by Anne O'Brien
Of course it would not happen. Surely at the eleventh hour Will would remember, between the first chase and the second, that Thomas had a legal claim on me as his lawful wife. Surely that would be the strongest argument for him to refuse Thomas as steward.
I was furious with Thomas that he should give me a morning of worry. What was he thinking? There would be nothing immoral in our household, for I did not think that was Thomas’s intent. He was a man of strong principle. Of duty and of loyalty. And, it seemed, of exceptional cunning.
‘What’s wrong?’ Isabella asked as she prepared to follow her father.
‘Not a thing. I would advise you not to ride to the hunt in that gown. You’ll scare the hounds.’
Isabella looked askance. ‘I will do as I please. You look as if you would like to give your husband an opinion he might not like.’
‘Will is always most accommodating to my desires,’ I said with no certainty at all.
The hunt was over. Will returned, plastered in mud and pleasure.
‘Will, I have to speak with you.’
My accommodating husband swept aside my desires before I had even voiced them. ‘We have a new steward, Joan. Now doesn’t that solve all our problems? Sir Thomas is keen. I can continue to live at court, and you don’t have to strain your pretty eyes at the ledgers.’ He cast himself down on a stool, signalling to one of his pages to pull off his boots.
I was beyond words.
Will sensed my lack of enthusiasm so wisely dismissed the page. ‘Well?’
‘I am delighted to hear our problem is solved!’
‘No, you are not.’
‘Of course I am not. How could you do something so… so ridiculous?’
‘It seemed eminently sensible. The King agreed.’
‘The King doesn’t know the complications here. Oh, Will! Are you witless? What if the tale of my first marriage is dropped amongst the gossip mongers at court? And there we will be, the three of us, happily living within the same household.’
‘But there is no such talk, Joan. It never was a legal binding between you and Sir Thomas.’ I set my teeth at his perennial insouciance. ‘You are married to me. Besides, who’s to talk of it now, after all these years?’
‘Scandal has a way of emerging when least expected. How the court will enjoy this. We will be a general laughing stock. Or you will. Have you even thought about it? The cuckolded husband. I can imagine what will be whispered, that Thomas used blackmail to get this position, threatening you to make him steward or he would broadcast the marriage to all and sundry. Do you want that?’
‘It won’t happen.’ Will poured himself a cup of ale since I made no attempt to do so. ‘Holland has given up on the prospect of you as his wife. He sees it as all water under the matrimonial bridge.’
‘Did you actually discuss it?’
‘No. We did not need to.’
‘Such honour amongst men! I don’t believe it!’
It was becoming increasingly difficult not to sweep the cup from his hand.
Will’s tone dropped to a condescending level. ‘This will be a purely business affair. There is no need for you to fear for your reputation, Joan. It would not surprise me if he did not seek another bride within the year.’
‘And did you discuss that too?’
‘What if we did?’
What could I say? Hardly that I had no belief in Thomas’s sanguine acceptance. But neither could I make a fuss. Will had decided and it was done. All I could say: ‘Well, as long as my reputation does not suffer. I have no wish to be part of a household drenched in the scarlet of scandal.’
‘Nonsense. Of course it won’t.’ A twinkle graced his eye as he kissed my cheek. ‘And my mother and grandmother will be there at Bisham as chaperone. There will be no dishonour or impropriety.’ The twinkle became warmer, his voice a little sly. ‘Besides, I think that it is time.’
‘Time for what?’
Despite his mud and dishevelment, Will’s arm curved around my waist.
‘I think, dear Joan, that it is time that we consummated this marriage.’
My heart thumped uncomfortably. It was time. It was more than time. I did not want to even contemplate it.
‘Not while you are covered with mud,’ I said.
‘That’s easily remedied.’ He kissed my cheek again as I turned my head so that he missed my lips.
‘And not while we are in mourning, Will,’ I added, snatching at reasons. ‘It would not be seemly.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ He looked as if he had forgotten.
I patted his arm. ‘Later.’
It was not, naturally, to be expected that this would be my last word on the subject of our new steward. These were addressed to the man in question.
‘How could you conceive of something so outrageous?’ I wasted no breath.
I cornered Thomas. Sometimes Will was too innocent a target. The King did not know what he had accomplished, but Thomas did. Thomas knew very well what he was about, all carefully planned like a battle campaign. He needed an occupation. He knew that our new household was in need. He could be uncommonly persuasive, as I knew to my cost.
‘With uncommon ease.’
‘Did you think this… this debacle would please me?’
‘I don’t see it as a debacle. And frankly, Joan, I am no longer certain what will please you.’
‘If even the whisper of our marriage escapes, the Salisbury household will become a thing of ridicule.’
‘But who will speak of it? Your family won’t. Will and his mother have their mouths sewn up. The Earl is dead. You priest is unfortunately – or fortunately – gone to receive his due reward in heaven. Our witnesses are sworn on the threat of God’s vengeance that they will not speak until I tell them to do so.’
‘I fear that someone will.’
‘The hawks in the Ghent mews? They are all dead by now.’
‘You have an answer to everything.’
‘Well, I don’t. I don’t yet have an answer to how to get you back. Any ideas?’
‘No.’
‘Do you wish to come back? I am not even sure.’
‘Neither am I. I am no longer sure that you love me. Or that I love you.’
‘You are a fool, Joan.’
‘I am beleaguered, Thomas.’ He simply looked at me with lifted brows. ‘You cannot expect it to be easy, living together in such close proximity. Why would you do it?’
‘Apart from a need to make a living? It is very simple. I will be able to see my wife. I will be able to talk with her, to serve her, even if I cannot touch her. Even if I can never take her to my bed.’
His honesty touched me, like the soft caress of a dove’s feather. Life was becoming more difficult by the moment.
Chapter Five
Thomas Holland took to estate management like a starving rat to old cheese-pairings. The elderly Salisbury steward was retired and Thomas stepped into his shoes in the dark, draughty and sprawling manor of Bisham with capable feet.
I was astonished at the precision with which he undertook every thing that came within his responsibility. There was nothing demeaning in a knight taking office as steward in a great magnate’s household. Indeed it would be considered a step of pre-eminence for Sir Thomas Holland to hold such a position. How right he proved to be: if he could lead men into battle, he could win over the servants from high to low and earn their respect, using either a bark of command or choice vocabulary favoured by the soldiering fraternity. When he did not know, he asked. He approached Will’s council with dignity. He addressed Will’s mother with a cool decorum that she enjoyed, while pandering disgracefully to Will’s grandmother with charm. In his dealings with Will he was deferential but firm in his opinions. He had them all eating out of his hand.
Here were unknown depths to this man, a range of skills of which I, in my short acquaintance, had never been aware. Perhaps he had not too, but his growing mastery won my admiration, another layer to add to my discomfit
ure.
And in his dealings with me? Thomas’s behaviour towards me was exemplary. So was mine towards him. There would be no dishonouring of Will.
Dowager Countess Catherine, at first, proved more than suspicious.
‘I do not approve. Was this your doing, Joan?’
‘It most certainly was not,’ I replied lightly, as if it was of no moment to me. ‘I would never have considered Sir Thomas to be adept at such a task. Your son was the one who accepted the offer. The King also thought it was a good idea. If you consider that I am a woman willing to discredit my birth by allowing any level of immorality beneath my roof, you do not know me well.’
She stiffened at my claim to have authority at Bisham. We did not speak of it again.
And so we lived, seemly as nuns in a convent. I could not see the future. I knew that this state of calm could not continue for ever. It was certainly the calm before the storm I had first envisaged so many years ago now, but when this tempest would break and how devastating the deluge, I could not imagine.
Sometimes I could feel Thomas’s stare, boring into the space between my shoulders. Once the touch of his hand when he passed me a napkin with which to wipe my fingers was like a charge of power between us. It stopped when I dropped the napkin. He placed it, neatly folded, beside my knife at the table.
Nothing overt. Nothing deliberate.
By the end of the first month, when I was wishing for the comforts and luxuries of my cousin Edward’s rebuilding at Windsor, Will, in light-hearted mood, began to suggest suitable brides for our steward. Thomas, so it seemed to me, began to listen. I too listened, frozen into displeasure.
But would it not be the best possible of outcomes?
I learned the worst of myself in those days. I could not have Thomas Holland, but I would not willingly hand him over to another woman. Green-eyed jealousy was not an emotion with which I was familiar; never having in my privileged life the need to desire what belonged to another. Now I experienced its discomfort, its piercing fury.
Meanwhile the King, with much enthusiasm that was fast transferred to his household knights and military men, was planning a new campaign in France.
It left me restless, driven by a need to say more, to do more when it became a subject of discussion that, given this opportunity, Thomas might once again take the path to war and never return. Honour said that I should say nothing. Duty said that I should stay as far away from him as I could except in the daily needs of the household. But whether it be romantic yearning or merely thwarted desire, it drove me to find him in the depths of the vast arched cellar where he was occupied in counting barrels and sides of cured meat with one of his minions. My only excuse was…
But I had no excuse, rather a need to be within his self-imposed domain.
‘My lady?’ He looked up from the list under his hand.
‘Sir Thomas.’
‘Can I be of assistance?’ I detected a lack of enthusiasm.
‘I believe you can.’
‘I am your servant, my lady.’ And to the underling: ‘Take this and give it to the cook. He will tell you where there is a lack in our accounting. Ask him if he can explain the whereabouts of six tuns of fine Bordeaux wine.’ And when he had gone, ‘Now, my lady. I can think of no need for you to be in your cellar at this time of day.’
He was not friendly. He suspected me of playing with fire. There was much truth in it.
‘Will you sit?’ I requested.
‘Where?’
He made no move to do so.
‘That barrel will do.’
‘Why? It would not be courteous for me to sit while you stand.’
‘Just sit down!’
‘If you wish, my lady.’
How prosaic. He angled his body to perch on a small barrel of salted fish, while I stood in front of him.
‘What do you want, Joan?’
He was no longer my steward but my lover.
‘I might never see you again.’
He did not question what I might mean. Perhaps he understood. Or perhaps he trusted me, as he should, to deal circumspectly. And yet when I touched his face, the lightest of touches with my fingertips against his cheek, he flinched a little, and when my fingers travelled on to discover the tied ends of the silk band, his own rose to still them.
‘Don’t!’
‘But I will. I did not think you would be shy of your scars.’
‘I am not. But what man would willingly exhibit them to the woman he loves?’
His voice was suddenly harsh, tearing at my heart. I softened mine in compassion.
‘Then I will tell you. A man who is proud of their begetting. A man who was courageous in battle. You have both those attributes.’
‘Then do as you wish.’
He let his hands fall away, as I loosed the silk.
Jesu!
He was horribly scarred. The eyelid permanently closed now, a scar ran deeply across it from his hairline to just below the arc of his cheek bones. Any deeper and I suspect he would have died. Gently, I touched the puckering flesh, no longer red and angry after all these years but I could imagine how once it was. He was a brave man to withstand the pain, as were so many of our knights.
I could also understand why he had hidden it from me, for it had destroyed his comeliness and there was a vanity in him after all. Yet how typical of him to draw attention to it in so cavalier a fashion. Under my ministrations Thomas remained perfectly still, as if carved in marble. But when, without warning, I leaned and pressed my lips against his disfigurement, I felt him exhale long and deep, as if he had long held a fear of which he could not speak.
‘You do not despise me,’ he said. ‘You do not find the scar distasteful.’
‘I do not.’
I smoothed my fingers over the silk I still held, contemplating his future, and mine, unable to envisage either.
‘Will you ever not wear this?’ I asked, struggling against the huge well of sadness that seemed to have opened up beneath my heart.
‘One day. When I am full satisfied with my fighting for the honour of God and St. George and England. Then I will take it off.’ For a moment he hesitated, head tipped back so that he could look at me. ‘Does it disgust you?’ he asked again.
‘No. Did you think that it would?’
‘How am I to know what is in a woman’s mind? And one with royal blood, that has the power to bestow on a woman inordinate pride. I am only a soldier.’ For the first time since Thomas had returned to England and found me wed, I heard regret in his voice as his fingers found mine and pressed down a little. ‘I still cannot believe that you were willing to join your name to mine.’
‘We haven’t made a good fist of it,’ I said. ‘And I cannot hurt Will. He is my friend, has always been so, and has no ill will towards either of us.’
For a long moment he looked at me as if weighing the words he wished to say.
‘Remember this. If I die in battle, so that we never discover an opportunity to be together as man and wife, remember that I never loved anyone but you.’
He touched my cheek with the back of his hand, while I turned my head to press my lips there. It was the most tender of caresses, awakening all I recalled of that youthful love that had afflicted me. I pressed his hand against my cheek, enjoying the moment of unexpectedly breathless affinity.
But not for long. His voice was suddenly as edged as the sword that he did not wear.
‘Why did you do it Joan? Why did you allow yourself to be thrust into this marriage? Why not just tell the King that you could not legally take the step? That you were my wife? You wed me in good faith, yet within the year you had entered into a marriage with William Montagu. But why? You are the most headstrong woman I know, yet you let yourself be browbeaten into denying me. How could you do it, to cause so much inconvenience? This chaos is of your making.’
The atmosphere in the cellar swooped into the cold of winter ice. Could he not have acknowledged that I had caused him he
artache rather than ripples to the surface of his pond? I pulled away from him, hurt and angry at this sudden steep descent from tenderness to blame, yet knowing that my actions must seem to him bound by nothing but female inconstancy. Why would I compromise my soul by laying my hand to a second vow, when I was bound by a first one? It would seem incomprehensible. But now I was weary, weary of being castigated as shallow and disloyal, driven by self-interest or youthful extravagances to defy my mother and choose my own path. I felt colour creep into my cheeks as I accepted that perhaps I had made the wrong decision in not declaring my inability to wed when I stood before the altar with Will, but it had been done in a true spirit.
If Thomas was going to war, he should know.
‘I did it because…’
But I had kept my counsel for so long. What would be gained by my abject confession? I pared it down.
‘If I had confessed to what we had done,’ I said, ‘I was afraid I would burden you with a dangerous notoriety. My intentions were of the best.’
Simplistic as an explanation, but not entirely untrue.
‘Then God help us when they are not of the best.’
Which was not helpful.
‘Were you forced into it by your mother? By the Countess of Salisbury?’
‘Yes.’
It was the easiest confession to make.
‘And you agreed to remain silent.’
‘Yes.’
‘But Edward would have to find out sometime.’ Thomas’s hands were planted on his knees, the frustration no less. ‘If I returned and laid claim to you, all the world would know, as I’ve no doubt it will, when I do exactly that.’ He exhaled sharply as if coming to an unpleasant decision, his hands clenching into fists. ‘Better to ride over rough ground as fast as possible.’
‘I owe you my heartfelt apologies,’ I replied stiffly. ‘For making matters worse.’
His scarred brow was still grim. ‘You were very young, I suppose, to be left to make these decisions.’