The First Princess of Wales (38 page)

“Listen to me carefully, Jeannette. I love you, damn it. Aye, I have since I first saw you. And you have brought me joy only to be followed by anguish and pain.”

“But, I—”

He shook her hard. “No, listen! I will do as I said about de Maltravers, and you will go home under my guard early on the morrow. And we shall never meet again like this—not until you know you love me and have the courage to say so.”

Dazed, she stared up at him. “But, my lord you know that—”

His big hand covered her mouth. “No excuses, no lies. Tonight, the way you came to me and responded to my touch, you were either a whore or a woman in love, Jeannette. Think on that dilemma the eons until we meet again.”

Before she could say whatever words she could find, he covered the little space of floor, opened, and then closed the door behind him so quietly she was sure he had not just touched her everywhere at all.

She held her breath as two pairs of heavy footsteps descended the stairs. Frozen, she heard two horses in the street below. After an eternity of staring at the flickering ghosts on the ceiling, she breathed out a great, rasping sob.

His cruel words, his touch she could still feel—see his eager face. Blessed Virgin, she wanted to scream his name and chase after him out into the dark, dark night!

Cold tears ran across her flushed cheeks to roll into her ears and down her throat. Her body ached, pained as though some integral, inner part of it had been wrenched away. Her mind crashed into a frantic emptiness where only his cold voice echoed in hollow repetition. Whore. Love. Eons. Meet. Again.

All night she heard his velvet voice and dreamed of horses’ hoofs in the close below. She jolted wide awake whenever she thought there were men’s footsteps in the hall. She believed she heard Roger’s voice singing that sad song of bitter love again, again, but it must have been only echoes of her frenzied, futile dreams.

S
he was, no doubt, she told herself grimly over and over that next week, the only person who had ever gone on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and never seen the shrine. Guarded by three of the prince’s plainly dressed men and accompanied by a glum-looking Roger Wakeley, she had returned to Liddell early the next morn. She had not protested the cold, efficient orders of the prince’s men whom she did not know. She felt chastened, drained, shamed, and bereft. She held her head high and spoke to none of them. Yet they had bid her a polite farewell and turned their horses back to Canterbury even as the walls of Liddell first loomed in sight among the Kentish Weald.

The next week, she moved about Liddell at her duties and pastimes in a daze. Whatever she did, repeatedly her eyes glazed over with the veil of memory and she would stand stock-still as if frozen by a wizard’s wand: her hands preparing spices or sewing, her arms full of her children, in half-stride on a brisk walk about the grounds, she would turn, listless, and hear his angry, impassioned words and see and feel his presence.

He had loved her from the first, he vowed. Loved, loved, from that first day she had seen him angered and muddy, with broken wrist tilting at the quintain in that lonely yard at Windsor. She had not then known who he was or what terrible thing that yard had seen—her father’s murder, mayhap at the very will of the prince’s father. How tangled the tentacles of passions had become—as dear, old Marta used to say, like a clinging spider’s web that would never let one run to freedom again.

Freedom. How she had desired it once, fought for it, and how it had eluded her. Did she ever possess it? Did it end when she had first gone to court or when Mother died that night and the child had understood at last the woman’s burden of lost love? Or had real freedom ceased to be when she had first gazed up into those deep blue eyes under that tawny mane of Plantagenet hair?

She shook her head hard to bring herself back to her surroundings. Vinette had just finished with her hair. She had dressed formally tonight for supper although Thomas would be gone for at least three more weeks and John had not yet arrived back from Midsummer Tournaments in London. She sighed as she stood to give herself a final, quick perusal in her polished mirror. She had donned a new emerald kirtle and white
surcote
edged with seed pearls to cheer herself. Besides, getting all dressed up like this for a lonely supper with only Vinette and Roger to speak to at least took time and attention and kept her from moping or brooding half the day. Then, too, last night she had dreamed again of running away down a long, black tunnel, chased by thudding footsteps. De Maltravers, mayhap, or even the king—but really, she feared it was something else there in the darkness which pursued her: something like her own desperate fear that she loved the prince and always had.

“No!”

“What? Madame Joan, you do not like the coiffure?” Vinette asked, her concerned face appearing in the mirror above Joan’s shoulder. “But I did it just as you wished, Madame!”

“No, it is fine, Vinette. I was just thinking aloud, that is all.”

The maid rolled her brown eyes as she had repeatedly this week at her mistress’s jumpy behavior. Wherever Madame Joan had gone, whatever she had done this week had changed her, and Vinette did not believe for one minute that the lady and her narrow-eyed musician had gone off to Canterbury as they said. Had they not come home empty-handed with naught but one pilgrim’s penny and was not there talk in the serfs’ marketplace that she had ridden in with three strange men who had turned tail and fled at the sight of Liddell Manor? If only they had been home in France, her love, Pierre Foulke, would have known what to make of the fatuous doings of the nobility. Pierre said there would be a day of reckoning when the rich and noble would come tumbling down and then, he promised, there would be no more secret, haughty happenings among the smug nobility.

Vinette Brinay shrugged her slender shoulders. She did not really believe that day would ever come, but it did keep Pierre all astir with grand plans for heroic deeds every bit as secret and haughty as the doings of the nobles he said he hated. Besides, Madame Joan was a good enough young mistress, though she was entirely too moody of late. Then, too, the first two weeks Lord Thomas had been gone to his lands up north, the lady had chatted amiably with Vinette after dinner and given her much free time in the long, sweet afternoons.

“I said, thank you, Vinette. Why not see how Madeleine is doing rousing the little ones while I go on down? We shall all sit by the head table in the hall and sing after supper. At Liddell I cannot bear to eat here in the solar where my mother lived alone so long when I was little. The Great Hall is large, but it is better there.”

“Aye, and so sweet-smelling on these summer eves, Madame. Mayhap your brother and his men be on their way home soon and you will not have to eat with just the little ones, all alone with your thoughts.”

Joan pivoted to stare at the girl as she stood at the top of the newel staircase which led down to the front corridor. Vinette faced her guilelessly, a concerned look on her pretty, freckled face. Surely, this maid and the other servants, except Roger, could know nothing of what she had done and been through. “Do not fret for my thoughts, Vinette,” she said and then to be certain the girl could never read her mind, she added, “My memories of my mother’s days here are peaceful now. All that sadness is long past.”

Partway down the curve of stairs, she heard the rattle of horses’ hoofs outside. They must be close on the cobbles directly at the entrance to make all that noise. John was home or, perhaps, visitors had come from Canterbury on the road home to London!

She pressed her clasped fists to her pounding chest and hurried to the front door. The servants, including John’s fourth squire Robert he had left at home, and two cooks, came darting from parts of the manor to see who it was. Squire Robert opened the big front door for her and she strode boldly out under the family crest before it even occurred to her it might be anyone else besides John returned or the prince come to apologize for his wretched behavior at Canterbury last week.

She halted on the top step of the entry and stared as her emerald skirts belled gently to a rest about her hips and legs. She faced six men in black, mounted on black horses. All were liveried with the gold and azure leopard and lily crests of the King of England.

“Lady Joan of Kent?” the silver-haired man at the head of the impressive little band asked.

“Aye. Welcome to Liddell. I am Joan of Kent, Lady Holland.” Her heart began to thud wildly until it nearly drowned out her thoughts and their crisp words to her. The king was angered mayhap, she had dared interfere with the prince or de Maltravers and perhaps he had sent them to arrest her!

The silver-haired man she felt she should recognize but could not place had dismounted. “I beg your gracious leave to speak direct to the point, Lady Joan of Kent,” the man said. Joan was aware Vinette, holding little Thomas, and Madeleine, with the babe John, now flanked her on either side, their eyes wide at the display of unfamiliar men black-garbed, armed, and royally liveried.

“Speak, then,” she answered.

“I am Sir Lyle Townsend, Lady Joan. His Grace, Edward, King of England and France, bids me tell you most grievous news. At the Midsummer’s Eve Tournament there was a
grande mêlée
which became quite bold and undisciplined, lady.”

Her voice sounded sharply piercing as it rang out. “John? Has my Lord John been hurt?”

The man’s eyes were lightest brown, and she saw him set his jaw hard. “Aye, lady. The king sends his grievous regrets, his most sad condolences. There were four knights accidentally trampled in the
mêlée,
lady, and your brother John is dead. His body as well as gifts from the king follow by a day or so in a funeral cortège which we—”

“No!” Her own shrieked denial shredded the spring air, and her baby began to cry in frightened, rattled screams.

The man touched her arm, urging her inside, but she shook him off and stood her ground.

“In the king’s tournament?” she demanded. “He cannot be dead! Men do not die in tournaments. Saints, I know they lose eyes or break bones, but not dead!”

“We are grief-stricken, Lady Joan. He was a fine knight of mettle yet fully untested, fine, young and brave.”

“Young, aye. He was the last.”

“The last of your family except for yourself, you mean,” he said nearly shouting to be heard over the baby’s cries. “The king at the urging of His Grace, the Prince of Wales, recognizes this too, lady, and bids you accept the lands of Lord John as your own duty and inheritance. His Grace declares you Duchess of Kent, with title rights to these demesne lands and hall.”

The thought sank in slowly: Liddell—hers. She took little John away from teary-eyed Madeleine into her arms to comfort him and slumped back against the entryway for support.

Surely, this was all another waking dream, a black nightmare of pounding steps and rushing down an interminable, deep tunnel. John was only twenty with Liddell to care for and to love. The plague stole Edmund three years ago and now this!

Gifts from the king to foolishly try to compensate for John’s death, she thought, as the other men dismounted and stood patiently at the bottom of the steps with loaded arms. “I will accept no gifts from the king,” she announced to them. Her knees shook as did her voice, and she pressed back harder against the stone doorway to stop the spinning of the men and forest beyond.

“Please, Duchess, let us go in,” Lyle Townsend was saying. “I know this is dreadful, dreadful news. We are bid to give you these gifts—to a member of the king’s own family, His Grace said, and here, look, the king and the Prince of Wales, who has sent gifts also and a missive, bid you bear up under this sore trial and accept this with their love.”

He motioned for another man to step forward. While she clutched her babe to her and Vinette and Madeleine and John’s poor, sniveling little squire Robert pressed close to her, the man unrolled a stiff parchment scroll. On it was painted exquisitely in luminous colors and gilded gold, the Kent family coat of arms with one vast difference: around the neck of the snow-white stag resting on the bed of ivy was now a ducal crown chained by golden fetters to a larger, grander royal crown.

Joan’s eyes burning with tears stared unblinking at the beautiful crest.

“Your new coat of arms, fashioned at the desire of the king and prince, Duchess,” the man was saying gently. “They bid you recognize your necessary ties to the crown as indeed your father and both brothers before you have done. They bid you accept this tragedy with peace in your heart and love for your distant cousins of Plantagenet blood, His Grace the King and the Prince of Wales.”

Her eyes lifted to Lyle Townsend’s intent face and she blinked the tears away to see him. She, beset by shock and grief and loss again, understood the new crest and the accompanying, warning words well enough. Aye, she could read this fair painting, these gifts, this wretched new turn of Fortune’s cruel wheel well enough. She was as captured as that deer there, chained to them whether she willed it or not, chained by circumstances and bitter hatred—and mayhap now, by love.