“My lord. The Princess has been telling me how much she anticipates renewing my acquaintance. It is my greatest wish,” I said, placing my hand softly over Edward’s. “We will do all in our power to make Joan’s return a happy one. I have ordered the apartments at Westminster to be made ready.”

“Excellent!” said Edward.

“A family reunion, no less!” Isabella smiled.

Joan scowled at my use of her given name, then quickly hid it behind a tight curve of her mouth and an unmistakable barbed response. “I cannot express my gratitude!”

So the battle lines were drawn. Joan regarded me as less than a beetle to be squashed beneath the sole of her foot. She might justifiably have expected to order affairs in England to her liking, with the approval of a father-in-law who remembered her fondly as a child brought up in the royal nursery. And now, in the space of a half hour, she had learned that she had a rival. I was the one to order affairs at Court.

But a warning tripped its way down my spine. At some point in the future, which I would not contemplate, Joan would be the one to hold all the power.

“We should celebrate my son’s return,” Edward announced, oblivious to the antipathy amongst the women in his household.

“I will be gratified to arrange it, my lord,” Joan responded, seizing the chance to make her mark.

“No, no. We won’t ask that of you. I think we can give you time to recover from your long journey, my dear.” Edward looked across the Princess to me. “What do you think, Alice? A tourney?”

It was not done deliberately. Edward had little guile in him these days, but the effect was like a bolt of lightning. Joan inhaled sharply, hands clenched in her damask skirts.

“I should take up my responsibilities immediately,” she stated. “As your daughter by marriage, I should be hostess at a Court function.”

“But Alice has the knowledge and the experience,” Edward demurred. “She’s the one to ask. What do you say?”

“A Court banquet,” I replied. “To organize a tourney would take too long.”

“Then a banquet it shall be.” Edward was turning away, back to his son, content.

“I would organize a tourney!” Joan’s demand sliced through the air.

“As you will. Talk to Alice about it!”

With true male insouciance, Edward cast aside the matter to return to the discussion of military tactics with the Prince, leaving me to fight a war in his wake, but unlike the days in the Abbey, I had the skills now to avoid and maneuver. And attack. And surprisingly, I had an ally.

“It is my right, and you will not usurp it,” Joan declaimed. “Now that I am returned—”

“Of course,” I interrupted pleasantly. “I’ll tell the King you insisted. A tourney? You’ll need to speak to the Steward, the Chamberlain, the Master of Ceremonies. The Master of Horse, of course. Chester Herald if you intend to invite foreign knights—which I’m sure the King will insist on.…I’ll send them to you. I’ll send Latimer to discuss the ordering of food. The annual cleaning of the palace, which is now pending.…And where will you live? Do you intend to stay at Westminster? The accommodations are not very spacious.…”

The planes of her face tightened. “The Prince has not yet decided.…”

“Then do you wish to interview them in my rooms?”

“No.”

I spread my hands. “What do you wish?”

“Let it go, Joan.” Isabella chuckled. “Hold a banquet. It’s much less hard work in the circumstances. And let Alice do it.”

“I thought you would understand.”

“I understand that Alice is a past master at arranging these affairs.”

“Which I intend to change…”

“And I also understand that you are jealous, dear sister.”

“Jealous?” Joan’s voice climbed. “She has no right!”

“Sometimes, Joan, it is necessary to accept the inevitable.”

“That this woman rules the King?”

“Yes. And you should have the wisdom to give her credit for what she does astonishingly well.”

“I will not listen to you!” Joan stalked away to her husband’s side.

“Then you are a fool,” Isabella murmured after her, sotto voce.

“Whilst I,” I added, astounded at this turn of events, “am entirely perplexed!

“What I don’t understand,” I murmured to Isabella when the Prince and his wife had departed for a temporary stay in the royal apartments at Westminster, and I was left to consider the burden I had just been handed, “is why you would throw in your lot with me rather than with the Princess. Why not plump for a tourney and let her get on with it? Would it not please you to put my nose out of joint?”

“She’s naught but a block of lard!” Isabella announced.

“So?”

“I dislike her.”

“You dislike me!”

“True—but if truth be told, perhaps not as much as I dislike her. I always have.”

“Joan will one day be queen,” I warned. “I have no long-term prospects.”

“I know who holds the power now, and it’s not Joan.”

“I still don’t understand why you would stand at my back when Joan tried to stab it.”

Isabella frowned at me, clearly considering whether to take me into her confidence. “We’ll need a cup of wine. Or two…” Her eyes gleamed.

We sat in the solar, two conspiratorial women.

“Not a good marriage!” Isabella pronounced, and proceeded to inform me of all the facts that fair Joan had failed to impart to me about her marital affairs in those far-distant days at the Abbey.

Delicious scandal!

Joan had made a clandestine marriage, no less, at the precocious age of twelve, with Thomas Holland, who promptly abandoned his child bride to go crusading. Meanwhile Joan was forced by her family into a second marriage with William Montague, son of the Earl of Salisbury. Holland returned and for a good number of years became steward of William and Joan’s household.

“Can you imagine,” Isabella gloated in unseemly mirth, “what a convivial household that must have been! Whose bed do you think she shared?”

Then Holland petitioned the Pope for the return of his wife, and got her back, for good or ill, after an annulment of the Montague union. Holland died in the year I first met Joan.

“But Montague was still alive,” Isabella stated. “A living husband, even a dubiously annulled husband, did not make Joan good material for a royal bride. It smacks of a bigamous relationship to me! Many might consider so unorthodox a situation to be an impediment to the legitimacy of any child my brother got on Joan. Is their child Richard a bastard?” Isabella wrinkled her nose. “Hardly good news for the succession! The Virgin of Kent she was not! But my brother closed his ears and the marriage went ahead. Joan had him in her thrall.” Her lip curled. “She’s an ambitious woman.”

I could not blame her for that. “Like me?” I asked wryly.

“Exactly. That’s why she hates you.”

But Joan had every right to be ambitious. Furthermore, she would see her ambition fulfilled, and I would find myself effectively banished.

“Did you see her?” Isabella continued, oblivious to my thoughts, not mincing her words. “Joan the Fat! She still preens and smirks as if she were beautiful. And that makes it all the more incomprehensible to her—that you should have such power with the King when you are not beautiful.” Her stare was uncompromisingly critical. “Famously ugly, in fact.”

I stifled a gasp at the outrageous statement. “My thanks for the compliment.” But I think I had become resigned to it. It no longer hurt.

“It’s true.”

“The King does not think so,” I observed.

“The King is blind!”

And I thanked God for it. What a rewarding exchange of information this had been. Princess Joan would be my enemy. But Isabella…Here was a strange twist in our troubled relationship, yet it would be an unwise woman who put too much weight on any new intimacy. I raised my brows, determined to prod and pry.

“Do I understand that you will be my friend, my lady?”

The reply was as sharp as I expected. “I wouldn’t go as far as that!”

“I have never had a friend,” I added, poised to see her response.

“I’m not surprised. Your ambitions are beyond what most people can stomach.” She perused me, her eyes bright with anticipation. “But I’ll say this: It will be interesting to watch the battle royal between the pair of you. I’m not sure that I wish to wager on the outcome. It wouldn’t surprise me if the banquet never happened.”

In that moment I found myself wishing for the one thing I had never had—a friend, a woman to whom I could speak my mind with confidence and trust. A confidante. What would it be like to say what was in my heart, to bare my soul and know that it would be treated with respect? How would it be to have a woman to turn to for understanding, even for judgment? For balanced advice? I had never known it.

Was this a melancholy?

Briskly, I took myself to task. How was it possible to miss what one had never had?

I arranged a banquet to mark the return of the Prince and Princess. I was suitably extravagant in my outlay of coin to make the desired effect. The only whining voice raised in protest was drowned out by the din of the feasting courtiers.

“What did you wager on this banquet ever coming to fruition?” I asked Isabella.

“Not a silver penny! I thought the planning would shatter on the rock of Joan’s disgust.”

I smiled in pure joy. “You were wrong.”

“So I was.”

Joan was not finished with me. She had not even started. With a smooth exchange of seats as the feasting ended and the wine flowed, as the minstrels dived into their—to my ear—unmusical renderings, encouraging the Court to leap and caper with riotous levity, she leaned close, her eyes hard as jade.