Emma Campion - A Triple Knot (43 page)

Again, when the activity round the pavilions quieted, Efa escorted Joan out the door, where Hugh waited to take her to Thomas’s tent. Otho and Raoul withdrew on her arrival.

Just before dawn, Hugh came to escort her back to the palace. They slipped silently round couples tucked in the alleyways between pavilions and over men passed out from drink. Near
the side door of the palace, a man stepped out from the shadows to bar their way.

“Let me escort you in, cousin.”

“Ned. What are you doing out here?” Joan could not see his expression, could not guess his mood.

“Enjoying myself, just like you and everyone else.” He waved Hugh away. “I’ll not harm my dear cousin.”

“My lord, my orders were to see her safely to the door,” Hugh protested.

“Do you doubt the word of your prince, Hugh of Carlisle?”

“No, my lord. I—”

“Go along, Hugh,” Joan said. “I will be safe with my cousin the prince.”

He bowed and hastened away.

Ned took Joan’s arm. “Come with me before your Thomas raises an alarm.” He hurried her toward the rose garden while she protested that she was tired. He laughed. “It is no wonder. I don’t imagine you’ve slept. Just a moment. We need to talk.”

She yanked her arm from his grasp and stepped away. “You’ve ignored me since you arrived. Now, in the middle of the night, you accost me?”

“It’s the only time I know
she
won’t see us. I know what my grandam told you, and I cannot let her, of all people, poison you against the one who’s always been your champion.”

“What are you talking about?” The way he leaned close, imploring, unsettled her.

“I was so young, Joan, so frightened. If you’d married Edward Montagu, you would be gone from my life, and I couldn’t imagine it. But it was an awful thing I did. I’ve done penance for that every day since, I swear. When I saw how I’d hurt you—I’ve never forgiven myself. But I should have told you. I am so sorry you heard it from her.”

“Heard what?” she asked, though her weary mind already knew the answer, the truth that had always lain coiled in her
heart awakened, filling her with dismay. She had loved him too much to believe it. She huddled into her cloak and tried to pass him.

He caught her shoulders, pleading with her. “How old was I, six? Seven? I didn’t think, I just acted.”

“On the advice of an astrologer?”

“She told you that? She likes to think it. But I love you, Joan. I’ve always loved you.”

“And so you drowned my Bruno? What is wrong with you? What canker grew in you so young, a prince who had everything? Why are you telling me this now? To ruin my happiness?”

“She didn’t tell you? She said if I paid court to you she would tell you.”

“No. We talked of my marriage to Thomas. She said nothing of your unforgivable act.”

He turned away, cursing himself. She took the opportunity to move past him.

“Joan, please, don’t forsake me!” He caught her waist, pulled her backward against him, kissing her neck. “I beg you. I’ll be a friend to Thomas. I’ll help you anyway I can. I swear. I will be godfather to your firstborn, eh?” He kissed her again, then let her go. “Come. I’ll walk you to the door. Efa will be worried.”

“No.” She held herself away from him. “No. I cannot be with you right now.” She remembered him holding Bruno, lifeless. Her sweet Bruno. She remembered the fear in Ned’s eyes, and then that gesture, the one she’d made herself forget, as he handed Bruno to her, pressing his forehead to her shoulder. Caught out. She’d refused to remember it.

“Joan!” He reached for her.

She gathered her skirts and ran to Efa, standing at the side door, lantern in hand.

T
HOMAS HELD HIS BREATH AS
N
ED PASSED BENEATH A TORCH HEADING
back to the pavilions, muttering curses, his face twisted with anger, a contrast to his pleading humility moments earlier. Then Thomas looked back to Joan, watching until he saw Efa put her arm round his beloved and escort her within.

“Come. We’ve seen all there is to see,” Raoul whispered. “You were right. She is true. I am glad of that.”

“I’d not understood how much he loved her.”

“Ah. That is also good to know.”

“Thank you, my friend. I’d not seen that.” Lucienne had been right. He must watch his back with the prince. “It
is
good to know.”

T
HE LEAVE-TAKINGS WERE AS TERRIBLE AS WHEN SEEING LOVED
ones off to war. Which of them would not return? The church bell in the town of Windsor had rung several times since dawn, signaling new plague dead. The celebrants shrouded themselves in cloaks fumigated with juniper wood, the fires dotting the upper and lower wards. In the chaos, Joan and Thomas had no need to hide. They clung to each other.

“Swear you will ride straight home, no tarrying, and light the fires all round the castle,” Joan implored.

“I swear, my love. And you? Where will you go?”

“We’re to Westminster to close the house, then Bourne with the Wakes.”

“Listen to Efa’s every instruction.” Thomas kissed her once more. “I’ll come for you as soon as I hear from the lawyers.”

Maud embraced her, Otho pecked her cheek. When they were gone, she rushed up to the battlements to catch a last glimpse. But Ned was there. She shook her head at him and
crossed to the other side of the tower, calling out to Thomas, waving. He glanced up, lifted his hand. “God keep you, my love!” she whispered.

“Joan—” Ned came up behind her and reached out for her. “She meant for this to break us apart.”

“There is no us to break apart. It’s Thomas I love, Ned. Thomas.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Don’t.” She hurried away—from him, from herself and her willful blindness.

F
or a moment, standing in the orchard, breathing in the late-summer smells of damp grass, ripening apples, and freshly cut hay in the fields just beyond the low stone wall, Joan took joy in being alive. She slipped off her shoes and relished the sensation of moist grass and uneven earth beneath her feet, bringing as it did a rush of memories—high-pitched children’s voices, hers and her brother John’s, as they dashed round the trees in pursuit of each other; slipping out one night in hopes of catching sight of the owl that called, but sensing more than hearing the rush of its feathers, and then a small animal crying out in pain and terror; helping in the harvest of apples, amazing all with her agility in climbing trees.

Such happy memories were few and quickly faded as one scent overwhelmed the others. Decay. Just beyond her feet were windfall apples, pecked by birds and so brown they must have lain there for days, some so shriveled that they might have fallen months ago. The orchard stood neglected, the gardener and his family all dead of the plague. Joan bowed her head and prayed for their souls, and for all victims and their families. In June the pestilence had taken her uncle, Thomas Wake, and Maud Holland, whom she’d so quickly grown to love, and through the
summer countless others. It truly seemed the end of days, the end of all hope.

Noticing the lengthening shadows, Joan dared stay in the orchard no longer. Her mother might wake and call for her. Slipping into her shoes, Joan rejoined Helena and the two armed retainers who had escorted her outside the castle walls. Fear and disorder stalked the land. Only within the castle walls did the household feel safe, yet even there the Death walked.

Like the orchard, the fields and gardens looked abandoned. Except for the cut hay, evidence that someone had made the animals a priority. Even the steward’s stone-and-timber house, in which Blanche Wake had sequestered herself with a few healthy servants, looked abandoned, shuttered against the lovely day.

A man stood in the gatehouse doorway.

“John!” Joan hurried to her brother and embraced him.

“Am I in time?”

“I think so. Come.”

Efa was busily shaking cushions and coverlets out the open casement. Within the great bed, the curtains pulled aside, lay Countess Margaret, so shrunken as to appear to be but a suggestion of the woman she had been. But she watched with an alertness that belied her weakened state. Joan sat on the edge of the bed, near her mother’s head, and took one of her hands. It was hot, and the skin felt like dry parchment loosely wrapped round her prominent bones. So close, Joan smelled the sickness despite her fragrant necklace of herbs. She prayed, as she had done since the boils appeared, that her mother might be one of the rare survivors. She had already lived longer than most.

“You are so kind to me,” Margaret whispered.

“Joan, do you dare touch her?” John’s voice shook.

“Look who’s here, Mother.”

“Is it John?” Margaret gasped for breath. “Come so far?”

Joan motioned him closer. “So she can see you,” she whispered.

He did not stay long in the chamber. “Are you mad, sister? Come, take the air.” His caution was like Blanche’s, though she had sat with her husband when he succumbed in London on the cusp of June. Joan, Blanche, and Margaret had then come north to Lincolnshire, hoping the pestilence might pass them by. But it had not.

When John had gone, Margaret tried to sit up, gesturing for Joan to come closer.

“I beg your forgiveness, my child,” she whispered, grasping her shoulder. “You were so young, so inexperienced, and I fed you to the wolves.”

“There are no wolves in England,” Joan said as she eased her mother back onto the cushions. “I have it on the best authority.”

“Lions, then. There are lions in the Tower.”

Joan almost smiled at her mother’s acuity, even on her deathbed, for the king did keep lions in the Tower of London. Caged, a symbol of the powerful whom he so yearned to conquer.

“And I foiled you all by making my own choice.”

“I pray for you, Joan. That you and Thomas win, that you have children and prosper.”

“Rest now. You’ll need your strength to attend my wedding.”

Joan had been interrogated by the tribunal of English bishops two weeks earlier, she and Margaret going to London for a night, Blanche too fearful to make the trip. They had been hopeful on their return, for the first time daring to begin planning the wedding. And then Joan had awakened in the night to find her mother burning with fever beside her. She cursed herself for asking her mother to accompany her. The manservant who attended them had died within days, and one of the two retainers two days later.

Just as dawn sharpened the shadows in the room, Margaret’s hand went limp in Joan’s.

“Mother!” Joan cried out as she bowed over her mother’s wasted body, weeping to remember her strength, her fierce determination to protect her children from the royal family, who had stood by while her husband, their father, was butchered.

Efa knelt beside Joan, holding her close as she bent her own head in prayer.

Later, the two washed Margaret’s body with loving care and dressed it in fragrant oils, then wound her in a shroud sweetened with fragrant herbs. They burned all the bedclothes and the garments they’d worn in tending her, and then, as John and Blanche accompanied the coffin to the churchyard, Joan and Efa closed themselves in together, sharing their grief and waiting to see whether the Death would take them.

W
ith what trepidation Joan boarded the king’s barge, sent for her to answer his summons to Eltham, where she, Thomas, and Will would learn Pope Clement’s decision. As the barge approached the landing for Eltham Palace, Joan pressed her feet to the deck and stood tall, fighting lightheadedness, knowing the foolishness of quailing now, after all her efforts. Nine and a half years she had waited to be free to live with her husband. Soon she would know if it would ever be so. She thought it a cruel thing, to be denied the courtesy of receiving the news in solitude. But the king insisted that they all be present.

Frost crunched beneath her boots as she stepped onto the frozen ground. And there was Thomas, dismounting and rushing forward, enfolding her in his cloak, holding her close, his warm breath calming her.

“No matter what happens, know that I will always love you.” He pushed back the hood of her cloak and kissed her.

“You are my first and only love, Thomas. We will be together. It must be so. God honors his own law. He must.”

But she saw in the lines that etched his face that he held the same question in his throat: Did the pope honor God’s law? She took his hand, holding it tightly—so afraid, so afraid, and yet grateful that he was here, that he had survived.

“I have a plan if the pope should fail us. Raoul offered long ago to make me his captain. He offered a château, prestige—”

“But he’s here, a prisoner of the Crown.”

“He’s to be sent back in the new year to raise the rest of his ransom. We could accompany him.”

“You’re a Garter Knight. The king would never forgive you.” She searched his face. Could he be serious? “It would be treason, Thomas.”

“I know. And while my mother lived I could not do this. But now—what are our lives without each other, Joan?”