The King’s Concubine: A Novel of Alice Perrers (54 page)

“Then
don’t
visit me. I won’t expect you.” Crossly, furious at Joan and at my own weakness that I felt the hurt of it, I spread the garments on the bed, then began to search for shoes in a coffer.

“So you admit you might end up there?”

“I admit to nothing. I only know that I must go!”

“And you were never one to take good advice, were you?”

“I took yours, married you, and look where that got me! A whole fleet of enemies. And banished, forsooth!” The accusation was entirely unfair, of course, but I was not concerned about being dispassionate. I stood and looked at him, daring him to disagree, my hands planted on my hips.

And he did. Of course he did. “I think you made the enemies well enough without me.”

I took a breath, accepting his deliberate provocation. “True.” And I smiled faintly, the sore place beneath my heart easing a little just at the sight of him, strong and assured, filling the doorway to my room. But I turned my back against him. Suddenly I wanted to tell him how much I loved him, but I dared not.

“You loved him, didn’t you?” he stated.

I looked up, startled from my unwinding of a girdle stitched in muted colors—I would pay my final respects with commendable discretion. “Yes. I did.” I thought about what I wanted to say, and explained, as much to myself as to Windsor. “He was everything a man should be. Brave and chivalrous, generous with his time and his affections. He treated me as a woman who
mattered
to him. He was loyal and principled and…” My words dried. “You don’t want to hear all that.”

“Quite a valediction!”

“If you like. Are you jealous?” Completely distracted now from the heavy links in my hands, I tilted my head and watched him. Without doubt, jealousy as green as emeralds in the ring I had refused spiked the air between us. “I don’t think you are necessarily either loyal or principled. Only when it suits you.”

Now, there was a challenge. What would he say to that?

“God’s Blood, Alice!” The bitterness in the tone shivered over my skin.

“So you
are
jealous!”

He thought for a moment. “Not if you lust after me more!”

Which made me laugh. “Yes. You know I do.” Impossibly forthright, Windsor always had the capacity to surprise me, and to confess to lust was far easier than to admit to love. The power would remain with me. “I had a love—a deep respect—for Edward, but I lust after you—just as you lust after me. Does that make you feel any better?”

“It might! Prove it!”

Abandoning the garments, my mood softening under his onslaught, I walked toward him and he took me in his arms. We understood each other very well, did we not?

“I want to be with no one but you, Will,” I said, and pressed my lips to his.

I hoped he would be satisfied, and although I thought he might push me, to my relief he did not. What was it that made me love him so much? What was there to bind me to him? We did not hunt together, as I had with Edward. We did not dance—Windsor, I suspected, was as wrong-footed at dancing as I. There was not a poetic bone in his whole body to seduce me into love and longing. We did not even have the intricate and magical workings of a clock to bind us. What was it, then, except for naked self-interest? Was that all it was? I did not think so, but I could not tally the length and breadth of it as I might assess a plot of land.

But I loved him. And pretended I did not.

“Glad to hear it.” He kissed my mouth, his desire evident. “Do I come with you?”

“No. I’ll go alone.”

“I still say you shouldn’t.…”

I placed my fingers over his mouth. “Will, don’t.…”

His teeth nipped at my fingertips. “Do you want me to stay tonight?”

“Yes.”

So he did.

“I’ll keep you safe, you know,” he murmured against my throat, his skin slick, his breath short, when I had proved to him that his jealousy had no grounds.

“I know,” I replied as I fought against the dread that threatened my contentment. The powers ranged against his protection of me might be too great. The royal hospitality in the dungeon in the Tower might not be a figment of my imagination.

“I’ll not let any harm come to you.”

“No.”

His arms held the black fears at bay and we enjoyed each other; my heart was lighter with the rising of the sun.

“Don’t go!” he murmured.

And still the dangerous word
love
had not been uttered between us. I was forced to accept that it never would be.

I ignored Windsor’s advice and went to Westminster.

Anonymous in black and gray—posing as nothing more than a well-to-do widow, for I was not completely lacking in good sense—I took myself to Westminster, to the Abbey, with two stalwart servants, who forced a way through the crowds. I would be there. I would let the mysticism of the monastic voices raised in Edward’s requiem Mass sweep over me, and would thank God for Edward’s escape from the horrors of his final days. I would not be kept out—not by Joan, not by the devil himself. The crowds were predictably ferocious but no impediment to the elbows of a determined woman.

We approached the door. A few more yards, and then it would be possible to slip inside. A blast of trumpets brought everyone around me to a halt, apart from the usual haphazard pushing and jostling, until those at the front were thrust back by royal guards, each applying
his halberd as quarterstaff. I edged my way as close as I could, and there, walking toward the great door, was the new King, not yet crowned, pale and insubstantial in seemly black, his fair hair lifting in the wind. What a poor little scrap of humanity, I thought. He had none of the robust presence of his father or grandfather, nor, I suspected, would he ever have.

And at his side? My breath hissed between my teeth. At his side, protective, self-important, walked his mother. Joan the Fair, her sour features unable to restrain her final triumph. Stout and aged beyond her years, wrapped around in black velvet and sable fur, she resembled nothing less than one of the portly ravens that inhabited the Tower.

Damn you for standing in my path to Edward’s side!

She was so close I could have touched her. I had to restrain myself from striking out, for in that moment of blinding awareness, I resented her supremacy, her preeminence, the power that she had usurped, which was once mine. A power against which I had no defenses.

I hope your precious son rids himself of your interference as soon as he’s grown! I hope he chooses Gaunt’s influence over yours!

Did she sense my hostility? There was the slightest hesitation in her footstep, as if my antagonism gave off a rank perfume, and she turned her head when she had come level with me. Our eyes met; hers widened; her lips parted. Her features froze, and I was afraid of the threat I saw writ there. It was within her authority to bring down the law on my head, despite the solemnity of the occasion. My future might rest in those plump, dimpled hands. What had possessed me to risk this meeting? I wished with all my heart that I had heeded Windsor’s caustic warnings.

Joan’s mouth closed like a trap and her hesitation vanished. How sure she was! With a little smile, she placed one hand firmly on her son’s shoulder, all the time urging him forward into the Abbey. So much was said in that one small gesture. And then they had moved past me, so the
frisson
of fear that had touched my nape eased. She would let me go. And I exhaled slowly.

Too soon! Too soon! Joan stopped. She spun swiftly on her heel. The men-at-arms lining the route stood to attention, halberds raised, and fear returned tenfold, flooding my lungs so that I could not breathe. Would she?

Our eyes were locked, hers in malice, mine in defiance, for that one moment as immobile as the carved stone figures that stared out with blind eyes above our heads. Would she punish me for all I had stood for, all I had been to Edward? For this ultimate provocation in the face of her express orders?

Joan’s smile widened with an unfortunate display of rotted teeth. Yes, she would. I almost felt the grip of hard hands on my arms, dragging me away. But she surprised me.

“Close the door when we are entered. Let no one pass!” Joan ordered. “The proceedings will begin now that the King is come.” She turned away as if I were of no importance to her, yet at the end she could not resist. “Your day is over,” I heard her murmur, just loud enough so that I might hear. “Why do I need to bother myself with such as you…?”

For the briefest of ill-considered moments, spurred by brutal insolence, I considered following in the royal train, slipping through before the great door was slammed shut, and taking my rightful place beside my royal lover’s tomb. I would insist on my right to be there.

Ah, no!

Sense returned. I had no rightful place. Sick at heart, I fought my way out of the crowd and back to my water transport, where I was not altogether surprised to find Windsor waiting for me. Nor was I displeased, although furious with Joan, but mostly with myself for my impaired prudence. In true woman’s fashion, I took my embittered mood out on him.

“So you’ve come to rescue me!” I said with a nasty nip of temper.

“Someone had to.” He was suitably brusque under the circumstances. “Get in the barge.”

I sat in moody, glowering silence for the whole of the journey; I had been put very firmly in my place, more by Joan’s final words than by anything else. Windsor allowed me to wallow, making no attempt at conversation to discover what had disturbed me. He simply watched life on the riverbank pass by with a pensive gaze.

Why do I need to bother myself with such as you…?

I had always known that the days of Edward’s protection would end, had I not? But to be cut off quite so precipitously…It had been
frighteningly explicit. There was a new order in England in which I had no part. I must accept it, until the day of my death.

My personal mourning for Edward was far more satisfying, to my mind, and what he would have wished me to do. On my return, I did what he had loved, what he had reminisced over even when he could barely sit upright against his pillows, much less climb into the saddle. I took a horse, a raptor on my fist, Braveheart at my heels—older but no wiser—and hunted the rabbits in the pastures around Pallenswick. The hunting was good. When the falcon brought down a pigeon, my cheeks were wet with tears. Edward would have relished every moment of it. And then, retired to my own chamber, I drank a cup of good Gascon wine—“dear Edward, you will live forever in my memory”—before I turned my back on the past and looked forward.

But to what? Isolation. Boredom! They were better than being hunted down by a bitter woman bent on vengeance, despite her words that I was nothing to her. I knew it was not in Joan’s nature to abandon the chase. Thrusting myself under her nose had not been one of my wisest choices.

“I shouldn’t have gone, should I?” Wrapped in a heavy mantle, unable to keep warm, I huddled over the open fire when the weather turned unseasonably wet and wild.

“I told you not to,” Windsor remarked, entirely without sympathy, except that his hands were astonishingly warm around my freezing ones.

“I know you did.” I was moody and out of sorts, much like the high winds and sudden squalls of heavy rain that arrived to buffet us.

“Don’t worry. They can’t get to you, you know. Your banishment was rescinded by Gaunt himself.”

“Do you believe that she’ll forget?” His optimism was unusual.

“No.” So much for optimism! He scowled down at his fingers encircling my wrists, with the cynicism I appreciated in a world of flattery and empty promises. “How much did the King leave her in his will?”

I answered without inflection. “A thousand marks. Not enough to crow about. And Richard gets Edward’s bed with all the armorial hangings.”

Scowl vanishing, Windsor guffawed immoderately. “Far better that
you
should have had the bed!”

“Joan will probably have it burned to rid herself of the contamination of my presence. She’ll not let the boy sleep in it.”

“Are you mentioned?” he asked.

“No.” I had not expected it. I had no place in Edward’s will. He had given me all that he could, all that he had wished to give.

“At least that should give her cause for rejoicing.”

“I doubt it! When I left Sheen I made sure I had Philippa’s jewels packed in my saddlebags and Edward’s rings safe in the bodice of my gown. Short of searching my body in full public view, she couldn’t get her hands on them!”

Windsor laughed again, then sobered. “Enough of Fair Joan. We can’t spend the rest of our lives worried out of our minds, can we? So we won’t.”

Which I had to admit was the best advice I could get.

Windsor released my wrists and raised his cup of ale in a toast.

“To the storms. Long may they last. May they flood the roads and riverbanks between London and Pallenswick until Joan forgets.”

“By the Virgin! Until hell freezes over!” But I took his cup, finished the ale, and echoed the sentiment. “To the storms.”

The rain and winds abating, the roads were soon open again, and the Thames was once more busy with river traffic, so we heard of events in London and elsewhere. Some of them encroached on my existence not at all. How strange that was.

The boy Richard, clad in white and gold, was crowned on the sixteenth day of July. A Thursday, forsooth! Unusual, but chosen as the auspicious Eve of St. Kenelm, an undistinguished but martyred child King of the old Kingdom of Mercia.

“Doubtless Fair Joan thought the lad needed all the happy auguries he could get,” Windsor growled.

Which was a sound assessment. There were troubles afoot. In the absence of a strong English army with a king at its head, the French had seized the initiative with numerous incursions along the south
coast of England, burning and pillaging all they came upon. The town of Rye became an inferno. Some French marauders even reached Lewes. In Pallenswick we felt safe enough.

How strange to have no association with such momentous events, to be entirely divorced from the King’s plans to drive the French out. Who would take on the direction of foreign policy? Gaunt, I supposed. I closed my mind to it, for it no longer touched me.