high place . . . and quickly?
ONE LOOK IN my silvered looking-glass tells me that heartbreak has not cost me my looks. I am pale, and the cream of the gown makes me look ethereal, like a snow maiden. The yellow ribbon brightens the colour of my fair hair, which shows golden beneath the cream veil of the hennin.
‘You look beautiful, m’lady,’ my maid says nervously.
‘Ask Duke Humphrey if I may come to see him in his room,’ I tell her and wait till she returns with his invitation.
We are housed in the same suite of rooms in the castle.
I have only to walk through his presence chamber and open his privy chamber door to find him.
Dr Bolingbroke is with him again. I had hoped the duke would be alone; but as I come in, the philosopher stands up, bows to me, and tactfully goes out.
He must think I feel humiliated. He will think I am desperately anxious about my reputation.
But he is wrong. He may be the cleverest man in England, but I don’t feel shame.
I could walk around St Paul’s Cathedral as a penitent, wearing nothing but my shift, carrying a lit taper, and I would feel nothing.
I curtsey. ‘Your Grace,’ I say formally.
He jumps to his feet and comes towards me, pulls out a chair for me to sit. ‘Dear Mistress Cobham, they told me you were ill. I was going to send Gilbert Kymer to you.’
‘I was shocked,’ I tell him.
‘I too!’ He looks as if it is true, his handsome face scowling with worry. ‘I never dreamed . . .’
‘I was shocked because what Owen ap Maredudd said was not true,’ I say mournfully.
‘What?’