Emma Campion - A Triple Knot (41 page)

In October, one of the guards fell from his horse in a storm. Though he suffered multiple injuries, including a broken leg and a gash in his shoulder, he refused Efa’s help, believing her to be a witch. As his wound festered and his fever rose, the other guards abandoned him in the yard for fear he carried the pestilence. They no longer came in to walk the walls.

Desperate, the injured guard finally accepted Efa’s ministrations, and as he healed he told Joan all she needed to know about the other guards’ habits and fears, and the lay of the land to the west.

In late October, they were ready. A villager ingested Efa’s tincture of angelica, mint, feverwort, and rosemary, and when his sweat was sufficient to soak through his shirt he stumbled to the gates of the keep, crying out for Efa. As he pounded on the gate the guards stayed back, not daring to touch him. Efa and Alf opened the gate and let him in. A day later, two more villagers arrived and were taken in. By nightfall on All Hallows Eve, the guards had fallen back to the farmhouse in which they bunked, and with much shrieking and clatter the villagers went about scaring away the demons, covering the sound of Joan’s escape with Efa, Helena, and the crippled guard. She brought nothing with her but Jester in his basket. Beyond the village, Alan Holland waited with horses.

M
ARGARET AND THE
W
AKES HAD WITHDRAWN TO HER BROTHER
’
S
northernmost manor to flee the pestilence, and it was there that Alan brought Joan. Through chill rains and a first snow they
rode, Alan and four of Thomas Wake’s armed retainers surrounding the three women and the injured guard, intimidating farmers to allow them shelter in barns on the nights they found no abbey or inn. Having done no riding for more than a year, all three women found the first days difficult, but they refused Alan’s offer to commandeer a cart that would slow their pace. Joan would have galloped all the way but for the muddy roads being too dangerous for horses at such speed. It was impossible that Will could be in pursuit, but she could not shake the fear.

Curled into their hoods as they rode, there was little conversation until they stopped for the night, but it was enough to bring Joan close to Alan, who enjoyed telling her stories about Thomas in his youth, as well as family legends. He befriended Jester and often rode with him enfolded in his cloak to give Joan more ease in the saddle, knowing that her injured wrist ached with the jostling as well as with the cold and damp.

The snow had turned to a bone-chilling sleet the day they rode into her uncle’s yard, and Margaret swept Joan into the hall before she said a word, rushing her to a bedchamber where she was stripped of her wet clothes and tucked into a bed soon warmed by hot stones. Held in her mother’s arms, Joan wanted to feel safe. But this woman who now expressed such remorse for obeying the king might do so again. It was up to Joan to defend herself.

Alan stayed with them for a week, winning over the Wakes and her mother as a considerate guest always ready to lend a hand, a good listener, an entertaining storyteller. He was a man easy in himself, with little ambition and seemingly none of the sense of responsibility to restore his family’s honor that was such a foundation of Thomas’s character. Joan’s gratitude toward him only deepened as she heard of the death toll from the pestilence in the West Country through August and September—villages where almost everyone died, the few survivors left half-mad and wandering the countryside for food and shelter, towns faring
little better. Not even the royal family had been spared, her uncle told her. She grieved to hear that Princess Joan had died of the pestilence on her way to wed the heir to the throne of Castile, and the infant William, born in summer, had succumbed to the pestilence in a matter of months. Alan had risked far more than the king’s censure to rescue her.

When Alan took his leave, Joan handed him two letters—one for Thomas, which said nothing of Will’s attack, for she did not want to give King Edward any cause to deny the Hollands the honor of being Knights of the Garter, and one for Lucienne to put in Bella’s hands, in which she provided all the horrible details. Joan counted on Bella to share it with Ned. She wanted him to know what Will had done. Only Ned could punish Will with impunity; only he could ensure that Will would never again feel safe. And turning him so completely and irrevocably against Will was the best revenge she could devise at present. Alan promised that he would leave it to her to tell Thomas of the incident.

She stood on the threshold of her uncle’s hall, watching Alan disappear into a wintry mist, praying for his safe arrival at the royal court.

I
N
A
PRIL
J
OAN
, M
ARGARET
,
AND THE
W
AKES HEADED SOUTH FROM
Cumberland. King Edward had sent messengers to all the corners of his realm summoning the nobility to Windsor for St. George’s Day, when they would celebrate the first gathering of the Order of the Garter. All were challenged to defy the pestilence for the honor and glory of the great realm of England, but in truth they were honor-bound to obey the summons of their liege lord. Margaret expressed outrage at his callousness in risking so many lives.
Is it so different from war?
Joan wondered. But the news cheered her. She could not wait to see Thomas.

First they would spend a week in Westminster, where Joan
would meet with Magister Vyse, the lawyer who was to record her testimony and present it to the papal legate. Her aunt had chosen him as a man who could be trusted to represent Joan’s interests rather than making a name for himself or pleasing the king. Joan was eager to be heard.

They kept a brisk pace, pausing only briefly during the day to rest, eat a little, and relieve themselves, stopping at night in religious houses where they were expected, though not necessarily welcome. Lay brothers and sisters covered their mouths and noses with cloth and wore gloves to serve them, and the abbots and abbesses kept their distance when greeting them, fearful of the poisonous miasma that carried the pestilence. They rode past villages in which the only signs of life were animals abandoned and left to roam, found streams befouled by plague corpses, gagged on smoke from funeral pyres when the wind was in their direction. Joan felt as if she were back in Calais, only this time she was among the besieged. She rejoiced when they left the land on the last day of the journey to travel down the Thames by barge. The pestilence had cured Joan of her fear of traveling by water.

The house in Westminster felt forlorn, dusty and cold. Joan freed Jester to explore the echoing rooms as the servants set to work cleaning and lighting fires, but he chose to stay close to her. Walking out the following morning to the office of Magister Vyse, she found the streets largely deserted. The lawyer said the royal family had spent the months since the Christmas and New Year’s revels at Kings Langley and most of the government had been shut down since the plague gained ground in late summer of the previous year. Now that it was so empty, he thought it quite the safest place to be. But he warned them not to go east to London, which was as crowded as ever.

He asked Joan to give her testimony regarding her betrothal and her night with Thomas in her own words, his clerks bending to the task of recording all that she said, the scratching of
their quills an arrhythmic accompaniment to her embarrassingly explicit account. When she had finished, the magister asked thoughtful questions about the weeks leading up to the betrothal, the situation with Albret, the friendship of the Van Arteveldes, the betrothal and marriage to Will on her return to England, and, most recently, her incarceration at Mold and Will’s attack. He apologized for pressing her for details, assuring her that he appreciated how uncomfortable it must be to relive it all.

Lady Margaret listened with head bowed, twisting a sachet of spices in her hands.

When at last the magister declared that he had all he needed, Joan thanked him. “As painful as it has been, I am relieved that at last I’ve been truly heard.”

He warned her that it was only a step, that the case was far from resolved. “It’s true that the marriage to Montagu would never have stood a chance in an objective court of law, but the papal court—” He shook his head. “Rome, Avignon, the corruption is the same. And, considering it was all done with the blessing of King Edward and your mother, the outcome is hardly certain. All I can do is present the truth and trust that someone respects the law.”

His words dampened the hope with which she’d met the day. But she gave him a strong handshake. “One way or another, I will be free of him.”

Vyse squinted at her as if wondering whether she had heard him, then shrugged and wished her good day.

T
he lower ward was waking up, servants carrying poles and fabric for the pavilions that would house the Garter Knights and their entourages, others carting blue-and-silver pennants, trestles, wooden slabs, and benches to prepare the great hall for the celebratory feast. Joan climbed the tower stairs up to the battlements, eager to breathe the fresh air aloft. Even out in the castle yard, juniper fires burned to push back pestilential vapors. But the queen’s quarters were far worse, the smoke so thick it burned her eyes and raked her throat, snaking up to coil round the roof beams, glowering down on the subdued courtiers, a constant reminder of the pestilence closing its deadly fist around the kingdom. Through the night Joan and her mother had sipped honeyed water to ease their coughs. No wonder the queen’s ladies spoke in hoarse whispers their litanies of the plague dead and the debauchery inspired by the fear that the pestilence signaled the end of days—public copulation, wild dancing until dawn.

Joan had arrived bristling with righteous anger, ready for a battle with her royal cousins if they dared to challenge her escape. But the queen was a pinched and pale presence, still deeply in mourning for the two children she’d lost to the plague the previous summer. Ned had not yet arrived, but Bella had assured
Joan of the success of her letter. At the New Year’s joust, Ned had knocked Will off his horse. “A broken leg, a shoulder out of joint, and a broken wrist—he was carried from the field in intense pain.” Bella licked her lips. “Ned outdid himself.” And the king—Bella had not spared him the details of what Joan had suffered from Will, but Edward had merely admonished him to treat her with the respect that was her due as his wife and a woman of royal blood. As for Will’s legal support, Philippa had handed that over to Isabella, the dowager queen.

“God help us,” Margaret had whispered when Joan recounted the news. “Let me go to her. I once knew her well.”

Joan refused the offer. “I will not subject you to that woman.” But she’d not yet gathered the courage to confront Isabella herself.

Up on the battlements she looked down at a heartening view, the hustle and bustle of folk milling round, the beautiful multicolored pavilions, the long lines of travelers waiting to enter the gate, horses pawing the ground, people dismounting to greet friends, dogs nosing about. And already newcomers crowded the lower ward. Had she missed Thomas’s arrival? Leaning farther over, Joan scoured the crowd immediately below. Her heart skipped a beat—Lady Maud looked up, raising a gloved hand in greeting. As Joan let go to wave back, someone caught her by the waist and kissed her neck.

“Thomas!” she turned in his arms and hugged him hard. “Oh, my love. I prayed and prayed the pestilence had not reached Lincolnshire.”

They kissed and stepped apart, drinking each other in. Joan forgot everything in the joy of the reunion.

“God bless Alan. I would not be here were it not for him.”

Pain flitted across Thomas’s scarred face. He bowed his head. “The pestilence has taken my brother.”

“Alan? But was he not with you?”

“With Lucienne, at her daughter’s in Sussex. Lucienne,
Alan, her son-in-law, several of her grandchildren—they are all dead.”

“Mother in heaven, I sent him to her with a letter for Bella. I thought Lucienne would be at court.”

“You sent him the first time. He left her, then returned after delivering your letters to the princess and to me. He gave her the love I couldn’t. They both had joy in the end. I pray it was enough for a lifetime. But it is not your fault.” He kissed her hand.

“Lucienne and Alan.” Joan crossed herself and bowed her head. “God grant them peace. They were so good to us.”

Thomas lifted her chin, kissed her forehead. “We owe it to them to ensure that we are together.”

“Yes.”

“And you, my love? What is your news from Magister Vyse?”

She told him, wishing it were more hopeful, but he did not seem surprised. “We have formidable earthly opponents. But we have God on our side. Still, we must have a care. Come. We are too visible up here.”

As she led him back down into the crowded ward, they planned how she would join him in his pavilion that night.

Otho waited for them at the bottom. Lady Maud had been taken away by Joan’s mother. “And we must see to our pavilion, eh, Thomas?” Otho kissed Joan’s hand. “You will forgive me, but we have much to do.”

Joan urged Thomas to go. “I will find you later, and we can talk.” She pushed through the crowd to St. George’s Chapel, lighting candles at the Lady altar for Alan and Lucienne. A long time she knelt before the Blessed Mother, remembering two loving souls. When she rose, she was ready to seek out the she-wolf in her den, feeling Lucienne and Alan at her back, guiding her forward.