The First Princess of Wales by Karen Harper
“I do not jest with you, de Coucy, if you do not jest with my sister.”
“Never, Your Grace!”
The man was arrogant from the tilt of his sleek eyebrows to his jeweled, clasped fists, Edward thought, but Isabella had been so gaily brittle, so hurt all these years since another Frenchman had jilted her at Bruges that this could do well enough. And from the glint in her blue eyes, he knew that it had better.
“How old are you then, Ingelram?” the prince pursued.
“Twenty, Your Grace.”
“And unwed, unbetrothed?”
“Oui.”
“And you would wed with the princess?”
“Certainement, Your Grace, I have sworn it, as soon as we can convince the great English king, the princess’s royal sire, certainement, on my word as a de Coucy!”
“Then I apologize for the untoward interruption, but I have need of the princess’s clever Plantagenet brain now for arrangements of my own. Matters of state.”
“Of course, Your Grace. I am proud to know you, proud to serve.”
Suddenly embarrassed at his concluding double entendre, Ingelram de Coucy bowed to Isabella and with as stately a gait as he could manage, fled the room.
“I will kill you, kill you, if I lose him over this, my lord,” Isabella’s usually lilting voice threatened.
“St. George, but that threat is a far cry from ‘oh, thank you, thank you, dear brother’ of a moment ago.”
“Do not dare smirk at me! I do not give a tinker’s damn if you are the Prince of Wales, the next Plantagenet king or lord of the whole universe, Edward! I love him and I want him.”
“Believe me, I understand and sympathize. And I will help you get him if you settle down and stop hissing at me.” He smiled again maddeningly, she thought, as he leaned his hips back on her polished dressing table. It struck her then for the first time that he was happy; he was enjoying this and somehow the too familiar pent-up tenseness was gone from his austerely handsome mouth.
“By the Virgin’s Veil, my lord prince, we have not had such a contretemps since you used to always order me around years ago, you know. So then, I shall forgive you for this terrible blunder and you shall tell me what you are doing here all unannounced and unabashed. Damn, I know I just forgot to lock the stupid door. Do I have a promise?”
“You had best beware trying to force advantageous promises from one of the architects of the mazelike Treaty of Brétigny, Isabella, but, aye, it is a promise. Quite frankly, ma chérie, if I did not need your help tit for tat as you need mine, I might have bashed young Ingelram’s elegant French brains out or hauled both of you before the king, but I know what it is to throw all caution to the winds, and so, I seek your help.”
Isabella folded her arms across her full breasts. “Is it something about our Jeannette then?” she ventured. “Last time I brought up her name to say I would invite her here you almost brained me.”
“Aye, it is Jeannette again, and I do want just that—for you to bring her here. I received word only today from John Chandos in France that Lord Holland has died of plague in Normandy. I am asking—beseeching you—that whatever it takes, however long it takes, I need her here to have my chance.”
“Here? Under the king and queen’s noses to rile them all up again?”
“It must be done that way, openly, deliberately, honorably.”
“Then you mean to marry her?”
“Hush. Do not screech so. What did you think I meant, dimwit—a little roll in the hay before she finds her next husband! Or mayhap I should send all my guards and retainers away and have her come to my palace chamber. I have loved her for years, Isabella, only her, and I will have no other. It is destined.”
“Destined? Holy Virgin, I admit I have seen it over the years how you have felt about each other and how she has fought it. Do you believe she will fight it no more?”
“It will not matter in the end. I can convince her. Only, I must have her here, to court her properly. If she fusses about coming right away, I thought we could entice her somehow.”
“Entice? Such as?”
“She has no close family and Holland left none. Her sons need sponsors, and you realize she has a blond daughter with a Plantagenet face named after you?”
“The child—she is not yours, my lord?”
“No, sister. Not mine, but the mother must be and then heirs of my own for the throne. I thought to get her here we could offer to be godparents to her fatherless children, you and I.”
“Aye. The king and queen could hardly protest that since Jeannette has Plantagenet blood, too. But the king is likely to hold up the proclamation of you as Duke of Aquitaine if he catches wind of all this, is he not?”
“St. George, Isabella, I should not have teased de Coucy about needing your wily brain. Indeed the king might try that, but I know what I need to fill my life and it is not another title or duty however hard I have worked for every foot of precious French soil we now claim. And you, sister. If Father threatened, let us say, to rescind the entire funding for your vast wardrobe, could you be extorted to give up your de Coucy?”
“Never!”
“Then we are agreed, and in league to the end on this. What help I need to get Jeannette here I shall have and whatever aid you need to keep de Coucy you shall have, parental or national strictures be damned.”
Isabella’s face broke into a beautiful smile, and she clasped her hands like a little girl who had just been given the most wonderful of presents. “Aye, Edward. And someday, we shall tell our children of this pact and they will laugh and wonder why we made such a heroic story of it. I only know I will never, never be hurt in love again.”
“Nor I, Isabella. Whatever it takes—nor I.”
They drank a toast of sweet wine Isabella had obviously meant for her de Coucy, and talked, and laid out their battle plans far past midnight.
Because of a thunderstorm, it had been far past midnight when Joan had finally gone to bed, but she tossed and turned fitfully in the solar bed at Liddell, her mind full of racing thoughts. On the morrow, the morrow, she would part from her eldest son, her dead husband’s pride, as he went north to Warwickshire to begin to serve the great Beauchamp family—the first, traditional step toward knighthood. Parting from him—admitting he was old enough to go—would be difficult. She dreaded the farewell, but sleep eluded her for another reason too. Today, by royal messenger, had come a letter from Princess Isabella.
The poor, exhausted messenger had been clear to Normandy to seek her and their paths had somehow crossed at sea, so a necessary reply to the letter issued over two months ago was long overdue. It was mayhap the invitation, the sign, she had prayed for and yet its actual arrival with the silk ribbons and red royal seal terrified her. Come to visit as soon as you can, it had said. Princess Isabella had offered the Prince of Wales and herself as godparents to her now fatherless sons. And Isabella had closed with the reverberating words, “My dear brother and I desire both to see you and to renew our long and close relationships.”
Saints, she thought, rolling over in bed again and punching her goose-down pillow repeatedly. “Desire to see you” and “our long and close relationships”—when it came to the prince, that could mean anything. How desperately she wanted—needed—to see him now that she was really able to love him with good conscience, but she would die before she ever consented to be his mistress again. And yet, she knew when she saw him, when she looked into those crystalline blue eyes or breathed in that heady scent of bergamot he always wore—before he even touched her, she would be utterly lost in love.
She flopped onto her back in the big bed and pressed her hands to her flat belly. When he looked at her—it had always been so—his gaze burned to her very core and set her most private fantasies ablaze. It was as though, in one raking glance, he stripped her garments from her and pulled her to his strong, hard body.
She moaned and shifted her legs tightly together. Oh, no, no, not this treacherous, pulling t
Tears of longing, of frustration trembled on her lashes. How forceful, how direct, yet tender he had always been when he had touched her, even from that first time he had pulled her on his lap in the private garden at Windsor. But then the queen and her own brother Edmund had discovered them and all the trouble with his parents had begun. And now—would not the king and queen be just as disapproving of their love as they had ever been?
The flow of feeling continued, rolling over her in caressing waves, throwing taunting pictures and teasing memories at her tired brain. Those stolen, precious days they had spent at Monbarzon after they had first come together the night she arrived, he had rained tender, velvet kisses all over her before he had moved to take her again: kisses down her throat, across her aching breasts to pull her nipples to hard peaks of desire, down her belly and between her thighs—
“Oh!” she moaned aloud and sat up in the soft bed with the coverlets pulled awry all around her. It was as if she could feel the actual touch of his lips, his warm, calloused hands, his plunging again and again to fill her desperate need for him.
She dragged the covers off and got out of bed. The cresset lamp had gutted out but there was moonlight by which to re-read Isabella’s letter if she went to the window. She took the parchment from the table and unrolled it slowly in the shaft of moonglow. Too dark to see the words but she knew what it said and that it meant a chance for them.
Aye, she would go back to Windsor despite the bad memories there which threatened the good thoughts. She had to try, to face the king and queen, to risk all to just know that it might be possible. In the morn, as soon as they had bid Thomas and his guard from Warwick a farewell, she would write to the princess and then, mayhap, it would be too late to ever venture back.
King Edward sat hunched over papers he was signing: Edward R III . . . Edward R III, while his scribe at his velvet elbow carefully sanded each official signature. When the door of the conference room at Windsor opened, and he heard his eldest son’s distinctive, quick tread, he did not look up at first. He did not relish this interview or its dangerous implication, and his clever son would know it soon enough. He signed Edward R III on the next crinkly parchment page before he looked up.
“Good. You came. You have been off riding to the horn so much in the Great Park, I have hardly seen you unless I summon you. Sit, my son.”
Edward sat stiffly in the chair across the big, littered conference table as though he knew something dire was coming. He watched one more careful Edward R III sprawl across an elaborately scripted page. His royal sire shoved the rest of the pile of letters to the side. “Enough for now, Will. Leave us,” the king mumbled to his hovering scribe.
“Aye, Your Grace.” The thin, young man bowed to both king and prince and went out on cat’s feet. The king leaned back in his chair and sighed.
“Actually, Your Grace,” Prince Edward began in the tense silence, “the hunting has not been good. I rather tire of it.”
“Hunting. Oh, aye, that. I did mention that, did I not? And since the hunting at Great Park is disappointing, you have chosen to hunt elsewhere, is that it? Come, Edward, we shall not joust over this,” he challenged his son when he saw a frown crush the proud brow so much the mirror of his own. “Do not pretend you do not catch my drift. Isabella let slip today she has invited the widowed Duchess of Kent to come to court—and the lady has accepted.”
“Aye. Then you have heard the news too that Isabella and I have offered our services as godparents to the two Holland heirs. The elder has already gone off to Warwick to the Beauchamps a fortnight ago, so I hear.”
“Really? So you hear! And are you not in contact more directly with the lady then, too?”
“No, Your Grace, but since you have reared me to be a warrior like yourself and since you do not wish to joust, I shall tell you flat out—I shall be in close contact soon with Jeannette if I have my way.”
He watched his father’s sharp, blue eyes widen at his blatant admission. Years ago such a look of dismay on his royal sire’s face would have sent him into paroxysms of activity to amend the fault, to fulfill any command. But now, for this, he just met steel gaze with steel gaze. He had waited for this attack to come, and he only hoped it might save Isabella or even Jeannette some of the brunt of the battle later.
“She is hardly suitable for you, Edward. A widow with three children by a knight of the northern, small-landed gentry who—”
“She is descended from the same royal grandsire as I, my lord father—indeed, your own father, King Edward II.”
“Aye. Then there is that too. If you ever considered marriage, you would need papal dispensation for your ties to her by second and third degree.”
“Permission is granted by His Holiness freely and frequently, Your Grace. All the simple complications aside, I have thought perhaps the biggest stumbling block is Joan of Kent’s long-held conviction that you let Roger Mortimer and that slippery bastard de Maltravers dispose of her father.”
The king stood and moved to stand behind his tall-backed chair, so Edward, who never sat in his presence, rose also. The king’s hands gripped the chairback so hard his fingers went stark white, but his voice was deceptively low.
“That is all long, long past. The maid was deceived by that insane mother of hers who locked herself in some little room at their manor for years before she died. No one thinks on that now that de Maltravers disappeared over two years ago and no one needs to discuss it with him now. It is over—over and that woman need pursue such treason no longer!”
“She does not pursue the treason, Your Grace, although it almost killed her once.”
“I never thought to harm her—never! I only told her to keep her foolish thoughts to herself or she could join de Maltravers in exile.”
“I am sure you told her such—and more, but I meant not that you ever threatened her with death over it. She was certainly sent off to exile anyway, was she not? Married to Holland and exiled for a price, and so I have been without her for so many years—”
King Edward’s mouth dropped open in surprise, the prince thought, a king who always hid his real feelings so cunningly. It was suddenly as if he were seeing his father for the first time.
“And for so many years, you have longed for this woman, separated from her, while she was married to another?” the king floundered as if some great illumination shone on him at last. “So long ago since she first came to court. You have been longing for one particular woman when you could have had any—have had many? This is why you never lifted a finger to help with marriage arrangements? This is why you choose now to coerce your sister and go behind my back to gainsay my wishes?”
“I will have Joan of Kent, my lord king—if she will have me.”
“If? St. George, boy,” the king shouted in a half-laugh, “but would that not be just like the little vixen. Shall I pin my hopes on that then? There are French princesses who will gladly have you—and solidify the new alliance, too.”
“One of the reasons I have been so zealous for the Treaty of Brétigny to be completed and ratified, Your Grace, is because it serves as far better Anglo-French binding than any bloodless political marriage ever could.”
The sullen blush of controlled anger suffused the king’s fair skin as he stared almost awestruck at his son and heir. “And Aquitaine?” he said low.
Again the tension of tugging wills nearly crackled with energy between the two tall blond men. “And Aquitaine?” the prince parried.
“Holy saints, Edward,” the king shouted as if he would lose control of himself at last. “For the past few months I have been right on the verge of announcing to the world I intend to name you Duk
Prince Edward fought to keep his own volatile Plantagenet temper in check. Often in the exhaustion of a fight on the battlefield he had seen the victor was the man who kept his head however hard his blood boiled. His voice, when he answered, was controlled but much too strident and too loud.
“I have chosen, my lord father. I cannot love Aquitaine, or need Aquitaine the way I love and need this woman. I cannot fill my soul with Aquitaine—or get sons by it for our family’s throne.”
“But all you have spent—years of work, battles, flaming victories for France—”
“That is just it. Hell’s gates, Your Grace, I am thirty-one this June and I have done all that, but I will not ignore my destiny to love her! The people cheer me in the streets and I cannot make myself care anymore. I am contentious to my servants, bitter to my men, and have never been yet able to accept how the Plantagenets sold Jeannette to first Holland, then Salisbury, then Holland again. Isabella is like a mirror of me—she flits about and longs for love, rushing here and there to avoid being truly alone—”
“We do not speak of the Princess Isabella here!”
“No? Do we not? Then let us speak of that other one you mentioned but a while ago and thought I would not heed. If de Maltravers disappeared over two years ago, then, of course, no one may speak with him now, but that is not how you meant those words of him, is it, Your Grace?”
The wily, blue eyes in his father’s face darted off, then refocused in slits of pure challenge. “St. George, my boy, state your meaning blunt.”