Free Royal Mistress by Anne Easter Smith

time he had come to his senses and refused John Lambert’s offer. But then he relented. In some ways, he reminded himself, the union had paid off.

    L ondon proved William correct. There were no banners and flowers festooning the houses and businesses along the Chepe, no fanfares or troubadours, no children skipping along beside the king’s retinue, and no shouts of “God save the king.” A few groups of townspeople gathered at the great conduit and the standard alittle farther along Chepeside and waited for Edward to ride by, but mostly Londoners went about their daily tasks and thus informed their sovereign of their displeasure.
    It was a blue September sky, the sun warming the riders as they processed slowly through the streets. King Edward was magnificent on a black warhorse that was caparisoned from flaring nostrils to twitching tail in dagged silk, embroidered all over with York’s white rose and Edward’s own Sunne in Splendour badge, the leather harness decorated with gleaming brasses. The king’s eyes flitted over the jaded faces of his subjects, and he felt a twinge of guilt remembering these same faces from June smiling and cheering him on to glory. Damn them, he thought, he had brought back an army without limbs lost or wounds won, and with only a few dead—mostly from disease; they should be grateful. He shifted in his saddle, aware of the aching in his joints, a new and unpleasant result of contracting a tertian fever in the low-lying marshes around Calais. His physician warned him he might suffer the pains, as well as sudden chills and fever, for the rest of his life and advised the king to be more judicious in his eating habits. Edward had been astonished to hear the diagnosis, never having had a day’s serious illness in his thirty-three years, and his normal affability had deserted him then as, in a rage, he had ordered the doctor from his tent.
    All at once, Edward sat straight in his saddle, his melancholic ruminations interrupted by a group of young women, gawping and smiling at him on a street corner. Edward’s deceptively lazy blue eyes could never pass over female figures without singling out the prettiest and imagining her in his arms, and one of them had caught his fancy. He inclined his head and winked at her, satisfied to see the maid blush and turn her head. In that moment, riding by John Lambert’s shop and looking the other way, he had failed to see the beauty sitting in the window, gazing intently at one of the young nobles in his train.
    Edward may not have noticed Jane Shore, but his chamberlain had.

    O ne of several riders behind the king, Will Hastings scanned the sullen crowd and marveled at how quickly the Londoners could change their mood. He had exulted at the exuberance Edward’s exodus had generated in these same citizens not five months earlier. In truth, Will could not blame them and guiltily tried to ignore the bulging saddlebags on his squire’s horse, which contained treasures given him by a relieved king of France for Will’s having turned Edward around and homeward. He also misliked the humor of the English soldiers who had ridden disconsolately to their homes over the downs and along the paths from Dover and Sandwich, cheated of any spoils that would have accrued to them on the battlefield. And they all need paying, he thought. God help us if they are not.
    He shook off the ominous musings and raised his eyes above the crowd to the mostly empty windows on the second and third stories of the substantial merchant houses that lined the north side of the Chepe. On his left was the Mercery, a block-long arcade of shops and stalls, some with upper floors. A figure in an open window caught his eye and the face he saw made him draw in a sharp breath. Sweet nails of Christ’s cross, but she is a jewel, Will told himself. He noted the richness of her gown with the shimmering hennin crowning her oval face, the creamy rounded tops of her breasts rising just above the