Joan could have simply killed Thomas, and the prince she dared not look at.
“So, then it is decided that the Hollands will stay here until our return while the rest of us press on as soon as we have some wine,” Prince Edward concluded and turned his back to speak low with his father.
While Thomas Holland looked shocked at their apparent dismissal, King John of France stepped forward once again and reclaimed Joan’s hand. “My greatest pleasure in these weeks of dismay since I came to England is to meet you, Duchess. Disappointments in life, eh—frustrations? I have known many of late and mostly at the chivalric hands of this Prince of Wales and perhaps you sympathize with me, oui?”
Joan dared to tug her hand back. “Forgive me, Your Grace,” she answered in smooth French, “but I do not follow your words.”
“Ah, c’est un grand dommage. I only meant that I must ride an honored prisoner to London and now you must by turn of Fortune’s cruel wheel remain here, eh? Adieu, Duchess, and her lord.” King John’s eyes went over her again in a studious, yet amused way. Then, he turned with his hovering retinue and rejoined King Edward and the prince.
Before Joan could even find Isabella to bid her farewell, Thomas had her in a firm grip on her upper arm and was guiding her away through the chatting crowd.
“St. Peter’s bones, woman, but you do have a talent for getting us alternately sent for then exiled, do you not?”
“Let go of my arm, my lord. You are hurting me and I am still light-headed.”
“Aye, light-headed near His Grace, the prince, as always. Do not think, dear wife, this one good eye I still have is not enough to see his face and your trembling. Queen Philippa warned me long ago and it is still true, though you have been a woman worth the having despite all that. And I know well enough, too, why I was not sent for to fight with His Grace at Poitiers where a Garter Knight belonged. He cannot bear to be civil to me because of you!”
She pulled from his hold on the first step up inside the Garter Tower where they had gone in from the crowded Lower Ward. She pressed herself back against the curving, cold wall. “That is unfair, my lord!”
“Is it? And now the French king falls all over you with words of fond condolence for a fellow sufferer?”
“And where have you been these last few days? Falling all over Queen Philippa with whisperings of our private life? No one knew about this babe—no one until she announced it grandly a while ago out there just as you told her in private!”
He reached out to yank her to him, and his round face went livid with an anger she had seldom seen him display. “Aye, I went to her. St. Peter’s bones, I am proud to serve her, and I serve her in the purest chivalric duties, madame. She looks to me for comfort unlike my steely, little wife who keeps all her warmth for her memories, her paltry lands at Liddell, her sons, and others.”
“That is not true. I thought we had gotten along well this winter.”
“Did you, Duchess of Kent? Did you? I tell you, you are just damned lucky you have been in my bed every night so I know this new child you carry is mine. We will rest here a day or two and then I shall take you to Liddell to join our sons. As soon as possible, we had best hie ourselves home, for this huge ransom the Plantagenets have put on your French king’s red head will no doubt fall on our peasants and rile up rabble-rousers like Vinette Brinay’s tanner even more. And I assure you, next time I come to court, you will stay at your blessed Liddell where you could not possibly cause such a spectacle!”
His copper eye was narrowed to a furious slit, and his chin quivered at his tirade. His pride, she thought numbly, his pride has been crushed, and if he ever found out about her time with the prince at Canterbury or Monbarzon, let alone before they were wed, he would be likely to explode and kill her for certain.
“I shall try not to cause you such distress henceforth, my lord,” she managed calmly, “but you were hardly around to faint on since you were strolling with the queen who is evidently prouder of this babe I carry than you are. I will be going up to my bed now, so you may ride along clear to London with them all if you like.”
She pushed past him up the curving stairs of the Garter Tower named in honor of that noble order and for her own garter lost so long ago. She heard him stamp down the steps and bang the door on his way out. She pressed her shoulder against the cool stones by a narrow slit meant for shooting arrows. The May breeze off the River Thames smelled clean and fresh up here, but it brought, too, the sounds of revelry below and of hundreds of people remounting for the festive victory jaunt to London. She peered out, but the depth of the embrasure was two feet, and she could not see the activity down in the Lower Ward.
This day she had awaited for seven long months was over now before it had hardly begun—a quick glimpse of her Edward among the staring crowd; the high walls separating them even as did the cold tower stones; rushed, public words that could never be personal or intimate again. Saints, she had been better off when the sweet passion’s pain she felt for Edward, Prince of Wales, had been hatred and not this burning, bittersweet agony of love!
She sank down on the narrow steps and watched the tears plop onto the expensive, jeweled emblems of two royal nations on her surcote. She had to go on: the foolish dream was over. The prince belonged to all of them and to himself, never to her. In a day or two, before the court returned with all their happy tales of this triumphant day, she would be gone to sanctuary at Liddell and then home to Normandy even as her mother had once fled from painful memories hoping for escape. France might ransom her king for three million crowns of gold someday, but never, never would she let her heart be held hostage again for any fortune on this earth, she vowed. Never!
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Vinette! Madeleine!” Joan called up the stairs, then decided to see what was keeping them. “Saints,” she muttered under her breath as she lifted her dark green skirts and ran up the steps, “we shall be so late to the fair, everything decent will be already sold.”
She strode down the quiet hall to the solar door and peeked in, fully prepared to dash on to look in the boys’ room or the nursery where her four-month-old daughter Bella lay asleep. But, to her surprise, her maid Vinette; the nursemaid Madeleine, holding the startled blond babe Bella; and both sons were in the solar. The boys and Vinette scrambled on all fours peeping at the carpet while Madeleine scolded and Bella whined in her arms.
“What in the world!” Joan began as four guilty faces looked up in surprise. Her lilac eyes took in the whole little tableau and judged its import: huge pearls from the necklace Prince Edward had given her almost two years ago at Monbarzon lay scattered everywhere on the Brussels carpet.
“They just broke, Mother,” eight-year-old Thomas protested in a voice that told her who was the culprit.
“My coffer! Why were you in my coffer and clear to the bottom, Thomas? And you, John,” she scolded her second son who looked frightened enough to have been caught by a rampaging enemy knight. “That coffer is Mother’s! Really, Vinette, what happened?”
Thomas stood up slowly, his fist full of fat pearls. His copper eyes widened at the anger he saw on his lady mother’s lovely face. “Sorry, Mother. We were only digging for buried treasure.”
“We found some with a whole bunch of old letters from a dragon,” John piped up.
“My letters! All right, you have all been very, very bad to get in Mother’s things. Give me the pearls—here, just put them in this basket and go wait in the hall. And, Madeleine and Vinette, you two are hardly ready to leave for the fair—and why is Bella up from her nap?”
“I heard a ruckus, I heard Vinette scream, Madame Joan—I heard it all and came running so fast with the babe to see what I heard,” the plump-faced Madeleine blurted out in one of her typical long-winded answers.
“All right, I said. I realize accidents happen but, Thomas, I look to you now that your father is gone so much to be a good influence for little John and a help to me. No more digging for treasure or dragon’s let
ters in my things—now, all of you get out until I clean this mess up.”
She bent over to quickly examine the stiff parchment letters shuffled about the bottom of the coffer as the two chastised maids and grim-faced boys walked out and closed the door. Two letters—aye, they were all here, all she had left of the missives the prince had sent her this last year—all she had left of some faded, foolish memories of sweet passion’s pain.
She touched the crinkly vellum, stroked the double wax ducal and royal seals, then stuffed them back under her winter clothes the boys had disturbed. Dragon’s letters indeed! The official one she kept because it said her son John should have Liddell someday if the elder Thomas had the Holland lands in Lancashire. The only dragon it dealt with was that traitor to her family, John de Maltravers, but at least her pleas through the prince to King Edward had foiled the return of all the vile man’s lands.
The other letter from the prince apologized for the terrible mess that had come of their reunion on his triumphal return to Windsor over a year ago. To the first letter, she had bound with a ribbon the old green beryl ring from so long ago and it still hung there forlornly now that she never wore it or even looked at it. Her eyes went again to her beautiful pearls she never dared to wear either.
“Damn!” she said to the silent room and knelt to gather the rest of the silky-hued gems. A broken chain—how perfect, she mused as the pearls rattled in clusters into her little basket. Broken links to Prince Edward, to the court, now even to her Lord Thomas, for since little Bella was born and her sire beheld her blond hair so unlike the copper locks of the two boys, he had ceased to treat her as a wife although he was civil enough to her when he was home. Even though he knew Bella was his child beyond a doubt, her Plantagenet fairness had somehow estranged him from both daughter and wife, and he had scarcely spent two nights in a row here since Joan had refused to name the child Philippa and they had settled instead for Isabella, after the Princess—Bella, for a sentimental sobriquet.
Her ties to Roger Wakeley too—broken after all these years, for the King of England, of all people, had sent for him, and she had let him go. Now, she played only occasional lullabies for the little ones on her lute and seldom sang. She drove herself to frenzied activity about the manor until she fell exhausted into bed at night.
This time, Thomas had evidently ridden off to try to join Prince John of Lancaster who, with King Edward, the Prince of Wales, and Prince Lionel, was rumored to be raiding to the south. She shoved the retrieved pearls in their basket down in the coffer under her garments and snapped the lid closed. Broken, all of it, just like the thread of her life, and—saints, she sometimes was not sure whether she cared to try to mend it all again or not.
She went to the door and yanked it open to see Vinette and Madeleine ready to leave for the fair at last. “The boys?”
“The babe asleep, the boys in their rooms playing dragons and treasure still, but not, madame, with your things,” Vinette assured her.
“I should hope not. I had a good nerve in there to tell both of them they could not go to the fair on the morrow with us, but then, one does not find buried treasure everyday. Come along then, and do not forget your market baskets.”
Vinette winked at the portly nursemaid as they scurried downstairs trying in vain to keep up with Madame Holland’s fast clip. The four-day market fair was just a mile away in a meadow between Pont-Audemer and Corneville-sur-Risle, and simply everyone would be there. Vinette never got much chance to see her old village friends now that she had been the Duchess of Kent’s chief lady’s maid. By holy Mary’s veil, Pierre, Vinette’s love who had oft scolded her for her loyal service to a noble family would no doubt be there in the tanner’s booth and mayhap try to steal a kiss and mayhap even tell her again she must choose between loyalty to him and her own folk and loyalty to the fancy life she led at the Hollands’ high and mighty Château Ruisseau.
“Vinette, do not dawdle as we are late already and I want us to purchase many things today. St. George, I wish my Lord Thomas were here to help oversee the hired carriers, but we shall make do.”
The three women mounted waiting palfreys and with their two armed guards from the household, clattered out of the castle. In these times when village serfs festered under the burdensome yoke of tremendous taxes to help pay for the French king’s ransom and to reestablish the knightly army so decimated at Poitiers, armed guards went everywhere with the Lady Joan under her absent lord’s orders. Sometimes, Vinette thought, as she smirked under the floppy straw bonnet the duchess had given her to keep the splatter of freckles from her pale skin, she almost thought Lord Holland had put the guards on his lady wife to be certain she did not run away.
“Vinette, when we have begun to purchase, you and one of the guards take the coins and look for bearers or carters to bring the goods back to the Château, and be certain you only give them half what they ask. I do not want them reselling our merchandise to someone else and keeping the coins to boot.”
“Oui, madame, but Pierre says the carters from the village are honest and always underpaid.”
“Aye, Pierre would say that. And remember that you promised me you would not go off lollygagging with him. I do not wish to have to hold our entire discussion about Monsieur Pierre, the silver-tongued tanner, all over again.”
“No madame, only—”
“Only what, demoiselle? I believe you told me you were happier living at the Château than you would be as wife to him in the village.”
“And,” the usually complacent Madeleine dared, “her ladyship did promise next time Lord Holland came home for a spell, a husband from the household or guards could be found for you, Vinette, a husband so you could live in the Château, girl!”
“Oui, Madeleine, so I have heard from madame once and from you repeatedly,” Vinette replied, her full mouth drawn down in a pout, “only, I think people ought to be able to chose their own loves, and not have their betters putting others on them they cannot abide.”
Joan held her tongue. The maid was a little snip at times, and badly needed to be chastised only—only, though she did not intend to admit it to her, the girl’s little rebellion reminded her of her own frustrations at seeing the reins of her life wrested from her control by Queen Philippa who had married her to both Salisbury and Thomas at the whim and convenience of the lofty Plantagenets.
They joined the busy traffic through the little town of Pont-Audemer where the tanners, a few merchants, and twenty serf families in vassalage to Lord Holland lived. The serfs’ cottages were out a ways, scattered amongst fields and copses; then began the clusters of wood and daub and thatch homes before one saw the few fine homes of stone and slate around the Norman Church of Saint-Ouen with its belfry towering forty feet over the town. The church was a lovely one for the area, Joan thought, with the local gentry or nobles of two centuries in eternal sleep under the smooth floorstones and impressive monumental brasses or occasional full-size effigies. The serfs rested under the turfy sod in the little crowded graveyard at the skirts of the heavy stone church.
Today the town marketplace with the adjoining stocks, pillory, and ducking stool for scolding wives or merchant cheats stood forlornly vacant by the duck pond—the only creatures in view, Joan mused, who were not rushing to this country fair.
On the other side of town, the market fair rose up in a fallow, grassy field ahead of them, bright tents and banners making a brilliant flash in the late morn sun. Saints, but it looked very busy from here already and not at all tawdry or shoddy as the shire fair had been last year up by Rouen. A buzz of voices and the sounds of cattle and horses from the livestock stalls assailed their ears as they dismounted and paid a lad to watch their horses. Many people, both the great and the serfs of the district, jostled and bustled in the cluster of booths. Hawkers and itinerant peddlers shouted their inducements to see, to buy.
With the wide-eyed Vinette and plump Madeleine in tow, Joan began to stroll the first stalls heaped with displays of drie
d fruit: raisins, dates, and figs from faraway Spain, and quinces from Portugal, which Joan remembered had been a favorite treat of the Plantagenets whose private rooms had always boasted several flat, silver dishes of the delicious cooked fruit.
One booth sold naught but fine dyes—brilliant red from Damascus and indigo from holy Jerusalem. They passed shoemakers where Joan ordered boots for both sons, coppersmiths, leather and fur makers. To Joan’s relief and Vinette’s all too obvious dismay, the sly-faced Pierre Foulke was not among the tanners at the leather stall which boasted fine pouches, belts, and intricate scabbards. Joan fingered a small scabbard for a lady’s dagger. The leather was tooled with little twining ivy leaves as in her family crest, but she had many other purchases to make, so she put it back.
“Madame, should I not see to some bearers now so they are not all taken when we leave?” Vinette inquired and shot Joan a wistful smile.
“But we have bought very little yet, Vinette.” Joan bit back the desire to warn the maid again about seeking out Pierre Foulke, but, after all, it was a public place and she was so seldom among her own people. Indeed, it was not fair to impose her own bitter moods on her servants, and the girl had been quite faithful even with the rumors on the wind concerning haughty serfs and peasant rebellions in the area. Joan counted out three coins from her squirrel pouch and pressed them into Vinette’s dainty hand.
“There, then. Get some ribbons for yourself and little Bella’s scant locks, but do not be gone long.”
“Oh, no, madame, I shall not. Merci, madame.” Vinette Brinay was gone in a whirl of brown skirts before Madeleine could remonstrate or her mistress change her mind.
A cloth hawker in a nearby stall had momentarily ceased his patter at the approach of Joan of Kent, an obviously wealthy lady, but the instant he caught her eye, he immediately resumed his recital extolling the virtues of each texture and shade. “Plush blue camlet for a winter robe, milady, most fine, soft as rabbit’s fur. And here gentle sindon, ah, look, milady, brilliant cange for a Yuletide gown.”