Everyone gathered in the Great Hall for the midday meal. At the lower end, a hundred poor people had assembled at several trestles to receive bread and pottage as charity from the King. Joanna often worked with Cecily, serving food to the people as a work of humility and Christian charity, but today she was helping the royal nursemaids and had custody of the lady Beatrice, a delightful little girl almost five years old, with brown-gold ringlets and huge blue eyes.
At the high table, Iohan was performing service duties, an embroidered dapifer’s towel over one shoulder as he carried a bowl and a jug of rose water for the guests to wash and dry their hands between courses. The royal children sat apart from their parents at a table nearby, attended by servants and learning their manners, observed by but not interrupting the adults.
Joanna helped Beatrice with her food and while doing so cast her eye over the other children with a proprietorial eye. Edward, coming up to eight, was very conscious of his status as the golden prince and heir to the throne. He could be autocratic and demanding but Joanna still loved him unconditionally. He had enormous charm and would often give her a spontaneous hug and kiss. Last year at the consecration of Beaulieu Abbey he had been seriously ill with a fever but had eventually made a full recovery. Nevertheless, the scare he had given everyone had made him even more precious.
Beatrice wriggled back and forth on the bench, and when Joanna touched her arm to settle her down, Beatrice whispered to her and wriggled some more. Without fuss, Joanna took her hand and led her from the chamber to the nearest latrine. She helped her lift her skirts and sat her on the wooden seat over the hole. Beatrice swung her legs and hummed a little tune and then wrinkled her nose. ‘It smells in here,’ she said.
It would be surprising if it did not, Joanna thought, but Beatrice had her father’s sensitivity about such matters – Henry was always complaining about the noisome privies.
Beatrice finished, and as she hopped off the seat, Joanna’s brother barged past them, tearing down his braies in haste. Throwing himself down over the hole, he voided his bowels in a violent explosion. If the latrine smell had been noxious before, now it was overpowering. Iohan leaned forward and vomited a puddle at his feet.
Alarmed, Joanna hastily returned Beatrice to the hall, gave her into Roberga’s care and, begging her excuses, sped back to her brother. He was still sitting on the seat, groaning.
‘Iohan?’
He raised his head to look at her. He was red-faced, sweating and glassy-eyed.
‘What have you eaten?’ Joanna demanded.
‘Nothing. I wasn’t hungry this morning. I had a chicken pasty yester-eve from a pie seller.’
She cast her gaze heavenwards. Hungry young men often bought pasties and the like from the traders and opportunists who hung around the court, sometimes with disastrous consequences. ‘Go to your pallet and I will come to you when I can,’ she ordered him.
‘I can’t. I have to serve at table!’
‘Not like this you cannot! I will make it right with the King.’
He started to rise off the hole but had to sit down again as another spasm tore through his bowels. The stench made Joanna retch.
‘I will fetch a physician.’
She fled the latrine. Before returning to the hall she washed her hands and face to banish any miasma that might linger over her person. She sent word to the King of Iohan’s illness and begged leave of the Queen to go and tend to him.
‘Of course,’ Alienor said, concerned. ‘Go to your brother. You have my full leave and I will send you my physician.’ She cast an anxious glance towards the children, for any malaise was a threat to their wellbeing.
Joanna raced back to Iohan who had collapsed on the latrine floor. She found two valets to pick him up and bear him to his bed and had them strip him to his undershirt. His soiled hose and braies she kicked aside for the laundry maid before fetching a bowl of lavender water and a cloth.
Iohan groaned and clutched his stomach. His skin burned like a furnace under her hand, but his teeth were chattering. She wrung out the cloth and set it upon his brow. He looked at her fearfully.
‘You will be all right,’ she soothed. ‘See, here is the physician now. This will teach you to eat pasties from the door, no matter how hungry you are.’
The physician, Master Peter, was a small, bright-eyed man with quick movements that still managed to be unhurried. He examined Iohan carefully and got him to piss into a glass vessel. Then he swilled the dark yellow urine around in the light and compressed his lips. ‘Your sister is right,’ he said, giving Iohan a stern look. ‘No more chicken pasties, young man.’ He prescribed boiled water to be drunk from a silver cup.
Iohan drank the first dose once a cup had been found, but soon after, vomited it back up. Joanna made him some more, this time ensuring he took small sips, and it stayed down. Following which, he fell into a restless, febrile slumber.
‘I will come back later,’ she said, and smoothed his damp hair with a tender hand.
He nodded faintly without opening his eyes.
When Joanna returned to the ladies’ chamber Cecily came to her straight away. ‘How is Iohan?’ she asked. ‘We have all heard he is unwell.’
‘Sick,’ Joanna replied numbly. ‘Burning and shivering with fever and voiding his belly and bowels. Probably a bad chicken pie. He was well yesterday – he pulled my braid and teased me because I was in a hurry and he wouldn’t let me pass, and I called him a nuisance. I shouldn’t have.’
‘Do not start laying that upon yourself, my girl,’ Cecily said. ‘I have taught you better than that.’
Chastened, Joanna bit her lip, and Cecily hugged her.
‘You should keep him cool and quench his thirst,’ said Sybil Giffard. ‘Young men of that age often have too much choler in their humours. I will come and see him myself if it will help.’
