The First Princess of Wales Read online

  Marta moved a step closer to the old man and lowered her voice. “Ye read th’ planets for Lady Margaret last week, did ye not? And she asked if her taking th’ vows a th’ St. Clares would give her final peace?” Marta pursued.

  “She asked that, aye.”

  “And Lord Edmund said ye assured her she’d be finding final peace there with the St. Clares in London.”

  “Aye, Mistress Marta, true enough.”

  “Then why do ye not show a little joy for them? Lady Margaret to the peace she ha’ never found sin’ her lord ha’ been murdered and my Lady Joan to better things. Aye?”

  Morcar nodded at the window but his eyes seemed to glaze over again. “But at the moment, she is so untouched, so free, so peaceful, Marta.”

  “Joan?” Marta’s birdlike hand darted out from under the cloak to grasp Morcar’s wrist. “My Lady Joan? Did ye read her signs, too? She said naught of it. What is it? What did ye see? She will come to no harm at th’ court that slew her father?”

  “Calm your feathers, Marta.” Morcar’s papery thin voice came to her ears. “I am old, I have seen much, the wheel revolves from fortune to fall to fortune again for all of us.”

  “Aye, but for Joan—”

  With an amazing amount of strength for his frail appearance, the old man disengaged Marta’s hand. “Leave off, Marta. I hear the lord’s men on the stairs. I have given the Lady Margaret my word and I will not tell Joan what I have read until she is married.”

  “Married? When?”

  “Leave off, I said. I am weary and the great journey has not even begun. I have no wish to leave Liddell, but like the Lady Joan, I am sent for. Remember, maids of Joan’s age are marriageable at great Edward’s court, as well you know, Marta. And surely, Joan will have time at court before she is wed.”

  Marta’s eyes narrowed at Morcar’s suddenly stern profile, and her heart beat very fast. “Wed high or low? The lass be so willful as ye know, Morcar, so passionate—to have things her way.”

  “Aye, but I will say no more.” He turned to face the direction of the door through which issued the rumble of male conversation and laughter. “And, Marta, be not so foolish as to try to question the Lady Margaret herself. She is beset this day with fears for her journey out of her safe sanctuary in that room upstairs. And to tell true, I told her little of the Lady Joan’s charts. What will be will be.”

  He moved away from the window, but ignoring propriety in front of the lord’s men, Marta scurried after him.

  “Please, Lord Morcar, by St. Andrew, the lass be all I ha’ had to love these last long years sin’ Lady Margaret turned against th’ child.”

  He looked calmly at Marta, and his austere features softened as he gazed down on the wiry, petite Scotswoman. “Be calm in your heart, little Marta. Tell me truly, who would need the stars to read the Lady Joan’s future? Will not she be well loved? Admired? And set her own ways and styles? Do you not remember the first chart we did for the Lord Edmund and Lady Margaret when the little Joan was born in the middle of July the summer her father died? Born under Cancer, eager for action, ruled by the moon, a romantic, moody, curious—an alluring woman. Hold to that, little Marta. I am sorry you shall not be with her there for she could have need of your sharp tongue and practical Scots brain, eh? I had hoped to live out my days here in quiet, green Kent, not back at the court of a Plantagenet king whose family had some part in my Lord Edmund’s death. But the king has suddenly remembered my service to his dear uncle. The king speaks and we all—almost all—obey.”

  A strange smile lit his mouth again as he moved stiffly away. By St. Andrew, Marta thought, it was fortunate that the Lady Margaret in her litter would force their slow travel pace, because that frail, old man would never live to see London otherwise.

  Lord Edmund, who looked as little like his father as Joan strongly resembled their sire, entered and stopped stock-still across the room. His eyes were violet, like poor Lady Margaret’s, but other than that trait he shared with Joan, the twenty-three-year-old Edmund, Earl of Kent, and the Lady Joan looked nothing alike. Brown-haired and round-faced, Edmund resembled his mother’s Wake family lineage; while, but for the eyes, Joan was as blond and fair a Plantagenet as her executed father.

  “Marta? Joan is ready to eat with us, is she not?” Lord Edmund’s clear voice interrupted the tumbling flow of her thoughts.

  “Aye, milord. I shall fetch her direct. She but stepped out in th’ garden for a wee breath a air.”

  He shook his head once and raised his hand as if to ward her off. “No, Marta. I shall see to her. The Lady Anne will be down soon. You may help Glenda and the servants. They have orders to bring my lady mother down at the last minute before we set out.”

  He spun sharply on his heel and Marta’s eyes followed his black- and red-garbed figure as he disappeared from the great hall into the corridor. “Aye, for th’ love a St. Andrew,” Marta murmured under her breath, feeling much better as she always did whenever she invoked the patron saint of Scotland. “No one ever said anyone with blue Plantagenet blood in their veins does not know how to give orders or insist their own will be done!”

  Outside in the midmorning sun, Joan stood at the edge of a fish pond staring at the reflection of the manorhouse and sky. She cradled her precious lute against her like a child and let the sun on her back chase the chill of pending departure from her veins. On a whim, she bent to pick a little handful of violets, purple trilliums, and forget-me-nots at her feet.

  “Take a care not to fall in, Joan. We hardly have time to fish you out and you are wetting the hems of that lovely new kirtle on the dew.”

  “Oh, my Lord Edmund. I did not hear you. But it cannot be time to go already.”

  Her brother gave her that quick, half-mouthed smile of his, and his eyes went approvingly over her appearance. At least he did not seem to be out of sorts this morning, Joan thought, much relieved. It just would not do to be arguing with him on this last morning here in who knew how long. Little butterflies of apprehension fluttered in her stomach, but she beat the feeling down.

  Edmund looked ready for riding and very grand in his black tunic which had red piping over his powerful chest and shoulders. He sported a smart black beaver hat with a narrow brim jauntily turned up in back, and a short fur-lined travel cape swung from his shoulders. His gilt spurs clinked slightly as he approached.

  “This is a lovely day, a special and great day for you, Joan. I want to be certain you understand that. Mother and I have decided this is best for you.”

  “As you say, my lord.”

  There was a moment’s awkward silence between them while birds twittered from the cherry tree behind and the green earth, damp after last night’s gentle rain, seemed to breathe out a heady freshness. She wished with a sudden stab of longing she knew Edmund better—knew and trusted him fully. He was some years older than she and had been reared, until his majority, at Lord Salisbury’s grand household at Wark Castle far to the north, where her brother John, five years older than she, was now. She loved Edmund, of course, deep down, but they had never been a family, not since Mother did not seem to love her anymore.

  “The lute, Joan. You asked if you might take it, and I agreed despite the fact few court ladies play their own instruments. That is only a new trend and there are plenty of trained court musicians you will enjoy. It should be wrapped and packed if you are as worried about its safety today as you were last week.”

  “Aye, brother, I am. I told you it means a great deal to me.”

  “Aye, and your sweet voice with it is charming, I admit that.” Edmund put an index finger on her arm as if to reassure her, but immediately moved two steps back toward the house. Then, as if to deliberately shatter the tenuous moment between them, he took up an old subject they had argued much over these past weeks.

  “But I still do not approve of that glib-tongued French beggar, Roger Wakeley, wandering in like that when I was off to king’s service and living here for over a year without
my permission.”

  He held out both hands as if to ward off her protest. “Aye, you have told me, lady, he was a talented singer and musician, and I suppose it is quaint you learned so well, but you ought to have been busy enough with your tutor studying French, Latin, and numbers. It is an excellent lady’s education without all the other fripperies you insist on, Joan. Your stubborn penchant for love songs and full-blown romances when your first responsibility is to learn chatelaine household duties is quite beyond me. You shall not be out riding free as the wind or playing lute songs in some forest glade at court, I assure you.”

  She ignored the slight to her own abilities to manage a household, but her pulse beat faster at his slurs on the poor, banished Roger Wakeley who had arrived with a fever and a broken leg and had stayed to have both mended by the manor leech. That she’d caught the fever he had and nearly died until the ugly swelling under her arm burst and drained, and that two servants caught the malady and died hardly mattered later. For Roger, in the year before he was asked to leave by a young Edmund, had taught her to play and sing and memorize a hundred chansons and troubadour and jongleur melodies—a whole world of beauty and joy to help fill the hours dear Marta and the servants could not. And now Roger Wakeley had been gone two long years anyway, so how dare Edmund bring it all up again now!

  “I do not wish us to have this argument repeatedly, my lord,” she said with a steady voice. “I shall try to please you, but you have no right to slander my dear friend and music teacher. You were gone, gone a whole year, and then you made him leave, and there was no one left but Marta since Mother even hates the sight of me—”

  She stopped the rush of words, shocked that she had voiced the unspeakable thought. Tears crowded her thick lashes, threatening to spill down her cheeks. Her full lower lip pouted, then trembled. Edmund looked as surprised as she.

  “My dear little sister—chérie—do not say so of our lady mother. Do not think so.” He moved nearer, barely touching her elbows with his big hands. “She has been ill, ill and so unhappy since our dear father died. This, of course, you know.”

  She nodded mutely, her eyes as purple as the flowers crushed in her hand against the neck of the lute she held before her as if it could be a buffer against her brother’s coldness.

  Edmund’s mind raced. Of course, she knew that much, but what else had she been told or had she guessed? She seemed so young and naïve to him still; yet she was very clever, and after all, she was the one who had been living here in this house with a half-demented, grief-crazed woman all these years.

  “Joan, let me explain, and then we must go in for a quick meal before we set out. See, through the gate. I can hear the horses being brought around already.”

  “I am not the slightest bit hungry, my lord.”

  “I do not care. By the saints’ precious blood, lady, you need some sustenance before you ride six hours to Rochester. Now, mark my words well. Our lady mother—it is not that she detests the sight of you, not at all. Rather, she loves your face too much and it hurts her.”

  Joan’s voice sounded strangled in her throat. “Loves my face? It hurts—her!”

  His hands reached to steady her at the elbows. “Our father. You did not know him, I know, chérie, as you were not yet born, but you resemble him greatly and you were the last child. You do see what I am trying to say, do you not? They were very, very much in love, our parents, and quite simply, you bring back all the agony of her departed happiness and the tragedy of losing him.”

  “But that is all wrong, Edmund! If that is what she feels, it is so wrong. If that were me, I would cherish that child, hold her close, a gift and memorial of the lost love,” she protested, her voice quivering.

  “Hush, Joan. We cannot judge other people, nor be other people. I am telling you she loves you, but it is just too hard for her.”

  “Let me go, my lord. That is fine, just fine. I understand, really; it is all right. She has always tolerated a short visit from me on saints’ days, several times during Yule. I am the one who could not bear it after a while with her, and I would make excuses to leave that little inviolate sanctuary she keeps up there.” She gestured wildly toward the small window above, from which the Lady Margaret could view the vast beauty of Kent if she were so moved. Was there a face, a wan, sad face, pressed to the glazed panes of glass and lead even now? No, of course not. This whole nightmare of Mother, this whole day she was leaving home, was one hideous dream.

  Joan skirted the frustrated Edmund and strode headlong for the house before he caught her and swung her around to face him again.

  “Look, Joan, I know it cannot have been easy, but she has been ill and more and more terrified to go out of that little room as the years have passed. She is almost fifty-two now, she senses death over the horizon, and she wants to make amends. She has been sick and hateful and she knows it.”

  “Now! There, you have said it. She has hated me!”

  “No, no, that is not it. Hates that she lost one husband, then a second. Hates what life has done to her and hates those who murdered our father.”

  Joan’s sharp mind halted, then spun back through all the whispers and half-bits of knowledge about her father’s death, things she had heard over the years and buried in her mind: beheaded for treason; an innocent, gentle man beheaded for treason against the crown when all he had tried to do was inquire into the murder of the present king’s father, a foul murder committed by an inhuman demon usurper named Roger Mortimer.

  Her breath caught in her throat at her next words. “But, my lord, our dear King Edward had the murderer of both our father and his own arrested and executed as soon as he could seize his right to rule back from Mortimer. Was Mortimer not hanged, drawn, and quartered? Who then is there left for Mother to hate all these years?”

  Edmund hesitated. By the rood, this wisp of a girl argued like a cleric from the Inns of Court in London. He had decided long ago she must never know the entire story; indeed, he knew he was taking a gamble with life’s dice to take her to court where she might hear the whispers someday, but Queen Philippa had asked for Joan, to rear, and it did the family no good for her to be a cloistered nun here at moated Liddell. It was true, it was pertinent, and it would obscure the more devastating truth it cloaked.

  “No, Joan, there is one other left, an accomplice to Mortimer, who carried out his orders to kill the king and no doubt helped to arrange for our father’s death.”

  “Who? Will not the king execute him now?”

  “No. You see, he escaped to Flanders and still lives there. Only, there are occasional rumors he may try to come back. Maltravers, Sir John de Maltravers, is his name—from a rich Dorsetshire family.”

  “Not so rich anymore, I warrant, now the king surely holds his lands,” Joan said, and the trembling against his hands ceased.

  He had indeed played that move well, Edmund thought, suddenly proud of himself for outwitting this shrewd, little hoyden when he had to. Just so she never learned the rest of it, the rumors that de Maltravers might return with full pardon and restitution to England—and that it was King Edward and Queen Philippa themselves who might pardon the man. It was even claimed by some that de Maltravers’s fine position in Flanders was due to the good will of the king. At least Joan’s quick mind was on de Maltravers now, a villain she could hate without ever meeting. And in the process, she had, perhaps, believed that their mother’s insane bitterness was focused on the faceless de Maltravers and not herself. He certainly had no plans to tell Joan that de Maltravers’s wife still lived on a farm in Dorsetshire which the Plantagenets held in his name.

  “You will eat with me, Joan, and then we shall be on our way, fair maid,” he ventured boldly. “Anne and I will want you back for visits when it is allowed, of course. Come on in now.”

  She followed him through the arched doorway crested with the white, antlered hart, the coat of arms of their dead father that was Edmund’s heritage now with the house and title. “Of course,” Joan repe
ated low, “when it is allowed.” She held the wilted purple flowers on her lap while she ate and kept her lute by her side, too.

  An hour later as the bell in the little chapel across the cobbled inner courtyard tolled its monotonous farewell, Edmund’s men mounted fifteen strong to accompany them to Rochester, and tomorrow beyond. Joan’s lute was wrapped in linen strips and, with a down pillow on either side of it, stuffed in the hemp sack on her palfrey’s sleek brown flank. Although Edmund tried to insist she wait, mounted, with the others until the servants and he brought Lady Margaret down from her haven above, Joan refused and stood instead clutching a tiny bunch of blue forget-me-nots from the walled garden. All of them stared at the covered litter—with its four poles, canopy, and curtain—awaiting the Lady Margaret.

  Joan stood on one foot, then the other trying not to panic or to weep. The vast gray, stone walls, covered by their tapestry of ivy, suddenly never looked more foreboding. A horse snorted; someone’s spurs clinked while the bell tolled on.

  Then, for the first time in these sad, slow revolving years, Margaret of Liddell stood on the front steps of her dead husband’s ancestral home. Edmund held her by one gray-swathed arm, and her faithful Glenda by the other while Marta appeared behind. Everything seemed to stop, to totter for one instant on that threshold. The Lady Margaret, her head covered with a pleated veil, her neck hidden by a vast wimple that flowed over her shoulders, paused, and her violet eyes blinked wildly in the sun. Her gaze jumped across the courtyard to the waiting men and horses and then fastened on Joan. It seemed as if she might speak, but Edmund nodded to Glenda and they hurried her down the few broad stairs. Then Edmund loosed her arm to bend and lift her into the litter. Before she could stop herself, Joan moved toward the little clustered trio.

  “My lady Mother, I am so glad you are here and it is such a beautiful day for you. Here, from the gardens, flowers—forget-me-nots, Mother.”