by Karen Harper
The goblet shook so in her hand a splash of liquid cooled her thigh. “I understand,” she whispered.
“They will try to keep us apart, but if there is any need for subterfuge or deceit, it must not be between us. Say you understand,” he pursued, his face completely serious.
“I did say it, my Lord Edward. Please. You are hurting me.”
He loosed his hold and sipped his wine, his eyes still pinning her to the velvet where she sat, her knees pulled up and her golden tresses a veil to partly cover her nudity. His warm fingers lifted to stroke the slant of her cheek. He felt growing desire for her assault him again. For three years he had been watching her, wanting her. St. George, she drove thoughts of any other woman from his mind and turned his very insides to hot, molten lead when her violet eyes gazed wide on him like this. Yet her next words brought the outside world crashing in and he longed to silence her with a kiss.
“I guess it will not be too long now before Calais falls, Your Grace.”
“Aye. This week, I judge.”
“And then we will be sailing home for a victorious welcome for you. But those poor people starving in that city—”
“Look, ma chérie, they have had a standing offer to submit to our mercy at any time. It is their own choice to stay behind those walls.”
“Submit to your mercy—a strange way to speak of it. And was it so with us today? I submitted to your mercy?”
“Save it for another time, Jeannette. I dislike a scolding woman in bed. I can get all the lawyers, strategists—or enemies—I need elsewhere.”
“Oh, well—of course, I did not mean to be a scolding woman. Of course, I want to fall into line and any bed you choose anywhere, just like all your other women—”
To her dismay he grinned at her despite her shrewish tone. “Ma chérie, I cannot tell you how much it would please me to believe even for a moment you are one tiny whit jealous of what other women I may or may not have had. Now finish the wine you so desperately wanted. I have other plans for our evening—all of it.”
She felt suddenly shy, then panicky. How dangerously close a few moments ago she had come to shouting out her love for him and yet—and yet she had vowed to her mother she would avenge their family cause on the royal Plantagenets. Isabella was foolish and innocent, the queen both kind and foreboding, the king so utterly unreachable. But this man, Edward, their dear son and heir, was close, vulnerable—so close that—
He took her half-emptied wine goblet from her unresisting fingers and drained it himself before dropping it to the carpet behind him as he had done his own. He reached for her waist, tangling his fingers in her long hair. He noted she was trembling barely perceptibly, but she faced him like a warrior with her shoulders back, her eyes steady, and her pert chin held proudly. She was a little warrior in her own way and one he did not quite understand. Other women, even noble or royal, he could have at his bidding yet he cared not. This one, all champagne and lilacs and wild spirit, he wanted to possess as desperately as he had ever wanted a victory of a more heroic sort. Yet she had put up some wall and however much he desired to scale it, it grew apace.
He leaned forward to take her lips which she yielded warily. “My beautiful, violet-eyed love,” he said low and then he began his campaign of conquest that so often with this woman ended in his own surprising surrender.
Calais had capitulated; the lengthy siege against the apparently impregnable walls was over. Even the richest inside the city had finally been reduced to eating rats and dogs, and Jean de Vienne, the brave leader of the city’s garrison, had at last asked for terms. King Edward of England gave a reply direct and simple. He had offered Calais mercy long ago before he had lost a year at siege and hundreds of soldiers to winter cold and disease camped outside these walls in rude, wooden structures. For long years, Calais had been a home port for pirates preying on English ships in the Channel. Now the defiant citizens must surrender to either being killed or ransomed at his will—unconditional surrender. The famous Plantagenet temper Joan had seen in the king, Prince Edward, even Isabella, which was whispered of from the midland shires of England clear to the pope’s palace at Avignon, had been fanned to fever heat.
But the king’s advisors counseled against such severity. Philippa, near her time with her tenth child, pleaded for the Blessed Virgin’s mercy. Even his warrior son, who amazed those closest to him by his calm and contented demeanor lately, suggested that power could best be served at times through gentleness—a true chivalric ideal most courtiers whispered the Prince of Wales had learned through reading about King Arthur but only Edward himself knew he had learned through his patient, secret conquest of the little Jeannette of Kent whom he was certain he had tamed now they had become lovers. They had spent a second long night together at their little sea cottage, though he had to risk going clear to her room down the hall near Isabella’s suite and several other guards not in his employ had seen them leave. Still, the night had been beautiful: the whole world was beautiful despite his father’s temper or the starving, wretched citizens of Calais on the other side of those high walls.
Finally, King Edward agreed to a compromise which would both bestow mercy and yet seek redress and justice—six of the richest city leaders must present themselves before him clothed only in their shirts with nooses around their necks ready to be hanged. They must present to him a naked sword, handle first to symbolize their utter defeat and bear the keys to the city and the castle within. The other conquered citizens left in the city would then benefit from the king’s mercy.
The English court, which had gone to Bruges for the marriage that never happened, was all assembled that Saturday, August 4, 1347 for another sort of festivity—the surrender of stubborn Calais. Joan sat next to Isabella on the dais behind the king, queen, and prince under a striped azure and gold silk awning which flapped gently in the sporadic, warm sea breeze. Everyone was richly attired; many had donned the expensive brocades and jewel-studded satins they had expected to wear at the Princess Isabella’s wedding. Only Isabella herself and her dear friend Jeannette had vowed never to wear their pure white dresses once destined for that marriage day and never to mention it again to anyone.
Joan wore a clinging, peach-colored satin kirtle in which she was much too warm for the day. The long-skirted, tight-bodied, and long-sleeved popular styles were uncomfortable in weather like this and someday, when she had enough power, she fully intended to change the fashion, she vowed. But today her gown stirred restlessly about her ankles and the traditional liripipes at the sleeves draped over the arm of her chair; even the wispy scarves fluttered from her high, pointed headpiece. Yet she had dressed as she knew she should, even to please the queen. If the king had not been in such a towering rage of late, she might have dared to talk Isabella into something far more frivolous to show them she did not care for their pious and proud Plantagenet ways. One of the slit surcotes she favored or a kirtle dripping with her favorite deep, swinging fringes would do. She would be bareheaded and laugh at their frowns or—saints, but one of those diaphanous night chemises they had brought from Flanders would suit this warm day! Then, the prince would be pleased at least.
She could not repress the little smile which lifted her cherry red lips as she squinted out into the sunlight at the small, approaching group of men from Calais. This town had fallen to the English, she told herself, just as the prince surely had fallen to her. He thought himself the aggressor, the conqueror, no doubt, but when he needed her as much as he seemed to the two nights they had spent at that lovely, little beach cottage—when he sought her kisses and caresses and lost himself in her body—she felt her control over him. That might have to be her eventual revenge on these Plantagenets. He would ask for her, need her beyond reason, and she would reject him and his parents—perhaps Isabella too, if need be—with him. She would tell them why. Everyone would know that Joan of Kent sought retribution for her murdered father and ruined mother. She would take Marta and go home to Liddell Manor in qu
iet Kent to live caring for the estate when her brother Edmund was away and playing sad songs on her lute. The picture of her poor father summoned before the assembled councilors at Windsor by Roger Mortimer and that oily-faced bastard de Maltravers drifted through her memory. And then, when she saw the present scene unfold before her, she nearly screamed out at its stunning impact.
With the wailing lamentations of grief from within the walls of nearby Calais as sad background music, six men approached the king’s silken tent. A moment’s swelling breeze lifted the awning and their garments, and flapped the leopard and lily banners smartly. The six burghers of Calais walked haltingly; gaunt-faced, ravaged, white-bearded, they halted before the colorful pavilion in linen shirts, barelegged with rope halters around their scrawny necks as they had been told.
They knelt down and held up their hands and once again said, “Gentle King, behold here we six, who were burgesses of Calais and great merchants. We have brought the keys of the town and of the castle, and we submit ourselves clearly into your will and pleasure, to save the residue of the people of Calais, who have suffered great pain.”
Joan half rose out of her seat, her mouth open, her eyes wide. They had suffered great pain! The speaker was so frail and his voice creaked like an old oak door at home, not with fear but with utter exhaustion and desperation. He was so blue-eyed, so vital in his pitiful linen shirt with the knotted noose hanging forward on his sunken chest. Her father once, so blue-eyed, had pleaded in his shirt and rope, doomed, doomed before all who had stared, cold and haughty like this king. But then, this king had been off in cowardly flight instead of at Windsor where his uncle, Edmund of Kent, needed mercy!
Isabella’s hand darted to Joan’s arm and she pulled her back down into her seat. Suddenly, Joan was aware the prince had turned his head to glare, but she ignored him too.
“Sir, we beseech Your Grace to have mercy and pity on us through your high nobles,” the old man of Calais concluded. The king took the keys and sword and handed them to Prince Edward but made no immediate answer. The scene blurred before Joan as her eyes filled with blinding tears. Her own blue-eyed father—his portrait at Liddell in the hall was so blue-eyed—he had pleaded like this, the terrible hangman’s rope heavy on his neck and no one had listened.
King Edward’s tawny, crowned head moved as he formed his terrible words. “Death to you all, rebels and enemies. My mercy you spurned earlier, and you may reap the harvest of my just vengeance now. Away with these Frenchmen!”
It took Joan a moment to grasp his meaning; then, she realized even if King Edward had been there for her father the result might have been the same.
She turned to the frowning Isabella beside her. “Your Grace, no. He cannot. He cannot have them beheaded or hanged. He cannot,” Joan hissed to Isabella and grabbed her wrist.
“Sh! His Grace is so angry and rightly so,” the princess whispered back at her. The surrounding crowd of nobles murmured, shifted, buzzed with whispers. Ahead of them, the queen’s lofty headpiece tilted as she pivoted to stare at her daughter and her young, distraught ward. The king sat stone-still as if carved in marble. One clenched fist rested on his knee, his beard moved in a warm gust of wind, and his gold crown glinted dully in muted sunlight. English guards in leopard tunics were leading the men away. At last the king and prince moved down off the dais to confer in deep tones with their chief negotiator, Sir Walter Manny, newly arrived from the English victory over the Scots at the siege of Berwick.
Joan, her hands clasped tightly in her brocade lap, hunched farther forward to speak to the queen. “Your Grace, please, cannot we plead for them? They are only old men brave enough to come out here for this. Cannot we convince the king to show mercy?”
“Cannot we?” the queen echoed, turning to face Joan more fully while a surprised Isabella looked on. “Who is we who would dare to beard His Grace when these enemies have finally capitulated and we may soon all go home to England?” Her face looked annoyed and stern. Joan had not talked to Her Grace for several days, and she had not seen such a hard look since that long-ago day when the queen had come upon her sprawled across the prince’s lap in that walled garden at Windsor.
Joan clasped her hands together so tightly in her lap that she felt her fingers go numb. “Your Grace, I know the king would give you aught you ask of him. He bends to you only. I have seen it—you yourself have said it, and now you are so far with this tenth royal babe that he would deny you no—”
“And why are these old, foreign men anything to you, Joan? Did not your dear prince explain that at their glorious Crécy the French were vanquished? Is this not more of that glory? I begged my lord king for mercy for the women and children left in that miserable walled city and he hearkened to me. Why are these six lives so much to you then?”
Joan’s teary, violet eyes locked with the queen’s pale blue ones. Joan felt a battle enjoined there which was more than this issue of six old men’s lives. Philippa’s gaze wavered one moment in her plump face as if she remembered or realized something, but that face hardened again and Joan was suddenly afraid.
“Well, my Lady Joan, the king will not have them dispatched until they are shriven, so we have a few moments to speak further. Excuse us, my dear Isabella,” the queen said and a strange half-smile parted her lips. “I have private business with our dearest Joan for a moment.”
Isabella’s eyes popped as if she had swallowed something huge, but she knew well that flat, direct tone her mother used but seldom and she reluctantly did as she was bid. All her wild vows of blaming her parents for her desertion by that pompous Louis de Male she had already forgotten. She much preferred being in their majesties’ good graces even if her cousin Joan evidently did not see the wisdom in that.
Queen Philippa followed Joan a few steps beyond the farthest tent pole where they would be alone for a moment. The sun was stunningly bright and the sky arched porcelain-blue overhead outside the shelter of the silken awning where they stopped.
“Shall I fetch you a stool, Your Grace?” Joan began. She fully meant to plead again for the queen’s intervention in these looming executions, but there was something else in this from the way the queen was acting now. Saints, if she had to, she would even dare to bring up her own father’s cruel death though they had never spoken directly of that before.
“How badly do you wish for those lives, then, Jeannette?” The queen’s use of the pet name the prince called her startled her, for she had reverted to calling her Joan for many months now.
“Badly, Your Grace. You see, I just feel—”
“And I want something from you badly, ma demoiselle, and will have your vow on it. You see, I know of your—liaison—with the prince at night—the little beach place, I know not how many nights, so do not bother to equivocate or deny it.”
The tent pole behind the queen’s floating head scarves seemed to move; the distant castle walls of Calais seemed to jump closer, to quiver from their foundations.
“No, my dear, he did not tell me. He knows nothing of my knowledge of this, but that is not important, only that it must end now, completely, permanently,” she went on in a rush. “I want your word you will go along with my arrangements that you wed William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury next week, here at Calais. The prince will be riding circuit to protect our beachhead, and the secret ceremony will be held after he is gone.”
“Salisbury! But—what about Thomas Holland? You cannot ask this of me!”
“Keep your voice down, my dear. I do not ask, I demand. Our beloved heir is destined for a foreign dynastic marriage—a princess. Of course, you must realize that. And he had been so amenable on that point until you managed to—to quite unsettle his life. Oh, do not look so crestfallen, dear Joan. I do not blame you for the little seaside trysts or loving him, for who would not?”
“I—I do not love him. I truly do not love your son.”
Philippa looked surprised, then doubtful and annoyed. “I do not believe you, but then, it really ma
kes no difference. Fine, for there will be a ready smile for Lord Salisbury when we tell him of his good fortune after the prince has gone. And I expect you to take to your room with fever or some such until he is gone. I will not have all this upsetting him or his father until there is nothing he can do. And now, you will give me your word and I shall seal your vow by kneeling before my husband king and pleading for your poor burghers’ lives. Salisbury is from a fine family and the marriage will suit you. I shall handle Thomas Holland and, eventually, my beloved son.”
“Aye, I see.” Joan felt as if she were sleepwalking through a nightmare, but the continual wailing of the defeated from behind the walls of Calais was all too real and she had to hurry to save the blue-eyed old man with the rope around his neck. At least there would be some pleasure in besting the prince, but just when she had fancied herself in control, the wheel of Fortune had spun to cast her downward in despair again.
“I shall have your vow on this and then you may go to your room until I send for you, Joan,” the queen repeated, her words piercing Joan’s thoughts until her eyes refocused on the pudgy, suddenly frightening face so close. She did not, could not love the prince despite how he took her to the heights of rapture, could she? When she bedded with him, he sailed her high above the sea. She could not ever imagine the fond, smiling Salisbury doing any such thing to her.
The queen’s hand pinched her shoulder. “Swear it, Joan. All time for otherwise, but this choice has gone.”
“I—aye, I swear it. Betrothals at court, mayhap marriages too—they are nothing.”
“Go now. I promise I shall plead for the old men. Go now.”
Dazedly, her mind racing faster than her feet, Joan hurried back to the one-floored wooden warren of rooms which had been her home near the prince these last four months. The mazelike edifice looked squat and ugly now. The sand dune where he had come to take her away on his horse last week seemed barren and cold.