Isabella: Braveheart of France (12 page)

He sends her back to France to present his case again over the disputed Gascon lands at the Paris Parliament. “How can your father ever resist his own daughter when even Lancaster gives in to you?” he tells her.

He does not know her father.

But he trusts her and so she will go.

She makes a pilgrimage to Boulogne, to Amiens, and to Chartres accompanied by Gloucester, Henry de Beaumont, and another magnate called Baddlesmere. It is a passable show of strength.

The night before she arrives in Paris they burn Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Templars, over a slow fire on the Île de la Seine. As he dies, he invites her father and Pope Clement to meet him at God’s judgment before the year is out.

When she arrives, everyone in Paris is talking about it.

“The ravings of a madman,” Phillip says and dismisses the episode out of hand.

They walk together through the royal cloisters. There is frost on the grass and mist curls around the gargoyles perched on top of the pillars. Isabella shudders, imagining one of them to be the writhing spirit of Jacques de Molay.

She presents Edward’s petitions and asks for his favourable opinion of them, but Phillip is more concerned about the wounds on her arm. He summons physicians.

The next day a messenger arrives at the court from Rome. The Pope is dead. The Templar’s curse has been swift, though her father seems unperturbed. “Clement was an old man,” is all he says. She stares at Phillip and imagines him dead. What would the world be like without him? She cannot imagine it. He has been the touchstone to duty and achievement for so long.

What will I do when I have only my own conscience as guide?

Chapter 21

Berwick

Edward is no longer the man who sat shrunken and abandoned on his throne when they brought him news of Gaveston’s death.

He has now amassed a great army; just one victory against the Bruce and he will have the barons in his thrall and nothing Lancaster can do about it. She sees Pembroke in attendance. These days he cannot do enough to appease the king, though she knows from her private conversations with Edward that he does not blame him over Gaveston’s death. Mortimer is there, too. His looks are smouldering but she ignores them. She is a wife now, not a simpering girl.

Surrey, Richmond, the Despensers, father and son, they are all there; only Lancaster, Warwick, and Arundel have not appeared for the mustering of troops. “They say I have to wait, that I may not move against the Scots without the consent of the Parliament or I am in defiance of the Ordinances! The Ordinances! They still wish me to bow and scrape to them for permission to visit my own privy!”

She is resting in the rooms he has put aside for her in the castle. Her arm is healing at last, though she fears it will leave a permanent scar. But no one will see the disfigurement but her husband, and even he sees it seldom enough.

After the journey home from France she had gone directly from Dover to London, then on to Doncaster and Pontefract and finally here to the wild borderlands. The travelling was hard and difficult, but she is Edward’s queen, her place is beside him.

“Thank you for coming,” he says when they are finally alone.

“I would be nowhere else at such a time. Win this one battle and everything will be restored to you.”

“The die is cast. I will make Lancaster regret what he has done.”

He cannot lose. Even without Lancaster and Warwick, his army outnumbers the Scots by three to one. The King’s only fear is that the Bruce will run and deny him the victory he needs.

“I have heard disturbing news from France. Is it true?”

She nods. “The adulteries were proven. Jean, their sister, was a witness. I was right in my suspicions. The d’Aulnay brothers were convicted of treason and will suffer their fate accordingly. “

“What has your father done to your Marguerite and Blanche?”

“Marguerite has had her hair shorn and is sent to Château Gaillard, her marriage annulled. Blanche as well. I fear they will never see the sun again.”

“And Jean?”

“Under house arrest. My brother argues her case. I do not think she had any part in it, but she is disgraced for not speaking out sooner.”

“As you said yourself, a royal lady who commits adultery knows the sin she commits in God’s eyes.”

“Indeed, your grace. They knew the risk.”

She thinks of Marguerite, that stupid giggling girl, how she had stared at her doomed knight through the curtain that day in the Notre Dame.
“All my husband ever wants to do is play tennis.”
A woman might have private longings, but if she were royal, she could not indulge them, no matter how she burns for more. What had happened to her was not Isabella’s fault. She had been obliged to tell her father what she knew.

That night she keeps a candle burning in her chamber and waits for Edward to come to her again, after all these months and so many letters. But he stays awake, drinking and gambling and laughing at his tumblers and fools, and the nights are cold in Berwick, and she shivers alone.

Chapter 22

She waits for him at Berwick Castle while he goes in search of the battle he must not—cannot--lose. At last a foot soldier arrives ahead of him and is ushered into the court to tell his story. The Bruce did not flee, it appears. Instead, he waited for Edward at a place called Bannockburn. He had chosen the battlefield and dug pits on the carse, funnelling Edward’s army into the killing ground. Edward had fallen into the trap, and in the ensuing carnage Gloucester has been killed, along with ten thousand English foot soldiers. Henry de Bohun, one of England’s greatest knights, has died at the hands of the Bruce himself, and the Scots had captured the Earl of Hereford.

The next day a fishing boat docks at the castle. Isabella and the rest of her women rush down the narrow walk to the Tweed to meet it. Pembroke, the Lady de Vescy’s brother and Edward himself are both on board. Old Hugh is there as well. He carries his son up to the castle on his shoulders, gore leaking down the front of him.

Edward does not even look at her. His eyes are glazed, still fixed on the battlefield.

Later she dresses his wounds as he sits immobile in a wooden tub, not speaking. Afterwards she and her ladies wash his armour, they must scrape off the mud and dried blood with stiff brushes. They say the king fought well, but whether he fought well or ran like a girl, it will not matter now.

He had believed nothing could stand in the way of heavy cavalry; they had all believed it. They were all wrong.

***

“And you!” Lancaster dares point a finger at his king. Some gasp inside the Parliament at his presumption. “If you had honoured the Ordinances, we should never have suffered this humiliation. An army of twenty thousand defeated by a dozen peat boggers with sharpened sticks!”

Edward is forced to listen to this abuse. Isabella stares over her uncle’s head, she will not look at her husband for fear that should he look back they will see it as further sign of weakness.

And she will not look at Lancaster, for she has come to despise him.

He relishes this moment. He has the king on his knees.

“We must press on with this war,” Edward says. “If we desist now, the Bruce will have his crown and we shall never have Scotland.”

“Is eleven thousand dead not enough for you?” Lancaster hurls at him.

“We cannot let them win.”

“We didn’t.
You
did.”

Edward subsides into his throne, shrunken in, as if they have removed all his bones and left just breathless flesh and half a heart.

“I never wanted to be your enemy, Edward,” Lancaster says. His long sleeves rustle against his velvets, as he parades before the parliament, like a peacock before a mate. “But you planned to lead your victorious army against me, is this not so? You thought to vanquish the Scots only so that you might vanquish your own cousin.” He shakes his head, appears disappointed rather than angry. “But you are not your father, you are not Longshanks. You are weak and stupid and easily led.

Edward flinches, as if struck with an open hand, and struggles to recover his composure. His hands ball white-knuckled into fists.

“You made me kneel to you at Westminster. For what? To be forgiven for a righteous act. I should kill Gaveston again if I could, send him to a traitor’s death just to hear the bitch scream.”

Now Warwick is on his feet, the great resenter, the great complainer: “You have led us to disastrous wars and bankrupted the Treasury. We demand a purge of the royal Exchequer and a limit to the royal purse of ten pounds per day.”

“Ten pounds!” Edward is on his feet. “I would not keep my dogs on that.”

“Then get smaller dogs,” Lancaster says.

He cannot refuse. He no longer has power over England, though he is the king. It is Lancaster who is regent now, in all but name.

It is just after the Feast of Saint Saturninus when a messenger arrives at court from France. Her father is dead. She knew he had been ill, but this is unexpected. There is not time to attend the funeral, for a crossing of the Narrow Sea at this time of the year is not advised. Besides, Edward tells her that he needs her with him, to help deal with the revolt of his barons.

She hears Jacques de Molay laughing, perched like a gargoyle on the roof of the palace. When he died, he cursed Phillip’s line for seven generations. She wonders what her own punishment will be.

It is hard to imagine him truly gone. Yet in many ways he is not gone at all, he is still there with her every day, wagging a long finger in her face:
You will love this man. Do you understand? You will love him, serve him and obey him in all things. This is your duty to me and to France. Am I clear?

***

Edward works tirelessly to have the anathema that Winchelsea laid on Gaveston’s head reversed. His man Reynolds makes sure it is done, but it is not easy and costs money. He has said to her that he will not bury his friend until he has been avenged, but common sense prevails. He cannot have him mouldering in a priory chapel in Oxford forever.

He decides to inter him at Langley. It is a perfect day for such a homecoming; crows perch on skeletal trees, the wagon bearing his mouldering bones splashes through puddles of freezing mud, the friars that accompany it splattered to the waist. How much is he paying the Order for this?

Edward stays with him that night, so that his Perro does not sleep alone. From her window she sees the candles flickering in the chapel, and once she thinks she hears a noise over the wailing of the wind. Was that Edward wailing? No one has ever loved like this.
It should have been me, I want a man to love me like this.

So many lords there the next day for the funeral: Pembroke, the Despensers, even Hereford who was one of those who dragged Gaveston off to Warwick Castle. The clouds of incense are so thick it is hard to see the grandees on display, but she counts an Archbishop, four bishops, thirteen friars, fifty knights and the Lord Mayor of London. There is Mortimer, of course, with his wife. She catches him staring, and wonders what goes on behind those black eyes.

The occasion is mostly marked by who is not there: Lancaster and Warwick.

They are saying masses for Gaveston today in every church in England. This does not come cheap, and piety is expensive, but Edward does not care. He refused Gaveston nothing in life. He is disposed to do no less in death.

The tears come, she feels her control slip; it starts with a choking at the back of her throat. She cannot hold it back. She sees Edward give her a questioning glance. He thinks the tears are for Gaveston.

She never cried for her father, perhaps she still expected to see him there when next she went to Paris: stern, strict, the one sure thing in the world. Her eldest brother was king now, though her uncle Valois made all the decisions while Louis played tennis.

They lower Gaveston’s gold-draped coffin.
What a sight we are! Me howling, the friars chanting and Edward on his knees, shoulders heaving. And the whole of England watching. What they must think of us!

She rides back to London in her carriage, bumping over muddy roads. Her ladies cry out at every bump, every pothole. She peers between the curtains at a sodden and starving world. Human scarecrows scavenge in the fields. The rains ruined the autumn harvest, and it has not stopped raining since. She sees a cow lying bloated on its side in a flooded field, then another. She cannot stand to look further; she flicks back the curtain and submits to the jolting of the carriage.

They have seen me cry once today; they shall not see me weak again.

She stares at Eleanor Despenser, wincing with every bounce.

You have your duty,
Phillip whispers.
You know what you must do.