The First Princess of Wales (14 page)

“Hot, spiced malmsey for Your Grace while you wait, the prioress says,” her high-pitched voice told him.

He shifted uneasily from one warm booted foot to the other, suddenly embarrassed by the tiny woman’s bare feet on the stone floor. “My thanks, sister. Is the lady not arrived yet? The prioress promised I might have a word alone with her before she went in to her mother.”

“I know not any of this business, Your Grace,” the nun said as he took the warm metal goblet from her tray. The prioress’s best wine, spiced and heated, the little nun thought, but then, this handsome, tall, and earnest young man was their next king. By the Blessed Virgin, if he knew only part of what sorts of terrible things the feverish Lady Margaret had said yesterday when she was helping to nurse her, he might not come tramping clear over here in the snow from wherever he had been to see the daughter of some lady who accused his family of the vilest of deeds. And then, to say he wished to comfort the bitter lady’s daughter who would no doubt have her ear filled with those hateful ravings—if her mother still lived when she got here—well, thank the Blessed Virgin eternally she herself was a cloistered nun safe away from all such weavings of Fortune’s snares in the cold, evil world. Then, as she turned to go, suddenly wishing to comfort the young man, the little nun said, “Do not fret for aught, Your Grace. If our dear prioress says the lady will see you, it shall be so.
Benedicite.
”

“Peace to you, little sister,” he murmured before the door closed again on his thoughts. He had taken no mistress these past five months, but, of course, he could never just blurt that out to the maid with the champagne-colored hair the moment he saw her. He always felt right on the cutting edge of emotion when he thought of her like this, his Jeannette. He felt the desire to protect, but to possess; the will to give, and yet to seize; to drown her in pleasure, yet to take his own pleasure from her whatever protests came. She could be all wild fire and warm honey at once—in one glance was the softness of a woman and the brazenness of an untamed—

Another rap on the door sent his feverish musings crashing into a stone wall of fierce expectation. The gray-eyed prioress looked in, her mouth forming the words he had awaited for so long. “Your Grace, the Lady Joan has arrived, and I shall usher her in for one moment while I prepare her mother for the visit. Your time with her may be brief, you understand.”

“Aye. My deepest thanks, my Lady Prioress.”

He stood rooted suddenly to the center of the rough stone floor, he, Edward, Prince of Wales, feeling every bit the expectant little knave awaiting his first great gift of horse or hall—or battlefield—to call his own. There was only one narrow stone bench in the bare room and one little table. Why had he not told the prioress he needed two cushioned chairs, better lights than these fat tallow candles and wine to warm her from the cold?

The wooden door pivoted inward. She came in alone and the door closed on the watchful prioress’s face he glimpsed behind Joan’s brown-cloaked shoulder. Flecks of snow etched her head and shoulders in twinkling diamond dust before they melted into her woolen cloak. He meant to speak, to rush to her to take her hands, but they both stood their ground as though frozen to ice statues by the cold.

She curtsied shakily, her face still lifted, her eyes unbelieving. “No one told me you would be here, my Lord Edward. Did—did the queen send you?”

“No, Jeannette.” He stepped forward and the weak light of the room made her eyes look deeper violet than he had remembered. Here among all these stones in late December, she smelled of cold, fresh air mingled with wild gillyflowers. “I only learned your lady mother is very ill after I arrived. I thought perhaps it was merely a Yuletide visit you planned to make here, and I wanted—I needed—to see you alone, I had thought you would have come to see her long ere this. It has been almost five months, Jeannette.”

Her nostrils flared and her eyes widened in her beautiful, oval face. Her high cheekbones looked almost delicate in the wavering light; her full mouth set in the firm line of obstinacy he remembered only too well.

“After everything,” she began, her sweet tones rising in petulant stubbornness already, “you believed I might come to see her so that I might see you?”

“I had hoped, Jeannette, obviously in vain that you might think softly on me after these months apart—to want to spend some time with me—”

“Here? Here with the blessed nuns hovering and my mother ill to death in the next room?”

“Hush, love.” He stepped closer and seized her gesticulating hands; yet he did not touch her otherwise. His heart soared when he noted the beryl ring on the little finger of her cold left hand. “Cease, Jeannette. The nuns do not need to hear all this, and I told you, I knew naught of your dear mother’s illness until I came today. I hardly meant we would stay here in this little room together. I am sorry for your mother’s illness. Perhaps, after all, I came to comfort—”

“Please, my lord prince, please let me go.”

He dropped her hands and stepped back as though she had struck him. His eyes skimmed her light golden head from which her hood had fallen when she curtsied. “My timing is wrong, and for that I apologize, Jeannette.” His voice barely reached her as she whirled away. Her heart beat so wildly at his mere presence she could not think, could not breathe. And now, like this, both hopeful and distraught, to have to go in to face her mother—suddenly, she wanted desperately to reach out to him to make him understand.

“You have no right to wonder why I have not come before to visit her, Your Grace,” she began, her voice on edge as she realized she had not meant to taunt him. “It had naught to do with wanting or not wanting to see you.”

She could tell by his voice he had taken a step closer to her again. “I know full well that pious, noble ladies often take the vows of this order before—before they get too old, Jeannette. My own dear grandmother Isabella, once our queen, claims she will do the same before she dies to atone for her past sins.”

She pivoted to face him, unshed tears she could not explain clinging to her thick lashes. He stood so close her hems brushed his booted feet. How fine he looked, so strong and proud, leonine, a younger, taller image of his father—and so utterly out of her reach. “My mother atones for no sins, my lord prince,” she bit off her words. “She has been quite the recluse for as long as I can remember, and in fact I have been hardly welcome in her presence since as far back as my memories go.”

“But why, my Jeannette? Surely,
chérie,
you misinterpret.”

“Saints, it does not matter! Not anymore. That is why I am certain she is dying and has some final farewell. Perhaps, now she will finally tell me why she could never love me.”

He had reached for her before the quick knock on the door, so close it made them jump apart. The prioress’s kindly eyes went uneasily from Joan to the prince and noted well the strain on both their young, handsome faces.

“The Lady Margaret will see you now, Lady Joan. She drifts in and out of fevered sleep, and you must understand she is very weak. Yet she is eager to see you and has been asking for you since the early hours of this morning.”

“Aye. I am ready now.”

“Jeannette,” he said, so close to her yet. “I will wait here and we shall talk more.”

“No, Your Grace. Do not wait on my account, please do not.” Her eyes darted to the prioress. “And please thank Her Grace, the queen, for sending you.”

She preceded the prioress out into the hall, realizing as she did that the ploy of mentioning the queen before the nun was probably laughable. The prioress herself must have been in on the plan to inform the prince anytime the Lady Joan of Kent came to visit the St. Clares. So the strength and wealth of royalty could reach anywhere, accomplish anything. She should have learned that by now. And the prioress probably thought her heartless and rude to gainsay the heir to the throne and turn her back on him without a curtsy. Saints, let them all think as they would! Her own mother had never loved her and how could anyone expect the prince of all England to sue for love from her?

“In here, child,” the prioress murmured and opened an arched and pointed door. The room inside was dim. “I shall stay with you if you wish. The Lady Margaret is greatly troubled.”

“No, it is all right. I just—I thank you for your care of her, and I shall call if she has need of aid, Holy Mother.”

The prioress inclined her head and motioned the little nun sitting by the single, low wooden table and bedstead to follow her out. If only Edmund were closer than the long ride from Liddell, or even John could be here from Lord Salisbury’s lands far to the north, she thought, as she stepped forward.

A pale cast of candle glow softly etched the sleeping face. So much change in so little time! The cheeks were drawn, gaunt, the body under the woolen gray coverlet slight and unmoving. A rosary and large wooden crucifix drooped from one limp hand. The skin looked waxen, the eyelids faintly bluish. But the small breasts moved. She breathed.

Joan bent over the delicate form. “Mother? My dear lady mother. It is I, Joan. I came when you wanted, Mother.”

The wild violet eyes Joan had so clearly inherited shot open. The gaze jumped, darted, then focused on Joan’s face so close. “My own Edmund’s child. Dear, dear Edmund. He is dead, Joan,” she whispered, her voice like dried parchment.

Joan’s cold hand clasped her mother’s even colder one. “Aye, dearest mother, I know. A long, long time ago.”

“No. No!” The frail woman tried to pull herself up, but Joan pushed her gently back to her pillow. The silvery hair was spread wide across it like a pale, satin pillow of its own. “No, dearest Joan. He died but yesterday, again and again. Over and over!”

“Mother, please just rest. I am here now. You need your rest.”

The thin, birdlike hands gripped Joan’s wrist incredibly hard, and the pale lips carefully formed each word as though it were painful to speak. “I sent for you. I have to tell you, Joan, Edmund’s child, before it is too late.” A terrible coughing rattled the frail frame while Joan cradled the bony shoulders with one arm. She awkwardly eased one hip onto the edge of the straw mattress to hold her mother closer.

“Tell me then, Mother. Tell me and then rest. Edmund and John have been sent for by the queen even as I was.”

Lady Margaret’s body went rigid as though racked by some unspeakable terror before she relaxed again. “The queen, curse her soul! The king, too, and their babe the damned Prince of Wales. Curse, curse them all for his death this morning, your father’s cruel death.”

They had warned her of this, of course, the feverish mind, the unreality. “Mother, it is all right. The king and queen have been kind to me—and the prince in his own way. You must hush now and quiet those awful thoughts.”

“For years, for years—since they killed him yesterday, I have tried to forgive—to ask penance for my hatred. I have hidden myself away hoping, praying I could forgive. For that I never went out. For that I came here. For that loss of my Edmund, I could not bear to look on you, so much his dear face. He could not be here to rear you with me so it was not fair I do so alone.”

Perspiration stood out in huge beads on Lady Margaret’s white skin, and Joan reached for the sponge in the dish nearby to wipe her brow. “It is all right, dearest Mother. Be calm, please, just rest. I am happy to be here with you now. Everything is all right now.”

“No. I must tell you. Do not trust them. Do not love them. Your brother Edmund said the queen should be allowed to rear you, and all these days I tried not to tell you—but I must. I must!”

“Aye, aye. Tell me now. I am listening.”

“This king—Philippa too—they let your father die. My dearest Edmund, the king’s own uncle—they let him die.”

Saints, she is so confused in her delirium, Joan reasoned. Edmund had told her more than once that their father had been accused, trapped, and executed through the evil machinations of the vile Roger Mortimer, the lover of the king’s mother, Isabella.

“Mother, the queen now is Philippa. Mortimer is long dead, his accomplice de Maltravers has fled to Flanders, and Queen Isabella is in exile at Castle Rising all these years. Edmund explained it all to me.”

“Fool!” she hissed and the eyes went wildly piercing. “Listen to me! I have not forgiven though I have wearied myself with prayers and repentance and you must know. Listen. Mortimer had my dear husband arrested for trying to find if this present king’s father, Edward II, had been indeed foully murdered, but this Edward who even now sits upon the tainted throne—he let it, he wanted it to be done!”

“Dearest mother—”

“Aye, let me tell you now how it was. Mortimer had the old king murdered at Berkeley Castle, aye, and de Maltravers is to blame also. But this King Edward gained the throne from that dreadful crime, and he hardly wanted my dear Lord Edmund to stir up questions on the murder.” Sinews and veins stood out like cords on Lady Margaret’s neck as she went rigid and tried to rise. Joan helped her to sit as she leaned clumsily into her.

“Listen, my Joan. Listen and remember all this as I will be gone tomorrow.”

“Mother, you must not speak thus.”

“I must go on so you will know what you must do. My Edmund, Earl of Kent—so decent a man to be so traitorously used. He only wanted what was right, but the young king did not want the truth. Murder, torture, hatred, and deceit—that is the royal Plantagenets. I have heard—heard they yet show favoritism to de Maltravers who lives richly in pretended exile in Flanders.”

Joan bent forward cradling the raving woman. She no longer argued or tried to calm the feverish words. She listened, wide-eyed, hypnotized by the tale so terrible it had to be true.

“He was so good, his motives so pure, my Edmund—he saved my very life from deepest despair when my first husband died. So loving. But they tricked him into saying he believed the murdered King Edward II might still be alive—indeed there was word he had escaped. Aye, Mortimer and de Maltravers had him arrested and hauled before Parliament with trumped-up charges of treason, but the boy-king, Edward III, whom Mortimer and Isabella helped rule—he abandoned his uncle Edmund in his hour of need—vacated himself from all our pleas and gave Mortimer the royal seal needed for the death warrant, too.”