by Karen Harper
She raised her dazed face to stare at him. “There is more to tell then,” she faltered, and her tumbled mind fought to clear itself from debris so she could reason. “Am I to be sent back to Liddell? I swear to you, my lord prince, it has been my fondest wish, my only desire.”
He gave her a little shake. “Stop it. No, though I wish that were the next blow. The king, it seems, Jeannette, after you did whatever you did to thoroughly rebuff him the night of the Garter ceremony, himself wrote the pope to urge on Thomas Holland’s request for an annulment from Salisbury. I can only be thankful for your apparent spurning of my royal sire’s intents that night, but it has sealed your fate with Holland as the pope has ruled in his behalf. I would guess that Holland will be here any day now to claim his betrothed and soon enough be off to Normandy, the apparent price for the king’s help in winning you. So you are free of Salisbury’s claim and Thomas Holland has won.”
“Holland! After all this time. Holland.”
“Aye. The thought does not grieve you then?”
She pulled free at last from his restraining grasp, and he let her go. She stood, closely wrapping his huge, inky cloak about her like darkest, thickest armor of black midnight.
“Of course, it grieves me. All I ever asked of being here at the great Plantagenet court was my freedom—the right to be alone sometimes if I so willed it, to choose my own path, but that is not the way things are done. Holland, Salisbury—it is all the same.”
“Is it, my poor, little maid?” His resonant voice sounded very tired, listless. “Then why should a wretch like the Prince of Wales say any different?” He shook his tousled, damp head. “St. George, but what I would not give to have this battle be as easy as that which won my spurs at Crécy!”
She stared down at the floor not daring to comprehend his words. Edmund and Anne dead. Holland, victor at last. She grasped her hands very tightly together. This frightening, magnetic antagonism she had shared with Edward, Prince of Wales, Plantagenet, must be ended now. Now she must wall off the pain of loss and hurt so it could not devour her like this. Aye, she might marry Thomas Holland, but she would never belong to him or anyone else but herself. Saints, at this little stone altar where poor, beset Rosamonde had probably begged the Lord for help, she vowed it!
No tears fell, he marveled as he watched her. How he had rehearsed this scene where she would collapse in his arms, and he would comfort her and vow his undying love before this tiny, crude altar even at their parting. But when had Jeannette of Kent ever not surprised him? He was not sure he even dared to carry her back to the manor, for he was not convinced he could keep himself from wildly sprinting off with her into the black reach of forest to freeze in eternal embrace with her in the pure white of untouched snow. Staring at her like this, he felt utterly bereft as if he were the one separated from a loved one by the wide chasm of death.
“Shall we go back now, Your Grace?” she said quietly. “Does Isabella know?”
“No, but she and the others must be told.”
She nodded and turned to walk slowly up the cold nave of the dim chapel. She shivered as though ghosts crowded in upon her warmth—not of poor love-smitten Rosamonde, but ghosts of memory she must keep close to her now she was losing them all: Father, Mother, Edmund, Anne, even Morcar—now everyone here she would leave behind in England would be mere ghosts of reminiscence too. Thomas Holland would take her away to some place called Pont-Audemer in Normandy, among the hostile French, the king had said. In her room tonight, smothered in her pillow where Constantia would not hear, she would cry for them all.
She was not even aware the prince had followed her to the door and lifted her at first. He carried no lamp now. The snow had ceased. The whole world lay before them deep black and silent white. Despite her resolve to be bravely alone, she held tightly to his broad shoulders and rested her cheek against his beating heart all the way back in the cold, dark night.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Edward, Prince of Wales, trailing four friends, two falconers, six hunt hounds, three squires, and his exhausted minstrel Roger Wakeley at his muddy heels, slammed open the door to his private solar at his country palace of Kennington and stamped in from hours of hawking in the cold January air. The prince, Nickolas Dagworth, and Hugh Calveley threw themselves into chairs clustered around the table near the fire while servants hovered to pour them heated wine. The cold, wet dogs, which had been madly retrieving felled heron and partridges all afternoon, flopped panting near the hearth. The prince drained the wine and immediately extended his flagon for more.
“Saints’ blood, my lord prince, but you have set us a hellfire pace these last few weeks,” Nick Dagworth observed and then coughed into his leather sleeve. “Hunting at dawn, hawking immediately after, and jousting bouts.”
“Can you not keep up anymore, my friend?” the prince countered, no tone of jest in his strident voice at all. “How in hell shall we beat the French again when we go back there next year if you cannot keep up with a little winter gaming? More wine here, squire.”
While their servants scraped their boot soles, Dagworth and Calveley exchanged a quick, worried glance. Something was driving their prince hard and they were in turn driven to keep up with him. They had come to this little countryside castle outside London almost a month ago and there had not been a moment’s respite since. Dagworth had caught a chest cold he could not shake and even though the weather was mild for late January and the snow had melted to ruts of frozen mud, he always felt chilled. This breakneck pace had them all yawning in corners and nodding over dinner in the early evening. And when everyone else faded, the prince amused himself to all hours of the night, his minstrel Roger had said, with the voluptuous new maid Bethany whose father was a small landowner in this area.
Only very recently had His Grace seemed to become a real womanizer, Nick Dagworth thought as he was racked by another coughing fit. Really, it was from about the time of the Garter Ceremony last spring when he had started to sow his wild oats here and there at whim, apparently never really favoring one particular maid for long. There had been that one woman Katharine de Vere who had borne His Grace a bastard son and now lived at Berkhamstead in the prince’s household there, but lately it was a new maid every fortnight. By the rood, Nick Dagworth liked a willing woman to warm his bed as well as anyone, but at this rate, he would just as soon pass by a little sweetmeat like the raven-haired Bethany St. Clair, who no doubt awaited her prince all hot and ready in the adjoining room. At that thought, the violent hacking seized Nick again; then he wheezed until his eyes watered.
Prince Edward was pacing in front of the fireplace, tossing scraps of meat to the tired hunt hounds when Nick got control of himself. “That sounds worse, Nick. Best hie yourself off to bed.”
“Well, if you would not mind, Your Grace. I do not think I could stand another marathon tourney at backgammon ’til all hours, though I probably will not sleep a wink with this wretched chest and throat.”
“Not sleep a wink—aye, my man, I know how that is,” the prince observed, his voice more subdued than it had been of late. He leaned his hands on the marble mantel and put one booted foot up on an andiron. “Just drink a lot of wine, Nick—a lot, and then hope you drop off before you have to start jumping up to the chamber pot all night.”
“I thought perhaps your secret remedy for sleepless nights was a hearty roll with a lass like the black-haired Bethany in there,” Hugh Calveley chuckled and nodded toward the door to the luxurious sleeping quarters. “By the Virgin, Your Grace, at least you have her trained well to not come traipsing out here to scold us for being gone all day and now making all this ruckus. What a lucky rogue to have her right where you want her waiting!”
Hugh and Prince Edward laughed while Nick coughed and then swigged enough wine to temporarily soothe his raw throat. To have her right where you want her waiting, the words echoed through the prince’s frenzied thoughts. These last two weeks—since he had heard Jeannette was to be married on t
he last day of January, tomorrow—such a desire as that haunted him, tortured him on a rack of exquisite memory and desire. To have Jeannette right where he wanted her waiting for him, even as the voluptuous, clinging Bethany no doubt awaited him on the other side of that door.
He had tried everything to drive these thoughts of Jeannette away: hours of penance on his knees in the chapel while his friends thought he prayed for deliverance of England from the plague; hours, days of violent physical exertion to check the longing; mental exhaustion in reading, chess, backgammon; two weeks of nights of wallowing between Bethany St. Clair’s soft, white thighs. But he could not shake the grip of panic he had never felt before, the stark fear that he, Edward, Prince of Wales, was losing something he wanted desperately and could not have. He would almost call this feeling for Jeannette hate, if he were not so afraid it was love.
Annoyed his thoughts might show on his face, he spun away and bid his entourage a curt good-night over his shoulder. At the door to the bedchamber he turned back to summon Roger Wakeley and his favorite squire Leonard with a flick of his wrist. Fully aware of the taut rein on their lord’s temper, they hastened to follow him, nearly tripping over the hounds which evidently had the same idea. Roger Wakeley and Leonard shoved the eager dogs back and closed the door behind themselves.
Once in the luxuriously decorated chamber, Leonard darted to help the prince divest himself of his garments, a task he had already begun by peeling off his surcote, jerkin, and shirt and tossing them back behind him on a chair as he stood at the hearth seemingly mesmerized by its flames. The prince’s naked upper torso gleamed like polished marble in the firelight, a fact obviously of great interest to the woman who sat waiting in the canopied bed across the room, her ebony raven locks tumbling loose. All of the women the prince had taken as brief liaisons since last spring had had black or red or brown hair, Leonard mused, as he knelt near the hearth to pull off His Grace’s boots. And here, he had been certain once His Grace had only favored the more blond and fair damsels.
“My lord prince, I am so happy you are not so very late tonight,” Bethany St. Clair’s smooth voice floated from the bed to the prince’s distracted mind. “You have been gone, you know, since before dawn this morn.”
The crooning tone suddenly annoyed him. Why must women cozen and wheedle? he fumed. Why could they never be like a man and just come out with it to say what they thought? “I know well enough what time I left, demoiselle,” he returned curtly and stood rock-still, both fists on the mantel while Leonard scrubbed him with lint dipped in water of bergamot.
Roger Wakeley, without waiting to be instructed, had begun to strum a tune on his lute, a pensive melody to fit his master’s mood. Let the others around this powerful prince who were supposedly so familiar with him fret and whisper as to what strange malady rode their lord so hard, Roger mused, as he shifted smoothly to another tune. He knew, he who had made his way in the world of the powerful these last ten years by supplying King Edward with whatever it was he would like to know. Sacrebleu, he knew more of what ailed this proud Plantagenet prince, perhaps, than the man himself would admit or even recognize. Tomorrow at eventide, on the last day of January, at Eltham Manor forty miles from here, Joan of Kent was to wed Sir Thomas Holland.
Roger’s fingers rippled a smooth series of plaintive chords between songs. Aye, he would wager his best lute that was it, and on a sudden impulse, he decided to test his theory. When the prince was at his moodiest and alone, he had oft requested a sad lay of unrequited love, “Li Dous Cossiere.” He would sing it for him now and watch the fine profile, etched by fireglow, he could observe so easily from here. Whether by tears or sorrowful sighs, Roger would know for certain what grieved the prince.
He began the lyrics low, nearly whispering, picturing in his own mind’s eye how grief-stricken both the prince and Lady Joan had looked on their parting a month ago at Woodstock in the snow. She, of course, had only just learned two days before that her brother Edmund, who had ordered Roger to leave Liddell years ago, and his lady wife were dead of plague, so her suffering was understandable. But, sacrebleu, if those others had just watched the prince’s face as closely as he had—
“Alas, parting is grounds of woe,
Other song I cannot sing.
But why part I my lady from,
Since love was cause of our meeting?
The bitter tears of her weeping
Mine heart has pierced so mortally,
That to the death it will me bring
If I not see her hastily.”
The prince listened, frozen to a rigid stance before the flickering fire. Then, his big, tawny-maned head pivoted, and his eyes glittered coldly like cut aquamarine stones. “I asked not for that song now! I did not bid you sing that one. Get out, both of you, and leave me alone!”
He should have expected that sort of reaction, Roger scolded himself. The skilled game of reading royal moods he thought he played exceedingly well, but he had slightly misjudged here and was pleased enough to escape unscathed as he carried his instrument before him to beat a quick retreat with the worried Leonard on his heels.
“But, my lord prince, you are hardly alone,” the beauteous Bethany’s voice came to Roger’s ears as he shut the door behind him.
“I hardly meant you, pet,” the prince muttered, but he did not look her way. He fought hard to beat down the grief of loss so new to him, this damned suffocating feeling that he had to see Jeannette, touch her again.
Bethany stirred on the bed behind him, and he slowly turned to see her pull the coverlet down to bare her nude, alabaster body to her knees. There, he assured himself—there was a way he could bury this strangling need and get control of his thoughts and life.
The warmth of the firelight retreated from his body as he padded over to the deep bed. His feet felt warmer standing on this deep-pile Persian carpet. He braced his knees along the silken bedsheets and smiled, picturing Jeannette there, waiting for him, longing for him and lifting her arms. But when this woman smiled back and held out her hand to him . . .
Reality smacked him like cold water in the face. Cursing, he spun away, back to the fireplace where he put one hand on the mantel and glared into the leaping flames.
“What is it, my lord?” Bethany St. Clair asked, her voice now a nasal whine. “What have I done?”
He ignored her and shook his head to clear the cobwebs. He was too tired, that was all. He was no court magician or dreaming troubadour to see such fantasies of lost love, or to feed on them until he was soul-sick. Yet he had to know Jeannette was safe and well or he would go mad. His minstrel Roger Wakeley—aye, that would do for an excuse. He’d send him to her to be certain of how and where she was.
He wrapped himself in a black velvet robe and thrust his feet in felt slippers while the woman behind him sobbed softly. He said over his shoulder, “It is nothing you did or did not do, Bethany. It is not you at all.”
He stalked from the room, leaving the door ajar behind him. His comrades had all gone to their own beds, and the solar fire burned low. His favorite hunt hound, Rook, stared up at him with luminous eyes but, when she recognized him, put her head back down. He yanked open the door to the hall, startling the two guards on duty and waking a dozing linkboy.
“Stay!” he ordered them all as though they were hunt dogs too. He strode down the corridor alone, grabbed a low-burning torch and hurried down the corkscrew staircase to the chambers beneath where the servants bedded. Another linkboy dozed, amazingly upright on his feet as they were so adept at doing.
“Knave, awake! Fetch me Roger Wakeley, my minstrel.”
The boy jumped like a puppet on a string, shocked to see his lord prince in a robe in the servants’ hall in the dead of night. “Aye! Aye, milord, Your Grace,” he managed and scampered two doors down to disappear into a room.
Roger Wakeley came out instantly, alert, a quill in his hands. The prince wondered what he had been writing so late at night. “Composing new love songs, m
instrel?” he asked gruffly.
“In a way, Your Grace,” the man replied in his smooth French accent, hoping the prince would not sense his alarm. “Sacrebleu, thoughts of love in new-written songs or otherwise know no rest.”
The two stared at each other, Wakeley short and soft-looking and the prince so tall and angularly lean. Wakeley’s heart began to beat noticeably harder; he gripped the quill pen in his ink-stained hand until he felt the shaft bend. Perhaps he had overstepped here tonight. And if the prince ever guessed he had been penning his monthly report to King Edward on his observations of his beloved, supposedly trusted son, whatever would be his fate then?
“I am riding to Eltham at dawn on the morrow and you are going with me.” The prince interrupted his nervous musings.
“Aye, Your Grace. And the others?”
“Just two other guards. I mean to travel fast and light.”
“I see.”
“You do not see at all, minstrel. Pack your things because we shall be attending a wedding there and you are my gift to the bride.”
Roger Wakeley’s mouth dropped open before he could cover his surprise.
“Well, man, do not just stand there like a simpleton. Aye, I am speaking of your little music student, Lady Joan of Kent. I will expect you to serve her well and honorably, or I swear I shall string you up by your own lute strings.”
The musician cleared his throat. The king had told him he was to stay with the prince’s household and had gone to a lot of trouble to have his mother, the deposed Queen Isabella, offer his services to the prince. But now, if he was to be off at some moated Norman castle with Joan of Kent—