The First Princess of Wales (40 page)

T
he next morn Joan let Stephen Callender ride past her in the damp forest mists of dawn and followed him, careful to keep her horse Windsong on the soft turf along the road so he would not look back. She had no intention of stopping him to reveal herself where any early-rising manor serf could see her or to be so close to the Château yet that the man might consider dragging her back. But he set a good pace south, and the one time he did glance over his shoulder that first hour of foggy daylight, he evidently saw naught amiss in the cloaked and hooded boy on a horse behind him as he plunged on, skirting the sleepy little village of Le Bec Hellouin about five miles from the Château. He looked back the second time as the road opened up through fields of barley and oats awaiting the harvesters’ sickles in the weeks to come. The crops grew in tiny, random patches as they were divided or merged haphazardly over the centuries by serfs’ deaths or marriages, reminding Joan of a brightly hued, irregular chessboard. The time, she realized, for her next chess move was now. Sweeping her arm in a wide arc that Stephen Callender could not misinterpret since he’d turned around in his saddle again, she summoned him to her.

He halted and swung his chestnut-colored horse around to trot back cautiously toward her. She knew he would need to be close before he recognized her, for she had dressed in garments borrowed from Thomas’s squire last night, and her thick tresses were tightly braided and coiled under a heavy brown hood. Her black palfrey bore no signs of rank or person.

“State your business with me, my man,” Stephen Callender demanded, his eyes dark slits under his straight black hair as he squinted to see the face within the deep hood. His right hand rested easily upon his sword hilt. He halted his horse about twelve feet away and simply stared.

With a flourish, Joan threw her hood off and stared back, reveling in the man’s obvious shock and dismay. His long face dropped even longer as he swore a string of curses in French as if he could make her disappear or flee. “By the death of the Blessed Virgin!” he managed at last in English. “Duchess—are you alone? Am I sent for to return?”

“Of course you are sent for to return, Master Callender—to return to the prince to report on all my doings like a good little lackey,” she spit out at the astounded man and relished the panic which rioted across his usually well-guarded features.

“My lady, please, I do not know what someone has told you, but—”

“But nothing, Master Spy-Musician! And, pray, do not look so alarmed. Since His Grace, the Prince of Wales, is evidently so eager to keep watch on my thoughts, my family, and my actions, I am merely doing you a service as well as he. Will he not be much pleased to reward you richly when you not only give him the little tattletales and rumors you and Master Roger have so cleverly gleaned, but actually deliver me in person to give him a hearty dose of what he would know when we get to Tours?”

The man’s eyes nearly popped from their sockets at that, and at first only a strangled, little sound came from his throat. “To Tours! Hell’s bells, Duchess, Tours is a hundred miles from here through enemy-held territory!”

“I do not believe you. We have heard all week that the prince’s brother’s army where my husband serves is here in Normandy marching south to meet the prince’s forces.”

“True, Duchess, but I know not where either English army is for certain and I plan a hard, three-day ride to Tours and His Grace’s forces may not even be there when I arrive.”

“When
we
arrive, Master Callender. I can keep the pace, though I had not reckoned on so far a jaunt.”

“A jaunt? Holy Saints, Duchess, the prince would have my head on a pike to rot in the sun if he ever thought I took you for a ride outside your castle walls in these dangerous times, let alone over a hundred miles through enemy territory to Tours! My head on a pike!”

“I suggest you stop screeching, man, and we get under way. The prince will have your head on a pike indeed unless you do exactly as I say anyway. I have important business with the prince, thanks to his continual meddling in my life, and I cannot help it that he is running around France when I need to tell him such. I will see you are protected and my dear friend Roger Wakeley too, for I wish to deal with him myself—
if
you deliver me to His Grace and then back home again safely. I brought food. I can ride, so let us be off!”

She replaced her hood and jogged slowly past the man who scrambled to follow. From a swift side glance she read his face well. His sallow skin had gone livid with fury and panic.

“Please, Duchess, have mercy on a poor man—on Wakeley, too. When His Grace loses his temper, no one is safe.”

“Really? And I assure you, Master Callender, when I lose mine, the prince is not safe either. I think we had best set a faster speed here if we hope to make good time.”

“I insist you go back. For your children’s sake—for all of us, I shall escort you back. In truth, I do not know where the prince’s army is. I may have to search for days and when your husband hears—”

“He shall not hear, for I left word I have retreated to the cloisters at the Church of St. Ouen in Pont-Audemer for a few days, and no French army will bother two swift-riding men on the road when they are desperately searching for a whole, vast English army.”

She urged her horse to a gallop and Callender followed, pounding along beside her and shouting warnings she blithely ignored. It felt so wonderful to be out in the late summer air, free of constricting walls, servants’ eyes, and whispers. The saddle, the horse’s rhythmic movement were exhilarating beneath her.

When, in final desperation, the man beside her dared to reach out for her horse’s bridle to halt her, she smacked his wrist sharply with her reins and settled him in his place for good. “You will escort me quickly and carefully to the prince and then home again and never tell a living soul, Spy Stephen. If you do this, I shall assure His Grace you saved my life on the road or some such and that I forced you to bring me. However, if you do not cease this foolish, wasteful foot-dragging, I swear to you by St. George’s blood, I will tell the prince you sought to lie where you so jestingly told Master Roger the Prince of Wales himself would revel—in my bed. Do I make my serious intent quite clear by this promise, prince’s spy?”

The man’s mouth set hard, but his angry, intense eyes gazed straight ahead at last. “Aye, Duchess of Kent. Quite clear. I will tell you only, I expect no complaining then; for with wench bait even garbed like a boy, I have no intent to be seen or stopped. From now until we sight the banners of azure and gold and the three ostrich plumes of the prince, we halt only to rest the horses.”

She turned her face back to the road south and smiled as she refastened her hood carefully forward over her curls. A victory over the prince already and she had not yet even given him a hint of the battle to come! She bent lower over Windsong’s rippling mane, reveling in the intoxicating glow of freedom, adventure, and power she only last night thought had been lost forever.

S
oon enough the thrill dulled to pounding hoofs on dusty roads or grassy fields as they skirted the French villages of L’Aigle, Mortagne, and Bêlleme. Joan got soaked to her skin when they forded the River Risle to avoid a bridge crowded with drovers’ carts. Soon enough, her muscles ached and her teeth and head pained with every rough jolt. She walked stiffly bowlegged when they dismounted to rest or water the horses and, even as they sat to share simnel biscuits and cheese, she still felt the pounding rhythm of Windsong’s powerful flanks. They slept a few hours one night burrowed into a haystack and the next in a damp rye field. They stole apples from orchards for themselves and the horses, and plunged on again, crossing the Loire on a tiny, unfortified bridge near Couture in the middle of the night.

Forced to hide in the thicket of the road the next day as a French contingent of soldiers passed so close that they overheard their every word, Joan turned spy herself. She and Stephen learned that King John II had brought his French army down from Chartres to Blois from which he hoped to cut off Prince John of Lancaster and his English battalions which had been raiding through Normandy. The thought that English troops and her husband might be somewhere in the vicinity heartened Joan until she realized that Thomas Holland, if he knew of this scheme, would definitely stop her. Nothing, nothing, she vowed silently again, would halt her from her own battle with Prince Edward. Aye, she and these dangerous French had one thing in common, at least, for she meant to win a victory once and for all over Edward, Prince of Wales, Plantagenet.

On their third day on the road, the calm weather turned blustery. Leaves rattled, trees sighed and swayed, and the skirts of a young woman ahead of them on the road whipped wildly around her ankles. They would have passed by the maid quickly, but her words nearly carried away by the wind stopped them.

“Good sirs, a little ride into the village,
si’l vous plaît
? I hate to walk against the wind, and I fear the whoreson damned English may be near.”

Stephen said something to Joan about information and turned back to lift the girl up behind him. She was buxom, black-haired with rather swarthy skin and dark eyes, but Joan was careful not to stare too closely.

“Where are these terrible English forces, then,
ma belle
?” Stephen asked her in his smoothest French as they jogged on.

“I can tell you not far enough away. Wish’t they were all roasting in hell, I do. The Black Prince of Crécy been raiding northward from Bordeaux all summer, the bastards. But Tours shall never be taken. The French hold it firmly, and our blessed king’s army outnumbers the English over two to one. Gerard told me the whoreson damned English will be cut off at Tours and squashed like a beetle under a rock, the bastards.”

“You are so very well informed,
ma belle,
” Stephen flattered her. Joan noted the girl’s dark eyes were trying to peer beneath her hood even while she spoke to Stephen, so she rode a bit farther ahead.

“Of course I am well informed,” the maid’s voice floated to Joan’s alert ears. “The Comte de Poitiers’s troops only yesterday were garrisoned in our village up ahead and hold it yet. I slept, fine sir, with Gerard, the Comte’s first squire, who told me all those things after he enjoyed my charms. I pleased him greatly, you see. Wish’t you or your handsome friend with the fine legs might want the same loving, eh? I have a room behind the inn and for a coin, I could show you both what the Comte’s squire enjoyed and why he told me all his thoughts after he enjoyed my charms, eh?”

“The coin I shall give you as a token of thanks, but I must put you down as my friend and I need to go on our way and not through your little village, alas.”

Despite her surprise and protest, Stephen swung her down and flipped her a coin. She did not dart after it but stood arms akimbo in the road staring up at them. “It shan’t do you no good to avoid the French soldiers if that be what ye’re thinking,” she said. “The troops of our blessed King Jean le Bon—they are everywhere here. And say, sir, is your friend there a boy or a maid? And why does he never say a word then?”

Joan and Stephen wheeled away off the road and left her shouting her questions at them until the wind swallowed up her words.

“Have we miscalculated where he should be?” Joan asked Stephen as they followed a little streambed across a meadow southward. “Do you think the French could really hold Tours and be ready to cut off His Grace’s outnumbered army?”

“Men only tell lies before they sleep with a maid, not after,” Stephen said brusquely and spurred his horse to a faster clip.

On the hunch that the maid spoke the truth about the French army’s position, Stephen and Joan skirted an extra half-day southeast around Tours. Between Langeais and Villandry they finally found a small unguarded bridge on which to cross the wide, Loire River, as Prince John of Lancaster was no doubt trying to do to reinforce and rescue Prince Edward’s badly outnumbered forces. South of the Loire and of Tours, they rode east on the fourth afternoon, praying the first troops they saw would speak French only as a conquered language.

An hour before sunset, just as they had dismounted to discuss how they could best avoid the little village of Monbazon ahead, Stephen and Joan stiffened in shock. Horsemen exploded noisily from the bush. Joan’s horse bolted in panic. Stephen thrust her between his mount and his back as he drew his sword. Three big horsemen instantly towered over them all with swords and pikes which glittered bloodily in the low western sun.

“One little move with that blade, rogue, and you two are vulture’s meat,” a gruff voice shouted down at them in French, and Stephen pressed Joan back farther behind him as he threw down his sword.

Another tall rider loomed over them, his clopping horse’s hoofs drowning out Joan’s pounding heart. This man wore a helmet with no visor, and with huge broadsword drawn, he leaned down to flick Joan’s hood off her head. Her fingers tightened around the single, small dagger she wore thrust in her leather belt. The sun blazed behind the man’s big head as his sword point caught both hood and hidden hair coil to yank her head back hard against the flanks of Stephen’s skittish horse.