The Honor Due a King (36 page)

“News from France, your grace?” I pressed my ink-smeared fingertips upon a page of my book to keep the hot breeze that was blowing in from the open window from flipping the pages over.

Stapledon glanced uneasily over his shoulder at the sound of footsteps. Hugh Despenser hovered in the doorway. I gestured for him to enter. He closed the door softly behind him, but respectfully stayed his distance. There if I needed him.

The bishop drew a breath, closed his eyes and pressed two fingers to his right temple. “You must understand ... how hard it is that I tried. Counseled her. Quoted scripture. Begged of all near to her. Yet my words fell on deaf ears. I bring you not news from Paris, sire, but ... Hainault.”

I chased away a fly with the tail of the ribbon that marked my place in the book, then laid it thoughtlessly between the pages and snapped the book shut. “Enlighten me, if you will. Was the queen not in Paris when you were with her? Your duty was to speak convincingly with her. She was to come home, leave her brother’s court. The pope wrote back to me that he was demanding Charles send her away.”

“Even kings bow to popes, my lord. He did as told, asked her to leave. And she went. To Count William of Hainault’s court in Valenciennes.”

“Hainault?” Hugh echoed, stepping forward.

“By invitation of Sir John of Hainault,” Stapledon clarified, nodding his head. He pulled his hands within his long sleeves, shoulders hunched. “It would seem that Sir John is deeply enamored of the queen. I begged with her to forsake Mortimer, my lord. To return with your son to England. But she declined ... nay, ordered me away.”

“Why so?” I slid the book away from me, pushed back my chair to stand, but my knees were weak, knowing part of what was to come. “I swear, had Pembroke not stumbled into his grave it would be the queen now groveling before me and not you and your pathetic tongue devising excuses.”

I had dispatched him in Isabella’s company because he was one man I could trust to watch her every move. He had been my spy all along. I imagine she knew of it, but never cared, flaunting her lover Mortimer ever more openly as the days and weeks went by.

“An answer, Bishop Stapledon.
Why
did she refuse?”

His left eye twitched. He swallowed hard. “Because you would not banish Lord Despenser.”

A sharp, white pain cleaved my skull. “That she would so persist ... Should I cower at the haranguing of a woman whose jealousy rules her every action? Lord Despenser has been naught but loyal. She has been anything but. And my brother Edmund – did he return with you?”

“He, too, is in Hainault.”

“I ... don’t understand. Is he spying then? Ah, yes. How clever of Edmund. Brilliant, brilliant. Has he returned reports of her activities? Come, your grace, what does Edmund say?”

“He sends no word, sire. Nothing at all.”

Edmund in Hainault? Trailing after her with his nose aquiver, as if she were a bitch in heat. Ah, Edmund, Edmund. Are you, as well, under the spell of her witchcraft? Did she bestow on you one of those shy, seductive glances she now uses so freely, touch you in an alluring way, confide in you?

Hugh came to my side. “Then why is the queen in Hainault, your grace?”

“To find her son a wife.”

“What?” I threw my chair back as I leapt to my feet. Gripped the table so hard that a splinter pricked beneath my fingernail. “She can’t possibly ... I have already entered into negotiations with the King of Aragon for his daughter. No, it is not her place to decide such a thing. Impudence! Flagrant impudence! The disobedient bitch. Had I no care for her children, I would slit her open from her belly to her lying mouth and let the buzzards have at her liver. Oh, her heart is the wellspring of corruption. I should have seen the evil in her there at Boulogne, disguised as an innocent, and left her weltering at the altar in the cathedral as they doused her with holy water and burned the flesh from her bones. That deceitful, devil-whoring bitch!”

My entire body jerked with an uncontrollable spasm. Hugh kneaded at my shoulder to soothe me. I cursed and ranted for minutes before his gentle touch had chiseled away at my granite wall of anger. Ever calm, his voice carried no murderous edge to it, no intimation that he had lost any control. “Count William has three ... four daughters, does he not?” Hugh explored. “None yet betrothed?”

“Yes,” Stapledon said.

“And an army, well equipped.”

Stapledon shook his head.

Hugh took my arm and eased me back into my chair before my knees completely failed me. He sank to his haunches beside me. “This is more grave, my lord, than a disagreement over mates for your heir. This is about your very life. Your crown is in jeopardy. You must –”

“In jeopardy,” Stapledon broke in, “because my lord has succumbed to ill influences and committed iniquities so –”

“Get out of here!” I bellowed, hammering my fist on the table. The heel of my hand cut into the table’s edge. I winced. Tears sprang to my eyes, not from the pain of my flesh, but for the roiling troubles of my realm sucking me downward like a whirlpool while the heavens rained down on my head. A farce of a marriage. A son who would betray me.

“But sire,” Stapledon objected, stiffening his jaw, “I implore you, heed me in –”

“Out! Out!” I pulled a throbbing hand to my chest. “Every blessed day of my existence, badgering clerics and overweening advisors have scraped out my ears with their pointed tongues. In the course of my life, I can count on one hand the number of men who granted me the respect and honor due a king.” I spread out my quivering fingers before me, then tucked my thumb against my palm. “You are
no longer
one of them. Away with you! You have more than failed in your task. You have made a laughingstock of me.”

He took one step back, faltered, then blurted out, “Sire, I –”

“Away! Out of my sight. Do not show yourself to me or speak to me again, you sanctimonious shit-mouth. Go back to godforsaken France. Out!”

Step by step, Stapledon retreated, until he reached the door and tugged slowly on the latch. “Even the word of Our Savior Jesus Christ could not be heard by those who covered their ears and would not listen.”

I lurched across the table, grabbed a spiked candlestick empty of its candle and flailed it after him. The door banged shut just as the candlestick smacked against the iron hinge of the door.

Hugh’s hand slid gently from my shoulder to my forearm. “Shall I have a guard sent after him, sire? He should be made to pay for those words. A few weeks in the dungeon? A hefty fine?”

I slumped in my chair, my head filled with a fog of rage. Slowly, the blood returned to numb limbs. My thoughts gathered clarity. “Bring me ink and parchment, dear Hugh. I must write a letter.”

“You have written dozens upon dozens of letters, Edward. What good is one more? What good were any of them?”

“The pope is on my side, Hugh. He is. He knows ... about Isabella and Mortimer. About their adultery and treason. And Charles fears for his own soul so much that he threw her out. The letters – they did
some
good, did they not?”

“But not enough. Not nearly enough.” He knelt beside me and drew my head against his shoulder, letting me give way to the tears I could not keep in. How long I wept, I have no recollection. I felt as though I were beginning to drown beneath a sheet of ice and could not break through to fight for breath.

“Oh, Hugh. I told that she-wolf I would take her back. That she had only to abandon that troublemaking Marcher Lord and desist in her demands to rid you of me. So simple. And yet, Lord God, I never envisioned this – that she would take my son away and put him before an army against me. What do I do? I don’t know anymore. Tell me what to do.”

“Gather your own army. Issue a summons.”

“No. No more fighting, Hugh.” I tried to take heart in his counsel, to place faith in his eternal loyalty, to believe that somehow I would overcome those who rose against me. “She will not do it, Hugh. She will lose heart. She’ll come home with my son. Come crawling to me. Begging forgiveness. She will. And all will be right. You’ll see. There won’t be any war. I won’t fight my own son. I can’t. Won’t.”

“Then present your belly, Edward. Give your queen the power she craves.”

I pulled away. “No, not that. I –”

“If you make it so easy, one day soon it will be Roger Mortimer commanding the kingdom. And as he beds your willing wife, he’ll whisper his wish into her ear: that he wants you ...
dead
.”

***

Forest of Dean, Wales, 1326

B
erries were dotting the buckthorns when they landed on the Suffolk coast in late September. Queen Isabella and the fawning Sir John of Hainault rode with my son at the head of a band of mercenaries onto English soil – hired killers from Brabant to as far as Bohemia – and yet no one barred their way.

Mortimer rode well back in the ranks. He was, to his credit, sly enough to give ground when so much depended on the queen being able to garner sympathy for her cause. One would have thought the English people would be smart enough to see both Isabella and Mortimer for what they truly were: adulterous traitors.

My summonses went unanswered. A plague of apathy had infected the land. They all sat on their hands while foreigners pilfered from them and marched their merry way to London. If I met with Isabella without an army at my back, larger and better equipped than hers, I was as dead as a duckling in a fox den.

I had to go. Find refuge until allies could be mustered. It would only be a matter of time before England would sour on the queen and her bedfellow.

Needing to move swiftly, I fled from London. I left my son John with Hugh’s wife, Eleanor, in the Tower. The girls I sent with all haste to Bristol in the guardianship of Hugh’s father – the elder Hugh Despenser.

Fields of ripened grain embraced the hills of England and spilled into the dales. Our company was small, numbering only a dozen in whole: a handful of guards, a few of my household staff including Jankin, and my two last loyal supporters, Hugh and Chancellor Baldock. We followed the narrowing Thames westward and then swung sharply north.

The road to Wales had no end. To guard the secret of our passing, we kept to the countryside and forests. At Bristol, Hugh took as much coin as he could carry and so we feared thievery. Whenever we passed by a small village, Jankin or a couple of my guards would go into the nearest village to buy meat, bread and ale. I cursed the bitterly cold October nights and dreaded each dawn for the toil it held as we were forced to flee further and further west into the wilderness.

In Gloucester, again, I found nothing but a brotherhood of indifference and disdain. And then, a few leagues beyond the city, we came across a Benedictine monk passing from Glastonbury on his way to Leominster. I took him aside and shared some bread with him as we chatted idly at first about the bounty of the year’s harvest. Unaware of my identity, he delivered to me a stream of terrible news. I gave the holy man a shilling and asked him to say a Mass for my mother’s soul.

Aimless, we continued vaguely westward, until we came to the Forest of Dean. We claimed a little embowered place cut into a hillside among the beeches and threw down our blankets with weary relief. As the rest of my party settled for the evening, I climbed a slope a hundred feet away and sat down on a large rock beneath a yellowing larch to ponder on my shrinking kingdom.

The sun sank behind the furthest hill. I pulled my face down within the tattered pile of fur bordering the neckline of my soiled cloak, shivering so violently my teeth clacked like a stick slapping over the spokes of a turning wheel. Hugh approached. His head was covered with a liripipe, its long tail arranged meticulously in a swoop from one shoulder to the other. As he neared me, I could discern the distinct, damp, wooly smell of his serge cloth cloak.

“Jankin stole three fat hens this morning,” he said. “The men have struck up a fire. Come. Eat. Warm yourself. No need to catch cold or starve.”

“I told you: no fires. They’ll find us.”

“Eventually, yes,” Hugh conceded blandly, “they will. But fowl served up raw would give us all aching bellies and I, for one, am starved.” He crumpled down beside me and sighed. “You’re troubled. What did that monk have to say? You’ve confided in no one. I take offense.”

Starlight filtered down through barely leafed branches. What I knew ... how could I say it?

I scraped my dry, cracked fingers over the roughness of the rock on which we huddled. “A fitting throne, is it not? A prickly crown of hollies and what a king I would be.” I gave a raspy laugh, my throat raw from thirst. “Look at us, Hugh. What a pitiful lot we are. Loathsome, starving. How pathetic. They’ll beat us for stealing. Perhaps we should turn to begging. More pride in that.”

“What were you told, Edward? You’ve dismissed hope altogether since we left Gloucester. Why?”

“Must you know everything?” I laid my forehead on my knees. Finally, I looked up at him, his sleeves torn from the thorns, a smudge of road grime on his chin. “All right, then. I’ll tell you. When they landed, my half-brother Thomas threw his arms around her and welcomed the queen and her foreign slaves. Leicester joined her immediately. The bastard’s no better than his dead brother. He must have known long ago when and where she would arrive. Knew all along. They were conspiring from the moment she left London. And London? London threw open its gates for her. Your own wife gave up the Tower
and
my son John to that French harlot. And do you know what else they did? Can you even imagine? They cut off Bishop Stapledon’s head and buried his body in a rubbish heap.”

He turned his head away. “I’m sorry ... about your son. My wife – I thought that ... She must have had no choice.”

“Isabella and Mortimer – they’re in Bristol already.”

I saw a cloud of shock pass over his face just then. No use in hoarding the ill tidings, I gave them up. “As Isabella took my daughters to a window overlooking the courtyard, they took your father, your namesake Hugh ... and hung him. Lynched like a common thief. How horrid that must have been, dangling there, kicking his feet, praying for the rope to break.”