‘Perhaps the Earl of Cambridge might know something about this book?’
Swynford raised a shoulder. She caught me looking at her bare skin, didn’t seem to mind. ‘Our dear Edmund Langley?’ She played the Four of Hawks, a shrewd move, evidently.
‘The Infanta and her sister are at court this month, I’ve heard.’ The wives of Gaunt and Langley, the eldest of Edward’s surviving sons. I went to take her four but flubbed my draw. She smiled as she swept the table clean in one movement and laid out a new play.
‘Ah yes, the hermanas español. Those dark bitches are my little hell.’ Swynford looked up with a worried smile. ‘What a tangled web you spin for me, John Gower. Are you here to torture me or amuse me?’
‘Your choice.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Let’s have a different game, a simpler one.’ She picked up the cards again and laid ten of them face-up on the table. ‘Choose one. Any card at all.’
‘What determines my choice?’
‘Merely the condition of your soul.’
Feeling mischievous, I leaned forward and tapped the Devil.
She puckered her lips. ‘But that is Chaucer’s card.’
We shared a laugh as she gathered the cards into a loose pile, though just as quickly her face clouded. ‘I know something about this book.’ She looked across the hall to the humming circles of gentry. ‘There have been whispers of a theft. A strange manuscript, stolen from La Neyte last week.’
‘Silver I could understand, or plate. But who would steal a book?’
‘It was a young woman, passing as a lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Bethune. Now she’s dead.’
I stared at her.
‘Someone skulled her, out on the Moorfields.’
‘The Moorfields? I can’t imagine—’
‘And, John,’ she breathed, leaning forward, her eyes attractively wide, ‘I think I may have seen her. Coming out of the abbot’s private chapel, right before she lifted it.’
‘What sort of a book?’ I asked, trying to keep up.
‘I know nothing of its content, I swear to you. Only rumours.’ To my surprise I believed her. ‘And now Braybrooke is involved, asking my duke all sorts of ugly questions. You know how suspicious everyone is since the council, and that crazed friar’s rantings last year. As if my duke and the king are mad dogs in a ring, circling one another, waiting for the next chance to lunge for a neck.’
This gave me pause. ‘Why would the Bishop of London be after the same book as Chaucer?’
‘Suppose it’s less innocent than you suspect. Not one of those romances everyone is reading. Not a saint’s life. But a book of prophecies.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Heretical prophecies.’
‘Prophecies.’ I recalled the preacher spewing his verse out on Holbourne, and Chaucer’s agitation when I recited the man’s words. ‘Wycliffe’s work?’ John Wycliffe: a heretic, thoroughly condemned and recently dead, but all the more dangerous for that.
‘Lancaster doubts it, though—’
Swynford’s chin lifted. She stood. I twisted my neck as I rose to see the figure of Joan, Countess of Kent and the king’s mother, standing at the arched doorway. Greying hair pulled back from slivered eyes, widow’s weeds on a figure to make any man pause despite her considerable age. High cheekbones, set beneath a wide brow, and cobalt eyes that flashed as they settled on Swynford.
‘Where is my brother?’ she demanded as she approached, four of her attendants stepping aside. ‘He summons me up from Wickhambreaux, yet I am kept waiting at Westminster half a day.’ I winced inwardly at Gaunt’s treatment of his sister-in-law. In the nine years since the death of Prince Edward, Gaunt’s elder brother and former heir to the throne, the countess had seen her status slowly decline. Had her husband survived the ancient King Edward, she would have ascended to queen consort, and helped the younger Edward rule with the same flawless grace and deliberation she had shown so many times on public occasions. Though still the most beloved woman in the realm, Joan was becoming more and more of an afterthought.
Katherine put a hand to her breast. ‘He just left us, Countess. An appointment at Fulham.’ She straightened her skirts and retook her seat, the other ladies doing the same; a subtle insult.
Joan’s lips tightened. ‘Tell the duke my patience wears thin. I shall return to Wickhambreaux tomorrow.’
‘I will tell him, Countess,’ said Swynford.
Turning to leave, the countess looked at me. She sucked in her cheeks. ‘John Gower.’
I bowed deeply. ‘Your servant, Countess.’
She regarded me closely. ‘I’ve gazed into your mirror, Gower.’
‘My lady?’
‘I have read your great work, the Mirour de l’Omme.’
My cheeks flushed. ‘You surprise me, Countess.’
‘Why is that?’
‘I would not expect such a humble work to make its way to so noble a reader as yourself.’ Nor its writer’s name to be remembered.
She waved a hand. ‘Rot, Gower. The breeding of Death and Sin, the bastard births of Hypocrisy and her sisters – why, you could be describing the household of Lancaster!’
Swynford gasped, staring in hatred at her lover’s sister-in-law.
The countess gestured with her chin and turned away. Chaucer’s book forgotten, my head swimming with the rare flattery, I followed her through the gauze curtains and out on to the small terrace.
‘I am too hard on Lancaster, you know,’ she said as we circled. ‘It was a unique humiliation for a man like Gaunt, to bounce his king on his knee.’ She walked along the parapet, pausing to pick dead leaves out of a pot. ‘Though it has to be said that there are not many so powerful yet so willing to sacrifice their ambition. You would agree?’
‘The Duke of Lancaster’s modesty is universally admired, my lady.’
She spun on me, eyes darkened. ‘Watch yourself, Gower. The ears of Westminster are as plentiful as scales on a herring.’
‘Yes, Countess,’ I said, chastened.
She stared at the lines of barges plying the Thames in the distance. ‘My son has many enemies. Enemies who openly question his legitimacy.’
She paused with the ruffle of curtains. In the open doorway to the upper gallery stood Swynford, the gauze draped across a bare shoulder. One of her sons had wandered to the terraces, it seemed, his gaze now following a bird. Gaunt’s youngest child, a girl they had perversely named Joan, she held by the hand. Seven and counting, some Gaunt’s, others her late husband’s – the entangled promises of a future none could yet foresee.
Swynford, after an amused glance between the countess and me, whisked her children away. The countess watched the curtains flutter in their wake.
‘Be inventive with your next work, John Gower,’ she murmured as the curtains stilled. ‘To see my son stand before Parliament, with his slutting uncle at his side? A spectacle worthy of the mysteries.’ With that she left me.
In the distance the river was a plane of drifting pieces. Barges, wherries, a raft of sawed logs soon to be swallowed by the city below. To my weakening eyes they appeared as so many living forces, moving against each other in ways I could then only dimly understand: an enigma in motion, like Swynford’s foreign deck of cards. I stared