The First Princess of Wales

by Karen Harper

  Cold tears ran across her flushed cheeks to roll into her ears and down her throat. Her body ached, pained as though some integral, inner part of it had been wrenched away. Her mind crashed into a frantic emptiness where only his cold voice echoed in hollow repetition. Whore. Love. Eons. Meet. Again.

  All night she heard his velvet voice and dreamed of horses’ hoofs in the close below. She jolted wide awake whenever she thought there were men’s footsteps in the hall. She believed she heard Roger’s voice singing that sad song of bitter love again, again, but it must have been only echoes of her frenzied, futile dreams.

  She was, no doubt, she told herself grimly over and over that next week, the only person who had ever gone on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and never seen the shrine. Guarded by three of the prince’s plainly dressed men and accompanied by a glum-looking Roger Wakeley, she had returned to Liddell early the next morn. She had not protested the cold, efficient orders of the prince’s men whom she did not know. She felt chastened, drained, shamed, and bereft. She held her head high and spoke to none of them. Yet they had bid her a polite farewell and turned their horses back to Canterbury even as the walls of Liddell first loomed in sight among the Kentish Weald.

  The next week, she moved about Liddell at her duties and pastimes in a daze. Whatever she did, repeatedly her eyes glazed over with the veil of memory and she would stand stock-still as if frozen by a wizard’s wand: her hands preparing spices or sewing, her arms full of her children, in half-stride on a brisk walk about the grounds, she would turn, listless, and hear his angry, impassioned words and see and feel his presence.

  He had loved her from the first, he vowed. Loved, loved, from that first day she had seen him angered and muddy, with broken wrist tilting at the quintain in that lonely yard at Windsor. She had not then known who he was or what terrible thing that yard had seen—her father’s murder, mayhap at the very will of the prince’s father. How tangled the tentacles of passions had become—as dear, old Marta used to say, like a clinging spider’s web that would never let one run to freedom again.

  Freedom. How she had desired it once, fought for it, and how it had eluded her. Did she ever possess it? Did it end when she had first gone to court or when Mother died that night and the child had understood at last the woman’s burden of lost love? Or had real freedom ceased to be when she had first gazed up into those deep blue eyes under that tawny mane of Plantagenet hair?

  She shook her head hard to bring herself back to her surroundings. Vinette had just finished with her hair. She had dressed formally tonight for supper although Thomas would be gone for at least three more weeks and John had not yet arrived back from Midsummer Tournaments in London. She sighed as she stood to give herself a final, quick perusal in her polished mirror. She had donned a new emerald kirtle and white surcote edged with seed pearls to cheer herself. Besides, getting all dressed up like this for a lonely supper with only Vinette and Roger to speak to at least took time and attention and kept her from moping or brooding half the day. Then, too, last night she had dreamed again of running away down a long, black tunnel, chased by thudding footsteps. De Maltravers, mayhap, or even the king—but really, she feared it was something else there in the darkness which pursued her: something like her own desperate fear that she loved the prince and always had.

  “No!”

  “What? Madame Joan, you do not like the coiffure?” Vinette asked, her concerned face appearing in the mirror above Joan’s shoulder. “But I did it just as you wished, Madame!”

  “No, it is fine, Vinette. I was just thinking aloud, that is all.”

  The maid rolled her brown eyes as she had repeatedly this week at her mistress’s jumpy behavior. Wherever Madame Joan had gone, whatever she had done this week had changed her, and Vinette did not believe for one minute that the lady and her narrow-eyed musician had gone off to Canterbury as they said. Had they not come home empty-handed with naught but one pilgrim’s penny and was not there talk in the serfs’ marketplace that she had ridden in with three strange men who had turned tail and fled at the sight of Liddell Manor? If only they had been home in France, her love, Pierre Foulke, would have known what to make of the fatuous doings of the nobility. Pierre said there would be a day of reckoning when the rich and noble would come tumbling down and then, he promised, there would be no more secret, haughty happenings among the smug nobility.

  Vinette Brinay shrugged her slender shoulders. She did not really believe that day would ever come, but it did keep Pierre all astir with grand plans for heroic deeds every bit as secret and haughty as the doings of the nobles he said he hated. Besides, Madame Joan was a good enough young mistress, though she was entirely too moody of late. Then, too, the first two weeks Lord Thomas had been gone to his lands up north, the lady had chatted amiably with Vinette after dinner and given her much free time in the long, sweet afternoons.

  “I said, thank you, Vinette. Why not see how Madeleine is doing rousing the little ones while I go on down? We shall all sit by the head table in the hall and sing after supper. At Liddell I cannot bear to eat here in the solar where my mother lived alone so long when I was little. The Great Hall is large, but it is better there.”

  “Aye, and so sweet-smelling on these summer eves, Madame. Mayhap your brother and his men be on their way home soon and you will not have to eat with just the little ones, all alone with your thoughts.”

  Joan pivoted to stare at the girl as she stood at the top of the newel staircase which led down to the front corridor. Vinette faced her guilelessly, a concerned look on her pretty, freckled face. Surely, this maid and the other servants, except Roger, could know nothing of what she had done and been through. “Do not fret for my thoughts, Vinette,” she said and then to be certain the girl could never read her mind, she added, “My memories of my mother’s days here are peaceful now. All that sadness is long past.”

  Partway down the curve of stairs, she heard the rattle of horses’ hoofs outside. They must be close on the cobbles directly at the entrance to make all that noise. John was home or, perhaps, visitors had come from Canterbury on the road home to London!

  She pressed her clasped fists to her pounding chest and hurried to the front door. The servants, including John’s fourth squire Robert he had left at home, and two cooks, came darting from parts of the manor to see who it was. Squire Robert opened the big front door for her and she strode boldly out under the family crest before it even occurred to her it might be anyone else besides John returned or the prince come to apologize for his wretched behavior at Canterbury last week.

  She halted on the top step of the entry and stared as her emerald skirts belled gently to a rest about her hips and legs. She faced six men in black, mounted on black horses. All were liveried with the gold and azure leopard and lily crests of the King of England.

  “Lady Joan of Kent?” the silver-haired man at the head of the impressive little band asked.

  “Aye. Welcome to Liddell. I am Joan of Kent, Lady Holland.” Her heart began to thud wildly until it nearly drowned out her thoughts and their crisp words to her. The king was angered mayhap, she had dared interfere with the prince or de Maltravers and perhaps he had sent them to arrest her!

  The silver-haired man she felt she should recognize but could not place had dismounted. “I beg your gracious leave to speak direct to the point, Lady Joan of Kent,” the man said. Joan was aware Vinette, holding little Thomas, and Madeleine, with the babe John, now flanked her on either side, their eyes wide at the display of unfamiliar men black-garbed, armed, and royally liveried.

  “Speak, then,” she answered.

  “I am Sir Lyle Townsend, Lady Joan. His Grace, Edward, King of England and France, bids me tell you most grievous news. At the Midsummer’s Eve Tournament there was a grande mêlée which became quite bold and undisciplined, lady.”

  Her voice sounded sharply piercing as it rang out. “John? Has my Lord John been hurt?”

  The man’s eyes were lightest brown, and she saw
him set his jaw hard. “Aye, lady. The king sends his grievous regrets, his most sad condolences. There were four knights accidentally trampled in the mêlée, lady, and your brother John is dead. His body as well as gifts from the king follow by a day or so in a funeral cortège which we—”

  “No!” Her own shrieked denial shredded the spring air, and her baby began to cry in frightened, rattled screams.

  The man touched her arm, urging her inside, but she shook him off and stood her ground.

  “In the king’s tournament?” she demanded. “He cannot be dead! Men do not die in tournaments. Saints, I know they lose eyes or break bones, but not dead!”

  “We are grief-stricken, Lady Joan. He was a fine knight of mettle yet fully untested, fine, young and brave.”

  “Young, aye. He was the last.”

  “The last of your family except for yourself, you mean,” he said nearly shouting to be heard over the baby’s cries. “The king at the urging of His Grace, the Prince of Wales, recognizes this too, lady, and bids you accept the lands of Lord John as your own duty and inheritance. His Grace declares you Duchess of Kent, with title rights to these demesne lands and hall.”

  The thought sank in slowly: Liddell—hers. She took little John away from teary-eyed Madeleine into her arms to comfort him and slumped back against the entryway for support.

  Surely, this was all another waking dream, a black nightmare of pounding steps and rushing down an interminable, deep tunnel. John was only twenty with Liddell to care for and to love. The plague stole Edmund three years ago and now this!

  Gifts from the king to foolishly try to compensate for John’s death, she thought, as the other men dismounted and stood patiently at the bottom of the steps with loaded arms. “I will accept no gifts from the king,” she announced to them. Her knees shook as did her voice, and she pressed back harder against the stone doorway to stop the spinning of the men and forest beyond.

  “Please, Duchess, let us go in,” Lyle Townsend was saying. “I know this is dreadful, dreadful news. We are bid to give you these gifts—to a member of the king’s own family, His Grace said, and here, look, the king and the Prince of Wales, who has sent gifts also and a missive, bid you bear up under this sore trial and accept this with their love.”

  He motioned for another man to step forward. While she clutched her babe to her and Vinette and Madeleine and John’s poor, sniveling little squire Robert pressed close to her, the man unrolled a stiff parchment scroll. On it was painted exquisitely in luminous colors and gilded gold, the Kent family coat of arms with one vast difference: around the neck of the snow-white stag resting on the bed of ivy was now a ducal crown chained by golden fetters to a larger, grander royal crown.

  Joan’s eyes burning with tears stared unblinking at the beautiful crest.

  “Your new coat of arms, fashioned at the desire of the king and prince, Duchess,” the man was saying gently. “They bid you recognize your necessary ties to the crown as indeed your father and both brothers before you have done. They bid you accept this tragedy with peace in your heart and love for your distant cousins of Plantagenet blood, His Grace the King and the Prince of Wales.”

  Her eyes lifted to Lyle Townsend’s intent face and she blinked the tears away to see him. She, beset by shock and grief and loss again, understood the new crest and the accompanying, warning words well enough. Aye, she could read this fair painting, these gifts, this wretched new turn of Fortune’s cruel wheel well enough. She was as captured as that deer there, chained to them whether she willed it or not, chained by circumstances and bitter hatred—and mayhap now, by love.

  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

  O man unkind,

  Have thou in mind

  My passion sharp!

  Thou shalt me find

  To thee full kind:

  Lo, here my heart.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Thrashing 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.