The King’s Concubine: A Novel of Alice Perrers (18 page)

“This is a sin!” he growled in confirmation, if I had needed it, as I walked past him from the room.

“It is the King’s will.” The less I said, the better.

“You should not be part of it.”

I was brief but defiant. “I am summoned.”

“By your own contriving, no doubt. What you do must disgust any man possessing even an ounce of decency. The Queen has given you everything and this is how you repay her.” Wykeham’s mouth shut like a trap.

“I think we should go,” I replied, and turned away so that I need not see his vile disgust of me glitter in his eye. What had passed between me and the Queen must remain locked away, and so I must be content to let this man I had called a friend think what he wished of me, even though he condemned me for a sin not of my committing.

He led me through the deserted corridors. Had everyone been sent away deliberately? Not one page, no clerks or body servants, not one of the royal household was about on that night that set my feet on a new and dangerous path. My escort was unnervingly silent, so that I could taste his disapproval in my mouth, feel the burn of it on my skin. For the length of a single breath I stumbled almost to a halt. What if I didn’t comply? Was this how I wished to lose my virginity, as a creature in the clever royal scheming to benefit King and Queen? My mind was clouded with uncertainty, my heart encased in ice. So, what if I refused? What if I…? But events had moved on too far and too fast, as I knew, and I was being carried along, a mindless leaf in a stream. Quickly I pattered after Wykeham, until he came to a halt so abruptly that I all but trod on his heel. Wheeling ’round, he forced me to retreat a step, but he seized my wrist in an unpriestly grip.

“You should not be here!” His eyes were furious, his lips stretched in anger.

“Will you deny me to your King?” I would say anything to stop the accusations. “Not even you could do that, Wykeham.” I put a sneer into my voice. “You can build walls and arches, but you can’t dictate to your King!” Anything to shut him up.

Instantly he released me, thrusting me away so that I staggered against the wall.

“Wykeham…!” I gasped.

His mind was closed against me. And what could I have said without betraying the Queen’s carefully crafted deceit? With a brush of his knuckles against a door, Wykeham opened it, stood back, and gestured me to go through. I stepped into the room. The door closed at my back.

Chapter Six

I
t was Edward’s private chamber, redolent of masculine luxury. Wood paneling hung with tapestries, a fireplace with burning logs and a favorite hound curled there. A
prie-dieu
and a crucifix. A coffer, a standing table, a high-polished chair with carved arms and back—opulent, I decided as I took it all in at a glance, used as I now was to such magnificence. Here was everything a nobleman with a taste for prayer and erudition and comfort could wish for. Edward might have spent most of his life engaged in the hardship of campaigning in France, but at Havering, despite its insignificance compared to the royal dwellings at Westminster and Windsor, he enjoyed all that his consequence could bring him. And there were signs of recent habitation. A pole with a falcon that appeared to be asleep. A sumptuous damask and fur chamber robe in deep glowing red cast over the coffer. A flagon for wine and cups, and a platter of what remained of a meal. Books, one open, and a rosary cast on the bed; a bowl and ewer flanked by a candle stand, the fine quality of the candles casting a soft glow.

And a quite superlative bed.

My eye slid quickly away from its silk covers, its red and gold curtains. After the emotion of the past half hour, my control was compromised. I stood hesitantly with my back to the door, an animal at bay, so
it seemed, as I waited for the predator to pounce. For surely the King of England was as much a predator as his hawk.

The hawk rustled its feathers and sank further into somnolence. The hound twitched and whined in the throes of some hunting dream.

And Edward walked toward me from where he had been sitting perusing the pages of a book, hand outstretched in greeting. How beautiful he was. How carelessly he wore that beauty, how unself-consciously, how unaware of the impression his fine-carved features and magnificent stature would make on the beholder. Would make on me.

“Alice.” The stern lines of his face softened into the vestige of a smile. “You look as if you’re considering that I might pounce and dismember you.”

“I think I am,” I replied.

Edward’s laugh rumbled. “I’ll not do that.” His hand closed over mine. “You’re freezing—or frozen with fear. Come to the fire.…” Pulling me gently forward, he placed me in his own chair, speaking all the time as if I were some flighty, unbroken filly in need of reassurance. Leaving me to look around, he poured two cups of ruby liquid. “Here. It’s from Gascony. The best wine we have.” He pushed the cup into my hand, hooked his toe around the leg of a stool, and sat at my feet, lifting his own cup to his lips.

“Drink, Alice.” He nudged my forearm. I realized I had been staring at him, my thoughts paralyzed with uncertainty. I still could not look at the bed. For sure the King had not invited me here to have me copy the nation’s accounts into a ledger.

Edward drank, his eyes never leaving my face. Under that intense gaze my nerves faltered, and I looked down at the chasing on the fine silver cup, inconsequentially following the outline of a superbly tined stag with my finger.

“Would it please you to be my mistress?” he asked, as if inquiring about my health.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s honest, by God!”

“It has to be, Sire. I don’t know how to answer you otherwise.”

I took a careless gulp of wine and coughed. One of the logs collapsed with a sigh. The hawk shuffled on dry feet.

“You are a widow.”

“Yes.”

“Then you should not fear this.” His hand gestured toward the bed.

I swallowed. “I am a virgin. My marriage was never consummated. He couldn’t.…” I really had begun to tremble, now that the moment had come upon me. I glanced up to see that Edward was frowning at me. So that was not the answer he had wanted. He had wanted a mistress with some knowledge of what occurred between the sheets. All Philippa’s planning would go for naught. “I can leave, Sire. If you don’t want me here…”

“I’ll tell you when I don’t!” A flash of eye, a brush of temper that surprised me, and then it ebbed as fast as it had flared between us. His voice was very gentle. “Forgive me. This has to be a very private transaction between us.”

“And you don’t trust me to keep my own counsel?”

“That’s not what I meant.” His eyes were on mine, fierce and searching again, and I could not look away.

“I know what you meant. I know you don’t want to hurt Her Majesty.”

“You think it won’t hurt her to know?” Surging to his feet, he was suddenly as far from me as he could get, at the other side of the room. Who was the animal at bay here? I watched him cautiously. “Sins of the flesh,” he murmured. “They will return to haunt us.”

“I am no gossip, Sire,” I replied.

“How old are you?” he asked harshly.

“Seventeen years, my lord, perhaps eighteen.”

“So many years between us, so much experience that I have and you do not. Do you know, Alice? I’ve never been unfaithful to her. Not in all the thirty years of marriage. No matter the rumors that I have taken lovers—from the day I wed her I have not broken my oath. But now…”

But now she has told you to take a lover!

How to keep all the secrets? Was I to be a deft juggler, keeping the separate items aloft in an orderly pattern, dropping none? Or a skilled weaver, melding all the colors into one seemly whole? Was I capable of such discretion? Such skill? Countess Joan’s words slammed into my
mind.
It is important for a woman to have the duplicity to make good use of whatever gifts she might have.
And there she was with her cruel smile. Until I banished her. There was no place for Fair Joan’s cynicism in this maneuvering between Edward and myself. I waited, the nerves in my belly fluttering like finches in a cage.

“When I touch her she has to sink her teeth into her lips not to groan with the agony.” Edward turned away from me to brace his hands against the edge of the coffer, head bent, shoulders rigid as he made his confession. “I love my wife. But I desire you, Alice. Is that very bad?”

“Wykeham would say so, my lord.” I was still chafing at his reproof.

“What would
you
say?”

The only thing I could. “That you are my King and can demand my obedience, my lord.”

His mouth twisted. “A simplistic answer to smooth over any complication.” Silence fell. Heavy. Full of decision and indecision. And then: “If you are to share my bed, you must call me by my name.”

“Edward.” I tried it, as I had written it of late. I smiled. And the King must have heard the smile in my voice and he looked back at me over his shoulder.

“What is it?”

“It sounds strange.”

“Strange…Do you know how few people call me by my name?”

“No, Sire.”

“I could count them on the fingers of one hand. All the friends of my youth—dead within the last two years. Northampton—the bravest of my generals. Sir John Beauchamp, who carried my standard at Crécy. Lancaster—the most trusted of all my friends. The years are cruel, Alice. You’re too young to see it yet. They rob us of our health and our friends and our hopes, and give nothing back.” His sight was turned inward, his expression melancholy. Another log fell into ash, dislodging others, and as if the sound prompted him to what he was and what he must be, Edward slowly raised his head. His spine straightened visibly, and the lines of his face firmed as his lips compressed. “I am not allowed to grow old. I am King.”

I stood, my own anxieties obliterated by compassion, not that I
would ever have dared reveal it. Here was a proud warrior who had lived and fought for a lifetime, yet there was no comfort for him. Nor would he ask it—he would bear the burden of kingship to the grave, whatever the depth of loneliness it demanded from him. I walked slowly toward him, presenting him with my own cup, since his was forgotten on the coffer.

“You will not grow old. You will live forever. And I will call you Edward, if that is what you wish.”

I touched his hand as he took the cup from me, marveling that I could so easily transgress the honor due to the King; all my fears seemed to have fallen away. I let my fingers rest lightly on his, as his eyes captured mine.

“I remember the softness of your mouth. When you smile, your face is illluminated as if a candle is lit behind your eyes,” he said. “It lights you from within.”

“You flatter me.”

“Then we will flatter each other.”

Edward kissed me. His lips were firm and warm against mine. An intimate kiss but with no heat of passion. He was not aroused. Perhaps it was the desire of courtly love he wanted to give me rather than the fulfillment of the flesh.

“God will damn me for this, but…”

He let his hands drop from my shoulders, for there was harsh conscience again. I thought that in his youth there would have been no hesitation in Edward taking what he wanted, but he was not at ease with either his conscience or with me. His authority, within the bedchamber or without, was supreme, but his memories had roused the specter of death and decay.

So what was my role here? It came to me that I wanted nothing more than to give him some level of contentment. To make him smile again. But how…how to distract him from these morbid thoughts that gave him no pleasure? What skill did I have to achieve that? The arts of seduction were unknown to me. What might he want most from me that I was capable of giving? What could I do? Well—I could argue and hold an opinion.…

My eyes were caught by the documents strewn across the table. Affairs of business and policy. I walked to stand before them.

“Tell me what you are doing here, Edward.”

“Interested in royal policy, are you?” Intrigued, he had watched me go.

“Yes.” I looked back at him, a deliberate challenge that he was free to accept or reject. “I am capable of far more than deciding the color of the gown I wear or how my hair should be dressed!”

“Are you, now?” Accepting the challenge, Edward directed me to sit on a stool and reached to select one of the documents, handing it to me. “Family affairs,” he said, resting his weight against the table, interest in my precociousness replacing the melancholy. This was better!

“You are fortunate. I have no family,” I said. “I know nothing of such.”

“I have sons. Magnificent sons. And they bring me power.” And there was the King again rather than the man, his finger on every pulse, his hand wound tight in the reins to keep ultimate control of the kingdom. “What do you see on that document?”

He tapped the one I held. The Latin was close-written in the crabbed script of a clerk, but I could read enough. “Ireland,” I said.

“Good! This is Lionel. He’s in Ireland. A difficult province, a tough job. Once, I’d have gone myself, but I’ve sent Lionel as King’s Lieutenant. He’ll have to tread a path between all the damned interests. God knows it’s a morass of bad blood.”

He took the document from me and gave me another. I felt like a novice again, under instruction, or a clerk under Janyn’s scrutiny, but my fascination with the documents was keen. “And this?” he asked.

This one was more difficult, but the names were clear. “This is Aquitaine.”

“Edward, my heir.” The pride in his voice was unmistakable. “He’ll rule Aquitaine well as long as he curbs his tendency to stamp on the interests of those he rules. Gascony’s restive—he must learn to be patient at the same time as he learns to be king. He is a good commander, a man after my own heart. Now, this…”

He was enjoying himself. A man confident and assured as he spread out before me the heirs to his power who would carry the Plantagenet blood and name into history. I took the new document.

“This is John. John of Gaunt. The Duchy of Lancaster is now his.
And Edmund? I was planning on the Flanders heiress for him”—he frowned at a document with a heavy red seal that had cracked on its journeys—“but the French want her, and they have the ear of the new Pope. I’ll have to look elsewhere for him. And then there’s Thomas.…”