The First Princess of Wales (17 page)

Caught in her own clever trap. A plague on the man! But she had not fully yielded, not given him the clinging adoration he no doubt expected was his due. How tantalizing it had all been—the sweep of passion she could not stem, the powerful need of his body for union with hers. Thank the blessed saints, he would be gone on the morrow to France to his precious, all-consuming war!

How it would set them all back to know: how Mother would have approved that she had dared to strike the proud Plantagenet prince on the eve of his glorious departure. Let the damned, bloody French fall at his feet! Saints, she never would!

Still unsteady in the silver hush of twilight, she picked her solitary way back to the little postern gate in the vast walls of Windsor.

E
dward, Prince of Wales, stood in the open flap of the hastily erected tent where he had just eaten a quick, cold meal with his father and their closest councilors. Rain beat relentlessly in a sudden summer cloudburst to drench the scarlet, blue, and gold silk tent and turn the road and valley below to slick grass and cloying mud. For two days now, chased by a French horde rumored to be eight times the size of their forces, the vast army of King Edward III had been racing to reach safe haven north of Paris in their own duchy of Ponthieu. Now, realizing they could not easily escape to join their Flemish allies as they had planned and believing in the God-sanctioned right of their cause, the army of the English king and the prince had turned to face the fast-approaching enemy near a little French village called Crécy.

The mud would hinder the mounted French more than the English bowmen and men-at-arms who would all fight afoot, Prince Edward reasoned. Yet, awaiting the first real battle of his life, as the clouds suddenly lifted, his mind went back to that rainy day he had first seen Joan of Kent, wet, disheveled and quite muddy in the little quintain yard at Windsor. Over two months now since they had parted in hurt and anger after she led him on and tricked him in the forest trysting place—so much had happened already and the most important yet to come soon. Today.

Today was August twenty-sixth, 1346, and that made it—St. George, he realized, they had landed from England at St. Vast-la-Hogue in Normandy over six weeks ago. The king had knighted him and a small group of his young compatriots, including Joan’s simpering beau, William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, that very day in recognition of the great and certain deeds to come on the campaign. And the eager, ready group of young knights had not disappointed their king in their victorious sweep through hostile France. For the hundredth time, Edward prayed to the Virgin and his patron St. George that they would not disappoint him this day of days either.

He sensed someone behind him in the tent opening and turned to face Thomas Holland, the man the queen had not only selected to squire the spoiled little Jeannette of Kent to official functions the last year but had also betrothed her to the night before the army had sailed for France. He would worry about that later. Betrothals were common, easily broken, and besides, after this campaign and the deeds he intended to perform today, surely neither his mother nor his father would gainsay him what he asked of them. Edward felt he and the fine, one-eyed warrior, Thomas Holland, had an unspoken truce over that betrothal. Holland evidently knew not to overstep his place, and the prince was loath to let a woman affect the bonds between knights when they faced so great a common enemy.

“Thomas,” the prince said only and turned back to his perusal of the waiting battlefield below.

“We are ready and calm, my lord prince,” Holland replied, as if to read the prince’s thoughts of battle and avoid the touchy subject of the willful woman he sensed still stood between them. “The place is ideal, the strategy is perfect. They will come into his narrow Valley aux Clercs below and we shall mow them down.”

“The king will be angry if we do not capture the best of them for ransom, Thomas. An expensive two-month summer progress, this, even though we have taken spoils.”

“And rightly so, Your Grace. St. Peter’s bones, when we captured Caen and found that battle plan all made up for the second Norman invasion of the English realm, ’twas a wonder we could control our furious troops at all. If that damned pretender Philip had not had that large army hiding out at Paris, by the rood, we would have taken her too. We were but twelve blessed miles from the gates!”

“Save your strength and rancor for the French whenever they dare attack, Thomas,” the prince said. “Everything awaits our victory—the army is loyal, disciplined, and proud to a man. Shoulder to shoulder, bowmen with armored knight, we will face them well.”

He turned and clapped the older man on his mailed shoulder before turning back into the tent still addressing the serious knight. “At Caen you helped us save the ladies and children who might have been harmed but for English mercy, brave Thomas. See to it that out there today you do not confuse the Frenchies for the weaker sex, by St. George!”

Holland’s copper eye widened at the surprising jest, and then he grinned and went out to gaze downward again, as did many others, at the roads south from which the lightning glint of French armor and the thunder of hoofbeats must surely come.

The prince’s squires dressed him in his black chain mail and draped his silk scarlet and gold
surcote
over it to be belted. They all froze in one sharp instant as a screech and flapping noise punctuated by shouts of men shredded the air outside. He seized his big sword and dashed out to behold the sky above black with cawing crows.

“A sign! Another sign from heaven! But is it good or evil?” someone behind him muttered.

Dramatically, the prince lifted his unsheathed, two-edged sword aloft. Strength and flair and comfort at any cost, his sire had told him but two hours earlier when he’d set out to make a sweep of their positions—that is what a king and prince must give to their troops in war.

“Another propitious sign!” he called out to quiet the shouts and murmurings of his men around the tent and those of the waiting men-at-arms and Welsh spearmen on the spur of hill below. No matter—they would pass on his words and cling to them in their direst hour of need.

“A third sign—a holy number,” his deep, youthful voice rang out. “First, the miraculous fording of the River Somme under fierce arrow fire when the French believed they had us ensnared. Second, this rain to mire them in their coming defeat. And now, French crows—the black harbingers of hell to warn Philip’s foolish troops they cannot win against us here. Let them come on and learn the true, tempered courage of an Englishman!”

A cheer went up, echoed again and again farther down the line as his words were passed on. Beneath his tent, the battlement of which he was in charge—fifteen thousand noblemen at arms and four thousand yeomen archers in two divisions—rested after eating and drinking. Now that the rain had stopped, he could see the clever longbowmen taking out their carefully coiled, still-dry bowstrings from their conical metal hats and beginning to restring their weapons of stout English yew or ash. In earlier fierce battles with the French, the ruinous strength of the dreaded English longbows had saved the day, for the gray goose-feathered shafts pierced chain mail and armor alike as if they were mere velvet.

Below him, down a little slope of shiny grass and scrub brush, stood the wild Welsh spearmen who had driven pointed stakes into the ground to halt mounted French charges. In the valley below, the English had also dug square, knee-deep holes to send the armored horses and metal men crashing to the slippery turf.

As the prince and his men turned back to their tent to await the battle, Godfrey of Harcourt, the quick, wily Norman baron who was their chief advisor in this campaign, hurried up with a train of lightly armored men. It was partly for men like Godfrey that the English had invaded Normandy, because King Philip had confiscated the vast holdings of many such barons for their loyalty to the English king.

“My dear prince, stirring words.
Sacrebleu, magnifique!
Edward
le Roi,
too, he rouses the men, he comforts and urges them on!”

“Any word from our advance scouts, Godfrey?” the prince asked, cutting off any further flow of effusive praise. “There was word of their approach at three of the clock. The impetuous, conceited French probably deem they have daylight enough to attack, as it is but two hours later now.”

“Word from the scouts,
oui.
The French approach apace, like dumb sheep to the slaughter, eh? Blessed Marie, this outlay is
grande
—the three battalions with your strength here and Arundel and Northampton’s men to your left and the king behind should his reserve be needed. Let them come on!
C’est magnifique!
That escape path through the forest of Crécy to the sea—bah! Here, here on this vast plain our grand victory lies, eh?”

Prince Edward nodded, his heart beating wildly. Ordinarily such sweeping rhetoric from the clever, dark-eyed little man would seem foolish, overblown, but today—today! He could sense the moment despite the humid closeness of the air, feel the beginning of his new life out there where he would prove himself in heroic combat. For heaven and St. George! It must be his time to soar at last and nothing must stop him. Years of preparation, of dreaming, and desiring—such a flow of passion coursed through him that his mind tricked him by conjuring up a picture of the wild, alluring, yet unreachable Jeannette, just out of his final grasp and rough conquest.

“Your Grace, your father
le roi
at the tent,” Godfrey of Harcourt interrupted his thoughts.

They gathered in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, the best flower of knighthood and bloom of Plantagenet royalty England could offer that day. The king’s priest voiced a lengthy prayer while the men clanked greaves and swords by shifting anxiously from foot to foot. Yet even as they embraced stiff-armed and then disbanded to their final position, the low thunder of an approaching army seared the humid August air.

The king moved toward his son at the last, and they faced each other eye to eye, both tall, blond, and heavy-shouldered, so alike in appearance but for age and the king’s golden, full beard.

“Today, my Edward, the chance at last to win your spurs,” the king said, his voice gruff with emotion.

“I shall not fail your hopes for me, Your Grace. I have never been more certain, more ready.”

“Aye. It was a sore plight to try to outrun the thieving bastards further and so here we are. Your fine words when those blasted crows flew over were reported to me. Fine, fine words. By the rood, your mother and your family would be proud.”

“They shall be proud of all of England’s pride on the morrow when this is all over.”

The king’s gauntleted hand rested on the prince’s metal shoulder. “Listen to me well, Edward. I have taught you thus, and you must not forget even in the shift and swirl of onslaught—war cannot be all rules and grandeur, knightly heroics and such. At the tourney, aye, speak chivalry to the ladies, aye. But war—war is real, my son. Use your wits, your cleverness. Planning, as we have done well here is one thing, but tactics under charge and fierce duress is quite another. By the rood, my son, keep your wits, that is all.”

He turned away and was immediately swallowed by his protective horde of armored knights. Aye, the prince knew the story well of how his sire had learned to trust wiles and not only chivalrous strategies on that terrible night the wild Scotsman they called the Black Douglas had sneaked into his tent to slice him to ribbons. The young king had only escaped with his life because his little priest threw his body at the Scotsman’s sword and died in his king’s stead. Defeated, humiliated, tricked in the Scots Wars, the young King Edward had vowed never to be so trapped again, and the son had learned the truth of that war lesson well—aye, and in dealing with deceitful women, also, Prince Edward told himself grimly.

The English stood stalwartly in their positions upon the hill above the gentle valley hemmed in by forests. For over an hour, they watched the French approach and align themselves in perfectly balanced columns. By six of the clock, the enemy was assembled for a massive charge. Impatient, stamping French horses rimmed the southern entrance to the battlefield, and at the fore of Philip’s massive army, the whole feudal levy of northern France swollen by many mercenaries from Genoa, Luxembourg, and Bohemia, stood the well-trained Genoese crossbowmen. The call to arms by the French king Philip had even attracted the elderly king of Bohemia, a hero of chivalry whose fine reputation studded with glorious deeds Prince Edward greatly envied. Despite John of Bohemia’s blindness, no fiercer fighter was to be found.

Precisely at six when the French made the movement to advance, a fourth miraculous sign lifted the spirits of the waiting English: from behind the glowering line of sullen gray clouds, a sinking golden sun poured its rays to warm the backs of the Englishmen—and blind the eyes of the attacking French.

Too late, too late for everyone. With mingled shouts of
“Montjoye St. Denis!”
and the distant dip and tilt of banners and pennants dotted with the French
fleurs-de-lis,
the battle was enjoined.