The Traitor's Wife (83 page)

“I am not a felon.”

“Just a lady who deals in a spot of felony, eh? Just as Hugh was not a pirate. He would have been proud of you, now that I think of it. The lord pirate and the lady felon. You were a well-matched couple, weren't you?”

“If we were well matched, so are you and Isabella. Two adulterers—and two murderers.”

Mortimer did not flinch. “Ah, that tiresome rumor about the late king has reached even your ears, I see. There's no truth to it. He died of natural causes, and was viewed by half the clergy in Gloucestershire. Not a mark on him. But we are getting off the topic of your lands, my lady.”

“And if I don't give them to you?”

“Then you rot in prison.”

Eleanor snorted. “The king won't let me stay here indefinitely. When he and the council find out that I have not been released as planned—”

“Find out from whom? Nothing gets to the king unless it gets to me first. No one sees him whom I don't want him to see. Nothing leaves the council that doesn't go to me or my men. I have the order freeing you, and if you choose not to give me what I want, it'll go straight into the fire.”

“The king won't put up with you forever, Mortimer.”

“I am the Earl of March. You shall address me as such.”

“I shall address you as I please. You are a jumped-up knight who owes all to that whore we must call a queen. I am the daughter of the Earl of Gloucester. I would be Earl of Gloucester myself if I were a man.”

“If you were a man, my dear, I would have stabbed you with my sword six times over by now. The lands. Deny them to me, and this order will be destroyed.”

“I'll save you the trouble.”

The early morning being chilly, a fire had been lit in her room. Eleanor snatched the parchment from Mortimer's hands and threw the pieces into the fire. Behind her, Mortimer grinned. “You're a haughty bitch, aren't you? Your grandfather and father would be proud to see a lady of such spirit. Pity you didn't think first, though. Men.”

Four men with vacant faces came into the room, arms crossed. “Well, look alive, you. You've a lady to escort. Don't think of taking your pleasure with her first, though. We're in a hurry.”

Eleanor opened her mouth to scream, but before anything had come out, Mortimer had knocked her unconscious with a single blow. He watched coolly as the men tied her, gagged her, and bundled her into a sack. “Mouthy little slut. Make good time, you, in getting her out of London before she wakes up, and kept that gag on her. We don't want her screeching on the way to Devizes Castle.”

Although the constable at Devizes Castle in Wiltshire knew the identity of his new prisoner, his underlings did not, and they listened patiently as their new charge, a knight's widow with pretensions to nobility whom the Earl of March had imprisoned for making wild and irrational threats against the crown, demanded that a letter be sent to her first cousin, the King of England himself! Then she launched into a tirade about the inadequacy of her lodgings, which were no more than a tiny cell with a chamber pot in one corner and a pallet in the other. The guards humored her for a while longer. Then they handed her some bread and ale, locked the door, and left her to rant in solitude.

At Wigmore Castle a few weeks later, King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, otherwise known as Mortimer and Isabella, watched as each of two young knights tried his best to unhorse the other. Every knight in England, except for those out of favor with the court, seemed to have come to Wigmore for the Round Table tournament.

The occasion was another double Mortimer wedding, the juvenile bridegrooms in this case being the future Earl of Pembroke, Laurence de Hastings (rescued by the queen in 1326 from the clutches of his earlier betrothed, Nora le Despenser) and Edward, the Earl of Norfolk's heir. The newlyweds sat in the stand next to the Countess of March, whom the Earl of March had graciously had escorted from Ludlow Castle to spend some time with the court.

Between Arthur and Guinevere and the Countess of March sat King Edward and Philippa. Edward watched the proceedings morosely. It was not that he disliked tournaments. In fact, he loved them, unlike his father who had tolerated them while Gaveston was alive and besting all of his opponents but had afterward regarded them with a mixture of boredom and suspicion. The second Edward's enemies had delighted in plotting against him at tournaments, and who wanted to spend the afternoon trying to knock someone off his horse and watching others do the same when one could be galloping through the countryside in the company of a good friend or two, then cooling off with a swim? But his son thought differently. Had this tournament been somewhere else, in someone else's company, he would have been enjoying himself to the utmost. There was the thrill of competition, the danger, the surprise, the satisfaction in seeing an especially well-aimed thrust, the beauty of the horses and their trappings. There were the ladies, dressed in their prettiest gowns and giving their favors, the adoring looks sent to and from the stands as the young knights rode out, the charming flirtations—

There was his mother, the Queen of England, playing the whore to the Earl of March. And their adultery became more blatant every day. No longer did the queen and Mortimer stand apart when England's bishops were around; the men of the Church either discreetly ignored the relationship or stayed far away from the court where they did not have to witness it. No longer did they hide their affair from their families. Even the king's younger sister Eleanor had guessed something of it. Only the other day, she had asked him, “Ned, if the Countess of March were to die, do you think Mama would marry the Earl of March?”

Edward's stomach churned.

Beside him, Philippa was talking gamely to the Countess of March. Edward had yet to meet a person whom his young wife could not put at ease, and the countess's mouth was actually curving into a smile as they conversed. Still, what must it feel like for the poor countess to come to court and have to make small talk? What was it like for Mortimer's young daughters to be overshadowed at their own weddings?

He looked moodily at the play-crown Mortimer was wearing. Why hadn't his own wife been crowned yet? His mother said that it was a matter of money, that there would be a ceremony in due time, but the money had been found for this farce easily enough: a thousand pounds had been borrowed from the Bardi. In the crown's name! Mortimer could have easily financed the tournament himself without the Bardi's help, him and Isabella, with all the loot they had raked in from the Despensers and Arundel, with all the lands the queen had been granted by the crown. Meanwhile, his own household was so short of money that his keeper of the wardrobe periodically threatened to resign. What the king needed, he'd said, was an alchemist, not a humble clerk.

In two months he would be seventeen. Too old to be ordered about by Mortimer and his mother. But would Mortimer give way? Edward doubted it. He was enjoying himself far too much to slip quietly into the role of mere trusted advisor. And Isabella would never encourage him to do so. It had been the loneliest day of Edward's life not long ago when he had realized, first, that his mother was the Earl of March's lover and, second, that her feelings for him were such that given the choice between loyalty to the earl and loyalty to her son the king, she would probably choose the earl.

A new pair of knights rode out onto the field, and Edward's spirits lifted a little. William de Montacute, one of the few people in his household he trusted, was next in the lists. William was about to leave on a mission to the papal court in Avignon. What if William could gain a private audience with the Pope, to tell him the state into which England had fallen? Cash-strapped, cowering before the Scots and the French, run by a man who was intent only on self-aggrandizement, its rightful king cast into the shadows? Edward had no clear plan of what to do yet, it was true, but a change would have to come, and he knew that the change would have to be effected by himself. And on that day papal support would be necessary…

He would have to seek out William alone, of course. No chance of simply seeing him alone in his chamber; Mortimer made sure of that. No, where other kings could talk to whom they pleased where they pleased about whatever they pleased, the King of England would have to sneak away to have a private conversation with his friend. But soon, he vowed, his days of sneaking would be over.

“Jail fever!” The constable of Devizes Castle glared at Robert, head of the prison garrison and known to his fellow English speakers merely as Bob. “We've never had jail fever here before.”

“Maybe, my lord, but our fine lady started with it five days ago.”

“That creature? She is a vastly inconvenient woman.”

“She is very ill, my lord, and has been out of her senses the entire time. Indeed, I believe she will die soon.”

The constable sighed. Though the Earl of March had given orders for Eleanor to be treated as a common prisoner would be, he also had been emphatic that she not be treated so badly that she died of ill-use. He would not be pleased to have a corpse delivered to him. “We had best try to prevent it. My personal physician shall attend her.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“And move her to a guest room. I gather she is in no condition to escape.”

“She is in no condition to know her name, poor lady.” The constable glared at him. “I beg your pardon, my lord. But after the jailors told me of her illness, I saw her myself, and I do find her a pitiful little creature. She must have friends somewhere—she cries out for so many people. William, and a Hugh, and her uncle, and a Gladys, mainly.”

The constable snorted. “Hugh, is it? She'll cry out for him for a long time. I suppose I might as well tell you now who she is. What have you heard?”

“The men say she claims to be daughter to the Earl of Gloucester, Gilbert the Red, and granddaughter to the first Edward, but I know that is a delusion of the poor thing's.”

“No. She's right. Remember Hugh le Despenser? That's his relict.”

Bob stared. “His widow? Here in rags, sick to death?”

“The Wheel of Fortune turns,” the constable said philosophically.

“Then, sir, I pity her all the more.”

The constable harrumphed. “Then you take charge of her. As for me, I'm hoping the earl will soon take her off our hands. He told me in August that he'd trouble me with her only for a few weeks, and here it is December.”

He went off, still grumbling, and after a while a young servant boy came to Bob to tell him that the lady's room was ready. Bob went to the cell where, by his own, entirely unauthorized connivance, Eleanor lay in some comfort on a clean pallet, wearing only a thin, coarse shift donated by Bob's sister but well covered with blankets. The lady's once pretty red hair had been so dirty and matted that after consulting with his sister, Bob had cut it; he hoped she wouldn't mind too much. Eleanor was mumbling to herself but seemed a little calmer than usual. He picked her up, easily as he might a kitten, and smiled at her as she opened her green eyes, dull with fever, and looked at him languidly. “Hugh? Where are you taking me?”