The First Princess of Wales (30 page)

Men’s voices, closer now; tall shadows thrown across the entryway—Isabella on the prince’s arm laughing up at him with her voice of ringing, jangling chimes. Joan leaned her right shoulder into the wall to steady herself. Prince Edward looked hale and hearty—magnificent with the dual flash of whitest teeth and eyes as he laughed deeply and swept off his snow-covered velvet cap. He was garbed entirely in black and gold.

“Not the plague, God save us, not the bloody French or the gates of hell could prevail on us to spend a Yule away from such fair beauty,” his deep voice began while Isabella and those around Joan laughed and cheered.

The broad, arched doorway behind the prince filled with stamping hooded or hatted men, commenting, waving, grinning—but nothing seemed to register on Joan. The impact of his nearness, his voice, those huge shoulders, the tawny mane of hair—by the Virgin, she dare not gaze into his icy blue eyes or she was doomed. Her legs felt like water, the steps under her like the deck of a Channel ship in October. She despaired as she felt a steady blush creep up her neck, her fair cheeks, even the tips of her ears hidden under the wheat-hued, beribboned coils of heavy hair. No. No! She must not, could not, feel this way for him still!

In the press of ladies, she moved down the stairs directly behind Constantia, who had managed to step completely in front of her. In a curving line, the
demoiselles
mingled among the seven men, greeting the prince and his friends with kisses and fond embraces and the hooded servants with kind words and sweet smiles.

Joan crashed back to reality with a thud as her eyes swept the scene to fully assess it. Praise be, he had not brought Holland or Salisbury, but somehow, she had known he would not. No wonder Isabella was all giggles, for her Yuletide wish had come true: the tall, hawk-faced Sir John Chandos stood grinning at the prince’s elbow. The other three knights he had brought were his more raucous cronies—in plague time, when everyone wanted to escape the grim specter of hovering death, she should have expected as much. Black-haired and handsome, Sir Nickolas Dagworth was kissing Constantia directly in front of her, and that giant of a man, the only one Joan had ever seen taller than the prince, Sir Hugh Calveley, bellowed a laugh. Sir Robert Grey, whose reputation both as a great hunter and joker always preceded him, bent even now to take her hand in his cold one and plant a firm kiss on her cheek.

To her amazement, Joan found her voice. “And the prince no doubt brought you to play the Lord of Misrule at the Yuletide feast this evening, Sir Robert.”

“Aye. Do you always read his motives exactly, sweet Joan of Kent?” Sir Robert guffawed and gave her a significant wink she chose to ignore. “In these terrible plague times, we need all the jesting we can get, eh?”

“Robert Grey,” Isabella’s high voice interrupted, “I will not have anyone mention that vile tragedy during your stay. Any other who says ‘plague’ or looks a moment sad will pay a forfeit!”

“Sweetest sister,” the prince’s deep voice broke in, and he took a step toward Joan and Sir Robert that seemed to bring him ever so much closer, “we will have feasting and fun, that is of a certain, but we shall also remember our English folk out there terrified and dying. I had thought before the celebration for Yuletide we would ask the parish priest here to say a mass for all the lost and suffering souls—out there in our realm.”

“Oh, of course,” Isabella agreed, her voice and wild eyes more muted. “I—well, of course, we had thought of that,” she added, and Joan crossed herself both for the princess’s little white lie and for the fact they had not thought of that at all.

Sobered to calmness by his voice and words, Joan gazed up directly into the prince’s shattering, sky-blue stare.

“My lord prince. Welcome to Woodstock.”

“Lady Jeannette.” His voice was now somehow guarded, the fervent tone which had colored it as he spoke of his people’s suffering had fled. She curtsied smoothly and accepted the brief brush of his warm mustached mouth on her smooth cheek. There, she thought. The greeting, the kiss, the sweep of feeling is gone, over. I am fine now.

She watched the affectionate welcome he readily accepted from Constantia. The maid simply leaned into him, pressing her full bosom to his black leather jerkin which smelled so deliciously of cold air and forest and freedom.

Joan turned away to greet the dark-eyed Nickolas Dagworth whose practiced glance appraised her quickly as always. Saints, she thought as he squeezed her against him in a deliberate bear hug, if I cared one whit for Prince Edward, it would be obvious whom to choose to try to make him jealous. But she was older and wiser now. She wanted no tangled ties of heartstrings ever again with anyone. Let him make a fool of himself with that cow-breasted Constantia. She was above any sort of games to rile him or vie for his affections. They only led each time to anger and eventually separation and grief. If he had ever slightly touched her heart, he never would again. She would show him a protective armor of her own fashioning!

Before she took Hugh Calveley’s proffered arm as they all went in to sit down to a warming drink of hot spiced wine, she twisted her beryl ring off her finger and hid it inside the little silk pomander pouch dangling from her girdle.

B
ut at the feast that evening, after the men had rested and washed away the road dust, after an hour of solemn mass for the beset souls of the realm, Joan’s assumed cloak of calm was shredded—not by the prince or Nickolas Dagworth or any man she had greeted at the entryway earlier, but by a new servant Prince Edward had brought to cheer them all at Woodstock. Joan had hardly noted the three hooded servants when his retinue first arrived. The prince had brought his head falconer, Philip Pipe to care for his precious, hooded peregrine Greta; a favored squire, Wilt Clinton; and a new talented French minstrel as a present to the ladies. But until they began to eat at table that evening with a full haunch of venison, plum puddings, rabbit stews, and wines littering the groaning tables before them, Joan had not closely noted the new minstrel with whom the prince had replaced his old friend Hankin.

Only a middle-sized, middle-aged, round-faced man with brownish hair and a charming French accent, she thought the musician at first. He strummed his lute magically, sitting across the narrow hall before the fire which gilded his silhouette with a blazing aureole of light. But his deft touch on the strings to woo from them such resonant tones, his soothing, achingly sweet voice was utterly, completely, astoundingly familiar.

Joan halted her goblet halfway to her lips and stared.

“Your Grace, wherever did you find that marvelous new minstrel?” Constantia Bourchier was asking as if to save Joan the trial of addressing the prince where he sat halfway down the table between Isabella and Constantia.

“My little Yule gift to all Isabella’s charming
demoiselles,
especially those with their own sweet voices and good ears for lovely melody,” he replied smoothly. Joan’s heart beat even faster, but if the prince gazed at her to be sure the compliment reached its mark, she was not looking his way. “My talented new lutenist Roger was these past six years with my dear grandmother in her exile at Castle Rising in Norfolk.”

“With the deposed and exiled Queen Isabella,” someone murmured. Whispers buzzed about the long table to lend a strangely sibilant counterpoint to the lute and the crackling blaze of Yule log.

“Roger!” Joan said and those around her turned to stare. She stood at her place barely aware she had sloshed burgundy wine on the white brocade tablecloth. Sir Nickolas Dagworth directly across the table narrowed his dark eyes at her pale face, then craned his neck to see what had made the beautiful Joan of Kent look as if she had seen a ghost. Oblivious to the numerous stares and dying whispers at the table as others watched and elbowed those next to them, Joan shoved her heavy chair back and walked quickly around the length of seated guests.

She stopped and squinted into the blaze of fireglow at the man. The massive Yule log on the flames roared and crackled as, distantly behind her, Joan heard Isabella’s shrill voice call her name.

Five feet away, the man halted his quick fingers midway across the strings and stood while his last gay chord of music hung suspended between them. He did not look surprised as she knew she must before them all. For one moment her eager voice was the only sound in the room save the crackle of fire. “Roger Wakeley! Oh, Master Roger, it is you!”

He swept her a little bow and extended his free hand to steady her at the elbow. His straight brown haircut low over his forehead, his long nose, and brown eyes looked so utterly familiar after all this time.

“
Oui, ma demoiselle
Joan of Kent, and you, grown so lovely, here with the king’s family, a place I just never thought to find you.”

The kindly, avid-eyed face was almost the same as when Roger Wakeley had lived at Liddell for two whole years to teach her the lute and bring some joy and music into her sheltered, lonely existence there. The intricate twists of fate, the agonies of complicated womanhood in the series of Plantagenet courts and castles dropped away as Joan stared steadily, tearfully, into his face.

“I thought to never see you again,” she began in a rush, at first unaware the table behind her was astir with muffled voices again and that both Isabella and Prince Edward approached from behind. “I cried for days that Edmund had made you leave and I had not known that you were going.”

She jumped at Isabella’s voice at her side. “Jeannette, you mean you know the prince’s new minstrel from somewhere? But he has been at Castle Rising with our grand’mère Isabella for years and years.”

“Six years, I said, sister,” the prince put in. Damn this touching, tearful little scene, Prince Edward cursed to himself, annoyed that Joan, as usual, had managed to upset his equanimity just when he thought he had himself under tight rein so as not to let her rile him. “Before that, you two obviously knew each other,” he said, trying to sound lightly amused at the coincidence while his quick mind calculated Joan’s age back compared to Roger Wakeley’s six years ago. Surely she had been much too young then for any sort of
affaire du coeur,
and not with a French minstrel more than twice her age.

“My lord prince, and dear princess, Roger taught me to love music, so many songs, to play the lute at Liddell when I was only a child.”

“To play the lute,” the prince echoed, remembering how long it took him to even master the fundamentals of the damned, delicate thing before he decided his fingers were made only for horses’ reins and weapons. “But how long were you in their household, Roger?”

“Two years, my lord prince,” Roger Wakeley answered, but his gaze was still on Joan. “
Sacrebleu,
two wonderful years. The lady and her old maidservant Marta nursed me through a deadly disease and set a broken leg bone, and I repaid them in the only way I could—by teaching the Lady Joan to sing and play.”

“And to love beautiful things, Roger,” Joan echoed. Prince Edward frowned despite himself. He detested the way Jeannette pronounced the minstrel’s name in that soft French way as much as how she gazed at him all dreamy-eyed as though the rogue were some conquering knight in full battle armor. He had only brought the man to cheer up the ladies—aye, because he knew his fine voice and lute would please Jeannette especially. And now this whole thing had been a disaster and she was making a fool of herself, with tears clinging to her lashes, because she was reunited with her maidenhood music teacher! Coincidence and fate, cursed fate, always throwing obstacles between them! But had not he long resolved to be done with her, especially since that bloody, damn row with the king over the little vixen? If only he had not wanted so desperately to be here to comfort her when she learned the tragic news he must soon tell her. Damn! He should never have come here at all.

“I suggest you sit down now, Jeannette, and finish the meal,” the prince said. “Let your ‘Ro-jer’ sing and play. That is what I wheedled him away from my grandmother for.” He turned back to the table with Isabella in tow and announced grandly to all the intent faces, “My new lutenist turns out by chance to have lived at the Lady Joan’s childhood home in Kent. Music! Everyone eat now.”

He turned back as if to wait for Joan to follow also, but instead she curtsied and smiled at him and Isabella. “My lord, shall I not sing and play also? I would love to entertain with Master Roger, for I intended to sing later after the meal anyway. The princess has arranged it all. We know so many of the same songs, you see, and such a wonderful occasion—”

“Fine,” the prince’s steely voice cut in from where he stood halfway back to the table. “Just do whatever pleases you, Lady Joan. Far be it from me in these tenuous times to interrupt a joyous reunion.”

The table quieted until the prince had reseated himself. His squire jumped to refill his cup, and Constantia Bourchier smirked, cat-eyed, directly at Joan before she leaned close to the prince to smile up at him. He laughed at her whispered words and playfully tugged a stray crimson curl as though the interruption had not occurred. Joan could tell Roger Wakeley was on edge, yet watchful, too, and vaguely amused as his quick brown eyes took in the whole scene. A pox on all the revelers at the table, Joan thought, before she remembered the plague and prayed instantly to have that curse recalled.