The First Princess of Wales (15 page)

Joan’s head pounded, and crashing reality loosed her rampant fears. The prince was here even now—perhaps to find out what Lady Margaret would divulge on her deathbed. The half-spoken rumors over the years about her father’s death, Queen Philippa’s pretended solicitations—Isabella’s kindness—all a vast lie, a terrible bribe? No, oh, no, it could not be!

“They brought him before a mock session of Parliament hastily convened at Windsor where the young King Edward ruled with his regent mother Isabella and her lover Mortimer,” Lady Margaret gasped, and Joan bent even closer to hear. “Treason was the charge. They dragged him in, protesting, with the rope already knotted around his neck to show his guilt. He was borne in in his shirt with a rope around his neck! I rode all day to Windsor from Liddell to see the king, to beg for my Edmund’s life. All day on a horse to beg—ask Marta. Ask Edmund, or Morcar. They know the truth!”

A fit of coughing seized the wasted frame, and Joan held a little dish of water to her lips which she drank greedily. Marta and Morcar—Edmund. All knew this horrible tale and never told her aught of it!

“But the king was gone when I arrived exhausted at Windsor—gone to Woodstock to await the birth of his heir they said. And he had left the Great Seal behind him to doom my Lord Edmund. He could later claim his hands were clean. With the king’s seal, Mortimer, even de Maltravers, would dare anything.

“They would not let me help my Edmund, not even see him. The very next day at dawn, they led him to a makeshift scaffold and block at Windsor off the Upper Ward in a little narrow place where there was a quintain practice yard.”

“Oh, no, Mother. No!” Joan’s mind pictured it instantly, the magic, private little place where she had first beheld her prince. Violent black and red colors cavorted, exploded in her brain.

“Aye, hush now, Joan. They sent me back to Liddell under guard while all day my Edmund stood waiting to die. Horror of the deed so obviously heinous gripped the castle and the countryside. The headsman fled and all day my dear Edmund was made to stand by the block while another axeman was sought. Long, long hours where he prayed—he knew—his dear nephew, the young king must surely intervene. But no word of salvation came, and I was de Maltravers’s prisoner on the road back to Liddell. Finally, for promise of a pardon, a prisoner, under the sentence of death, from some foul hole agreed to do the deed. At nearly dusk, he died, betrayed and believing himself quite unloved by the king to whom he had vowed loyalty forever.” The woman shuddered, gasped, and, as Joan was silent, plunged on.

“Some say it was his revulsion at this foul deed done by Mortimer that convinced young King Edward he must seize the throne from his mother and her lover shortly thereafter. But I say, the king let it happen to shock the realm into seeing why he must kill Mortimer and take his rightful throne. He left the Great Seal behind and abandoning all responsibility fled to Woodstock where on that very day his young queen delivered his heir, Prince Edward on June fifteenth. Guilty. Guilty as Judas kissing the Lord Christ that last night. The Plantagenets all have guilt blood on their hands. I did not want you to know any of it before, dear Joan, but your coloring, the shape of your face and hair—all, all my dear Edmund’s. I have tried to bear it all these years since they killed him—to forgive, but I cannot. I came here to pray for penance and then to die, but I can only die.”

Again she fell into a fit of hacking coughs while Joan cradled her close like a child. Joan’s stunned mind raced headlong down a dark passage, reeled into the blackness of despair and hatred. Her love for the fair and glorious Plantagenets withered and turned foul, and was smothered under the agony of truth—the terrible, awesome truth.

“Joan, forgive me.”

“You should have told me sooner, Mother, years ago. We could have loved each other—could have shared this.”

“No one could have shared this. It was too dangerous. Edmund said I must never tell you but now I have. You have gone to live among them. If you can forgive them, that is your concern, but I never have—I cannot—I never shall, God forgive me.”

“God will forgive you, dearest Mother. He must. Here, I swear to you I shall take it on myself against the king’s family and de Maltravers, so you may be forgiven. Entrust it all to me. I am not afraid of them.”

“My dearest little girl. When I saw you grow, for he left you as yet unborn when he died but yesterday, I saw his accusing eyes in you and I could not bear it.”

“My eyes? But I loved you. I always wanted you to love me!”

“Accusing. Just that, my Joan.”

Joan bent closer. The voice was raspy, fading, floating. “Aye, my Edmund’s child, I shall leave it all to you. This long, long hatred, it has quite—worn me out. This huge, cold lump inside me will not go away. It grows and spreads. So cold.”

“I am here, Mother, and I will not leave. Rest now and when you awaken, please let us talk of him—Father, as he was before—before they killed him.”

“Aye. Before, so charming and so fair-haired, like a young lion. My heart beat fast when he was even near. . . .”

The words trailed off and she seemed to doze instantly, her bluish eyelids closed, her pale lips slightly parted. Joan edged her mother back on the pillow and straightened her aching body. Those last words—how cruelly ironic, words she herself might have spoken of Prince Edward but this very afternoon before all hope of that was crushed in this inundation of knowledge. And now, somehow, some way, the great and mighty Plantagenets and a distant, faceless man named John de Maltravers would pay!

She sat rigid on the side of the narrow, straw mattress staring into a shadowy corner of the little room. Her mother’s breathing became labored, and she knelt by her bed, then hurried to seek the nun who had nursed her. The tiny woman came instantly and touched Lady Margaret’s forehead; then she felt the little pulse at the base of her neck.

“She but sleeps, lady, though her breathing is very weak. You know, dear child, you must not take to heart what words she whispers in this fevered sleep. Her agony has not been of the body but of her haunted mind.”

Marta’s parting, desperate words came back to Joan: “If she says aught of your father, aught to hurt you, keep a stout heart.” It was all true, of course, not some feverish dream and Marta knew it well. They all had and for how long? All but dear, little Joan had known!

“Joan. Joan?”

“Aye, Mother, I am here.”

“Ah, it is so dark now, I cannot see you. Tell Sister Alice to fetch a light.”

Joan’s desperate eyes met those of the little nun so clearly lit by the candle near the bed. “Just close your eyes, Mother. I am here.”

They sent for a priest to perform the last rites, but the Lady Margaret did not respond as she was shriven. Then, at last, when it was nearly midnight, she gripped Joan’s hand and smiled wanly. “My dearest Lord Edmund, how I have loved you so,” she said. And died.

Joan sat by the bed, wide-eyed, uncrying, while the kindly nuns closed the eyes and reclothed the body. Then she went willingly with the prioress to her little study down the hall and sat wearily on the chair the gray-eyed woman indicated. She felt nothing now—stunned, bombarded, drained by too much in just a little span of hours. She bowed her head while the prioress prayed for her mother’s restless soul, but her mind hardly grasped the words.

“Will you stay the night, Lady Joan?” the prioress was asking her. “Then in the morn your guards can take you back or you are welcome here until your brothers arrive and we bury Lady Margaret under the stone floor of our little chapel as she requested.”

“Aye, I should like to stay here a few days. But are my escorts still here from the palace?”

The gray-eyed prioress nodded and looked as if she would say more. “Sit here, dear lady, sit for one moment, and I shall send someone to tell them they must go back to Westminster with the news at dawn tomorrow. We shall ask permission for you to stay with us a little while.”

The prioress stood and moved away to the door. “Comfort will come, my daughter,” she said, but Joan was too weary to turn her head or respond. “Comfort will surely come through prayer and the knowledge her troubled soul is now at rest—and through those who love you here.”

The door opened but did not close. Joan stared down at her clasped hands which seemed to swim before her eyes. Those who loved her here—the kindly nuns, of course, and soon Edmund and John must arrive too late to bid Mother farewell just as poor Mother had been too late to save or even to bid her beloved husband Edmund farewell so long ago.

She closed her eyes and leaned her head on the tall, wooden chair back. Her mind drifted, floated; a voice not of her own making inside her head chattered strangely in her ears. Footsteps on the floor. The prioress must have come back to kneel before her chair and take her cold hands in big, warm ones.

“Jeannette.
Ma chérie,
I am so sorry.” The voice was velvet deep, and reality came screaming back. The prince knelt before her, touching her, his arm tenderly against her knee.

She heard herself shout something, and yanking her hands loose, she struck out at him catching him hard on his chin. Astounded, he lost his balance. She sprang to her feet, tripped by his heavy knee on the hem of her skirt. “No!” a woman’s voice shrieked somewhere very close. “Get away. Never, never touch me again!”

His face a shocked mask, he stalked her to where she stood against the wall. “Jeannette, my sweet, I know it was a terrible thing to face alone. Please, love, let me help—let me comfort you.”

She flailed out wildly against him as he reached for her, ducking her blows, and hauled her firmly against his chest, speaking comforting, pleading words. Sobs racked her body but there were no tears. He felt so unmovable, so strong against her. And he had dared to be born that very day the king had let her father be killed; he dared to be one of them—the murderers.

He pressed her close, one big hand awkwardly stroking her disheveled hair. Deceitful, all of them. So deceitful. Even Isabella with her gossiping butterflies—gifts, bribes, whispers, deceit. She could be that way, too, to defeat the great and glorious Plantagenets—so like themselves they would never know.

The man, crooning, stroking—he had waited all the hours it took her mother to tell her the awful truth and then to die. This great and powerful prince, their hope and future king—whether he was here to learn what the Lady Margaret divulged or because he truly cared and wanted still to possess her was quite inconsequential now. The well-being of this man was at the very center of Plantagenet happiness: through using him, she could pay them all back for the death of her father and the endless agony of her mother. She could be so clever at it she would escape unscathed, and no one would ever know. She must simply wall up her feelings for this big, blond man—close them off and never feel them and then do her work on them all. The little chanting voice in her head was icy, crystal clear, and when she realized it must be so, she finally relaxed against his muscular, wool- and leather-covered chest.

“Ma chérie, ma demoiselle,”
he comforted her in his gentle French. “Let me help. I know it must be shattering.”

Her answer was muffled in his leather jerkin. “Aye, my lord prince, but I shall be better now, much stronger.” She tried to move away but he seemed reluctant to release her.

“After this is all over, Jeannette, we must be very careful. I have asked the St. Clares not to divulge my presence here and the guards do not know.”

“Fear not, Your Grace. I shall be very careful.”

Surprised by her suddenly cold and quiet tone, he loosed his embrace and stepped back, merely touching her shoulders. She looked exhausted, haunted almost, he thought. He led her slowly to the high-backed chair she had been sitting on when he entered. She sat willingly, her strangely colored violet eyes on him but looking somehow past him or through him.

“Jeannette, the prioress tells me you have chosen to remain here for a few days, but she assures me the Lady Margaret will be buried before Yule. Your first Yule at court in mourning—well, it will hardly be a gay time as my two brothers are ill and the queen is consumed with seeing to their care. Will you—would you let me call on you here these several days before you go back to court?”

She shook her head slowly. “My brothers are coming. And what would the prioress and all the chaste nuns say?”

His blue eyes widened. Was she making a jest? “It is fit that someone from the royal family visit, and why not I?” he pursued.

Her eyes focused on his face as if she had summoned her thoughts from some distant sanctuary. Surely, if her mother had been such a recluse and cast the girl off for years, surely if she had not visited the mother once in the four months she had lived so close in London, the emotional ties could not keep her in mourning overlong. St. George, his time here in England might be so short before the French war, and the necessity to keep his family from knowing he was seeing her made such times doubly dear and dangerous.

“Jeannette, may I come to see you here?” he repeated when she only stared.

“Aye, Your Grace. Only, take a care not to expect more than I can give you.”

He bent over her hand and his warm lips brushed the backs of her curled fingers. Astounded at her numbness of feeling for him now, she dared to smile. She felt a strange power over him suddenly when none of her own was relinquished—a firm grasp of what she must do.

This will be so easy, she mused, and closed her eyes to lean back in exhaustion as he rose and went to the door to summon the prioress. I shall do as I will and not care a whit for the consequences. I shall be clever and cold and conquer where poor mother had failed, she recited to herself.

Yet the Lady Margaret’s words taunted her as, sitting upright in the high-backed chair, she drifted off. “So fair-haired, like a young lion—my heart beat fast when he was even near—my dearest lord, I have loved you so.”

PART TWO