The King’s Concubine: A Novel of Alice Perrers

by Anne O'Brien

  “Good-bye, Wykeham.” I knew I might never see him again. “He said I should take them, you know.…”

  “I expect he did.” Wykeham bowed low. “Take care.”

  I laid my hand on the latch, suddenly without the strength to lift it. I felt as empty as a husk. I knew there were things to do, but at that moment, I had no very exact idea of what they were.

  All I knew was that I wanted to be with Windsor.

  The horrors of that day were not at an end. Could they get any worse? They could. They did. When all I wanted was to escape from my own grief, from the unbridled excess I had indulged in to justify Wykeham’s censure, there in the Great Hall stood two figures just arrived. One had a high, piping voice, the other the mien of a public executioner.

  The child King and his mother.

  In a moment of sheer cowardice, I considered disappearing through the maze of rooms and corridors before Joan could notice me. She now had the power to draw my blood. In the aftermath of what had happened, I felt that I might bleed all too readily.

  No! No! You will not retreat!

  I had never avoided confrontation, and I would not start now. Gathering my resources, I took on a hard-edged veneer of arrogance, as if Edward had not just died in my arms. Thus I descended the staircase with a swish of my velvet skirts and swept a magnificent curtsy to the ten-year-old boy who now wore my lover’s crown.

  “Your Majesty.”

  Richard, God help him, clearly did not know what to do or say. His forehead furrowed and he gave me a nervous smile. “Mistress Perrers…” He looked up to his mother’s face for some idea of what he should do next. Then he bowed to me with quaint solemnity.

  “There is no need to bow, Richard.” Joan’s painted face was brittle, cold as a winter’s frost. And unbearably calculating. “So Edward is dead, is he?”

  “He is, my lady.” How scrupulously polite I was. She would never accuse me of ill manners.

  “Mama…” The boy tugged on his mother’s sleeve.

  “You are King now, Richard,” she told him.

  Still, it meant nothing to him. He turned back to me, his pale face alive with anticipation. “Will you take me to the royal mews, Mistress Perrers, to see the King’s falcons?”

  Your falcons!

  The realization nipped at my heart. “No, Sire,” I replied gently, although my greatest wish was to be away from there, away from Joan and her son. “It is too late tonight. Shall I send for refreshment, Majesty?”

  “Yes. If you please. I’m hungry.…” He almost danced on the spot with impatience. “Then can we go and see the hunting birds…?”

  Joan’s hand descended on her son’s shoulder like a metal lock. “Mistress Perrers—or is it Lady de Windsor? How does one know?—Mistress Perrers will not be staying, Richard.” And to me, her lips curled with vicious pleasure, her eyes suddenly hot with satisfaction: “You have no role here. Your reign, Queen Alice, is over.” She had the upper hand at last and would revel in it. “I will give orders for your chambers to be cleared forthwith. I expect you to be gone before—let me see, I suppose I can afford to be magnanimous—before sunrise.” Smoothing her hand over the fair hair of her son, she tilted her chin in a smile that showed her teeth. “You will ensure that you take nothing with you. If you do”—her teeth glinted—“you may be sure that I will demand recompense.”

  So, she would strip me of all my personal possessions—it was not unexpected. Nor, I suppose, could I blame her after a lifetime of disappointment. But I would fight back.

  “I will take nothing that is not mine, nothing that was not given to me,” I replied as I clutched the rings tightly in my hand so that the settings dug into my flesh.

  “By an old and besotted man who could not see you for your true worth.”

  “By a man who loved me.”

  “A man you bewitched by who knows what evil means.”

  “A man I respected above all others. Anything he gave me was of his own free will. I will take what is mine, my lady.”

  So I curtsied to her, a deep obeisance, as if she were herself Queen of England.

  “Get out of my sight!”

  I turned and walked away, the clear voice of the child carrying down the length of the hall. “Can we go and see the falcons now? Why will Mistress Perrers not take me…?”

  It would be hard for him to be King. It would be impossible for him to step into Edward’s shoes.

  I left Sheen. It was in my mind that I would never return there, or to any of the royal palaces that had been my home. Joan was right, however malicious the intent behind her words. My reign, if that was what it was, was over.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Every living soul in London could claim to have rubbed up against the closing minutes of Edward’s final journey to his burial on the fifth day of July in Westminster Abbey, close to Philippa’s final resting place, just as he had promised her. Did the worthy citizens not crowd the streets to watch the passing of the wooden effigy with its startlingly lifelike death mask? Even the wooden mouth dragged to the right, memento of the spasm of muscles that had struck him down. Edward’s people stood in dour silence, remembering his greatness.

  This is what I was told.

  Edward was clothed in silk, his own royal colors of white and red and cloth of gold gleaming, his coffin lined with red samite. He was accompanied to his tomb with bells and torches and enough black cloth, draped and swagged, to clothe every nun in Christendom. A feast celebrated his life, the food valued at over five hundred pounds, at the same time that the gutters were filled with the starving. Such wanton extravagance. But he was a good man and the citizens of London would not begrudge the outward show. Why should their King’s life not be celebrated? The isolation and failure of his last years—when was the last time any of them had set eyes on him?—were pushed aside by those who bore witness to this final journey.

  But what of me?

  Should I not have been allowed to say my final farewell? So I think, but it was made very clear to me that my presence was not desired. Was not appropriate. It was made more than clear by a courier from the mother of the new child-monarch, who announced the news with a set face, speaking by rote.

  Could the despicable Joan not have written her orders? Of course she could have, but that would have meant treating me as an equal—and that she could never do. Even on her deathbed, if I held out to her the gift of life, I swear she would have spit in my face.

  “You are not to attend, mistress.” The messenger at least dismounted and marched over to where I waited for him. I had thought he might shout from beyond the courtyard arch. “It is unseemly for one who is not a member of the family to accompany the coffin. His Majesty King Richard has ordered that you remain outside London during the ceremonies.”

  “His Majesty?”

  “Indeed, mistress.” He revealed not a flicker of an eye, not a quiver of a muscle. But we both knew the truth.

  “I will consider the request.”

  The courier looked askance but presumably carried a more suitable response back to Westminster, while I called down curses on Joan’s malevolent head. But she had the power now in the name of her son, and I was banished. I must remain at Pallenswick, where I had been reunited with Windsor. I watched the courier gallop from my land, watched until his figure was swallowed up by distance. Then I leaped into action.

  Ordering my barge and an escort to be made ready for the following day, I sped up the stairs to my chamber in search of suitable garments in which to mark Edward’s passing. I had discarded no more than three gowns as too drab or too showy before Windsor appeared in the doorway.

  “I didn’t know you were here,” I said, engrossed. “I thought you were riding over to inspect the repair of the mill wheel.”

  “To hell with the mill wheel! Don’t do it!” he ordered, without preamble.

  “Do what?”

  “Don’t play me for a fool. Alice! I can see inside your head! Don’t go!”

&n
bsp; So he had the measure of me. How could he read me so well? He was the only man who could. I kept my eyes on my busy hands, matching a fur-trimmed surcoat to an underrobe of black silk.

  “Why should I not? Do I obey the directives of Joan?”

  His stare was intimidating enough. “Don’t go because I don’t want to have to visit you tomorrow night in a dungeon in the Tower!”

  “Then don’t visit me. I won’t expect you.” Crossly, furious at Joan and at my own weakness that I felt the hurt of it, I spread the garments on the bed, then began to search for shoes in a coffer.

  “So you admit you might end up there?”

  “I admit to nothing. I only know that I must go!”

  “And you were never one to take good advice, were you?”

  “I took yours, married you, and look where that got me! A whole fleet of enemies. And banished, forsooth!” The accusation was entirely unfair, of course, but I was not concerned about being dispassionate. I stood and looked at him, daring him to disagree, my hands planted on my hips.

  And he did. Of course he did. “I think you made the enemies well enough without me.”

  I took a breath, accepting his deliberate provocation. “True.” And I smiled faintly, the sore place beneath my heart easing a little just at the sight of him, strong and assured, filling the doorway to my room. But I turned my back against him. Suddenly I wanted to tell him how much I loved him, but I dared not.

  “You loved him, didn’t you?” he stated.

  I looked up, startled from my unwinding of a girdle stitched in muted colors—I would pay my final respects with commendable discretion. “Yes. I did.” I thought about what I wanted to say, and explained, as much to myself as to Windsor. “He was everything a man should be. Brave and chivalrous, generous with his time and his affections. He treated me as a woman who mattered to him. He was loyal and principled and…” My words dried. “You don’t want to hear all that.”

  “Quite a valediction!”

  “If you like. Are you jealous?” Completely distracted now from the heavy links in my hands, I tilted my head and watched him. Without doubt, jealousy as green as emeralds in the ring I had refused spiked the air between us. “I don’t think you are necessarily either loyal or principled. Only when it suits you.”

  Now, there was a challenge. What would he say to that?

  “God’s Blood, Alice!” The bitterness in the tone shivered over my skin.

  “So you are jealous!”

  He thought for a moment. “Not if you lust after me more!”

  Which made me laugh. “Yes. You know I do.” Impossibly forthright, Windsor always had the capacity to surprise me, and to confess to lust was far easier than to admit to love. The power would remain with me. “I had a love—a deep respect—for Edward, but I lust after you—just as you lust after me. Does that make you feel any better?”

  “It might! Prove it!”

  Abandoning the garments, my mood softening under his onslaught, I walked toward him and he took me in his arms. We understood each other very well, did we not?

  “I want to be with no one but you, Will,” I said, and pressed my lips to his.

  I hoped he would be satisfied, and although I thought he might push me, to my relief he did not. What was it that made me love him so much? What was there to bind me to him? We did not hunt together, as I had with Edward. We did not dance—Windsor, I suspected, was as wrong-footed at dancing as I. There was not a poetic bone in his whole body to seduce me into love and longing. We did not even have the intricate and magical workings of a clock to bind us. What was it, then, except for naked self-interest? Was that all it was? I did not think so, but I could not tally the length and breadth of it as I might assess a plot of land.

  But I loved him. And pretended I did not.

  “Glad to hear it.” He kissed my mouth, his desire evident. “Do I come with you?”

  “No. I’ll go alone.”

  “I still say you shouldn’t.…”

  I placed my fingers over his mouth. “Will, don’t.…”

  His teeth nipped at my fingertips. “Do you want me to stay tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  So he did.

  “I’ll keep you safe, you know,” he murmured against my throat, his skin slick, his breath short, when I had proved to him that his jealousy had no grounds.

  “I know,” I replied as I fought against the dread that threatened my contentment. The powers ranged against his protection of me might be too great. The royal hospitality in the dungeon in the Tower might not be a figment of my imagination.

  “I’ll not let any harm come to you.”

  “No.”

  His arms held the black fears at bay and we enjoyed each other; my heart was lighter with the rising of the sun.

  “Don’t go!” he murmured.

  And still the dangerous word love had not been uttered between us. I was forced to accept that it never would be.

  I ignored Windsor’s advice and went to Westminster.

  Anonymous in black and gray—posing as nothing more than a well-to-do widow, for I was not completely lacking in good sense—I took myself to Westminster, to the Abbey, with two stalwart servants, who forced a way through the crowds. I would be there. I would let the mysticism of the monastic voices raised in Edward’s requiem Mass sweep over me, and would thank God for Edward’s escape from the horrors of his final days. I would not be kept out—not by Joan, not by the devil himself. The crowds were predictably ferocious but no impediment to the elbows of a determined woman.

  We approached the door. A few more yards, and then it would be possible to slip inside. A blast of trumpets brought everyone around me to a halt, apart from the usual haphazard pushing and jostling, until those at the front were thrust back by royal guards, each applying his halberd as quarterstaff. I edged my way as close as I could, and there, walking toward the great door, was the new King, not yet crowned, pale and insubstantial in seemly black, his fair hair lifting in the wind. What a poor little scrap of humanity, I thought. He had none of the robust presence of his father or grandfather, nor, I suspected, would he ever have.

  And at his side? My breath hissed between my teeth. At his side, protective, self-important, walked his mother. Joan the Fair, her sour features unable to restrain her final triumph. Stout and aged beyond her years, wrapped around in black velvet and sable fur, she resembled nothing less than one of the portly ravens that inhabited the Tower.

  Damn you for standing in my path to Edward’s side!

  She was so close I could have touched her. I had to restrain myself from striking out, for in that moment of blinding awareness, I resented her supremacy, her preeminence, the power that she had usurped, which was once mine. A power against which I had no defenses.

  I hope your precious son rids himself of your interference as soon as he’s grown! I hope he chooses Gaunt’s influence over yours!

  Did she sense my hostility? There was the slightest hesitation in her footstep, as if my antagonism gave off a rank perfume, and she turned her head when she had come level with me. Our eyes met; hers widened; her lips parted. Her features froze, and I was afraid of the threat I saw writ there. It was within her authority to bring down the law on my head, despite the solemnity of the occasion. My future might rest in those plump, dimpled hands. What had possessed me to risk this meeting? I wished with all my heart that I had heeded Windsor’s caustic warnings.

  Joan’s mouth closed like a trap and her hesitation vanished. How sure she was! With a little smile, she placed one hand firmly on her son’s shoulder, all the time urging him forward into the Abbey. So much was said in that one small gesture. And then they had moved past me, so the frisson of fear that had touched my nape eased. She would let me go. And I exhaled slowly.

  Too soon! Too soon! Joan stopped. She spun swiftly on her heel. The men-at-arms lining the route stood to attention, halberds raised, and fear returned tenfold, flooding my lungs so that I could not breathe. Would
she?

  Our eyes were locked, hers in malice, mine in defiance, for that one moment as immobile as the carved stone figures that stared out with blind eyes above our heads. Would she punish me for all I had stood for, all I had been to Edward? For this ultimate provocation in the face of her express orders?

  Joan’s smile widened with an unfortunate display of rotted teeth. Yes, she would. I almost felt the grip of hard hands on my arms, dragging me away. But she surprised me.

  “Close the door when we are entered. Let no one pass!” Joan ordered. “The proceedings will begin now that the King is come.” She turned away as if I were of no importance to her, yet at the end she could not resist. “Your day is over,” I heard her murmur, just loud enough so that I might hear. “Why do I need to bother myself with such as you…?”

  For the briefest of ill-considered moments, spurred by brutal insolence, I considered following in the royal train, slipping through before the great door was slammed shut, and taking my rightful place beside my royal lover’s tomb. I would insist on my right to be there.

  Ah, no!

  Sense returned. I had no rightful place. Sick at heart, I fought my way out of the crowd and back to my water transport, where I was not altogether surprised to find Windsor waiting for me. Nor was I displeased, although furious with Joan, but mostly with myself for my impaired prudence. In true woman’s fashion, I took my embittered mood out on him.

  “So you’ve come to rescue me!” I said with a nasty nip of temper.

  “Someone had to.” He was suitably brusque under the circumstances. “Get in the barge.”

  I sat in moody, glowering silence for the whole of the journey; I had been put very firmly in my place, more by Joan’s final words than by anything else. Windsor allowed me to wallow, making no attempt at conversation to discover what had disturbed me. He simply watched life on the riverbank pass by with a pensive gaze.

  Why do I need to bother myself with such as you…?

  I had always known that the days of Edward’s protection would end, had I not? But to be cut off quite so precipitously…It had been frighteningly explicit. There was a new order in England in which I had no part. I must accept it, until the day of my death.