by Karen Harper
When he spoke low at last, his voice was not his own. He meant not for it to be so fierce, biting like a whip, but she had obviously been with Holland or Salisbury while he’d waited over an hour for her in that chill, dark hall, and she looked tousled enough to have come from a passionate lovers’ clinch.
“Only sacks of feathers here, Jeannette. No straw, but it will do for what I intend. I ought to break your proud little neck for this trick, but I shall settle for a sweet taste of your body. Is there no end to this—Holland, Salisbury, even the king? I swear to you, little vixen, you will know for a certain the one who beds you is Edward, the conqueror, who is not any conquest of yours.”
Like a conceited bully who knew he would win, she thought, he unbuckled his belt noisily and dropped it to the floor. He threw himself down beside her and rolled them over so she was partly pinned under him. Fear and desire hardened to cold fury as she went rigid and tried to pull away.
“I want his name, witch,” he hissed in her ear, “the one you came from so late, so disheveled like this.” At her icy demeanor he felt his temper snap and vault away, out of his control. “I will have his title, his head! Both Salisbury and Holland followed you out and did not return. I had it all arranged to keep you untouched and now you have ruined all my plans.” He pushed her down, his big hands clasped in her hair to hold her still. She gazed up into his distraught face only inches from her own.
He does not know, her stunned mind screamed at her. The king, his own sire—he does not know where I have been or what has happened. She had assumed this fury was because he knew it all, had spied or followed her. If she told him who had sent for her and tried to possess her, would his curse hold true? “I will have his title, his head,” he had said.
“Name him, Jeannette! Name him! Your stockings are even loose, ungartered! Who was it?”
“As you command, Your Grace. Perhaps it was even the king. Now take your hands off me. I am sick to death of being vilely abused by royal, rutting Plantagenets named Edward.”
His high brow crushed his rakish, tawny eyebrows down over his eyes. “I want God’s truth, Jeannette.”
“Then let me go. You have no right—you, the supposed greatest chivalrous knight of all Christendom—to haul me about in straw or sacks or whatever—no right to threaten and rape me and—”
“Rape? St. George, madame, I cannot recall a time you were not as hot and as willing as I once we started. If you could only curb this wild desire to string all men along as though they were so many little wooden knights—”
“I? Get off me, get off!” She shoved him away and he chose to budge a bit to let her breathe. “How dare you grab me and threaten me! Everyone knows you bed with some unnamed town free-woman—maybe more than one from the way you eyed Constantia Bourchier tonight. And let that unnamed woman have your bastards!”
“Enough! We are not here to discuss me. My life away from here is none of your concern.”
“You mistake my contempt as concern, Your Grace, for I care not what sluts you bed with and where!”
“Saints’ blood! Then sacks and feathers will no doubt serve just fine here now!” He pressed her down again, pinning her arms to her side while she kicked and writhed. He held her head still and covered her mouth with his, but cursed and spun away as she bit his lip hard. His eyes were murderous. He stared aghast at her as she shrank back along the stone wall. He looked to her as shocked as she. Then, in his muted blue eyes, she read the lonely agony of heartfelt pain.
The interlocking patterns of their breathing raked the silence between them. Blood appeared on his lower lip where she had bitten him, but he only wiped it away on the back of his hand and stared.
His voice was rough velvet, barely discernible when he spoke. “I heard your words earlier, Jeannette. Tell me you lied. You cannot have been with the king.”
“I was with the king, Your Grace.”
“But your dress is torn, your hair all mussed—so late at night. You are lying. You detest me—what we shared—so much then?”
Her eyes widened in utter amazement. Aye, the great prince was hurt, afraid, lonely as she had often been. Now she could use the truth to best him as she had wished for so long. He might dare to accost his father—they might fight or hate each other for this—and when a parent turned away, such agony of heart followed. She opened her lips to speak but no words came. Now she could give him pain, and all she wished to do was comfort. Her heart melted, flowed out to him.
“I see,” he whispered. “So I have been alone in this little affaire du coeur all the time and was gravely mistaken. You would even use my father. What reality does to dreams, by the rood,” his voice trailed off.
“My lord prince, it was not the way you think.”
“Really? All mussed like that, your hair, dress, stockings, late at night—not what I think?”
Her heart crashed so hard against her ribs in longing she could hardly hear her own words. “I will not be owned or possessed, my lord prince, by any man. That is all.”
“Hell, Jeannette, we are all owned, possessed by something—rules or birth or duty.”
“But not by someone.”
He got slowly, heavily, to his feet. “My mistake exactly, it seems, Lady Joan. Do not cower like that. I mean not to force, to rape, or defile you as you so pointedly put it. I swear to you, Joan of Kent, I shall never do aught to so offend your delicate sense of virtue again until you can unlock that hardened little stone of a heart and learn to be a woman. Get up now and I shall deliver you safe and untouched to your own room.”
She stood, her legs trembling, her feet crushing down the feather-filled sacks. He buckled on his belt, and as he stood to let her pass, she saw his big hands were shaking. He shoved the coffer away from the door and snuffed the two lamps to plunge the room into total blackness. It was not until she accidentally stumbled against his shoulder in the hall that she realized her eyes were blinded by a rush of tears.
She had to tell him how it had been with the king, since the raving fury she had expected for that had never quite come. His reaction was sullen, controlled. She suddenly longed to share her burden of revenge—but then, must he not be the object of such hatred? Surely, he knew she cared not for the other men and had just been swept along in Isabella’s fun, the court games, the queen’s commands. But was she not then owned and possessed by others even as she had vowed never to be? That nameless woman out there who shared the prince’s bed and bore his child—he had neither defended her nor protected her. If only things had been different, not so ruined, so doomed from the very start.
“Your Grace,” she managed outside the door of her room, “may we not speak on the morrow?”
“No. I have much business. Old Morcar read it well, too well. I shall be gone to Sonning tomorrow.”
“I see. Then, please, only remember things are not always what they appear to be.”
“Aye, Jeannette. Poor stupid dolt that I am under all the titles and trappings, I have only recently found that to be much true.”
“I am sorry for it.”
“Are you?” His voice was cold but sad. It was too dark to read his expression. She felt tears trace jagged paths down her flushed cheeks. “I am sure you will not let it bother you a whit come the morrow,” he continued. “And I assure you—of me you shall be free unless you grow up someday to wish otherwise. Trample on whomever you will until the queen and king ship you off, and when some poor wretch lies legally between those enticing thighs—damn you, Jeannette—when it is much too late for us ever, think on me then!”
He turned and stalked off, his dark form swallowed instantly by blackness until just his footsteps whispered back to her. She felt numb, totally bereft, the way she had felt the night her mother had died. Laden with regret, smothered by remorse, she was terrified of crashing brutally into something in herself which she could never hope to fathom or control.
The iron door latch was cold to her touch. The room appeared a blend of grays, but
she closed the door quietly and tiptoed past Marta’s pallet and across the carpet until her knees struck her bed. Trembling as though the room were icy, she stripped and draped her garments across the foot of the bed, then climbed carefully under the coverlet—naked, for she could not bear to reach for the diaphanous gown laid out. She had worn it the night the prince had taken her to their little seaside cottage at Calais. She curled up, shivering, between the cold linen sheets.
Exhaustion drained her, made her feel bodiless, floating. Across the room dear, old Marta flopped over, then began to snore. Saints, what did it matter, any of it? She would never sleep tonight after all this anyway.
She could almost grasp now why Mother had chosen to live all those years locked away. To hate from afar and not at intimate range where one could be hurt again; aye, mayhap that had been wise. Why did all this have to happen when she only wanted to be free and happy?
She felt as if she were spinning, or the room whirled wild around her. Like a wheel, the whole bed, the chamber and court revolved to make her dizzy. She heard her own words now in her head, the lyrics to the song she had oft sung on the lovely lute the prince had brought her:
“The lady Fortune is both friend and foe:
Of poor she maketh rich,
Of rich poor also;
She turneth woe all into well,
And well all into woe.
Trust no man to do well,
The wheel it turneth so.”
The wheel blurred by inset with glittering faces like an emerald, sapphire, and diamond necklace she had seen somewhere. Its colors melded, sparkled. Philippa sullen, demanding; the king leering. Holland, Salisbury. The princess laughing. Mother—her mother was sad and dead. But in the center—at the very hub, his prideful, handsome, leonine face—my lord, my dear Prince Edward. The wheel rushed faster as she reached out to him. The planets rotated by, vast diamond stars and golden suns—Morcar’s wheel of Fortune she would never grasp, never trust. The prince’s face darkened and blurred as the wheel whirled and threw her off into the utter void.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Green spring brought more to England than festivals and a rebirth of chivalry: in one monstrous leap across the English Channel, the curse of virulent plague ravaged the land. From the squalid ports of the Mediterranean, it had swept Italy and devastated France—hitting the coasts of English Dorset in August of 1348. In Devon, Somerset, Oxford, the pestilence glutted its greedy maw on rich and poor alike until it crashed through the gates of teaming London on All Saints’ Day in November. Those in London’s populous tenements, crowded monasteries, and busy merchants’ halls prayed for deliverance, but stayed for death. The rich and noble fled the city for the sanctuary of their great country homes, out of reach of the grim-fisted devourer called in whispered tones simply—the Death.
King Edward, his queen, and youngest children took their retainers to the hunt lodge at wooded Eltham Manor in Kent, a small house, but evidently these last two months, a safe one. The Prince of Wales and his large retinue hunkered down at Sonning Manor for the duration, while the Princess Isabella and most of her ladies settled in at Woodstock in Oxfordshire. None of the places were large enough to house the whole court for a long stay, but fear was on the land as Yuletide approached, and so, they stayed. There would be no joyous reunion at Windsor for the court this dreadful year, for all but great Edward’s most noble courtiers kept close to their own walled houses in distant shires. While most of Europe suffered and perished, England’s elite waited and hoped the black hand of Death would condescend to pass them by.
But, despite such precautions, a few of those closest and dearest to the king’s family were ravished away with one-third of England’s folk. Favorite servants perished, too: old Morcar, the king’s astrologer, died in his seventy-first year without ever having shown Joan of Kent the precious astrological chart he had cast for her. And at Sonning, Prince Edward’s most beloved minstrel Hankin, who had once played messenger to the Lady Joan, collapsed and died in delirious agony after two days of fitful ravings. Also from the Prince of Wales’s vast household two kitchen scullions and a falconer followed in swift succession, sending the prince and his retinue fleeing north to Berkhamstead only thirty-five miles from Woodstock. When, after a month it appeared the Black Pestilence had not pursued the prince there, he sent his sister Isabella a note by masked, sanctified, and purified courier that a small party consisting of six other men and himself would be joining her at Woodstock Manor for a few days’ visit at Yuletide.
Bubbling over with plans, Isabella immediately showed the note to Joan where she stood at a glazed window looking out toward the wintry blue-green fir and oak of Wychwood Forest which stretched east and west to the borders of Gloucestershire as far as the eye could see.
“The prince,” Joan echoed Isabella’s shrill words in a much quieter tone. “Here on the morrow? I thought the plan was we had all best stay separated in these dangerous times when death leaps from house to house on the merest breath of air.”
“By the rood, Jeannette, such vile, depressing talk. Aye, I know, I know, commoners, villeins, and serfs die by tens of tens, but it has been so dreary here these two months with all demoiselles like us simply packed in here and a stodgy old garrison of guards to protect us and not a single, young gallant in the lot! My dear lord father has been a veritable, nasty bear since summer and now to just exile all of us here at Woodstock while they at Eltham have all the fun—and have all the men—face it, Jeannette, it has all been absolutely dismal here.”
Joan’s heart beat a rapid tattoo as she pressed her hands to her breasts to steady herself. The prince, here in this intimate, little hunt lodge after so long. Of course, he would still hate her and act haughty and cold, but then, might that not make being near him even easier to bear? She had not seen this exile at Woodstock as dismal at all; rather it was a blessed escape from that other plague which had smitten her heart.
“Well, for heaven’s sake, Jeannette,” Isabella scolded, “you cannot just stand there misty eyed! I expect your help to get everything ready for them. We shall show that wretched black disease out there it cannot stop some fun and delights we cherish for Yuletide, I warrant.”
“Of course I shall help. I suppose your ladies will all need to move in together to free some chambers for His Grace. I wish I could go home to Liddell until this is over, but I know that is foolish.”
“Foolish? Impossible more like. How could you wish to leave when we are finally to have something to do around here? The king distinctly said you are to stay at Woodstock in my retinue until you are sent for to wed. At least this pestilence has shut down the Vatican and that will stop that annulment matter and leave you free as I am for a while.”
“Aye. There is all that,” Joan said slowly. The annulment, Holland, Salisbury. She hardly ever thought of all that here as if it did not matter, did not really touch her life. She either reminisced about the prince, or really thought on no one at all. Instead, here at wintry Woodstock, set like a rough jewel among three ponds in the embrace of deep forests, she remembered her maidenhood at Liddell before all the confusions of the court: she thought on Marta, whom she had been forced to leave at Windsor with most of the ladies’ maids; and her poor, violet-eyed mother sequestered by choice in that silent chamber reliving a wretched past; of Morcar with his charts and signs and strange warnings, now all stilled by death; and of Roger Wakeley, her dear friend who had wandered in to Liddell to fill her quiet life with music and song and then had left at her brother Edmund’s insistence over six years ago—another of several childhood desertions by a trusted loved one.
“Now come along and buck up,” Isabella was saying again. “By the rood, His Grace had better ride in here with fresh venison or be prepared to go out to hunt at once for we have only enough on hand for one huge feast. They all eat like mowers at harvest day, you know. Jeannette,” Isabella concluded in a rush with her hands on her shapely hips, “you quite simply must stop this moping. P
lague or no plague, you have been a stick-in-the-mud since that day after the Garter Ceremony when all perdition broke loose.”
“The day the king scolded you for being a spendthrift, you mean,” Joan countered as they walked the length of the low-beamed central hall toward the comfortable solar where Isabella slept and the ladies congregated in the daytime to keep warm.
“Aye. At first, of course, I thought all the show of expensive garters had set him off at me, but that could hardly be since he had made such a fuss over yours and renamed the new Order of the Round Table the Order of the Garter after them. Truth is, I believe, I got caught in his foul mood because someone told him I borrowed coins from my grooms and ladies to pay his bowmaker and, then, too, that was the day of his vile row with dearest Edward.”
“The king fought with the Prince of Wales that day?”
“Did I never tell you? Aye, the morn after all that lovely torch dancing. I guess it slipped my mind with the plague talk and all, and I was so out of my humor the king scolded me for riotous spending when he knows he wanted me dressed well. It was so strange—the prince has been known to argue with our lady mother in that stiff-necked way of his but never to take on the king. I swear that is why Edward rode off in a huff with his men, remember, even before we heard all these dire predictions of the pestilence and he had to go to Sonning? And if we are not ready to put on some sort of show for Yule, we might feel dear Edward’s barbed tongue too, so we had best get our heads together for something wonderful.”