Free Katherine by Anya Seton

the lists while Ellis his squire removed his armour, but Hugh was unaware of Ellis or his surroundings. His blood ran thick as hot lead in his veins and he suffered desire, shame, and confused torment that nothing in his life had prepared him for.
    Hugh Swynford was of pure Saxon blood except for one Danish ancestor, the fierce invading Ketel who sailed up the Trent in 870, pillaging and ravishing as he went. A Swynford girl was amongst those ravished, but she must have inspired some affection in her Dane since she lured him from his thorpe in Lincolnshire to her own home at the swine's ford in southern Leicestershire, where he settled for some years and adopted her family's name.
    The Swynfords were all fighters. Hugh's forefathers had resisted the Norman invasion until the grown males of their clan had been exterminated and even now, three hundred years later, Hugh stubbornly rejected any tinge of Norman graces or romanticism. He went to Mass occasionally as a matter of course, but at heart he was pagan as the savages who had once danced around Beltane's fire on May Night, who worshipped the ancient oaks and painted themselves with blue woad - a plant indeed which still grew on Hugh's manor in Lincolnshire.
    He was an ungraceful knight, impatient of chivalric rules, but in real battle he was a shrewd and terrifying fighter.
    Hugh's branch of the Swynford family had long ago left Leicestershire and returned to Lincolnshire beside the river Trent south of Gainsborough; and when Hugh was a child, his father, Sir Thomas, had fulfilled a long-time ambition and bought the manor of Kettlethorpe where Ketel the Dane had first settled. For this purchase he used proceeds from the sale of his second wife Nichola's estates in Bedfordshire, at which the poor lady wept and lamented woefully, for she was afraid of the towering forests around Kettlethorpe, and of the marshes and the great river Trent with its stealthy death-dealing floods. The Lady Nichola was also afraid of the dark stone manor house, which was said to be haunted by a demon dog, the pooka hound. Most of all she was afraid of her husband who beat her cruelly and constantly reproached her for her barrenness. So her wailings and laments were done in secret.
    Hugh thought little about Kettlethorpe one way or the other, beyond accepting it as his home and heritage, and he was a restless youth. At fifteen he struck out into the world. He joined the army under the King, when Edward invaded Scotland, and there met John of Gaunt, who was then only the Earl of Richmond. The two boys were of the same age and Hugh conceived for the young Prince, whose charm and elegance of manner were so unlike his own, a grudging admiration.
    At sixteen, Hugh, thirsting for more battle, had fought under the Prince of Wales at Poitiers. Hugh had killed four Frenchmen with his battle-axe, and shared later in the hysterical rejoicing at the capture of King Jean of France.
    Hugh won his spurs after that and returned to Kettlethorpe to find that his father had suffered an apoplectic stroke in his absence. Hugh stayed home until Sir Thomas finally died and Hugh became lord of the manor. But as soon as his father had been laid in a granite tomb near the altar of the little Church of SS. Peter and Paul at Kettlethorpe, Hugh made new plans for departure.
    He detested his stepmother the Lady Nichola, whom he considered a whining rag of a woman overgiven to fits and the seeing of melancholy visions, so he left her and his lands in charge of a bailiff. He fitted himself out with his father's best armour and favourite stallion, then engaged as squire young Ellis de Thoresby, the son of a neighbouring knight from Nottinghamshire across the Trent.
    Thus properly accoutred, Hugh rode down to London, to the Savoy Palace. He owed knight's service to the Duke of Lancaster by reason of Hugh's manor at Coleby, which belonged to the Duke's honour of Richmond, but he had not the money for the fee, and in any case much