Little Edward sucked his fist and made small sounds of impending hunger. Sensing a storm, Sybil exchanged glances with Alice the wet nurse, who started to rise from her stool.
De Montfort raised his brows. ‘Then I beg your leave, sire,’ he said, with laboured courtesy, and continued to keep firm hold of his wife’s hand.
‘Either come or go hither as you choose, for it seems to me that is your custom,’ Henry said curtly.
De Montfort bowed. ‘Then with your given consent, we shall depart and not disturb you further.’ He left on the instant with Eleanor and his entourage.
Henry lifted his cup in a trembling hand and took several swallows. The baby, no longer content with his fist, commenced bawling into an uncomfortable silence.
‘If I may take your son to the Queen, sire,’ Sybil reiterated, deferential, but insistent.
‘Yes, go,’ Henry snapped. ‘Everyone else deserts me after all.’
Sybil curtseyed and stooped to pick up the swaddled baby, her expression neutral. Her husband lifted the cradle and Joanna and Alice followed the couple from the painted chamber, walking with heads down and hands clasped. Joanna had not understood all the nuances, but the friction between the King and de Montfort had been palpable and frightening.
In the Queen’s apartments, nothing was said. Alice settled Edward at her breast and Joanna fetched clean napkins and swaddling to change him. The Queen, wearing a loose robe, sat on a stool by the bed while Willelma combed her hair in long, smooth strokes, applying rose water to the tines. The churching gown lay across a long trestle, the rich silk gleaming in the candle light.
Joanna had just handed a towel to Alice because Edward had burped a milky trickle when Henry stormed into the chamber like an agitated whirlwind and everyone knelt in haste. The Queen stood up and faced him, her eyes wide with shocked surprise. ‘Sire, what is it?’ she asked.
‘My sister’s husband!’ Henry was almost choking on his words. He shook the piece of parchment clutched in his fist. ‘Never have I known such arrogance and ingratitude.’
‘Come, my lord, sit down.’ Alienor kissed his cheek and drew him to the bench. ‘You should not upset yourself. Willelma, fetch the King some wine.’
‘Should I not? Your uncle Thomas has written saying he needs funds for his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. De Montfort owes him five hundred marks and has had the gall to tell him I will honour the debt out of my own treasury, when he has neither told me of the arrangement nor sought my permission. Instead I learn about it now, in this letter!’ He waved the parchment under her nose. ‘After everything I have done for that man, he pushes his debts on to me behind my back while upstaging me in my own chamber on the eve of your churching! I will not stand for it!’
Willelma returned with the wine and Alienor presented it to him herself. ‘Calm yourself, sire, anger avails you nothing,’ she said gently.
‘I will not be made a fool of in this way!’ His eyes shone with angry tears. ‘Simon de Montfort will not take advantage of my goodwill and outdo me like this. When all is said and done, he seduced his way into my family. I have tried to embrace him as my sister’s husband. I have given him every privilege and benefit of the doubt and all he sees is an opportunity to take still more. If you had seen him tonight, posturing and swaggering, with never a word to me about this debt of his. He should read that motto above my chamber door and apply it to himself !’
Joanna shrank into the shadows, frightened by the King’s rage. She looked to Cecily for reassurance, but Cecily’s lips were tightly pursed.
‘You must not allow such things to upset you,’ Alienor soothed, kissing his cheek. ‘You should manage them with diplomacy. I hope you do not hold this against Uncle Thomas.’
Henry shook his head and cuffed his eyes. ‘No. He is bound on a holy cause and he is indeed owed the money. It is not he who has given offence.’ Abruptly he set his cup aside and stood up. ‘Simon de Montfort will learn that he cannot ride over me roughshod and escape the consequences.’ He raised Alienor’s hands to his lips. ‘I am the better for seeing you, but I should not be here.’
‘No, you should not,’ she replied, smiling. ‘You should go to bed, my lord – all will seem better on the morrow.’
‘I know where I wish I could sleep,’ Henry said, causing Alienor to blush. ‘I know where I want to lay my head.’
She gave him a coy look. ‘Well, that is for tomorrow too. You are truly not angry with my uncle?’
‘Truly not, my displeasure lies in other directions.’ He went to look at Edward, now replete and sleepy in his cradle. ‘Perfect little man. I will give you the world.’ He stooped to kiss the baby’s brow, and then left.
Alienor sighed. ‘I thought everything was settled between them, but it seems that the Earl of Leicester has overstepped the bounds again – likely they were both in their cups. I will try and find a way around, but they are men at different ends of a line. Keeping them apart is better than having them close.’
The household prepared for bed. Remembering what she had seen in the hall, Joanna shivered. The court was a place of beauty and grace, but it could be dark and dangerous too. Like a forest full of sunlit dells and deep undergrowth.
As she knelt at her bedside to say her prayers, Cecily touched her shoulder. ‘Put your faith in God, child,’ she murmured. ‘Whatever troubles you, He will always answer.’
‘But what if He does not?’
‘Then you have not been listening hard enough.’ Cecily tenderly smoothed Joanna’s hair. ‘God always answers. Sometimes He does not give you the answer you desire, and then you deny it, but He is always there.’
Comforted by Cecily’s voice as much as her words, Joanna finished her prayers, promising God she would listen harder from now on. Settling in bed beside Mabel, she watched as Roberga extinguished the candles one by one leaving a single lamp burning; a light in the darkness.
Together with the other girls from the Queen’s household, supervised by Cecily, Joanna stood near the altar in the abbey church, holding a tall candle, as yet unlit. Golden morning light streamed into the cathedral nave, illuminating the drapes and decorations the King had ordered for the Queen’s churching. Joanna felt very grown up. The trimming from her new gown sparkled in the sun’s rays and Mabel had woven her hair in an intricate plait with a light veil over it, secured with little golden pins.
Waiting at the altar for the Queen’s entry, King Henry looked tense and tired. Joanna thought he probably had a headache. His younger brother Richard, Earl of Cornwall, was at his side – tall, fair-haired and handsome, with a jutting jaw and harder features than Henry’s. His wife was Joanna’s maternal aunt, although Joanna barely knew her. Countess Isabelle was a beauty with lustrous flaxen hair coiled under her headdress. Her hand rested protectively on her belly, swollen with yet another pregnancy. Her brother, Joanna’s uncle Gilbert, stood beside her, the light glistening on his scalp under his thinning hair. Iohan, wearing a green and gold tunic, was in attendance as part of his entourage. So many of Joanna’s Marshal relatives were present, she could barely mark them all.
