The First Princess of Wales

by Karen Harper

  “He say he knows that, milady, and that is why he say come talk to him now.”

  “The fool,” she whispered to the door. “A spy, a fool, a deceiver.” Her voice dissolved in a sob, and she bit her lower lip to halt the flood of tears which threatened.

  “Matt. Tell him to come to the bottom of the stairs and I will talk to him. Tell him it cannot be long.”

  She heard the boy’s flying feet in the hall. He was probably only too glad to get away. She smoothed back her wild, loose hair, and left the door ajar so she could hear Thomas when the raving began.

  In the dim stretch of corridor, the air seemed fresh and calm in contrast to the inferno of the little room where she nursed him. The sulfur powder she threw into the fire and the borage hardly even fazed her anymore since she had grown almost numb to their penetrating odors.

  She sat several steps down the curving flight of stairs where no one at the bottom could see her. She heard nothing below. Nervously, she smoothed the skirt of her green wool kirtle over her knees.

  “Master Roger?” she ventured and her voice sounded almost ghostly in the aching silence of the Château.

  “Lady Joan! Aye, I am here and I need to see you. Please, lady, I must come up.”

  “No, you cannot. Did they not tell you my Lord Thomas is hard smitten?”

  “Aye. And with the plague. The fact I have come now is God’s gift to you, Lady Joan, I am certain of it. I am sorry for Lord Thomas, but do not fear for your own safety.”

  The words seemed to roll right over her although she tried to grasp each one. He made no sense. It made no sense he had come back. Then she heard his quick, light tread on the stairs but before she could rise to flee, he rounded the curve of wall and seized her hands in his.

  “Lady Joan, do not run. Sacrebleu, it is all right, I tell you.”

  “No! Are you crazy! It is plague, I said! Plague! I have sent the children away and—”

  “And stayed here to die yourself?”

  “Mayhap!”

  “That is just it, lady. I believe you cannot die from it. I should have explained it long ago to you but there was never any threat or need.”

  “I cannot? What do you mean I cannot?” Her eyes darted over the kindly face which had been so familiar, yet so deceitful and so treasured over the years from her maidenhood days. A little glimmer of thought leapt out from her deepest buried memories then, even as Roger Wakeley, still grasping her hands in his, began to explain.

  “When you were a child and I first came to Liddell years ago—”

  “When the king sent you to spy on Edmund of Kent’s traitorous wife, my lady mother, you mean!”

  “Aye. We have had that conversation before. You and old Marta bound my broken leg then.”

  “I remember that.”

  “And do you remember then those who lived at Liddell also nursed me through a disease where I had a fever and swellings on my neck?”

  Her lavender eyes lifted to lock with his intense, brown ones. “Aye, I do recall it.”

  “And I recovered.”

  “So you mean Thomas might recover?”

  “That is not what I mean, lady. When I was sick, it spread to three others at Liddell. Two house servants died but you and I recovered.”

  “I was sick with it? And it was plague?”

  “I believe so. Few recover but we both did and once you survive it, you are destined to never be smitten with it again.”

  “Destined,” she breathed, her stunned mind darting not to that maidenhood illness of which the faintest memory persisted, but to Morcar’s star charts she had in her possession in the solar now, and to Prince Edward’s last departing words that he had once believed she was destined to be his. Destined, she marveled. Destined to escape de Maltravers’s attempt to kill her, destined to escape the brutal Jacquerie—and now this.

  “You do remember. You do believe me?” Roger Wakeley’s smooth voice slid into her reverie.

  “Aye. But why did you come back here? Why now? His Grace, King Edward, surely has not sent you on another fool’s errand to report on me, for I am no worry to him anymore.”

  “Are you not? But indeed, I come of my own free will for the first time in so many years, I hate to admit it, my Lady Joan. His Grace has sent me once to your lady mother, once to you, once to his own poor, lonely mother, the deposed Queen Isabella, and once even to His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales to spy, but I swear to you that is all behind me now.”

  He looked at her so earnestly that his lower lip trembled, and his forehead, hid by his long, straight brown hair, crashed down to nearly hide his intense, shadowed eyes.

  “His own mother and the Prince of Wales too,” she faltered. “Indeed, I have kept good company over the years. And now?”

  “The old boy wanted me to travel clear to Castile to sing for and spy on Pedro, King of Castile. Sacrebleu, I am too weary of it all, too old, and besides, Pedro is rumored to be crazed and sadistic. And so, lady, I come to you a refugee, to one who also has disobeyed our great King Edward and likely will again. I only pray that you will trust me enough to take me in here.”

  Her weary eyes searched his earnest face. “Aye, my old friend Roger, when you put it so, I can hardly deny you. Saints, I have made enough of my own stupid mistakes in a life much shorter than yours not to recognize the need to escape and begin again. You may stay.”

  As if to protest her ready decision, Thomas Holland’s voice shattered the silence from down the dim hall behind her.

  “I must go to him. Thank you for your blessed news. Later, when you have rested—the children are at the weaver’s croft on the south side of town. You could visit there and tell them I love them, see how they are.”

  “I shall, lady, and then I shall be back. When you take a rest next time, there is more to tell. You are exhausted and must have help in this. I shall be back soon.” He loosed her hands as startled as she that he had held them all that time. Appalled at the words he heard the sick man shouting in the distance, he turned and ran down the steps to spare her the added shame.

  “Joan! Joan!” the demented voice shrieked down the echoing hall. “I will kill him, kill him! Fetch the prince to me. Kill him. To keep you. Bastard! Royal bastard! Kill him to keep you.”

  Joan ran down the hall to his room and slammed the door. She bent over Thomas to sponge his face.

  “Hush, my dearest lord, hush. You know not what you are saying.”

  “The queen. All her fault. I adored her. She only used me. I cannot kill her son. No one but kings dare to kill kings. Is he king yet, the prince?”

  His wild copper eye darted, rolled. His eye patch had pulled free again and for one of the few times in their ten-year marriage, Joan beheld the poor, emptied eye socket.

  “The queen. Queen Philippa,” his frenzied words tumbled out much lower now. “She never sends for me anymore. The prince never wants me there—to fight with him anymore. Never.”

  “Here, Thomas, drink a little cool wine. It has winterbloom in it to keep your sores from bleeding. Here, my lord.”

  She poured a little through his cracked lips, but most spilled out to run down his unshaven jaw and neck. He breathed heavily now, almost panting, and his breath smelled foul. His copper eye had somehow glazed over with a look of distant unreality, the coldness of death.

  “Dear and most benevolent St. Roch, blessed protector of plague victims, guard this one from death’s mighty hand. Amen.”

  She repeated the prayer again, staring helplessly down at him, waiting for she knew not what. She heard the creak of door behind her and turned expecting to see Roger Wakeley. But there, her gaunt, white face etched by cavorting firelight, her reddish hair all wild like blown straw about her staring eyes, stood Vinette Brinay.

  “Saints! Vinette!”

  The woman seemed to glide toward Joan. She came close and leaned slightly over the bed. Her long, disheveled hair fell over her face like flaming silk, and Joan took a step away in some unname
able horror.

  “I knew Pierre must be here somewhere,” Vinette said, and her voice sounded rough and crackled. “I am glad they did not catch him and he is not dead yet, madame.”

  “Vinette, where have you been? Two years. How did you get here?”

  Vinette turned her head to answer but stared past into apparent vacancy. “Here? I belong here. You promised it to me when you fled with the children. Did you think I would forget? Pierre loves me, madame. He wants to wed with me.”

  “I do not know where you have been, Vinette, or how you came here now, but you must go away. This is my Lord Thomas, and he is very ill.”

  “I am so glad your prince did not kill him. Poor Pierre. I will take care of him now.”

  Vinette’s hands, so thin Joan could almost see bones and blue veins beneath the papery skin, reached out to untie Thomas’s linen bindings. Joan pulled Vinette’s hands back sharply.

  “Vinette, you are not well. I am going to put you in another room as you cannot go back down to the servants now. Come on with me.”

  “No. No! You wanted to be untied, you begged. Do you not remember? Pierre is mine—my Château Ruisseau. You get away. He wants to marry me!”

  In a frenzied move, her hands raised like claws, she threw herself at Joan and they hit hard into a carved oak post of the bedstead. Thomas jolted awake to shout his incoherent curses as wild colors danced before Joan’s eyes at the blow to the back of her head. A sobbing, screaming, wild-faced Vinette scratched and kicked at Joan under her on the carpeted floor by the bed, but both women were hampered by their skirts and hair. Shocked for an instant, exhausted and furious, Joan at last struck out at the girl’s contorted face. Then, even as Joan’s wasted strength allowed her to subdue the maddened, thrashing woman, Roger Wakeley appeared to yank Vinette off her. Vinette writhed even in his arms, screaming and cursing as he dragged her away out into the hall where a door slammed and all fell to silence again.

  On her knees, Joan hunched over, both palms flat on the carpet to stop the room from swaying. Shaking, stunned, she gasped for breath even as she heard Thomas do so on the bed above her. She shoved the great, golden curtain of her hair back from her face and stood unsteadily.

  She prayed aloud to St. Roch to comfort herself as she tried to give Thomas more of the cool winterbloom-laced wine she realized would do him no good now. She heard Roger Wakeley come back in. Without glancing up, she knew he stood on the other side of the bed.

  “Forgive me, Lady Joan, for letting that happen. I found her in the next village on my way here and barely recognized her. I thought she had gone mad or had simply run off and was playing daft to avoid being punished. She was living in the back room of a mill and served, I warrant, as not much else than the mill owner’s poor, demented trollop.”

  Joan did not look away from Thomas’s increasingly bluish face. “Poor Vinette,” she whispered through sudden tears.

  “When I heard from the servants here about what had happened, I told them to care for her downstairs, but she somehow drifted off and no one would come up here to seek her. I am sorry.”

  “It hardly matters now, Roger. It is judgment on me somehow, destined to be saved or not myself. You heard what Thomas has been yelling and what Vinette said, too. My husband who loathes me lies here screaming his hatred because I have loved the prince, and that poor, insane girl down the hall detests me since she thinks I take her dead Pierre whom the prince had hanged over two years ago! Saints, it is just too damn, awful much to bear sometimes!”

  He came around the bed to comfort her, but she put a hand up to stop him. “No. I am all right. My husband is dying now and I must care for him. You go out in the hall and sing, Master Roger, not of anything that would distress him but of green woods and riding. No songs of glorious battle or love, only mayhap of sweet springtime coming soon.”

  He touched her trembling hands for one moment. “Aye, my Lady Joan. And gladly for you.”

  He went out and closed the door, and shortly after the soothing flow of lute and lyrics began. Between her increasingly frenzied prayers to St. Roch, she clung to the music to keep her sane as Thomas Holland gasped the remnants of his life away in the grinding grip of plague delirium.

  Thomas Holland had been buried under the floorstones of the Château’s chapel for an entire week before Joan felt the place was safe enough to summon the children back from Madeleine’s family’s crude little croft near town. None of the servants had been smitten and she herself felt no encroaching disease. She felt nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  She ordered the servants to scrub every room he had been in since he’d returned from buying the Yule gifts in Pont-Audemer. All his garments, the bedclothes from his room, even the fine Persian carpet she had burned and the charred remains were buried outside the Château walls. She insisted his squires wash his horse twice with ash-leaf balm to cleanse it. She had the gifts he had brought them that last day he was himself soaked for three days in black willow-bark water to purify any of the vile contagion clinging to them. Even now, she could hear Bella somewhere downstairs tooting that ridiculous horn she so loved, her last—her only—gift from a father who could not love her.

  Joan stared up at the too familiar underside of her brocade bed canopy in the solar. A widow at age thirty, her life all turned upside down again. Destined for what? To live on while those about her died over the years? To keep inheriting lands and titles until she was the only one left? To have truly loved only once and to be fated—destined—to never fulfill that love?

  Roger Wakeley began to play again outside her door as he had each morn and afternoon while she slept or rested. It was a blessing he had come back. He amused the children and taught them songs, although the boys took much coaxing to sing and eleven-year-old Thomas had lectured Roger that since his lord father had not cared a whit for music, he did not either. Still, the fact that Roger had known both the king and Prince of Wales went a long way toward making Roger acceptable in young Thomas’s copper eyes.

  She must get up, she told herself, but after three days in bed she still felt listless and separate from the world outside. Had Mother felt this way all those years in her solitary room at Liddell? she mused. For the first time she could almost grasp why she must have not wanted to be disturbed or made to feel, not even wanting her own child about to upset the sweet silence.

  The children. Of course, she must care for the children. But over the years the boys would be reared to knighthood in the great houses of the realm as was proper, and Bella would grow to a beauty and be married. And then, in her bed, just like this, Joan, Duchess of Kent, would be alone.

  Thomas would inherit the birthright lands in Lancashire one day. In four years on his sixteenth saint’s day, he could claim them legally now that his sire was dead. And when she died, John would have Liddell, of course, and this French Château and lands would—

  She sat up in bed and pulled the down-filled coverlet up about her shoulders. Bella did not need this place and the boys would own English lands, mayhap even accrue more through favorable marriages if she could arrange it. She did not want this place, ten years of work to improve it notwithstanding. It was French and she was English and besides, now that the Treaty of Brétigny renounced English claims to Normandy, it would be much harder to hold over the years.

  She would sell this Château and lands and walk away without another look back at the place where Thomas had died, the place where the Jacquerie had left its cruel mark, the place where dear Marta had died so long ago, and where she had parted from her prince forever. Surely there could be no protest from the Plantagenets that a bereaved widow sold her dead lord’s Crécy landholdings and retired to her modest country manorhouse in Kent. She would bother them no more at court, and they would never even hear her name.

  Her brain pulsing with excitement for the first time in weeks, in years, she wrapped herself in the huge coverlet and strode barefooted to open the door to the hall. Roger Wakeley looked up amazed from his cha
ir, then a huge grin lit his face to see the look on hers.

  “I see my lady, the Duchess Joan of Kent, is back again,” he said as his fingers plucked a livelier melody than he had dared to play for days.

  “Aye. Could you summon the children and then come back? And ask Renée to come up when she can. I need to bathe and get dressed.”

  “Your wish is my command, fair lady,” he said and surprised her by handing her his lute before he hurried off down the hall.

  Holding the lute by its neck, she darted a quick look in her polished mirror on the table. Terrible! Purplish circles under the huge, sad lavender eyes, the cheeks drawn and pale, the hair as wild as a Kentish haystack! She tugged a comb through her tresses and tried to pinch some color into her cheeks.

  She sat in a chair by the hearth and wrapped herself more completely in the puffy coverlet, the lute resting in her lap. How long it had been since she had played and sung and meant it. Now, mayhap, at Liddell, she would sing again.

  She strummed the four perfectly attuned strings and felt the light, pear-shaped body of the lute reverberate against her thighs. She smiled wistfully despite herself. Aye, for only the love of music and the love of one man had she ever felt her inner being tremble like that, and at least now, she would have one of those loves to cherish.

  Almost hypnotically her fingers began to pick out the pensive song which had tormented her these last days, and very low, she sang the words aloud unafraid:

  “Sweet passion’s pain doth pierce mine heart

  For I have loved thee from the start,

  But foolishly behind high walls

  I hid such proof

  Nor saw this truth.

  “Sweet passion’s pain doth urge me plead

  That I might be thy love indeed,