Emma Campion - A Triple Knot (38 page)

Leaning against her nurse, Joan breathed deep, taking in the high stone walls, the ramshackle buildings within them, and the square stone keep. Mother in heaven. As Jester’s barking grew sharper, she stumbled over to the cart and grabbed his basket from one of Will’s retainers. Setting it down on the ground, she opened it and scooped up the agitated terrier, speaking softly to him as he sniffed her and licked her face.

“Who is this wild creature?” Efa asked, holding out her hand so that he might sniff and approve, then rubbing him behind one ear.

“A gift from Prince Edward,” said Will. He stepped back when Jester barked at him, avoiding eye contact with the three women.

“This is Jester,” said Joan. “He is sweet and well behaved. Come, Efa. Show me my prison.” She set Jester down on the ground and grasped Efa’s arm for support before her legs
gave way. The past few days had taken their toll, but she’d be damned if she’d let Will have the satisfaction of witnessing her weakness.

On the first level, a wild-haired man bowed to her. “My lady.”

“This is Alf, our cook,” said Efa. “We are blessed with him.”

Up two levels of narrow stone steps they came out into a hall, the walls hung with tapestries from various Montagu properties, and furnished with high-backed chairs and benches brightened with colorful cushions, a trestle table set with food and drink, a brazier smoking nearby. There were four window embrasures, one in each wall, wider than arrow slits but letting in little light. Two menservants bowed to Joan, one proffering a goblet.

“Hot spiced wine,” said Efa. “You need it.”

“I must shed these filthy clothes and bathe before I eat or drink,” Joan said. “Helena as well.” In truth, she feared the wine would go straight to her head.

Efa led them up another level to a chamber in which stood a curtained bed and several smaller pallets, cushioned chairs, a few small tables, and a large wooden tub near a brightly burning brazier. There were four windows like the ones below.

Two young women who had been setting out soap and cloths by the tub straightened and bowed their heads, and were about to withdraw.

“Stay. You will wash Helena after she has assisted me with Lady Joan. Watch and learn,” said Efa.

They crowded onto a small bench, watching Jester circle the room, exploring. Joan told one of them to go down to the hall and bring him a plate of meat and some water.

Undressing Joan, Efa tsked and sighed over the marks left on her wrists and ankles by the bonds and the bruises from the rough ride in the cart.

“Do not stir up my anger just now. Let me bathe in peace.”
Joan stepped out of the pile of clothes on the floor and into the hot water, sinking down until her chin touched the warmth, her knees rising. She closed her eyes and succumbed to the ministrations of her women, feeling the knots ease under Efa’s skillful hands. When she stepped out, the two young servants added the water that had been steaming on the brazier so that Helena might bathe while Efa took a comb to Joan’s tangled wet hair. Jester, fed and watered, curled up at Joan’s feet. “Bring our food up here, Efa. I cannot bear the sight of my jailer.” If she was lucky, Will might drink enough to tumble down the stairs and break his neck.

Much later, as Joan lay in the soft, clean bed, she told Efa of the journey, shaking her head at any attempt to forgive Margaret’s complicity, instead turning her mind to the men left behind, the horrors of the siege, her farewell dinner with Thomas and his mother. Curled up between Helena and Efa, with Jester draped over one of her feet, she slept then—a sound, dreamless sleep.

In the morning, Will sent a page to summon Joan to the hall. He was clean-shaven, dressed in a jacket she’d not seen before, quite elegant, blue velvet with yellow silk showing through the slashed sleeves. Plunder, she guessed.

“How beautiful you look this morning, my lady.”

His look was soft, tender. Was this what it took for him to feel for her, an abduction? She turned back a sleeve to show him the bandage round her wrist.

“And this? Is this beautiful, my lord?”

He blushed. “I’ve brought you a gift.” He nodded to a servant, who opened one of several chests stacked by the table. “Plunder from Calais.” Will shook out a fine tapestry, proudly displaying it.

“It stinks of the funeral pyres. Put that back and take these chests to one of the outbuildings,” Joan ordered the servants.

“Leave them. Take the tapestry into the yard and beat the
smoke out of it.” Will invited Joan to sit and break her fast with him.

“I’ve already eaten. Was that all, my lord?”

“You’ve not yet recovered from the journey.”

“Yet? Do you expect me to find contentment in my prison?” She turned to leave.

He grabbed her arm and pulled her to face him. “Sit with me while I eat, then.”

“What will you do to me if I disobey? What is left? A beating?” She laughed at his frustration. “You humiliate me and then expect my cooperation?”

“All the way from Calais I carried those chests, for you! For you, damn it. And that’s the thanks I get? One tapestry needs airing and you refuse it all? If you made half the effort I have to save our marriage—”

“Effort to save it? Any sympathy I felt for you in France was killed by my abduction.”

“Sympathy?
Sympathy?
And how can it be an abduction? You’re my wife!”

“You’ve never been more than half a man, spineless, cowering behind your mad mother’s skirts. Go lie with your pretty page and leave me be.” She managed to pull out of his grasp and rushed from the room.

Will departed the following day.

C
ardinal Adhémar Robert at last interrogated Thomas, then paid him the courtesy of showing him letters he had prepared summoning Will and Joan, or their legal representatives, to Avignon for interviews. With a rumor of a terrible pestilence killing hundreds in Italy, Thomas sent his mother home in the company of the papal messenger, planning to remain in Avignon until the messenger returned with news. She had argued to stay, but Thomas assured her that the pope and the cardinals were doing all they could to close themselves off from the sickness. Strangers were questioned about their routes to the city, and those arriving from the east were turned back at the gates.

The papal messenger sent to England returned to Avignon in late March with the news that the Montagu family had sequestered Joan and forbidden her access to her own counsel. Hearing this in the presence of the cardinal, Thomas perforce contained himself, but only barely. Another messenger, who had been sent north with an apostolic brief addressed to the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of Norwich and London, reported that the curial investigation of Thomas’s charges had also come to a standstill because of Lady Joan’s silence.

Cardinal Robert shook his head at Thomas’s desperation. He had seen all this before; it was nothing out of the ordinary.
She would be denied visitors and correspondence, nothing more threatening. A wife was, after all, the property of her husband. And it was reasonable that Will Montagu should consider Joan his wife until and unless the Pope ruled otherwise. But he promised to speak with His Holiness at once and, much to Thomas’s surprise, the cardinal kept his word. Pope Clement himself dictated a letter to the three prelates enjoining them to ensure that Joan was able to appoint an attorney of her own. Over a farewell dinner, the cardinal warned Thomas not to place too much hope in a quick response.

“The dowager Montagu, Elizabeth, she has much wealth and the support of your king. She means to prolong this case until you have spent all your silver.” He tapped the side of his nose. “But His Holiness has no affection for your king and respects you for your part in the Lithuanian Crusade. So do not despair.”

W
ILL GATHERED THE MEN GUARDING THE KEEP AND INSISTED THAT
they give up the names of those who had let in a heavily pregnant woman from the village, now recovering from childbirth on a pallet in the kitchen. Two men stepped forward, one the king’s man, one Will’s. Both fathers, they admitted to coming to her aid, empathizing with her husband’s desperate plea for Efa’s help. They stood stoically as Will berated them.

Joan had asked Will to look the other way. After all, no harm had come to her. “For pity’s sake, Will, you should be proud of them for showing mercy.”

He had sneered and stormed out of the keep. Now he looked a fool, vaguely threatening them with censure, for if he
replaced them, that was two who might reveal to the Hollands Joan’s whereabouts.

Over dinner Will was conciliatory, asking after her health, for she looked pale.

“So would you had you spent the winter here, never permitted out beyond the walls.”

He hardly looked better—perhaps a little broader in the chest since they’d parted in August, his face a bit more filled out, but his eyes were shadowed and she’d heard him asking Efa for a tincture to help him sleep.

“At least you are safe from the pestilence.” He told her how it raged on the continent, the rumors that a ship had brought it to Portsmouth. “You are far north and away from the coasts.”

It frightened her—Thomas was in Avignon, her mother right on the Thames. He had brought a letter from Margaret, but mentioned nothing about his grandmother Elizabeth, also in Avignon.

“Ned has a mistress, did you know?” Will added, watching Joan for a reaction. “And she is with child.”

Joan wrinkled her nose at the news and told Will that she wished the bastard well. But in truth she was startled by the pain of hearing it. She had helped at the breech birth in the kitchen, watched the child come forth, wailing, the mother, depleted by the long, painful ordeal, weeping for joy as she took the infant to her breast. Joan wanted to experience that joy, a joy so far denied her. She was twenty years old, betrothed to Thomas for eight years, married to Will for seven, and yet childless.

“You are not so indifferent as you pretend to be,” said Will. “Is it the prince or the baby you envy?”

She slapped him. He caught her hand and kissed it. He said that he would gladly plant a baby in her as soon as the pope decided whether he would raise the child. He would not risk having his child raised by a Holland, a family without honor—the
father a traitor, a daughter the longtime mistress of John Warrenne, Earl of Surrey, the current Lord Holland a rapist.

“Robert?”

“You’d not heard? He raped Sir Gerald Lisle’s wife, Margery, while Prince Lionel was in the next room. The king has disinvited him from the St. George’s Day tournament. And then, of course, there’s your Thomas, seducing a girl of royal blood. No one believes you were a woman when he took you, Joan. He raped a child.”

“He did not!”

“No child of mine will be raised by those dogs.”

“Yet you tell me that King Edward has named Thomas and his brother Otho to the new order he is forming, the one you’re so proud to be a part of. An order of dogs? What is it called—the order of the kennel, the order of the hounds?”

Will shrugged. “They fought valiantly at Caen and Crécy. The king needs them for his war.”

“Perhaps not the order of the kennel, then. What is it called?”

His knuckles played a tattoo on the table. “The Order of the Garter.”

She had him. Now she could twist the knife. “Your mother’s garter again? How honored she must feel.”

He slammed his palm on the table, upsetting a flagon of wine. A servant rushed forward to stop the flow before it ruined Joan’s gown.

“It is not her garter. It never was.”

“You saw His Grace in the pavilion that day, Will. Why do you think she took a vow of celibacy? To atone for cuckolding your father with the king.”

With a curse, he strode out of the hall. She felt no joy listening to him stomp down the steps. She felt bruised. Empty.

A
T LONG LAST
T
HOMAS HEADED HOME
. H
E
’
D LINGERED TOO LONG
in Avignon, but he had made good use of the time, learning much about the dire conditions in France. King Edward might look more favorably on one who brought such news. Perhaps in exchange he might be persuaded to cease interfering in Joan’s life. But it was difficult not to despair.

After the pomp and splendor of the papal court, the countryside through which Thomas rode north seemed another world—too quiet, too empty. Most inns were shuttered, and though Thomas and his squire, Hugh, wore no livery and spoke a simple traveler’s language that most in the countryside could understand, they were met with suspicion. For who indeed travelled when pestilence was abroad in the land but mercenaries, thieves, and those who might carry the death with them?

Farther north, past the present reach of the pestilence, he saw little improvement in the conditions. This devastation was the aftermath of the war, the demands of the French king, the ravages of the English armies. He wondered whether King Edward would question his goal were he to see this, whether he would choose to be satisfied with having brought France to this pass.