by Karen Harper
He shook his head to reassure her and reined the horse in at the cherry orchard closest to the Château. Over his broad shoulder as he dismounted and lifted her down, Joan saw that his two men following them had stopped far down the road. The prince tethered his black horse to a tree branch laden with crimson fruit. His big arm lightly around her shoulders, he led her back into the thick grove of trees.
“At the banquet, love, Pierre Foulke, in celebration of his heinous victory that day, violated Vinette Brinay—on the table in the Great Hall before the drunken crowd—and then offered her to one of his henchmen who did the same. I am sorry for the maid Vinette, my love, but I am also grateful he was too drunk to fetch you downstairs for his obscene celebration. Other noble ladies elsewhere about in this Jacquerie have not been so fortunate.”
“No—oh, no. Poor Vinette! Then, when she came upstairs to me like that disheveled and all disoriented—but she said she loved him and only had a bump on her head from the riot at the fair. I should have taken her with us! I told her to lie down and wait for him!”
“You did what you had to do, my love. Renée says she later heard Vinette was there in the solar when Foulke staggered upstairs looking for you. She believes the girl fled when he began ripping the solar apart in his fury you were gone. She was obviously stunned and distraught. She may turn up someday or she may not. Until I send you some other maids—English maids—your loyal, plump Madeleine and hobbling Renée will have to do.”
“My lord prince, I am grateful, so grateful for all you have done but I could not accept servants from you, nor the beautiful things you have promised to refurbish the Château. Thomas would never allow it. And wherever would you get English maids to send me while you are here raiding France, or should I not ask such an impertinent question?”
His eyes lit to see she was teasing despite her tears, so he decided to hazard the last piece of unsettling news he had for her—besides the fact he must needs depart soon, which he hoped desperately would grieve her more than anything.
He fingered one of her wayward curls the color of finest white wine and gazed avidly into her stunningly beautiful face made even more exquisite by the hint of suffering.
“Jeannette, about de Maltravers, I never meant to doubt you, only the chance of his daring to turn up, to seek you out like that was nearly unbelievable.”
“Did you find the old woman with the pet goose then?”
“Aye. An old crone who lives in a hovel by a duckpond on the south side of Pont-Audemer. She—and the goose—found the deaf man you spoke of run through in the church by the sacristry door just as you said.”
“There, I knew it. But of course, she never went up in the belfry—I did not tell her to.”
“No.” He hesitated to tell her the rest—the truth, for he had seen her go all wild at Canterbury or at Bruges so long ago over de Maltravers’s part in her parents’ tragedy, and he even sensed, deep inside, that his own father, King Edward, was somehow guilty of blood on his hands in the whole terrible story. By St. George, she would just have to handle it; maybe it would get her home to England so he would not have to pursue her here again under any circumstance.
“Jeannette, I know you believed de Maltravers was dead, but he actually must have only had some sort of fit or seizure, or his heart stopped for a minute, I do not know.”
“Perhaps someone only stole the body. He seemed to be alone. He must have had money on him.”
“He was evidently not alone. A stranger stayed all day in the Deux Hommes Inn on the near side of town as if waiting for someone and then stormed out by himself when no one came to join him. The old, goose woman later saw that stranger carry another man out of town, riding slowly on his horse and holding that man upright before him in the saddle.”
“But he was dead! His man wanted his body mayhap for burial.”
“The old woman said the man looked ill, but he was definitely alive.”
He watched the passions flit across the lovely face he had adored so many years. All this time apart, he fumed, and our last day together before I set off back to camp before my sire sends men in search of me is taken with all these dreadful topics instead of the only one that matters.
“Jeannette?”
“I am all right. I feel so drained of hatred or revenge in all this now. The children and I are blessed to be alive—to have you here.”
He put his arms around her in a heady rush of joy and crushed her against him. “My dearest love, how I have longed to hear that! I have never, never loved, adored, and desired you more than I do this very moment. The world, obligations be damned when we are together. We have each other—this afternoon and night.”
He lifted her chin to kiss her but her lips did not pout for the kiss; rather, her lower lip trembled and her violet eyes filled again with crystal tears. “And then, you leave again—my Edward?”
“Aye, I must on the morrow. But there is tonight and other days we shall find, other rooms and beds and moments—”
“No.”
“I cannot help leaving, my love. The king and Lancaster will unite near Calais in two days and I must be there.”
“Of course you must. You always must and I must do certain things, too.”
She pulled gently back from his embrace and, stunned, he let her go. She turned to face him; a trembling green and red cherry bough was the only tenuous barrier between them. She grieved that already a little frown creased his proud brow, and she regretted that this inescapable moment had to come before their final moments of parting.
“Jeannette, I know how hard it is when we are apart.”
“Do you? It is hard when we are together. I could have died from shame and longing at Windsor last time. There is no real time for us—it is always hurried good-byes and wretched pretending.”
“Wretched? Was Monbarzon and what we shared there wretched? Or the other times you melted to sweet, wild honey at my touch?”
“I beg you do not torment me with that. Aye, I do not deny it anymore. I have never loved—will never love—anyone as I do you, but it is not enough!”
“Oh, really? To be loved, adored all these years by the Prince of Wales—”
“Saints, I know who you are. I wish you were not the Prince of Wales, you know, just the lowest peasant—I, too—miserable though they are. Then at least we might be together and not hide our few stolen days. I am wed to one of your Plantagenet knights, Your Grace; I have his three children.”
“I see.”
“I doubt if you do. It is not for love of Thomas Holland I say these things. I just die inside to say this, my dearest lord, but I cannot be your mistress ever, ever again.”
“Mistress! The love of the Prince of Wales is no mistress! It was far beyond that, more precious all these years—at least to me. But do not think I came here to rescue and then to beg, Jeannette. I have sons and duties too.”
She looked away at last as the sheltering embrace of leaves and ripe fruit they had not touched all blurred scarlet and green through her tears. “That is just my point, Your Grace. We are trapped whatever the old astrologer Morcar’s star charts promised once. I will always, always love you, but that love is doomed by fate or who we are or the terrible things our parents have done or something we cannot control.”
“If you love me, you will not turn me away like this.”
“That is not true. It is because I love you.”
“St. George, you are just exhausted. We had best go back then. There is much to do before we ride out in the morn. I shall leave six men as I said and only take six back. Aye, Jeannette, I do have duties and there is one I have shirked long enough to coddle my foolish heart—and that of one I love.”
She meant to only take a shallow breath, but an audible sob racked her. “Aye, for the throne if not your heart, Your Grace, the Prince of Wales must wed.”
“So I have been repeatedly counseled, Jeannette, and I thank you for your kind, motherly advice on it.” His voice had gone hard and
cold like the honed edge of a sword, but somehow that helped her to regain her composure.
He grabbed a huge handful of cherries from the low branch between them, tearing leaves and bruising fruit in his sudden motion. He turned away and his words floated back to her over his shoulder. “Come on then, we will walk back if you are strong enough for all this. And I shall be sending your precious Thomas Holland back to you when I see my brother Lancaster. I will not have you accuse me someday of being David to Bathsheba’s Uriah.”
She did not know what he meant, but she dared not challenge him on it. They walked in proud silence back into the stony embrace of the Château walls.
The next week passed for Joan in as much of a fog as her feverish illness had. She berated herself one moment for sending the prince away so bitterly; the next moment she felt she had done the best she could to battle the agony of continued separation. In a whirl of frenzied activity, she supervised the skeletal servant staff that had not been killed or run off in the Jacquerie, and she kept the men the prince had left behind busy at needed repairs. Yet she learned too late that bravely sending the prince away after mere words was just as devastating as sending him away after the ecstasy of glorious love-making.
She had saved restoring the Great Hall for last, perhaps because she could not bear to think of what poor Vinette had suffered there at the brutal hands of Pierre Foulke during the drunken orgy of the Jacquerie. Joan’s long blond tresses swept up and bound in a wide strip of linen, she supervised the hanging of the single long tapestry the prince’s men had recovered from the village. She squinted at it to be sure it hung straight; her head pounded from an almost daily pain she was certain was caused as much by her heartache as that of her brain.
“No, Jensen. No, man. Hang it a little lower on the left side, I said.”
“Mother! Mother!” her eldest son’s voice shrieked from the hall. She put her hand to her head as both boys darted in. “Horses coming down the road! Maybe the prince is coming back and bringing us some armor like he promised! Come on! Come and see!” He wheeled around with a cavorting six-year-old brother at his heels and dashed back out before she could answer.
The prince! Surely not—not after that awful parting, she thought, jolted to panic as she realized how terrible she must look. With a twist of cloth and a shake of her aching head, she loosed her hair and tried to smooth the flurry of heavy tresses.
Outside, the May sky shone pearly gray unlike that golden, clear morn she had parted from him only last week. Horses—aye, she could hear them now, a small number, surely not the prince. And then, even as reality crushed the foolish fantasy of joyous reunion with her Edward, the boys’ excited squeals told her what she already knew.
“It is Father! Father has come home! Father, Father, we can ride knights’ horses now!”
Joan stood her ground in the cobbled courtyard waving her uninjured arm as Thomas Holland and two squires clattered in across the drawbridge and past the inner gatehouse. He looked so small suddenly, and she was not certain if separation had dwarfed him or if she only compared his size to the towering frame of the prince.
Lord Thomas Holland dismounted stiffly, his face wary until the boys swarmed him and he lifted both in his arms a moment before he set them back down. His copper head turned to Joan; his eye, of much the same hue as his hair, surveyed her before he bent to kiss her cheek brusquely.
“My lady. Thank heaven I find you all well. I had no knowledge the foolish peasant bastards would really rise up against proper and lawful authority, of course, or I would never have gone. Forgive me, Joan, I did not know until word came through His Grace Prince John of Lancaster. Of course—of necessity, I have thanked the Prince of Wales for what he and his men did here in my absence.”
The speech was monotone, stilted as if he recited it from something he had been forced to memorize. His eye looked slightly past her and might just as well have been covered by a dark patch as the other.
“Come in, my Lord Thomas. The Château has missed its lord and the boys have greatly missed their father.”
“And the lady of the Château?” he asked so low she was not certain he expected an answer. He walked slowly in beside her with their sons at his heels.
“It was really something, Father! His Grace, the prince saved us, and his men gave John and me rides all the time and some swords, too.”
“Swords? John, too?”
“Sure,” John volunteered. “Everybody got swords, ’cept Mother and Bella, and they did not get anything.”
Thomas Holland’s eyes swept Joan at his son’s words, and he chose to turn immediately and go upstairs rather than survey the ground rooms as Joan had briefly indicated he should.
To increase her foreboding, in the upstairs hall he patted both boys on the head and sent them back down to play. She heard him sigh wearily as she followed him into the solar and closed the door behind them. Of course, she thought, he had been to horse for days and his old leg pains bothered him.
“You must be exhausted from the ride, my lord. Some wine?”
“Aye. Why not? The bastards did not ruin all of it then?”
“They did but we have since purchased more.”
“Did we? And who, pray tell, is we?”
“His Grace’s men when they were here,” she said carefully. She caught the shift of the wind well enough, and dreaded his words to come.
“St. Peter’s bones, lady, but His Grace is helpful, is he not? He saves my wife, my home, my sons—”
“Your daughter Isabella, too, my lord. You have a daughter and she is sleeping right over there, so please do not shout.”
His eye sought the little cradle near the big canopied bed, and he walked over to peek in. “Aye, lady, I know well enough I have a daughter and a fair one at that.”
“She resembles me even as the boys do you, Thomas.”
He came back and slumped in a chair at the table as she poured him a goblet of ruby red Burgundy.
“I was about to say, Joan, His Grace, the Prince of Wales rides in here like St. Michael’s avenging angels and then to boot, tells Lancaster to send me home posthaste.”
“I cannot pretend your arrival does not please me, and you look as if you need a respite. Your usual good ruddy color has gone waxen-hued.”
“Hell’s gates, do you not think I know it? There has been much sickness on the march—flux, grips, hints even of plague from Poland. Some of my old wounds have pained me again, but not, I tell you, not half so much as being bandied about from pillar to post again by His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales. Damn, but I would have come home on my own the moment I heard about the horrendous Jacquerie. I need not him to tell me as he has before at his convenience where to go, or how damn high to jump.”
“My lord, I assure you, he was only being kind and, no doubt, wishing to solidify this region further by your presence when he asked you be sent home.”
“Saint Peter, is that it? He made you privy to his plans, did he?”
“No, Thomas, only he did tell me he intended to send you home to me.”
“How touching, how terribly noble! The man never gave a tinker’s damn for any women but his own—sending knights here or there into battle or not—we all just jump and obey like jack-on-strings, do we not, my duchess?”
“You have always been so loyal to the Plantagenets, my lord, and this sounds not like you at all. Her Grace, Queen Philippa—”
“Hold your tongue on that. My service to Her Grace is quite another thing, lady, and you had best remember that. A pure and chivalric duty. You would not even name the child after Her Grace, so do not lecture me on her.”
“I was hardly lecturing you, Thomas. I see you are very tired and I believe you have not been well. To defend one’s home, one’s lands, is a completely honorable and necessary duty, so I do not see why you must fret and fume as if you have been punished or sent to exile in Flanders or wherever. The boys need their father, and I am glad you are here.”
“Glad? Are you? Then I shall expect a hero’s welcome, love. We have been parted so long, and you are glad to have me home, eh? Even after those days here with him? My sons obviously adore him—too.”
“That is not fair. Aye, I am grateful to him for rescuing us. The boys need someone to look up to just now, a man to spend time with them and teach them, and they just turned their affections to him and his men.”
“‘Turned their affections?’ St. Peter’s bones, wife, a good phrase! And now my hero’s welcome. Let’s to bed.”
Her eyes widened though she tried not to show surprise on her face. “Now, my lord? The boys are waiting. Bella sleeps. Are you not hungry, Thomas?”
He stood and cracked his goblet down smartly on the tabletop. “Fed up, more like than hungry, Lady Holland. I demand—I will have my affectionate welcome. Two so long separated, both having been in danger—did not our lengthy, wretched separation pain you enough to greet me with open arms and legs, too, lady?”
He moved woodenly a few steps to her and pulled her close in an embrace either rough or desperate. Slowly, she put her arms around his big waist.
“No more protests, Joan? I have road dust on me. It is the middle of the day. But when people in love have been separated as we, any chance, any excuse to bed will do.”
“I do not need your mockery, Thomas. I have been through enough lately and do not deserve it. I need you here to comfort, not torment me.”
He started toward the bed, drawing her along with him.
“Let me at least move Bella’s cradle, my lord.”
“And wake her up? Just come around this far side, my dear, and she will not see a thing. Of course, I would never want the children to see anything they should not.”
His tone, laced with sarcasm, made her stiffen and draw back despite her silent vow to please him, to cooperate. At her balk, he pulled her toward him and tumbled them both heavily onto the bed, she on her back, he pressing her down and staring into her flushed face with his copper eye.
“In love, Thomas, or even in duty, I could welcome this, but not with your cruel innuendos. Say what you will, but do not take it out on both of us this way.”