Read Online The Court of the Midnight King: A Dream of Richard III by Freda Warrington - Free Book Online Page B

met and crossed. Within, Father Dunstan kept two altars. The Christian one was richly gilded with an image of Iesu on the cross. The older one was a block of pitted stone, engraved with spirals. Eleanor was determined that the old altar would not be destroyed as long as she lived. Statues of the Blue Virgin and the Dark Mother faced each other across the dusty space. Here John was entombed beneath a stone effigy of himself in armour. Friar Bungay, Dame Eylott and Bridget Marl – priestess of the London Motherlodge – attended the service, the only outsiders Eleanor wanted. Christian prayers were said, blessings of divine Auset given. The villagers trod both paths as it suited them and saw no conflict in this.
    “He said it was King Edward’s triumph that kept him alive so long,” Eleanor told Katherine later, when the mourners were gone. Kate saw grief and suppressed fear in every stiff line of her body. “If Henry and Marguerite had won, so John said, his spirit would have faded and died with Henry’s wits. Instead, Edward came to breathe life back into the land. Is it so, Kate? Did your father truly think life issues from the king’s divine appointment, and not from the Earth, the heartbeat of the Serpent Mother? He was my soul’s companion, ah, but still a man.”
    She stared without focus at the arched brightness of a window. Something broke inside Kate. She flung herself out of the house, away from the oppressive atmosphere, out into the wild cool air of the herb garden. There she fell behind banks of feverfew and wept her heart out.
    ###
    A year passed. Eleanor sent out no messengers, so news of Lady Lytton’s widowhood travelled slowly. Indomitable, she continued to nurture her estate as ever. Like the abbess of a holy house, with a great bunch of keys at her waist, she was constantly busy with every matter of the estate and village. No concern was too small for her attention.
    Lytton Hall had long been a sanctuary for waifs: peasant girls who found themselves with child, nuns outcast from their order for some transgression; Eleanor turned no one away. Nan had been an unwanted infant. Martha was a healer driven from a village near Nottingham with accusations of witchcraft.
    And then Edith Hart, a grey spectre haunting the house.
    Edith was gone now. She’d survived four years after coming to them. The Lancastrian who’d confiscated her estate smartly switched allegiance the moment King Edward took the throne. Since Edith refused to challenge him, her lands were lost. Without her sons, she no longer cared.
    Eleanor had tried to rally her spirit, but all Edith wanted was peace, to mourn in the safety of her friend’s domain until she faded away.
    Katherine often saw her ghost wandering the corridors of the house, or seated in corners like a mass of cobwebs. She still heard Edith’s voice whispering the unpalatable truths that she and Eleanor wanted to deny.
    “The only sure way to protect this place is for Katherine to marry,” she’d said before she died. “She needs a good strong lord to keep you safe. She needs sons to secure the title and estate for all time. Otherwise this jewel will be snatched from you, as mine was.”
    “I do not wish to marry,” Katherine had answered, then nine or ten years old. She tried not to lose her temper with Edith, who was sad and frail. “Good lady, I want no husband to command me. My mother and I do perfectly well as we are.”
    Eleanor had also reacted with fire. “Edith, I know of no such ‘good lords’. I was lucky with John, for we loved each other and he respected my path. But husbands die. Sons guarantee nothing – yours did not!”
    Edith’s face turned to ash. Eleanor had caught her hand and said, “Forgive me. But it’s true. Our only certainty is the sacred earth, our secret ways into the hidden world. That’s our source of strength. Not self-seeking arrogant nobles who would buy and sell us like sheep!”
    Katherine was watchful and perceptive.