by Karen Harper
The prince had gone out by another door to be waiting for and guarding her arrival as he had vowed he would. In the growing shadow of hickory and willows ahead, she saw him step forward and motion her farther around the gray-green pond.
He wore a leather jerkin belted closely across his flat stomach, and his hose and boots were dark as the greenery behind him; his tawny head was unfashionably uncovered and mussed; he looked as if he had been riding. She, in contrast, had dressed elegantly, flamboyantly almost, in a vibrant gown of the type she and her pliant compatriot Princess Isabella had taken to wearing in their increasingly mad and witty revels about the court. The kirtle was of orange-red sindon—a fine, expensive linen—and had a low, oval bodice, softly pleated, and a full soft skirt. The delicate silver-threaded roses embroidered on the narrow sleeves, full hem, and taut bodice were entwined gracefully. The surcote was sunset-hued and had a wide, golden fringe which the younger set at court had now made quite the style. Her heavy blond hair was bound up in two elaborate plaits with seed pearl ribbons at the side, and tiny ringlets spilled over her brow and nape in a fashion no one else, not even Isabella, accepted yet. Saints, but if the fickle courtiers could only know she had their beloved prince on such a taut leash—she grinned inwardly—such a coif would no doubt soon be all the rage, too.
He smiled and seized her hand to lead her a little way back from the pond to the far side of a single, massive oak the girth of at least four fat friars. Although it was hardly dark here yet, Prince Edward’s eyes shone white as they went over her, and his teeth looked purest snow against the sun color of his face. One moment she hesitated to move away with him from the open area of the pond, for the snare she had set entailed their being readily seen. But, this was not back too far, not hidden really, and she would no doubt hear approaching voices and call out easily enough when it was time.
“Jeannette, ma chérie, here—over here.” His voice was breathless and velvety deep. “I brought us a little wine and a coverlet so you will not muss that lovely gown. It is flame hued, Jeannette—the color of the French battle flag, the oriflamme, which means no quarter will be asked or given. Will it be so with us today, ma Jeannette?”
He tugged her down into the embracing curve of gnarled roots, where she sat comfortably on the woolen coverlet pressed against the massive, towering tree trunk. He sat quickly beside her, blocking her in but not touching her, one arm thrown casually across his raised knee.
“Always thoughts of the French and battle talk, Your Grace,” she countered ignoring the tease which struck her almost as a physical caress. The little, wild-winged butterflies in her stomach which had been quiet for so long, fluttered, then went still.
“Thoughts not of that battle right now, Jeannette, but this other you have been waging so fiercely to keep me at bay. Since I leave on the morrow, I assume you decided to surrender just a little and, like the other sweet demoiselles of the realm, send your knight off with a kiss, at least.”
The direct, quick ploy of the assault startled her. The few times she had been near him these past few months he had been so amenable, polite, and gentle. She beat back the desire to retreat and fervently hoped it would not be long before she heard the voices of the others she had summoned.
“No witty, gay reply, my laughing, flirtatious lady? I had feared lately Isabella’s flighty fancies had changed you, but perhaps it is the other way around. Your silence I take for a truce, and I am here to stake my claim.”
He moved quickly forward before she could turn away as she had meant to do. His hands held her head still while her grip went to his wrists. His eyes, nearly in shadow, studied her startled face, and just before his lips descended, her nostrils flared at the impact of his manly scent—leather, cloves, wine, and the touch of heady bergamot he often wore.
The assault was direct, firm, and it devastated her defenses. Thomas Holland’s few but masterful kisses had never done this to her. And the others, like the fond, fawning Montacute, Lord Salisbury, she had held at bay entirely.
Her lips opened against the prince’s and tingled at the onslaught of his wet, wild tongue. Her palms went flat against his leather-covered chest as if to push him away, but she had not the strength. How massive his body seemed so close to hers like this, how dangerous and overwhelming!
He deepened the kiss by slanting his mouth across hers and crushing her closer. She slid across the little span of woolen coverlet toward him, her hip through her gown pressed against his iron thigh. His tongue darted, demanded, and, mindlessly, she met the challenge in the deep, warm battlefield of his mouth.
His breath came ragged in her ears as he rained little kisses down her neck and throat. “My sweet, my sweet, it has been so long you have been forbidden me and on the morrow I am leaving. Please, Jeannette, yield to me, my precious.”
He pressed her back on the coverlet, his arm tight under her back while the sweet offensive of his lips, mouth, and hands intensified. As so long ago in the little walled garden, her limbs turned to warm water against him. Please—the prince was begging her, please to yield—and then he would enjoy her, use her as she had vowed to use him. Even now his mouth burned through her gown and chemise beneath. His touch lured her to renounce her vow to her mother to bring justice to the vile Plantagenets.
“No, my lord, please. No, stop! I cannot!”
He raised his big, tawny head, and she saw doubt and pain flash in those deep eyes before he frowned. “No, Jeannette, I will not stop. It must be for us today and always. Be damned to them all. You are mine as I am yours.”
“No. Loose me!” She pulled away, struggling in his arms. He cursed and was off her in an instant, though he did not give ground.
“You wretched little tease. All the smiles, the laughter—taking my gifts with sweet, low promises of later. St. George, vixen, later is now!”
She pressed back against the encircling tree roots. “You have no right to speak thusly to me, Your Grace. Oh, I am certain you are not used to being fought off but—”
His hand gripped her shoulders, and he gave her a single, rough shake. “Indeed I am not, demoiselle, that is, not by one whose eyes promised everything.”
“That is not true!”
“Aye, promised everything to others, too. You and Isabella are the instigators of the rest of the silly little flirts. Damn it, Jeannette, I thought you were different. You were different once.”
“You are hurting me, Your Grace. I am not some Frenchman or enemy at the joust.”
“No, and so I shall conquer you entirely another way, but as completely and as thoroughly, wild little Jeannette of Kent. I have watched you with the others—the amused Holland, besotted young Salisbury, and the rest. Indeed, I told myself they only get the same as I—precious little that—so why should I sport the green eyes of jealousy for your amusement? Then, I tell myself she only strings the others along to cover the feelings she bears her dear prince, but damn it, I have waited long enough!”
“I—I do care for you greatly, of course, my lord prince, but do not speak of me as though I were some prize falcon or palfrey you can break and own. I agreed to meet you here for a farewell, and now you grab me and accuse me—”
The Plantagenet temper she had only caught brief glimpses of on Isabella’s pert face or even the king’s exploded at her. He pulled her fiercely to him, his hands wild on her back, waist, and hips. His mouth branded kisses on her throat and across her collarbones before plunging lower. She twisted against him, at first in rage and then in consuming, rampant desire.
Her blood pounded so hard it nearly drowned all sanity. His knee pressed between her legs, lifting her skirts. He moved even closer, shifting her under him again. To her utter panic, he was fumbling with the lacings of his hose.
The world above—tree limbs, summer leaves, and dimming sky—spun crazily. Cool air crept up her thighs above her gartered hose.
He bent to take her lips again, then hesitated to whisper, “I did not mean for it to be this way
or here our first time, ma chérie. After this war we fight in France, I swear it will be different, but I must leave, knowing you are mine.”
No, a little voice screamed inside her. No! All the planning, all the strategies to hold him off until she could see the way clear to make them pay.
He had moved closer again when he froze and lifted his head. Joan heard a man’s laugh close by, then the high sound of a woman’s voice calling her name. The expression on the prince’s passion-glazed face crashed from astonishment to disbelief to raw fury.
“Joan!” came Isabella’s voice. “William says he cannot bear to be away from you, so I brought him out. Jeannette!”
The prince’s big hand shot across Joan’s mouth to silence her, although she had no intention of answering Isabella and bringing them over to see her sprawled beneath him. She had planned their arrival to ensure his proper behavior and to show him she did not favor him over the others, but she had never expected to have them walk in on this. The weight of his body hurt her now. He looked as if he would like to strangle her.
“Traitor!” he muttered, his mouth close to her ear. “I will not have the queen marrying you off to some simpleton who cannot handle you before I have had my fill!” The moment he loosed her, she scrambled to cover her bare legs and knelt on her haunches glaring at him.
The calls came more distant as Isabella and the slender, dark-haired William Montacute, the new Earl of Salisbury by his powerful father’s death, traced the pond’s grassy edge away from them.
“I have had enough of playing fond, country knave at your beck and whim, demoiselle,” Edward said, his voice cold and hard.
“You? I daresay, you got what you came for!”
“I hardly even got started. Are you such a country maid that you don’t know what I intended beyond a few clinging kisses and your stubborn submission to a quick caress? Your childish trick of summoning those two or whoever else you planned to have parading out here to put me off sickens me. The way you have been stringing so many poor sots on lately, I am just surprised you don’t know exactly how things are done between adults who do not simply play foolish games, courtly love or not, poor little country Joan.”
Her hand shot out at his taunting face before she even realized the sharp crack meant she had struck him. Her eyes widened as a red mark slowly suffused his lean cheek.
His mouth had gone chiseled, hard granite; his narrowed eyes were sculptured marble. His voice came low, controlled, when he spoke again. “I save you from my wrath now, little enemy, as I need my strength for the journey to France and great trials to come. But I shall take your challenge when we meet again, and you will see who is lord and conqueror then. Straighten your hair and go back to your silly friends. I tire with this child’s play.”
He stood gracefully, like the swift Plantagenet leopards he so often bore on his pennants and shields. His feet nearly silent, he turned his broad back and disappeared into the depth of green forest.
Isabella and William of Salisbury had stopped calling, although their voices seemed so near she could hear each word. Patting her coiled braids in place, she peered around the big tree trunk, amazed to see they were far across the pond and only their voices carried over. Her legs wobbled as she moved forward. But as Isabella and Salisbury drifted yet farther away, she merely leaned back against the tall tree.
Dusk descended. The voices were no more. She would give them some excuse; that hardly mattered now.
Caught in her own clever trap. A plague on the man! But she had not fully yielded, not given him the clinging adoration he no doubt expected was his due. How tantalizing it had all been—the sweep of passion she could not stem, the powerful need of his body for union with hers. Thank the blessed saints, he would be gone on the morrow to France to his precious, all-consuming war!
How it would set them all back to know: how Mother would have approved that she had dared to strike the proud Plantagenet prince on the eve of his glorious departure. Let the damned, bloody French fall at his feet! Saints, she never would!
Still unsteady in the silver hush of twilight, she picked her solitary way back to the little postern gate in the vast walls of Windsor.
Edward, Prince of Wales, stood in the open flap of the hastily erected tent where he had just eaten a quick, cold meal with his father and their closest councilors. Rain beat relentlessly in a sudden summer cloudburst to drench the scarlet, blue, and gold silk tent and turn the road and valley below to slick grass and cloying mud. For two days now, chased by a French horde rumored to be eight times the size of their forces, the vast army of King Edward III had been racing to reach safe haven north of Paris in their own duchy of Ponthieu. Now, realizing they could not easily escape to join their Flemish allies as they had planned and believing in the God-sanctioned right of their cause, the army of the English king and the prince had turned to face the fast-approaching enemy near a little French village called Crécy.
The mud would hinder the mounted French more than the English bowmen and men-at-arms who would all fight afoot, Prince Edward reasoned. Yet, awaiting the first real battle of his life, as the clouds suddenly lifted, his mind went back to that rainy day he had first seen Joan of Kent, wet, disheveled and quite muddy in the little quintain yard at Windsor. Over two months now since they had parted in hurt and anger after she led him on and tricked him in the forest trysting place—so much had happened already and the most important yet to come soon. Today.
Today was August twenty-sixth, 1346, and that made it—St. George, he realized, they had landed from England at St. Vast-la-Hogue in Normandy over six weeks ago. The king had knighted him and a small group of his young compatriots, including Joan’s simpering beau, William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, that very day in recognition of the great and certain deeds to come on the campaign. And the eager, ready group of young knights had not disappointed their king in their victorious sweep through hostile France. For the hundredth time, Edward prayed to the Virgin and his patron St. George that they would not disappoint him this day of days either.
He sensed someone behind him in the tent opening and turned to face Thomas Holland, the man the queen had not only selected to squire the spoiled little Jeannette of Kent to official functions the last year but had also betrothed her to the night before the army had sailed for France. He would worry about that later. Betrothals were common, easily broken, and besides, after this campaign and the deeds he intended to perform today, surely neither his mother nor his father would gainsay him what he asked of them. Edward felt he and the fine, one-eyed warrior, Thomas Holland, had an unspoken truce over that betrothal. Holland evidently knew not to overstep his place, and the prince was loath to let a woman affect the bonds between knights when they faced so great a common enemy.
“Thomas,” the prince said only and turned back to his perusal of the waiting battlefield below.
“We are ready and calm, my lord prince,” Holland replied, as if to read the prince’s thoughts of battle and avoid the touchy subject of the willful woman he sensed still stood between them. “The place is ideal, the strategy is perfect. They will come into his narrow Valley aux Clercs below and we shall mow them down.”
“The king will be angry if we do not capture the best of them for ransom, Thomas. An expensive two-month summer progress, this, even though we have taken spoils.”
“And rightly so, Your Grace. St. Peter’s bones, when we captured Caen and found that battle plan all made up for the second Norman invasion of the English realm, ’twas a wonder we could control our furious troops at all. If that damned pretender Philip had not had that large army hiding out at Paris, by the rood, we would have taken her too. We were but twelve blessed miles from the gates!”
“Save your strength and rancor for the French whenever they dare attack, Thomas,” the prince said. “Everything awaits our victory—the army is loyal, disciplined, and proud to a man. Shoulder to shoulder, bowmen with armored knight, we will face them well.”
He turn
ed and clapped the older man on his mailed shoulder before turning back into the tent still addressing the serious knight. “At Caen you helped us save the ladies and children who might have been harmed but for English mercy, brave Thomas. See to it that out there today you do not confuse the Frenchies for the weaker sex, by St. George!”
Holland’s copper eye widened at the surprising jest, and then he grinned and went out to gaze downward again, as did many others, at the roads south from which the lightning glint of French armor and the thunder of hoofbeats must surely come.
The prince’s squires dressed him in his black chain mail and draped his silk scarlet and gold surcote over it to be belted. They all froze in one sharp instant as a screech and flapping noise punctuated by shouts of men shredded the air outside. He seized his big sword and dashed out to behold the sky above black with cawing crows.
“A sign! Another sign from heaven! But is it good or evil?” someone behind him muttered.
Dramatically, the prince lifted his unsheathed, two-edged sword aloft. Strength and flair and comfort at any cost, his sire had told him but two hours earlier when he’d set out to make a sweep of their positions—that is what a king and prince must give to their troops in war.
“Another propitious sign!” he called out to quiet the shouts and murmurings of his men around the tent and those of the waiting men-at-arms and Welsh spearmen on the spur of hill below. No matter—they would pass on his words and cling to them in their direst hour of need.
“A third sign—a holy number,” his deep, youthful voice rang out. “First, the miraculous fording of the River Somme under fierce arrow fire when the French believed they had us ensnared. Second, this rain to mire them in their coming defeat. And now, French crows—the black harbingers of hell to warn Philip’s foolish troops they cannot win against us here. Let them come on and learn the true, tempered courage of an Englishman!”