The First Princess of Wales Read Online Free Page A

hate all these years?”
    Edmund hesitated. By the rood, this wisp of a girl argued like a cleric from the Inns of Court in London. He had decided long ago she must never know the entire story; indeed, he knew he was taking a gamble with life’s dice to take her to court where she might hear the whispers someday, but Queen Philippa had asked for Joan, to rear, and it did the family no good for her to be a cloistered nun here at moated Liddell. It was true, it was pertinent, and it would obscure the more devastating truth it cloaked.
    “No, Joan, there is one other left, an accomplice to Mortimer, who carried out his orders to kill the king and no doubt helped to arrange for our father’s death.”
    “Who? Will not the king execute him now?”
    “No. You see, he escaped to Flanders and still lives there. Only, there are occasional rumors he may try to come back. Maltravers, Sir John de Maltravers, is his name—from a rich Dorsetshire family.”
    “Not so rich anymore, I warrant, now the king surely holds his lands,” Joan said, and the trembling against his hands ceased.
    He had indeed played that move well, Edmund thought, suddenly proud of himself for outwitting this shrewd, little hoyden when he had to. Just so she never learned the rest of it, the rumors that de Maltravers might return with full pardon and restitution to England—and that it was King Edward and Queen Philippa themselves who might pardon the man. It was even claimed by some that de Maltravers’s fine position in Flanders was due to the good will of the king. At least Joan’s quick mind was on de Maltravers now, a villain she could hate without ever meeting. And in the process, she had, perhaps, believed that their mother’s insane bitterness was focused on the faceless de Maltravers and not herself. He certainly had no plans to tell Joan that de Maltravers’s wife still lived on a farm in Dorsetshire which the Plantagenets held in his name.
    “You will eat with me, Joan, and then we shall be on our way, fair maid,” he ventured boldly. “Anne and I will want you back for visits when it is allowed, of course. Come on in now.”
    She followed him through the arched doorway crested with the white, antlered hart, the coat of arms of their dead father that was Edmund’s heritage now with the house and title. “Of course,” Joan repeated low, “when it is allowed.” She held the wilted purple flowers on her lap while she ate and kept her lute by her side, too.

    A n hour later as the bell in the little chapel across the cobbled inner courtyard tolled its monotonous farewell, Edmund’s men mounted fifteen strong to accompany them to Rochester, and tomorrow beyond. Joan’s lute was wrapped in linen strips and, with a down pillow on either side of it, stuffed in the hemp sack on her palfrey’s sleek brown flank. Although Edmund tried to insist she wait, mounted, with the others until the servants and he brought Lady Margaret down from her haven above, Joan refused and stood instead clutching a tiny bunch of blue forget-me-nots from the walled garden. All of them stared at the covered litter—with its four poles, canopy, and curtain—awaiting the Lady Margaret.
    Joan stood on one foot, then the other trying not to panic or to weep. The vast gray, stone walls, covered by their tapestry of ivy, suddenly never looked more foreboding. A horse snorted; someone’s spurs clinked while the bell tolled on.
    Then, for the first time in these sad, slow revolving years, Margaret of Liddell stood on the front steps of her dead husband’s ancestral home. Edmund held her by one gray-swathed arm, and her faithful Glenda by the other while Marta appeared behind. Everything seemed to stop, to totter for one instant on that threshold. The Lady Margaret, her head covered with a pleated veil, her neck hidden by a vast wimple that flowed over her shoulders, paused, and her violet eyes blinked wildly in the sun. Her gaze jumped across the courtyard to the waiting