Katherine seated herself in a carved gilt chair and surveyed the-two nuns with polite indifference as they bowed before her. White nuns, Cistercians, shrouded in snowy wimples and habits, a tall one and a short one. The former turned away at once and seemed to be examining the embroidered Venetian wall hanging. Katherine had had only a glimpse of a pale unsmiling profile.
The short nun began to talk in a weak insistent voice, her heavy-jawed, middle-aged face twitched with nervous little smiles. "Most kind of you, Your Grace - forgive this intrusion, really I hardly know how to explain it. Oh, I'm the prioress of Pinley - a very small foundation, you know where we are? Only a few miles from here, near Warwick - but of course we're not on Lancastrian land. Your Grace wouldn't know us - -"
What is all this about, Katherine thought, faintly amused. "Is there some help I can give you, my lady prioress?" she said, glancing in some perplexity at the rigid white back of the other nun, whose marked withdrawal was surely peculiar.
"Well," said the prioress, chewing her lips, "I don't rightly know. It's Dame Ursula there who would come. She's my sacrist and librarian, not that we have many books, I think it's maybe that she wanted, wondered if - but Dame Ursula, she talks so little, sometimes we think she's very odd, though not the way she used to be - -"
Katherine raised her eyebrows and drew them together.
"Oh," said the prioress, "she's quite deaf, I doubt she can hear me."
But it seemed that the other nun had heard. With a slow almost languorous motion she turned and looked full at Katherine, whose heart began to pound before her mind knew any reason for it, who gazed blankly at the triangular wedge of face enclosed by the white wimple, then at the slate-grey eyes that looked at her with hesitant enigmatic question.
"You do not know me?" said the tall nun quietly in the flat toneless voice of the deafened.
Katherine stared again. She pushed herself up from the chair, gripping the armrests. She tried to speak, but the blood drained from her head, she fell back sideways - and slipped off the chair.
The blankness lasted only a few moments, though it was long enough for the page on hearing the prioress' frightened cry to have summoned Catherine's women. When she opened her eyes, she had been laid on the rug, Griselda Moorehead was sponging her forehead with wine, Hawise was burning a feather beneath her nose and there was a chorus of female speculation: "What happened? The Duchess swooned - but she never does - what can be amiss?"
The prioress had drawn back and was wringing her hands, crying that it was not fault of hers, that she didn't know what happened, that Dame Ursula - -
Katherine pushed Hawise and Griselda aside, she struggled to her elbow and saw that the tall white nun knelt by her feet, the wimpled head was bowed and there were tears on the pale cheeks.
"Go away please, everybody," said Katherine in a shaking voice, "all but Dame Ursula. I'm sorry I was so foolish. The heat, perhaps - -" The women reluctantly obeyed her. Hawise made after them after she had helped her mistress to her feet and shot a long startled unbelieving look at Dame Ursula, who continued to kneel with her head bowed.
When they were alone, Katherine bent down, took the clasped thin trembling hands in hers. "Blanchette," she whispered. "Oh, my darling - I always knew - Dear God, I knew you'd come back - -"
The nun raised her head at last. "I had to see you again," she said through stiff pale lips, "I could no longer live with my hatred."
There were only two people in the castle who understood why the Duchess was closeted in her bower all that day with the Cistercian nun. These were the Duke and Hawise, who saw to it that she was not disturbed, while the mystified prioress was made welcome in the Hall.
The mother and daughter could not speak much for a long time. They wept together quietly and after a while they prayed on Katherine's prie-dieu. It was only bit by bit that Katherine comprehended her daughter's story. Blanchette was unaccustomed to talking, and her deafness, result of the scarlet fever, had increased her withdrawal into an interior world which satisfied her.
She made this clear: the convent life contented her, she wished for no other, there was no doubt that she had a true vocation. She was grateful to the nuns, who had sheltered the wild half-demented child who had come to them fifteen years ago, and who had accepted her as a novice later, though she had no dowry and pretended that she did not know her name. "I never told anything about myself," said Blanchette. "I couldn't. My soul was eaten up with fear, fear and hate.
Mother," she took a sharp breath and looked deep into Katherine's eyes, "did I hear wrong that day in the Avalon Chamber?"
It was as Katherine had suspected all these years, the added pain that had lain at the core of her anguished bereavement. Blanchette had misinterpreted the Grey Friar's accusation and had believed that her mother had deliberately poisoned her father.
Speaking distinctly, her lips slowly forming each word, Katherine effaced this horror for Blanchette at last. And the grave twenty-nine-year-old nun received the truth and understood, as the frightened child could never have.
It was the news of the marriage which had stirred Blanchette from her long self-containment. She had begun to remember her mother's love for her, to see Katherine as a woman who could never commit the hideous crime that the child had believed in. "And - I thought, I felt, that you could not have married the Duke if it were true."
Later Blanchette, speaking with even greater effort, told of how she had escaped from the Savoy; though that time was for her now a dim fantastic memory. From the Avalon Chamber she had run to hide in the falcon mew. "How long I don't know, the hawks in there frightened me; I had forgotten you, forgotten what was happening to the Savoy. I thought only of my green linnet in its cage upstairs."
She had gone back up the secret stairs to the Privy Suite to find her bird. The suite was filled with smoke and the roar of approaching fire. The bird lay dead on the bottom of its cage which the rebels had tossed in a corner of the Duchess' garde-robe. As Blanchette picked up the cage, the passageway burst into flames behind her, and she jumped from the window into the Thames. The wooden cage had held her up until a boat came by. It was rowed by a Fleming, who was flying from the massacre of his people that was taking place in London. He hauled Blanchette on board with him and rowed on desperately up the river.
"I don't know where he put me ashore, "said Blanchette," or where I wandered for some days - but I think I was trying to get here to Kenilworth, to you as you used to be. One of the Pinley serfs found me lying exhausted in a field, he brought me to the convent. They thought me daft for a long time, I would not talk and could hear but little, while in my heart was - oh Blessed Christ - -" She turned from her mother and clasping her long delicate hands on the white wool of her habit stared out through the window to the placid mere.
"Ay," she said after a while, "it was He and His love that held me, when all other love was twisted into hate." She got up and kneeling down by Katherine looked up into her face. "Mother, I shall be an anchoress. Ay - I've thought much about it, but I had to be free of hatred first. A cell dedicated to God where I shall never more see the outer world."
"No, darling, no!" Katherine cried below her breath. "I can't give you up again." She had been thinking of what might still be done for Blanchette to make up to her for the youth she had missed. Of how, by special dispensation, Blanchette might visit Kenilworth from time to time, that she might even travel to Kettlethorpe as she had once longed to do.