“At last!” fumed Elizabeth, and swiftly moderated her voice to sound meek and wifely. “God greet you, sir. I trust you had a good crossing.”
Johanna was neither watching the formal reconciliation nor listening to Sir Edmund’s account of being seasick.
“Introduce us,” said her husband and Edmund Mortimer drew him before Elizabeth. “Madam, my one-time esquire and companion-in-arms, Sir Geraint de Velindre. And?” Edmund gazed at Johanna blankly. Could this be the man that her mother had sent to Petronella for safekeeping?
She did not wait for Edmund’s gauche attempt to discover her name but elegantly reached out a hand to Gervase. “Velindre, is that in Laval?” Flirtation laced her voice. Her gaze slid provocatively from his steel sabatons up over the azure livery, halted in brief astonishment at the rearing lions counter-combatant that had been added to her mother’s design, and met his wintry stare with parted lips. His eyes glittered warningly at her.
“No,” guffawed Edmund. “Wales!”
“An unusual name, Geraint. Wales, hmm. You must know the Despensers well.”
Her husband dropped her hand as if she had burnt him, his expression condemning her for a featherheaded idiot. “Of course, I know them well, my lady,” he sneered. “Like every other man here. I should hardly be lifting a sword against them if I did not. Your servant, mesdames.” With a click of spurs, he curtly bowed and strode off in the direction of Miles, no doubt to terrify him into silence as well.
Johanna shook inwardly.
Sir Edmund was studying her with a droll expression. “Your pardon, my lady. He is always like that when someone mentions the Despensers. Has some personal feud with them. Never would say why. Over land or who knows? Maybe Hugh Despenser propositioned him when he was younger.”
“Excuse me.” Johanna turned away from the disgusting tactlessness. A sea of faces swirled before her and the moist heat of the chamber threatened to suffocate her. The queen’s giggling laugh had become oppressive. Leave to quit the royal presence had not been granted, but Johanna could not face Isabella. She was past caring as she fled for the chapel.
Save for a young pox-scarred brother tending the candles, the priory church was a quiet womb that gave nourishment to Johanna’s world-weary soul. She knelt, seeing again the disgust in Gervase’s face at her frivolity, and tried to let the bitterness of rejection seep from her bones down into the flagstones. Tears overwhelmed her and she tried to muffle her weeping, but even here she had no privacy for her grief. The young monk came loping across to her with the exuberance of a dog that had espied a bone and Johanna retreated politely, angered that there was nowhere that was safe for a woman’s solitude. In despair, she paused outside. Now it was night, the shadowy cloisters could offer peace, but instinct told her she was not alone. She took a few steps from the door of the chapel and hesitated. The wall cresset that had lit the distance earlier had been extinguished.
The sudden movement in the darkness made her hope that it was Gervase who waited there, but it was Sir Roger Mortimer who flung a hand either side of her. She recognised the soft, sibilant laugh.
“You intrigue me, Johanna FitzHenry. A hint of the nun within that alluring body. You withold yet offer.” His hand curled about her neck, the ball of his thumb seeking her lips. “I saw the desire in your eyes tonight.”
God defend her! He had recognised the languishing she had tried to hide and thought it was for him.
“My lord, I fear you are—”
“You like teasing, do you?”
“No, and you are taken, my lord, and so fare well.”
“One kiss, little temptress, and I will let you go.” It was a mistake to let his mouth descend on hers. She showed him she did not appreciate the experience but unfortunately he took her indifference as a challenge.
“No, my lord, please no . . .” It took the grip of both hands to force those persistent fingers away from her body.
“Oh, so I mistook the signals, did I, or do you want to make an ass of me?”
“This is a misunderstanding, I assure you.”
“A malicious word or two in the queen’s ear and you will lose the favour you have so diligently acquired.”
“Then have me sent away, my lord.”
“Too late for that, you tease.” He grabbed her hand and forced her palm down to his engorged member.
“My lord, the queen . . . I will not betray her trust.”
But he was already loosening his clothing. “Hush, yield to me now and I shall do you no harm.” He licked his finger and ran it along her lips. She jerked her head back but the unforgiving stones pressing into her back allowed no further recoil. As his forefinger meandered from her mouth down between her breasts and over her belly to fasten and grab between her thighs, the old fear threatened to paralyse her, but she forced it back. Wait, wait, she told herself, then jab your fingers into his eyes or up his nostrils.
“I want you now, woman, and what Roger Mortimer wants, he usually gets.” His hardness jabbed at her belly and his mouth came down relentlessly on hers as his hand tugged up her skirts.
“Father?” An unfamiliar voice called from the head of the cloister.
“Go away, damn you!”
“Father, the queen is asking for you.”
“Tell her, Edmund, I will be with her in a moment.” Johanna felt the laughter hissing against her mouth. “Tell the queen I am coming.”
But the door was thrust further open, two shadows stood aside and a vicious rectangle of light fell upon Mortimer’s boots against her bordered hem. The queen’s lover loosened Johanna swiftly with a stifled oath, his hand warningly upon her mouth as he thrust her further into the unrevealing darkness.
“Yes, yes, go to, lad. I will attend her now.”
Adjusting his clothing, he swaggered towards the cressets and the heavy door creaked to behind him leaving Johanna in merciful night.
“Are you the only concubine besides the queen or is he working through a list?” remarked the nearest column. If she had not known Gervase’s voice, she would have mistaken the jagged edge to it for humour.
“God defend me, it is not what you think.”
“What I think does not matter anymore.”
So after all the waiting, it had come to this. Johanna wanted desperately to see his face but knew that sentencing was already given.
“Dear me,” he continued, his beloved voice offensive with sarcasm, “do God and his angels sleep once more? Are the wicked times of King Stephen and the Empress Maud come again to bother England?” He seemed to expect an answer and when none came, he added with brittleness, “Suffolk was full of complaints about assaults on wives and property. It seems we shall exchange the king and his aging catamite for a whore and her old lover. Is he not a perilous proposition considering he already has a wife—oh, I was forgetting—and a beauteous queen for a concubine?”
Her reply was choked as if she no longer could work her voice’s mechanism. “I . . .” she swallowed, “I h-had a yardstick once but he is long gone. Gervase—”
He appeared before the night sky, his great shape, at last substantial after the years of yearning for his presence, eclipsing the misted moon. “De Laval? Not anymore,” he answered, his voice light and chill as frost. “Geraint will suffice.”
It was an effort to strap on her meagre armour against him and try bravery. “You have been brawling against the French in Gascony, sir?”
“Ah, so you do not want to talk about the illustrious Mortimer.”
“To you? Have I asked you how many women you have enjoyed, how many hearts you left broken on the cobbles next morning?” He did not answer and she faltered on. “I-I cannot believe that you of all people can condemn me without a hearing but as it is so, leave my reputation there in shards also.”
A deep sigh reached her eventually. “Better so. Who knows what this war may do to us?” Even a goosehead could not mistake the bitterness in his voice. He broke the further silence between them by soundin
g as though he was working through an agenda.
“Miles told me about Father Gilbert. I am sorry. Your mother is in good health though?”
“She is fending off a pair of suitors. I think she will take one of them come Yuletide. You have other questions, sir? Would you like me to enumerate our present household?”
“That will not be necessary,” he retorted icily. “Did all the roses reach you?”
“Yes, all four. I thank you.” A pox on this formality! Let Satan make a guest of him, whoever he was, and welcome!
“And the letter also?”
“I have not made the contents of the letter known.” Johanna’s tone grew harsher with each breath. She understood that he wanted her to hate him. It made it easier to cut her loose and let her sink. But why now when the rebel cause held such hope?
“I see.” Did it take him just two words, angrily muttered, to destroy all hope of happiness? Oh, she had been right to dread meeting him again; there were no crocks of gold for her to find at the end of this particular rainbow.
He had not finished with the list. “Perhaps it would be wise if you told me your latest proclamation on Gervase de Laval.”
She wanted to feel for his left hand in the darkness and confirm the presence of an alien band of gold. She could accept that he might be bound to another woman even if the truth gave her heartache, but if the rogue was dismissing her from his life for no good reason then she would be utterly destroyed.
Her voice was increasingly difficult to come by. “The . . . the answer for the common hearing has been that reports on Gervase de Laval are inconclusive. But rest assured, tomorrow it will be announced that the Scots have set him free to plague the English and he is gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to give thanks for his release. I shall have him eaten by a bear on the return journey.”
“Thank you.” She did not anticipate the heaviness in those two brief words. “It seems you expected a comfortable resolution eventually. How sensible and tidy.”
“Yes.” The word was wrung out of her.
“Is that an absolution?” He sounded too eager.
With a sigh, she dealt him the answer she thought he needed. “It is whatever you wish, sir.”
It was hurting too much. Just an exchange of words and God had snatched her up and wrung all happiness out of her. Her soul was unrecognisable, tortured, twisted, colourless. Without hope, she was a nothingness, and yet she cared too much to be falsely weighed in Gervase’s scales and found wanting.
“I shall not embarrass you in any way, sir, except there is one condition.”
“Only one.” His soft laugh lacerated her. “A bargain then. Name it.”
“Believe that I have no truck with Mortimer. He waylaid me just now like a highway thief.” The answering silence persecuted her. “I will swear so on six cartloads of saints’ bones.”
“Since you and I are damnable perjurers, Johanna, I can hardly accept that.” He turned away from her, the profile she had adored now that of an enemy. His words were a sigh upon the wind. “Is it so important to you what I believe?”
A despair so foul that it had to come from Hell itself crawled up through her body.
“It was . . . yesterday,” Johanna answered softly.
GERAINT LET HER walk from him in a proud rustle of taffeta. Her perfume lingered longer. Then that too was wasted on the restless wind that industriously herded the fallen leaves on the courtyard path. Despising himself, he gripped the stone rail in his gloved hands and banished the memories that threatened to enfeeble his resolve. It had to be done. Afterwards, if he survived, he might make amends, providing she could forgive him, but better she hate him now in case they dragged him from his horse and hanged him. The sorrow blinded him, manifesting in tears that ran down his tanned cheeks to splash onto his velvet mantle, and he cursed his name.
Thirty
IT WAS EASY to avoid Johanna the next day as they rode southwest to Dunstable, their numbers sufficient now to ride against London, but news came that the royal fox had fled to Hugh Despenser’s demesne in Wales.
“Well, here is a sight for a jaded taste. You look as happy as a bald Medusa.”
A fist thudded Geraint unexpectedly between the shoulderblades, sending the ale in his leather cup spilling onto the ground. His hand fisted instinctively, only to discover a slight figure standing arms akimbo behind him. For an instant he thought it was one of the horseboys and then his dulled mind cleared. This man had bells stitched to the three liripipes of his hood and a bladder at the end of a stick. His tightfitting jupon and hose were pied scarlet and yellow and so bright that he could have been stuck up in daylight as a clifftop warning beacon.
“Jankyn!” Geraint swung the jester up. The bells rattled angrily.
“Nay, do treat me more honourably than a wench, you great oaf.” Set down, the little man tidied his tunic sulkily like an outraged old maid.
“Jankyn, I do not believe it! Whence came you?”
“With my lord Henry, Earl of Leicester—and of Lancaster, I should say, if all was well with the world.”
“Why, that is wonderful news. Here.” His erstwhile master refilled the beaker from the leather bottle in his saddlepack, and with his arm about the jester’s shoulders, led him a distance from the campfire.
Earl Henry had been expected daily, for the queen was his niece and it was well known he was enraged that the king had not allowed him to take his dead brother’s title as Earl of Lancaster.
“No surprise there, eh?” Jankyn chuckled, once they were free of eavesdroppers. “Since our mighty king topped my lord Thomas and gave most of his estates to the Despensers, my lord Henry has no trouble with his conscience. I shall not say the same of you. I have seen lepers look more cheerful. Are you reunited with my lady Johanna?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Goats butt, great one, butt you should not. What’s amiss? Is her heart given to another? Is yours? Has she acquired a crookback and an accursed tongue?”
“I cannot explain.”
“Will not, you mean.”
“Aye, question me no further, Jankyn.”
“Pooh, I had liefer lie with a poxy whore than try shovelling common sense into the space betwixt your ears.” He cocked his head towards the tents that had been flung up. “Hear the carousing. My lord of Leicester is feasting the queen and prince. You spurn merriment, great one?”
“Aye, I do. Should you not be there providing the entertainment or do jesters these days have apprentices?”
“I wish it were so! Rest easy, I shall do my duty shortly. My lord Henry is in fine humour. As luck would have it, we spent last night at Leicester Abbey and who should be there but one John Vaux, a creature of the Despensers, transporting Hugh the Elder’s treasures.”
Geraint’s lip curled. “More spoils for Isabella and Mortimer.”
“My, my, you are grown surly.” He jabbed his wand of foolery into Geraint’s belly.
“Jankyn . . .”
“Nay, purge yourself, dear cuckoo. There is a worm within the spit landed from your beak. I can play the friar and give you Hail Marys aplenty for your sins.”
“Can you see matters improving? What do we do if we snare the king? Force him into more promises he will not keep?” He looked away sourly to the sky as if seeking an answer. “Kill the Despensers? And what happens after that? Oh, Jankyn,” he searched the other man’s face, “since Boroughbridge I have waited for such a time as this.” His gaze took in the scattering of the army’s twinkling campfires stretching out across the field. “But the reality. . .” He shook his head. “When I served in Mortimer’s household as an esquire, I thought he was the sun and moon but this . . .” he sneered, gesturing towards Leicester’s noisy tent. “I am disappointed. The more I saw of him in France the more I realised he is not the man to lead this kingdom. Despenser has a keen grasp of administration but Mortimer is merely an opportunist. He takes each day as it comes. They all do except Bishop Orleton. He seeks to guide them
now, but will they listen? Oh, it is so easy to find fault with them and I would not be in their shoes for all the gold in Hugh Despenser’s coffers but . . .” Another wave of guffaws reached them. “But empty pots make the most noise.”
“What think you then of the prince?”
“I like the boy, Jankyn. He does not bluster like Miles FitzHenry and the other lads his age, pretending he knows it all. Instead he listens and watches but keeps his own counsel.”
“There is your hope then.”
“True, but when? He will be but fourteen come November and the King Edward is still hale and like to make old bones.”
“Sir, while you cannot hold back the tide, it would be folly indeed to swim against it. Be patient.”
“Oh, I know, but when you see short-term greed everywhere around and no one with a thought for aught but their own interests it is hard.”
“That is your monastery training for you, lad. It taught you to look at the secular world from the backside of the mirror. Whoa, here comes the Holy Church in a flapping of vestments to shrive us or perhaps his holiness has gone to the great pulpit in the sky and you are bidden to Rome . . . oh, my lord bishop, good even to you.”
The bow was obsequious, but Bishop Orleton gave the jester a perfunctory nod. “Better behaved tonight, thank the Almighty,” he observed, surveying the dark huddled shapes around the campfires.
“That is because their heads ache too much already,” muttered Geraint. “Have you had enough of the back-slapping, my lord?”
Adam Orleton’s silvering hair blew into his eyes and he brushed it back, the great episcopal ring of Hereford catching the firelight. “You think to escape? Oh, but I play the messenger. The queen desires you to sing for her. Is that how you spent my money in France?”
Geraint ignored the questioning stare from Jankyn. “Must I, my lord?” he growled. “This carousing turns my belly. Here we are on the verge of a bloody civil war and the queen desires a song. Besides, I have turned lily-livered. My abandoned wife will tear me to pieces with her fingernails.”
The Knight And The Rose Page 45