The Service of the Dead

“Dame Katherine?” Berend the cook called to her from the doorway as she picked up the lantern and closed the shutters.

“First I must wake the children.”

He nodded and withdrew with the dogs, closing the door behind him.

Back in the silvery early morning light, Kate stood a moment looking up into the spiraling snowflakes and drew a deep, easy breath. Yes. Better now. She headed to the house. Stomping some of the snow off on the slate doorstep, she slipped her feet out of her twin’s boots and carried them into the hall, setting them near the hearth to dry.

On a table lay the accounts with which she’d thought to catch out her brother-in-law the previous evening. She muttered a curse as she warmed her hands at the fire. It troubled her, the king’s men searching her ship. But no time for worry now. She had much to do. Lighting a lamp, she carried it up the solar stairs to where her wards slept beneath the eaves, one to either side of her bedchamber. At first nine-year-old Marie had shared Kate’s bed, but her complaints murdered sleep. Kate could do nothing right – the covers were too heavy, too light, the room was too warm, too cold, the pillows too hard, too soft, Kate stole the covers, she slept too hot. Enough! Another partition had gone up on the far side of her chamber.

She drew back the curtains on Marie’s small bed. At rest, the child was a beautiful creature, tiny for her age, delicate, as if of fairy folk. Button nose, full lips, cleft chin, and thick dark lashes that rested so sweetly on cheeks rosy with sleep.

Neither Marie nor her brother Phillip favored their father, the man to whom Kate had been wed for three happy years. A time of innocence, before she learned all that Simon had hidden from her. Kate had imagined her husband sleeping alone since the death of his first wife, Muriel. She had ascribed his enthusiasm for bed sport to a decade-long hunger – except perchance an occasional night with a whore when the loneliness threatened to devour his soul. Such loneliness – his wife and son dead. How she had pitied him. And all the while, two bastard children about whom he had never spoken were alive and thriving in Calais, in the home of the French mistress he’d kept long past any need for consolation. He’d continued the relationship while married to Kate.

She imagined her rival, Anne, as a delicate beauty, like her daughter. Marie looked as if a strong wind would shatter her ivory skin. Both she and her brother had rich reds in their dark hair and startling blue eyes. Quite a contrast to Kate, who was sturdy, with bold features, brown eyes, and dark brown, wiry, unruly hair. Kate reminded herself that Simon had called her beautiful, and there was no doubt he’d enjoyed their bed sport and her company, laughing with her, seeking her opinion. She missed him, every day she missed him. His death had robbed her of much joy. Though once his will was read and his account books were opened to her, she had discovered she had been living in a dream.

Marie curled into her pillow with a soft sigh.

What trick of nature erased all trace of Simon from his bastards’ fleshly forms? The Neville family tended to unusual height and barrel shaped trunks. Simon had been tall, fair-haired, with hazel eyes. Was this the cause of his silence regarding them? Did he doubt Marie and Phillip were his? Or had he been waiting until Kate had babies of her own before he told her about the two he had fathered with a beauty in Calais? She would never know. The only child Kate had conceived of him had been stillborn, and two years ago a fever had taken Simon from her. He’d ignored the fever for far too long, believing it would pass on its own. Had his mistress known of his death? According to the children’s account, their mother died almost exactly a year after Simon. Would she have kept the news from her children?

Marie and Phillip had been grieving for both parents when Lionel deposited them on Kate’s doorstep a year ago. “Their mother is dead, two months now. Their French grandam said they are Nevilles and our family’s responsibility.”

Stunned, never having guessed her husband visited a second family on his frequent travel to Calais, Kate had stared at the two small ones. Perhaps not so surprised as she might have been, had she not already learned of Simon’s crippling debts and heard his will. “Two more Nevilles – God save us all. How old?”

“Marie is eight, Phillip eleven.”