The King's Mistress (53 page)

“His Grace did insist I wear some of the late queen’s jewels then,” I conceded. “But I knew they were never mine to keep. What else do they say of me?”

“That you control access to the king, and that his household is now filled with your friends.”

“Geoffrey! That is not true.” Perhaps the first was, to an extent, but not the second. Those perceived as my friends were the very men I had warned Edward against. “They connect us because we engage in trade.”

Geoffrey held up a hand. “I know that, and most other folk do as well. But they prefer to chatter about such nonsense rather than delve more deeply, where they might discover the uneasy fact that His Grace is not the man he once was, and neither is his heir. Prince Edward’s son Richard is likely to be the next king, but he is so young—too young—and too much like the late Queen Mother Isabella for their tastes.”

I worried for Joan. I, too, had heard this said about her youngest son. “Poor child, already criticized for a likeness over which he has no control.”

• • •

E
DWARD’S IMPENDING
sortie into France loomed over the household all spring, for essentially all the household officers, pages, grooms—all its males—were to embark with the king and the prince. Two men in ill health confronting a wily fox on his own terrain—I feared for our two Edwards. I planned to retire to one of my manors in the countryside with my daughters and Grandmother, if I could persuade Dame Agnes to make the journey. She had been frail and confused on my most recent visits, but I wondered how much of that was worsened by her withdrawal from society. She rarely left the house now, doing so only to cross the square to the church. I also hoped that John would join us for a while; Lord Percy was considering my request to have my son with me for a few months.

All my bustling about in preparation could not drown out my fearful thoughts. Despite knowing how much it meant to Edward, I prayed that something benign might prevent his proceeding. He counted on a victory over Charles to take away his aches and pains, rejuvenate him, right all the wrongs of recent years. But neither victory nor defeat could change the truth that he was an aging king with a troublingly broken heir, and I feared how he would cope with disillusionment after victory even more than I feared how he would meet with defeat.

It had been months since he had been able to make love to me, though we continued to pleasure one another in other satisfying ways. I tried to convince him that we were as passionate and loving as ever. But I knew he felt diminished. One evening he urged me to seek out love potions or spells that might make it possible for him to make love to me again. My arguments that he
was
making love to me in all the ways that mattered only angered him.

“I fear such people as those who dabble in love potions and spells, Edward, my love. What if someone should find out and condemn us?”

“I am the king, Alice. Who would dare condemn me?”

Some questions were better left unanswered, but in my heart I doubted that he was as safe as he thought.

I
N LATE
July I gathered my daughters and Dame Agnes, to whom the warm days of summer had been kind, and we began our travels with the short journey to Barking Abbey to spend a day with Bella, now a novice. I had seen her earlier in the season, on her birthday, and
rejoiced to witness her contentment. As I had hoped, Dame Agnes was comforted by seeing this as well.

We then continued on to the manor of Tibenham in Norfolk. It was part of the de Orby wardship in which I had invested a great deal of money and Robert’s time, hoping to return it to productivity. Henry, Lord Percy had suggested that his half sister Mary, my ward and heiress to the manor, might accompany John and revisit the home in which she had spent her earliest summers. She was a few years his junior, and as Edward still considered her a possible wife for our son I agreed, thinking it worth observing them together. The manor was very near the sea. I did not like to journey so far with my frail grandmother and little Jane, who was still very young, but in the end Joan’s excitement about seeing her brother won me over.

It proved to be a beautiful house, and Dame Agnes enjoyed sitting in the garden there, feeling the cool salt breeze beneath the hot sun in the late afternoon. I missed the bright mornings at Fair Meadow or Ardington, though. So near the coast, the mornings were often dull with fog.

I was soon distracted by an unexpected visitor. One misty morning as I stood in the hall looking out on what seemed to be a solid wall of gray just beyond the porch, two figures on horseback emerged from the fog. My first thought was fear that something had gone wrong in Sandwich. In June Lord Pembroke’s fleet of ships sailing to La Rochelle in Gascony, carrying a small fortune to pay for the military support of Gascon lords and their men, was utterly destroyed by a Spanish fleet. After the initial hysteria, the silence into which the palace sank was more terrifying than all the cries and moans and shouted accusations that had greeted this news. I and many attached to Edward’s household had invested heavily in the war as a show of confidence. We were stunned by our loss. Plans for embarking from Sandwich had resumed with a sense of desperate urgency. Both Princess Joan and Prince Edward had impressed upon me how devastating was the loss of our fleet and wealth, and how essential it was to retaliate. They had asked me to go to Richard Lyons to ask for more financial support, which I had done, with much misgiving. The king, my beloved, was not strong enough for such a venture either in body or spirit.

Now I crossed myself and said a prayer that these visitors did not presage ill news. As the men drew closer, a different dread manifested itself—the taller rider on the fine horse was William Wyndsor.

“What is he doing here?” Grandmother hissed behind me.

I had not noticed her there. “I do not know. I pray it is not bad news about the sailing.” I turned to her, looking into her gauzy eyes. “But how can you recognize him from here?”

“I smell him, the rat who tore our family apart. Friend to the she-devil!”

She thought it was Janyn. “It is not my husband, he is dead, Grandmother. It is Sir William Wyndsor.”

She looked confused.

“From afar his dark hair and his height could fool me as well,” I said. Courtesy required I should invite him into the hall. “Shall we welcome him?”

I sent a servant to fetch a groom who then invited William and his companion within. I reached the screens shielding the hall from drafts just as William stepped through them, shaking out his damp cloak.

“God’s blood, you are as beautiful as ever, Alice!”

“Is there some trouble?”

“No. I come to thank you for your assistance.”

“As I wrote at the time, there was no need to thank me.” How could he not know how unwelcome he was in my home?

I sent his page to the kitchen for some food and ale.

Grandmother greeted William with cautious courtesy. Mary Percy, John, and Joan looked up from their play to study him as only children can, openly staring, taking no care to hide their disinterest when he did no tricks.

But William strode over to them and crouched down. “I am William Wyndsor, recently come from Ireland. Whom am I addressing?”

“Mary,” she said with a lisp and a finger up her nose.

“Joan.”

“John Southery,” my son said, scrambling to stand and give William a stout bow.

William expressed delight upon meeting them, then noticed Jane in her nurse’s arms as he rose. “And this lovely child?”

“Jane.”

“These are all yours?”

How little he knew of my life. “Not Mary. I am her guardian, though she does not usually reside with me. John is being fostered by her half brother, Henry Percy.”

William lifted a brow. “The three others are the king’s children?”

“Of course.” I felt myself blush though I knew his question was most likely innocent, not a suggestion that I had more lovers.

“They all favor him. But where is Bella?”

“She is now a novice at Barking Abbey. Her choice.”

“Such a beautiful child.”

“Yes, she is. Now come, William.” I led him out into the brightening yard, then turned to him and demanded, “How did you know where to find me?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, William, I believe it may.”

“I asked. Discreetly. I have but a few days, Alice, then I must return to Westminster. I had to see you.”

“It is most courteous of you. And now, your deed done, you are welcome to refresh yourself before continuing on your journey.”

“You would send me away so soon?”

“Yes. Rest here in the garden. A servant will bring you some food and ale.”

“Will you sit with me awhile?”

“I cannot. I must see to the children.” I hurried back inside the house.

Robert came to me in a little while to say that William and his servant had departed.

“Had His Grace sent him? Is there news?” he asked.

“He said nothing of Sandwich. He’d come all this way merely to thank me for arranging the sale of that manor—the one you took care of for me. But how he knew where to find me, and to come so far … I do not like it. What sort of man persists with so little encouragement? What is his game? Who sent him?”

Robert took my hands. “If he returns, I shall deal with him.”

I pressed his hands. “He is not your burden, my friend.”

“Nor should he be yours.”

I drew strength from Robert’s concern. But I was still worried. Edward must not hear of William’s visit, innocent though it was. In his frail state his reactions were unpredictable, often rash. I asked Robert to listen for gossip among the tenants. Days later, when he had heard nothing, I finally began to hope that nothing would come of William’s unwelcome appearance.

“Your new tenants have benefited from your improvements, Alice,”
Robert assured me. “Even had they noticed anything awry, I doubt they would speak ill of you.”

Unfortunately, I soon learned that Henry, Lord Percy knew of William’s visit. Not wishing to call more attention to the incident, I did not investigate whether John and Mary had spoken of it as children might, or whether it had been Henry Percy himself who had told William where I would be. I would not have considered the latter but that I knew how ambitious Percy was, and could well imagine his tucking away this knowledge of William’s interest in me as possibly useful in future. I could not judge whether my concern for Edward’s failing health and his reckless intent to lead an army had rendered me so worried about my own future that I suspected enemies where there were none, or whether I was right to sense ranks closing in round me. For the rest of our sojourn in Norfolk I walked about in a fog of fear and anxiety that dimmed the joy of having my children and Dame Agnes with me in such a beautiful setting.

I did not see William again until I returned to Westminster, which was much sooner than I had expected.

I
N LATE
summer the weather turned foul. The king, the prince, the barons and all their men, ships, and stores were still waiting in Sandwich for the winds and storms to abate so they might cross the Channel to France when word came that the English-held town of La Rochelle had fallen to Charles’s troops. The weather had defeated the two Edwards, father and son. In mid-October the expedition force was disbanded, having achieved nothing, gone nowhere, at great cost. It was a financial disaster, for wars were funded on the understanding that ransoms and plunder would refill the coffers. There was no hope of that this bleak autumn. Worse, the great kingdom of Aquitaine was all but lost—little now remained in English hands but for some strips of land along the coast. Edward’s dream of being king of both France and England was dead.

I thanked God that he was back in Windsor, but he returned aged and dispirited, craving escape in lovemaking, hunting, hawking, dancing, yet bereft of the will even to rise from his bed. In truth, he suffered from such debilitating despair that I agreed with Prince Edward that we must protect the king from public view on his worst days.

The desperate financial situation required Wykeham’s calm wisdom and Brantingham’s practical caution. But Prince Edward denied them
both access to his father, saying the two bishops had had their chance to advise the king and failed. All of us at court who had the wherewithal once again bought some of the loans, to provide the Crown with immediate cash.

I do not know whether a younger king and a healthier prince might have made the journey to France that late summer. On some days Edward was certain that he had failed his people; if he felt that the prince might better lead the people, he would have stood aside. But the horror of it was that the heir, too, had failed his people. On other days Edward railed against the winds and tides, the inefficiency of his captains, his son’s plodding progress to Sandwich.

He began to slip back into the past, talking obsessively about the half brother he had met in Italy, the bastard son of his mother and Roger Mortimer. He spoke of how he regretted never having made the effort to meet him again after that one encounter when the boy was about eight.

“My half brother … What sort of man did he become? Was he bitter? Content?”

He also thought much about the rumor that his father had escaped from Berkeley Castle and secretly retreated from the world, living out the rest of his days in peace in a monastery. “Would that I might do so. An old king is no good for the realm.”

Gradually a darksome aspect crept into this plan; he began to forget more and more often that his father had actually died at Berkeley, and that his retirement had been only a rumor. He reassured himself that he would be following his father’s “wisdom” in knowing when a monarch should abdicate with grace. I would try to distract him by drawing him out for a brief ride or, if he were not so inclined, at least to the mews to see the hawks. I hoped that being out in the countryside and moving freely would bring him back to the present. I remembered with what anxiety Tommasa and Janyn had witnessed the dowager queen’s decline, and how right they had been to fear it. I prayed theirs would not be my fate.