by Karen Harper
It was the most lovely solar chamber she had ever seen, with large glass panes to let in the light and two recessed window seats. The huge fireplace was carved with leaves and flowers to echo the frieze along the edge of the painted ceiling. The floor was of finest azure- and gold-glazed tiles set with the Plantagenet leopard and French fleurs-de-lis.
Tears came to her eyes at this sunlit realm of peace and grace his workmen had created here, for even bare of hangings, furniture, and carpets at this moment, it was the most enticingly intimate haven she had ever beheld.
“It is exquisite! I love it, my Edward!”
She thought for one moment he would seize her but she must have been wrong, for his eyes only looked away to a recessed doorway past the mantel. He walked over to open the door, and she moved closer to see. As she peered into the next large chamber lit by warm sunglow, his voice behind her rasped dangerously low, “The State Chamber, but no bed quite yet, damn it.”
She stepped into another wonder. This bedchamber was as elegant as the solar, but more charming for its mullioned windows, ornate mantel, and painted ceilings—a painting of an azure, cloud-studded sky. But most breathtaking was the lush pile of furs, brocades, silks, and velvets all on bolts or in huge swathes spilled across the tiled floor like a great, shimmering sea.
“Saints, Your Grace! They are beautiful! Which of these will go where?”
He clicked the door closed behind him and followed her in. “Now that you have seen the principal rooms, I thought mayhap you could help me decide, love,” he said. “I would pay you for your help most royally.”
She shot him a quick look and took in the grin on his suddenly devilish face. She smiled back but chose to ignore the veiled taunt and knelt at the edge of the rich array of materials, stroking, examining each she could touch. He came to sit cross-legged beside her, his eyes watching as she scrutinized the bounty.
From somewhere in the room he had magically produced a leather-covered flagon and poured two golden goblets of bubbly wine.
“Oh, thank you, my Edward. My throat is parched. Then there are servants here?”
He lifted one eyebrow as his gaze went thoroughly over her, almost causing her to spill her wine on the rose-hued swath of velvet across her lap. She pressed her legs tightly together and leveled as cool a look at him as she could manage over the rim of her goblet.
“No, sweetheart. I told you, no one is here but the guards we left down on the pier. I had this placed here for us. The leather bottle keeps it cool.”
“Oh. It is delicious. Look at this velvet, Edward. I really would love it on chairs and bolsters in the solar.”
“Done. What else? What would you like for bed coverlet and hangings in here? This is exactly where the big bed will go. I am too tall to abide short ones, you know.”
She drained half of her wine and set the goblet back away so he could not see how her hands were trembling. “The bed. A big bed here. This azure brocade over in this stack. Look, Edward, it is the same hue as Plantagenet crests and banners, and it would perfectly fit the heavenly ceiling you have had painted.”
She leaned forward on her knees and put one hand down in the riot of fabrics to reach for the azure brocade. Behind her he moved, swift as a lion, crinkling satin, crushing velvets under his big knees as he reached for her. One hand came around her waist and the other touched, then turned her hips. Instantly, she found herself on her back amidst the downy pile of rich materials, staring up at his intense, handsome face with the painted blue sky beyond.
“Edward, let me up. We will wrinkle all this fabric,” she began, but his hands and body pressed her softly down.
“Damn this fabric and this whole place if I cannot have you,” he said before the sweet onslaught of hands and mouth began.
He entwined his fingers in her loosely curled coiffure to hold her head still when she tried to protest. She hated the few, feeble struggles she permitted herself before wrapping her arms around his neck to return his kisses.
All her vows, all her planning, her long-rehearsed denials drowned in a sea of helpless futility. He could never marry her, granted, she thought, not after how his parents felt, after everything. But she would be with him like this whenever he sent a letter to her or crooked one little finger. Anywhere. Always.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
All that night after she had been to Kennington with the prince, Joan paced her bedroom at Windsor in dizzying circles while her two maids slept in the outer chamber. Of course he loved her, wanted to have her, as he put it—she believed all that now. He had said all those things again at their parting this evening as well as assuring her they would be together from now on and that she was to trust him to care for her always. He had left written orders behind at Kennington for his workers, carefully describing the fabric samples she had chosen which must be used to complete each room. Saints, she saw the royal handwriting on the palace wall clearly enough—he had decided Kennington would be her home while she lived in elegant splendor as his acknowledged, well-beloved mistress.
She stopped her furious circling of the room to lean on the small, deeply recessed window ledge. Outside it was that tenuous silver-gray which hovered just before dawn. The whole night had passed; she had paced in circles and thought in circles and arrived absolutely nowhere.
He had said he must see his parents to explain things and then he would speak with her this afternoon about their strategies. Strategies! Did he think she was another town to be conquered or battle to be won? She had a name, a heritage, and family to worry about, and his strategies for her would just never do however much she loved him.
She began to dress hurriedly in the same riding outfit she had worn to Kennington as her frenzied thoughts rattled on. She could never be another Fair Rosamonde to be hidden away in a bower to be visited when he had time. Edward would no doubt ask her to go with him to Aquitaine next year, but bastard children born here or there would still be bastards.
It was her fault, she scolded herself again as she yanked on her riding boots. Her fault not only for loving him so desperately but for leading him on, aye, for letting him have her, as he put it, on their first full day back together after years of separation. His beguiling smile; his lean, manly body; a stunning new palace to decorate at her whim, and she had capitulated as completely as any French town he had ever conquered. Saints, there was only one thing to do to seize control of her life whatever the cost of passion’s pain.
She opened the door to the outer chamber. “Gertrude, Sarah, get up. I need you.”
They stumbled in bleary-eyed, and Gertrude stubbed her toe on the leg of the dressing table.
“Heavens, you ninnies, be careful. Now listen to me. Get your cloaks, take a wall sconce from the hall, and send a linkboy from downstairs to the stables. I want my horse saddled immediately and two of the guards and the squire I brought from Liddell found and roused. I am going home this morn. You two will pack and follow on the morrow with the other guard.”
“Home? Already, milady?” Sarah protested. “But we only been at Windsor these four days an’ you said—”
“Forget what I said. Gertrude, if your toe is all right, you two go on now.”
She left a hurried note on the little table of her room for Edward, her dear Edward, and said a quick prayer over it he would love her enough not to curse her or follow her either:
My Dearest E.,
There is so much I would say, but let it be only this. I have loved you from the start and knew it not. I do know the truth—and full pain—of that love now.
Fortune’s wheel has spun again to put us within reach, but now I see it must go no further.
Please understand and let me go though I shall always love you.
Bless you, my Edward, and your great destiny.
J.
She left another quick note for Princess Isabella, and in a half hour she was mounted with her startled little band of Liddell retainers although the squire could not be found; by dawn the
walls and towers of Windsor were mere child’s toys in the Thames Valley below. By late afternoon, she was home.
She stood on shaky legs still holding her horse’s reins in cramped, gloved fingers and stared glumly about the familiar courtyard of her beloved fortified manor house. What was that he had said to her only yesterday? “Please God, we shall never have to wall up English homes anymore with moats and towers to keep out invaders.” Aye, that was it. But now, eternally, her invader would be here within these walls, within her heart, for the invader was the love she would always carry for him. How different this place looked when she thought of it that way, as a sanctuary invaded by what she could never have, by what she had chosen to lose. Dear saints, how had it ever come so quickly to this, and yet she knew what she must do.
“Emmett! Jonathan!” she shouted to the old pair of guards who had watched over Liddell’s gatehouse for years. The men who had ridden hard in with her from Windsor turned back to stare at her as they led their mounts off toward the stables. She knew they had glanced askance at her and whispered all the way home, but she did not have to explain a thing to them if she chose not to. Let them all think she had gone insane—become a recluse from the outside world even as her mother had years before.
“Aye, milady,” Old Emmett called from the gatehouse entrance. As always, the old man turned his cap nervously in his gnarled hands and shuffled his feet when he spoke to her.
“I want you, Jonathan, and whoever else it takes to pull up the drawbridge,” she called to him and heard someone behind her gasp in surprise.
“Duchess,” Thomas, one of her guards, put in as he ran across the courtyard from his horse. “Are we being pursued? Should we to arms?”
“No,” she told him, told them all in a loud, commanding voice. She was exhausted, grieved, right on the knife’s edge of a crying jag, and they dared to question her, to protest. “No,” she said. “I just want it up for a while, that is all, so do it!”
Old Emmett shuffled across the cobbled courtyard toward her, his wrinkled face crumpled in a frown. “Doubt it even works, my lady duchess. Hain’t been up fer years a course. No need here’bouts.”
“There is a need. I say so. Oil it. Fix it or whatever, but get it closed. Is that understood?”
She did not wait for the bumbling answer nor to be subjected to their whispers or pitying glances as she spun on her booted heel and strode into the house. On the steps she nearly collided with Roger Wakeley, lute in hand.
“Sacrebleu, Duchess Joan! Back already? How was His Grace? What is all the yelling?”
She glared at the kindly, smiling face and charged on up the steps with him in her wake. In her own solar at last, she stripped off her gloves and threw them on the table, then collapsed in a chair. Roger stopped, looking precariously balanced across the table from her, his face all too obviously disappointed.
“I am really tired from the ride back, Master Roger, and wish to have some time alone. I will see the children as soon as I have composed myself, and I shall call for you later.”
“You evidently left Windsor in some haste. And the children are not here. You did tell Madeleine they could go to the summer fair at Chatham, you know, and they went with Lord Wrothesby and his niece as you had said they might. Bella was thrilled. They cannot possibly be back before the morrow as they were to spend a night at Wrothesby Hall en route both ways. It was your suggestion, you know.”
“Aye, fine, I hear you. I am not ranting or raving about it, am I? I told them well enough they could go, and you should have gone too. No better place to find a few new love songs of fair romance, eh, Roger? And close the door as you go out. And see if the old fools at the gatehouse have pulled up the drawbridge as I ordered them—please.”
“The drawbridge—that rusted old thing? Duchess, have you—are you fleeing from someone?”
It disturbed her that she had seemed to lose control of her voice, of her words. “No! No, of course not, only mayhap from myself, though that is nothing new. Saints, Roger, just get out and leave me to myself. Now!”
She could tell he considered disobeying her, but after a hesitant moment, he turned away, went quietly out, and closed the door. She sat. She stared. She wept. She remembered. At last she fell on the bed and slept in great heaves of rolling dreams like a frightened little craft tossed by huge, weltering waves of agonized seas.
When she woke at dawn the next day, she was sprawled across her bed, stiff and sore under a coverlet someone had draped over her. She sat and stretched. Her stomach was cramped with hunger but she drank only wine left on the table and at last washed yesterday’s road dust from her body and her long hair. She let her damp tresses dry and curl themselves in the growing heat of the July day. One window had been left wide ajar and out there somewhere on the slate roof, one stupid bird kept warbling his song as though nothing had happened. She lay back on her bed ignoring the slow spread of water from her damp hair across the linen pillowcase beneath her and stared at the shadowy underside of her bed canopy for endless minutes.
Sometime later she heard Roger’s voice, then a sharp rap on her door. “Go away, Master Roger. I do not want to see anyone.”
“But I need to see you.”
“Is Vinette all right?”
Brazenly, he opened the door without permission to enter and poked his head in. “Vinette is normal for Vinette,” he said, his usually bland voice angry. “And how about you?”
“If Vinette is all right, go away. You might sing to her a little while. It always calms her to have you sing.”
“My dear duchess, Vinette, as we both know, is well enough lost to this world since she believes her Pierre died of plague back in Normandy and you would not let her stay forever at his grave. She is not changed. She sits and stares at corners of her room, even as you evidently intend to do. You are not your poor, sad, helpless lady mother to handle losing him this way, dear duchess. I cannot bring myself to believe it, but is that what has happened?”
She saw he had come much closer as she sat up on the side of the bed and swung her feet down. Saints, but she was dizzy.
“I do not wish to discuss it, Roger, and I have asked you to leave me alone,” she said low. Why did not the fond fool just go? Aye, she had thought of her mother closed up in this room for years after she lost the man she loved, but this was not like that at all. Or not like the demented, ruined girl downstairs who moaned and wept for her lost love. No, not like them at all!
“Did they—is the drawbridge secure?” she heard herself ask him.
“Aye, the damn rusty thing is up. I only hope you do not intend for all of us to starve walled up here as we are. I hope we can get it down when the children return. You do intend at least to let your children into this little fortress you are making, do you not? Castles today hardly need walls anymore with moats and towers since peace with the French, I daresay.”
“Get out, get out! Go spy somewhere or sing somewhere! Go play fond love songs elsewhere, but not here!”
The look he gave her was one of pity rather than concern or anger and for that she hit her fist on her bed after he went out and closed the door in maddening silence. Then, she sat frozen as he dared to sit right outside in the hall and strum the melody to a song she had made her favorite since Thomas had died and she had dared to hope the destiny hinted at in the old astrologer Morcar’s charts might become reality:
“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,
But blindingly and armored bright
I hid such proof
Nor saw this truth.
And now sweet passion’s pain doth teach
That my last chance must be great reach,
For wildly doth Dame Fortune’s wheel
> Spin by such proof
Nor halt for truth.
Welcome, sweet passion’s pain, until
My heart shall recognize its will.
Whatever prophecies proclaim,
I know such proof,
Accept this truth.”
She wanted to scream at him to stop, but it was all too perfect, too ordained—even destined. When he sang the lyrics again from the other side of the closed door, it was as if she herself sang them accepting the truth of inescapable, inevitable reality. Saints, she could probably survive without Edward, Prince of Wales, but she could never really live without him. And she wanted to live, very, very much.
“Roger!”
He opened the door and nearly fell into the room. “Aye, my duchess?”
“I feel better now. I need some food. The children are not back, are they?”
“No, Duchess. And if they were, they would find your blessed drawbridge stuck.”
“Oh, saints. I should never have done that. Gertrude and Sarah should be home today, too. I have been acting crazy, I know it, so you need not lecture me again.”
“I? Never, milady. But, is there something else you have done you should not have? When you fled back so suddenly from Windsor like that after I was so certain—”
“Please do not start! Aye, I left him! I ran away like a coward because I could never be his wife, and I could not face more of these separations like we have had over the years.”
“Not be his wife? Whyever not? What has happened then? I know for a fact he always intended it, dreamed of it.”
“Hell’s gates, so the master Plantagenet spy of all times speaks! Dreamed of it? Intended it? Well, so have I, but what does that matter to the king and queen? To duty and necessity? To England? I—betrothed, wed, unbetrothed, wed again—I, a widow of a minor knight with three children—I, a rabble-rouser over my father’s execution to boot—it is utterly impossible, my dear fellow lutenist. Aye, mayhap I am crazy like Vinette. Do you know what he planned? To have me as an acknowledged mistress, aye, with a velvet cage—a whole palace—to await his visits, but a wife—impossible! Now just leave me alone and tell them I will be right out. St. George, dearest Roger, I have made such a mess of things, left him, insulted the queen too, and I shall never make things aright! Just go on now!”