The Fair Maid of Kent Read online

  The Fair Maid of Kent

  Caroline Newark

  Copyright © 2017 Caroline Newark

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 9781788032315

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For Richard

  Contents

  List of main characters

  Prologue Gascony 1338

  1 Antwerp 1338

  2 Ghent 1340

  3 Bisham 1341

  4 Wark 1341

  5 Marriage 1341

  6 A Royal Cousin 1342

  7 Death and Danger 1344

  8 The Prince 1345-6

  9 Calais 1347

  10 Inquisition 1347

  11 The Pestilence 1348-9

  12 Into the Unknown 1349

  Epilogue Broughton 1352

  What happened next

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Contact

  Coming Soon

  The Pearl of France

  List of main characters

  Prologue

  Gascony 1338

  The lord of Albret wiped the blood from his hands and considered his visitor with a cold eye.

  ‘Is she a virgin?’

  The Englishman smiled.

  ‘But of course. Would my master offer you anything but the best?’

  ‘Ah yes. Your master, the King of England and his desires.’

  It was no secret to the lord of Albret that the King of England coveted the French throne. As the only living grandson of the great Iron King he had a better claim than Philip of Valois who was a mere nephew. But the Estates in their wisdom had chosen the Valois. If his informant was to be believed, the English king had not given up the fight and encouraged by his unspeakable mother was planning war. Christ’s blood! The Valois would be shitting his breeches at the thought.

  ‘I’m not sure there is enough in your master’s proposal to attract me,’ mused the big man, scratching his ear.

  The Englishman sighed in exasperation. He knew the big man’s neighbours were talking to Philip of Valois’s envoys and the old fox enjoyed nothing better than threatening him with a flirtation with France.

  ‘Your son would boast a close alliance with our king,’ he said persuasively. ‘The girl is not some distant kin, you understand, but a cousin germane, the daughter of his favourite uncle. And very beautiful.’

  The big man rubbed his fingers together, wondering if the French might offer more. The Fleur-de-lys was said to be full of fears and misgivings, and stubborn as a mule when cornered. But he was rich.

  The Englishman was becoming impatient. This particular fortress on the edge of the Landes, a half day’s ride from Bordeaux, was draughty, and the steaming damp from the marshes seeped into his bones as it did everywhere in this godforsaken country. If it wasn’t for the river traffic, all those creaking vessels making their laborious way up the Gironde, bringing the Englishman his barrels of wine and the king a fortune in taxes, nobody would bother with Gascony. But things being as they were, it wasn’t simply a matter of English pride to defend this last bulwark of the great Angevin empire, it was fast becoming a necessity. The wine trade suffered in time of war but when the whole of Aquitaine was theirs once more, the vineyards in the haut pays would fruit again and the English king would reap his just rewards.

  ‘My wife is ailing,’ said the big man. ‘A great inconvenience to me. Her women send messages to say she has taken to her bed.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said the Englishman, wondering if his host’s lady was sick to the point of death or merely trying to avoid his attentions. He’d heard nothing of an illness despite paying some damoiselle in her household to bring him information.

  ‘I may shortly be in need of a wife myself.’

  Ah, thought the Englishman, so that’s the way it is. The image of the beautiful virginal English girl had stirred the old lecher’s appetite and he wanted her for himself. Doubtless there’d be some other bride for the son. It made no difference as long as the matter of the betrothal was settled soon.

  ‘I’m sure my master would not be averse to a slight change in our plans, although I would remind you the girl is very young.’

  ‘But biddable.’

  ‘Oh yes, extremely biddable. She has been raised in the royal nursery with the king’s own daughters and knows her duty.’

  1

  Antwerp 1338

  We drifted on through clear grey water. It was July and after five terrifying days at sea the King of England’s fleet of more than three hundred ships was sailing slowly down the estuary of the River Scheldt in a smooth and lazy fashion. Our canvas sail gave one last despairing sigh but the forty-foot long coloured streamer adorning the top of the mainmast didn’t stir; it hung like a giant’s discarded headcloth, limp and forlorn and forgotten.

  By the time we edged round the final bend there was barely a breath of wind. In front of us the Christopher, one of the king’s favourite ships, was being drawn slowly towards the walls of the little town of Antwerp where thousands of people on the foreshore could be seen cheering and waving and throwing their hats in the air. It promised to be a very grand arrival.

  Once, when I was too young to know better I’d asked Lady la Mote if the king was my father.

  ‘Certainly not,’ she’d said, a flush creeping up from her wrinkly neck to the edges of her soft white veil. ‘He is your royal cousin.’

  The flush had deepened to cover the whole of her face while her fingers twisted her sewing into a crumpled ball.

  ‘Has your lady mother not told you about your father?’

  My mother never told me anything. She had left me in the royal nursery when I was three years old and almost never came to visit. Sometimes she took my little brother away to inspect what she called “his inheritance” but she never took me. Once a year she allowed me to kiss her old woman’s hand and receive her blessing but I knew she didn’t love me, not the way a mother should, not the way my cousin the king loved me.

  It was Margaret who first told me about my father. We were sitting on the wall at Framlingham eating cherries and inspecting my uncle’s deer park which stretched from Brabling all the way to the corn mill at Saxtead.

  ‘He’s dead, you lump-head!’

  ‘He can’t be,’ I cried. ‘He’s my father.’

  ‘Well, he is. He went to Winchester for the parliament and never came home. the king had him executed. Father said they cut off his head.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ whispered Alice who was a small pale shado
w of her older sister.

  I was six years old and felt sick at the thought of my father’s head being chopped off. I wasn’t stupid, I knew these things happened. I’d seen plenty of blackened heads with sightless eyes rotting over the gates on London’s bridge.

  ‘What had he done?’

  ‘Nobody said.’

  ‘But he was my father,’ I wailed. ‘The king would have called him “uncle”. Why would he want him dead?’

  Margaret spat out her cherry pip and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘It wasn’t the king who wanted him dead. It was the king’s mother.’

  I clutched at Alice who nearly fell off the wall in fright. I was scared of the king’s mother. She swept through the nursery rooms at Woodstock in her rich brocades and fine black veils looking for all the world like the witch Margaret said she was. She smiled with her sharp little teeth at the king’s children and gave them costly gifts, but she glared at me as if I had no right to be there and she would like to scratch out my eyes.

  ‘The king must have signed a death warrant,’ worried Alice. ‘There has to be a death warrant, otherwise it is murder.’

  ‘Father said the king’s mother held a knife to the king’s throat to make him sign,’ said Margaret. ‘And if someone is holding a knife to your throat you don’t have a choice. You’d be a fool not to sign.’

  I thought of the king with his large capable hands and his loud carefree laugh and wondered how he could have done this to me. How could he have allowed my father to be killed? I was his cousin. I was his little Jeanette. I had sat on his knee and played with his beard and he had kissed me. He had tickled my chin and told me I was his sweetheart. He had said he loved me.

  Slowly my eyes began to fill with tears.

  ‘Oh don’t be such a cry-baby,’ said Margaret.

  ‘But my father is dead,’ I wept.

  ‘I know,’ Margaret sighed. ‘It’s a pity but it couldn’t be helped. Here, have another cherry and see if you can reach the path this time.’

  Elizabeth jabbed me with her elbow. ‘What can you see?’

  The quayside at Antwerp was dominated by a huge platform draped in black cloth and on a dais, raised higher than anyone else and surrounded by black and gold banners, was an exceptionally tall man. His upper lip curled, his black brows furrowed and I thought he looked extremely dangerous.

  Elizabeth pulled herself up on the rails to get a better view. ‘That must be the Duke of Brabant,’ she announced. ‘He’s the king’s cousin and a person of great importance.’

  Flanking the duke on either side were several other richly dressed men, equally important judging from the quantity of jewels and costly silks on display.

  ‘The princes of the Low Countries,’ sighed Elizabeth, gazing at the glittering magnificence. ‘My father says they’ve come to fight with us against the armies of the French king but of course you wouldn’t know that, Joan, would you? People don’t tell valuable secrets to girls like you.’

  I had endured a whole year of Elizabeth’s particular brand of friendship: the pinching, the hair-pulling, the stealing of my ribbons and the hissing of “traitor’s daughter” into my ear. I hadn’t wanted to leave Woodstock to live in her mother’s household but I had been given no choice.

  The order had come from a frosty-eyed Lady la Mote who had charge of the girls in the royal nursery, and she had been unforgiving,

  ‘But why?’ I said. ‘What have I done? Why am I being sent away?’

  ‘You are trying to tell me you don’t know?’

  She drew up her shoulders and began speaking rapidly as if she couldn’t wait to rid herself of what needed to be said.

  I didn’t understand the words she used or the halting descriptions of my behaviour: impropriety; intimacy of a sort that no young girl should ever be a party to; a gross betrayal of Her Grace’s loving trust. Never before had she, Lady la Mote, had a girl in her care who had so blatantly disregarded everything she had been taught and behaved in such a disgraceful way. Impure thoughts, immodesty, the need for contrition, repentance, and lastly, when the whole of her face had flushed to an alarming shade of crimson, a suggestion of the attentions of older men and a hushed mention of His Grace, the King’s knee.

  ‘How could you have behaved in such a way? And in front of the queen and the royal daughters?’

  It had been the day of the visit of the royal children to their parents, an afternoon of great excitement with singing and laughter and special games. I remembered Isabella loudly demanding her father’s attention, Joanna rolling her little woollen ball across the floor and Edward, as usual, leaning on the arm of his mother’s chair. The king had circled his arm around my waist and drawn me close.

  ‘Too old to sit on my lap, little cousin?’ he had murmured.

  ‘No, Your Grace.’

  But sliding myself awkwardly onto his knee I’d found I was now tall enough for my white satin slippers to touch the floor. Beneath the thin silk cloth of my gown I could feel the firm pressure of his legs on mine and the tightening of his fingers on my waist. I’d leaned back into the solid comfort of his shoulder where the blue velvet smelled of spiced perfume and his cheek was warm against my hair. But something had changed and as the queen’s eyes met mine I knew she was thinking I was no longer a child and had no business sitting on the knee of her husband receiving his caresses. I had displeased her but at the time I didn’t realise how much.

  Lady la Mote’s lips were set in a thin disapproving line. ‘As soon as arrangements can be made you will join the household of Lady Catherine Montagu at Bisham and you will remain there for as long as the queen wishes it.’

  Our arrival in Antwerp was just as I had expected. As soon as we set foot on dry land there was the usual embracing and lengthy speeches of welcome which accompanied my cousin wherever he went and afterwards we walked in slow and solemn procession to the Church of Our Lady to give thanks for the safe arrival of the King and Queen of England and their friends. Then there were yet more speeches and kissing and exchanging of gifts before we were escorted to our hired lodgings where we would spend the first night.

  I barely noticed my tiredness or the way the ground shifted unsteadily beneath my feet because of the strangeness of everything. I kept reminding myself this was Brabant, not England, this was another country where things were done differently. What was most surprising was the lack of solid ground as most of Antwerp appeared to be half-afloat. The crooked houses with their odd-looking roofs were separated, not by paved or cobbled streets, but by wide smelly ditches full of water, with bridges and steps and ridiculously narrow pathways. All around was a watery light which made the early evening sky shimmer and beads of damp crawl up my arms.

  I should have known that my first night in such a strange place would not be peaceful but whatever other surprises I might have imagined, the last thing I expected was a summons. The girl and her escort arrived at dusk, just as the candles were lit, when the milky sky of morning had turned to an evening haze of soft purple and grey.

  ‘Lady la Mote requests that the Lady Joan should come at once,’ the girl said, keeping her eyes on the floor. ‘The Lady Joanna won’t stop crying. The nursemaids can do nothing. She weeps and calls for the Lady Joan and won’t go to sleep.’

  Lady Catherine sniffed as if the girl had brought the stench of the ditches into the house. I could see she didn’t want me to go. She was the wife of the king’s closest friend, Sir William Montagu, the Earl of Salisbury, and she had never liked me. That first day at Bisham when I’d stood in front of her, trembling in my water-stained clothing, waiting for her approval, her lips had twitched in annoyance and she had looked as if she’d wanted to slap me.

  Now, she was struggling with what she interpreted as a royal command. She didn’t want to say yes, to make me seem a person of importance which in her eyes I was not, b
ut she couldn’t, in all conscience, say no.

  ‘It is very late but as the child is the king’s daughter you must go,’ she said, her mouth twisting with disapproval.

  I bobbed a curtsey, murmuring my gratitude for Lady Catherine’s kindness and almost ran from the room before she could change her mind.

  It was still warm from the heat of the day as I followed the girl outside. Our escort carried torches and were armed. This was not our country and even though we were honoured guests in the territory of the Duke of Brabant, I think none of us felt completely safe.

  ‘It is very strange, the place where we’re lodged,’ whispered the girl. ‘The lord who lives there is called Sir Two-Faces. The man in the kitchen, who speaks some English, says his master wishes people to know how rich he is so he has offered his house to the English king.’

  The wealthy townsman’s house where the king and queen were lodged for the night was a large painted building with carved gables, very ornate and rather grand and set well away from the ditches. It was made of wood like all the other houses. The two-faced townsman couldn’t be as rich as people said he was or he’d have built his house with stone which is what rich men did in England. Perhaps all the duke’s people were poor because the rambling fortress by the edge of the river and the Church of Our Lady in the middle of the town appeared to be the only stone buildings in the whole of Antwerp.

  The girl led me past the guards and up the stairs to a room crowded with women. Lady la Mote was there, wringing her hands in despair, while five nursemaids fluttered uselessly around the bed twittering and fussing. I could hear Joanna, a thin mewing cry like a trapped kitten.

  I pushed past the people loitering at the door and walked over to the bed.

  At the sound of my voice she stopped wailing. Her little round face was red and streaked with tears.