The First Princess of Wales Read Online Free Page B

men and horses and then fastened on Joan. It seemed as if she might speak, but Edmund nodded to Glenda and they hurried her down the few broad stairs. Then Edmund loosed her arm to bend and lift her into the litter. Before she could stop herself, Joan moved toward the little clustered trio.
    “My lady Mother, I am so glad you are here and it is such a beautiful day for you. Here, from the gardens, flowers—forget-me-nots, Mother.”
    The desperate violet eyes darted, focused, widened. Her mother’s voice sounded strange, for Joan could never recall it however hard she tried. “Oh, aye, dear Joan and going to be reared at their court. I am so sorry, Joan.”
    Sorry for my going away, that I have to be brought up at court, or that you never really loved me, Joan wanted to ask.
    “Aye. Thank you, Mother. Here.” She pried apart her mother’s fingers tightly balled into a fist. Lady Margaret took the bunch of flowers. Joan had meant to give them to Marta when she came down, but Marta would understand.
    Violet eyes met violet eyes. “Forget-me-nots,” her mother said, but her eyes closed and she never looked at the flowers.
    “Joan, get back now,” Edmund whispered. “You can talk tonight. It will be dark before we see the walls and spires of Rochester if we do not set out.” He lifted his mother, and his shoulders and head hid her slight, gray-cloaked form from view as he bent to place her in the litter and drew the curtains closed. It was immediately silent inside.
    Fighting back tears, Joan hugged Marta good-bye again and let Edmund give her a boost onto her favorite fine black palfrey, Sable, which he was letting her keep at court. They clattered out across the cobbled courtyard and past the walled flower and herb gardens. They rode under the rusty, spike-teethed portcullis and funneled across the wooden drawbridge down the lane between the white-blossomed cherry, pear, and apple orchards. The gray, ivy-clad walls and Norman-built towers seemed to collapse slowly behind them under the clear cup of blue porcelain sky; then Liddell Manor was swallowed by the thickening forest beyond the little hamlet where their thirty tenant farmers and serfs in the lord’s demesne resided. When they turned northwest toward Rochester, the noon sun beat warm on their heads and hands.
    The pace was ploddingly slow because of Lady Margaret’s litter, but Joan did not mind. The day was precious and Mother had taken the flowers. Maybe if it were allowed, as Edmund said, she could leave the court for a little while when they were at Westminster Palace to visit Mother at the Poor Clares down the Thames a way. It would be a little while, no doubt, before a novice took her final vows, and after all, Mother being cloistered was nothing new.
    As the motion of Sable’s bouncing back became hypnotic, Joan began to daydream. She would meet the wonderful Plantagenets and, despite whatever Edmund would say, play a French song for the queen and king. After all, they were claiming half of France through the king’s French mother and there were rumors of war between the English and French over that, Edmund had said. Perhaps all the knights at court would rush off to war as Edmund always had, and she would have free rein over whatever vast royal forests or wildernesses were out there somewhere. If only the Plantagenet princes and princesses would like her, maybe they could be like the friends or family she had never had. And then, Morcar was along, though she knew he loathed leaving Liddell only a little less than she. But it was all a great adventure and on such a lovely day. She would look back on this journey as the beginning of her new life, she decided, and without realizing it, she began to hum, then sing low in her sweet, clear voice.
    Several of Edmund’s men turned to grin at her or winked and whispered to each other, and one who had carefully flirted with her all week, Lyle Wingfield, dropped back to eye her thoroughly as he always did.