Hugh and Bess (25 page)

  “Did you never think of Will in all of this?”

  Joan ignored the question. “Sir Thomas was gone for so long, I thought that he had forgotten me and everything would work out, except that I loved him and couldn’t love Will. But then he did come back, and he found out I was married to Will. He was angry and sad, but he said that it was best that I continue that way, since he didn’t have the money to contest the matter and because he didn’t wish to hurt my reputation. So we decided to go our separate ways.”

  “Is that what you were doing when you were making love to him at Windsor Castle?”

  Joan's lovely eyes opened wide. “You saw us?” Bess nodded coldly. “I’d had too much to drink and so had he. We were going to our chambers when we met each other outside the hall. We started kissing and then some clumsy oaf fell against us. That brought us to our senses and we parted. But it made us both start thinking that we should be man and wife after all.”

  “So he took service as Will's steward so he could see you?”

  “No! Will asked him because he had served your father well, and Sir Thomas couldn’t find a good excuse to refuse; I had nothing to do with it. How could you understand? I’ve tried to be a good wife to Will, but he's such a boy compared to Tom. And you forget that Tom is my true husband, in the Church's eyes as well as ours. Now that he has his grant for taking that Count d’Eu hostage, he is going to take the case to the papal courts. Then they shall judge me Thomas's wife. I truly believe that is why I have been barren with Will. As a punishment for deserting the man I married.”

  “Or as a punishment for deceiving Will.”

  “He's better off marrying elsewhere.”

  “I certainly believe so, and I hope he does. He deserves better.”

  Joan shrugged and stood up. “You may leave now, Lady Despenser. Pray tell your brother not to come back here tonight.”

  Hugh and Bess's house was only a few houses down from Joan and Will's. All the houses looked so much alike that coats of arms had had to be nailed to the doors so that their occupants could tell them apart. She walked wearily past the page who opened the Despenser door and went upstairs, where Hugh was waiting in the chamber as though he had never left it. “Where's Will?”

  “Sleeping in the next room. He’d had a bit of wine before you came, and he had a bit more after, enough to put him asleep. Good heads for wine don’t seem to run in your family.” Bess frowned, and he pulled her close to him. “I gather the news from Joan isn’t good?”

  “She swears that she was married to Thomas Holland when she was twelve and that she was too frightened to tell anyone when they arranged the marriage to Will.”

  “Poor thing.”

  “Poor thing! She has humiliated poor Will, shamed our family, and you call her a poor thing!”

  Hugh shrugged. “My mother was in a similar fix, did I ever tell you? She and Joan were first cousins; maybe bigamy runs in their family.”

  “Hugh!” From the next room she heard Will snore. It sounded like an unhappy snore. “How did it happen?”

  “God knows. She never said and I never dared to ask; I imagine she was ashamed of herself, poor lady. It wasn’t my father, of course, it was Sir William la Zouche and Sir John de Grey, the one of Rotherfield. You’ve met Grey here, but I guess you didn’t know how close he came to having the honor of being my stepfather. Anyway, Zouche and Grey both claimed to have married her. They fought it out for several years in the papal courts, and Grey finally stopped appealing. She was in her thirties when it happened, older and wiser than poor Joan.”

  “Poor my elbow,” muttered Bess.

  “While your brother was reasonably sober, I suggested that he send Joan back to England as soon as it can be arranged. No need to say why; he can make the excuse that the situation here disagrees with her health or that he wants her to attend to his estates. Whomever she's married to, she's best off away from both of them until this is settled. It would be awkward if she conceived a child just now. Your brother thought it was a good idea.”

  “It is, Hugh.” A little mollified, she kissed him. “But I think that you are being far too easy on Joan.”

  “It's Holland who's to blame, sweetheart. He's years older than Joan and should have known better than to get her into this mess. But with a face like that on the girl, what man could help himself?”

  Bess's look could freeze over a desert. “Of course, it's a matter of taste, and her looks never appealed that much to— Shall I sleep in the next room with Will, my dear?”

  Surprisingly, Joan made no fuss about returning to England, and her excuse of ill health was given credibility by the pale, drawn looks she exhibited on the way to the merchant ship on which she took passage several days later. Bess privately hoped that the ship was boarded by pirates, though she reflected glumly that even they too would likely be bowled over by Joan's heart-shaped face, deep blue eyes, and russet, curling hair. She would probably end up as their queen, with them piling booty on her lap.

  Will, rather to Bess's surprise, had recovered some semblance of his usual good spirits. He rode with Joan to the shore as if nothing amiss were between them, and he kissed her good-bye with affection, though somewhat gingerly. Thomas Holland, wisely, had deeply interested himself in the conduct of the siege that day and was not on hand to bid his bride farewell.

  Joan's departure was scarcely commented on by those outside of her immediate family, however, for the siege was in its last gasps. Sickened, Bess had heard the rumors that the citizens of Calais were reduced to eating horseflesh, then that of the few scrawny dogs and cats that still roamed around the town. She had seen a copy of a letter that Jean de Vienne, the governor of Calais, had attempted to smuggle to King Philip. Soon, Jean de Vienne wrote, the men of Calais would be left with the choice between eating each other and walking out into the English lines to face certain death. If Philip did nothing soon, he would not hear from the men of Calais again.

  The English troops, having retrieved the letter after its carrier, trapped, tossed it into the sea, gave it to their king. Edward forwarded it to King Philip in hopes of forcing his hand. Philip had reacted by sending an army, which camped so close to Calais that its citizens, encouraged, had lit bonfires in celebration. Two peace-making cardinals had arrived as well, but failed utterly in their mission. Then Philip had offered to do battle in a space to be agreed upon between the two sides. It was a battle no one thought the French could win. Since May, fresh English troops had been pouring into the town; the wooden houses of Villeneuve-le-hardie had long since filled up. Yet Bess waited nervously for word that the site had been chosen. The English had won battles against seemingly impossible odds; so, everyone knew, had the Scots years ago at Bannockburn. What if sheer desperation carried the day and brought victory for the French this time?

  She was sleeping after a day of pacing to and fro when Hugh shook her awake at about dawn. “Hugh! You are off to fight?” He shook his head, and she sniffed. “What is burning?”

  “Everything the French army couldn’t take with them. They’ve broken camp and left. There will be no battle now; there's no army out there to fight.”

  “Left! But what of King Philip?”

  Hugh shrugged. “No one knows what he was thinking. Maybe he realized that he stood no chance of winning; maybe he thought of giving up Calais to save the rest of France. But he and his men are gone either way, and Jean de Vienne has sued for terms.”

  “They were brave men to last this long,” Bess said hesitantly. “I hope the conditions are not too harsh.”

  Hugh smiled at her. “Truth is, Bess, I do too. So do most of us, I think.”

  Yet when the people of Calais offered to surrender, King Edward appeared to be in no mood to offer terms, to the bewilderment of his leaders, who expected that the richest and most prominent citizens would be held to ransom while the others were sent on their way. Edward insisted he would make no promises, but would use the inhabitants of the town in whatever manner he saw fit. All remonstrated with the king, for it was very easy for all of them to imagine themselves at the mercy of their enemies. At last Edward gave in. He would pardon the defenders of Calais their lives—all of them, that was, except for six. With those six he would do as he pleased.

  On August 4, 1347, virtually every English person in Calais gathered outside the city walls, King Edward and Queen Philippa on a dais in the middle, flanked by the English earls and the higher-ranking knights like Hugh. Bess and the other English ladies stood in a knot close to the queen. They watched as the gates of Calais slowly opened and Jean de Vienne, emaciated and so weak that he could not walk but had to be put on a horse, rode out, wearing nothing but his shirt, drawers, hose, and a noose around his neck. Behind him, no less emaciated and too weak to take more than slow, uncertain steps, walked five men in identical attire. Only the material of their shirts, worn but still obviously made from a superior cloth, marked them out as wealthy men. Someone helped Jean de Vienne from his horse, and then all prostrated themselves before Edward. “Have mercy on us, your grace.”

  The crowd was stark silent as Edward considered the request for a minute or two. “Summon the headsman,” he said, and settled back into his chair of state.

  The earls and lords on the dais, to a man, began protesting, some of them through tears. Bess herself was weeping, as were the ladies around her, even the Lady Isabella, who was not noted for her sensitive nature. The six men remained prone, praying. Then Queen Philippa rose and descended the platform. She turned to face her husband.

  “My lord. I have crossed the seas to be by your side. I have asked very little of you since then. I ask you now to have mercy on these brave men and spare their lives.” The queen fell to the ground beside the six men, making seven figures lying in front of the dais.

  The crying stopped and the crowd grew silent again. “Very well,” said Edward, standing. “Rise, my lady. I cannot refuse what you beg of me so earnestly.”

  Bess let out the breath she had been holding and felt herself sag with relief. Had the king meant to pardon the men all along? She did not know, and in truth she no longer cared, for she knew now that she and Hugh and all the rest would soon be going home. As the queen and the six men rose, Bess began smiling. Home to England!

  But soon, the most deadly enemy the English had ever faced would follow them there.

 
ix

 
June 1348 to February 1349

  THE LADY ISABELLA GAVE A RARE NOD OF APPROVAL. “You make a lovely boy, Bess. If your husband could see you now!”

“Soon he will be seeing me,” Bess said glumly. She stared at her hose-covered legs, visible from the knees down. “And what if he recognizes me?”

  “You will be masked,” said the Lady Isabella patiently.

  Bess frowned and touched her hand to her hair beneath the man's cap she was wearing. It was pinned up and hidden under a coif for good measure, but surely when she was on horseback the motion would send it tumbling down. “Hugh will recognize my hair if it falls.”

  England had been in a giddy mood since Calais had fallen the previous year. With Calais now an English colony, its fine houses occupied by Englishmen and much of its treasure adorning English castles and Englishwomen, the country had been in a mood to celebrate, and the celebrations had yet to stop. Scarcely a month had gone by after one tournament was finished before another was announced. The crowds at each feast and tournament had been more brightly dressed than at the last, the entertainment more outlandish. At the last tournament, a group of unknown ladies, dressed in male clothing, had pranced their horses onto the field, and the sixteen-year-old Lady Isabella had determined to outdo them. To this end, she had enlisted the assistance of her own ladies and that of the younger, more slender wives of the assembled lords and knights. Bess, on the tall side and with especially trim legs, had been a natural for the scheme.

  She just hoped Hugh would not be angry at the display she would be making of herself. But she could hardly refuse the king's own eldest daughter, could she?

  In any case, she comforted herself, it was not as though the king, at least, were ignorant of what Isabella had in mind. Though Isabella had initially made her plans on a modest scale, arranging to borrow male clothing from her brothers, she had soon discarded this idea in favor of all of the clothing matching, and once this idea was carried out, it would have been unthinkable for the man-ladies to be mounted on anything but matching horses also, with matching trappings. Isabella enjoyed a comfortable income, but this coordination of mounts and materials could not have gone on without the king noticing. Fortunately, he was an indulgent father, especially since his child had been so publicly jilted, and he had given his blessing, and his money, to the show, stipulating only that the cotehardies not be too short and that the women keep on their masks. And so Bess had been conscripted.

  It was the sort of display Joan of Kent would have delighted in, but Joan was not at court these days. William was keeping her in strict seclusion on one of the duller Montacute estates while Thomas Holland prosecuted his case to be declared her lawful husband before the papal court at Avignon. With Joan left out of all of this year's festivities, Bess felt some pity for her, but not all that much.