The First Princess of Wales (39 page)

Blinded by tears, she held her babe to her and turned back inside into the vast silence of Liddell. She would survive this all. She must! She would bury John next to Edmund and Anne under the stone floor of the church and raise up a beautiful stone effigy to his young, vanquished knighthood. She would care for Liddell until her Lord Thomas returned. If the word of the tragedy had traveled north, surely he would come soon. But whether he did or not, she, Joan, Duchess of Kent, would be alone in grief for eons until she would see the prince again.

She turned to glance once more at the painted family crest she now assumed as her own due. The little golden chain linking ducal crown to royal—aye, that was the way she felt beneath all this bitterness. For the first time in her life, something terrifying seemed absolutely inevitable.

Tears streaming down her face, she bid the king’s men enter the hall and sent the wailing cooks to prepare more food.

PART THREE

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

T
hrashing fitfully on the big feather bed, Joan awoke, but the dream pressed yet heavily upon her. A cresset lamp still burned low on the solar table. Her startled eyes widened, darted up to the underside of the satin bed canopy. Saints, she was home at the Château safe in bed! Alone.

Reality rushed back to shred the remnants of her nightmare: she had been in that tiny room in Canterbury again and the frightening footsteps were thudding up the steps, down the hall. The door of the chamber had opened, but before the cloaked figure could enter, she turned and ran into the dark, secret tunnel which led to freedom outside. She ran and ran until she could not think or breathe.

Joan pressed her hands to her temples and shoved back the masses of tangled blond hair. The coverlet and sheets wrapped around her perspiring body felt like a constricting cocoon. Damn, she thought, I have not had that dream for almost a year.

She shoved the covers off, rose, and wrapped herself in a warm perse robe. Although it was still comfortable this early September, the nights hinted at the tangy nip of autumn frost.

She sank into a chair at the solar table and poured herself a little Burgundy. She could not have been asleep too long before the dream began, she reasoned, for the lamp had not sputtered out. She would love to peek in on the children to assure herself all was well except that would rouse Madeleine, too, and then the servants would whisper that their Lady Holland, Duchess of Kent, paced the castle halls at all hours because her Lord Thomas had gone to war.

The tepid wine soothed her throat. Poor Thomas—happy enough like the rest of the English knights that war threatened France again, but not at all happy to be summoned into service of the Prince of Wales’s younger brother John, newly created Duke of Lancaster. After all, Thomas Holland had bellowed when the orders had arrived via royal courier, he was a charter member of the Garter Knights who had seen service with the prince at Crécy. And to make matters worse, she knew it rankled him that she now out-ranked him as a duchess while he had not been elevated to a duke.

She had no way of knowing what it all meant—if it meant anything at all—and she refused to speculate. It had been more than four years now since she had seen the prince, and that one meeting was only a brief, impassioned half-hour in Canterbury. Since then there had been naught from him but an annual written Yuletide greeting to her and her lord. The three other times she and Thomas had been back in England to oversee Liddell or the Holland lands in Lancashire, she had been near no one from the court, preferring to stay at Liddell while Thomas visited Windsor or Westminster only to report back that the prince had not been there anyway. He, like the other knights of the realm, had bided his time at his own pursuits until the long-awaited call to arms had come at last.

As she stared into the dark swirl of Burgundy in her goblet, she marveled that her life had been so relatively calm and content these five and a half years of her marriage to Thomas Holland. Except for that tumultuous week the summer she had gone to Canterbury and her dear brother John had been killed in Midsummer Eve tournament, really there had been nothing but memories to stir the blood, and memories oft burned low like this wavering cresset lamp. The adventure, the freedom, the desire to drink deeply of life that she had longed for as a maid—what had happened to
that
Joan of Kent?

Almost before she realized what she would do, she stood and hurried to the carved coffer which held her winter furred
surcotes.
Her hand burrowed down to the bottom of the chest through velvets and brocades and softest furs all smelling faintly of winter sachet herbs until she seized the flat, carved box which had once held her mother’s few jewels. She opened the box almost reverently and stared in the dim light at the little beryl ring and the single parchment letter with the broken red wax seal. It had been a good long time since she had read the letter from the prince although she had once nearly worn it out with staring at the words until she had etched them in her memory. In the light of the lamp, his own firm, bold strokes of handwriting now leapt at her from the crinkled page:

My Lady Jeannette,

The inevitable separations—through death or otherwise—which we must face are indeed the cruelest blows life deals. Yet in this loss of your dear brother John as in that loss of your brother Edmund we shared two Yules ago, I pray you shall find solace.

Now let me speak this business clearly: the king is grieved for your past differences with him and the queen over the loss of your father years ago. He did love his uncle Edmund of Kent also and bids you accept from him two condolences for the loss of your family members as he sues for peace between you.

Firstly, he does create Joan, Lady Holland as Duchess of Kent and sole heiress of Liddell Manor House in the shire of Kent and all
demesne
land attached thereto. Let your head and your heart accept this bestowal graciously for your father’s sake, lady, for as you realize, with all male heirs of your family now deceased, Liddell would otherwise revert to the crown for bestowal elsewhere.

Secondly, His Grace, Edward, King of England and France, bids me assure you that one Flemish ambassador of whom you and I have recently spoken, will not be returned to live in England, nor shall his vast land holdings once confiscated by the crown upon his exile be returned to him; however, he shall no longer be forfeit of his manor house in Dorset wherein his wife resides. (I know you will accept this too with equanimity, Jeannette, as surely you have no quarrel with the man’s wife any more than you might have with the wife of whatever poor axeman finally did the deed.)

Dear Duchess of Kent, these things must of force content you for now. Keep close your dear home of Liddell for your second son John who bears his young, deceased uncle’s proud name. The elder lad, Thomas, will, no doubt, inherit the Holland estates to the north someday.

Until that day we meet again, remember me.

Edward, P.W.P.

Post Script. I hope that you, like I, will see the golden fetters binding the two crowns on your new Duchess coat of arms not as an imprisoning bondage but as a golden link of eternal affection.

She stared long at the brash signature: Edward, Prince of Wales, Plantagenet. How skillful this letter was, how impossible to argue with or disobey. That day the king’s men had come to Liddell with news of John’s death, she had not accepted His Grace’s tendered gifts except for the two bestowals Edward had urged her to take in this letter. Saints, how much there was here brimming beneath the cleverly selected words, if one dared to let the imagination free. He had used mention of her sons to settle her contentious spirit at accepting gifts from the king she detested. And who had told him her son’s names, for she never had. Then, here at the very end—where her fingertip even now stroked the words—did the cryptic wording not hint that Thomas Holland’s eventual death day might be the same as “that day we meet again”?

Lost in the glow of reminiscence, she put the little beryl ring on her finger and replaced the folded letter at the bottom of the coffer. She had never shown the letter to her Lord Thomas and told herself she kept it only so that her son John would be assured of his inheritance of Liddell someday.

Distraught she had let her thoughts wander so and afraid she would never manage to reclaim sleep now, she moved to a window over the gardens and pushed the leaden pane ajar. In muted melody through the brisk night air, the strains of two distant lutes wafted to her.

It was, of course, Master Roger and that traveling minstrel friend of his, Stephen Callender, who had been here and at Liddell several other times the past year. The song was one she did not recognize, and yet the stirring melody, however distant, beckoned to her.

She donned her felt slippers and, lifting the low-burning lamp, went out into the corridor. Master Roger’s room was directly beneath this wing, as were Vinette’s and the small chambers of the other household servants. She padded down the staircase to the corridor below, recalling the late night venture she had made down the black secret tunnel of the Château to visit Marta’s grave. In the dim, narrow hall, lit only by one rush torch at the far end, the melody of the two entwined lutes was much more distinct. They were strumming rather than plucking the strings; the song had a martial beat, and words drifted to her now as the refrain began again:

“The prince among the press of shields

In ebony-hued armor

Doth lead his men

French strife to end

Under white-feathered banner.

“Beside my prince amid the fray

There’s no place to be rather.

See helmets split, lances shatter,

And blows exchanged in battle.”

The melody ceased but a conversation began as Joan stood fascinated by the new war song on the other side of the door. How beautifully Roger’s clear, unmistakable tenor had blended with Stephen Callender’s baritone in that marching song, and how distinctly their words floated to her now.

“That will please the prince, Stephen, though, by the rood, I know what little gift would please him more in these treacherous times while he raids France up and down from Bordeaux and tries his tricky damnedest to avoid the French king’s growing army.”

“What would please him more, Wakeley—a victory over the French or the beauteous Lady Joan of Kent in his bed?”

They both chuckled. Joan jumped at her own sharp intake of breath, and she nearly dropped her lamp. She could not have heard aright! That man could not have said those words, nor her old friend Master Roger have laughed with him like that!

Her first impulse was to pound on the door and accuse them, but she froze listening intently as Stephen Callender’s voice went on. “By the saints, Wakeley, what shall I tell him new this trip when I get to reconnoiter with our forces at Tours? That the lady is lordless now that Holland is off to help Lancaster chase Frenchies? A hell of a lot of good that will do him as he has an eight-thousand-man army to protect and answer to.”

Hell’s gates, her mind shrieked, this man is off for the prince’s camp at Tours, wherever that is, and to report on me! All those other traveling musician friends of Roger’s—this man himself here before back and forth—a spy! And, worst of all, her own longtime confidant, Master Roger, a gift from the prince when she had married Thomas—all these years, sent to spy on her!

Her shoulder pressed hard into the rough stone wall outside the door while fury racked her. But then, that passion turned to overwhelming curiosity. If Roger Wakeley was a royal informer as well as a skilled musician, when had it begun? Those years at Liddell when she first knew him—oh, saints, sent to spy on them then too, mayhap on her poor, shattered mother to be certain she caused no upheaval over her husband’s unjust murder: a serpent nurtured in the very bosom of her family all these years!

The welling anger, buried for all this time since the royal Plantagenets had given her Liddell and she had compromised on de Maltravers’s lands, rose up in huge, overwhelming waves to assault her. A spy she had loved all these years; then, surely, the Plantagenets were guilty of her father’s death as Mother had claimed! The prince had only done what his royal sire had demanded of him. He had wooed her, guarded her, watched her at his king’s command, and she had almost been snared by it all to fall in line like another poor warrior knight to do whatever he bid! Never. Never! How she longed to throw what she knew in his wretched, handsome face in front of his whole army!

She forced herself to listen to their voices again, and when she heard Stephen Callender’s next words, the plan came to her full blown, perfect, and so thrilling, she curled her toes in her soft felt slippers to keep from screaming her joy.

“I will bid you a good-night then, Wakeley, with one more roll through this new song so you can teach it to His Grace’s lively Kentish lass. At dawn’s first light, man, I am off to report to the prince and I hope to hell for my sake he is further north than when I left him.”

She turned away and ran down the corridor as they began strumming the pompous martial song again. Saints, if the prince loved a good battle, so be it, for he was about to face one that would make the French foe seem like mere tilting at the quintain. At dawn’s first light, that wretch Stephen Callender had said. She had a lot to do in these few hours, notes to write, a saddle sack to pack with clothes and food. Settling the score with Roger Wakeley would have to wait until her return, and he would have to cooperate with her plan and help cover her departure or she would threaten to expose him and insist he leave forever. The knowledge that he had cared for her only because of his need to know what she did pierced her like a sharp pain, but she hurried on. By dawn’s first light, she would have a horse and be awaiting Spy Stephen at the bend in the forest road and then she would tell him a thing or two she had gleaned from spying!

Her heart beat faster and she smiled despite herself at the prospect of meeting the prince in her own lance-shattering battle.