Joanna (73 page)

He would never do it, no matter how driven, yet it was the best and kindest thing he ever could do for her, the ultimate act of love. And he was not capable of it. Instead, he would see her torn to pieces with fear for him and grief for her people and her family, and in the end, she might be torn to pieces literally. He had seen… . No, he would not think of that. Before that, he would find the courage to kill her. He would!

Adam, Ian, and Alinor talked long that night. Joanna could not tell whether Geoffrey listened or not. He sat and looked from one to another, but her flesh crawled and she knew that he saw only her. She crept from her chair and up the stairs and into bed, and she cried and cried until she was so exhausted that she overslept the next morning. Adam was gone by the time Joanna woke, and so was Geoffrey. Her blank, stricken expression did not need explanation to Alinor.   “Geoffrey has only gone down to the town to see about the ships,” she said. “He will be back to dinner.”

Joanna’s body stiffened as if to resist a blow, but her mother did not question her or offer her sympathy. She began to speak about certain problems, which Joanna had left unsolved for Alinor to settle, explaining in detail to her inattentive daughter what decisions she would make and the reasons for these decisions. Ian was slower to see Joanna’s misery. It took him another day or two to determine its cause. Then Alinor had to drag Ian off to Iford before he murdered his son-by-marriage. Mercifully, the ships Geoffrey had chosen were readied in a short time, and he sailed off to add them to the fleet the king was assembling in Thames mouth and the Dover roads.

There were a few weeks of quiet, not expectant and eager as the period of waiting for invasion had been in 1212, but sullen and ominous. On May 18, a new disaster struck. A violent storm swept in and destroyed the fleet. England lay naked to the invaders. Four days later they came. John’s army was in the right place. The trumpets sounded, the troops were drawn upand the king ordered them dismissed and rode off to Winchester.

Geoffrey returned to Roselynde. With a face of stone, he told Ian that his father had parted company with the king. He gave no reason for it, only said that he would go and see to his lands and stay upon them. Joanna went at once to pack her things. He had kissed her when he came in and called her “sweet heart” and somehow she had choked down the scream in her throat and prevented her body from shuddering and shrinking away. It was no light thing to be embraced by a corpse.

Ian followed her into the women’s chambers and begged her to let her husband go and to stay with them. Numbly, Joanna shook her head.

“I love him,” she said simply. “I never wanted to. I knew that love is only suffering, but it is too late now. I love him.”

They did a round of Geoffrey’s properties and then went and shut themselves into Hemel. In their travels they had   seen that the scars of John’s campaign were healing rapidly under the new growth of early summer, but all the other news was bad and grew steadily worse. There was hardly any resistance to Louis. Keep after keep opened to him. By August, two-thirds of the barons had yielded. Then, there began to be a hint of change.

Some, of course, had remained loyal from the beginning. Dover had shut herself tight and resisted all Louis could do, although he came himself to oversee that siege. Engelard held Windsor, hurling taunts and insults down at the attackers. Barnard Castle stood firm against the Scots, and Eustace de Vesci died in an attempt to storm it. Nicolaa de la Hay leaned out from the tower of Lincoln keep and spat down at the commander who ordered her to yield. By God’s grace the wind carried the spittle right into the man’s face. That was her answer and God’s. Lincoln did not fall.

Ian, after considerable discussion with Alinor, went to the king at Winchester. With Salisbury and his brother estranged, Ian was determined to give John no excuse to name him, or Geoffrey, or Adam traitors. A small force of French did come to Roselynde when it was known the lord of the keep was gone and called upon Alinor to yield. They thought a keep, no matter how strong, would be easy meat when ruled by a woman. Alinor’s answer was no less rude than Nicolaa’sexcept that she used words. The French looked at the walls of Roselynde and at the sea, tasted a few yard-long arrows from Ian’s Welsh archersand passed on to softer prizes.

Kemp lay tight shut also, with Adam prowling the walls like an angry lion. One of Louis’s men had seized a smaller stronghold of Adam’s and had butchered the garrison and the castellan and his family, even though Adam had offered ransom for them. That ended Adam’s brief desire to flirt with a foreign king. Geoffrey spoke true. Only Louis’s own Frenchmen would be favored. Other barons who had yielded were discovering the same truth. They received a very cold welcome from Louis indeed and, even though they were willing to fight for him, discovered that their lands were not safe from Louis’s men. The French knights   in Louis’s tail were poor men. They had come to England to seize lands for themselves, not to rid the English of an unwanted king.

Men who had changed sides once, changed sides again. John
had
signed Magna Carta, after all, and he had tried to live by itat least more than Vesci and Fitz Walter, who had brought this plague of Frenchmen down upon England, had done. Of course, John had betrayed them by asking the pope to annul the signing. But that was John. Better the devil they knew than this new devil, who had all the hungry maws of his own men to fill and nothing to fill them with but the land of Englishmen. Feelers were sent out and were well received by the king.

By mid-September, John felt it was worthwhile to begin a campaign. He marched out and down the valley of the Thames, drawing the besiegers away from Windsor and then, with the help of the garrison which poured out to support him, drubbed them soundly. The king then turned north to Lincoln and relieved the siege of that castle, where Nicolaa had held out valiantly after her defiance. By October 8, John had moved across eastward to Lynn. There he was welcomed without any battle, and the royal forces paused to consider where next to strike. On October 10, the king was not well. He had a severe flux of the bowels. They waited one day more, but even though he grew no better, John was impatient to move south. They moved on to Wisbech.

On the twelfth of October, a catastrophe befell John and his supporters. The baggage train with the entire treasury, the crown jewelseverythingwas overtaken by an unusually swift incoming tide as they crossed the Wellstream estuary. Everything was lost! Everything!

The king and his suite rushed in on their more powerful horses, thinking to save something of the treasure. A few men were drowned, all were soaked through and plastered with the mire of the swamp. They saved nothing; they nearly lost the king, dragging him away by force when his horse was near helpless in the quicksand. Even after that, John would not leave. Racked with dysentery and chill, he   insisted upon waiting until the tide went out again. The carts were so broad and heavy that he hoped some at least would not have been swept away or completely swallowed up, Ian and a few others had thrown off their furred cloaks before they rushed into the water. Anyone who had a dry stitch contributed it to warm the king. The wind blew sharp across the marshlands. Ian crouched against his destrier, shivering until he thought the flesh would shake free from his bones.

Before the tide had even run out again, they were back in the icy water, groping and tugging. The king had been right insofar as the carts not sinking completely, but they had all tilted or overturned. The small, heavy items had slid off and sunk deepdeep beyond recall. The treasure was lost forever. A few broad plates were saved, but none of the gold; that had sunk.

When they came forth from this second wetting, Ian was numb. His head felt huge and his chest tight. Weary of body and stunned with the magnitude of their loss, they struggled on to Sleaford. There, a distant cousin of Alinor’s gave them shelter, and they stayed over the fourteenth and fifteenth. Ian heard the king was worse. He was not well himself, coughing continuously and finding difficulty in catching his breath. The weather was horrible. It poured rain, and the wind howled so that it could be heard even through the enormous walls of the old keep.

Unbelievably, on the sixteenth of October, John insisted on moving again. Whoever had influence with him begged and pleaded, but he would not listen. Alinor’s cousin looked at Ian when the word came that the king would go.

“You should not,” he said. “Stay here. You are more than welcome. He will not miss you.”

The eyes said more. They said the king would miss no one and nothing any more, and when Ian saw John it was plain that this was true. Death was on his face and his flesh seemed loose on his bones. Ian knew the king would not realize that he had remained behind and that, even if he did, it would not matter. Nonetheless, he could noT do it. Hate and duty had bound them together through all the years. Shivering and coughing, Ian mounted his own horse and followed the master he had never loved but could not leave. They struggled on a bare twenty miles until John collapsed.

It was plain now the king would not live. Ian was not sure he would live himself. Each breath was a torment and his limbs were not willing to obey him. John survived the night of the seventeenth, but as the dark ebbed, so did the spirit. Before dawn, the king was dead.

Ian could not believe it. It was inconceivable. All his life John had been there, a threat, a force to circumvent. Hate is as strong as love; Ian felt as if his life had been broken. A terrible need seized him and a terrible fear. He feared he was dying and he needed to be with Alinor. Even though he could barely walk and could not speak at all, Ian gathered the men of his personal guard and rode out of Newark.

They traveled through the day, although Ian became so weak that his master-at-arms Jamie had to mount behind him and hold him in the saddle. During the night, he was worse, but he signed to be lifted to his horse in the morning and they rode on again. By afternoon, it was plain that whatever Ian wanted he would never live long enough to reach Roselynde. In these times, however, a man could not simply ride into the nearest keep and expect to be welcomed. Jamie sent a few men south and west to ask the names of the holders of keeps in the area. He nearly wept with relief when he learned that Hemel was only five miles ahead, due south.

For Joanna, the past five months had not been as dreadful as she expected. The agony of pity and fear had receded into a dull misery, although Geoffrey had not changed. She was accustomed to the deadness under his smile and loving words. Only once in a while, when there was word that French troops were moving in the area, he looked at her in such a way that a cold sweat of fear broke out on her body.

Self-preservation aroused in Joanna a lively and unavoidable interest in what was going on in the country. Hemel was a substantial keep, but nothing like Roselynde or Lincoln. If Louis or one of his powerful supporters turned his attention to Hemel, it might not be able to resist for longand Hemel was the nearest of Geoffrey’s keeps to Louis’s   main stronghold. Joanna could not help wondering, when Geoffrey’s eyes rested so strangely on her throat, why he had chosen Hemel above one of the other strong places. Was it habit? Hemel had been the home of his childhood. Or was it because he almost hoped they would be attacked so that he could end his living death in true peace? It was a fear that sharpened Joanna’s interest in the news and in every act of every day.

Thus, when word of a troop of men headed for the castle was called down from the wall, Joanna set aside her work and ran down to hear the exchange of challenges. Instead, she heard Geoffrey cry for haste in letting down the bridge. This must be a welcome, yet there was something in her husband’s voiceJoanna took to her heels and ran, arriving just as Geoffrey and Tostig received Ian into their arms.

‘‘My lord!” Geoffrey gasped.

“Ian!” Joanna echoed.

Then she heard the sucking, rasping breath, the cough like that of a half-drowned man.

“Bring him to bed,” Joanna cried. “Geoffrey, listen! Strip him naked and strip yourself and Tostig too. Do you both get into bed with him and keep him warm until I can bring hot sand. Prop him high so he can breathe. Cover yourselves with eveRything you can lay hands uponfeather quilts both above and below you. Be quick! Be quick!”

It was the maddest day Joanna had lived since she heard Geoffrey was not dead. This kind of illness did not permit quiet. The bags of hot sand must be changed continuously; braziers to heat water so that Ian would breathe steam fragrant with aromatic herbs had to be tended. Ian had to be lifted and shifted so that his coughing would bring up the phlegm that clogged his lungs. Servants came and went; medicines were compounded, trickled down his throat; maids with warmed hands thrust under the covers massaged his legs and arms to make the blood flow better.

After the warmth of his body was no longer necessary, Geoffrey was useless in the sickroom. He hung about anxiously for a while, but soon realized that there would be no   change, either for good or ill, for many hours. All he could do was send off a messenger to Alinor. She would be in some danger traveling in these times, but if Ian should dieAfter that, not knowing what else to do, he went to ask Jamie when and how Ian’s illness came about. Naturally, the most important news came first. The king was dead. Geoffrey could not believe his ears. He asked Jamie again and again, and was assured with more and more detail, which eventually described the whole of what had happened, that John was, indeed, dead.

He galloped up to the sickroom, but was unceremoniously shoved out of the door by Edwina. If Ian should happen to regain his senses, the last person anyone wanted him to see was Geoffrey. Three days followed in which Geoffrey had plenty of time to digest the news and consider it in all of its ramifications. He kept coming to the sickroom and being driven away. Although Joanna was sure that Ian no longer wished Geoffrey any harm, she had no intention of permitting him to be exhausted by man-talk now that he had regained consciousness. On the morning of the fourth day, Alinor arrived, shaking with tiredness and terror, to be greeted by the happy news that her husband was out of danger. He was weak, but he was able to smile at her and whisper her name before he drifted off to sleep again.