The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas (67 page)

Elizabeth blanched, thrust back to the moment forever seared
into her memory: Before the Earl of Ross had captured them on that fateful
night, Belle had told her of being awakened by a strange dream of James running
toward her carrying an infant.

Brother Fergus kissed Jeanne’s womb. “This day we have been
twice blessed. The saint has brought you back to us … with the promised child.”

D
ESPITE THE LATE WINTER CHILL,
Isabella’s anger boiled as
she sat waiting in her carriage outside the Lion’s Gate of London Tower. After
raising a rebellion army in France and marshaling the support of the fractious
English barons, she had deposed Caernervon, rendering him the first monarch in
England’s history to suffer such ignominy. Yet because she was French, and a
woman, these London quislings now refused her the privilege of witnessing her
own son be knighted in preparation for his coronation that afternoon. Even the
lowly scribes who stood at the wall slits to record the ritual were being
accorded more access than her.

Oui, remember this day in your chronicles, you feckless
monks! England will not soon forget the First of February in the Year 1327.

She looked up with bitter
regret at the cruciform window high above her. Four bloody years had passed
since her ambitious paramour, Roger Mortimer, an accomplice in the coup,
cheated Caernervon’s execution ax by escaping through that aperture. She had finally
surrendered to Mortimer’s persistent advances, but only to enlist his aid in
chasing her husband and his rapacious favourite, Hugh Despenser the Younger,
off to Wales. Yet she soon learned to her dismay that she had merely replaced
one inconstant lout with another: Mortimer was now pitting young Edward against
her, puffing her son with flattery and stoking him to invade Scotland as the
first act of his reign.

As the royal herald rode
past her window, she muttered unheard curses at the new crest that Mortimer had
commissioned to celebrate his rise to power.

Roger, you trumpet
your escape from that Tower as if the Almighty Himself had reached down and
plucked you from the block. But it was I, not God, who saved you. Do you forget
the soporifics that I secreted into your cell that night? The gaolers who fell
asleep on your watch paid dearly enough with their heads. You would be rotting
in the grave had I not commissioned the galley at Dover to take you to Paris. I
warm your bed, but do not think me blinded to your schemes. You will not shunt
me from the governance of my son!

At last, the prince appeared on the ramparts to accept the
dull acclamation of the throngs, whose loyalty had been purchased with coin
that the realm’s treasury could ill afford. Shod in sandals and dressed in a
kirtle of velvet opened at the breast, young Edward could barely crane his
narrow head and dark brown curls above the merlons. When the smattering of
cheers dissipated, the boy descended the steps, followed by John of Hainault, a
mercenary officer from the Continent hired for his protection. Escorted to a
white stallion caparisoned in gold and black, Edward mounted and, offering his
mother not even a nod of acknowledgment, rode off for Westminster with Mortimer
at his side.

Her eyes welled up.
Child, you promised I would rule with you.

All around her,
the Tower grounds echoed with
ghostly screams. Incensed that she had been left behind, she ordered her
postilion
to catch up with the royal procession. Her nerves, already frayed by the
upheavals of the past months, were now shaken to the bone by the rattling clops
over the cobblestones of Lower Thames Street. The city was strangely quite for
this hour, a rare occurrence that she found blessed, until she realized that
the crowds had merely become tense and surly on spying her approach. Even the
weather had turned traitorous, seducing her with a glint of morning sun, only
to give way to a lacerating mix of sleet and rain. Mortimer had tried to cower
her to remain in her quarters, ostensibly for her safety, but she would not
allow him to flaunt himself as the boy’s prime councilor. These English
ingrates needed reminding that the daughter of a French king had saved them
from a hapless monarch bred of their own bloodlines.

She risked a glance past the crack in the curtains. Thrice
she had traveled this gloomy ceremonial route. How frightened she had been on
her first arrival in London, at the tender age of thirteen. Transported up from
Margate on a galley under heavy guard, she had fallen green with seasickness.
This morning was balmy compared to that horrid day, when the river had frozen
over for the first time in thirty years. Caernervon had met her on
Westminster’s steps with a manner more frigid than the icicles hanging from the
gargoyles. She had feared she would not survive a year in this mirthless land,
but she had outlasted them all: Longshanks, Gaveston, Clifford, Despenser.

And now, her worthless husband.

Her second procession down these same treacherous warrens
had taken place only three years ago, during her triumphant return from Paris.
After escaping Caernervon’s clutches, she had sailed across the Channel to the
protection of her brother, Charles IV, the king of France. Her cousins,
overjoyed at her return, had begged her to remain in Paris, but she was
determined to see
her
Edward installed on the English throne. Now
these fickle Londoners, who had once welcomed her back as their liberator, cast
aspersions on her honor and slandered her with the epithet, the She-Wolf of
France. Had she made an ill-fated choice by leaving Paris? No, she would yet
bring these English back to her side. She cared not a whit for their love; it
was their fear she desired.

The blast of a foghorn above London Bridge startled her from
her scheming thoughts. That molding monstrosity never failed to thrust her into
a despond. Only Norman dullards would cobble a veritable city of houses and
shops atop a bridge. Unlike the elegant Parisian spans designed to enhance the
beauty of the Seine, this squat traverse poisoned the Thames with sulfurous
miasmas coughed up from hundreds of chimneys. Over the centuries, so many
buildings had been haphazardly encrusted upon the buttresses that the bridge
now resembled a giant beaver’s tunnel on the verge of collapse.

At the tollhouse, where
William Wallace’s severed head had once been nailed on display, a shriveled
penis and testicles now hung from a stanchion.

She snorted a vengeful
puff of air at the macabre sight.

There is the last of you, Despenser. You did not learn
from Gaveston’s folly, did you? He too underestimated me. You thought you could
steal my estates and cast me away in some hole, but you did not count on the
troubles with France. If there was one thing besides buggery that I could rely
upon from my husband, it was his whimpering insecurity. He refused to cross the
Channel and pay homage to Paris, so I offered to serve as his envoy and take
the babe with me as a gesture of good will. What fools you were to let us go!
But I kept my promise to return, no? When I marched across that bridge out
there with an army reinforced with every man you ever insulted, the two of you
scampered off to the wilds without raising a sword.

The royal procession
doubled its pace across Fleet Street. Mobs from the outlying shires still loyal
to Caernervon lined the way, no doubt drawn by the rumors that he would return
at the eleventh hour with an army of thousands to abort the coronation. When
the Abbey’s spires finally broke through the low clouds, she felt safe enough
to retract the curtain fully.

Across the way stood the
Temple, once the most hallowed of confines in England, but now used as an
armoury. Her thoughts returned to the Feast of the Swans, when Caernervon had
pissed his breeches inside that sanctuary and his new knights had nearly
drowned themselves in wine. Months later, most of them did drown, in
Bannockburn’s quagmire. The young knights who rode with her son this day now
blustered that
they
were the generation destined to bring Robert Bruce
and James Douglas to the Tower.

Several minutes later, they arrived at Westminster. Pelted
by the strengthening rain, the Archbishop of Canterbury stood waiting on the
portico with his drenched forehead braced against the biting wind. She thought
he looked more like a duck with its bill tucked into its breast than the
country’s most venerated churchman. Young Edward dismounted and, without
waiting for the rest of his entourage to arrive, nodded impatiently for the
traditional entry to commence. The acolytes hurried ahead of their future king
and the archbishop while unrolling a carpet of red vermilion toward the
coronation chair.

Her carriage was diverted into a wynd adjacent to the south
cloister. She angled her head through the window and discovered that a
contingent of mounted guards had converged on her. “I must enter from the
front!” When the sergeant of the detail ignored her protest and halted the
carriage at a rear portal used by the monks to load foodstuffs, she threw open
the door and clambered out in a rage. “Damn you! Did you not hear me?”

“Orders, my lady,” the sergeant said coldly.

“Whose orders?”

“The King’s.”

“The King is no longer—” She only then understood that he
was speaking of her son, not her deposed husband. Indignant, she flung off her
cloak and tried to retreat through the cloister’s garth, but the guards blocked
her path. The sergeant pointed her toward a hallway that led into the chapter
house.

Her heart pounded from terror. The cloister was deserted.
Where were the monks? Conniving
bastard! Mortimer had waited until this final hour to have her murdered.
He knew the canons would be in the minster to witness the ceremony. As the
guards drove her into the bowels of the cloister, she searched the colonnades
for a path of escape. Finding none, she whispered to the sergeant, “Whatever
you have been paid, I will double it for your forbearance.”

The officer said nothing as he forced her pace with a hand
at her elbow. The tapers along the narrow hall had been extinguished. She
gasped at the evil cleverness of Mortimer’s plan.

This is why he tried to convince me to remain here.

They were taking her to the abbot’s private chapel to commit
the deed. Roger and the other barons would make a great show of lamentation and
insist that she had been waylaid by one of Caernervon’s henchmen while praying
alone to petition God’s blessing on their new king. It would be the garrote
under sheepskin, or perhaps a poison. No marks would be found.

She whispered a fervent prayer to the Virgin as the sergeant
led her around a corner. When he refused to acknowledge her plaintive glance,
she crossed her breast and begged, “I pray you, make it painless.” She pressed
her eyes closed and waited for the cord against her neck.

The door creaked open—a resounding chant stole her breath.

She was escorted into the
south transept, and the sergeant released her to a chair in the first row
facing the raised platform on the high altar. Had the officer lost his resolve?
The archbishop and clergy turned on her from their elevated seats. Their faces
were cast in surprise, or was it disappointment?

They did not expect to see me alive again.

The sergeant waited to be dismissed while she tried to
compose herself.

Had this man risked his life to save hers? She accepted his
kerchief to muffle her sobs. The barons and clerics were still staring at her,
but the angle of their arched eyes revealed that they were shocked not by her
continued existence, but her attire. For weeks she had debated what to wear. A
gown too gaudy would have been seen as frivolous, particularly given the
penurious state of the treasury. Parliament had criticized her taste as too
risqué—too French, they really meant. When she had commissioned a ruby-studded
girdle of silk for the wedding of her handmaiden, there had been talk of
convening a trial for her dissipation of royal assets. On this day, she had
overcompensated with a black satin dress, edged with
grise
fur and
brightened only by a necklace of rubies encased in silver. These congenitally
suspicious English no doubt saw in its somberness some omen of disaster or an
occult message for Capetian spies to come to her aid. To the depths of Hell
with them! If they persisted in calling her a wolf, then she would dress the
part and—

“My lady?” the sergeant whispered to her ear. “Are you not well?”

She glanced down at her hands. They were shaking from her fury.

Across the nave, young Edward sat on the coronation chair,
his feet dangling from the throne in yet another reminder of the perverse
nature of the proceeding. He stared reverentially at Longshanks’s black marble
crypt, as if expecting the old man’s ghost to rise up and crown him. On a
crimson pillow lay arrayed the regalia of the realm: The cross, the scepter,
the royal mace, the black Rood of St. Margaret stolen from the Scots, and the
infidel dagger that had wounded Longshanks at Acre. A ripple of whispers roused
Edward from his trance. Only then made aware that his mother had arrived, the
boy greeted her with an indifferent glance, a coldness that stung.