Free Hugh and Bess by Susan Higginbotham Page A

needs of his small audience.
      During the years of captivity that had followed his surrender (a scene that never failed to elicit groans from his brothers when Hugh told it), he had vowed to go on pilgrimage to Santiago if he was freed and pardoned. God having kept his end of the bargain (albeit somewhat tardily, in Hugh's humble opinion), Hugh kept his the following spring, first paying Emma and her bed a visit before enduring the rigors of self-enforced celibacy. It was his first time abroad, and besides the interests of foreign lands, he enjoyed the anonymity of his pilgrimage, where he traveled not as Hugh le Despenser, the son of a notorious man who had died a traitor's death, but as plain Hugh, a gentleman of modest means with some knightly training. Well provided with money, and skilled enough with his sword to repel any of the rogues who preyed on those traveling the pilgrim route, he would not have been sorry to have remained wandering overseas were it not for his family and Emma expecting to see him return. So he thought, at least, until he stood aboard the deck of the ship that was taking him back home and caught his first glimpse of the English coastline, barely visible through the mist. He felt himself smile, and he smiled even more broadly when he stepped on land just in time to be greeted by a rain that was too light to make travel impossible and too hard to make travel comfortable. In Spain the sun had shone every day, and now that Hugh thought about it, that was simply unnatural.
      Back in England, having first hurried to Hanley to spend a joyous afternoon in Emma's bedchamber, he moved onto the manors that the king had granted him as a form of recompense for his father's and grandfather's much more extensive estates, all of which had been forfeited to the crown. Running them, and helping his mother with her own estates, someday destined to be Hugh's provided that he stayed on the king's good side, kept him busy. Still, though nothing he was doing was bringing the name of Despenser into ill repute, nothing was giving it any new luster either. Fortunately, the Scots soon remedied this situation.
      Hugh rode off to his first battle in the summer of 1333 with mixed feelings. He had a certain liking for the Scots. Briefly during the second Edward's reign, he and a couple of other youths had been hostages in Scotland. He had been treated well by his hosts, and his short stay there had passed pleasantly. Besides, like his mother, he held to the principle that no one who had sent Mortimer home in humiliation, as England's old enemies had in 1327, could be completely without merit. Too, it was humiliating to be riding in the retinue of his cousin Edward de Bohun as a mere man-at-arms when the Bohuns and all of Hugh's other male relations had been knights, or even knight bannerets, for years. Yet when battle was joined at a place called Halidon Hill, Hugh's ambivalence and shame deserted him, and he fought fiercely, sharing in an English victory that no one had seen in a generation.
      Knowing that he had fought well, Hugh was nonetheless somewhat wary when Bohun rounded up him and a couple of others to see the king. Even after he arrived in the king's presence and realized that he had been brought there not to be reprimanded but to be knighted, he was a bit uneasy when Edward's sword thumped upon his shoulder, lest the king decide to strike off a Despenser head out of sheer habit. But nothing went amiss, and his royal cousin stared at him thoughtfully after Hugh obeyed his command to rise. “I have been told that you are a good fighter, Sir Hugh,” he said. “You shall be useful to me, I think.”
      Hugh looked around the field, where England's enemies lay dead in heaps. “Provided the Scots can keep on obliging,” he said dryly.
      “Oh, they will,” said the king. “You can’t keep them down. Count on it.” He clapped Hugh on the back a bit awkwardly; he had witnessed the deaths of both Hugh's