The King’s Concubine: A Novel of Alice Perrers (36 page)

“I’ll see that you are rewarded,” I found myself saying.

“Now, why would you do that?” How calm his voice, how trenchant his words. “Do I look as if I need your charity?”

“No! And I’ve no idea why I offered it! Since you are so unfriendly I should consign you to the devil.”

“I’ll not go. I’m aiming for a place with the angels.”

“Then my advice is this—don’t associate with me.”

His smile, a merest breath, was a little sad. “You do yourself down, Alice.”

“I merely follow the fashion.”

“I’ve seen you with Edward. You are good to him, and for him.”

“But only for my own ends.” The scathing quality of my reply mirrored his and shook me by its virulence.

“I’ll not argue the case, since you’re determined to douse yourself in self-pity today. You clearly don’t need me to point out your sins.” He looked ’round the bleak, empty room. “Well, that’s it.”

I was sorry I had tried to provoke him. “When do you go?”

“Now.” He bowed, quite formally. “God keep you, Mistress Perrers.”

“He’s more likely to keep you, my lord bishop.” And when he laughed, I leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Do you know?” I whispered, in a moment of gentle malice. “Sometimes I have thought that we could have been more than friends, if you were not a priest and I not a whore.”

Wykeham’s solemn face creased. “Sometimes,” he whispered back, “I have thought so too. If you ever need me…”

He stopped at the door, and then went out, closing it quietly behind him so that I stood alone in the deserted room. Finding a forgotten quill on the floor, I picked it up and slid it into my sleeve. Bishop Wykeham was a friend worth having, and he was right to castigate my slide into self-pity. I had made my bed and for the most part enjoyed lying
in it. It would be an unforgivable weakness if I were to whine about the repercussions.

I must be strong. For Edward, if not for myself and my children.

I watched Wykeham ride out, astonished at the sense of loss that was almost as painful as the guilt. He should not have had to forfeit his offices and his estates, and my guilt increased when Edward gifted one of Wykeham’s estates to me: the pretty, desirable, extremely valuable manor of Wendover in Buckinghamshire, with its fertile fields and timber, its easy routes to London, and I was nudged into making reparation. Greseley had acquired for me the manor of Compton Murdak, and so I granted its use and income to Wykeham. I grimaced as I signed the document. Who said I had a heart of stone? But the grant was for a limited term only, and Compton Murdak would return to me. I was not too softhearted. It behooved me to have an eye to my own wealth, after all.

So Wykeham left, and I turned my mind to a meeting I really did not wish to have, but could not avoid.

I was late. When I arrived, father and son were in the midst of clasping hands in what was undoubtedly a joyful reunion. The Prince had returned to England. It would have been a moment for national and personal rejoicing, if it had not been so shattering for any onlooker.

Shattering? It was a truly horrifying spectacle.

I knew the Prince had needed to be carried into battle as if he were a man of twice his age, that his strength had waned so rapidly that he resembled in no manner the knight who had led his troops at Poitiers. We had all mourned the death of his firstborn son. But nothing could have prepared me for
this
. Whatever the disease that afflicted him, he was wasting away, his face a gaunt death’s-head. Even from a distance I could see that Edward was as aghast as I.

“Thank God…!” Edward wrapped an arm around his son’s shoulders.

“It’s good to be home.” The Prince stiffened, as if he could not bear to be touched.

“I have longed for this day.”

Edward ushered his son to a seat. Isabella spoke softly, with something like despair freezing her features into what might pass as a smile. And there at Edward’s side, her hand on Edward’s arm as she smiled up into his face, was the Princess Joan.

The Fair Maid of Kent.

I had last seen Joan brushing the dust of Barking Abbey from her skirts. Now I took stock. The years had not been kind to her, her face full and round like a new-made cheese, flesh encroaching on her slight frame so that her once-fastidious features were now flaccid, coarsened, and the remnants of her earlier prettiness wholly overlaid by excess. Over all, gouged in the soft flesh next to mouth and eye were lines of grief and worry.

Edward was busy with the Prince. Isabella and Joan stood a little apart, two forceful women. As I walked toward them, Joan looked ’round, her expression such as she would direct at a servant tardy in bringing wine.

“Here is Alice,” Isabella announced with a face and voice as bland as a dish of whey.

“Alice?” Joan’s lips pursed.

“Alice Perrers. The King’s whore.” Isabella stated it without inflection.

“We had heard.…So it’s true.…” Joan stilled as she saw me, really saw me, for the first time.

I curtsied, my expression, my bright smile, one of disingenuous welcome. “My lady. Welcome back to England.”

Joan’s brows snapped together. Memory returned, as it must. “The Abbey!”

“Yes, my lady. The Abbey.”

“You two know each other?” Senses instantly on the alert, Isabella was jolted out of her blandness, like a cat spying an approaching mouse.

“Yes,” I replied. “The Princess was kind enough to give me a monkey.”

“How unfortunate that it did not poison your blood with its bite,” snapped Joan.

“I have proved to be exceptionally resilient, lady,” I assured her with gracious serenity. “You will be gratified to know that I found your advice most pertinent.”

“Your name was not Perrers,” Joan responded, as if it made a difference.

“No. I have been wed.”

“Fascinating…” Isabella purred. “A reunion. How charming…”

Joan’s gift for razor-edged comment returned with polished venom. “She was naught but a clumsy, nameless servant lent to me to fetch and carry.” She turned on me with fire in her eye. “By what ill chance did you become…?” She gestured to my clothes, my person.

“The King’s lover? No ill chance, lady. I am mistress of my own destiny now.”

“Fortunes change, dear Joan,” Isabella interposed with sparkling devilment. “As you yourself should know. Alice is a remarkably powerful woman.”

“It’s not fitting,” she spat. “And now I’ve returned.…”

“I doubt you’ll change the King’s mind.” Isabella was enjoying this.

“The King will listen to me!” Joan was not.

I waited, sure of my ground. I would not antagonize—that would not be politic—but neither would I give way before such impertinence at the hands of this woman who expected to slide into the preeminent role as the next Queen of England. The preeminent role was mine.

Edward became aware of my presence.

“Alice…” His touch of greeting on my hand was unmistakably intimate.

“My lord. The Princess has been telling me how much she anticipates renewing my acquaintance. It is my greatest wish,” I said, placing my hand softly over Edward’s. “We will do all in our power to make Joan’s return a happy one. I have ordered the apartments at Westminster to be made ready.”

“Excellent!” said Edward.

“A family reunion, no less!” Isabella smiled.

Joan scowled at my use of her given name, then quickly hid it behind a tight curve of her mouth and an unmistakable barbed response. “I cannot express my gratitude!”

So the battle lines were drawn. Joan regarded me as less than a beetle to be squashed beneath the sole of her foot. She might justifiably have expected to order affairs in England to her liking, with the approval
of a father-in-law who remembered her fondly as a child brought up in the royal nursery. And now, in the space of a half hour, she had learned that she had a rival. I was the one to order affairs at Court.

But a warning tripped its way down my spine. At some point in the future, which I would not contemplate, Joan would be the one to hold all the power.

“We should celebrate my son’s return,” Edward announced, oblivious to the antipathy amongst the women in his household.

“I will be gratified to arrange it, my lord,” Joan responded, seizing the chance to make her mark.

“No, no. We won’t ask that of you. I think we can give you time to recover from your long journey, my dear.” Edward looked across the Princess to me. “What do you think, Alice? A tourney?”

It was not done deliberately. Edward had little guile in him these days, but the effect was like a bolt of lightning. Joan inhaled sharply, hands clenched in her damask skirts.

“I should take up my responsibilities immediately,” she stated. “As your daughter by marriage, I should be hostess at a Court function.”

“But Alice has the knowledge and the experience,” Edward demurred. “She’s the one to ask. What do you say?”

“A Court banquet,” I replied. “To organize a tourney would take too long.”

“Then a banquet it shall be.” Edward was turning away, back to his son, content.

“I would organize a tourney!” Joan’s demand sliced through the air.

“As you will. Talk to Alice about it!”

With true male insouciance, Edward cast aside the matter to return to the discussion of military tactics with the Prince, leaving me to fight a war in his wake, but unlike the days in the Abbey, I had the skills now to avoid and maneuver. And attack. And surprisingly, I had an ally.

“It is my right, and you will not usurp it,” Joan declaimed. “Now that I am returned—”

“Of course,” I interrupted pleasantly. “I’ll tell the King you insisted. A tourney? You’ll need to speak to the Steward, the Chamberlain, the Master of Ceremonies. The Master of Horse, of course. Chester Herald if you intend to invite foreign knights—which I’m sure the
King will insist on.…I’ll send them to you. I’ll send Latimer to discuss the ordering of food. The annual cleaning of the palace, which is now pending.…And where will you live? Do you intend to stay at Westminster? The accommodations are not very spacious.…”

The planes of her face tightened. “The Prince has not yet decided.…”

“Then do you wish to interview them in my rooms?”

“No.”

I spread my hands. “What do you wish?”

“Let it go, Joan.” Isabella chuckled. “Hold a banquet. It’s much less hard work in the circumstances. And let Alice do it.”

“I thought
you
would understand.”

“I understand that Alice is a past master at arranging these affairs.”

“Which I intend to change…”

“And I also understand that you are
jealous
, dear sister.”

“Jealous?” Joan’s voice climbed. “She has no right!”

“Sometimes, Joan, it is necessary to accept the inevitable.”

“That this woman rules the King?”

“Yes. And you should have the wisdom to give her credit for what she does astonishingly well.”

“I will not listen to you!” Joan stalked away to her husband’s side.

“Then you are a fool,” Isabella murmured after her,
sotto voce
.

“Whilst I,” I added, astounded at this turn of events, “am entirely perplexed!

“What I don’t understand,” I murmured to Isabella when the Prince and his wife had departed for a temporary stay in the royal apartments at Westminster, and I was left to consider the burden I had just been handed, “is why you would throw in your lot with me rather than with the Princess. Why not plump for a tourney and let her get on with it? Would it not please you to put my nose out of joint?”

“She’s naught but a block of lard!” Isabella announced.

“So?”

“I dislike her.”

“You dislike me!”

“True—but if truth be told, perhaps not as much as I dislike her. I always have.”

“Joan will one day be queen,” I warned. “I have no long-term prospects.”

“I know who holds the power now, and it’s not Joan.”

“I still don’t understand why you would stand at my back when Joan tried to stab it.”

Isabella frowned at me, clearly considering whether to take me into her confidence. “We’ll need a cup of wine. Or two…” Her eyes gleamed.

We sat in the solar, two conspiratorial women.

“Not a good marriage!” Isabella pronounced, and proceeded to inform me of all the facts that fair Joan had failed to impart to me about her marital affairs in those far-distant days at the Abbey.

Delicious scandal!

Joan had made a clandestine marriage, no less, at the precocious age of twelve, with Thomas Holland, who promptly abandoned his child bride to go crusading. Meanwhile Joan was forced by her family into a second marriage with William Montague, son of the Earl of Salisbury. Holland returned and for a good number of years became steward of William and Joan’s household.

“Can you imagine,” Isabella gloated in unseemly mirth, “what a convivial household that must have been! Whose bed do you think she shared?”

Then Holland petitioned the Pope for the return of his wife, and got her back, for good or ill, after an annulment of the Montague union. Holland died in the year I first met Joan.

“But Montague was still alive,” Isabella stated. “A living husband, even a dubiously annulled husband, did not make Joan good material for a royal bride. It smacks of a bigamous relationship to me! Many might consider so unorthodox a situation to be an impediment to the legitimacy of any child my brother got on Joan. Is their child Richard a bastard?” Isabella wrinkled her nose. “Hardly good news for the succession! The Virgin of Kent she was not! But my brother closed his ears and the marriage went ahead. Joan had him in her thrall.” Her lip curled. “She’s an ambitious woman.”

I could not blame her for that. “Like me?” I asked wryly.

“Exactly. That’s why she hates you.”

But Joan had every right to be ambitious. Furthermore, she would see her ambition fulfilled, and I would find myself effectively banished.

“Did you see her?” Isabella continued, oblivious to my thoughts, not mincing her words. “Joan the Fat! She still preens and smirks as if she were beautiful. And that makes it all the more incomprehensible to her—that you should have such power with the King when you are
not
beautiful.” Her stare was uncompromisingly critical. “Famously ugly, in fact.”