The First Princess of Wales

by Karen Harper

  The desperate violet eyes darted, focused, widened. Her mother’s voice sounded strange, for Joan could never recall it however hard she tried. “Oh, aye, dear Joan and going to be reared at their court. I am so sorry, Joan.”

  Sorry for my going away, that I have to be brought up at court, or that you never really loved me, Joan wanted to ask.

  “Aye. Thank you, Mother. Here.” She pried apart her mother’s fingers tightly balled into a fist. Lady Margaret took the bunch of flowers. Joan had meant to give them to Marta when she came down, but Marta would understand.

  Violet eyes met violet eyes. “Forget-me-nots,” her mother said, but her eyes closed and she never looked at the flowers.

  “Joan, get back now,” Edmund whispered. “You can talk tonight. It will be dark before we see the walls and spires of Rochester if we do not set out.” He lifted his mother, and his shoulders and head hid her slight, gray-cloaked form from view as he bent to place her in the litter and drew the curtains closed. It was immediately silent inside.

  Fighting back tears, Joan hugged Marta good-bye again and let Edmund give her a boost onto her favorite fine black palfrey, Sable, which he was letting her keep at court. They clattered out across the cobbled courtyard and past the walled flower and herb gardens. They rode under the rusty, spike-teethed portcullis and funneled across the wooden drawbridge down the lane between the white-blossomed cherry, pear, and apple orchards. The gray, ivy-clad walls and Norman-built towers seemed to collapse slowly behind them under the clear cup of blue porcelain sky; then Liddell Manor was swallowed by the thickening forest beyond the little hamlet where their thirty tenant farmers and serfs in the lord’s demesne resided. When they turned northwest toward Rochester, the noon sun beat warm on their heads and hands.

  The pace was ploddingly slow because of Lady Margaret’s litter, but Joan did not mind. The day was precious and Mother had taken the flowers. Maybe if it were allowed, as Edmund said, she could leave the court for a little while when they were at Westminster Palace to visit Mother at the Poor Clares down the Thames a way. It would be a little while, no doubt, before a novice took her final vows, and after all, Mother being cloistered was nothing new.

  As the motion of Sable’s bouncing back became hypnotic, Joan began to daydream. She would meet the wonderful Plantagenets and, despite whatever Edmund would say, play a French song for the queen and king. After all, they were claiming half of France through the king’s French mother and there were rumors of war between the English and French over that, Edmund had said. Perhaps all the knights at court would rush off to war as Edmund always had, and she would have free rein over whatever vast royal forests or wildernesses were out there somewhere. If only the Plantagenet princes and princesses would like her, maybe they could be like the friends or family she had never had. And then, Morcar was along, though she knew he loathed leaving Liddell only a little less than she. But it was all a great adventure and on such a lovely day. She would look back on this journey as the beginning of her new life, she decided, and without realizing it, she began to hum, then sing low in her sweet, clear voice.

  Several of Edmund’s men turned to grin at her or winked and whispered to each other, and one who had carefully flirted with her all week, Lyle Wingfield, dropped back to eye her thoroughly as he always did. He was charming enough, she supposed, as she felt his gaze and blushed to see him stare, but she defiantly went on with one of the first songs her dear, lost friend Roger Wakeley had ever taught her:

  “When the nightingale singeth,

  The woods wax green;

  Leaf and grass and blossoms

  Spring in May, I have seen.”

  Her voice trailed off, and she sent Lyle Wingfield her coldest glance, but he was not to be put off so easily.

  “I know the words to that French chanson, demoiselle,” he said and grinned broadly to melt the frost of her stare. “You will be very welcome at court, I assure you, chérie, for your brother will not always be so close about, eh?”

  To her dismay, he proceeded to taunt her with the next two lines of the stanza which she knew all too well but had just decided not to sing:

  “And love is to my heart

  Gone with a spear so keen,

  Night and day my blood it drinketh

  My heart in suffering.”

  She surprised herself by laughing in delight at the tease. “Not I, sir. Speak and sing for yourself. I will have none of foolish love’s entanglements on me.”

  Why, it is easy and such fun to set a man back on his heels like this, she thought. Her laughter danced again on the forest breeze as she darted one quick glance through her thick-fringed lashes at the young man’s beaming face before she looked back to the road ahead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  At the great Priory of the St. Clares in bustling London town, the party of Liddell travelers spent the second night away from home. The prestigious sister house of the sprawling Abbey of the Holy Order of St. Francis just north of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the St. Clares’ was the frequent last refuge of pious noble ladies who, hearing the approach of death’s steady footfalls, took their vows and donned coarse gray habits to escape any possibility of hell’s fires. With full reliance that the purity of the holy, long-dead St. Francis, and their huge monetary contributions to the already wealthy abbey would assure them entrance into heaven, they remained within the gray walls cloistered with their memories and their continual prayers.

  Joan and her mother were housed by the nuns in their dormer while the men stayed next door at the huge abbey. Yet Joan saw little of her mother until she was ready to set out for the rest of the journey with Edmund and his men the next morn. Deep inside, Joan had expected no less; she had only hoped for some last night of trust; of conversation, acceptance, or revelation—of what, she did not know. Joan slept little and her pounding thoughts reverberated within her like the steady clanging of the distant chapel bell at compline: London, London. She was in London, and tomorrow, Windsor, the court. My new life. The royal court.

  At dawn she and Edmund bid Lady Margaret farewell in a small Gothic chapel lit by wavering candlelight. Already the St. Clares’ newest novice had clad herself in the order’s gray, shapeless robe with its small, attached hood, a cord belt around her slender form. Her feet, despite the chill of the smooth flagstones underfoot, were bare.

  Edmund and Joan both knelt briefly, awkwardly, as if to receive her blessing.

  “Do not worry ever for John or Joan, Mother,” Edmund whispered as he rose, his round face suddenly gaunt and drawn. “I will see that John gets on with the Salisburys and Joan, of course, will be fine at court.”

  Lady Margaret’s eyes darted to Joan’s bent head before the girl stood.

  “Aye, Joan,” her voice came, a wavering wisp of a sound in the wan candle glow. “Joan, at court with them. I will send for you when it is time, my dear Joan. When it is my time.”

  The words echoed in Joan’s jumbled mind: dear Joan . . . when it is my time, she had said. She called me her dear Joan.

  “My lady Mother, you must not speak of your time,” Joan heard herself say. “You will be fine, too. You shall see, but I—I will come if you wish.”

  “Aye. And then we shall speak of everything.” Her mother faltered, but just as Joan raised her head to ask what things she meant, Edmund took Joan’s arm and pulled her to her feet.

  “We shall be off then. The court is yet twenty miles away, you know, Joan.”

  His firm grip on her arm tugged his sister a step back, and the girl nearly tripped over her skirts as she rose.

  “Aye, so far away,” Lady Margaret echoed. She raised one pale palm. “God bless you, my children.”

  “God bless, dear Mother.”

  “The saints keep you safe.”

  Joan and Edmund backed away from the unreal, stilted little scene, then turned through the low arched door of the small chapel.

  “She seems quite good this morn, more steady,” Edmund said, without turning his
head as he hurried Joan down the corridor.

  “You did not need to make our farewell so sudden,” Joan shot back, not breaking her long strides to keep up. “She seemed to want to say something, and I do not like the way she spoke of ‘her time coming.’ She will live a long time yet. She must, Edmund.”

  A Poor Clare nun accompanied them now, scurrying along, evidently to bid them farewell in the courtyard, so Edmund lowered his voice.

  “Nonsense. It is only she is relieved to be here and safe, but I will feel better when we get you safely into the queen’s charge at Windsor. Yesterday you chattered all the way about the excitement of busy London. Just wait until you catch sight of beautiful, vast Windsor. It will lift your spirits from this silent place.”

  The petite nun bobbed her head as if to agree with Edmund’s judgment of the cloisters and swung open the narrow oaken door into the cobbled courtyard where their men and horses awaited. Joan and Edmund blinked in the blatant shaft of early morning sunlight.

  “I am excited about London, Edmund, Windsor too, the court. But Mother seems to fear it so. She always calls the king and queen ‘them,’ and looks so odd when she says it.”

  “Nonsense,” he repeated more sharply and gave her arm a quick shake as if she were a linen doll. He boosted her up on Sable’s waiting back and Joan fell belligerently silent while the little nun at the door waved and trilled, “Benedicite!” over and over.

  The avid-eyed Lyle Wingfield grinned to bid Joan a good morrow. And soon, though she meant it not to be so easy, her heart did lift again as their party departed the stony embrace of the sequestered priory in the middle of the busy city. Excitedly, Joan fingered the new little brass St. Christopher medal depicting the infant Jesus carried on the shoulder of the patron saint of travelers. The prioress had given it to her after vespers last night. They turned west on crowded Fleet Street amidst the screams of hawkers and vendors who sold from pushcarts or open shops guarded by huge hanging signs that advertised their trade.

  “There are over fifty goldsmiths’ shops on the next street, the Strand,” Lyle Wingfield called to her, and she shot him a smile. After all, Edmund had turned silent and sullen late yesterday as they got closer to leaving Mother at the St. Clares, and she needed someone to pump for answers to her myriad questions.

  “Are we nearly to the king’s palace at Westminster yet?” she shouted back to Lyle. “I wish to see it even though the court is elsewhere now.”

  “Wait until we clear this street, my Lady Joan. When you see the fair sight of any of great Edward’s palaces, you will know it for a fact!”

  And Lyle was right. When their little entourage cleared the press of narrow daub and wooden houses leaning inward above them, each succeeding story overhead shouldering out the sky, the vista of the western suburbs along the Strand opened up before their view: the beautiful stone homes of the rich swept down immaculate lawns to the sparkling Thames dotted by marble piers at which floated tethered, painted barges. Then Joan’s eyes lifted higher to the distant spires of the great abbey and palace of Westminster that lay ahead.

  Even Edmund roused himself from his brooding at the sight of the Gothic arches, carved statues, and turreted rooftops of Westminster. His horse nosed Lyle Wingfield’s big chestnut roan away from Sable’s glistening black flanks. With an eager finger Edmund pointed out the wings of the palace which nearly touched the church, erected in the form of a huge cross, wherein were laid to rest the past Plantagenet kings and queens including their own grandfather, King Edward I.

  “I shall visit there as soon as I can,” Joan assured Edmund. “I wish Father were buried there, too.”

  “So do I, Joan, but we have spoken quite enough of that tragedy already today,” he returned grimly, and she wondered how he could think they had spoken of that when their talk had been only of their farewell to Mother.

  The palace and the city dropped behind them as they followed the Old Richmond Road toward Windsor. It led through open meadows and forests, providing an occasional glint of river on their left. Only old Morcar remained stonily silent as the travelers chatted and bantered despite gathering rain clouds. At midday they halted to water the horses and devour the cheese, wine, and cold partridge pies the nuns had given them; then they pushed on again under a newly leaden-hued sky.

  Traffic on the road around them swelled as they passed the palace at Richmond and pushed on: litters, drovers’ carts, painted ladies’ chairs, and important-looking men on sleek horses jostled, crowded, and cursed in French or English. Joan wanted to ask Edmund or Lyle the questions which had crowded to her lips in the last two days—the entire last fortnight since she had known she would come here to live with them, as Mother said. What were they really like, these distant, lofty, glowing, royal Plantagenets to whom she was related and somehow linked? Like stars, like the glistening crown diamonds set in the fathomless velvet heavens, she thought, answering her own question. But something, some feeling held her back from the inquiry, as if in asking, she would know too much to still be safe and in control of her life as she had always been before this last month.

  “Look there, on that hill above the timbered valley,” she bubbled to Lyle the instant a new horizon rose to view. “Is not that Windsor, my lord?”

  Lyle Wingfield grinned from ear to ear and dared to wink at her even as Edmund watched. “Aye, demoiselle. I told you that you would know her on sight. Only a blind, old fool could miss Windsor flaunting herself like a blowsy hussy upon the hill for all to see.”

  She thought the knave’s choice of words despicable, but she was too excited to break the moment to tell him so. Above the wooded Thames Valley, like an imposing queen, rose huge, gray Windsor in rugged, solid grandeur: a massive protective wall studded with watchtowers encircled a lofty, round tower anchored in the central keep with a little town huddled at its stony skirts. But even as they rode down into the valley, raindrops from the bulging clouds overhead splattered them, and Joan quickly pulled up her hooded cloak to keep her head and shoulders dry.

  The rain seemed to do little to dampen the brash market crowd in the narrow streets of Windsor town. The brief cloudburst merely settled the drifting dust which Joan had come to ignore despite the fact that they were thoroughly coated with it, but it wet everyone’s hair including her own heavy, side plaits, which had managed to pull loose since she was hardly as good at braiding them as dear Marta had been. She would die, simply die, if anyone who ever knew Queen Philippa would glimpse her like this, so dirty and wet and road-worn. But then Edmund would surely never allow that. Why, she could even smell the woolen dampness of her once-clean and pressed deep blue perse dress.

  Amidst cries and shouts for hot pies or fresh strawberries, they clattered down to the very foot of tall Windsor Castle, wending their way carefully, and passed through the portcullis gate into the Lower Ward. Everywhere above them, suddenly, in the freshening breeze and dwindling raindrops, flew the gold and azure flags and pennants of the Plantagenet kings.

  Joan’s wide eyes darted to and fro as Edmund stepped forward to head off Lyle Wingfield’s quick move to help her down. Her legs and backside ached, her stomach rumbled with hunger, she felt muddy and wet and bedraggled, but the hubbub in the vast stretch of cobbled courtyard and the grassy Lower Ward was wonderful! In the glazed cobbles, now that the shower had ended, there were bumpy mirror images of every fine horse and hurrying person. Pages in liveries of various colors dashed by; important-looking church people and messengers strode here and there in no apparent pattern; and drovers with carts of animals, vegetables, and fruits lumbered past to two large entryways beyond.

  “Oh, it is marvelous—so busy, just like a day at the shire fair. Do you see anyone—you know—important?” she asked, but Edmund merely motioned her over to the left as if she had not spoken. Old Morcar had been helped from his horse, and he fell into a slow, weaving step behind them as they entered through a small, low door in the foot of what Edmund said was Curfew Tower.

  “Si
t here, Joan. Morcar, over here. The men will probably scatter with the horses, but just rest a few minutes, and I shall be back directly to tell you where you are both to go.”

  “But, my Lord Edmund,” Joan interrupted, “I thought surely you would know where we are to stay. You said I would be with two or three other ladies in the queen’s wing.”

  “Just hush, Joan. I am as wet and tired as you are. I cannot merely drag you in all unannounced and wander through the queen’s apartments looking for Euphemia de Heselaston to find where you are to bed, you know. Sit here with Morcar, I said, and I shall inquire about both of you.”

  She sank uncertainly down by the weary-looking old man in the little entry room where others were waiting, and a fat, oily man who appeared to be some sort of gatekeeper eyed her now and again. She and Morcar sat quietly, exhausted, on the hard bench for a quarter of an hour while Joan boldly stared down the impolite eyes. Her awe at being in such a wonderful place ebbed, and impatience flooded in.

  Morcar shifted next to her on the bench, and before she realized he was asleep, she spoke. “I need to stretch a bit, Morcar. I am sure Edmund will not mind. Oh, I did not mean to startle you. However can you sleep and we just arrived?”

  The old soothsayer’s long, damp hair looked stringy, and she wondered why he had not covered it with the hood of his black cape in the shower. Strange, but she had hardly given poor, decrepit Morcar a thought, and he had been there at the back of the traveling party all the time, silent and watchful like this.

  “Not sleeping, Lady Joan, not really sleeping. Too tired to sleep, but not you, eh? You are here, and now it begins.”

  “A new life, you mean?”