The First Princess of Wales

by Karen Harper

  To his dismay she shook her head and strolled on. It was so difficult to care about fashion and next year’s style here in Normandy with only Thomas’s increasing absences for the future and evenings before the hearth with three small children and so little music now to look forward to. So difficult.

  At the very hub of the fair where pie and tart makers plied their trade, Joan purchased for her guards, Madeleine, and herself hot meat pies pungent with pepper at one cart and custard flawns at another which they washed down with bowls of fresh ale. She gave them all coins then, with orders for buying, and sent them off into the next row of stalls while she drifted toward the entertainment area, ignoring beggars’ cries and the scarlet-hooded whores who called out to every passing man. Her heart lifted as she followed the jumble of musical sounds: bardycoats and other itinerant musicians sang folk songs and even bawdy lyrics to the accompaniment of guiterns, shawms, and fydels. Acrobats in piebald costumes, dancing on balls, played cymbals. Jugglers and trick dogs cavorted on all sides. But when two minstrels nearby began to sing a lament of King Henry and his lost love the Fair Rosamonde, Joan’s thoughts fled to that sad day at Woodstock in the snow near Rosamonde’s bower when Prince Edward had told her her brother was dead of plague.

  Now she turned away from where she had told her guards and Madeleine to meet her, and her eyes were entranced by heaps of lady’s fineries—lady’s fripperies, her Lord Thomas would deem them. She examined brooches of fine metals, splendid hair combs, belt buckles, and ribbons spread like a rainbow across vendors’ carts. To lift her spirits, suddenly plunged so low despite the festivities about her, she bought several items and moved on.

  At the next booth she purchased a lovely, polished steel mirror with an engraved handle of a lady gazing out of her castle window at her gentle knight-lover below. Joan lifted the fine mirror to gaze at her reflection: the woman who scrutinized herself in the polished, clear surface looked wan and very intense. I am almost thirty years old, she sighed as the heavily fringed, lilac-hued eyes looked away. Almost thirty and where was the adventure and where was the love, but for her three moppets?

  At the next booth, she marveled at the strange eating instruments new-brought from Italy. They had handles and four barbs for spearing meat or fowl, and the barker said they were called forks. She had just decided to purchase two of the oddities when she felt a tap on her shoulder and turned slowly thinking Madeleine or Vinette had returned.

  “Oh. You. Monsieur Pierre. Vinette is not here,” she told the hawk-faced man whose flat, black hair looked almost greased down over his forehead. His narrow, dark eyes darted over her and he licked his lips nervously.

  “I can tell Vinette be not here, madame duchess. There be something you had best see. Come wi’ me.”

  Joan stood her ground. “I most certainly will not. My two guards will be here in a moment, and I have no intention of following you to some tanner’s booth.”

  “Not that. Soon you wi’ all follow where we bid well enough. Your guards gone already where I want you to—the money changers’ booth, madame duchess. Vinette sayin’ you would understand, but Vinette is wrong. Come see our power.”

  He took a step away, then looked back over his shoulder. Joan could hear a ruckus somewhere, shouts, and cries several stalls over. Her heart began to thud. “Saints, what is that?” she asked.

  “The nobles’ changing booth, I says. The beginning of the end hereabouts. Too late for any of you to stop it. Shame on him who holds back!” he shrieked at her in frenzied parting and dashed off toward the increasing racket.

  Joan moved a bit closer to the next row of booths. The hubbub did indeed seem to be coming from the rim of the fair where the money changers were allowed to set up their narrow booths. She peered down one little grass-floored alley. Money and produce scales stood precariously on each rickety booth table. At one shed a small, raucous crowd of peasants argued with the changer.

  She looked back to scan the crowd gathering behind her for her women or her guards, but that strange Pierre Foulke had distinctly said her guards were already here. That would make sense, for the nobles in the district of Pont-Audemer all profited from the changing booths and the guards might think they should protect Lord Holland’s small interest in the fair.

  She moved closer among the pressing peasants toward the center of the confusion. For a moment, the increasing ruckus from one booth near which she stood seemed almost an echo of her own jumbled thoughts. Shouts and curses magnified; the booth rocked. Suddenly, the boards of the hastily constructed money changer’s stall shuddered and crashed noisily upon each other. The angry, screeching crowd of peasants began pelting the cowering money changer with fruit or kicking him if they were close enough.

  “No more taxes for the royal bastards!” a cry rang from hoarse throats all around. “Justice! Fairness! Damn them all! Shame on him who holds back! For glory, for the Jacquerie!”

  The Jacquerie! Those rumors of peasant uprisings near Senlis on the River Oise and in the duchies of Valois and Coucy told of the Jacquerie. Surely, only rumors. A peasant rebellion could never happen here and at a mere, pleasant market fair.

  Joan turned to hurry away from the burgeoning riot, but everyone else shoved inward gripping her in a human vise of screaming, taunting faces, crushing bodies, and raised fists. She saw her two guards wearing the Holland crest on their sleeves among the bailiffs trying to rescue the money changers and quell the crowd. Now, surely, all these foolish people would stop this screeching.

  “Stand aside for the lord’s men!” a bailiff she did not know shouted in her ear as he elbowed roughly past. Before her, the bailiff was struck with a shovel handle which materialized from the crowd. An arm swung a hatchet at the stunned man and blood spurted from his neck and shoulder. A pitchfork lifted ahead of her, spikes up to heaven in frenzied defiance. She heard fist on jaw behind her, the sharp grunts of a fight. The surge and swell of the screaming crowd suffocated her. Someone jabbed her in the stomach, and she would have doubled over in pain had not the vertical press been so great. She could see blood on distorted faces. One child’s voice shrieked piteously for his mother. Joan tried to reach his arm to pull him to his feet, but she was shoved on.

  She thought she would vomit or faint. Someone yanked at her green hood and her heavy blond braids, then spit on her from the back, for her garments and squirrel trim clearly marked her as a lady. A filthy hand grabbed her about the waist and fumbled roughly at her breasts. She screamed instinctively and hit back with all her strength. The odor of garlic-laden breath so close nearly gagged her.

  The man did not loose her, but the desperate thrust of the crowd behind ceased suddenly. She hit out at her attacker again, and her elbow dug into ribs and soft belly. A horse neighed very close; a heavy stave swung from nowhere, whooshing by inches away from her face. The strangling arm freed her at last, and she spun around fighting to keep her feet. Her peasant attacker, a fat, dirty man, fell half against her legs with his head split.

  She shrieked and darted back as her rescuer tossed the long wooden stave to the ground, moved his horse closer, and reached down to lift her. Half-stunned, still horrified, she grasped the black-sleeved arm and let herself be hauled up. Her eyes caught spurred riding boots heavy with road dust, a sword still sheathed. The horse bolted clear of the crowd while she clung precariously to her perch.

  A bailiff? Not one of her own guards. She twisted her neck to glimpse the silent, brutal rescuer who had so neatly split her attacker’s head like a soft melon. Sturdy chest and shoulder, black hair—

  Her eyes stared in horror, and her mouth could only gasp. The whole screaming cup of blue sky above overturned and shattered. She was held aloft, half suspended, in the iron grasp of her sworn enemy, John de Maltravers!

  “You! Here! No, no! Let me down!”

  His deep-set, dark eyes glittered in perverse pleasure at her shock and dismay. He spurred his horse more quickly away from the noisy riot behind them on the now chaotic fai
r grounds.

  “I am honored you recognize me, Joan of Kent, but then, it is obvious you are entirely too clever for your own good. Cease this struggling now, or I swear by the Virgin, I shall break your pretty little head the way I did that peasant bastard’s back there!”

  His strong arm about her waist pressed into her soft belly like an iron band, and she sat momentarily still as they left the grounds behind. Her head pounded; her blood coursed so hard in fear and hatred that she saw flaming red waves of color dance before her eyes. The man’s high forehead, large nose, thin lips, silver-etched hair, his shaggy brows, and deep-set eyes were imprinted as vividly in her frenzied mind as they had been that one other time she had seen him long ago in Flanders. All these years of loathing him—hating, scheming, wanting revenge for what he had done to her parents—smacked into her with sickening impact.

  “So quiet now, lady?” the deep, rough voice behind her gibed. When he spoke, his voice seemed to have two resonant tones as in a nightmare, and she shuddered.

  “Let me down,” she managed. “My guards will have your head split for this!”

  “Really? But, my dear, there is no one behind us on this road to town. Do not waste my time with threats for, Holy Virgin, I have suffered enough for those already.”

  “You cannot—” she began, only to have his cruel arm, holding her before him in the saddle, jab hard to crush the breath from her.

  “I say, Joan of Kent, keep silence, unless, of course, you wish to thank me for rescuing you back there from the stupid predicament you were in. How much you do owe me for that back there, you know, as well as for the ruin you have made of my fortunes? The French serfs are up in arms in the neighboring regions I rode through to get here, and I am certain one more noble lady raped by a mob would be nothing to them. After that, I am certain you would greatly favor my tender mercies! But do realize, Joan of Kent, I rescued you back there only to have the intense pleasure of meting out your punishment myself.”

  Her skin crawled as if with unseen vermin while he chuckled low in his double-throated voice. He was taking her into town, but the road was utterly deserted; everyone must have gone to see the riot. Why he was here, how he even found her at the fair—escape, help—spun through her whirling thoughts.

  “As for this rebellion,” she ventured, hoping her voice sounded calm, “my husband’s forces will put it down, and he will be out looking for me. I demand you release me.”

  “A little liar as well as a traitress!” His voice struck her like the cutting flick of a whip. “I went to your precious Château Ruisseau to seek you, and they said you were at the market fair and—alas—that your Lord Holland was off to war games somewhere. And now, despite what you have done to me these years, by a mere twist of Fortune’s wheel, I have saved you—but only until we settle our own differences, and then I shall perhaps handle you myself as that fine fellow back there wanted—”

  “No!” she screamed, going rigid to throw her weight back into him. He went off balance and grabbed for his horse’s neck not to fall as her fingernails dug and pried at his wrist imprisoning her. Half off his horse, he was forced to loose her as she slid heavily into the roadway in the center of the little village.

  She darted up even as he dismounted. The tall Norman Church of St. Ouen loomed over her, and surely some priests or monks would be inside unlike the villagers who had deserted the area. Behind her, de Maltravers noisily drew his sword.

  She ran up the stone steps and flew in the single, open door of the cool, dark church. “Help me! Help! Who is here?”

  She tore down a vaulted side aisle even as she heard de Maltravers close the big church door behind him. The vast silence of hollow stone reverberated gloomily.

  “Is anybody here?” she shouted and her own voice, dim and forlorn, echoed back “here, here, here” from somewhere high above.

  De Maltravers stalked her down the aisle beside the rows of effigies carved in continual, frozen prayer. Near the raised stone pulpit at the front of the church something moved, and Joan darted forward—an old man in hopsacking though not a monk.

  “Help me, please! Get help! Get a priest!”

  The man shook his head and pointed to his ears. “Nay. Sorry. Canna hear. Canna—I jus’ sweep. Canna hear—”

  She ran past toward the sacristry door where she could surely rouse someone. De Maltravers pounded closer, closer, and her skirts were such a heavy burden on her flying feet. Could not that old, deaf man see she needed help? Surely, he would get someone who had not gone to that damned peasant fair!

  She rattled the lock on the sacristry door when it would not budge. She hit her shoulder into it once before she turned to face his drawn sword so close.

  “Trapped, lady, trapped, just like your poor, meddling, stupid father before you. Your mother, too. That is what all this vile treachery has been about these years, is it not? Why have you tried so bloody hard to turn the king and prince against me?”

  “Vile treachery—you ought to know of that! You and Roger Mortimer—a king’s death, my father’s then to cover up the first heinous crime. You did not really expect to escape your past, did you, murderer de Maltravers?”

  A cold glint lit his deep-set eyes, and his thin lips pressed into an even firmer line. “So lovely to be so poisoned, but by the Holy Mother, I believe this jaunt of mine to find you even in these unsettled regions was well worth the trip. You know Joan of Kent, I wanted badly, very badly, to deal with you myself, but I must tell you I let the peasants back there know that if they wanted to go raiding, burning, looting, or whatever, there was a very charming, nearly undefended Château just a mile away on the River Risle they could start with—”

  Her jaw dropped and she gave a little, involuntary cry. Despite the sword point at her throat, she moved instinctively forward. “Stand, lady, just stand still until I am quite done with you.”

  “My children! My children are back there!”

  “Really? And did you give one thought to my children when you coerced King Edward to keep my disinherited lands from being returned to me after all my years of slavish service? All I own now is the small parcel of land in Dorset where my wife lives and what is that for my children?”

  Her eyes took in the distant approach of the old, deaf man behind. The fool! He should have gone for help, but if he could only distract de Maltravers, perhaps surprise him—

  “How did you manage it?” de Maltravers’s raspy, echoing voice went on. “I know you are a Plantagenet distant cousin, and I saw the prince’s face in Flanders when he looked at you. Then, too, I heard the later court rumors even as far away as I was in exile. You stopped the return of my rightful lands I sweated for all those years in their foreign service by whoring for the prince, did you not? Whore! You opened your thighs for him and mayhap the king too, so my justice today will be doubly deserved and very appropriate. Another noble lady found brutally raped and murdered in this unfortunate French peasant rebellion they call the Jacquerie. What a terrible pity!”

  His sword point held her back against the wooden door of the alcove as he stepped closer. His face a mask of controlled fury, his hand lifted to hook fingers in the oval neckline of her kirtle. The cloth tugged and ripped just as the deaf man reached out to touch de Maltravers’s shoulder from behind.

  “Please—not run wi’ weapons in da holy church. Go now. No sanctuary.”

  De Maltravers wheeled around, catching the old man with his fist on the side of his bald head. Joan shoved at de Maltravers and tried to dart away, but his hand grabbed her elbow to yank her back. As if in one motion, he threw Joan hard against the wall, then ran the old, babbling deaf man through the chest neatly with the point of his sword.

  Cowering away from the next thrust, Joan pressed back to the cold stone wall, her hands tight to her mouth. De Maltravers’s face was livid, his features contorted in raging fury.

  “You see what happens to those who defy me?” he hissed. He waited for no reply, but seized a wrist and dragg
ed her at breakneck speed back along the aisle to the narrow steps to the belfry at the front of the church. Cruelly, he twisted her arm behind her and forced her to the steps.

  “Up! Up, Plantagenet whore! Get up or I shall break your arm before I have you. Do as I say, and who knows but I might spare you to run back to die in the peasants’ fire with your so precious children. Up! I tire of revenge for mere amusement!”

  Bent back against him, she started up the narrow, curving steps to the belfry which was visible for miles around. Her feet stumbled, her arm wrenched. On they went, on and up, around and up.

  In the little wooden room above, the huge bell hung suspended over an open resonating space in the wooden flooring. Their footsteps sounded hollow on the planks edging the little room. He shoved her down in a corner, noisily sheathed his sword, and drew an eight-inch dagger from his belt.

  “Now,” he rasped, his double-edged voice broken by his long-drawn gasps for air, “let me set one thing straight before we end this. Let me tell you why—why you will suffer and die for your meddling. I have been home to see my family in Dorset. And I finally figured all this out. I should have been welcomed home by now, given all my lands and holdings. It amazed—astounded me at first, of course, that a mere woman could so ruin a lifetime of work.”

  Joan huddled like a coiled spring ready to flee, her back pressed hard against the wall. “A mere woman whose father you helped to murder most vilely—an innocent man, unlike yourself,” she threw at him.

  “Your daring and your stupidity does boggle the mind, Plantagenet whore. But as I was saying, while I was in England—in secret, of course, as I am still exiled, thanks to you, I learned from a source that the king had said that Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, was the one who had asked the prince not to allow the vast landholdings of the loyal, exiled John de Maltravers to be returned. I heard the other rumors of the prince’s foolish infatuation for you—”