The Traitor's Wife

by Susan Higginbotham

She would give the loot to the Church; that was it. Surely the king would see fit to let her leave here someday, and then she would offer up the treasure at holy shrines, bit by bit. God was bound to forgive her then, and the treasure would go to better use than it would be gracing the queen's own groaning tables. This problem solved, she climbed back into her bed and drifted off into a peaceful sleep.

  William la Zouche would have stopped in to see the baby and the puppy (which a delighted Gilbert had in fact named Lord Zouche, to the infinite amusement of Thomas Wake), but in June he had joined the court at York, where the English were preparing to do battle with the Scots. Isabella and Mortimer, remembering the great success they had had with Jean de Hainault and his mercenary troops when they invaded England, had bought his assistance again, and York was teeming with homegrown troops and the Hainaulters.

  The queen held a splendid dinner to welcome Jean de Hainault, but the English soldiers were not in a welcoming mood. It was one thing for the queen to rely on foreign assistance when she had been desperately trying to save England from the Despensers; it was quite another when there was Scottish booty to be had, and why should good fighting Englishmen be forced to share the spoils with a pack of foreigners? The dinner had scarcely progressed to the second course when a fight broke out between the English soldiers and the Hainaulters, spreading into the city's streets. By the time order was restored by the king and his elders, dozens of men lay dead.

  It was a bad start to a miserable affair. Several months before, despite having been ill for some time, Robert Bruce had journeyed to Ulster, which had been in disarray for some years and had edged toward chaos after the death of the Earl of Ulster in 1326. The earl's heir, Eleanor's young nephew William de Burgh, was but fifteen years old and had yet to be knighted. Still in England, with little military or governing experience, he was hardly in a position to take over his Irish lands. With the idea of eventually securing William de Burgh, who was Bruce's nephew as well, as an ally, the Scottish leader had determined to take control of the situation in Ulster himself. He had left his lieutenants, James Douglas, Thomas Randolph, and the second Edward's faithful friend Donald of Mar, to deal with England.

  But the presence of Robert Bruce turned out to be quite unnecessary; the lieutenants could humiliate the English all by themselves. The Scots, as usual, had traveled light, slaughtering local cattle when they became hungry and supplementing their diet with oatmeal, which they baked into cakes on the iron plate each man carried with him. The English, as usual, had traveled heavy, their pace slowed by their groaning baggage carts and their lumbering packhorses. Only when the English army, which had set out from York on July 10, had traveled for days without encountering the enemy did the leaders—the Earls of Lancaster, Norfolk, and Kent (officially), Mortimer (unofficially), and the king (when anyone paid any attention to him)—decide to speed up their pace by leaving the baggage train behind. Smoke having been sighted billowing in the distance, they ordered each man to take a loaf of bread with him, strapped to his saddle, in the conviction that where there was smoke, there had to be Scots. No further provisions were deemed necessary, it being certain that the English would defeat the Scots the next day.

  Instead, it began raining, and stayed raining for eight days. Those who had had the stomach to choke down their loaves of bread, sodden with rain and the sweat of their horses, were only slightly less hungry than those who had been more finicky. When provisions were sent from Carlisle and Newcastle, they proved barely edible. Horses were dropping dead, and men were shivering with ague. The Scots had long disappeared from sight.

  By the end of July, the Scots, full of cattle and oatmeal, were getting rather bored. Having captured a young English squire, they released him so that he could bring the English army to confront them. Finally, on the banks of the River Wear, the English at last faced the Scots—and realized that with the Scots securely stationed on a hill, crossing the river would be madness for the English. Invited by the English to battle them on equal ground, the Scots refused, though not without admiring the heraldic crests on the English knights' helmets, the first they had seen, and puzzling over the peculiar weapons, called “crakys off wer,” that the English had brought with them. But the gunpowder that lined the iron buckets was so sodden with rain that no one standing by the River Wear had any inkling of the havoc it would someday wreak.

  For several days the armies engaged in minor skirmishes, save at night, when the Scots employed every stratagem they could to keep the English from sleeping. Then, on August 3, the Scots camp grew strangely quiet. The next morning, the English found that they had moved to Stanhope Park, to yet another hill from which arrows could be showered down on the English.

  Yet for once it appeared that the Scots were at a disadvantage; they could be surrounded and starved out. But this was not to be. On August 4, as the English camp lay sleeping, men woke to find their tents falling around their heads and spears being poked through the fabric into their bodies. James Douglas had arrived in person with several hundred men.

  William la Zouche, hearing the commotion before his own tent could be reached, grabbed his sword and ran toward the direction of the king's pavilion, where Scots were slashing furiously at the ropes. As Zouche and others began to attack their attackers, the king emerged from the tent and had been all but grabbed by the Scots when his chaplain, having picked up a sword from somewhere, flung himself in front of the boy and began frantically striking about him with his weapon. His heroic gesture, fatal to himself, gave Edward's servants time to form an armed circle around the young king while the rest of the English camp, now fully roused, began to drive the Scots away. In minutes they were heading back out into the darkness, leaving behind a field of crumpled tents and dead and dying men.

  The next evening, the English were on full alert for another night attack. Instead, while the Scots' campfires burned through the night, every one of Douglas's men rode quietly away toward the Scottish border, their absence undetected by the English until the next morning. With no enemy to fight, Edward and his troops headed back to York, Edward weeping tears of frustration and anger. His own father, he thought, could have hardly done worse.

  “There's more bad news,” Mortimer said abruptly to the queen when the two of them were finally alone in her chamber there. “The Dunheved brothers prized your fool husband out of Berkeley Castle in July. Though he's back there now, by God, and closely kept.”

  “He was freed from the castle? Why was I not told?”

  “I am telling you now, am I not? We must make a decision, Isabella. Thomas Dunheved is at the bottom of a well, if you are interested, but Stephen Dunheved is still at large, and there will be more such attempts to follow. If not by this gang, then by others. Perhaps even by the Scots. There's your fool husband's old friend Donald of Mar, for one. He could free him, set him up as king again—provided that he dances to Robert Bruce's tune. And then where would we be?” He pointed in the direction of the city gate where Hugh le Despenser's left leg was rotting. “With Nephew Hugh, my dear.”

  “That is impossible! The English people would never accept Edward as their king again. With all of his faults—”

  “Men have short memories. So what shall we do with our former king, Isabella? Put him in a more secure castle and hope that he is forgotten eventually? Or take more final action?”

  “I will not decide this, Roger!”

  He shrugged. “Very well. I suppose it's to be expected that you would have some womanly indecision, some feminine weakness.”

  “Womanly indecision! Feminine weakness!” Isabella's eyes blazed. “I saved this country from the Despensers, have you forgotten that?”

  “Following my advice, have you forgotten that? Without me, today you'd be sitting in your chamber making altar cloths while your precious Edward let Hugh up his bum.” He paused. “Or perhaps by now they would have allowed you to join in.”

  She started to slap him, but he caught her hand. “Admit it, Isabella. It'
s what you've wanted all along. You're not one for half measures. You and I took the king off the throne, but that's not good enough, not in this world. Don't you want to do it right? There's only one way, and you know it. And it's the best way. Good for me, good for you, good for your son. Good for your fool husband, even.”

  “Good for him?”

  “Certainly. Nothing separating him from Piers Gaveston or Hugh le Despenser then, will there be? A blissful reunion. Oh, we'll be doing him the greatest favor we can do him, my dear.”

  She began laughing, was still laughing when he carried her to her bed, was still laughing when he stripped her. “Do whatever you want,” she gasped as he pushed inside her. “Anything you want. Anything.”

  His first months at Berkeley Castle had not been so bad. The room he was assigned was small, nothing like the chamber he'd been given at Kenilworth, but tolerable at least. The food was plain, but wholesome and not terribly offensive to a man who had once bought cabbages from a peasant and used them to make soup in his barge, right then and there. Berkeley was gruff, Maltravers gruffer, but his guards were civil enough, and willing to tell him news. He was occasionally allowed to go to the chapel.

  Then in July he was freed by Thomas Dunheved and his followers, and then recaptured, and after that everything changed for the worst—but he would not have traded those few summer days of freedom, of hope, for the most comfortable quarters in Kenilworth. On that dreadful day in Kenilworth when he had resigned his crown, he had thought he was utterly alone in the world, or at least that the few who cared for him—his son John, his little girls, his niece Eleanor, his sister Mary—were powerless to help him. On the night when he awoke to find his old confessor, Thomas Dunheved, standing over him, he knew he had been wrong. He did have friends, and surely those who could do nothing else to help him had led them to him with their prayers.

  Even when he had been captured by Berkeley's men, now all action and vigor after their prisoner had so embarrassingly escaped from them, his hope had not died. “There are others,” Thomas had hissed to him as they were being hustled in opposite directions by their captors. “You'll see, your grace. Be of good cheer. You'll soon be free again.”

  And he would be, one way or another, even though he was kept more closely than ever before and treated considerably worse than a common prisoner would be. In the last day or so, he had discovered that however cold, hungry, and dirty he was in his cell, he could take his mind anyplace it cared to go. Helping Lucy shear a sheep. Rowing down the Thames with Piers. Hunting with Hugh. Showing Eleanor how one of her birds would sit on his finger. He could retreat there and no one—not sour Berkeley, not cruel Maltravers, not the mean-faced guards who kept him now—could touch him.

  He settled back into the window seat where he spent most of his days—his bed was a mere pile of rags on the floor now—and let his mind roam where it would.

  Thomas de Berkeley looked through a grill at his prisoner, who huddled in the window seat staring into space. Since the restoration of Edward to Berkeley, Thomas had followed his father-in-law's oral instructions to the letter—a poor cell, poor food, poor ventilation, poor bedding, poor clothing, poor sanitation—and his former king seemed hardly worse for wear physically, although mentally he was clearly losing ground. Oh, he knew where he was and who he was and what he was doing there, most of the time at least, but in the last day or so he had acquired a strange ability to absent himself from whatever was going on about him, something that made him oblivious to the taunts of his guards and Maltravers, who took such relish in his role as jailer that one would think it was he, not Berkeley, who had spent the years after Boroughbridge in a cell instead of quite comfortably in France. “Your grace?” he called through the grill.

  Edward blinked and started; being addressed with respect never failed to bring him out of his reverie. “Lord Berkeley,” he said as if being asked to identify him.

  “Your grace, the queen has sent you a cloak. Here it is.”

  He fitted the cloak—a plain woolen affair that would never have touched Edward's shoulders while he was king—through the grill. Edward took it and turned it in his hands. “That is kind of her,” he said distantly.

  “She has not forgotten you, your grace. She still looks kindly upon you.”

  “If that was true she would let me see my children, wouldn't she? The whore!” Edward subsided back into himself as quickly as he had erupted. “It grows chilly at night now,” he said politely. “This will be useful.”

  “I've a mind to move him back to his old room and make him comfortable there,” Berkeley said to Maltravers later. “All this is for naught. He's growing worse in the mind each day, poor creature, but no less sturdy.”

  “Poor creature!” mimicked Maltravers. “I daresay you weren't poor-creaturing him when he was taking your estate and giving it to Nephew Hugh. And who, by the way, is 'Nelly'? The guards and I were having a chat with him the other day, before he became so barmy, reminiscing about Hugh's execution—”

  “Good God, Maltravers, why do you keep harping on that with him?”

  “And he started crying, which is hard to get him to do these days. 'Poor Nelly,' he said, again and again until we cuffed him to get him to stop. 'My poor, sweet Nelly.'”

  “That's his niece, you fool, Hugh's widow. They put her in the Tower.” Berkeley pushed his cup away and stood. “I'm having a featherbed brought in there, and giving him some fresh clothing, at least.”

  “Against Mortimer's orders.”

  “This is my castle and I'll not be dictated to as to how I treat my prisoner.”

  “Not your prisoner, the crown's prisoner. And what do you think will happen if he doesn't die of natural causes? You're doing him no favors, Berkeley. Mortimer will see to it that he goes, one way or the other.”

  “I'll worry about that when the time comes,” said Berkeley.

  The Scots had not finished with the English. Having left Stanhope, they turned their attention to invading Northumberland, this time under the direct supervision of Robert Bruce himself. The English army, meanwhile, had mostly disbanded, and the Hainaulters, to whom England owed over forty thousand pounds for this campaign alone, had been sent back to Hainault. Henry Percy was left to protect the north as best he could, while the court moved south, from York to Nottingham to Lincoln. While some districts nearby were able to raise the money to buy themselves out of a Scottish occupation, Northumberland's towns were burnt to the ground.

  One Scot, however, did not join the others in the north: Donald of Mar, now the Earl of Mar. With the blessing of his uncle, Robert Bruce, he was in Wales, stirring up trouble against the new English regime. Roger Mortimer had also eschewed the north in favor of Wales. He was at Abergavenny when he received a certain letter.

  “According to Lord Mortimer's lieutenant, William of Shalford, men in Wales, South Wales and North Wales alike, are plotting to release the old king,” said Sir Thomas Gurney, who along with William Ogle had hurriedly arrived at Berkeley Castle on the evening of September 20. “They are led by Rhys ap Gruffydd. Shalford says that if this plot succeeds it could be the undoing of Mortimer.” He looked toward the direction of the guardhouse and smiled. “Lords Berkeley and Maltravers, you are to acquaint yourself with the contents of this letter and find a suitable remedy to avoid the peril. Well. It's pretty damned obvious what they have in mind.” Gurney passed the letter to Berkeley and Maltravers, who read it silently.

  Maltravers laughed when he finished reading, but Berkeley said, “I'll have nothing to do with this, nothing.”

  “Nothing! The man's been living in your castle since April, except when you let him escape,” said Gurney.

  “I did not let him escape,” snapped Berkeley. “I underestimated the determination of his friends, that is all. Be that as it may, I'll still have nothing to do with this.” He turned and left the room.

  “Well?” said Maltravers. “How?”

  “Mortimer says it will have to leave no mark, as
people will be expecting to view the body.”

  “So chopping his head off is out of the question,” said Ogle cheerfully. “Well, there's poison.”

  “We'd have to find someone to make it up for us,” objected Gurney.

  “Strangulation?”

  “Strong as he is? He'd have to be knocked cold, and that would leave a bruise. Bruises around his neck, too.”

  “Suffocation?”

  “I suppose that's the only real choice,” admitted Gurney. He shivered and looked at the fire, which was dying. “Can't Berkeley's servants make a decent fire?” He took a poker and began prodding the logs with it. He poked too hard, and he had to pull it out of a log with some difficulty. Then he began laughing.

  “Are you daft, man?”

  “No,” said Gurney, laughing all the harder. “I've an idea. A most fitting idea.”

  Edward, comfortable and warm on the feather bed Berkeley had so kindly brought him several days before, raised up on his elbow and stared as he heard his cell door being unlocked. He watched as Maltravers, the Gurney fellow who had just arrived at Berkeley, and a number of men he did not know filed in, smiling most peculiarly at him and not bothering to invent any excuse for their being there in the middle of the night. So he had been right; he would soon be free, free with Piers and Hugh and Hugh's dear old father. His favorite sister, Joan. Adam and Lucy. His mother, his stepmother, his father… His mouth almost crinkled into a smile. No, his father probably wouldn't be pleased to see him, under the circumstances.

  In the torchlight he could now see that the men were carrying some rather incongruous items. A drinking horn? A table? A cooking spit, glowing red hot? He frowned. Were they going to feed him first? But before he could make any inquiries, he was seized and pushed over on his belly and felt the table, legs in the air, being pressed against his back as someone ripped off his drawers. Then the drinking horn was shoved into his body, then the spit through the horn, and Edward's screams were echoing through Berkeley Castle. Just as Thomas de Berkeley, lying in his chamber weeping, thought he could not bear to hear them any longer, they died.