@dukehumphrey

dukehumphrey:

iamthefirechild:

Summer Delangel, nee Rainault, neatly placed another stitch in the embroidered bodice she was making, and carefully did not sigh. Being a widow, even a knight’s widow, was even more dull, stultifying, and boring than being the old maid daughter of a merchant house had been. At least back then there had been the excitement of her affaire d’amour with Duke Humphrey — but he had left, and she had been married off, and then her stupid husband had died in one of the King’s endless battles with France, and basically at this point there was nothing she hated more than her own life.

She didn’t even have a child to remember her late husband by, or to make her brief marriage worthwhile. At that thought, she laid her handwork down in her lap, then aside completely, and forced herself to go outside. Once the dark thoughts began, there was nothing she could do to stop them, but a brisk walk helped to fight the useless tears. She set off for the palace gardens, eyes cast down to avoid meeting anyone’s gaze.

Once, in another life, Humphrey used to stand for hours on the small bridge erected over the little lakes in the gardens of Westminster palace. The lakes housed swans and giant sized ducks and other lesser kind of birds, and he could spend hours watching and feeding the swans.

“They are like us,” Hal used to say, “They stand tall no matter what, they are noble.” Well, Humphrey needed all his nobility probably to not sink into the ground constantly, these days. As he stood there watching the swans, he couldn’t see any resemblance of himself. Maybe, in another life, but if anyone called him ‘The Swan’ behind his back these days, they did so out of courtesy to his bloodline and not to him in person.

“I am the Swan, though,” he reminded himself, remembering how his friend John, now abbot of St Albans gave him the name at Balliol College. It would’ve fitted Hal more, who of course nicked the bird as personal badge before anyone else could even think of it – the right of the eldest. Though the Swan badge came from the Bohuns, the illusdtrious but now extinct family of their mother Mary, and Humphrey was the most Bohun-like of them all. Even his name was the Bohun name, the name of his mother’s father and almost all their ancestors on that line of the family tree.

He just stood there watching the swans, thinking of how boring they actually are to a mind restless with problems and worries, like his. His mind was constantly occupied now, with battles, and troops’ wages and servants’ wages, wives and still born sons and dead sovereigns and brothers, the traces of pain that poison brings. He didn’t hear the woman coming until she spoke.

“Humphrey!” Just as always before, his name spilled from her lips before she thought. He stood so still, so unchanged, Summer was sure she was seeing a ghost. Was he not gone, fighting battles in the Low Countries, petitioning the Pope on his wife’s behalf — anywhere but London?

Fate had driven them apart, as of course they had both known it would. She had put away the necklace he had given her, the books and clothes, along with her girlish belief in the power of love. Buried under the wreckage her life had become was her hope that a woman could change her own world.

But obviously this was her mind, distraught, playing tricks on her. The Duke of Gloucester could not be here in the Westminster gardens. Summer burst into the tears she had been trying to hold back, and dropped miserably onto a bench.

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