The First Princess of Wales (55 page)

He went out and closed the door, and shortly after the soothing flow of lute and lyrics began. Between her increasingly frenzied prayers to St. Roch, she clung to the music to keep her sane as Thomas Holland gasped the remnants of his life away in the grinding grip of plague delirium.

T
homas Holland had been buried under the floorstones of the Château’s chapel for an entire week before Joan felt the place was safe enough to summon the children back from Madeleine’s family’s crude little croft near town. None of the servants had been smitten and she herself felt no encroaching disease. She felt nothing. Absolutely nothing.

She ordered the servants to scrub every room he had been in since he’d returned from buying the Yule gifts in Pont-Audemer. All his garments, the bedclothes from his room, even the fine Persian carpet she had burned and the charred remains were buried outside the Château walls. She insisted his squires wash his horse twice with ash-leaf balm to cleanse it. She had the gifts he had brought them that last day he was himself soaked for three days in black willow-bark water to purify any of the vile contagion clinging to them. Even now, she could hear Bella somewhere downstairs tooting that ridiculous horn she so loved, her last—her only—gift from a father who could not love her.

Joan stared up at the too familiar underside of her brocade bed canopy in the solar. A widow at age thirty, her life all turned upside down again. Destined for what? To live on while those about her died over the years? To keep inheriting lands and titles until she was the only one left? To have truly loved only once and to be fated—destined—to never fulfill that love?

Roger Wakeley began to play again outside her door as he had each morn and afternoon while she slept or rested. It was a blessing he had come back. He amused the children and taught them songs, although the boys took much coaxing to sing and eleven-year-old Thomas had lectured Roger that since his lord father had not cared a whit for music, he did not either. Still, the fact that Roger had known both the king and Prince of Wales went a long way toward making Roger acceptable in young Thomas’s copper eyes.

She must get up, she told herself, but after three days in bed she still felt listless and separate from the world outside. Had Mother felt this way all those years in her solitary room at Liddell? she mused. For the first time she could almost grasp why she must have not wanted to be disturbed or made to feel, not even wanting her own child about to upset the sweet silence.

The children. Of course, she must care for the children. But over the years the boys would be reared to knighthood in the great houses of the realm as was proper, and Bella would grow to a beauty and be married. And then, in her bed, just like this, Joan, Duchess of Kent, would be alone.

Thomas would inherit the birthright lands in Lancashire one day. In four years on his sixteenth saint’s day, he could claim them legally now that his sire was dead. And when she died, John would have Liddell, of course, and this French Château and lands would—

She sat up in bed and pulled the down-filled coverlet up about her shoulders. Bella did not need this place and the boys would own English lands, mayhap even accrue more through favorable marriages if she could arrange it. She did not want this place, ten years of work to improve it notwithstanding. It was French and she was English and besides, now that the Treaty of Brétigny renounced English claims to Normandy, it would be much harder to hold over the years.

She would sell this Château and lands and walk away without another look back at the place where Thomas had died, the place where the Jacquerie had left its cruel mark, the place where dear Marta had died so long ago, and where she had parted from her prince forever. Surely there could be no protest from the Plantagenets that a bereaved widow sold her dead lord’s Crécy landholdings and retired to her modest country manorhouse in Kent. She would bother them no more at court, and they would never even hear her name.

Her brain pulsing with excitement for the first time in weeks, in years, she wrapped herself in the huge coverlet and strode barefooted to open the door to the hall. Roger Wakeley looked up amazed from his chair, then a huge grin lit his face to see the look on hers.

“I see my lady, the Duchess Joan of Kent, is back again,” he said as his fingers plucked a livelier melody than he had dared to play for days.

“Aye. Could you summon the children and then come back? And ask Renée to come up when she can. I need to bathe and get dressed.”

“Your wish is my command, fair lady,” he said and surprised her by handing her his lute before he hurried off down the hall.

Holding the lute by its neck, she darted a quick look in her polished mirror on the table. Terrible! Purplish circles under the huge, sad lavender eyes, the cheeks drawn and pale, the hair as wild as a Kentish haystack! She tugged a comb through her tresses and tried to pinch some color into her cheeks.

She sat in a chair by the hearth and wrapped herself more completely in the puffy coverlet, the lute resting in her lap. How long it had been since she had played and sung and meant it. Now, mayhap, at Liddell, she would sing again.

She strummed the four perfectly attuned strings and felt the light, pear-shaped body of the lute reverberate against her thighs. She smiled wistfully despite herself. Aye, for only the love of music and the love of one man had she ever felt her inner being tremble like that, and at least now, she would have one of those loves to cherish.

Almost hypnotically her fingers began to pick out the pensive song which had tormented her these last days, and very low, she sang the words aloud unafraid:

“Sweet passion’s pain doth pierce mine heart

For I have loved thee from the start,

But foolishly behind high walls

I hid such proof

Nor saw this truth.

“Sweet passion’s pain doth urge me plead

That I might be thy love indeed,

But blindingly and armored bright

I hid such proof

Nor saw this truth.

“And now sweet passion’s pain doth teach

That my last chance must be great reach,

For wildly doth Dame Fortune’s wheel

Spin by such proof

Nor halt for truth.

“Welcome, sweet passion’s pain, until

My heart shall recognize its will.

Whatever prophecies proclaim,

I know such proof,

Accept this truth.”

Although she knew Roger would bring the children in soon, she put the lute down and hurried to her coffer of treasures. Her broken pearls had never been recovered after the looting by the Jacquerie, but she still had the two letters, the dainty beryl ring, and now the two elaborately drawn zodiac birthcharts the old astrologer Morcar had cast for her and Prince Edward years ago. “Map of Joan of Kent of Liddell Manor” one was labeled and the other read, “Map of H. R. H., the Prince of Wales, Plantagenet.”

She unrolled them side by side pressing elbows and hands awkwardly to their curling corners to hold them flat. The delicate drawing reminded her of a bull’s-eye target for archery: four concentric circles, the two outer ones bearing the astrological symbols with occasional notes in Morcar’s spiderweb calligraphy.

Aye, just as the prince had said, perfectly aligned in the seventh house of matrimony. On her chart was the sun. That indicated, the prince had told her once at Monbarzon, that her marriage would assume considerable importance with a great widening of social status, surely not a wedding with Thomas Holland. And here, on the prince’s chart the sun in good aspect with Mars: success through personal efforts, the prince had said it meant, and obstacles overcome by sheer willpower. Ah, but she did not dare to dream!

She let the parchments roll closed noisily as the children came in with Roger Wakeley. As Joan sat back in her chair and rearranged her cocoon of coverlet, Bella climbed up in her lap and Master Roger strummed his retrieved lute gently, playing nothing in particular. The boys stood as if at attention for some dire pronouncement.

“I have wonderful news for you all,” she began eagerly. “As soon as we can, we are going to pack our things, sell the Château, and go home to live in Kent at Mother’s old home of Liddell!”

The boys exchanged silent glances and Bella’s smile did not change as she cuddled to her mother.

“But Father is buried here,” Thomas managed at last.

“Well, aye, my dear, but we are all English, and you are going to Warwick Castle as squire to Lord Beauchamp this summer anyway. I do not intend to rear you all here in France with no lord in the castle to protect us. We are going home, and I am certain you will all soon love Liddell as much as I do.”

“It is nice to visit,” John drawled, “but, I just thought this was our home.”

It struck her then, harder than she wished to admit, that indeed Château Ruisseau was their Liddell, and brief summer visits to her beloved childhood home in Kent could hardly have changed that. The solid surety she was doing the right thing fled.

“My darlings, I know it is all very sudden, but I have to do what I believe is best for us all now that your father is gone.”

“Father went to heaven,” Bella piped up wide-eyed, while the boys stood first on one foot then the other.

“Aye, my Bella,” Joan said. “I need all of your help now, very much. Thomas and John will carry on the proud Holland name and inherit their own lands someday. I love you all very, very much as your father did and I hope you will help me to do what I believe we need to do.”

“I will,” John said a little too loudly.

“And you, my dear Thomas?”

“St. Peter’s bones, of course, I will, Mother,” he answered, “and as you say, I am off to earn my own way this summer anyhow. Besides, in England, there will be more knights about to learn from and I intend to be the very best I can to make Father’s name great through my deeds. In England, closer to the court, we might even get to see the king or the prince again, eh, John?”

“Oh, sure! Is the court far from Liddell, Mother?”

Joan’s eyes darted behind her sons to Roger Wakeley’s carefully composed face. Flustered by this turn of talk, she looked away guiltily but not, she knew, before Roger had seen and understood.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“E
dward Plantagenet, Duke of Cornwall, Prince of Wales, now departs this hall!” the House crier’s voice bellowed as, amidst blasts of horns and the rumble of lords rising from their seats in fealty, Prince Edward strode from his father’s canopied throne on the dais in the great Painted Chamber of Westminster Palace. He often took his royal sire’s place at Westminster of late—on the throne as well as in discussions, as the Houses of Parliament struggled to understand and deal with the complicated terms of the Treaty of Brétigny by which years of hostilities with the French were to be ended. The Treaty, signed by both kings last May, encompassed a labyrinth of negotiated territories, ransoms, hostages, and, of most important interest to the Prince of Wales, the future control of the huge southern French province of Aquitaine of which he would soon be proclaimed governor. He welcomed the duties, the challenge. He welcomed anything that gave him power over others in the hope it might help him assert power over himself.

Nickolas Dagworth and Hugh Calveley met Prince Edward in the outer hall already crowded with his retainers and companions. The prince handed his crown to one squire and his purple velvet and ermine cloak to another without breaking stride with his two boon companions close at his heels.

“A marvelous explanation of strategy,” Dagworth said, hardly nonplused at all by the usually quick way the prince exited Westminster or anywhere else. When he was done with one task lately, the prince simply dropped it and plunged capably into the next, Dagworth marveled. No wonder the aging king had come to rely on this son as well as John of Lancaster so much these last few years.

“No flattery from you, Nick,” His Grace was saying as he refused an offered cloak to cut the stiff January wind off the Thames and mounted his tall black destrier. “Explaining that scramble of clauses in the Treaty is as complicated as a woman’s whims. Mount up, anyone who is coming. We are off for the house on Fish Street!”

His band of closest friends and advisors scurried to their mounts after hearing where they were headed this time. At first, in the scramble, only four guards and the two standard bearers kept a good pace with Nickolas Dagworth and his prince as they headed north past Whitehall toward the city. The chill breeze from the river flapped the prince’s proud banners and mussed his tawny, uncovered head. Bold and reckless, he was, Dagworth thought, as if he dared the weather, Parliament, his royal sire—fate itself—to stand in his way. Yet the man was frenzied too, consumed by some inner drive that plagued him.

From Charing Cross, along the Strand and Fleet Street, the cheering crowds began. Some Londoners who spotted the prince’s entourage leaned from windows; others turned in their tracks of daily duties to bellow their blessings, and Dagworth noted how the prince acknowledged his popularity, yet almost never accepted it. Word of their entourage, as usual, spread like the wind, and the crowds continued to swell.

“They love you, Your Grace,” he shouted ahead to the waving, nodding prince.

“Aye, for now, Nick. They think times are good for their Black Prince of Crécy, Poitiers, and Brétigny. But, St. George, where is there to go in their hearts after all that but down?”

Cheers of “Long live the Prince of Wales” and “Poitiers! Poitiers!” nearly drowned out Dagworth’s attempt to answer as they turned onto narrow Fish Street.

“There will be other great days yet, Your Grace! Aquitaine! Someday you will marry and then there is the throne—”

The prince’s blue eyes glittered coldly as his retort cut off Dagworth in midthought. “I need not your predictions on my future, triumphant or otherwise, Nick. I used to think new glories awaited, but now, sometimes I tire of it all.”

Unsmiling, but still nodding to acknowledge the yelling, running people, Prince Edward dismounted before his narrow, three-storied stone house and went immediately in. He saw Dagworth sit astride without dismounting for a moment. Hell’s gates, let the man sulk if he could not abide being put in his place. Let him sit out there in the street like a sullen jackass and listen to the cries of capricious crowds. The man might as well plan his own coronation or wedding as dare to speak of those two events for the Prince of Wales!

The prince tossed his riding gloves where he always left them on the oak table in the slate entryhall. He went into the oak-paneled, first floor parlor where a low fire burned. He slammed the door, tossed a new log on—which shot a shower of sparks at him—and collapsed in a tall-backed leather chair.

As much as there was to do, he felt the oppression, once again, of having nothing to do. Duties here in London always beckoned, overseeing his vast landholdings too, seeing to the rearing of his two illegitimate sons, enjoying numerous women to slake his occasional lusts—nothing was enough. Even the vast remodeling of his favorite palace at Kennington across the river bored him now, and he had not checked on its progress for weeks. He missed his friend Sir John Chandos who had been sent to France as king’s lieutenant to expedite land transfers from the Treaty, and he wished desperately he might have gone himself. At least then he would have had a reason to travel besides just visiting places. St. George, he might have even gone through Normandy!

Jeannette’s face as he had seen her last over a year and a half ago, all teary-eyed, stubborn, ever exquisitely beautiful, teased his memory from the leaping flames of the fire into which he stared. She had claimed she loved him, only him, but she had sent him away without a caress, without letting him do what they had both surely longed for more than life itself. And so, he had sent her Lord Holland home and forced himself never to write to her or speak her name. Only once, last summer, when his sister Isabella had heard the Hollands were visiting in Kent and had mentioned inviting them to Windsor, had he made a fool of himself by furiously forbidding her to do so. And then, though Isabella’s shocked face showed she knew the truth of his tormented heart at last, he had merely stalked off to come back here and buried himself under the welcome weight of his duties once again.

A sharp rap on the door startled him. “Aye? Enter. So you decided to come in, Nick. Back for more of my bitter moods?”

The tall, black-haired man entered with a parchment scroll in his hand. The old, jagged battle scar on his brown cheek looked especially white as his face suffused redder.

“No, Your Grace. I apologize for my hasty words out there. This missive is from Chandos in France. The messenger rode up with it even as I sat out there on your cheering front doorstoop.”

The prince held out his hand for the parchment, and Dagworth stepped closer towering over him. “Sit, Nick. You would like to call me out for my vile temper of late, admit it. Mayhap that is what I need—a few cracked heads in a joust or some new voluptuous bedwarmer but, unlike the indefatigable Sir Nickolas Dagworth, I even tire of that. What the hell lasting good is a woman’s body unless you love the woman inside? That is my real motto lately, you know—not ‘I serve.’”

Dagworth grinned despite himself, nervous at how close that must come to the truth of his liege lord’s heart—the heart that no one ever saw into, no one at all. He watched the prince’s austere, handsome face as his eyes scanned the letter from John Chandos. The prince frowned, startled, stared closer. Dagworth sat up straighter on the bench. Anybody who knew Chandos realized his written hand was atrocious to decipher, but the prince must be good enough at it by now to not stare agape like that. This was surely something else.

Dagworth leapt to his feet when the prince did, but only stood stock-still like a wooden quintain dummy when His Grace began to pace back and forth before the hearth, muttering. He unrolled the parchment further and stared closely at it again, then cast it into the leaping flames at his feet.

“Bad tidings, my lord prince? The territory transfer of Aquitaine has gone awry?”

“What? That. No, I am certain it is fine. He says naught of that. Nick, have them fetch fresh horses. The plague has gone through France and Thomas Holland is dead of it a month ago. I will be right down. Have the horses and anyone who will ride waiting in the street. I knew it. I knew it! Old Morcar was right!”

The prince ran from the room and the door banged open into the oak-paneled wall as Nick Dagworth stared after him. “Old Morcar? Who is old Morcar? But Thomas Holland—that means Joan of Kent again! Damn, but I should have known,” he said aloud as a new realization crashed in on him. “But then is she not in Normandy? Hell’s gates, I do not relish a cold ride clear to Normandy!” he muttered and hurried out to call everyone together.

B
ut it was not Normandy they headed for at a pounding pace that increasingly blustery, late January day—it was Windsor Castle where the queen and Princess Isabella had been in residence this winter while the Plantagenet men kept to business in London. By dusk, they had rattled stiff and saddlesore into the vast castle’s gray stone embrace of walls and towers. And before the prince’s arrival had even been announced to the queen, let alone the Princess Isabella whose chambers he now sought, he was striding still dressed in the same dusty garments he had worn to sessions in Parliament ages ago today.

His exhausted retinue fell away like flies either voluntarily or at his bequest as he approached Isabella’s suite in the southeast stretch of towers and rooms. Strangely, no guards were at her door and no flighty butterfly ladies clustered about the hall. She probably was with the queen and had taken all her retainers there, but he had no intention of seeing his mother until this business with Isabella was done and could not be undone.

He knocked twice and lifted the doorlatch expecting to see a deserted room. But he heard a muffled noise, a voice and stepped inside the dimly lighted, large chamber.

“Isabella,
mignonne,
it is Edward.”

A flutter of movement, a gasp, a shriek seized his attention from the distant corner of the room—no, in the bed. In a flurry of wild blond hair, his sister Isabella sat up in bed and a man’s broad-shouldered, naked torso bent close to protect her nakedness.

“Isabella! What the hell! Who is
he
?”

“Oh, Blessed Mary’s veil, my lord, how dare you just come in here!” she shrieked. “Oh, how could you, Edward?”

Incensed at first to see who the man was, the prince noisily drew his sword as he approached the bed only to see an ire matching his own cause Isabella to shake her fist nearly in his face. “Oh hell, my lord, you ruin everything! If it is not you, it is our beloved, overbearing father! Oh, dearest Ingelram, I am so ashamed, I could die!”

The man’s nervous, dark eyes fixed on Edward’s sword; he pulled Isabella’s quaking shoulders closer into the protective crook of one arm.

“Ingelram?” Edward floundered. “Also known as Enguerrand de Coucy? So—one of England’s most expensive hostages from the Treaty exchange and in bed with the princess royal!”

“Just stop it, my lord prince,” Isabella scolded between sniffles, and furiously tossed a little silk pillow his way. “Obviously, I invited the man here and obviously, I sent everyone away, even the bothersome guards. I am twenty-eight, you know, and sick to death of having no one to love. And I do love Ingelram de Coucy!”

“And I do love the princess, my lord prince, I swear it,” the sloe-eyed, handsome youth declared.

Edward spit out a string of oaths, but his sword arm went slack, and he stalked away from the bed to sit slumped over staring at the fire. He ought to challenge the French bastard, to run him through or at least call him out. The king would have. Any chivalrous, protective knight, any elder brother worth his salt would have and yet his initial outrage had ebbed to—damn them, they had looked so happy, so glowing and defiant even caught like that, he felt only an aching jealousy he could not be that way with his Jeannette. Now. All these years. Always!

He heard them scrambling to rise and garb themselves behind him. Low firelight danced along the sword blade resting across his splayed knees and then he actually smiled. Now, at least, Isabella would have to be his ally, willing or not, for she needed his good will as desperately as he needed hers.

“Your Grace, my lord Prince of Wales,” Ingelram de Coucy’s aristocratic French voice addressed him.

Edward rose, turned, and fought to actually stifle a grin at the young man’s obvious discomposure at being so caught—or mayhap, dismay at his slipshod, slovenly appearance at dressing so quickly or at vacating his obviously delightful resting place before the deed was fully done.

“I realize, my lord prince, I am here in England under the aegis of the Treaty as a hostage. However, should you wish to challenge me, to call me out, then
certainement,
I shall comply fully.”

Isabella, wrapped in a silk robe with her hair disheveled, ran over to seize de Coucy’s grandly gesturing arm. “No, no, my lord. Your Grace, Edward, no fighting or I swear you can fight me too!”

“No, my Isabella, no fighting over this. You see, I approve of love—and I need to talk to you alone.”