Sterborough Castle, Surrey, Spring 1422
Sterborough Castle, Surrey, Spring
MY FATHER COMES out of the big doors to the central courtyard to welcome us as we lead the horses over the drawbridge of my home castle, as the sun is setting in the early dusk of an April evening. I curtsey to him then kneel for his blessing, and when I get up, he kisses me.
‘Everything all right?’ he asks nervously. ‘I didn’t expect to see you home, what with the queen’s new baby and everything.’
‘I’m not his nurse,’ I say sharply. ‘I’m not a servant.’
‘No, no,’ he says hastily. My brother appears at Father’s elbow and hesitates to kiss me in welcome.
‘You look very fine,’ he says tentatively. ‘New clothes?’
‘I get two gowns a year as part of my salary,’ I remind him. ‘This was a gift. I have no money to buy gowns, as you well know.’ I step forward and kiss him. He may be a nervous fool but one day this castle will be his, with all the rents from all the lands around; he will be head of my house.
‘You must be tired,’ my father says hopefully. ‘You must want to dine in your room?’
‘No, I’ll come to Vespers.’
‘Reynold will read the service,’ my father says, even more nervously than before. ‘And – you’ll be pleased – your sister Elizabeth is visiting us.’
I shoot a quick look at my brother. If his piety is leading him towards the priesthood, it will be a disaster for me.
If Reynold disappears into some monastery, my little brother Thomas will inherit the title and the fortune, and he is a ten-year-old child that I hardly know, and it is too late to start now.
‘How lovely!’ I lie. ‘Are you turning priest, Reynold? How proud Mother would have been!’
He flushes and stammers that he reads the evening service when our family priest officiates at the hospital that they have set up in our abbey.
‘A hospital? Wonderful work,’ I say warmly, but I wonder how much it has cost them. ‘And is Elizabeth making a long stay?’ I ask pleasantly. ‘And is her husband here too?’
Elizabeth’s husband, Sir John Harpenden, an ugly old monster, was such a terror to my baby sister Anne that she took one glance at him and swore herself into Barking Abbey as a novice nun.
‘No, Elizabeth’s on her own for a short visit,’ my father says. ‘You’ll have your old room.’
I wave my maid to follow me to my room and brush the dust of the road from my gown and tidy my hair under a gold net.
Vespers is at five o’clock; the chapel bell chimes as I cross the courtyard and walk past the servants and the tenants to take my seat beside my sister.
There is a little murmur as I walk through the congregation, the women examining my gown and the men admiring my looks.
I don’t smile; I have learned to be indifferent, as the queen is, when people stare at her.
It is better to seem proud than seek attention.
My brother reads the service and from the regular responses and quiet attention of the congregation, I can tell he has done this many times before, and they respect him.
Of course, it might serve me well if he joined the Church and rose high as a bishop.
The king’s uncle, Bishop Beaufort, has used the Church as his private treasury and as a step in his upward rise.
Reynold in holy orders could help me at court, meeting lords and giving me a substantial dowry for marriage.
But my feeble brother has no ambition; he’ll do neither me nor himself any good.
He will want to renounce the world and pray with the pilgrims and the sick at the abbey, and young Thomas will take over and I will get nothing.
The service ended, we go to supper in the great hall, served in the noisy, dirty, old-fashioned way, with all the household sitting down to eat at the same time, the dogs snarling over bones under the tables, and all the bread trenchers coming in at once.
My father and brother, my sister and I, sit on a dais looking glumly down on the household, and my brother says the prayers like a common chaplain.
My father raises a glass, and everyone toasts my return.
‘Just for a short visit from her great place at court,’ my father tells the hall of servants, as if to reassure everyone that I am not back to stay.
He does not ask me why I have come home until supper is over and we are in the solar, wine and sweetmeats on the table, Elizabeth sewing some bit of stuff under expensive wax candles, my brother sitting before the fire and cracking hazelnuts in his teeth like a boy.
‘Oh! Use nutcrackers if you must eat nuts!’ I say irritably.
He jumps at my tone, but my father smiles. ‘Ah, we’re a sorry pair of men,’ he says. ‘Rough and ready. But we rub along. Let him eat his nuts Eleanor, and tell us why you’re visiting. Is all well at court?’
‘Well enough. My lady is a strange woman, but I like her. She’s high in the favour of the queen, and the king is paying her to stay in England. She’s determined to get back to her lands – she’ll need to raise an army.’
‘We’ve got no men here,’ my father interrupts hurriedly. ‘The king mustered every able-bodied man I had and sent half of them back with an arm hacked off or a leg blown off, and what am I to do with them?’
‘We founded the hospital at the abbey for them.’ My brother leans forward, his face lighting up. ‘So many wounded men coming through the parish needed our help.’
‘Beggars?’
‘Soldiers,’ he corrects me. ‘It’s a Christian duty to heal them and feed them and even house them.’
‘Anyway, I didn’t come here for Countess Jacqueline’s army. I came on my own account. What I need to know is: what becomes of me, when my lady goes back to her home in Hainault?’
‘Won’t you go with her?’ my father asks simply.
‘To a war?’
‘As her lady?’
I pause. ‘You wouldn’t want me to go into danger.’
There is an awkward silence. Clearly, no one has thought about this at all.
‘Better not go then?’ Elizabeth says, so tentatively that it is not an opinion but a question.
‘Of course you don’t want me to go,’ I tell them. ‘It would be far better if a nobleman married me before she ever sets sail for the Hollands. But since everyone is at war and no one has even seen me, you’ll have to make the arrangements Father. You’ll have to speak to someone about me.’
‘Who?’ he asks simply. ‘Who would I speak to?’
‘You must have many friends with sons of the right age,’ I encourage him. ‘Young men who are heirs to their fathers’ lands. Neighbours? Or look further afield – France or Ireland? When you go to London you must meet other landowners. Distant kinsmen? Mother’s family, the Culpepers?’
‘No great landowner would marry a girl with such a poor dowry,’ my father says simply. ‘I thought that was why you wanted to go to court: to try your luck directly?’
‘Don’t say: “try your luck”,’ I correct him.
‘I wanted to see the wider world; but these are difficult times. We’re in the middle of a war – there’s no noblemen at court; they’re all either with the king or mustering men on their lands.
I can’t be expected to find my own husband.
Nobody ever sees me. And how else am I to live? ’
‘Our lady mother intended you for the nunnery,’ my brother volunteers, thinking that he is helping.
I don’t even look at him.
‘It’s true: your mother hoped you’d take a place at our abbey,’ my father agrees. ‘You could be our abbess?’
‘That’s better than a bad marriage,’ my sister agrees.
‘No,’ I say shortly. ‘It’s not.’
A silence falls. If I stay any longer, I shall forget my courtly manners. I stand and brush down my gown over my slim hips. I see my sister take in the tight fit and the good wool cloth. She’s never had anything half as fine from her old husband.
‘Father, I’ll meet you in your rent room tomorrow morning to see what dowry I can have,’ I tell him. ‘If there’s money enough for you to build a hospital for old soldiers, then there must be enough for me, your own daughter.’
He looks uncomfortable. ‘Surely a husband will turn up, so pretty as you are. I didn’t know . . .’
‘Well, you know now,’ I say. I kneel on a stool for him to bless me.
‘Goodnight. God bless you, Brother, Sister,’ I say to Reynold and Elizabeth, and I stalk like a heroine in a story, with my head high, all the way to my bedroom, where I push my maid out of the room and go to bed and weep for pity of myself, that nobody cares for me.
They don’t want me to come home, but nor will they help me leave.
IN THE MORNING, I open the iron-bound door to the cellar room where the tenants come to pay their rents four times a year.
My slippers slap on the cold stone floor; the walls are damp plaster, with the lathes showing through in yellowing spots.
Under the table, solemnly produced on rent day, is my father’s great rent box, bound with iron and double-locked, chained to a ring set into the stone floor.
My father does business in the old way – on quarter day, the tenants come in with their half nobles and groats, and pay them into the rent box. As my father buys things, the groats and farthings go out again. His idea of careful management is to make sure that he never sees the bottom of the box.
‘How did you ever bring yourself to spend so much on the hospital?’
‘It’s a saving in the long run,’ he assures me.
‘The men used to come to the kitchen door for their dole and it was costing a fortune to feed them. Now, we send them to the abbey. We used the stone from our quarry; the tenants did the work as part of their dues. Now, the monks have the cost of feeding them from their own farm, and our chaplain works as the infirmarian for the same tithe as before. It hardly costs us anything.’
‘Then they must have been giving away a lot of bread at the kitchen door,’ I observe tartly. ‘But about my dowry. How much is it exactly?’
Of course, he does not know. It is the rent from a parcel of land which should yield more than it does, six silver bowls from a grandmother, probably worth more now than when they were weighed two generations ago.
‘And you shall have all the profit,’ he assures me.
It is a tithe of a sheep fold, the first cut of hay from a particular meadow.
He adds it all up on his fingers – there is neither pen nor paper on the rent table – and then tells me the approximate total.
‘That’s not nearly enough,’ I say flatly.
‘I know,’ he agrees. ‘That’s why your mother thought it best for you and Anne to go to the abbey, where they would be glad of girls of your breeding. As it’s our abbey, they’d take you for nothing. Barking took Anne at novice rates.’
‘My mother’s dying wish was that I should go to court,’ I remind him.
He hesitates. ‘D’you have someone in mind, Eleanor? My dear? You’ve not been . . .’
‘I told you – everyone’s abroad. Some of them will never come back. The young men of the Beaufort family are imprisoned in France . . .’
He gasps. ‘Beauforts! My dear, you aim too high. The bastard royal line? None of them’d ever consider us – not with the price of wool and hay so low. You might as well offer them the egg money!’
‘But if my brother goes into the Church, he won’t have a wife and a family to keep,’ I argue.
‘No daughters and no dowries. Anne is provided for at Barking Abbey, Elizabeth’s kept by her husband, and Thomas will get Reynold’s inheritance.
I’m the only one you have to provide for. Can’t you sell some land?’
‘Sell land?’ His face convulses as if he has just bitten into a crab apple.
‘Then what am I to do?’ I demand. ‘If I can’t marry a nobleman, a landowner – what am I to do? I can’t stay at court when my lady goes to war? I can’t go with her? What else is there for me?’
I think I have trapped him into agreeing with me. But as he is a stupid man, he thinks he has trapped me. His face clears; he smiles. ‘Exactly, my dear, yes.You’ll have to go to the abbey after all. It was your mother’s first wish, you know, if not her last.’