The Fair Maid of Kent

by Caroline Newark

  ‘I could bind you, Lady Montagu,’ he said quietly. ‘Or you could sit of your own free will. Which is it to be?’ He indicated the dark velvet of his robe where it spread in folds across his legs.

  ‘You wish me to sit on your knee?’

  I couldn’t believe he would humiliate me in this way but he smiled thinly and stretched out his hand to grasp hold of my waist.

  ‘For old time’s sake. Let us pretend you are still that coy little virgin you professed to be when I saw you at Wark. Let me see if I can make your girlish heart flutter as it must have fluttered that night when I came to your chamber.’

  He was furiously angry. Of course he was. That night at Wark I had claimed to be a maid when I wasn’t and now the tribunal in Avignon had exposed my lie. He knew I had tricked him and he was not a man who liked to be taken for a fool. I could only guess what he wanted of me but as my attorney was already at his mercy I must show myself willing. If I was to save both Master Heath and Thomas, I had to do everything I could to please my cousin.

  ‘Very well, Your Grace,’ I murmured, sliding onto his knee.

  The warm cloth felt deceptively comfortable, with its poignant memories of Woodstock and the long years of my childhood, the reassuring solidity of my cousin’s broad chest and the heady scent of his skin. I felt myself melt reluctantly into him as he tightened his hold and put his lips to my throat.

  ‘Tell me, my little cousin,’ he murmured. ‘Do you have men who write verses to your beauty? Do they praise the smooth whiteness of your neck and the roundness of your breasts? Do you have lovers breathing of those pleasures as they move closer in the dance, whispering soft words while they pull you into the shadows?’

  ‘I have a husband,’ I said lightly.

  ‘Ha!’ he laughed. ‘You have two, Lady Montagu. Two husbands. And I ask myself, are your appetites so great that one is not sufficient?’

  I flushed at the coarseness of the insult and closed my mouth angrily.

  He sat back with his hand still encircling my waist and regarded me steadily.

  ‘Thomas Holand won’t win, my dear, so don’t imagine it. I won’t have my Earl of Salisbury deprived of his wife. Think of the scandal. Think what it would do to my reputation if a marriage brokered by the King of England was found to be invalid and the king’s cousin seen busy cuckolding one husband with another. I’d be the laughing stock of Christendom. A king who cannot control his family or his nobles, a king happy to flout the laws of the Church by encouraging a sham marriage.’

  ‘And when the tribunal rules in Sir Thomas’s favour?’

  ‘It won’t.’

  This was a simple recognition of how things would be. If the King of England said the papal tribunal would rule in favour of Sir William Montagu, then that was what the papal tribunal would do. There could be no other decision.

  ‘Your husband wanted Holand killed but I said such a thing was not possible. I did consider a feat of arms, a fight to the death. That would have given us a great deal of enjoyment and satisfied those watching that justice had been done, but in the end I found myself unwilling to sacrifice one of my knights on the altar of a beautiful woman’s lust.’

  He put his hand to my throat and slowly stroked the skin with his thumb as if testing the smoothness of a piece of rich vellum.

  Ah, Jeanette,’ he said, sadly. ‘You have caused me so much trouble. What possessed you to marry Holand? I could understand if you had slipped into his bed one dark night. He’s an attractive rogue and not without charm. But to marry him? You must have known you couldn’t have a man like that. I would never have given my permission. You are my cousin. You couldn’t just marry where you pleased. Women have been imprisoned for less. Christ’s nails! I’d have had you in a nunnery if I’d known.’

  The memory of that moment in the attic room before we became man and wife, when Thomas’s hand touched mine, when I knew how it would always be between us and understood what a bond between a man and a woman could mean, that was what had quelled my last doubt about marrying him.

  My cousin’s hand tightened uncomfortably on my throat as if he wanted to squeeze the life out of me for my disobedience and for a moment I was truly frightened.

  ‘It was your fault,’ I said breathlessly, pulling my head away. ‘I would never have agreed to marry him if it hadn’t been for you.’

  He seized my chin in a painful grip and turned my face back. ‘Be careful what you say, my lady. I am not some cunt-struck boy you can abuse at will. I am your king.’

  In an instant he had changed from a cozening lover to the mighty King of England, drawing himself into his royalty. This was a king who could order a man’s hanging at the snap of his fingers. ‘I think you forget to whom you are speaking, Lady Montagu. It is not for you to lay blame at your king’s feet where no blame can possibly exist.’

  ‘Antwerp. The old man. You were going to marry me to him until you changed your mind and sold me to your friend, the Earl of Salisbury, bartering me for favours received.’

  He eyed me suspiciously. ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’

  ‘I think you do remember, Your Grace. It was Twelfth Night and there was snow on the ground. The old man was in your private chamber at the abbey. The servants said he came up from Koblenz with you. They said he was a friend of yours. He touched my face and stroked my hair and you asked him what he thought of me. You offered me to him.’

  He looked puzzled and then began to laugh.

  ‘Oh my dear little cousin,’ he said. ‘That was no friend and I certainly wasn’t planning to give you to him in marriage.’ He shook his head, still chuckling. ‘You could never have married him. It would have been impossible.’

  ‘He wouldn’t pay your price?’

  ‘Price was never an issue. I would never have sold you, not to any man, not even to the Emperor himself. You were far too precious to me.’

  ‘He didn’t consider me worthy?’

  ‘No, no, it was not that. You couldn’t have married him. He had a wife still living as I well knew.’

  For a moment he hesitated as if pondering the wisdom of what he was about to say. Then he reached for my hand and brought it up to his lips. Gently. one by one, he kissed my fingers.

  ‘He was my father.’

  I felt the cold slap of truth on my face.

  ‘But that’s impossible.’

  He smiled sadly. ‘Nothing, it seems, is impossible in this world.’

  ‘But your father was dead. You told me he was dead.’

  ‘I told you the truth as I believed it when it happened.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  He touched his lips to my hair.

  ‘I told you once there was a secret, a secret I couldn’t divulge because it was not mine to tell.’

  I nodded, remembering the night in the Tower when he had made me promise to give myself to him and in exchange he had told me about my father.

  ‘Everything is changed now and the secrets and lies of yesterday have been laid to rest. God has given us the gift of this brief moment poised between life and death and perhaps it is time you, of all people, should know the truth. Give me your hand.’

  Reluctantly, I held out my hand and his fingers closed over mine. His grasp was as firm as it had been all those years ago.

  ‘Lord Mortimer didn’t have my father killed. He had him taken secretly from his prison at Berkeley and a letter sent to my mother and me at Lincoln telling us he was dead.’

  ‘But why? Why would he do such a thing?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter why he acted as he did, suffice to say it was a deception done to fool others.’

  ‘But the funeral?’

  I remembered him telling me of the funeral and how he had walked with his mother behind the body of his father and seen him
lowered into the earth.

  ‘I don’t know whose body he put in the coffin but it wasn’t my father’s. It was the most diabolical deceit to bury an ordinary man and pretend he was an anointed king. It was an abomination.’

  ‘And this was what my father discovered?’

  ‘Yes. So Mortimer had to silence him. There was no other way. Whatever I said or did, Mortimer was going to have him killed. He couldn’t let him live. He knew too much.’

  ‘And my mother?’

  ‘He would have kept her imprisoned and you, my little cousin, would have wasted away in the dark. Perhaps in time he would have had you all murdered, when everyone had forgotten.’

  ‘But you rescued us.’

  He pulled me against him so that I lay half-cradled in his arms, the way I used to as a child.

  ‘I rescued you.’

  I was rigid with shock, my face in his hair, breathing in the scent of him, trying to reconcile these truths: my father’s death, the identity of the old man, the deceptions, the untruths, the bare-faced lies. There had been no plot to send me away, no cruel foreign husband and my efforts to thwart my cousin’s will had been pointless. I had been a fool.

  Eventually I raised my head. His eyes were glittering in the candlelight and I knew immediately what he was going to say.

  ‘Sweetheart, I am going to take you to bed.’

  He could command my obedience and to lie in his arms would not have been unpleasant but it was not something I desired. I was not the green girl I had been all those years ago and he no longer had my heart. He had done things to harm me and I had ceased to trust him.

  ‘I should prefer to return to my room if Your Grace permits.’

  For a moment he said nothing but I knew he was not pleased.

  ‘This is not a game, Lady Montagu, and I did not invite you here tonight to be insulted. I have done everything I can to help you and gratitude if nothing else should make you want to share my bed. And never forget how well I know you, my dear. It’s not as if we are strangers to each other’s desires.’

  ‘I am sorry, Your Grace, but I should like to go.’

  He twitched his lips in annoyance and for a dreadful moment I thought I had miscalculated and he was going to take me by force.

  ‘And if I command you to stay?’

  I thought of the note Thomas had sent.

  ‘Then I would have to be obedient to your will in the same way that Master Heath has no choice but to remain in the Tower where he has been sent at your command.’

  He put me off his knee and stood up, keeping a tight hold of my wrist.

  ‘God’s nails, woman! Am I supposed to know who Master Heath is?’

  ‘Master Nicholas Heath, Your Grace. You had him arrested and thrown into prison.’

  He narrowed his eyes and frowned. ‘The name is not familiar but I don’t keep a tally of all the miscreants in the kingdom. What has he done?’

  I hesitated but anger made me brave.

  ‘I think you know exactly who he is, Your Grace. He is my attorney.’

  ‘Lady Montagu. I advise you to be careful. You have a husband. You cannot bring a case in my courts. Why would you need an attorney?’

  ‘Master Nicholas Heath was introduced to me on the orders of His Holiness, Your Grace. He represents me at the papal tribunal in Avignon.’

  My cousin reached for more wine, raised the cup to his lips and then offered it to me. I turned my face away

  ‘A matter of a disputed royal grant if I remember correctly,’ he said at last. ‘You see it doesn’t do to go against a king’s desires, Lady Montagu. Never. If I choose to assign a rectory to my clerk it is not for Master Heath to dispute my right to do so. He should have known better.’

  ‘That wasn’t why you had him arrested.’

  He sighed, took another sip of wine and smiled very slowly.

  ‘What other reason could there possibly be?’

  I opened my mouth to reply but he put his hand out to silence me.

  ‘Go home, Lady Montagu. A wise woman always knows when she is beaten. Go home before I change my mind and do something I shall really regret. Go back to Bisham and make a dozen babies with young Montagu. Mend your marriage and learn what it is to be a dutiful, loving wife because, Christ knows, I no longer have any appetite for you.’

  ‘And Thomas Holand?’

  ‘Forget him. You can never be his.’

  Our homecoming should have been triumphant but at the foot of the steps we were met by a messenger dressed in black. He knelt at William’s feet and with tears in his eyes told him that Lady Catherine, the dowager Countess of Salisbury, was dead, a victim of the pestilence.

  And she was not the only one we lost. Hundreds were dying and my Uncle Wake was another who followed the path to God before the mid-summer fires burned brightly in the villages. Eight years earlier he had walked me to the door of Bisham chapel to marry William. I remembered his heavy tread on the crimson carpet and the uncomfortable bulk of his body next to mine, but little else. His face was a shadow. I received a curt note from my mother informing me of his death which she said was a result of the great mortality. There were no other words of sorrow or comfort and I had no idea whether she mourned his passing or not.

  At the height of the summer William had to return to Windsor to take delivery of his lands and receive his title from the king.

  ‘You will stay here,’ he said, wrapping his arms around me and holding me close. ‘You will be safer. I won’t be more than a week. It’s not a grand affair like when my father became Earl of Salisbury, just a brief ceremony. I expect there’ll be feasting but half the men call me “Earl William” already. I have no idea how many documents require my seal or how slow the royal officials will be but I’ll hurry back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Take care,’ I said, glad I was not going with him as I had no wish to face my cousin again so soon.

  I gave him a wife’s blessing and we walked together down to the Bisham jetty. Just before he stepped into the barge he turned and kissed me softly on the mouth. ‘You’ll be a countess when I next see you,’ he said. ‘My countess.’

  I waved farewell, watching the oars dip and the barge move away from the bank out into the current. I kept watching until I could no longer see the lonely figure of my husband sitting beneath the canopy and the Montagu standard fluttering proudly on the prow. I turned and walked slowly back to the house pondering on the difference it might make to my life to be Countess of Salisbury and whether after all it might not be a better life than being Lady Holand.

  The days passed idly by with no word from William until one morning there was a commotion in the yard and the sound of men’s voices. One of my ladies peeped out of the window.

  ‘Oh!’ she squeaked.

  ‘What? Who is it?’ I asked.

  ‘A most handsome and richly dressed young man in the courtyard,’ she said breathlessly.

  The others rushed to the window to take a look but from the expressions on their faces I gathered the handsome young man had disappeared.

  A moment later there was a clatter of footsteps outside my chamber, the door swung open and in strode Edward with a companion at his heels followed by my steward calling rather belatedly, ‘Edward, Prince of Wales, my lady, and Sir James Audley.’

  Clearly this was not a royal visit which required the splendour of heralds and a liveried retinue of a hundred men on horseback, otherwise I would have been summoned to the courtyard as lady of the house. This was a private visit, possibly even a secret one since Edward must know William wasn’t here.

  I rose from my chair and gave a respectful curtsey desperately trying to recall how low I should go if I was now a countess. I decided humility was preferable to correctness and lowered myself right down to the floor.

  �
�My lord prince,’ I murmured. ‘You are very welcome to Bisham.’

  He nodded his head curtly. ‘I thought of sending a note ahead and signing myself Perceval,’ he said with a careless laugh, raising me up and casting a glance round the room.

  I smiled. How long ago that childhood summer of Perceval and Blanchefleur now seemed and how innocent we had been. It was a time when a boy’s kiss meant nothing more than just a kiss. Now, when our lips touched, each one of us wondered if this would be the last time. Would we be spared?

  ‘Have you come from my husband?’ I asked, wondering what he wanted.

  ‘No,’ he said bluntly. ‘Montagu doesn’t know I’m here.’

  He turned to his companion whom I recognised from the St George’s Day tournament.

  ‘Go and entertain those damned women, James,’ he said, indicating my ladies who had withdrawn politely to the far end of the chamber with their sewing but now sat with their ears pricked, attentively listening to every word we said. ‘I wish to speak with the countess alone.’

  Sir James strolled over, leaned down to look at a piece of embroidery and made some comment which caused a ripple of girlish laughter and a couple of flushed cheeks.

  ‘Jeanette.’

  Edward grasped my arm and pulled me over to the settle in the window embrasure where we were mostly hidden from view. His hands felt hot and sticky through the light cloth of my gown and his face had an expression of annoyance as if I had displeased him in some way.

  ‘You are such a fool, Jeanette,’ he said, the moment he had me seated amongst the cushions with his knee pushed hard up against my leg. It wasn’t a very comfortable position and I was rather surprised at his lack of courtesy but I didn’t protest. Edward had grown to be a young man who liked his own way in all things and I didn’t think he would appreciate any criticism of his behaviour.

  ‘My father told me everything,’ he continued. ‘Why didn’t you come to me? If you were so desperate to be rid of Montagu, why didn’t you ask me? I’d have helped. I’d do anything for you, you know that. I could have had you freed from him if that was what you wanted. Nothing is impossible. But why in the name of Christ did you devise this stupid plan involving Holand? If the Holy Father’s tribunal frees you from Montagu, you’ll be shackled to Holand for the rest of your life. He’ll be able to claim you for himself and that’s lunacy. What were you thinking of?’