“Well, Maude?” asked Bertram softly. “Is it ay or nay?”
“As you will, Master Lyngern.”
This was Bertram’s wooing; and Maude wondered, when she was alone, if any woman had been so wooed before.
Constance expressed the greatest satisfaction when she heard of her bower-woman’s approaching marriage; but one item of Bertram’s project she commanded altered—namely, that Maude’s nuptials should not take place on the same day as her own.
“Why, Maude!” she said, “if our two weddings be one day, I shall have but an half-day’s rejoical, and thou likewise! Nay, good maid! we will have each her full day, and a bonfire in the base court, and feasting, and dancing to boot. Both on one day, quotha! marry, but that were niggardly.”
So Maude was married on the Saturday previous to her mistress. She was dressed in lilac damask, trimmed with swansdown, and her hair, for the last time in her life, streamed over her shoulders and fell at its own sweet will. Matrons always tucked away their hair in the dove-cote, while widows were careful not to show a single lock. Bertram exhibited extraordinary splendour, for he was generally rather careless about his dress. He wore a red damask gown, trimmed with rabbit’s fur; a bright blue under-tunic; a pair of red boots with white buttons; and he bore in his hand a copped hat of blue serge. The copped hat had no brim, and was about a foot and a half in height. Bertram’s appearance, therefore, to say the least, was striking.
When the ceremony was just completed, without any previous intimation, the Duke of York, who was present, drew his sword, and lightly struck the shoulder of the bridegroom, before he could rise from his knees.
“Rise, Sir Bertram Lyngern!”
So Maude became entitled at once to the honourable prefix of “Dame.”
The grander wedding was on the following Thursday. The Earl of Kent’s costume baffles description. Suffice it to say that it cost two thousand pounds. The royal bride doffed her widow’s weeds, and appeared in a crimson silk deeply edged with ermine, low in the neck, but with long sleeves to the wrist. She wore the dovecote, and over it an open circlet of gold and gems, to mark her royal rank.