The First Princess of Wales (44 page)

Joan cast a long, last look at the sprawling, third-story chamber where they had spent three wonderful, stolen days they might never have again. What a different world it had been, a bittersweet fantasy, now turned cold by the reality of crushing dangers. She touched her pearls through the boy’s jerkin and tunic she wore as her disguise. They felt warm and comforting under the rough garments against her bare flesh. Her eyes rested on the still mussed, red-curtained bed. She turned away and followed the scolding Stephen Callender down the stairs.

“A shame to leave that lovely lute behind,” she remarked, desperate to say anything to halt the flow of grief. “But I suppose it started out in French hands so it might as well end up that way.”

In the common hall of the inn where they were to await word from the prince to set out, Joan sank on a little bench before the low-burning hearth. “Wakeley says that other lute His Grace gave you years ago is a fine one, Duchess,” Stephen said.

“Aye. Wakeley says,” she mocked more bitterly than she had meant to. “I have him to deal with yet.”

Stephen put one booted foot upon the bench and leaned an elbow on it. “I tell you, Duchess, Roger Wakeley has been on your side, wanting what is best for you these years, as well as for His Grace, whatever you think.”

“I do not wish to discuss it now. I just want to have this wretched trip home over with.”

The front door of the inn banged open, and the Captal de Buch with several others in partial riding armor crowded in. “Madame, men, we shall go out through the back where your mounts await,” the imposing Gascon knight ordered, and everyone moved.

The Captal took her elbow as they went through the small pantry and larder and out into a narrow alley crowded with horses. Joan glanced from face to face searching for the prince, but of course, none of the men here were tall enough to be he. Surely, he did not mean to send her away without a final farewell after all this!

“You men, you Callender, may mount and hold your horses down there by the string of baggage wagons,” de Buch shouted not even looking their way. While she stood by the Captal, twisting her little beryl ring nervously, Joan watched the men mount and trot off.

With only her horse Windsong standing by, Joan waited awkwardly with the wily Gascon advisor of Prince Edward. Shouts, sounds of clattering horses, clanking metal, and creaking wagons filled the air from nearby streets.

“My palfrey looks well cared for, Captal,” she ventured. “The respite here has done him good.”

“Saints’ souls—it has been a boon for all of us, I warrant. His Grace included, lady. He was near the edge of his control with worry and tension but now—well, I believe his men have you to thank for the healing balm of his better temper and steadier mind now.”

As if those words had announced him, Prince Edward galloped in on a huge white destrier. Clad in ebony-hued riding armor on arms, chest, and thighs, he wore no helmet and his tawny mane flowed free as he rode. Clanking piece on piece, he dismounted in an amazingly graceful movement as the Captal disappeared behind the two horses.

“I meant to be here sooner to send you off, Jeannette, but there was so much to see to.” His vibrant blue eyes under the blond, rakish brows were serious and intent. His
surcote
was shiny black with his three Prince of Wales’s ostrich feathers and his proud motto in German:
“Ich dien”
—I serve.

“I know you are busy and that your mind was elsewhere this morning, our Grace. I am certain that everything will be well.”

“I had thought, sweet, that my father’s forces might make it here, but he is beset by troubles on the Scottish borders at home, and my brother’s battalions are trapped somewhere north.”

“But I know you can count on yourself and your men, my Edward.”

A little wisp of smile lifted his firm, chiseled mouth upward. “Aye, my love. I intend to tell my men as we move out now that I shall count on nothing—nothing but victory. I pray it shall be so for us someday.”

His face blurred, then doubled as she blinked back tears. “I do not see how, my lord prince, Morcar’s elaborate star castings notwithstanding. All the other things too that we—”

With a metallic clanking, his big fingers lifted to still her lips. “God’s safe journey home, my Jeannette. My guards will die to a man to protect you if need be. We must all be away now. No one will speak of this visit of yours here, they have sworn it.”

He bent to kiss her, a mere brush of the lips, then lifted her to her saddle as if he could not bear to look upon her face again. She sat erect, gripping the reins he handed her so tightly that her fingernails bit painfully into her palms.

“May the saints keep you safe, my lord prince. For England and St. George,” she managed, but her speaking of that battle cry was a mere whisper. Her face felt stiff, her wide eyes sought his. Suddenly, he looked austere, unknowable in his black armor and royal accoutrements.

With a sharp smack on its rump, he sent her horse down the little alley toward the waiting men. She did not dare to look back.

Now just another mounted man in rough yeoman’s garb, she held her hood tightly to her face as they melded with the throng pouring outward toward the narrow city gates. Yeomen with longbows and pikes walked afoot in well-ordered ranks; armored knights trailed by squires and personal baggage trains gleamed silver in the faint morning sun; horses and rumbling wagons lumbered along everywhere. Pennants and banners bobbed aloft like ship sails at sea.

Outside the city walls, Joan’s little band parted from the swelling march of Prince Edward’s army heading south to Poitiers where they were already digging in to cover their retreat. On a little hillock above the town, Joan turned stiffly in her saddle to look back at last.

Below, a moving silver river of armor flowed south and somewhere there, at the very vanguard, her prince would be leading them boldly on. Her own danger, the grueling ride back, even the future away from him faded to nothingness in that instant as she prayed fervently for his safe deliverance. How distant it all seemed already, how impossible that they had smiled and loved and bedded—and that she had dared to call that lofty, austere prince “my Edward.” She smothered a little sob deep in her throat and turned her face to the muddy road north.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

B
y midmorn the day after Joan and the prince parted, the pursuing French army had forced the outnumbered English battalions to dig in for a fight at a little plain called Maupertuis near the walled town of Poitiers. The disadvantaged Plantagenet forces, nevertheless, faced the massed, armored French fiercely, proudly and unafraid. Had not their hero-prince promised them victory despite the odds? Had not he carefully chosen this naturally protected stronghold and had it fortified despite the rain during their four days of rest at Monbarzon? The French leaders combined had not the brilliant tactical mind of their Black Prince, the English knights, bowmen, and baggage guards alike whispered; the French King John, his son Philip, and his brother the Duke of Orleans failed to recognize that the lay of the land at Poitiers did not seal the English fate, but rather their own.

Hunkered down within the natural barriers of thickly wooded hills to the east, marshy ground to the west, sloping vineyards and the shallow River Moisson to the south, and a broken thorn hedge to the northwest facing their enemy, the English awaited the inevitable. Only through two small roads in the thorn hedge could the massive onslaught of mounted French knights come, and on the defense of those two chinks in the English armor, the survival of Prince Edward’s forces depended.

Wave after wave of mounted armored Frenchmen shouting
“Montjoie! St. Denis!”
threw themselves into the deadly storm of English longbow arrows. The prince and his closest advisors waited behind their archers under the brazen flaunting of the Prince of Wales’s banner with the three white plumes captured nine years before at Crécy.

“I can read those French
surcotes
and pennants, Your Grace,” the one-eyed Sir John Chandos shouted to the prince over the ringing din of battle. “This huge first battalion must be under the king’s son, the dauphin.”

“Aye, John. Prince to prince, then, but I want the king himself as my prisoner before we leave this field behind as victors on this day!”

As the prince’s eager eyes scanned the continual inundation of enemy horses carrying their armored, plumed men, he marveled, not so much at their awesome numbers, but at their immense stupidity. “It is Crécy all over again, John. Our stout English archers mow them down to stumble on the bodies of their fellows and yet they come on hardly breaking rank! Only when they reach our lines here we must fight dearly to keep their sheer might from trampling us into this mud.”

“The men murmur at the unending host of French, Your Grace!” a bloodied Captal de Buch panted at the prince’s side as if he had appeared from nowhere. “Your forces need something to lift their hearts, for their supply of arrows is dangerously low.”

“Then we shall mount and charge—just long and hard enough to set the French back with our daring and cheer on our front line men. Meanwhile, de Buch, get a small contingent of clever Gascons like yourself who know this terrain as well as you—enough knights and archers to set up a goodly hue and cry. Go south, loop around the woods and hoist the St. George banner behind the French. Our numbers will be small but, saints willing, the bloody French may panic at the sight of us.”

“Aye, Your Grace, and with pleasure! Any king who garbs nineteen other men in identical battle gear to avoid capture should fall for such a ploy. I swear by the holy rood, I shall fetch all twenty French kings to you and you shall have your choice of them!”

Prince Edward bellowed a short laugh despite the grimness of the situation. For a moment he watched the wily de Buch rattle off in full armor to collect his small force, then the prince’s armored horse was brought up and his squire helped him mount. The huge plated destrier felt steady and good against his hips, the massive saddle weight a comfort under his muscular, armored thighs.

“Onward to the fray and victory!” he shouted and lifted an iron arm to urge on the others mounting behind him on the gentle slope of hill. He snapped his visor down with a clang, and his next words echoed in his brain: “For England and St. George!”

The cavalry led by the prince and Sir John Chandos pressed forward to cover their archers. They charged past the thorn hedge and around the edge of a gully to meet head-on the closest French knights. Sword clanged to sword, armor on armor. Horses shied, reared, neighed. Heavy breathing and constricting visors muffled shouts and grunts of fierce exertion. The English soldiers in the front lines cheered to see their prince press on. The din was deafening.

When the French battalion of the dauphin reeled away at the brave counterattack, the prince pulled his big destrier around toward his own lines. Mounds of French dead stuck with arrows littered his path and, through the slits in his visor, he saw his archers stand almost suddenly stunned and mute. He shoved his visor up and gasped for air.

“Shoot, men. Shoot! Reload! Drive the next line back again!” he shouted to the little clusters of archers holding their longbows. Already with the hindsight of battle sense, he could feel the unending waves of French bearing down again.

“Your Grace—no arrows left, Your Grace, an’ them French still acomin’!” someone screamed up at him.

“Look around you! Retrieve the arrows which have done their work already and fight on!”

One archer bent to the task, then another. All along the English lines depleted of weapons, yeomen darted out to snatch arrows from turf or armor or bloody flesh. Again the prince and his cavalry charged to give them some cover. Finally, as they retreated behind the blessed thorn hedge, the sky went black again with English arrows.

Suddenly, while the prince watched breathless, sweating, and amazed, the edge of the first of three gigantic French battalions sucked inward, halted, then turned and moved away.

“They retreat, my lord prince!” the Earl of Oxford screamed in his ear. “A bloody, damn French retreat! Surely de Buch’s men cannot have gotten behind them yet.”

“Mayhap they wish to save their dauphin knowing we will yet capture their good King John,” the prince mocked. He felt a jolt of heady energy surge through him at the thrill of beating back the first onslaught, much like that pure sensual rapture he had experienced when he had fully possessed his indomitable, untamable Jeannette.

And then, to his astonishment and the utter elation of all the beleaguered English fighters hemmed in within their little stronghold near Poitiers that day, the middle of the three cumbrous French battalions merely wheeled away to the northwest.

“By the rood, a full retreat!” Oxford crowed. “The damn fools in the Duc d’Orléans battalion must not know we are surely beaten by their overweening numbers if they but press on!”

“Beaten, never, no matter what their size or strength, Oxford,” the prince corrected him sternly. “I bid you all expect nothing but victory and it shall be so. It must be so! They have disgraced their so-called Noble Order of the Star to retreat while we still hold French fields.”

The prince’s eagle eyes scanned the scene below him. Again his protective wall of archers, dug in behind the thorn hedge and a row of their own buried pikes, were nearly bereft of arrows; again another endless, swelling wave of the enemy rode forward through the funneled approaches to the Plain of Maupertuis.

“The king’s own forces this time, Your Grace. But the yeomen have no time to forage out for arrows again, nor the protection of our cavalry to do so.”

“Mayhap not, my man, but look. Look you over the enemy beyond. De Buch is there—see, the raised banners of St. George!” He swung around in his shiny shell of full black armor and lifted the hilt of his dented sword to catch the glint of sun.

“De Buch and our men are there behind!” he yelled over the battle din below. “To horse, to horse this final time for victory!”

They clattered down the hill amidst the rows of grapevines, past their own cheering archers and into the face of the enemy. Already the final battle line of the French churned and writhed in a chaotic mass of metal horse and men. But to panicked flight by the appearance of an English force behind, they halted, turned, and fled.

The hawk-faced John Chandos was pounding at the prince’s side. “Push forward, forward! The day is yours, great prince! God has given this miracle into your hands!”

The day was theirs and swiftly ended as the English scurried to surround important noble prisoners and clear the area of all dangers. Under his proud standard, the Prince of Wales’s red silk pavilion was raised and, as he sat there resting after racking hours of marching, planning, and fighting, his men reported the final stages of the glorious English victory.

“We chased some clear to the gates of Poitiers, Your Grace, where the frightened townfolk have shut their doors. Shall we ferret them out?”

“No—enough of warfare for this day, unless we cannot find the French king among these forces here.”

“Your Grace, all this glory without your royal sire even here to advise—without the help of your brother Lancaster’s forces too. England will be wild with jubilee when we return to her!”

When we return to her, the prince’s exhilarated brain echoed. When he returned to England, Jeannette must be there. Only a day they had been apart but what a day—an eternity of struggle. His head snapped up at the next shouted words.

“My lord prince—the French king! The king has surrendered and with his son and sues to be delivered to his cousin, Prince Edward!”

Throughout the clustering crowd of tired, sweating knights and archers, a cheering swell rumbled closer like a roar of seastorm. Metal helmets danced aloft in shattering blue sky; banners jumped wildly over heads as the captured king approached the prince’s tent. Under the aegis of the Earl of Warwick, the tall, red-haired King John approached with his petulant, fourteen-year-old son Philip at his side.

“I yield to the better knight on this day,” King John said in wearied, monotone French. His thick, red beard bobbed when he talked. He handed his sword and right gauntlet to Prince Edward as a token of surrender. The gauntlet the prince kept, but he magnanimously returned the sword hilt first.

“Welcome to our English-held ground, Your Grace of France,” the now silent men heard their prince reply. “This victory feast shall mayhap not boast the rich fare you are used to, but I trust you will enjoy what we provide later for your stay in London well enough.”

Those closest to their prince saw his square jaw set in smug pleasure; the aquamarine eyes glinted with scarcely contained joy. Behind the three royal men of two sovereign nations, the Captal de Buch edged his way into the tent to find his appointed seat. Aye, as the precisely honed code of fair chivalry dictated, the French would be treated in defeat as long-lost boon companions but for the necessary lack of their freedom and their pride.

Saints’ bones, the Captal mused as he scanned the length of hastily set, silk-draped table, he could just imagine how the wild lilac eyes of the prince’s secret ladylove would light when she heard of this second conquest of her Edward in one mere, bloody, battling week. The Captal bowed his bull neck for the victory prayer, but he wondered if in all this, the prince’s excited thoughts, too, had strayed to conquest of a mere woman from this momentous victory over a king.

J
oan, Lady Holland, Duchess of Kent, sat with her now silent lute in her lap in the warming autumn sun outside her Château in Normandy. Her children were both taking afternoon naps in their rooms, and her Lord Thomas, who had been here a week now as a result of having caught a flux and having been ordered by Prince John of Lancaster to go home to his lady wife’s tender nursing, was still abed after his detested afternoon rest. She herself had been home three weeks now from that other world that never could really be, and the leaves were whispering all around her in their painted maroon, vermilion, and gold hues, rich as any illuminated prayer book.

No word. There had been no official word, for who could trust whisperings in the village of a great battle far to the south any more than one could ever trust the rumors at court? Had he escaped the powerful French army? Was he hurt or wounded or even heading home to England? How long again, how many years this time, until she would see his proud and handsome face?

Her slender fingers plucked the lute strings while the words of the tune rustled through her tumbled mind like falling leaves:

“O man unkind,

Have thou in mind

My passion sharp!

Thou shalt me find

To thee full kind:

Lo, here my heart!”

She pulled her slippered feet back under her woolen
surcote
for, despite the sun, the October wind was chill. The rough tree trunk behind her back felt comfortingly steady and Marta’s grave—a soothing place rather than a painful one as time went by—was near enough to see across the little growth of bittersweet vine from which the purplish flowers had long died and which now flaunted a display of their poison scarlet berries.