The First Princess of Wales Read Online Free PDF Page B

floated tethered, painted barges. Then Joan’s eyes lifted higher to the distant spires of the great abbey and palace of Westminster that lay ahead.
    Even Edmund roused himself from his brooding at the sight of the Gothic arches, carved statues, and turreted rooftops of Westminster. His horse nosed Lyle Wingfield’s big chestnut roan away from Sable’s glistening black flanks. With an eager finger Edmund pointed out the wings of the palace which nearly touched the church, erected in the form of a huge cross, wherein were laid to rest the past Plantagenet kings and queens including their own grandfather, King Edward I.
    “I shall visit there as soon as I can,” Joan assured Edmund. “I wish Father were buried there, too.”
    “So do I, Joan, but we have spoken quite enough of that tragedy already today,” he returned grimly, and she wondered how he could think they had spoken of that when their talk had been only of their farewell to Mother.
    The palace and the city dropped behind them as they followed the Old Richmond Road toward Windsor. It led through open meadows and forests, providing an occasional glint of river on their left. Only old Morcar remained stonily silent as the travelers chatted and bantered despite gathering rain clouds. At midday they halted to water the horses and devour the cheese, wine, and cold partridge pies the nuns had given them; then they pushed on again under a newly leaden-hued sky.
    Traffic on the road around them swelled as they passed the palace at Richmond and pushed on: litters, drovers’ carts, painted ladies’ chairs, and important-looking men on sleek horses jostled, crowded, and cursed in French or English. Joan wanted to ask Edmund or Lyle the questions which had crowded to her lips in the last two days—the entire last fortnight since she had known she would come here to live with
them,
as Mother said. What were they really like, these distant, lofty, glowing, royal Plantagenets to whom she was related and somehow linked? Like stars, like the glistening crown diamonds set in the fathomless velvet heavens, she thought, answering her own question. But something, some feeling held her back from the inquiry, as if in asking, she would know too much to still be safe and in control of her life as she had always been before this last month.
    “Look there, on that hill above the timbered valley,” she bubbled to Lyle the instant a new horizon rose to view. “Is not that Windsor, my lord?”
    Lyle Wingfield grinned from ear to ear and dared to wink at her even as Edmund watched. “Aye,
demoiselle.
I told you that you would know her on sight. Only a blind, old fool could miss Windsor flaunting herself like a blowsy hussy upon the hill for all to see.”
    She thought the knave’s choice of words despicable, but she was too excited to break the moment to tell him so. Above the wooded Thames Valley, like an imposing queen, rose huge, gray Windsor in rugged, solid grandeur: a massive protective wall studded with watchtowers encircled a lofty, round tower anchored in the central keep with a little town huddled at its stony skirts. But even as they rode down into the valley, raindrops from the bulging clouds overhead splattered them, and Joan quickly pulled up her hooded cloak to keep her head and shoulders dry.
    The rain seemed to do little to dampen the brash market crowd in the narrow streets of Windsor town. The brief cloudburst merely settled the drifting dust which Joan had come to ignore despite the fact that they were thoroughly coated with it, but it wet everyone’s hair including her own heavy, side plaits, which had managed to pull loose since she was hardly as good at braiding them as dear Marta had been. She would die, simply die, if anyone who ever knew Queen Philippa would glimpse her like this, so dirty and wet and road-worn. But then Edmund would surely never allow that. Why, she could even smell the woolen dampness of her once-clean and pressed deep blue perse