I Serve (10 page)

All men know how the third Edward removed his mother from power and slew her lover Mortimer. It is less well known how he befriended those whom she had cast down. Edmund of Kent had left three fatherless children, the youngest of which was barely out of the womb. Edward himself had just produced his first son, and his tender young wife Philippa offered to nurture her husband’s cousins along with her own babe. And so it was that Joan of Kent became a member of the king’s family, to be raised alongside her royal cousin as befits the granddaughter of a king.

The first that I saw of Joan was when the prince bade me bring a message to her. “You shall find her in my mother’s tents,” said he, and he produced a scroll that I was to deliver into no hands but her own.

“
But how shall I know her?” I asked, for I had never laid eyes upon the lady, and I feared that I would somehow miscarry through ignorance.

“
How shall you know her?” the prince repeated, and he laughed as if I had voiced some monumental stupidity. “She is accounted by all to be the fairest lady of England, and if you know her not by that, then God help you!”

I traced my way through the maze of tents to the royal pavilions that belonged to Queen Philippa. Winter was coming on apace and the sharp wind had chased all the royal ladies indoors. I stepped into the anteroom of the pavilion and begged an inquiring damsel to see the lady Joan. “Who are you, sir?” she demanded with an arched eyebrow, and I blushed fearfully and mumbled something about my service to the Prince of Wales. “Ah!” she said with her hauteur unabated, and she floated away with such a fluid motion that I could discern no steps in her stride.

I waited for some minutes, gazing with wonder at the delicate tapestries that hung the wall of the tent. The first panel showed two men fighting. There was a great disparity in size, but the smaller man had beaten the giant and was wounded in the attempt. “Marhault is slain,” I read in the stitchery. In the second panel the wounded man was traveling to a new land, and there a woman with hair of red and gold sat by his bedside and applied a cordial to his lips. “Isolt, the healer,” said the caption. More and more pictures followed. The man, having been healed, returned home on a ship, but his king bade him sail back again to the strange land whence he had just come. He took the woman into his ship and together they shared a cup of wine. The warrior’s king received the woman, and wed her to himself with a great marriage feast…. But in the panels that followed, I saw her not with the king, but with the man whom she had healed.

Footsteps sounded in the room behind the curtain. I skimmed through the pictures in a hurry, seeing that the woman with the red-gold hair returned to the king while the warrior whom she had healed departed for another land. The last panel showed a tower above the sea, and on the sea below, a ship approached….

“
Do you like my tapestry?” asked a clear voice, and I turned sharply like a man caught in some shameful act.

“
It is all folly,” the voice continued, “for Tristan was never meant to have the lady.”

“
Yes,” I said with a sheepish grin. “But it is noble folly, for I have never seen anything so beautiful.”

The voice originated from a little woman, plump and coming on to middle age. Her face was simple and complacent like a tame spaniel, but this simplicity did not extend to her dress. Pearls embroidered her close-fitting bodice and the cut gems on her sleeves twinkled like stars. I stared at her a moment, convinced that she must be some great lady. But I could see that she was no Joan of Kent, for she was of no more than average beauty. My errand was not to her.

“
Please, lady,” I said. “I have an errand to the lady Joan.”

“
So I have heard,” said the lady. “You bring a message from my son.”

“
Aye, Majesty,” said I as I fell to one knee, for with those words I comprehended that I was in the presence of Queen Philippa.

“
Come, sir,” she said, and stretched out her hand. “Give me the scroll. I will bear your message and give you gramercy for it.”

I swallowed. “I thank you for your kindness, sweet lady, but your son has commanded me to place this letter only in the hands of the lady Joan.”

She looked at me with surprise. “Methinks you are bold, sir, to rate the commands of your master above the commands of his mother. Nevertheless,” she said, with soft words that displayed fixity of purpose, “you will give the letter to me. The lady Joan is my attendant and will not complain of it—that I promise you.”

There was little to do but comply. I delivered the scroll into Her Majesty’s plump hand and with a gracious smile she left me. I hung my head, ashamed that I had failed to carry out the prince’s commands. Still, I determined to have one more look at the tapestry, for my eyes had barely brushed over the last scene when the queen had entered.

In the tower above the sea, the warrior lay on his bed—but whether sick or dead I could not tell. Below the cliffs, a ship had nearly reached the beach, a ship with a white sail. And on the ship was the woman with hair of red and gold. She had come to see her warrior once again, but was she too late to heal him?

As my eyes feasted on this picture, it seemed that the tapestry itself had come alive, for two of its panels parted and a girl stepped out of its borders.

“
Sir Knight!” she whispered in a soft voice. “Come hither, at once.”

She was lithe and slender as a flower stalk and her hair flamed red and gold like a field of poppies. The prince had said that Joan of Kent was the fairest maid of England, and my mind misgave me that this might indeed be she. I followed her awkwardly into a little room behind the curtain. The closet was small and narrow, and she drew very close to me so that I could catch her murmurs. “Speak low,” she warned me, “for we must not be heard.”

“
Are you the lady Joan?” I breathed.

“
No,” she said, and she laughed as if my question had been a fine joke. “I am called Margery, but I serve the lady Joan. You are the prince’s man, are you not?”

“
Aye,” said I. “He sent me with a message for Lady Joan, but the queen took it to deliver to her.”

Margery scowled; a sharp line shot between her brows as when marble is struck by a chisel. “Aye, she’ll deliver it,” said the girl scornfully, “as willingly as the French will deliver up Calais. You were a pretty fool to give it to her.”

My blood ran hot to hear these words, and my hand fingered the sword belt that sat on my hips. “I could not well refuse it to her,” I said defensively.

“
Nay, and since you’ve failed in your commission from the prince, you cannot well refuse to undertake a second commission from the lady Joan.” She placed her arms akimbo as she said this, and I could feel her breath warm on my face.

If she had been a man, I should have been angry with her, but as it was, my only wish was that she should not be angry with me. “I shall do any honorable service that the lady requires,” I said, trying to bow, but there was barely room for it.

“
Sweetly said, Sir Knight,” said Margery, and producing a scroll from her sleeve she placed it in my hand and closed my fingers around it. “Guard this well, for it is worse to lose a lady’s letter than a gentleman’s.”

I flushed to the roots of my hair. She treated me like the veriest page boy, and yet, if her face did not belie her, she could be no older than I!

“
Why do you linger?” she demanded. I dropped my eyes to the floor. There was no answer to be made. I tucked the scroll into the breast of my tunic and looked about me sharply as I lifted the flap of the tapestry and left the women’s pavilion.

When I returned to His highness’s tent, I found him playing at chess with Sir Bernard Brocas. The board and the pieces belonged to the prince and were a particularly treasured possession. They were of Moorish construction, carved ivory embedded in a base of gold. The pawns were the height of a grown man’s thumb, and the king weighed as much as a sling stone in your hand. The prince kept them in an inlaid box of rosewood and acacia, so ornamented that one might mistake it for a reliquary.

It was a favorite pastime of his to play at chess. I had carried messages from him before to Chandos, to Audley, and to Sir Walter Manny, begging them attend his highness in his pavilion for a match. It was rare that a man could get the better of him. Chandos had done so once, and I knew that the prince acknowledged Bradwardine, the king’s chaplain, as his master in the game. But for most men, the prize of prevailing over the Prince of Wales was as unattainable as the golden fleece.

I had seen the prince and Brocas play before and knew that Brocas was insurmountably outclassed. In the game of chess as well as the game of warfare, Brocas could think no further than two steps ahead. He was an impulsive man, quick to speak, quick to smile, quick to frown, and slow only in apprehending the consequences of his actions. This the prince had known since childhood. And since childhood, the prince had sought to remedy this defect in his friend.

“
Have a care, Bernard,” the prince said as I came in. “Do you not see that if you advance your pawn thus, you shall leave your knight exposed and my queen shall take him?”

Brocas’s dark brows pressed against each other as he encountered the prince’s eye across the chess board. “Highness,” he said petulantly, “Methinks it is superfluous for you to ask another to play, since you mean to play for both.” He knocked over his king with a disrespectful flick of the fingers. “There, I have done. You have won, which is what you wished, and I have saved you a half an hour of your time.”

“
Not so long,” said the prince, triumph glinting in his eye like the sparks from a fire. With a few deft motions, he showed Brocas how victory would have been his in three moves.

“
Ah, Potenhale,” said the prince becoming aware of my presence. “You gave the lady my missive? What said she?”

I was unsure at first where to begin, and a little bewildered by the presence of Brocas, but the prince bade me tell him everything and I saw that he kept no secrets from this friend of his childhood. My story stumbled over itself several times as I related to his highness each detail of the mortifying episode. I left out nothing besides the haughty manner in which Joan’s maid had received me.

The prince was not overjoyed to hear my tale. He did not storm as his father would have done, but his displeasure with me was apparent in the curling sneer of his comely face and the harsh edge to his voice. “You have miscarried in the worst of all ways,” he said shortly. My shoulders drooped sadly, and I wanted to crawl backwards out of the tent like a dog who has received a cuff from a beloved master.

“
Don’t berate the poor man so,” said Brocas, who had recovered his good spirits at the same time that the prince had lost his. “Forsooth, what was he to do in such a pass? As a wise man once said, ‘Do you not see that if you advance your pawn thus, you shall leave your knight exposed and the queen shall take him?’ Well, here is your pawn returned to you, and it will do you as much good to berate him as it will do me to berate this chess piece.”

I expected the prince to bridle at this, but he took the rebuke right calmly and gave me his hand in token of forgiveness. “So my letter is lost,” he said thoughtfully, “but you say that you have another.”

“
Aye,” I said eagerly, and fumbling in the breast of my tunic, I pulled out the scroll that Margery—beautiful Margery!—had put in my hands. The prince’s hands split the seal with haste. He leaned closer to the candles on the table, and I could see his lips forming the words that lay on the page though he did not speak them aloud. What manner of things had she written, the lady Joan? And how came it that her handmaid could produce a letter in answer to the prince even before her lady had received one?

“
Now God be praised!” the prince said after a moment, and his countenance metamorphosed completely from fire and brimstone to gentle rain. He quartered the letter with crisp, neat folds and placed it in his own tunic. My erstwhile unforgivable error seemed to be forgotten entirely. He gave me a golden guinea from his purse, clapped me upon the back, and called me a second Hermes. Then with a farewell to Brocas, he exited the tent stepping lightly over the threshold and whistling a merry tune.

JANUARY – AUGUST, 1347

5

Spring came to Calais bringing rising sap, shooting buds, and returning birds; but the one thing it did not bring was the termination of the siege. The high walls of the town loomed before us with the same impregnability they had possessed in September. It had been six months, and we were no closer to attaining the prize.

The ladies had grown fretful and talked of leaving again for England. But there would be no leaving without the queen, and she was determined to lay her head down on the same pillow as her lord and husband. Philippa’s short, plump figure had grown plumper still in the past months. The prince confirmed my unvoiced suspicions when he noted that his mother was with child. She would allow none of her ladies leave her at such a time, though God knows that the experience was common enough to her. It was the twelfth child she had carried, and there have been more since Calais.

Calais’s recalcitrance was wearing on more than just the ladies. The king’s mood was ugly, and all the nobles were on edge. When Calais’s governor had expelled the feminine and feeble from the town in early December, His Majesty had assumed that the end was near. He had only to maintain the siege and Calais would capitulate. The siege had been maintained, and yet the town still held out. It was incontrovertible, it was incomprehensible, but it was fact. The only explanation was that the town was still receiving supplies from somewhere.