The King’s Concubine: A Novel of Alice Perrers

by Anne O'Brien

  I stifled a gasp at the outrageous statement. “My thanks for the compliment.” But I think I had become resigned to it. It no longer hurt.

  “It’s true.”

  “The King does not think so,” I observed.

  “The King is blind!”

  And I thanked God for it. What a rewarding exchange of information this had been. Princess Joan would be my enemy. But Isabella…Here was a strange twist in our troubled relationship, yet it would be an unwise woman who put too much weight on any new intimacy. I raised my brows, determined to prod and pry.

  “Do I understand that you will be my friend, my lady?”

  The reply was as sharp as I expected. “I wouldn’t go as far as that!”

  “I have never had a friend,” I added, poised to see her response.

  “I’m not surprised. Your ambitions are beyond what most people can stomach.” She perused me, her eyes bright with anticipation. “But I’ll say this: It will be interesting to watch the battle royal between the pair of you. I’m not sure that I wish to wager on the outcome. It wouldn’t surprise me if the banquet never happened.”

  In that moment I found myself wishing for the one thing I had never had—a friend, a woman to whom I could speak my mind with confidence and trust. A confidante. What would it be like to say what was in my heart, to bare my soul and know that it would be treated with respect? How would it be to have a woman to turn to for understanding, even for judgment? For balanced advice? I had never known it.

  Was this a melancholy?

  Briskly, I took myself to task. How was it possible to miss what one had never had?

  I arranged a banquet to mark the return of the Prince and Princess. I was suitably extravagant in my outlay of coin to make the desired effect. The only whining voice raised in protest was drowned out by the din of the feasting courtiers.

  “What did you wager on this banquet ever coming to fruition?” I asked Isabella.

  “Not a silver penny! I thought the planning would shatter on the rock of Joan’s disgust.”

  I smiled in pure joy. “You were wrong.”

  “So I was.”

  Joan was not finished with me. She had not even started. With a smooth exchange of seats as the feasting ended and the wine flowed, as the minstrels dived into their—to my ear—unmusical renderings, encouraging the Court to leap and caper with riotous levity, she leaned close, her eyes hard as jade.

  “When I am Queen of England, I will destroy you for what you have done.”

  I returned the gaze, a little contemptuous. “And what have I done?”

  “You have entranced him! You have taken the King’s mind and twisted it! You have usurped a role that is not yours to take. Nor ever will be. You have schemed and manipulated until he sees nothing but your desires. You trick him at every step and turn.”

  I was startled by her unsubtle accusations, but not perturbed. I would use her own words against her.

  “As I recall, my lady, you advised me that a clever woman should always be capable of dissimulation, and mocked me when I did not comprehend.” I smiled as her face became suffused with color. “I have no need for guile or trickery. I show the King the respect he deserves. Which is more than you do, my lady. Do you think him so weak of mind that he cannot withstand the wiles of a woman?”

  For a moment she stared, openmouthed. “How dare you!” She had not expected me to retaliate.

  “I have brought nothing but pleasure and contentment to an aging man.”

  She was quick to regroup; I had to give her that. “Is that all? I see more, Mistress Perrers! You dip your fingers into the royal Treasury. Who paid for those garments you wear? You walk these corridors as if you were queen. I’ve seen you—you wheedle and connive until you squeeze all you can of land and estates and wardships from the King. When I am queen I’ll strip you of all you’ve filched and send you packing back to that dire convent with only the clothes you stand up in. And not even those, I swear…” Her eye traveled over my new velvet sideless surcoat in royal crimson, the jeweled cauls that encased my hair. “Then who will remember Alice Perrers! And if I discover you have at any time stepped even an inch outside the law, I’ll make sure there is a cell to confine you for the rest of your earthly existence. A pillory would not be too good for such as you! Even a noose…!”

  I looked across to where the Prince sat beside his father, allowing her bitterness to pass for the most part unheeded. Her accusations were not new to me. They could be heard in every quarter of the palace, with or without evidence to prove them. I had learned to live with them.

  “Look!” I interrupted her with a nod of my chin. And she did, the invective drying.

  “Do you truly look? And acknowledge what your eyes show you? When will you become Queen of England?”

  Two men. One old, one in what should be his prime. One fading slowly as the years took their toll, the other racing to his death. Unless there was a miracle, there was not one man in the country who would wager a purse of gold on the Prince outliving his father. Edward might be fifty-nine, the Prince a mere forty-one years in comparison, but I knew who would die first.

  So did Joan.

  And I saw the emotion that took a grip of her features so that any remnant of good looks was transmuted into ugliness. So she loved him. Despite everything, I felt a tightening around my heart and an unexpected lurch of compassion.

  “It must be hard for you to be so impotent,” I said.

  But my compassion was wasted. Joan’s eyes might be bleak with despair, but she thrust aside my observation with the flat of her hand slapped down on the table. “My lord will recover with rest and good nursing. And your days will be at an end. The Prince will live—you’ll see. And my son after him. I will be Queen of England. Your present good fortune will be laid waste before your eyes.” Her hands curled into fists on the table.

  “I wish you and the Prince well, my lady.”

  I shrugged off Joan’s answering stare that could have pierced a shield at fifty yards. Her plans for the Prince would never come to fruition, and Joan was wretchedly, hopelessly building a bulwark against the truth. I went to stand beside Edward, enjoying the brightness of his face as he conversed with his son.

  Edward’s restored vigor with the return of the Prince had its own consequences. I fell for a child at Easter. A girl, Jane, to join her sister in their little household at Pallenswick. She was not a pretty child, for she inherited my heavy brows and dark coloring, but I lavished love on her because of it, and Edward presented her with a silver bowl that I stored away with the other three. Edward had no imagination for birth gifts, but the recognition of this dark-browed daughter was magnificent.

  Edward’s return to good heart proved not to be transient. Despite the Prince’s weakness and his inability to visit Court with any frequency, Edward began to turn his ear to what was happening outside the walls of Westminster, where we were settled for the term.

  “Consider Parliament’s grievances,” I advised Edward.

  And so he did, meeting with his council at Winchester, as in the old days. Graciously conciliatory, he listened to the endless petitions, promising redress but doing nothing to undermine his own prerogative. Regal authority sat well on him with his ermine robes. When he returned to me from the success of his meetings, his enthusiasm filled the rooms of Westminster with a blast of energy. “I will rebuild our defenses,” he said. “And then we will go to war again. I will restore Gascony to English hands. Gaunt will help me.…”

  “You will do all that is necessary,” I assured him.

  His smile was almost a youthful grin. “I feel the years falling from my shoulders.”

  We went hunting, the best sign of Edward’s renewed spirits.

  Gaunt acknowledged his father’s initiative with a bow in my direction. “My thanks.”

  “It is my pleasure, my lord.”

  I needed no more. Edward was himself again.

  Beware fickle fate! Never turn your back o
n her. If you do, she will sink her teeth into your unprotected heel. If there is to be any maxim applied to the conceit of my life, that will be the touchstone. My spirits, one minute soaring as high as Wykeham’s new towers at Windsor, in the next collapsed as if the foundations had been fouled by a detail of zealous sappers. Edward sat in stunned silence, his knuckles white as his hands gripped and kneaded the arms of his great chair. I stood at his side, even going so far as to touch his shoulder to remind him of my presence. I don’t think he felt it. His mind, his inner vision, was across the sea with this ultimate, irreconcilable loss. All my hopes, all Edward’s optimism, were destroyed in one piece of news from a royal courier. The King aged before my eyes.

  “This date will be engraved on my heart,” he murmured, his voice broken with grief.

  I would have saved Edward from knowledge of the devastation, but how could I? It was his ultimate responsibility. Unaware of the latent strength in his hands, seeing nothing but the bloody massacre that had been recounted, he gripped my fingers as if to draw the lifeblood from them. And there was nothing I could say to him to soften the agony.

  The English fleet was lost. All of it. Completely and utterly destroyed when pounced on by a Castilian fleet, in opportunistic alliance with France, in the seas off La Rochelle. Our ships were swept by fire. Terrified horses stampeded, breaking apart the wooden vessels that contained them. The English commanders were captured.

  It was a terrible scene of wanton death and carnage.

  Edward gazed at the wall before him, seeing nothing but the destruction of his life’s work in this, his first major military defeat in his long reign. He said not one word, even as he sat through the night staring into the flames of the fire he insisted on having lit in his room despite the heat of the summer. I sat with him. I feared for his reason through those long hours. The next morning, as light filtered into the room, he stood.

  “Edward…you haven’t slept. Let me…”

  His words startled me.

  “I’ll have my revenge,” he said, low and even. “I’ll lead the greatest army England has ever seen into France. I’ll fight to take back all I have lost. I’ll not return home until it is done.”

  But it was a charade laid bare by the transparency of his skin pulled tight over spare cheekbones, by the trembling in his hands.

  Should I have tried to dissuade him? Should Gaunt? We did not. There was about Edward a hardness that I recognized and knew I could not fight against. He might be aging, but he was a lion still and needed to prove to himself and to England that he was a king worthy of his crown and people’s loyalty. I let him be.

  The preparations were magnificent, the army vast as, flanked by Gaunt and even the Prince, who was roused by the crisis of the moment, the whole force embarked on the Thames with appropriate fuss and splendor. Pride filled my heart, for a short time sweeping away my doubts as I watched from the shore. Edward stood at the forefront in gilded armor and helm, his heraldic lions resplendent above him as the war banners whipped in the wind: a sight to stir the senses. I had already made my farewell. Now I must leave him to God’s grace and pray for his success.

  “I’ll die on French soil before I allow them to take what is my inheritance!” he had sworn as he boarded his flagship, Grace de Dieu.

  It frightened me for him to tempt fate in such a manner. By the Virgin! My fears were well-founded.

  Three weeks later, the vessels had not stirred from port, contrary winds battering Sandwich and the brave plan into pieces. In Gascony, our beleaguered town of La Rochelle fell to the French. In utter despair, Edward called off the campaign. It was a sad, hopeless old man who returned to London to my waiting arms, and I could offer him no solace.

  The humiliation broke Edward. His world fell apart around him. Philippa’s death had wounded him sorely, but the failure in war broke him beyond repair. And during the following months with Edward sitting helpless in London? Not one major battle to claw back English advantage, but any number of minor skirmishes, each English-held castle and town coming under attack. Every English defense was obliterated. By the end of it, Edward’s Gascon territory was even smaller than that bequeathed to him by his father.

  All his life’s work destroyed.

  Despairing, Edward galloped into a truce signed at Bruges to cease hostilities. If England was humbled, Edward was trampled underfoot. He had lost everything, a thing that his mind found it difficult to comprehend. He tired quickly, losing the thread of conversations in the middle of a thought. Sometimes he fell into a silence from which he could not be roused. Sometimes he did not recognize me.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sir William de Windsor! Back in England! Back within my orbit!

  He might have thought it a matter of pure chance that I was crossing the vast space of the Great Hall at Westminster when he arrived, but I could have put him right if I had chosen to do so. I knew exactly when he dismounted from his mud-spattered mount, dispatched his horses, baggage, and escort to the stabling, exactly the moment when his foot struck the first of the steps into the great entrance porch.

  I stood in the shadows cast by a pillar to catch a glimpse of him, the first for nigh on four years. I had been expecting him, for before the debacle of the English fleet off La Rochelle, when Edward had turned his mind to England’s precarious hold on Gascony, he had also picked up the rumors emanating from Ireland.

  It was not good news. It never was. The usual trail of accusations of inefficiency, bribery, corruption, and backstabbing in the highest circles. Which put Windsor directly in the firing line, for no one doubted that the power was in Windsor’s hands rather than in the hapless Desmond’s. Windsor had no warning from me. Had I not promised to apprise him of royal policy toward Ireland? The last time I had written was to tell him that there was no policy. By the time I knew of Edward’s renewed interest, events had overtaken me. In an unusual burst of anger, and a flash of the old independence, Edward had ordered Sir William to get himself to London on the next available ship and deliver an explanation in person.

  When he would come, whether he would come, was a matter for conjecture. It was easy enough to claim the message lost en route. But I thought he would obey the summons. Windsor was not a man to hide from notoriety. And so I had been watching for his arrival, unsettled by the range of emotions that was stirred up in me. Some trepidation, some anticipation, a good deal of mistrust. And more than a pinch of pleasure.

  And here he was. My first impression—more than an impression, more a certainty—was that Windsor was not in a good mood. I would not have expected otherwise, given the tone of the royal demand. Crossing the threshold, he looked as if he had been thrust into the hall by a blast from a raging storm. His clothes were wet and mud-spattered; a hint of stiffness in his muscles told of long days of travel. Driven, furiously engaged with the direction of his thoughts, as if the storm had entered his brain, he marched forward. I thought he would stride straight past me. Did he even see me?

  I waited until he drew level, even two steps beyond, picking apart my own wayward reaction to this man as my heart beat a little more quickly, my mind bounding ahead to the prospect of his caustic observations. Unexpectedly my lips warmed. That final kiss had been compelling.

  If I did not speak now, he would be gone.…

  “Sir William…”

  He lurched to a halt, wheeled ’round, eyes fierce as if he expected an enemy to leap from concealment. Then he gave a sharp, impatient exhalation of breath.

  “Mistress Perrers.”

  He made a scratchy bow, irritable beyond words, to which I responded with an equally brief curtsy. Braveheart, older but no wiser, pushed hard against my legs to give herself courage.

  “Is that all you have to say?” I asked sweetly.

  His eyes narrowed. “What do you want me to say? I’m back. And not best pleased.”

  An understatement, I realized, seeing his expression clearly for the first time. His face was set hard, engraved with a fain
t cobweb of lines by eye and mouth that were new since I had last seen him. His tight-lipped mouth and flared nostrils spoke of temper. His whole body was, in fact, an essay in contained fury, with all the allure of a shard of flint. But my heart shifted at the proximity of his lean frame and sardonic features. When he snatched his hat from his head in a gesture of furious impatience, his hair clung, sleek as moleskin from rain and sweat, against his skull. The eyes that were dark and hostile on mine as he waited for me to speak were no darker than his dangerous and volatile mood. And still I felt that uncomfortable thrill of attraction, new to me, but frighteningly appealing.

  I set myself to speak of immediate affairs. Indeed there would be no point in doing otherwise, since the man was too caught up in the moment to think beyond his grievances.

  “I hope you’ve come prepared to answer for your actions in Ireland, Sir William.”

  “I might have hoped you’d have warned me, mistress,” he snapped back.

  “And I would.” I tilted my chin a little. I did not appreciate his criticism. “It was too late. The King’s summons would have reached you before any warning of mine. Besides, would it have made any difference?”

  He shifted his shoulders irritably. “So he’s angry.”

  “He’s not pleased.”

  “I thought the King was fading…” he growled. “I had hoped the Prince might have spoken for me.”

  “The Prince is ill.”

  “I had heard.…” Windsor sighed, his thoughts momentarily diverted. “And God knows I’m sorry for it. Once, we were close enough, fighting side by side, campaigning together—twenty years ago now.” His frown deepened as he stared down at his fist clenched on his ill-used cap. “We were both young and loved the soldiering life. He was the best commander I ever knew. And now…”

  “Now those days are gone; the Prince is dying.”

  “Is he, now? It raises a question over the succession.”

  “It does. A question where more than one has an interest.”