Katherine

This is one of the great love stories of medieval fiction.

A "mystery"? Yes. The mystery is: how did it come about that the great John o' Gaunt (son of Edward III, brother of the Black Prince, and uncle and regent of the boy king Richard II) should marry his one-time mistress, the commoner Katherine Swynford and that their children should be legitimised as the Beauforts and become the ancestors of Edward IV, Richard III, Edward V and the Tudors and Stuarts, the Royal Houses of England and Scotland? Was it witchcraft, as was rumoured at the time? On John o' Gaunt's epitaph in old St Paul's, she was referred to "eximia pulchritudine feminam" while a monk of St Mary's Abbey wrote of her that she was "une deblesse et enchanteresse".

The truth, according to Anya Seton, was simpler. Katherine and her sister were orphans whom the Queen took under her wing. Katherine was sent to a convent and her sister was married off to the courtier and poet Geoffrey Chaucer. One spring morning five years later, Katherine was brought back to the court - to be married to a minor knight, Sir Hugh Swynford. There she meets John of Gaunt, the great Duke of Lancaster and founder of the Royal House of Lancaster. They fall in love. The rest of the story (and the rest of her life) is the story of that love through periods of soaring happiness and great sorrow, through the Black Death, the accession of the boy king Richard II, the Peasants' Revolt and the burning down of Lancaster's Savoy Palace, until at last Lancaster's second wife (Costanza, Queen of Castille) dies and Katherine becomes Duchess of Lancaster and first lady in the land (for Richard's young queen has also recently died).

No magic then, and no mystery - except the magic and mystery which is True Love.