LITMIR.BIZ

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axe against his neck.’

      We all knew it well. When Richard was still young and untried as a monarch, giving power and patronage to unsuitable favourites, a group of magnates had taken issue with him. His favourite, de Vere, was beaten on the battlefield and hounded into exile. Richard was forced against his will to promise to take advice from those who knew better. Thus the Lords Appellant had become a force to be reckoned with.

      But Richard would not accept this curb rein on him for ever. Three years ago now, he had taken his revenge on those five Lords. His uncle Thomas of Woodstock had been smothered in his bed in Calais. The Earl of Arundel had been executed on Tower Hill, the Earl of Warwick imprisoned. The Earl of Nottingham had been banished for life. And Cousin Henry, then Earl of Hereford, the youngest of the Appellants, had been banished for a treason he had probably not committed. We all recognised that Richard had a vengeful spirit.

      ‘He carries grudges. He is self-absorbed in his own powers. No, I do not like him. I do not trust him.’ Thomas finished off the cup of wine. ‘Now we have to see what happens with the disposition of the crown, since it has been snatched from Richard’s fair head. We will act accordingly. I will not willingly give up what I have achieved.’

      He tightened his hand into my hair, curling his wrist into its thickness, and bestowed another kiss, harder, surer.

      ‘The question is, my lovely, ambitious Constance. Do you stand with me or against me?’

      My loyalties to my family were strong, yet I would stand or fall with my married Despenser fate. Indeed, were they not so completely intertwined, as Thomas’s hand in my hair, that there was no need to make a choice? York, Holland and Despenser would fight as one to keep their pre-eminence, whoever was King, be it Richard or Henry.

      ‘With you, Thomas. Are you not my devoted husband?’

      His kiss deepened. His hands tightened on my shoulders.

      ‘Then show me.’

      ‘Do I not always?’

      ‘No. Of course you do not.’ His hands slid to encircle my wrists and he pressed his mouth against the soft skin there, where my pulse beat, slow and unaroused. ‘I missed you.’

      ‘Which I do not believe.’

      ‘If only for your sharp tongue.’ His eyes softened, warning me of his change of mood. ‘But not only that.’ He lifted the ivory-backed mirror from the coffer at my side. ‘What do you see?’ He held it before my face. ‘What do you see, my lovely Constance?’

      ‘What should I see?’ I asked, determined not to respond to his cold-blooded wooing.

      ‘I’ll tell you.’ The curve of his lips became sardonic, his chin tilted, as he surveyed me. ‘I see a profusion of hair as fair as that of any angel painted in a missal, a face which is a perfection of shape and fine bones. Eyes lustrous enough to entrap any heedless man. A straight nose, lips indented at this moment with displeasure, an unhandsome crease between elegant brows.’ Thomas stroked the brows with the tip of one finger. ‘Is that sufficient to express my heart-felt admiration?’

      ‘How unexpectedly chivalrous,’ I observed as the crease became deeper and thus even less handsome.

      ‘Smile, Constance.’

      Obedient to his command, I smiled, knowing that my face would be lit as if with an inner light, even though it was a mockery.

      ‘If your unholy mother gave you nothing beyond a love of duplicity, at least you inherited the handsomeness of your Castilian forbears. Why should I not miss you? A lovely woman at his side is a gift of value to a man of ambition.’

      The mirror was cast aside regardless of its fragility. His chaperon and gloves were abandoned where I had left them on the floor, the damask garment shrugged off to join them, while I was efficiently dutiful if not enthusiastic as he led me into the inner chamber where the great bed with its Despenser hangings, all sumptuous gold fretwork on a red field, dominated the space. I knew the words to say, the caresses to give. I knew what duty meant within a loveless marriage. We had a son and a daughter, healthy evidence of my wifely attention. I gave him ease and obedience. If he wanted ecstasy he could employ one of the Court whores and pay her well in coin and compliments. He paid me in neither and awoke no desire in me. Nor did I expect it. I would live out my life with no experience of love, be it the soft caring gestures within a family or the blazing passion of lust. Life, I accepted, would be far more equable without. My mother had felt the hot breath of such a lust, with raw repercussions when she took a lover. I would never follow in her scandalous footprints. Political aspiration for my family would serve me well enough.

      Thomas fell asleep at my side with no more than a grunt of exhaustion while I lay awake and considered the dangers in which we found ourselves. For what was treason? Treason depended on whose brow bore the crown. At the moment it seemed that the crown of England lay in the gutter.

      And then as I fell into sleep, I wondered what was the advice that Edward, in Ireland, had given Richard which had awakened Thomas’s suspicions. I sighed a little. Whatever it was that Edward had set his hand to must wait.

      From where had my enmity to my husband stemmed? It had always been there. I had never found anything to like in Thomas, Lord Despenser, as he had been titled since the day I had wed him at the age of four years. There were some elements of that event that clung to my mind, to make a lasting impression on the woman I was to become. I was told what to say during the ceremony and spoke the words, although I did not understand the questions asked of me by the priest. The boy of six years at my side, gloomy-faced, without a glance in my direction, said the same. We were word perfect, and there was much indulgent laughter when our hands were joined and the boy was instructed to kiss my cheek, which he did, a peck worthy of a cock pheasant.

      I was his wife, I was given to understand. I looked at him with some interest, for he was a handsome boy. He looked at me, fleetingly, as if he would rather I had been the gift of a new hawk or hound. I don’t think that he looked at me again, except when I asked him:

      ‘Where is your father? Is he not here?’

      ‘My father is dead,’ he said.

      ‘I am sorry.’

      ‘I don’t need your sorrow.’ His lips twisted. ‘I don’t like you. I am here because my mother commands that I must wed you.’

      The only words we exchanged on that auspicious occasion. I would never forget his utter lack of interest in me, not that I would ever allow him, then when I was a child, or in later years when it mattered more to me, to see how much his indifference had wounded both my pride and my desire to be liked by this boy to whom I was tied by oaths and religious ceremony. Nor could I forget the overheard heat of ill temper between my father and mother as we sat at the culmination of the feast.

      ‘Could we not have done better than this?’ my mother asked under cover of a ceremonial blast of a trumpet as King Richard arrived late, but still to grace us with his presence.

      ‘The lad is a ward of the King. How much better do you want?’ My father was trenchant.

      ‘Despenser! His family is mired in past scandals. There are still treason judgements against his ancestors for corruption and misplaced ambitions. Are we not worth a more advantageous alliance?’

      My mother’s voice was still heavily accented from her Castilian birth, but her words were clear to those who eavesdropped, as I did while I washed my hands in a silver bowl.

      ‘Your mother was a whore,’ my father said. ‘Before your father made her respectable and married her. How much scandal do you lay claim to, Isabella?’

      It meant little beyond the shock of his use of that word in polite company.

      ‘But a royal whore, and to your advantage. You only wed me because of my royal Castilian blood.’

      There was no love lost between them.

      ‘I wed you, Isabella, because my father the King insisted on it and for no other

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