by Karen Harper
Joan pulled the boy back against her, and in a wisdom far beyond his years, the child held his tongue.
Gloating at her, Simon tied the two little boys back to back in two chairs and turned to her while Pierre Foulke strutted around the room picking up cups to look at, examining the tapestries or bed hangings. When Simon reached for little Bella in Joan’s arms, she moved quickly away to put the fussing babe in a blanket on the carpet.
“Just let her lie there. Leave her be, she is just a babe.”
“Aye, true enough, but bred to be another arrogant, pure, little noble bitch like her mother!” Simon accused.
Foulke snickered while Simon shoved Joan back in a chair and tied her firmly to it. He bent over her a long while knotting the ropes terribly tight despite her tears from the pain they caused her injured arm. When he was done and saw Foulke was peeking behind the curtain to the garde-robe chamber, he deliberately plunged his hand into the torn gown and roughly fingered the breasts she had denied him earlier. Then, so Foulke would not know, he covered her again and stepped away.
“After the feast,” he hissed low, “you will beg and beg and beg for Simon—I swear it.”
“Simon! There’s a good bit of armor back here, man! We will wear it down to our banquet, eh?” Foulke shouted from the little garde-robe chamber.
Simon lumbered behind the curtain, and Joan could hear them clinking about in Thomas’s spare armor pieces he insisted on storing there. “Now, do not be afraid, boys,” she whispered to her wide-eyed sons. “Someone will come soon. Do not be afraid.”
Her heart wrenched at their stalwart little faces frozen in fear and bewilderment. How much they both looked like Thomas. No wonder he had been furious that the babe Bella was so fair and looked so much a Plantagenet.
Her mind raced as she heard them laughing and strapping armor on behind the curtain. From the Great Hall below the sounds of revelry floated to them and occasionally someone screamed or cursed. Her hands were going numb and Simon had thoroughly tied her to the chair. Their chance for quick escape had vanished like the security of their lives here—Thomas gone, that other dear love ruined, this Jacquerie like the iron fist of impending death, her life maybe over. No. No, not the children, too. There had to be a way.
The two peasants clanked out from behind the curtain in Thomas Holland’s helmets and chest armor. “One wrong move from you, milady, and no second chance like I give you here,” Foulke threatened, his black eyes staring out at her from under the raised visor of the helmet. He lifted his sword to point it at the boys and went out. At the door Simon looked back, laughed, then swung the ruined door closed so that it shuddered on its hinges.
“Mother, I am tied too tight. I cannot untie you!” Thomas cried.
“Hush, my darling. Let me think now. Someone will come.”
While Bella fussed at her feet and began to cry to be picked up, Joan reasoned it all out. She must move her heavy chair over to the boys and somehow reach their bonds. If she could just untie one of Thomas’s knots, surely he could untie hers.
“Hush, my pretty Bella. Mother’s pretty Bella.”
Terrified that the child’s wails would summon or annoy someone, Joan began to sing. She had not sung much lately, less and less with Thomas gone, Master Roger gone—all her dreams of love for Prince Edward gone forever:
“Lullay, lullay, thou little child,
Why weepest thou so sore?”
she began the sweet lullaby, but then tried crazily to lift the children’s spirits with happier songs of woods waxing green and even of Prince Edward at war “among the press of shields in ebony-hued armor.” She sang as the baby quieted and the boys listened and as she scooted her chair bit by bit over to them praying no one came in.
She was panting hard from the singing and her physical exertion by the time her chair was near the boys. Each shift and lifting of her weight to move the chair wrenched her cut arm terribly and muted her brave lyrics until she recovered to move again. But when she had reached her goal the endless ten feet to the boys across the carpet, she could not grasp the knots by which either was tied however she struggled. Exhausted now, she sat silent for a moment as the horrible sounds of bawdy revelry floated up from the Great Hall below.
“Saints,” she cursed aloud without meaning to. “They are all so drunk on our wine there will be no stopping the fools next time!”
Her head snapped around and she gasped as the solar door creaked ominously open on those foreboding words.
“Vinette!” six-year-old John shrieked before Joan could turn to see who was there.
Vinette Brinay, bleary-eyed, disheveled, looking almost like another girl from the cheeky, sprightly maid Joan knew, came in slowly. “Oh, Vinette, bless the saints, you are here. Untie me quickly. I must take the children and flee.”
Vinette moved silently across the floor, and Joan saw she was barefooted and had a length of fine silk tablecloth wrapped around her almost like a shroud. “Vinette, please hurry. Are you all right?”
“He loves me, madame, he wants to wed with me.”
“Pierre Foulke? Please, Vinette, you cannot approve of what happened today at the fair. They murdered people, and it is not likely to stop there. Please, for the children, untie me.”
The girl stood stock-still as if she were in a stupor. “Vinette, have you been drinking? Here, untie these knots.”
“They are all drinking your wine, madame, ripping things down and carrying them off. Dancing. Dancing. They broke your lute. They killed Stephen and Jeremy before I came back from the fair, Lynette says. He wants me to marry him and live here after all the nobles are killed in the area.”
Joan’s brain reeled at the awesome possibility that Vinette might not have come to rescue them at all. The girl looked dazed, exhausted; her brown eyes in her attractive face hardly focused on anything when she spoke. Even her voice was not her own.
“Vinette. Marry him if you will, and live here, only untie me so I may get the children away from here before something happens.”
“Please, Vinette,” little John chimed in almost wistfully. “Bella has been crying a lot and we gotta go for help.”
“Sh, John,” Joan chided gently. “Vinette will let us go so we can all get safely home to England.”
“To England? To Liddell, Mother?” Thomas asked.
“Hush, now. Vinette, Pierre Foulke told me he intends to have me be his lady here after the banquet if I am still here when he comes upstairs soon.”
The girl’s eyes focused on Joan’s face at last. “No. He asked me to marry him and live here a fine lady. He is the leader of the fair and just Jacquerie for all of the Pont-Audemer region!”
“I am sorry, Vinette, but you see how my gown is ripped already. Only at the last minute did he decide to dine with his people first and join me here afterward. I told him I did not love him, I did not want to stay here with him, so he tied me here to await him. He said I must bear his son for he wanted one of Plantagenet blood—”
“No! Oh, no! Madame Joan, I think I hit my head today at the fair in the riot and it bled—see?” As if they were speaking of nothing else, Vinette lifted her long hair free of her forehead to reveal an ugly, blue-black bruise on her fair brow, but Joan thought the blood looked fresh.
“I feel so dizzy like things are blurring sometimes, madame,” Vinette went on. “All their wine made me sick. I think they were all watching. He proved he loved me. He said he loved me.”
“Untie me now, Vinette, and let me look at your head. Untie me so that I can flee Pierre Foulke’s desire to keep me here. I will put you to bed over there and you alone shall wait for him—wait to marry him and be the lady here.”
Vinette blinked bleary-eyed and bent to Joan’s ties. She fumbled interminably while Joan held her breath and prayed, warning Thomas who could see her with a look and John who could not see her with the pressure of her knee to keep silent. Just as she felt a loosening of the bindings of her wrist, the babe started fussing aga
in and Vinette looked up.
“I should bear him his children here in this house,” the girl said low.
“Aye, of course, you will, Vinette. Untie me.”
One scarf loosened, fell away and then the other. Joan flexed her numb hands ignoring the fierce ache in her arm injured by de Maltravers—all that seemed ages ago.
“I should have a babe like this one for him,” Vinette was saying as Joan bent to yank at the scarves binding her ankles to the chair legs.
“Mother, Vinette is taking Bella out!” Thomas cried.
Joan stood and nearly fell at her first step. Her right foot had gone to prickly numbness as though it were not ever there. She stumbled to the still-open door, took Vinette’s arm firmly and led her back.
“Here, Vinette, my dear. Give me Bella and climb into that bed there to wait for Pierre. You have hurt your head somehow. Here, do as I say.”
Joan lay the squirming babe on the floor by the boys’ chairs, and dashed to the sideboard for a food knife. She sliced their bonds in four quick thrusts, then ran to her coffer to grab her two letters with John’s birthright promise of Liddell.
“Madame, my head hurts and it is dark sometimes,” Vinette called out loudly from across the solar where she stood gazing down at the big brocade-covered bed. There were raucous voices in the hall. Joan seized the babe in her arms.
“Lie down, I said, Vinette. Come on, boys, and do not be afraid. Remember when you were looking for buried treasure? Well, we are going to find some and you must help me. Come on now.”
Her heart wrenched when she saw they were holding hands, but she hustled them immediately into the garde-robe room even as she heard boisterous voices so much closer in the hall outside. Armor pieces littered the floor and little John stumbled noisily over one.
Not daring to wait to see if they had been heard, Joan yanked aside the tapestry which covered the small, secret door’s outline. She pulled the long metal bolt and, as she did, she heard Vinette’s plaintive cry from the next room.
“Madame, he wants to marry me!”
The bolt scraped unbearably loud. “Mother, it is a door there. I never saw it before,” Thomas whispered. He peered in behind her as she jostled Bella to quiet her. “Oh, it is so dark.”
“Quiet. Now you must be very brave. I will hold John’s hand and Thomas comes last.” She pulled them immediately inward down the few dim steps she could see and shoved the pivoting door closed behind her to plunge them into utter blackness. Surely, the rebels would not find this right away and they would think they had escaped into the hall.
She took her youngest son’s cold hand and pulled them on, but she could not stand the way he tugged on her injured arm, and Bella was too heavy in the other.
“John, listen to Mother. Here, hold my skirts.” She heard a stifled sob and knew he was crying at last.
“Are there—well, if there is treasure down here, are there dragons, too?” he managed.
“No. No dragons, only bad men in our Château right now and we must run away. Thomas, hold on to him. I am depending on you.”
They went slowly on, interminably down the slant of passageway covered with stony rubble until the floor evened out and they were in the dampest part under the moat. Her hand grew sticky-cold with the dank slime of the walls on which she felt their way along; they all sputtered sporadically as cobwebs laced across their sweating faces. As the tunnel slanted up, Joan hit her shoulder into a supporting plank and recalled her recurrent nightmare of fleeing desperately down such a tunnel chased by unknown horrors. Now that nightmare had become reality.
At the far door which was above them, she pressed her back to the wooden pillar, breathing hard, thanking the saints for their temporary safety from all the terrors of the day. Her fingers fumbled for the rusted lock above her. It grated metallically in the silence broken only by their breathing and little Bella’s fussing. Slowly, carefully, she pushed the door to open it. It groaned but did not budge. The boys pressed tightly to her like little ducks, she thought erratically.
“What is it, Mother? Why does it not open up? It is so dark.”
“You have both been wonderful, my brave boys. Come here, Thomas and put your hands up on the door. Here, it is on a slant a little above us. When I tell you, we will push. One, two, three—push!”
The door creaked open a tiny space and a dim, gray line of light threw itself crookedly on the wooden steps. They had done it! The blackness was gone. So much time had passed since she had come back to the Château. It was already dusk outside, but that was good, for she had no intention of falling back into the filthy hands of those drunk, murderous peasants—fairness and justice of the Jacquerie be damned!
“Mother, are we going out? I am hungry,” John whispered.
“Hush up, John,” Thomas scolded in his best big-brother voice. “Mother is probably hungry, too, but we did not bring any food, did we, Mother?”
“No, my darlings, but we shall drink some water and eat some May apples or wild strawberries in the woods. You will have to help Mother because we will have to hide in the woods all night and maybe walk a long way on the morrow. All right, now, Thomas, we have to push the door again. One, two, three . . . ”
Cradling Bella to her, she heaved her weight against the slanted door above her. It lifted steadily as the tendrils and roots wrapped about its outline were stretched and snapped. New spring growth had covered it, nearly entombing them, she thought. It had been years since she had been down here and she had just assumed someone would keep it open. She lifted the heavy door and peered out.
Darkness on the forest fringe comes soon, she realized, and blessed again her good fortune which had saved her all day. Prince Edward’s words came back to her that she was destined for greatness. Saints, what foolishness old Morcar’s star charts were, but on a day of safe deliverance like this one, it almost made her a believer in such a prophecy.
With Thomas’s assistance and John’s pinched fingers when he tried to help, Joan closed the tunnel entrance and they covered it with weeds. How forlorn and foreboding the walls of the Château looked now across the ribbon of dark moat. Voices, shrieks, sounds floated to them but no one was in view. For the first time she worried about the beautiful things for which she and Thomas had worked long years to adorn their home. The rioters had broken her lute, poor Vinette had said. Things—they mattered not at all now that she had the children safe.
Though a full moon shed cold, silver light on their retreat, all was black beyond old Marta’s grave at the fringe of forest. Their eyes soon became accustomed to the darkness, but it was Joan’s sure knowledge of the pathway toward the forest pond that made their flight possible.
“Where are we going, Mother?”
“I am so tired, I am not sure anymore, my Thomas. Just to the pond until it gets light, I guess. I used to love to go out in the forest when I was a maid, you know. This may be fun.”
Thomas was obviously not taken in by her pretended enthusiasm. “In the dark?”
Her exhausted mind skipped back to that forest-pond trysting place where the prince had first made love to her at Windsor, the time she had arranged for Princess Isabella and Salisbury to come out and His Grace had stomped off in a fury before he had hardly begun. So many twists of fate to separate them, so many turns of Fortune’s tormenting wheel.
They sat exhausted, tight together on the grassy bank of the pond which was fed by a spring from the River Risle that eventually became the moat about their Château. They washed their faces and hands, and Joan led them in a shaky, whispered Ave Maria and a prayer to the prince’s patron, St. George. They filled their empty bellies with only water, and Joan sang them a low lullaby as they huddled all together in a bed of soft leaves under a clump of bushes a little way back from the pond.
“Mother?”
“What, my John?”
“Thomas says there are no real dragons. Only they are in your head, he says.”
“Thomas is right, my love, so d
o not be afraid of the dark.”
“But they are in my head sometimes, so I guess they are real.”
The child moved closer against her, and she could tell by his voice he was sucking his thumb, something she knew he had given up months ago.
“Bella is asleep, so the rest of you sleep, too, and in the morn we will get help. If anyone wakes up and is afraid, just wake me up and I will hold you,” she told them.
The leaves rustled occasionally as they shifted closer. Bella was tight against her breasts and John lay between her and Thomas. She had been afraid to look at her cut arm, but on the morrow she must try to wash and tend it, mayhap find some plantain or figwort to ease the pain. In her sore back, legs, and arms she felt either gripping cramps or nothingness. When she closed her eyes, the whole forest careened around, whirling in the strange hum of her dizziness.
Faces floated to her from the dark places of her own brain: de Maltravers—he had been real at last, stepping from her nightmare of revenge, and she had beaten him. Pierre Foulke, poor distracted Vinette Brinay, so changed by something unspoken, something terrible beyond the blow to her head. Old Morcar’s magic stars wheeled overhead in the vast heavens, and Prince Edward rode away in black armor, farther and farther away. Her mother’s wasted face, beset by dragons of revenge and fear on her deathbed—Edmund and her brother John were dead, gone and dead. Sometime, she slept.
She awoke to the twitter of the predawn forest dusted with gray chill. Her body ached and she stretched stiff limbs, gathering the babe closer for warmth. John lay curled up, breathing with his mouth open. Thomas! She sat bolt upright jostling Bella awake. Thomas was gone!
“I am glad you are awake. I was guarding you,” a voice behind her whispered.
She spun to see her eldest son sitting bent-legged a few yards away with a large stick across his knees.
“Oh! Thank heavens! I thought you were gone.”
“No, but since Father is always gone to fight, I have to help,” he explained patiently as though he were lecturing a foolish child. “Anyway, I heard horses and something like horns so I thought mayhap Father came back and brought some men.”