by Karen Harper
“This way?”
“Saints, you have not touched me in tenderness since before our fair, innocent Isabella was born, and I will not submit to coercion, punishment, or humiliation in this way. I escaped that in the Jacquerie, my lord, and have no desire to face such treatment again.”
Deep red suffused his round face and crept down his neck above his leather riding jerkin. His jaw set, his gaze hardened as he leaned into her with his powerful chest and arm and reached down to unhook his broad leather belt. It flopped heavily across her even as he pulled her skirts up. On the far side of the wide bed in her cradle, Bella stirred. Furious and hurt, Joan glared defiantly up into his blazing eye.
“Witch. Witch!” he hissed. He heaved himself off her. “Witch!” he accused again as she took in his meaning. Though he had obviously meant to possess her, he was unable. He turned away before she could see his impotency.
“What a fool you have made of me,” he ranted. “What a fool I was from the beginning to take you on for your Plantagenet blood no matter what the queen said. The prince has always had your fickle, spoiled heart, and damn you, no doubt, your body too!”
He scrambled off the bed and turned his back to her as he stood and refastened his garments. His belt still lay across her, but he made no move to retrieve that. Without turning back, he said, “I leave you to your thoughts, your bed, your daughter, duchess. As for me, I had rather be in hell than here!”
He stopped at the table on his way out only long enough to slosh more wine in his goblet and drink it straight down. He strode out and banged the door behind him.
She shoved the belt on the floor and straightened her skirts, all the while staring up at the newly replaced underside of the brocade bed canopy. Somehow, sadly, it had come to this: Thomas detested her, the prince now too. She was deserted, as alone as her poor mother had been years ago when she took to her solitary room as a recluse.
And yet Thomas Holland had been specifically saved from possible death with the Plantagenet army on raid in France. Whether from disease or battle, he could have been killed just like Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, in the Bible. Joan had asked a village priest about the story to understand the prince’s cryptic comment to her.
King David, Father Herman had said, had desired to marry Bathsheba so much that he had her husband, Uriah, sent into the front line of battle to die. But now, of course, His Grace’s comparison meant naught. He had saved her husband and she had sent the prince away ungratefully after all he had done for her over the years. Now, she must learn forever to be without him, so why would Thomas’s fury or any outside danger ever threaten her anymore?
Much later, when the boys’ happy voices drifted to her through the windows and little Bella began to fuss again, Joan got up and drank the rest of the Burgundy before carrying the babe outside to join them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Thomas Holland never went to war again—at least not with the French. Rather, he waged his own subtle, continual battle with his wife using for his weapons innuendo and bitterness. As the months passed, their two sons, spitting images of their father, learned to ride and joust at the quintain; pretty Bella grew golden curls and charmed everyone’s heart—but her father’s. And so, Joan and Thomas Holland lived one and a half years after the Jacquerie as lord and lady of Château Ruisseau, of Liddell Manor, and of his lands in Lancashire; yet they were husband and wife only in duty and appearance to the outside world.
With their brood of three healthy children, they did what would be well enough expected of them although they were invited no more to visit the royal Plantagenet court. King Edward and his three eldest sons were seldom at Windsor or Westminster in those times, for the continual need to control their vast if tenuous French territorial holdings rode them as hard as they rode their enemies. When further raids and expeditions failed, the Plantagenets negotiated the elaborate Treaty of Brétigny with the French, renouncing all claims to Normandy but keeping rich Aquitaine to the south which the Prince of Wales would eventually govern.
And now, as Yuletide of 1360 approached, France was beset by another threat besides the English might: for the second time in eleven years the plague swept up rich and poor alike in its greedy grasp.
“I told you, my lord, you should not have gone into Pont-Audemer with all the rumors of sickness about,” Joan greeted Thomas Holland as he strode noisily into the sweet-scented solar where she was reading to the children the heroic story of King Charlemagne from a lovely, illuminated book she had purchased the year before. Bay candles burned on the hearth and pine boughs made the room smell like a fresh forest. “If the whole English army is safe at home in England you need not go out looking to see if the plague rumors are true,” she scolded.
“Bah! Rumors tell it all. But for the usual winter agues and blains, there is not a soul out of sorts in Pont-Audemer. If it does get this far, we are sequestered well enough here. There were some traveling merchants in town and they say it is far to the south yet.”
Joan could feel the children’s eyes as they darted from her to their father. Though they tried not to let the children sense the contentiousness between them, she knew they perceived it and she grieved for that. Thomas was almost ten now, John nearly eight, and Bella over two. She remembered well how she as a child had sensed trouble in her own household—her recluse mother, a father taken away for something awful. She had decided long ago that when her three were old enough, whatever Thomas said, she would try to find the words to explain that the trouble they felt had naught to do with them. Soon mayhap, soon.
“St. Peter’s bones, I said traveling merchants, you little ninnies,” Thomas was bellowing at the children and poor, dainty Bella looked utterly startled at his booming voice. “Do not any of you want to know what I purchased for you as Yuletide gifts?”
The boys jumped up and exploded with shouts, and Bella soon caught the spirit of things, shrieking, jumping up and down, and clapping wildly.
“All right, all right. I see I have your attention at last,” he teased. “No good sitting about listening to foolish romantic stories of dead heroes when one can practice to be live ones, eh? Thomas, lad, over here. You are the eldest, so you first. I put my hand in this gunnysack and just see what I brought you.”
Tears of joy blurred Joan’s vision as she watched the round-faced, copper-haired boy accept a silver pair of rowel riding spurs Thomas had produced from the deep sack. But the moment, like so many others which might have been so sweet, turned sour through pure mischance.
“Oh, they are fine, my lord father. Saints, Mother, look. These are just like a pair the prince wore, I warrant, just like them!”
The smile froze on Joan’s face as she saw her husband’s round jaw go hard and firm. “Our heir has a good memory, eh, Joan? Too damned good, like all of us. John, you are next, boy. I put my hand in here once more and then—”
Thomas’s arm disappeared into the sack and emerged with a curved hunting knife that produced delighted exclamations. Thankfully, there were no more accidental mentions of Prince Edward, who was usually a forbidden subject at the Château unless she and Thomas traded bitter barbs over him in private. She had never yet admitted to Thomas she had loved—still loved—the prince, and sometimes she wondered if it might not have cleared the air if she had.
“And now, the little maid—our pretty Bella,” Thomas Holland went on as the boys gloated over their gifts.
Joan smiled as she pushed Bella forward a step. She was thrilled that Thomas had included the child in this sudden burst of Yuletide good will, for he had often ignored Bella, who, luckily, had been too young to notice much yet. “For you, Bella. Go on, sweet,” Joan urged. “Father has a present for you. Say ‘please.’”
“Please,” the tot echoed, and her angel face dimpled. Struck with a shaft of strange awe for the tiny maid he seldom heeded, Thomas Holland put his black velvet arm into the sack and pulled out a little tin horn. “Here, maid. Your mother loves music. Now you can pl
ay, too.”
His voice gruff, he showed Bella how to lift it to her lips and blow. At the high-pitched toot of the horn, Bella startled, then giggled. Instantly, she mastered the blaring, shiny instrument and darted off after the boys blowing it for all her little lungs could bear.
“That was wonderful of you, Thomas,” Joan said, truly touched as he stood awkwardly before her.
“It is Yule after all, Joan. If our Thomas is to go to Warwick to be a squire to the Beauchamps next year, we have to enjoy him while we can, eh?”
“Aye. I cannot believe he is almost old enough to start that long path to knighthood, and John only two years away if we can obtain another fortunate placement. Bless the saints for little Bella being so much younger.”
“Mm,” he grunted and wiped his brow with his sleeve. “Damned hot in here with this room all shut up and this fire blazing, lady,” he said as if to change the subject. “St. Peter’s bones, that ride over and back today heated me up royally.”
“It is winter, Thomas, and I think it is quite comfortable in here. Just sit down to rest and you will be fine.”
“Mm,” he repeated, and then, to her surprise, produced apparently from up his sleeve a silver brooch in the shape of a fleeing deer. “Here,” he said gruffly. “For your winter cloak. The merchants claim it is from Spain. I thought of the hart on your family crest you favor so, and I just bought it.”
“Oh, my lord, it is lovely, a lovely surprise!”
His avid copper eye swept her face as she rose to accept it. She smiled genuinely up at him and he felt his blood heat further with a long-smothered passion for his beautiful, willful wife. Ah, little Bella would be such a beauty to break hearts and ruin a man’s calm in his later years with doubts and pain too, he mused.
He watched Joan’s slender fingers fasten the brooch on her blue perse wool kirtle. “It is a fine piece, my Lord Thomas, and I shall wear it proudly, even as the children love their gifts.”
“Love,” he said low. “Aye, that would be nice. I will see you for dinner and mayhap talk of such things as love and gifts then. Now I am thirsty and need some cold wine and a good breath of fresh air.”
His usual ruddy complexion did look especially florid, she thought, as he strode away to his own room down the hall where he had settled in after his return over a year and a half ago. He always pushed himself hard, too hard, for his old war wounds acted up at times and his digestion was never good anymore.
She lifted the discarded book on Charlemagne to put it away in its metal box, and glanced down at the lovely illuminated page of King Charlemagne with his heir Prince Pippin. Both the king and prince were suited in elaborate fourteenth-century armor though they had lived and loved and fought two centuries ago; Prince Pippin’s hair was gilded blond with a down-curled mustache and Joan realized with a start that the artist must have indeed patterned this heroic royal pair after the present English king and Prince Edward.
She sighed and closed the book carefully. Time had helped to mute the pain of losing him, of never seeing him, but occasionally he leapt at her, full-blown in her busy brain, to disarm her thoughts and stir her deepest passions. Here, on painted page; in minstrels’ songs or her own tunes of unrequited love; in rumors of his victories, news of his illegitimate two sons being knighted; in the blessed, haunting fact he had not married yet—Edward, Prince of Wales, possessed her still.
She put her slippered feet up on the hearth andiron next to the little iron cage for roasting chestnuts and stared into the leaping flames. Thomas was dead wrong—the room was chill without this comforting blaze. She absentmindedly fingered the little, silver brooch and, listening dazedly to the tinny toot of Bella’s distant horn, she saw her heart’s imaginings in the orange-red flames.
“Mother, no. No!” Bella shrieked as Joan pried the beloved horn from her little fingers two days later. “No, no! Mine!”
“Come here and amuse your sister, boys. Saints, I am glad to know you two are old enough to understand.”
“But is Father very sick, my lady mother?” her son Thomas queried. “And, are you certain the disease could be on these gifts to make us sick, too? St. Peter’s bones, we have already had them about us for two whole days so mayhap the damage is done.”
“No, do not say that. I want to take all precautions. After all, the gifts came from traveling merchants from the south and that is where—well, I just want to be careful, that is all. I do not know how sick your father is, but sick enough I should pack you three off to Madeleine’s family’s croft for the day. And Thomas, I do not approve of your cursing by St. Peter or anyone else.” She realized her voice was shrill, but she could not help it.
“But Father always says that and you say ‘saints’ whenever the littlest thing goes awry.”
“Now, listen to me! I do not need your sharp tongue. You are in charge of these two and I expect your best behavior today when you are visiting! And please see to Bella’s whining as I am going back in to your father now.”
She hurried to Thomas’s room wishing she had parted from the children with softer words, for she had planned to send them to their old nursemaid’s family’s croft on the edge of town until she was certain that Thomas Holland had not been smitten by the plague.
There—she had said the word to herself. Already, she was so on edge and exhausted after nursing him all last night, desperate to get his fever down. The signs—the early signs were perhaps there, but then it could be a more benevolent disease at this point too. If only his fever would break; it made him shriek such delirious, terrible words she could not bear the children to hear! If only the painful swellings on his neck and under his arm—which shot him wide awake in pain—would shrink. Saints, if it was the plague, all of them could be as good as dead already!
As the day wore on, the Château lay silent in a dusting of new snow outside. The children had been gone with Madeleine for hours; Joan had even ordered the front gate closed though she could not stand to have the drawbridge pulled up and certainly wanted no big red plague cross painted on the front door.
In fairness to the servants, she had told them all to stay downstairs and twice a day food and wine for her were brought to the top of the staircase. She was not hungry, not anything except desperate, scared, and regretful, but to keep the servants’ spirits up, she threw the food down the garde-robe shaft so they would believe she was eating.
She kept the fire roaring day and night in his room where she nursed him. She burned the gunnysack he had evidently purchased from the traveling merchants from the south. But, on the second day, his fever was unabated and his neck and arm swellings had turned a putrid black.
She cried then in great, heaving gasps, crumpled exhausted at the side of his bed. The black death—aye, those black swellings were the final sign he was doomed, he and mayhap anyone else who came in contact with him. But she had no fever yet and no one had come to say the children were ill: she had ordered the guards to send for her the moment one of them showed the slightest hint of fever, and no one—thank heavens, no one—had come to break what was left of her heart with that.
She pulled herself up to kneel, leaning against the bed. Thomas’s breathing was labored; he tossed heavily, alternately burning and quaking with chills. Last night he had been so violent as to rise and walk, to embrace her even, that in desperation she had ripped a linen sheet into strips and tied him loosely down. Only now, that made it nearly impossible to change his sweat-soaked sheets under the pile of blankets she had covered him with hoping beyond hope that he could sweat the poisons out. She had tried everything, everything! In wintertime there were no toadstools to hang about his neck, but she had sprinkled the room with dried borage flowers and placed in bed with him a bozoar stone that she had sent the kitchen lad Matt out to fetch.
She folded her hands and tears squeezed from between her heavily fringed eyelashes as she said again the familiar, desperate plague prayer which she remembered from the gentle days at Woodstock Manor ten years ag
o when she had hidden from the death there with the Princess Isabella: “Dear and most benevolent St. Roch, blessed protector of plague victims, guard this one from death’s mighty hand. Amen.”
Her mind drifted even as she recited the words again. How strange, another cruel twist of Dame Fortune’s wheel that in bringing her and Bella the Yuletide gifts—the boys too, but then he had always favored them—Thomas had been stricken. Just when he had reached out to her a tiny step at last after these two terribly tense years, he had been stricken. “Dear and most benevolent St. Roch, blessed protector . . . ” For that last kindness, for all the years she had hurt his pride without meaning to, she would see this through. Besides, if she was to be stricken too, except for leaving the children, she almost would not mind dying. No. No. She was only thirty years old and she had not meant that. “Dear St. Roch, guard this one from death’s mighty hand. Amen.”
When the low knock sounded on the chamber door, she was not certain she had heard it at first. “Aye? Is someone there?”
“Matt. Matt from the kitchen, milady.”
Thomas’s eyes flew wide open but closed again, and he mumbled low, undiscernible words, but that would not last long if he kept up as he had been all night alternately mumbling then screaming his terrible accusations. She rose and, as she went to the door, she marveled how she almost floated. Her head no longer spun but her feet hardly seemed to touch the floor.
“Matt, what is it?” she asked, her cheek pressed to the wooden door. “No one is to come up unless I call, I said.”
“Aye, milady, only this be very important. Master Roger Wakeley, he come back, come in through the back kitchen door so Lynette say I come tell you at once, milady.”
Roger Wakeley! He had been gone since before the Jacquerie and now to just dance back into her life as he had done before and at this time seemed much too much to bear all of a sudden. “Why did he come, Matt? Tell him no, I cannot see him. Tell him there is plague and send him away!”