by Karen Harper
Secondly, His Grace, Edward, King of England and France, bids me assure you that one Flemish ambassador of whom you and I have recently spoken, will not be returned to live in England, nor shall his vast land holdings once confiscated by the crown upon his exile be returned to him; however, he shall no longer be forfeit of his manor house in Dorset wherein his wife resides. (I know you will accept this too with equanimity, Jeannette, as surely you have no quarrel with the man’s wife any more than you might have with the wife of whatever poor axeman finally did the deed.)
Dear Duchess of Kent, these things must of force content you for now. Keep close your dear home of Liddell for your second son John who bears his young, deceased uncle’s proud name. The elder lad, Thomas, will, no doubt, inherit the Holland estates to the north someday.
Until that day we meet again, remember me.
Edward, P.W.P.
Post Script. I hope that you, like I, will see the golden fetters binding the two crowns on your new Duchess coat of arms not as an imprisoning bondage but as a golden link of eternal affection.
She stared long at the brash signature: Edward, Prince of Wales, Plantagenet. How skillful this letter was, how impossible to argue with or disobey. That day the king’s men had come to Liddell with news of John’s death, she had not accepted His Grace’s tendered gifts except for the two bestowals Edward had urged her to take in this letter. Saints, how much there was here brimming beneath the cleverly selected words, if one dared to let the imagination free. He had used mention of her sons to settle her contentious spirit at accepting gifts from the king she detested. And who had told him her son’s names, for she never had. Then, here at the very end—where her fingertip even now stroked the words—did the cryptic wording not hint that Thomas Holland’s eventual death day might be the same as “that day we meet again”?
Lost in the glow of reminiscence, she put the little beryl ring on her finger and replaced the folded letter at the bottom of the coffer. She had never shown the letter to her Lord Thomas and told herself she kept it only so that her son John would be assured of his inheritance of Liddell someday.
Distraught she had let her thoughts wander so and afraid she would never manage to reclaim sleep now, she moved to a window over the gardens and pushed the leaden pane ajar. In muted melody through the brisk night air, the strains of two distant lutes wafted to her.
It was, of course, Master Roger and that traveling minstrel friend of his, Stephen Callender, who had been here and at Liddell several other times the past year. The song was one she did not recognize, and yet the stirring melody, however distant, beckoned to her.
She donned her felt slippers and, lifting the low-burning lamp, went out into the corridor. Master Roger’s room was directly beneath this wing, as were Vinette’s and the small chambers of the other household servants. She padded down the staircase to the corridor below, recalling the late night venture she had made down the black secret tunnel of the Château to visit Marta’s grave. In the dim, narrow hall, lit only by one rush torch at the far end, the melody of the two entwined lutes was much more distinct. They were strumming rather than plucking the strings; the song had a martial beat, and words drifted to her now as the refrain began again:
“The prince among the press of shields
In ebony-hued armor
Doth lead his men
French strife to end
Under white-feathered banner.
“Beside my prince amid the fray
There’s no place to be rather.
See helmets split, lances shatter,
And blows exchanged in battle.”
The melody ceased but a conversation began as Joan stood fascinated by the new war song on the other side of the door. How beautifully Roger’s clear, unmistakable tenor had blended with Stephen Callender’s baritone in that marching song, and how distinctly their words floated to her now.
“That will please the prince, Stephen, though, by the rood, I know what little gift would please him more in these treacherous times while he raids France up and down from Bordeaux and tries his tricky damnedest to avoid the French king’s growing army.”
“What would please him more, Wakeley—a victory over the French or the beauteous Lady Joan of Kent in his bed?”
They both chuckled. Joan jumped at her own sharp intake of breath, and she nearly dropped her lamp. She could not have heard aright! That man could not have said those words, nor her old friend Master Roger have laughed with him like that!
Her first impulse was to pound on the door and accuse them, but she froze listening intently as Stephen Callender’s voice went on. “By the saints, Wakeley, what shall I tell him new this trip when I get to reconnoiter with our forces at Tours? That the lady is lordless now that Holland is off to help Lancaster chase Frenchies? A hell of a lot of good that will do him as he has an eight-thousand-man army to protect and answer to.”
Hell’s gates, her mind shrieked, this man is off for the prince’s camp at Tours, wherever that is, and to report on me! All those other traveling musician friends of Roger’s—this man himself here before back and forth—a spy! And, worst of all, her own longtime confidant, Master Roger, a gift from the prince when she had married Thomas—all these years, sent to spy on her!
Her shoulder pressed hard into the rough stone wall outside the door while fury racked her. But then, that passion turned to overwhelming curiosity. If Roger Wakeley was a royal informer as well as a skilled musician, when had it begun? Those years at Liddell when she first knew him—oh, saints, sent to spy on them then too, mayhap on her poor, shattered mother to be certain she caused no upheaval over her husband’s unjust murder: a serpent nurtured in the very bosom of her family all these years!
The welling anger, buried for all this time since the royal Plantagenets had given her Liddell and she had compromised on de Maltravers’s lands, rose up in huge, overwhelming waves to assault her. A spy she had loved all these years; then, surely, the Plantagenets were guilty of her father’s death as Mother had claimed! The prince had only done what his royal sire had demanded of him. He had wooed her, guarded her, watched her at his king’s command, and she had almost been snared by it all to fall in line like another poor warrior knight to do whatever he bid! Never. Never! How she longed to throw what she knew in his wretched, handsome face in front of his whole army!
She forced herself to listen to their voices again, and when she heard Stephen Callender’s next words, the plan came to her full blown, perfect, and so thrilling, she curled her toes in her soft felt slippers to keep from screaming her joy.
“I will bid you a good-night then, Wakeley, with one more roll through this new song so you can teach it to His Grace’s lively Kentish lass. At dawn’s first light, man, I am off to report to the prince and I hope to hell for my sake he is further north than when I left him.”
She turned away and ran down the corridor as they began strumming the pompous martial song again. Saints, if the prince loved a good battle, so be it, for he was about to face one that would make the French foe seem like mere tilting at the quintain. At dawn’s first light, that wretch Stephen Callender had said. She had a lot to do in these few hours, notes to write, a saddle sack to pack with clothes and food. Settling the score with Roger Wakeley would have to wait until her return, and he would have to cooperate with her plan and help cover her departure or she would threaten to expose him and insist he leave forever. The knowledge that he had cared for her only because of his need to know what she did pierced her like a sharp pain, but she hurried on. By dawn’s first light, she would have a horse and be awaiting Spy Stephen at the bend in the forest road and then she would tell him a thing or two she had gleaned from spying!
Her heart beat faster and she smiled despite herself at the prospect of meeting the prince in her own lance-shattering battle.
The next morn Joan let Stephen Callender ride past her in the damp forest mists of dawn and followed him, careful to keep her horse Windsong on the soft tur
f along the road so he would not look back. She had no intention of stopping him to reveal herself where any early-rising manor serf could see her or to be so close to the Château yet that the man might consider dragging her back. But he set a good pace south, and the one time he did glance over his shoulder that first hour of foggy daylight, he evidently saw naught amiss in the cloaked and hooded boy on a horse behind him as he plunged on, skirting the sleepy little village of Le Bec Hellouin about five miles from the Château. He looked back the second time as the road opened up through fields of barley and oats awaiting the harvesters’ sickles in the weeks to come. The crops grew in tiny, random patches as they were divided or merged haphazardly over the centuries by serfs’ deaths or marriages, reminding Joan of a brightly hued, irregular chessboard. The time, she realized, for her next chess move was now. Sweeping her arm in a wide arc that Stephen Callender could not misinterpret since he’d turned around in his saddle again, she summoned him to her.
He halted and swung his chestnut-colored horse around to trot back cautiously toward her. She knew he would need to be close before he recognized her, for she had dressed in garments borrowed from Thomas’s squire last night, and her thick tresses were tightly braided and coiled under a heavy brown hood. Her black palfrey bore no signs of rank or person.
“State your business with me, my man,” Stephen Callender demanded, his eyes dark slits under his straight black hair as he squinted to see the face within the deep hood. His right hand rested easily upon his sword hilt. He halted his horse about twelve feet away and simply stared.
With a flourish, Joan threw her hood off and stared back, reveling in the man’s obvious shock and dismay. His long face dropped even longer as he swore a string of curses in French as if he could make her disappear or flee. “By the death of the Blessed Virgin!” he managed at last in English. “Duchess—are you alone? Am I sent for to return?”
“Of course you are sent for to return, Master Callender—to return to the prince to report on all my doings like a good little lackey,” she spit out at the astounded man and relished the panic which rioted across his usually well-guarded features.
“My lady, please, I do not know what someone has told you, but—”
“But nothing, Master Spy-Musician! And, pray, do not look so alarmed. Since His Grace, the Prince of Wales, is evidently so eager to keep watch on my thoughts, my family, and my actions, I am merely doing you a service as well as he. Will he not be much pleased to reward you richly when you not only give him the little tattletales and rumors you and Master Roger have so cleverly gleaned, but actually deliver me in person to give him a hearty dose of what he would know when we get to Tours?”
The man’s eyes nearly popped from their sockets at that, and at first only a strangled, little sound came from his throat. “To Tours! Hell’s bells, Duchess, Tours is a hundred miles from here through enemy-held territory!”
“I do not believe you. We have heard all week that the prince’s brother’s army where my husband serves is here in Normandy marching south to meet the prince’s forces.”
“True, Duchess, but I know not where either English army is for certain and I plan a hard, three-day ride to Tours and His Grace’s forces may not even be there when I arrive.”
“When we arrive, Master Callender. I can keep the pace, though I had not reckoned on so far a jaunt.”
“A jaunt? Holy Saints, Duchess, the prince would have my head on a pike to rot in the sun if he ever thought I took you for a ride outside your castle walls in these dangerous times, let alone over a hundred miles through enemy territory to Tours! My head on a pike!”
“I suggest you stop screeching, man, and we get under way. The prince will have your head on a pike indeed unless you do exactly as I say anyway. I have important business with the prince, thanks to his continual meddling in my life, and I cannot help it that he is running around France when I need to tell him such. I will see you are protected and my dear friend Roger Wakeley too, for I wish to deal with him myself—if you deliver me to His Grace and then back home again safely. I brought food. I can ride, so let us be off!”
She replaced her hood and jogged slowly past the man who scrambled to follow. From a swift side glance she read his face well. His sallow skin had gone livid with fury and panic.
“Please, Duchess, have mercy on a poor man—on Wakeley, too. When His Grace loses his temper, no one is safe.”
“Really? And I assure you, Master Callender, when I lose mine, the prince is not safe either. I think we had best set a faster speed here if we hope to make good time.”
“I insist you go back. For your children’s sake—for all of us, I shall escort you back. In truth, I do not know where the prince’s army is. I may have to search for days and when your husband hears—”
“He shall not hear, for I left word I have retreated to the cloisters at the Church of St. Ouen in Pont-Audemer for a few days, and no French army will bother two swift-riding men on the road when they are desperately searching for a whole, vast English army.”
She urged her horse to a gallop and Callender followed, pounding along beside her and shouting warnings she blithely ignored. It felt so wonderful to be out in the late summer air, free of constricting walls, servants’ eyes, and whispers. The saddle, the horse’s rhythmic movement were exhilarating beneath her.
When, in final desperation, the man beside her dared to reach out for her horse’s bridle to halt her, she smacked his wrist sharply with her reins and settled him in his place for good. “You will escort me quickly and carefully to the prince and then home again and never tell a living soul, Spy Stephen. If you do this, I shall assure His Grace you saved my life on the road or some such and that I forced you to bring me. However, if you do not cease this foolish, wasteful foot-dragging, I swear to you by St. George’s blood, I will tell the prince you sought to lie where you so jestingly told Master Roger the Prince of Wales himself would revel—in my bed. Do I make my serious intent quite clear by this promise, prince’s spy?”
The man’s mouth set hard, but his angry, intense eyes gazed straight ahead at last. “Aye, Duchess of Kent. Quite clear. I will tell you only, I expect no complaining then; for with wench bait even garbed like a boy, I have no intent to be seen or stopped. From now until we sight the banners of azure and gold and the three ostrich plumes of the prince, we halt only to rest the horses.”
She turned her face back to the road south and smiled as she refastened her hood carefully forward over her curls. A victory over the prince already and she had not yet even given him a hint of the battle to come! She bent lower over Windsong’s rippling mane, reveling in the intoxicating glow of freedom, adventure, and power she only last night thought had been lost forever.
Soon enough the thrill dulled to pounding hoofs on dusty roads or grassy fields as they skirted the French villages of L’Aigle, Mortagne, and Bêlleme. Joan got soaked to her skin when they forded the River Risle to avoid a bridge crowded with drovers’ carts. Soon enough, her muscles ached and her teeth and head pained with every rough jolt. She walked stiffly bowlegged when they dismounted to rest or water the horses and, even as they sat to share simnel biscuits and cheese, she still felt the pounding rhythm of Windsong’s powerful flanks. They slept a few hours one night burrowed into a haystack and the next in a damp rye field. They stole apples from orchards for themselves and the horses, and plunged on again, crossing the Loire on a tiny, unfortified bridge near Couture in the middle of the night.
Forced to hide in the thicket of the road the next day as a French contingent of soldiers passed so close that they overheard their every word, Joan turned spy herself. She and Stephen learned that King John II had brought his French army down from Chartres to Blois from which he hoped to cut off Prince John of Lancaster and his English battalions which had been raiding through Normandy. The thought that English troops and her husband might be somewhere in the vicinity heartened Joan until she realized that Thomas Holland, if he knew of this scheme,
would definitely stop her. Nothing, nothing, she vowed silently again, would halt her from her own battle with Prince Edward. Aye, she and these dangerous French had one thing in common, at least, for she meant to win a victory once and for all over Edward, Prince of Wales, Plantagenet.
On their third day on the road, the calm weather turned blustery. Leaves rattled, trees sighed and swayed, and the skirts of a young woman ahead of them on the road whipped wildly around her ankles. They would have passed by the maid quickly, but her words nearly carried away by the wind stopped them.
“Good sirs, a little ride into the village, si’l vous plaît? I hate to walk against the wind, and I fear the whoreson damned English may be near.”
Stephen said something to Joan about information and turned back to lift the girl up behind him. She was buxom, black-haired with rather swarthy skin and dark eyes, but Joan was careful not to stare too closely.
“Where are these terrible English forces, then, ma belle?” Stephen asked her in his smoothest French as they jogged on.
“I can tell you not far enough away. Wish’t they were all roasting in hell, I do. The Black Prince of Crécy been raiding northward from Bordeaux all summer, the bastards. But Tours shall never be taken. The French hold it firmly, and our blessed king’s army outnumbers the English over two to one. Gerard told me the whoreson damned English will be cut off at Tours and squashed like a beetle under a rock, the bastards.”
“You are so very well informed, ma belle,” Stephen flattered her. Joan noted the girl’s dark eyes were trying to peer beneath her hood even while she spoke to Stephen, so she rode a bit farther ahead.