In the decade preceding the glorious victories of Henry V on the fields of France and long before he'd come of age, an ill-advised excursion to those same fields by his father Henry the IV resulted in unforeseen disaster and the capture of 5 English earls, eight hundred Knights and two thousand good esquires.
As was the custom of the day: The Dauphin of France and his lieutenants, those who had captured without injury English warriors, held them in trade for English gold crowns. Repatriating captured English invaders this way increased the capital of many a French Lord's estate throughout France.
William of Edenbridge was one of those eight hundred. This good Knight had fought with courage dispatching many of the French who stood before him. His valor notwithstanding: the English line had failed in battle, the day belonged to France and he was led to captivity until such time as the coffers of Henry the IV could provide ransom for his release.
These were difficult months. From the moment Sir William surrendered his arms the disgrace and shame of defeat were compounded by his conquerors. The humiliation began by being paraded in a display through the villages of France where the English were pelted with garbage and stone at every turn.
It ended in their incarceration. A castle prison owned by one of the fiefdom's Dauphin below a great moated city and fortress became their home. William and his countrymen were subjected to jeering jailers and constant subjection to the curiosities of the Lords and Ladies of this particular French court. As if observing caged exotic animals, the genteel gentry of the Dauphin's court uninitiated to the ways of war and the English barbarians before them, would parade past the English jail cells speaking their French in mocking tones laced with condescension and laughter. Their high status and rank within the gilded Lords and Ladies of this French Court differed not one bit from that of William's own in England, yet the bitter foreign retribution wore on his soul.
At first William was defiant. But as the weeks and months progressed with no answer to his messages from home he secretly yielded to homesickness and thoughts of the Lady who owned his heart. Through couriers William had sent his pleas for release to the command of his King. Through couriers he had mirrored those pleas in correspondence to his love Cecelia.
Across the water that split the two countries Lady Cecelia had been petitioning her King franticly for an audience. She held in her possession the letters William had written, letters she had appealed to the court be shown the King in formal style the French demanded. That quilled ink on rolled parchments written in William's own hand was Lady Cecelia's only tangible connection to him. Clamoring to the Court's solicitors with them daily, she pressed them to her breast at night weeping in solitude and fearing for his loss to her forever.
In the castles quarters where Lady Cecelia had her chambers, her Lady in Waiting marked time by candles and glass. Its hour length burned almost to its end as Lydia prepared herself for the walk to Lady Cecelia's room. Although a daughter of royalty, Lydia was in service to her because Cecelia was sovereign; a birth Royal presumed to be betrothed one day to a Viscount, Earl or perhaps even a Prince due solely to her fathers' wide fortune and estates throughout the Kingdom. Befitting her status and rank The House of Henry deemed such a daughter be served by a Lady in waiting; the maiden Lydia.
Lydia's beauty was exceptional with authority of lineage enough to protect the secrecy surrounding her Lady's love for Sir William. On the occasion of the Joust it was Lydia who had preoccupied the awe-stricken armorer and Sir William's pages so thoroughly outside the canvas walls of the Knight's tent. Astounded by Lydia's beauty and rank they became deaf to the sounds of passion within. No lad of their standing had ever been within speaking distance to a Lady of the Court.
Cecelia's trust in her sister royal was complete. With Lady Lydia she shared every confidence and With increasing frequency Lydia attended to the heartsick Lady's chambers. Only there it seemed Cecelia could speak in confidence of her passion for William to someone so familiar with his ways. Lydia became the only living soul with which Cecelia could unburden herself of admissions of love, plans and dreams. With increasing frequency Lydia attended to the heartsick Lady's chambers.
The hearth would be ablaze with cherrywood illuminating tapestries hanging to keep the stone walls chill from the room. Arched windows of leaded glass, the blackness of night outside, reflected candlelight from candelabras which stood on tables dressers and ornate cabinets that stood against the walls. A dressing triptych, heavily cushioned chairs, carpets of royal burgundy and the accoutrements of a Lady of Royalty filled the room.
Each time she entered her Lady's chambers Lydia felt a certain sense of excitement, feeling of shared dominion and whether she lived an absent love life at her tender age of twenty years, Lydia enjoyed the vicarious deep attachment to Sir William as did her sovereign; beaming with joy at each happiness as well as burdened with grief at every sorrow.
On nights such as these expectation beamed from Cecelia's sparkling eyes for she had discovered, although belabored by time, a solution to her heartsickness.
"Oh Lydia...come, come!" Cecelia would show her another daily composition to a benefactor in France's court who showed a possibility of taking up her cause. A table covered with parchment, manuscripts, quills, ink and Royal stamps had become ubiquitous near her bedside. Her most recent composition spread out upon that table would be explained to Lydia in hopeful detail.
"These will go by envoy to the very daughter of the Dauphin himself," she excitedly smoothed out the parchment the ink still fresh upon its cream surface, "Witness, I have made my personal plea to her for the release of William!"
"Oh, my Lady!" Lydia exclaimed overjoyed at Cecelia's new expectations. Cecelia was once again miraculously infused with new energy.
"She MUST understand. I have been civil and diminutive, respectful and heartfelt in my requests. I shall express my Williams situation every day until I am sure she has received these entreaties. A courier will send my appeal at every tide to France. The gentleness of a woman's heart is all I have left." Yet, even as the days passed, these hopes were not enough to comfort her and she began to go absent from the Court's view for days on end as Lady Cecelia kept to her quarters attende to and visited by handmaidens to her service and Lydia to her friendship.
