The First Princess of Wales (22 page)

He rose, naked, and poured it for her, taking a sip of it himself as he returned to the bed and handed the goblet to her. Before she could drink, his big hand cupped her chin to make her look at him. His eyes were narrowed and glittering. “Jeannette, though you lie with me, never lie to me, ever. I could not bear it. Do you understand?”

The goblet shook so in her hand a splash of liquid cooled her thigh. “I understand,” she whispered.

“They will try to keep us apart, but if there is any need for subterfuge or deceit, it must not be between us. Say you understand,” he pursued, his face completely serious.

“I did say it, my Lord Edward. Please. You are hurting me.”

He loosed his hold and sipped his wine, his eyes still pinning her to the velvet where she sat, her knees pulled up and her golden tresses a veil to partly cover her nudity. His warm fingers lifted to stroke the slant of her cheek. He felt growing desire for her assault him again. For three years he had been watching her, wanting her. St. George, she drove thoughts of any other woman from his mind and turned his very insides to hot, molten lead when her violet eyes gazed wide on him like this. Yet her next words brought the outside world crashing in and he longed to silence her with a kiss.

“I guess it will not be too long now before Calais falls, Your Grace.”

“Aye. This week, I judge.”

“And then we will be sailing home for a victorious welcome for you. But those poor people starving in that city—”

“Look,
ma chérie,
they have had a standing offer to submit to our mercy at any time. It is their own choice to stay behind those walls.”

“Submit to your mercy—a strange way to speak of it. And was it so with us today? I submitted to your mercy?”

“Save it for another time, Jeannette. I dislike a scolding woman in bed. I can get all the lawyers, strategists—or enemies—I need elsewhere.”

“Oh, well—of course, I did not mean to be a scolding woman. Of course, I want to fall into line and any bed you choose anywhere, just like all your other women—”

To her dismay he grinned at her despite her shrewish tone.
“Ma
chérie,
I cannot tell you how much it would please me to believe even for a moment you are one tiny whit jealous of what other women I may or may not have had. Now finish the wine you so desperately wanted. I have other plans for our evening—all of it.”

She felt suddenly shy, then panicky. How dangerously close a few moments ago she had come to shouting out her love for him and yet—and yet she had vowed to her mother she would avenge their family cause on the royal Plantagenets. Isabella was foolish and innocent, the queen both kind and foreboding, the king so utterly unreachable. But this man, Edward, their dear son and heir, was close, vulnerable—so close that—

He took her half-emptied wine goblet from her unresisting fingers and drained it himself before dropping it to the carpet behind him as he had done his own. He reached for her waist, tangling his fingers in her long hair. He noted she was trembling barely perceptibly, but she faced him like a warrior with her shoulders back, her eyes steady, and her pert chin held proudly. She was a little warrior in her own way and one he did not quite understand. Other women, even noble or royal, he could have at his bidding yet he cared not. This one, all champagne and lilacs and wild spirit, he wanted to possess as desperately as he had ever wanted a victory of a more heroic sort. Yet she had put up some wall and however much he desired to scale it, it grew apace.

He leaned forward to take her lips which she yielded warily. “My beautiful, violet-eyed love,” he said low and then he began his campaign of conquest that so often with this woman ended in his own surprising surrender.

C
alais had capitulated; the lengthy siege against the apparently impregnable walls was over. Even the richest inside the city had finally been reduced to eating rats and dogs, and Jean de Vienne, the brave leader of the city’s garrison, had at last asked for terms. King Edward of England gave a reply direct and simple. He had offered Calais mercy long ago before he had lost a year at siege and hundreds of soldiers to winter cold and disease camped outside these walls in rude, wooden structures. For long years, Calais had been a home port for pirates preying on English ships in the Channel. Now the defiant citizens must surrender to either being killed or ransomed at his will—unconditional surrender. The famous Plantagenet temper Joan had seen in the king, Prince Edward, even Isabella, which was whispered of from the midland shires of England clear to the pope’s palace at Avignon, had been fanned to fever heat.

But the king’s advisors counseled against such severity. Philippa, near her time with her tenth child, pleaded for the Blessed Virgin’s mercy. Even his warrior son, who amazed those closest to him by his calm and contented demeanor lately, suggested that power could best be served at times through gentleness—a true chivalric ideal most courtiers whispered the Prince of Wales had learned through reading about King Arthur but only Edward himself knew he had learned through his patient, secret conquest of the little Jeannette of Kent whom he was certain he had tamed now they had become lovers. They had spent a second long night together at their little sea cottage, though he had to risk going clear to her room down the hall near Isabella’s suite and several other guards not in his employ had seen them leave. Still, the night had been beautiful: the whole world was beautiful despite his father’s temper or the starving, wretched citizens of Calais on the other side of those high walls.

Finally, King Edward agreed to a compromise which would both bestow mercy and yet seek redress and justice—six of the richest city leaders must present themselves before him clothed only in their shirts with nooses around their necks ready to be hanged. They must present to him a naked sword, handle first to symbolize their utter defeat and bear the keys to the city and the castle within. The other conquered citizens left in the city would then benefit from the king’s mercy.

The English court, which had gone to Bruges for the marriage that never happened, was all assembled that Saturday, August 4, 1347 for another sort of festivity—the surrender of stubborn Calais. Joan sat next to Isabella on the dais behind the king, queen, and prince under a striped azure and gold silk awning which flapped gently in the sporadic, warm sea breeze. Everyone was richly attired; many had donned the expensive brocades and jewel-studded satins they had expected to wear at the Princess Isabella’s wedding. Only Isabella herself and her dear friend Jeannette had vowed never to wear their pure white dresses once destined for that marriage day and never to mention it again to anyone.

Joan wore a clinging, peach-colored satin kirtle in which she was much too warm for the day. The long-skirted, tight-bodied, and long-sleeved popular styles were uncomfortable in weather like this and someday, when she had enough power, she fully intended to change the fashion, she vowed. But today her gown stirred restlessly about her ankles and the traditional liripipes at the sleeves draped over the arm of her chair; even the wispy scarves fluttered from her high, pointed headpiece. Yet she had dressed as she knew she should, even to please the queen. If the king had not been in such a towering rage of late, she might have dared to talk Isabella into something far more frivolous to show them she did not care for their pious and proud Plantagenet ways. One of the slit
surcotes
she favored or a kirtle dripping with her favorite deep, swinging fringes would do. She would be bareheaded and laugh at their frowns or—saints, but one of those diaphanous night chemises they had brought from Flanders would suit this warm day! Then, the prince would be pleased at least.

She could not repress the little smile which lifted her cherry red lips as she squinted out into the sunlight at the small, approaching group of men from Calais. This town had fallen to the English, she told herself, just as the prince surely had fallen to her. He thought himself the aggressor, the conqueror, no doubt, but when he needed her as much as he seemed to the two nights they had spent at that lovely, little beach cottage—when he sought her kisses and caresses and lost himself in her body—she felt her control over him. That might have to be her eventual revenge on these Plantagenets. He would ask for her, need her beyond reason, and she would reject him and his parents—perhaps Isabella too, if need be—with him. She would tell them why. Everyone would know that Joan of Kent sought retribution for her murdered father and ruined mother. She would take Marta and go home to Liddell Manor in quiet Kent to live caring for the estate when her brother Edmund was away and playing sad songs on her lute. The picture of her poor father summoned before the assembled councilors at Windsor by Roger Mortimer and that oily-faced bastard de Maltravers drifted through her memory. And then, when she saw the present scene unfold before her, she nearly screamed out at its stunning impact.

With the wailing lamentations of grief from within the walls of nearby Calais as sad background music, six men approached the king’s silken tent. A moment’s swelling breeze lifted the awning and their garments, and flapped the leopard and lily banners smartly. The six burghers of Calais walked haltingly; gaunt-faced, ravaged, white-bearded, they halted before the colorful pavilion in linen shirts, barelegged with rope halters around their scrawny necks as they had been told.

They knelt down and held up their hands and once again said, “Gentle King, behold here we six, who were burgesses of Calais and great merchants. We have brought the keys of the town and of the castle, and we submit ourselves clearly into your will and pleasure, to save the residue of the people of Calais, who have suffered great pain.”

Joan half rose out of her seat, her mouth open, her eyes wide. They had suffered great pain! The speaker was so frail and his voice creaked like an old oak door at home, not with fear but with utter exhaustion and desperation. He was so blue-eyed, so vital in his pitiful linen shirt with the knotted noose hanging forward on his sunken chest. Her father once, so blue-eyed, had pleaded in his shirt and rope, doomed, doomed before all who had stared, cold and haughty like this king. But then, this king had been off in cowardly flight instead of at Windsor where his uncle, Edmund of Kent, needed mercy!

Isabella’s hand darted to Joan’s arm and she pulled her back down into her seat. Suddenly, Joan was aware the prince had turned his head to glare, but she ignored him too.

“Sir, we beseech Your Grace to have mercy and pity on us through your high nobles,” the old man of Calais concluded. The king took the keys and sword and handed them to Prince Edward but made no immediate answer. The scene blurred before Joan as her eyes filled with blinding tears. Her own blue-eyed father—his portrait at Liddell in the hall was so blue-eyed—he had pleaded like this, the terrible hangman’s rope heavy on his neck and no one had listened.

King Edward’s tawny, crowned head moved as he formed his terrible words. “Death to you all, rebels and enemies. My mercy you spurned earlier, and you may reap the harvest of my just vengeance now. Away with these Frenchmen!”

It took Joan a moment to grasp his meaning; then, she realized even if King Edward had been there for her father the result might have been the same.

She turned to the frowning Isabella beside her. “Your Grace, no. He cannot. He cannot have them beheaded or hanged. He cannot,” Joan hissed to Isabella and grabbed her wrist.

“Sh! His Grace is so angry and rightly so,” the princess whispered back at her. The surrounding crowd of nobles murmured, shifted, buzzed with whispers. Ahead of them, the queen’s lofty headpiece tilted as she pivoted to stare at her daughter and her young, distraught ward. The king sat stone-still as if carved in marble. One clenched fist rested on his knee, his beard moved in a warm gust of wind, and his gold crown glinted dully in muted sunlight. English guards in leopard tunics were leading the men away. At last the king and prince moved down off the dais to confer in deep tones with their chief negotiator, Sir Walter Manny, newly arrived from the English victory over the Scots at the siege of Berwick.

Joan, her hands clasped tightly in her brocade lap, hunched farther forward to speak to the queen. “Your Grace, please, cannot we plead for them? They are only old men brave enough to come out here for this. Cannot we convince the king to show mercy?”

“Cannot
we
?” the queen echoed, turning to face Joan more fully while a surprised Isabella looked on. “Who is
we
who would dare to beard His Grace when these enemies have finally capitulated and we may soon all go home to England?” Her face looked annoyed and stern. Joan had not talked to Her Grace for several days, and she had not seen such a hard look since that long-ago day when the queen had come upon her sprawled across the prince’s lap in that walled garden at Windsor.

Joan clasped her hands together so tightly in her lap that she felt her fingers go numb. “Your Grace, I know the king would give you aught you ask of him. He bends to you only. I have seen it—you yourself have said it, and now you are so far with this tenth royal babe that he would deny you no—”