“Mama…” The boy tugged on his mother’s sleeve.

“You are King now, Richard,” she told him.

Still, it meant nothing to him. He turned back to me, his pale face alive with anticipation. “Will you take me to the royal mews, Mistress Perrers, to see the King’s falcons?”

Your falcons!

The realization nipped at my heart. “No, Sire,” I replied gently, although my greatest wish was to be away from there, away from Joan and her son. “It is too late tonight. Shall I send for refreshment, Majesty?”

“Yes. If you please. I’m hungry.…” He almost danced on the spot with impatience. “Then can we go and see the hunting birds…?”

Joan’s hand descended on her son’s shoulder like a metal lock. “Mistress Perrers—or is it Lady de Windsor? How does one know?—Mistress Perrers will not be staying, Richard.” And to me, her lips curled with vicious pleasure, her eyes suddenly hot with satisfaction: “You have no role here. Your reign, Queen Alice, is over.” She had the upper hand at last and would revel in it. “I will give orders for your chambers to be cleared forthwith. I expect you to be gone before—let me see, I suppose I can afford to be magnanimous—before sunrise.” Smoothing her hand over the fair hair of her son, she tilted her chin in a smile that showed her teeth. “You will ensure that you take nothing with you. If you do”—her teeth glinted—“you may be sure that I will demand recompense.”

So, she would strip me of all my personal possessions—it was not unexpected. Nor, I suppose, could I blame her after a lifetime of disappointment. But I would fight back.

“I will take nothing that is not mine, nothing that was not given to me,” I replied as I clutched the rings tightly in my hand so that the settings dug into my flesh.

“By an old and besotted man who could not see you for your true worth.”

“By a man who loved me.”

“A man you bewitched by who knows what evil means.”

“A man I respected above all others. Anything he gave me was of his own free will. I will take what is mine, my lady.”

So I curtsied to her, a deep obeisance, as if she were herself Queen of England.

“Get out of my sight!”

I turned and walked away, the clear voice of the child carrying down the length of the hall. “Can we go and see the falcons now? Why will Mistress Perrers not take me…?”

It would be hard for him to be King. It would be impossible for him to step into Edward’s shoes.

I left Sheen. It was in my mind that I would never return there, or to any of the royal palaces that had been my home. Joan was right, however malicious the intent behind her words. My reign, if that was what it was, was over.



Chapter Sixteen



Every living soul in London could claim to have rubbed up against the closing minutes of Edward’s final journey to his burial on the fifth day of July in Westminster Abbey, close to Philippa’s final resting place, just as he had promised her. Did the worthy citizens not crowd the streets to watch the passing of the wooden effigy with its startlingly lifelike death mask? Even the wooden mouth dragged to the right, memento of the spasm of muscles that had struck him down. Edward’s people stood in dour silence, remembering his greatness.

This is what I was told.

Edward was clothed in silk, his own royal colors of white and red and cloth of gold gleaming, his coffin lined with red samite. He was accompanied to his tomb with bells and torches and enough black cloth, draped and swagged, to clothe every nun in Christendom. A feast celebrated his life, the food valued at over five hundred pounds, at the same time that the gutters were filled with the starving. Such wanton extravagance. But he was a good man and the citizens of London would not begrudge the outward show. Why should their King’s life not be celebrated? The isolation and failure of his last years—when was the last time any of them had set eyes on him?—were pushed aside by those who bore witness to this final journey.

But what of me?

Should I not have been allowed to say my final farewell? So I think, but it was made very clear to me that my presence was not desired. Was not appropriate. It was made more than clear by a courier from the mother of the new child-monarch, who announced the news with a set face, speaking by rote.

Could the despicable Joan not have written her orders? Of course she could have, but that would have meant treating me as an equal—and that she could never do. Even on her deathbed, if I held out to her the gift of life, I swear she would have spit in my face.

“You are not to attend, mistress.” The messenger at least dismounted and marched over to where I waited for him. I had thought he might shout from beyond the courtyard arch. “It is unseemly for one who is not a member of the family to accompany the coffin. His Majesty King Richard has ordered that you remain outside London during the ceremonies.”

“His Majesty?”

“Indeed, mistress.” He revealed not a flicker of an eye, not a quiver of a muscle. But we both knew the truth.

“I will consider the request.”

The courier looked askance but presumably carried a more suitable response back to Westminster, while I called down curses on Joan’s malevolent head. But she had the power now in the name of her son, and I was banished. I must remain at Pallenswick, where I had been reunited with Windsor. I watched the courier gallop from my land, watched until his figure was swallowed up by distance. Then I leaped into action.

Ordering my barge and an escort to be made ready for the following day, I sped up the stairs to my chamber in search of suitable garments in which to mark Edward’s passing. I had discarded no more than three gowns as too drab or too showy before Windsor appeared in the doorway.

“I didn’t know you were here,” I said, engrossed. “I thought you were riding over to inspect the repair of the mill wheel.”

“To hell with the mill wheel! Don’t do it!” he ordered, without preamble.

“Do what?”

“Don’t play me for a fool. Alice! I can see inside your head! Don’t go!”

So he had the measure of me. How could he read me so well? He was the only man who could. I kept my eyes on my busy hands, matching a fur-trimmed surcoat to an underrobe of black silk.

“Why should I not? Do I obey the directives of Joan?”

His stare was intimidating enough. “Don’t go because I don’t want to have to visit you tomorrow night in a dungeon in the Tower!”

“Then don’t visit me. I won’t expect you.” Crossly, furious at Joan and at my own weakness that I felt the hurt of it, I spread the garments on the bed, then began to search for shoes in a coffer.

“So you admit you might end up there?”

“I admit to nothing. I only know that I must go!”

“And you were never one to take good advice, were you?”

“I took yours, married you, and look where that got me! A whole fleet of enemies. And banished, forsooth!” The accusation was entirely unfair, of course, but I was not concerned about being dispassionate. I stood and looked at him, daring him to disagree, my hands planted on my hips.

And he did. Of course he did. “I think you made the enemies well enough without me.”

I took a breath, accepting his deliberate provocation. “True.” And I smiled faintly, the sore place beneath my heart easing a little just at the sight of him, strong and assured, filling the doorway to my room. But I turned my back against him. Suddenly I wanted to tell him how much I loved him, but I dared not.

“You loved him, didn’t you?” he stated.

I looked up, startled from my unwinding of a girdle stitched in muted colors—I would pay my final respects with commendable discretion. “Yes. I did.” I thought about what I wanted to say, and explained, as much to myself as to Windsor. “He was everything a man should be. Brave and chivalrous, generous with his time and his affections. He treated me as a woman who mattered to him. He was loyal and principled and…” My words dried. “You don’t want to hear all that.”

“Quite a valediction!”

“If you like. Are you jealous?” Completely distracted now from the heavy links in my hands, I tilted my head and watched him. Without doubt, jealousy as green as emeralds in the ring I had refused spiked the air between us. “I don’t think you are necessarily either loyal or principled. Only when it suits you.”

Now, there was a challenge. What would he say to that?

“God’s Blood, Alice!” The bitterness in the tone shivered over my skin.

“So you are jealous!”

He thought for a moment. “Not if you lust after me more!”

Which made me laugh. “Yes. You know I do.” Impossibly forthright, Windsor always had the capacity to surprise me, and to confess to lust was far easier than to admit to love. The power would remain with me. “I had a love—a deep respect—for Edward, but I lust after you—just as you lust after me. Does that make you feel any better?”

“It might! Prove it!”

Abandoning the garments, my mood softening under his onslaught, I walked toward him and he took me in his arms. We understood each other very well, did we not?

“I want to be with no one but you, Will,” I said, and pressed my lips to his.

I hoped he would be satisfied, and although I thought he might push me, to my relief he did not. What was it that made me love him so much? What was there to bind me to him? We did not hunt together, as I had with Edward. We did not dance—Windsor, I suspected, was as wrong-footed at dancing as I. There was not a poetic bone in his whole body to seduce me into love and longing. We did not even have the intricate and magical workings of a clock to bind us. What was it, then, except for naked self-interest? Was that all it was? I did not think so, but I could not tally the length and breadth of it as I might assess a plot of land.