Chapter 12

Deerhurst, 1318-19

King Edward ordered a muster at York against the ever-threatening Scots, to which knights from across England responded. Thomas Lancaster's retainers at Lancaster's castle, Pontefract, however, barred their way north. Lancaster himself stated that 'if the king wished to take arms against anyone he ought first to notify the Steward of England.' Thomas Lancaster was, of course, Steward of England and was worried that the king was plotting to weaken his position. Because of Lancaster's latest intransigence, civil war appeared increasingly imminent; Lancaster even secretly contacted Robert the Bruce concerning a possible alliance against his sovereign.

By April of 1318 the need for conciliation was made imperative by the Scots' capture of Berwick, Harbottle and Wark. Only in Ireland, where the most powerful baron of the Welsh march, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, had succeeded in routing Edward Bruce, did matters look other than hopeless.

While the king and Lancaster wrangled over power and the concept of "crown," the Scots burned and pillaged much of the north. Finally, in August, 1318, a settlement—more favorable to King Edward than to his quarrelsome cousin—was reached in the Treaty of Leake. With Edward and his cousin in temporary harmony, a major campaign against the Scots was finally mounted in 1319.

Alone at Deerhurst Maria understood little more about political affairs than that they often kept Phillip away from her. Deerhurst, the entire surrounding area, was part of what was known as the Marchland—that area of England bordering Wales. The March was strategically important, that she knew, but much of it was isolated, and when Phillip was gone she felt abandoned, with few to talk to besides Anne Perth and her seneschal. She spent an unhappy year longing for Fordwich, pondering the babe growing in her belly and brooding over her husband's absences. No sooner would Phillip return than he would be summoned for yet another campaign. Sometimes she thought he left too willingly, especially as her birthing date loomed.

I know you have duties. I know you must obey your king and your lord. But still...

When he left she hid her tears, made even more ungovernable by pregnancy, until he was out of sight. After completing her daily duties, she'd retreat to her chamber where she tried to reason away her fears, whittle her love to manageable proportions, and remind herself of how she must play the part of an ordinary wife. Simply a partner. A helpmate. Competent, assured, busy, a woman who was not in the grips of this unholy obsession.

As her time neared, Maria wrote to her family, requesting her mother's presence. She'd begun to receive missives from Hugh and Eleanora, but the letters contained not so much as a mention of Henrietta. At first Maria had vowed that she'd never beg her mother for forgiveness, but as she herself readied for motherhood, she yearned to re-establish some sort of relationship. 'If you'll but come,' she wrote, 'I swear I'll be the daughter you always wished.'

Maria was delivered of her son, Thomas, with her sister-in-law, her maid and a midwife at her bedside. Phillip was in York with the earl of Sussex. Henrietta remained at Fordwich.

* * *

The Treaty of Leake destroyed the effective unity of Thomas Lancaster's opposition party. Agreement between the king and Lancaster himself, however, proved fleeting. Lancaster soon retreated to his estates where he sulked over the treaty, as well as the recent appointment of Bartholomew Badlesmere as Steward of the Household—a post which Thomas, as hereditary steward of England, felt he should control. When a two year truce was finally signed with the Scots at the end of 1319, His Grace blamed Lancaster's uncooperativeness for terms he considered humiliating. Lancaster, in turn, blamed the king.

At Deerhurst, Maria anxiously awaited her husband's return. As fall deepened into winter she bundled up little Tom, now nearly a year old, climbed the stone stairs to Deerhurst's north facing battlement, and strained for the first glimpse of Phillip's banner. Her bitterness toward him for so often leaving had long ago dissolved into an aching loneliness. She no longer cared whether her feelings might be unseemly. She wanted only to look upon his face, hear his voice, rest again in his arms, and share their son.

Her days revolved around little Tom and her duties as mistress of Deerhurst. Both her indoor and outdoor seneschals were competent, but Maria periodically rode across the estate with her overseer, Timothy Maudelyn, and went over the household accounts, which ran from Michaelmas to Michaelmas, with William, the chamberlain. She politely entertained the occasional guest or traveler, and supervised the household staff and her maids, including little Tom's nurse, Joscelyn—a fat, motherly woman who doted on the child. In her small solar Maria oversaw the sewing, embroidering, knitting and personally executed most of the spinning, using distaff and spindle.

Just as Henrietta had taught her.

While ordering the changing or freshening of floor rushes or instructing the gardener on the variety of cooking and healing herbs to plant, Maria could almost hear their voices blend. Sometimes she found herself using similar words and phrases and treating servants as she'd seen Henrietta do, though she never felt like true mistress of Deerhurst.

I am only play-acting, like a child stumbling about in grown-up clothes.

She felt little intrinsic pleasure in her duties, though she decided that was understandable enough. With Phillip absent, so was half her reason for existence. Little Tom provided the rest.

Maria often thought that if angels could be seen, they would look—and act—like her son. She fussed and worried over him so much that Joscelyn chastised her for her overprotectiveness, but she didn't care. Half the children born did not live to the age of five, and at the slightest sign of fever or cold, Maria administered steaming herbal baths and calamint tea and syrup. If Tom were listless or irritable she worried he had contacted smallpox or some dread disease like St. Anthony's Fire. She kept him always near her in the solar, whether when playing or napping in his elaborately carved cradle—a gift from Richard of Sussex.

At Tom's baptism, the earl had also sent a dozen exquisitely detailed robes and Queen Isabella even bestowed upon the child a silk robe trimmed in ermine. Isabella had been recently delivered of her third child, Eleanor of Woodstock, so Maria attributed the queen's surprising thoughtfulness to happiness over the birth of her first daughter.

From her own mother Maria heard nothing.

St. Remigius' Day passed, and with it the end of harvest time. Rents were paid and leases fell due and fall drifted toward winter. For the past weeks, Maria had haunted the battlements, always looking south. A feeling of foreboding weighed on her as insistently as the storm clouds obliterating the horizon.

Something dreadful has happened. I know it.

Because the danger remained unfocused it assumed life shattering proportions. Phillip was dead; her family had all perished of a plague; Tom's recent cough would prove fatal.

Finally, Maria spotted a troop approaching along a road white with a recent dusting of snow. The afternoon light was too uncertain for proper identification of the banners but Maria was certain Phillip had returned. Rushing to the solar she changed into her best kirtle and awakened Tom from a nap.

"Papa's home, sweetheart!" she cried as they entered the inner bailey where the troop was already dismounting. Then she halted, stunned. Upon their jupons the knights bore, not the blue of the Rendell wolf, but a red leopard's head. The man who turned to her with a glad cry was not Phillip but her father.

"Poppet!" Hugh crushed her in a fierce embrace. "How I've missed thee." He began to cry, and when he finally drew back Maria saw that his face was thinner and more lined than she'd remembered. In two years' time he'd aged a dozen. "And is this my grandson?" he asked, as she led Tom forward. Hugh bent over, favoring his bad leg, to bestow a shaky smile on his grandson.

Eleanora bustled forward to hug Maria. She smelled of lavender; Henrietta had used lavender perfume. Maria closed her eyes. Suddenly, she knew the reason for their appearance.

"We have come to take you home," said Eleanora.

Maria searched her twin's face. "Mother is dead, isn't she?"

"Aye."

Maria inhaled shakily. "When?"

"Near Michaelmas. Of a sickness to the lungs, as have so many these past months."

"Why did you not write? Why didn't Mother send for me when she took ill?"

Eleanora made a great show of removing her gloves.

"Did she ask for me before she died?" Maria pressed. "What did she say? Oh, I should have been there. I have known something was wrong. 'Twas Mother calling out to me, begging me to return."

Eleanora bent down and beckoned to Tom, who stuck his thumb in his mouth and refused to obey.

"Why are you avoiding me? Why will you not tell me about Mother?"

Hugh opened his arms and when Maria went to him, enfolded her once again in a tight embrace.

"Did she die an awful death?" Maria swallowed down an anguished sob. "Did she forgive me for Lord Leybourne and did she miss me very much?"

Hugh could not meet her eyes. "She passed so quick she didn't have time to mourn for anyone."

Something was not right here. Hugh and Eleanora were not behaving as they should. Maria's mind began whirling with all manner of possible events concerning Henrietta, all involving her in culpability. "You do not blame me, Papa, do you? Do you think Mama died of a broken heart?"

"Stop it!" Eleanora cried. Tears slid down her face but they were more of anger than grief. "Mother did not die because of you or anyone. She died of a murrain, that's all. And from the hour of Edmund Leybourne's death she never once mentioned your name, so do not torture yourself with fantasies of what might have been and never were."

When Eleanora's meaning registered, Maria's sorrow began to harden until she felt dead inside—as dead as her mother. Henrietta had used her as a marriage pawn and when her usefulness had ended, erased the very thought of her. Henrietta hadn't anguished over their estrangement; she'd given it no thought at all.

Maria raised her eyes to the darkening sky, to the snowflakes drifting sporadically to the hay glutted earth of Deerhurst's bailey.

"Now I know," she whispered. "I think I've always known."