The Stolen Queen (20 page)

It was John. John and another man, both of them filthy, dragging a bundle between them down to the water's edge. I crouched down, low to the ground. They did not speak, merely grunted occasionally with effort. The second man held the light
awkwardly in one hand, using the other to drag at the bundle, while John held the other end. Briefly, in the glow of the lantern, I caught sight of a bare leg. So it was done. I had driven my husband to this. I squinted into the dark, trying to trace the line of Arthur's body beneath John's straining shoulders. Maybe I could catch one last glimpse of his poor innocent face. Then the clouds opened once more, and I wished that I had not looked, for Arthur had no face, any more. John had not even allowed him to die by the sword, like a man.

The two burdened figures were staggering into the shallows now, the Seine flowed swiftly here and the second man was struggling to keep the lantern upright.

‘Hold still, curse you,' hissed John. ‘Take it in your teeth. We need to swing it.'

As the man raised the lantern to his mouth by its leather strap the light showed more fully. Arthur was naked, as naked as I had last seen him, and all of him so clean and lovely, his limbs marble-bright. The lantern bearer had a purchase on his shoulders now, and together they swung the body, once, twice, three times, releasing it to fall with a low splash into the black water.

‘It is done then, Majesty?'

‘It is done. You have seen nothing, do you hear? Nothing.'

‘Of course. As Majesty wishes.'

His speech was blurred by the lantern still caught between his teeth. John was behind him in the darkness, he had no time to turn around as my husband came up behind him, close, too close. The pale wool of John's sleeve drove up against his back, the last thing I saw before the lantern was quenched, he
grunted and toppled, a louder splash here in the shallows, then fell forward. John kicked him savagely … wet thumps, holding his boot, or a knee, on his back as he thrashed like a fish on land, until the waves of his dying ceased to sound.

‘Good,' John muttered to himself. ‘You saw nothing.'

I rose from the mud, ‘Will you kill me, too, my lord?'

‘Isabelle?' John shuffled towards me, the marshy bank sucking beneath us. Then his arms were about me, and for a moment my heart clutched inside, a faint wren flutter of fear, which passed before I felt his right arm move, replaced only with a great exhaustion.

‘Do it, then, John. Kill me too, if you must.' I closed my eyes and breathed deep. I could feel myself shaking, but it was only the damp cold. I was ready. I did not believe any more that God cared me to make my peace with Him. I had been ready for so very long. But John's arm was about my neck, steadying himself as he pulled me towards him, he was holding me tight against his wet body, his mouth buried in my hair, his throat tight with sobs.

‘Isabelle. What have I done? Oh Isabelle, what have I done?'

PART TWO

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
HE FISHERMAN WHO FOUND ARTHUR'S BODY KNEW
him by the ring. My betrothal pearl was jammed tight on the stump of his smallest finger, so tight that it had remained when John tried to slice it off, so tight that it stayed embedded in his softening flesh as he floated in the Seine like so much discarded bait. And for a jewel on a dead boy's finger, the castles of Normandy fell at the king of France's touch like a column in a game of tiles. First Conches, then Le Vaudreuil melted at the very sight of his troops as though they were built of sand, while my husband's liegemen scuttled away like white-bellied crabs before the tide. So many of them had sworn to defend their king to the death, but now they preferred the shame of breaking their oath than that of fighting for a murderer.

The fisherman hauled the corpse to the nuns at Notre-Dame-des-Prés, and it was only when the good sisters fearfully cleansed the body that they found the ring. The king and his fellow assassin had done their work well. Arthur's strong Plantagenet features were a mangled lump, his breast a sponge of stab wounds. Had it
not been for the ring, they would have buried the body quietly, believing the poor youth a traveller, perhaps, the victim of vicious outlaws. The countryside was swarming with thieves at that time, desperate men driven half-mad with hunger as the lords' wars were burning their crops and starving their children. Yet one of the sisters recognized Queen Isabelle's ring, that pure, priceless pearl, and they sent word to Philip. I had thought to protect John, to provoke him to such enormity only to finish the Lusignans once and for all, I had given my love as a sacrifice, and yet in the time after Arthur's death, as the couriers came and went and the whole of the Angevin lands were raised against John, I saw that I had not escaped Lord Hugh's bond over me. I had taken Arthur as my lover, and had him killed, and the horned man was well pleased.

I feared at first that my husband would revenge himself on the sisters of the abbey, like Geoffrey Spike-Tooth in my mother's long-ago story of Melusina, but the rage I had stoked in him was quenched the night he cast Arthur's body into the Seine, and he moved about his own castle like a ghost, no longer ranting or carousing, no longer even calling for wine, but slumped in a lassitude from which nothing could rouse him, not even the news of the crumbling of his father's empire. Lackland, they had called him once, when he was nothing but the younger son of great Henry, and, it seemed, the name was apt. William Marshal, still the most loyal of my husband's magnates, did what he could to dismiss the news of Arthur's death, calling it a foul calumny, but Philip of France returned calmly that if John of England wanted peace, he had only to produce his living nephew, and that, of course, John could not do.

Brittany was irreparably lost, Poitou, stirred up by the Lusignans, slipped further from John's control by the day, and Philip's men gnawed at the fringes of Normandy like so many rats. When Philip went to receive the fealty of his vassals in the south, he travelled down the Loire by barge, through what had once been the heart of Angevin territory, and there was not a man who came out to challenge his right.

We remained at Rouen from Easter until harvest time, a dragging, grey season. To me, it was as though the sun had been buried in that black water, bound in Arthur's red-gold hair. I had nothing to do but walk, and pray, and mourn, and the only mercy was that John's anger against me had vanished too in that murderous blaze which had consumed my beautiful boy. That time on the riverbank, in his desperation, was the last time my husband called me ‘love'. I knew that there were women who lay with men for money, and I knew the name for them, too. Whore. That was what they called a woman who was paid to have a man between her legs. The barons had whispered it of me before, when it seemed that John preferred to loll abed with his bride rather than fight for his lands, and now it was true. I had known that John would never forgive me for shaming him by losing my maidenhead to Arthur, for all he believed it had not been my will, yet this had seemed a tiny loss in comparison to what I knew I must do to Arthur himself. Enduring John was a fit penance, perhaps, for what I had done to Arthur, my love. His manner to me was respectful enough in public, as befitted his own dignity, but when we were alone in his chamber, whence he summoned me each night if he was not too far gone
in drink, he adopted a falsely jocular air, treating me as if I was no more than a tavern wench. I cannot speak of the things that he made me do, though his fumblings and his filthy satisfactions left me as much a maid as if Arthur had never touched me, while they seemed to please him well enough. I pitied him. He sought to humiliate me, for the private knowledge of what I was not, yet the insults he wrought on my flesh were nothing to me, I had no more feeling, then, than a corpse.

And even death had abandoned me. To live, it seemed, was my punishment. To live through the dull aching cruelty of every dawn, when I opened my eyes beside John's lumpen form and saw Arthur. Arthur riding next to me, Arthur opening his arms joyfully, Arthur's lips above mine as his body moved inside me, Arthur broken and white, cast endlessly into the freezing river that pumped relentlessly through my veins. I grew thin again, and my husband whispered spitefully that I was a scrawny bitch and when would I get him a child? I cared nothing for him. My heart was no longer made of rushing nerves and taut sinew, alive for Arthur, rather it was dull and ugly as a lump of kitchen tallow. I thought that one day it would just stop beating for despair, and that I would fall to the ground like a log, but I could no longer even hope it. I had done what I had done to prevent more hateful bloodshed, such as I had seen at Mirebeau, but now I knew with a keening grief that I had been wrong, that I could have eloped with Arthur and married him and been duchess and queen at his side and found another way to thwart the Lusignans. It would have brought war, true, but it seemed that all men were insatiable for war.

That knowledge might have driven me mad in time, but it was Angouleme that saved me. Since my Taillefer father's death I had been Countess of Angouleme in my own right, but I never would return to my city while my mother was there. But Lord Hugh was pressing hard, in right of the alliance of my betrothal, and I knew that my mother would not hold the city against her lover, if he was her lover still. As the riders came daily from Poitou, I began to understand why it was that men could fight for land. Why when everything else was gone, it stayed in their blood and their bones, and why they would kill and die for it. I thought of the water meadows, and the swallows' nests under the eaves of the cathedral, of the pure silver air and the sound of the wind in the oak trees, and the memory of those leaves coaxed a flutter of feeling in me. When I heard that my mother was gone to Paris supposedly to seek help from the king, but I knew it was really to leave the gates open for Lord Hugh, I felt the beginning of rage.

I tried to beg John to send troops to relieve the men of Angouleme, but even when I tried my prettiest wiles, gritting my teeth as I caressed him, he merely looked at me scornfully and told me that he had already given up everything for me, and what more did I want that he should send men he could not spare to die for a single county? He dismissed me, saying that if I was no use for getting sons I had better be at my prayers, and went back to his wine, only to call for me again when he had drunk enough to rouse his lust. I wanted to hiss at him that I had had the best man in the world murdered for him, but his anger was of no more use to me. I saw that I needed two things: first gold, and then a son.

I had money of my own, why should I not defend my city? My English lands were worth four hundred pounds a year, a huge sum, I thought, enough to pay an army. But who could lead it? So I sent for my clerks and since I had no chancellor, not even a household of my own at Rouen, I instructed them myself. I wished I had paid better attention to my lessons, for I could make no sense of the figures in the account books they showed me, how so many shillings could belong to this manor in Devonshire, or this mill in Bedfordshire, places I had ridden through, perhaps, but never paid any mind. I was not even certain that I knew what a shilling was. I even missed Lady Maude, who might have assisted me in making it out, but she was gone far away, to her husband's lands on the march of Wales, another place of which I knew nothing.

There was one man who had an interest in defending my abandoned city, one who was wily and slippery enough to persuade the Lusignans to take their soldiers and campaign for other prizes. I gritted my teeth and dictated a most tender letter to my brother Pierre, asking him to be my seneschal in my husband's name, and promising him the men and gold he would need to hold Angouleme against his father. I thought this very cunning, for Pierre would never fight Lord Hugh. Rather, now Arthur was gone, they would come to some accommodation and work out how they could best make use of me. And if I could keep Angouleme safe for a time, then I might have another use for my brother.

So Pierre became John's man, and my husband thanked me grudgingly for what I had contrived. I tried to persuade
him to go down to Poitou, and confront the Lusignans, but as almost always, he hesitated, and once again gave the advantage to the French king. Philip of France was mustering to attack the Lionheart's great fortress as Les Andelys, Château Gaillard. I had heard my poor Taillefer father speak of it with awe, this castle raised on a rock within five miles of the French king's keep at Gaillon, the ‘Saucy Castle' built as a gesture of defiance when the Lionheart still ruled in the south. Richard had built it in two years, it was perhaps his true love, as his poor rejected Spanish queen had never been, and it had eaten at his coffers like the most jealous of mistresses. My papa said that while the stones of Gaillard rose, blood rained from the skies. Now Philip planned to take it from the English, this last symbol of their martial strength. It was William Marshal who raised the defence, who sent to England for gold to pay the northern mercenaries, who summoned the boats to break the French siege from the river that ran hundreds of feet below Gaillard's walls. And it seemed as if Melusina, the water spirit, swam to the aid of her Lusignan kinsmen, thrashing the currents of the Seine with her tail, so that the oarsmen lost their time and were swept downstream, losing sight of the soldiers on the banks. When the remains of Marshal's flotilla were hauled back to Rouen by horses roped to the barges, their shallow keels were still swimmy and stained with blood. It was the last attempt the English made to recover their own.

Marshal gave out that his lord would remain and fight on through another year, but even as he gave his seal to the clerks, our sad household at Rouen was being broken up. Early in
December, John told me we would soon leave for England. It would be hard riding, he explained to me, we would have to leave before dawn to make our way to Bayeux, and on to Caen on the coast, but then I took pleasure in that, did I not? His little soldier, he had taken to calling me, carelessly, his pretty squire. I produced a rueful smile and bade Agnes to prepare our trunks. I was glad, so very glad to be leaving this cursed place, I prayed that once in England we should be safe, and I could begin again. I prayed that I might have a son, a son who would be an English king, at least, and even more one day. So I took the enamelled box in which I kept the gifts Arthur had given me, and went down to the river at night one last time. I sent them after his body, all those pretty trinkets, for though I had pawed them over and wept, I knew them to be false, gifts from a boy who had never truly known his love. As I raised myself from the bank I promised that I should cry no more for him, sleeping now at the abbey with my pearl ring on his finger. I should be an English queen, I told myself, the mother of English sons, sons who would fight one day for my city of Angouleme. The Lusignans might triumph in my husband's lands, but I should deal with them on my own terms, as a queen.