The First Princess of Wales (35 page)

Thomas Holland’s mouth was full of simnel biscuits dripping with thick honey. “Below? Another of Wakeley’s singing friends?” he choked out.

“No, my lord,
pardon,
some sort of messenger
certainement
. And attached to the English court, I might wager, because—”

“Court? Messenger? Well, bring him up, man, and get some more food from the kitchens then!”

Joan calmly, deliberately spooned up a bite of custard flawn, but stopped with it halfway to her mouth. “My lord, this could not mean a summons to arms, could it? All the rumors about a new English war, even the peasant unrest hereabouts, might indicate such.”

Thomas shook his copper-hued head of hair and hastily wiped his mustached mouth with the small, damp linen cloth Joan always insisted he kept at table for spills and neatness. He glanced over at his eldest son playing happily before the low-burning hearth fire and rose to his feet to greet his guest. His single sharp eye conveyed his excitement, Joan thought, at the prospect of some sign he had not been forgotten by his beloved English Queen Philippa for whom he secretly tended some unspoken bond—and by her royal Plantagenet husband.

The wiry, black-haired visitor they greeted hardly looked a messenger, for they were usually strong and burly. Short, with a hooked nose and darting eyes, he was obviously famished, road-weary, and nervous.

“Milord, Milady Holland. Richard Sidwell, Esquire, at your service. My gracious thanks for receiving me so readily into your beautiful castle. I have been ahorse all day to make it here by dusk. I am sent to Alençon, but I came only two months ago from London bid by Her Gracious Grace, the Princess Isabella.”

Joan’s amusement at the little man’s overabundant use of the fawning word “gracious” sobered to joy and astonishment. “You have seen the Princess Isabella—sent by her?” Joan stammered and came around the long table to join her husband. She saw the expectation go out of Thomas at that bit of knowledge. No doubt, this visitor had nothing to do with Queen Philippa, the king, or the resumption of the French Wars.

“Aye, my gracious lady,” the sprightly little man gushed, “for the princess does send her love to you, her dear and gracious friend, and to your Lord Holland and bids me convey to you news of her great victory.”

“Her victory?” Joan asked. “Is she to wed?”

“No, no, my gracious lady—just the opposite! She said to convey to you she has escaped another snare—I do have a letter writ by her own scribe to you in my things, gracious lady—and she has gainsaid her royal parents and refused to wed with Bérard d’Albret, son of the great lord, Sire d’Albret of Gascony. The princess said that the Lady Holland, her dearest friend from other adventures, must know of this triumph to share it with her.”

“Triumph!” Thomas Holland snorted. “Rubbish, more like—insubordination and foolish headstrong deeds, Joan, of which I am glad to say you at least are well quit of.”

Richard Sidwell’s dark eyes darted back and forth to drink in the nuances of tension here, spoken or otherwise, between this Garter Knight lord and his so beauteous lady. He had heard of her comeliness of form and face, for rumors that the Fair Maid of Kent had ensnared the Prince of Wales’s heart had circulated for several years before her marriage to this man and their departure to live in Normandy on lands newly won at Crécy. But Sidwell had never glimpsed her himself before today, and never dreamed such a thing as ephemeral rumors could be so true. Aye, the lady was fair indeed—breathtakingly awesome.

Her abundant hair which tended to wayward curliness was pulled back in a single braid as thick as a man’s wrist, falling down her back to her shapely hips. Those tresses, he mused, were the color of wheat in noon sun or moonglow on clear, windless nights. Her face seemed perfection—a lovely oval with elegantly high cheekbones, a slender, pert nose, and a full, almost pouting mouth which had ever been the envied style at court. But the eyes were so rare—clear amethyst or the hue of fringed gentians within the thick, dark lashes. And wonder of wonders, the lady seemed so natural in stance and posture, as if she were quite unaware of her disarming beauty. Her loveliness, he mused still studying her through slitted eyes, was the more stunning for being unadorned. While his practiced eye was nearly jaded by the glut of rich fabrics and cosmetics, and the abundance of jewels in the Princess Isabella’s household where he served, this woman wore the simplest blue wool kirtle, soft and clinging, with only her linked belt, from which dangled her heavy ring of keys, about her waist. It was impossible to believe that a woman with that body had borne two children in two years. The breasts were full, but the waist and belly so tiny and flat he could almost span them even with his small hands. On her, no jewelry detracted the eye. She wore only a gold wedding band and a small beryl ring on her other hand, all set with some fine gold work of filigreed ivy leaves.

“My Lord Thomas,” the Lady Joan was protesting low, “the princess was greatly devastated at her desertion by her betrothed Louis de Male at Bruges, you recall, so she perhaps only feels here she has her revenge for that.”

“Nonsense,” the copper-haired Thomas Holland persisted, while Richard Sidwell pulled his eyes away from the Lady Joan to assess her lord in this interesting exchange of tempers. “Getting back at this poor bastard d’Albret is hardly getting even with de Male. The king and the prince did that well enough for her last year in that sea battle off Winchelsea when they trounced the fleet of Castilian ships de Male encouraged to wreak havoc on England. The princess is just too damned headstrong and Her Grace should have handled her daughter with more force.”

“As she did me, I assume you mean, my lord. Saints, I for one am all for the princess’s happiness. And would you so criticize the dear Queen Philippa about her daughter if Her Grace were standing here instead of poor Richard Sidwell, who is no doubt tired and famished and is in need of our hospitality rather than our heated words about the princess? Please sit at our table, Master Sidwell. Partake and then tell us whatever you know of events in London. Exactly why did the princess say she changed her mind about the marriage or had she never agreed to it at all?”

Despite her usual fears of hearing news from the court, Joan plied their visitor with hot food and wine while Thomas looked on glumly over a wine goblet, his little son on his knee. Between bites of mackerel and biscuits drenched in Normandy honey, Richard Sidwell told them how five fully laden ships, heavy with goods for the princess and her retinue, had been prepared to set sail for Bordeaux when the bride defected. Sumptuous gifts for the groom, a massive bridal trousseau—one robe of which took twenty-nine skilled embroiderers nine days to complete—everything was prepared when Princess Isabella refused to embark. The bridegroom was so devastated, rumors said, that he had taken holy vows as a cloistered Franciscan friar and left his inheritance to a younger brother.

“Pure insanity,” Thomas Holland’s voice cut in on the marvelous tale while Joan hung on every word, trying to picture it all. “Let your minstrel make up some sad song to sing about it then, lady, so you can get all misty-eyed over it again. All I can see is the princess has made a mess of a necessary alliance with her groom’s father. King Edward needs all the friends he can get in Bordeaux for this coming war and a woman upsets the whole damned apple cart!”

“Thus it has been since Eve, my gracious host,” Richard Sidwell ventured and spooned up more custard, noting how the grim-faced Lord Holland just eyed his lady wife askance and did not find the jest a bit amusing. Poor lady, to have so serious and dour a knight for husband in this walled, moated manor so far from the excitement and gaiety of the Plantagenet court, Sidwell concluded, and washed the custard down with another gulp of wine.

“Any other, better news?” Lord Holland asked when he was done eating. “News of war? I long for it sometimes.”

“Aye, so do the other knights, of course, I have heard, my gracious lord, but the new King John of France bides his time and so does our royal king. King John, ’tis said, in obvious jealousy and affront to England’s Order of the Garter, has founded a so-called Order of the Star this January, despite his depleted finances from the ruinous wars ending at Crécy.”

“Saint’s blood!” Thomas swore low. “The Order of the Garter shall vanquish the Order of the Star when English knights next meet French on a battlefield. Say on.”

“Well, my gracious lord, speaking of Crécy and all—His Grace, the Prince of Wales has not been affianced again, since the last negotiations fell through and ’tis rumored he bides his time waiting for the next French war almost in self-imposed exile from London at his vast manor holdings. ’Tis rumored too he has a second son now by another lady different from the one named de Vere who bore his first.”

Richard Sidwell, esquire, regretted that last bit of news the moment he spoke it, for the lovely Lady Joan’s face clearly showed shock and dismay before she covered it by turning away to take her copper-haired little son into her arms from his father’s lap.

“A raft of bastard sons will do His Grace no good,” she heard her husband say, but the words did not stop her flow of memories. “The prince will have to marry and soon to get himself heirs for the royal line of succession someday. Quite simply, the man has no choice as some of us did.”

While Thomas Holland and their wiry, little guest spoke of other things, Joan bounced her son on her blue-woolen knees, but his delighted smiles and squeals hardly permeated her thoughts. She, in perpetual, forced exile here with Thomas Holland, had two sons; Prince Edward, in temporary, chosen exile there, with different women had two sons. The wheel of Fortune had spun and cast them off in far different directions where they had perhaps much the same lives, but each alone.

Her vision blurred with tears which she rapidly blinked back. Damn this rush of silly feelings. Saints, damn this little messenger from Isabella who dared to remind her of what once could have been! She glanced down at the beryl ring the prince had given her over seven years ago. She should not have worn it. She would take it off and never look on it again!

“Lady, I said I thought I would take our guest downstairs to his chamber now and I will be right back.”

“Oh, aye, of course. A chamber newly aired with fresh spring rushes on the floor I hope you will enjoy.” She managed a smile and a calm demeanor as she held her son to her to bid Sidwell good-night. “In the morn perhaps you would like to look around our lands here before you set out for Alençon,” she added. “I would like the princess to be told how well we get on here when you return to her.”

“Aye, Lady Joan. A gracious lord and lady in a most gracious French castle. Good even to you.”

The room breathed silence after their footsteps died away and Madeleine came to take little Thomas off to the nursery down the hall where she slept on a trundle bed in earshot of the Holland sons. Soon, Joan thought, soon Thomas would need his own room and then a pony—then a little quintain and blunted weapons, schooling, his own life of knighthood, and wars, and daily agonies of heart.

She pressed her fingertips to her eyes, suddenly exhausted. It had been a long day. She twisted off the beryl ring decorated with her family’s ivy leaf insignia and dropped it in her jewel coffer even as she heard her husband’s tread outside the door.

“St. Peter’s bones, that little esquire can jabber—and eat and drink,” he said immediately and sat at the cleared table to pour himself more wine. “Here—the missive from the princess,” he added and scooted the small, ribboned and wax-sealed scroll down the length of table toward her.

She came closer, sitting across from him to open it. “Do you know, Joan, besides stopping here, what the man’s task is for the princess—why he is traipsing around over here in hostile France?”

She looked up at him across the forsythia on the polished table. “No, of course not, unless I did not hear him tell us.”

“The poor knave is over here fetching figured brocade for her from Alençon! Clear across the Channel and a two-hundred-blasted-mile ride through French territory for figured brocade! The woman is daft—it is the new fashion at court, he says. By the rood, Joan, you are well quit of Isabella and the rest.”

“And are you well quit of them?” she parried.

“Your meaning?”

“Do you not miss being with the Plantagenets in their glittering realm? The queen, for instance?”

“I have been loyal to Her Grace ever since I was in the party of knights sent to fetch her from Flanders as a bride. I told you that. Are you implying something about our marriage, madame, that I owe her a debt for such? She let me down when she wed you with Salisbury, but I have long forgiven her for all that even if you have not. I have been well enough content to live here with you as wife because I took comfort in believing you were well content to get away from the Plantagenets. I should be most disturbed, madame, to believe one little word of His Grace, our prince’s private doings at home, would change any of that contentment.”

She leveled a cool, violet stare at his one-eyed challenge. “Not a whit, my lord,” she lied.

“Good. Then, it is off to bed for us. That damned brocade fetcher cost us a goodly part of a fine evening with such piddling news of trousseaus and bastard sons, fashions, and de Maltravers—”

Joan crunched the stiff parchment scroll in her hand. “What did you say? De Maltravers? I heard naught of de Maltravers. How—what did he say?”

“How the hell do you know aught of de Maltravers anyway, Joan? It is just more gossip Sidwell threw in when I took him to his room.”

“De Maltravers, the exile from Flanders? Tell me, Thomas!”

His mouth dropped open and he half rose out of his chair to lean toward her across the table. “Aye,
that
de Maltravers, John de Maltravers. But he has been gone from England for as many years as you are old surely. Now, what in the hell did you know of de Maltravers?”

“Saints, Thomas, do you know nothing of me? He is the man I despise most on the face of the earth now that Roger Mortimer is dead. He helped King Edward murder my father!”