The King Must Die (The Isabella Books)

by Sasson, N. Gemini

  Parliament was due to convene at Nottingham in only two weeks. Mortimer was growing increasingly paranoid over rumors that Lancaster was part of a movement to oust him—or worse to put him on trial for crimes against the kingdom. Preoccupied with my own troubles, I did not care to hear Mortimer’s obsessive ramblings about plots and conspiracies, some of them involving mention of the king. It had been dealt with previously and put in its grave. I would not live my life in fear of shadows and whispers.

  I was alone in my chambers, having given orders not to be disturbed, as I had often done of late. It was yet early evening, but I blew out the few candles that Patrice had lit for me and lay down upon my bed, still clothed. I could still smell the smokiness of the burnt wicks and marveled at how all my senses had gradually heightened these past three months, smells, especially. I could smell the dropped petals of a rose past its bloom a hundred feet away and the sweet pungency of cut hay in the next valley. The smell of spiced sausages, however, invoked retching. And the cravings—I had sent Patrice to the kitchen twice alone this last week in the dead of night to fetch me almonds and fruit. She had not been pleased to be roused thus and after the second time decided to keep a supply at hand on a side table.

  My hands wandered over my lower belly, cupping the growing roundness there. I thought I felt ...

  Yes, there it is—a stirring. A movement. Life.

  “Isabella?”

  My heart stopped. It was Mortimer. My breath was trapped in my lungs.

  How do I tell him? Should I? I do not even know what to do—to let it live or to let it go. I have waited too long already for the latter. By not deciding, I have decided.

  But I can’t ... It cannot be. Too much shame. Too many lives to be wrecked.

  He came toward me through the darkness without stumbling, sensing where I was by my breathing alone. Then his sudden weight upon the bed made me roll on my side toward him, my hand still on my belly.

  “Isabella, are you ill again?” He reached out, swept my hair from my cheeks with a tender caress, and bent to kiss my ear.

  “I am well ... well enough. You needn’t worry. It’s just that ... I have felt better. It comes and goes.”

  Stroking the curve of my neck, he lay down beside me. The scent of leather and horse hide lingered around him. “Lancaster took up residence within the town. I do not trust him, Isabella. I never will.”

  “What would you have me do about it? He is here, like everyone else, at the king’s command, fulfilling his duty.”

  “I ordered him beyond the walls, to a manor several miles away. It is safer that way.”

  “Safer from what, Roger?”

  There was a gaping pause. He moved, so that the length of his body aligned to mine, our hips meeting, and he took my face between his hands. “Are you well enough to be give yourself to me? It has been weeks—I cannot bear it any longer, love. I think of you every day—what it is like to be with you, to hold you, have you.” Without awaiting an answer from me, his hands were already wandering beneath my clothing, tugging at laces, lifting my skirts, peeling back any impediments to his needs, seeking out the places that often delivered me into waves of ecstasy.

  “Isabeau, my love ...” His breath quickened, mine echoing it. “I cannot live without you.”

  Nor I you, Roger. And I love you, though it be the end of me.

  ***

  He looked down at me in that dreamy haze that follows lovemaking and kissed me softly on the lips, on my nose, above both eyes—each airy brush of his lips a promise and a memory. Then he lowered the length of his body beside mine and nuzzled his whiskered face in the warm curve between my neck and shoulder.

  The moist heat of his breath curled around my neck and tickled beneath my chin as he whispered, “With all my heart, Isabella, I love you ... only you. How I wish I could tell the world. Or better yet, that the rest of the world would just disappear. My God, there are men who madden me so, that I could kill them with my bare hands. The only way I can stop myself, sometimes, is to think of you. To be with you. And all of it ... goes away.”

  “Roger, there is something ... I must ...” The words choked me. I could not say them. I tried again. “I m-m-must ...”

  “Out with it, my love. Tell me. If I can tell you that I have contemplated murder with those who wrong me, then we have no secrets, do we?”

  How can I tell you ... that everything we have between us ... is in peril? How can I tell you that our love has ruined us and those around us? God mocks us, Roger. He brings us together, yet tortures us with shame and now this ... this disgrace disguised as a blessing.

  My belly tightened. My mouth was as dry as sand. My tongue stuck to the back of my teeth. I swallowed, shaped my lips into the words I loathed to say and forced the sounds of speech from the hollow depths of my throat. “I am with child.”

  His body stiffened like a plank. He did not move or speak or even breathe. It was as if the truth had been a boulder dropped upon him from above, crushing the air from his chest, shattering all his bones into a thousand splintered pieces, leaving him lifeless. At last, he buried his face in the pillow and mumbled, “Sweet Jesus ... how?”

  ‘How’? How am I to answer such a mindless thought?

  He sat up straight and sudden, gulping. His breath came in ragged, angered gasps. “Were you not ... How—how could this have ...? I thought you could not bear any more children. My God, why now? After so long ...”

  I had known he would be shocked to hear it. Still, I had been careful. I had been. Except perhaps once or twice, now and again. The remedy that Patrice taught me had worked for so long. When a woman grows older, after not having conceived for so many years, after also having been told she would never bear children again ... how was she to even think it might happen?

  But what did all that matter? There was a child inside me. Mortimer’s child. Ours. Mine.

  I knew he might be angered, but what I wanted—what I needed—was for him to hold me and tell me that everything would be all right. I had not done this alone—and certainly not purposefully. “It is to be. We will have a child, Roger. Does it matter how or why? And we must begin to think, now, what to —”

  “Isabella!” He ripped the blankets away, swung his feet over the edge of the bed and turned his bare back to me. “You will not have this child. Do you hear me? You cannot.”

  I took affront to him so readily dismissing this ... this ... thing that had happened to us. It was not some unwanted pup to be tied up in a sack with rocks and tossed into the Thames. It was a child, waiting to know life. Shivering terribly, I grappled for the corner of the blanket and pulled it over my hips and breast. “If God wills it ... If I carry it to —”

  “There can be no child, you stupid woman!” he shouted. The muscles of his shoulders pinched taut. He raked his fingers through the short, dark mat of his hair, and then rotated his fingertips hard into his temples, trying to massage away his angst. “Take care of it. Do what you must.”

  His implication was clear. He stood, drew up his braies, gathered his leggings and shoved his feet into them. With exaggerated movements, he yanked them to his hips, drew the cord tight, and began to wander about the room, groping in the half-darkness for his shirt, kicking at the floor in displaced vexation. Near the window, he stooped to reach for the rest of his clothing. Moonlight cascaded in silver ripples over the lean muscles in his back.

  “And if I don’t? It is your child, as well, Roger. You would have me murder your own blood, an innocent?”

  He jerked himself upright. I heard the ‘swoosh’ of wadded cloth unraveling as he hurled his shirt at me. A button snapped at the corner of my eye, above my cheekbone. Instinctively, I raised my fingers to feel for torn flesh or a raised welt, but before I could, Mortimer’s thundering shadow crossed the room, seized me by the wrists and dragged me naked from the bed. He twisted my wrists hard, so that my elbows turned in and I was forced down to the floor. The impact rammed splinters into my knees. I cried out�
��in pain, surprise ... in fear of him.

  “It will be the death of us both, you fool!” His teeth flashed savagely. He tightened his grip, burning my flesh, cutting off the blood to my fingers until they went numb. “The pope himself ... if not your own son ... would have both our heads. Is that what you want? Is that what you want?!”

  I trembled in his hold. “Roger, stop, please ... someone will hear. They cannot find us like this.”

  He shoved me to the floor, away from him. I crumpled into a misshapen ball, my arms wrapped around my head, trying to protect myself from a surge of emotions washing over me like the crashing waves of the sea in a rising storm. But it was too much. Too much. Too much blackness pounding down upon my head. Too much pulling me under. I couldn’t fight it. Couldn’t swim from it or run. Couldn’t cry out for help. Couldn’t raise myself up to stand strong and dignified before Mortimer and remind him of his part.

  How many times had he whispered in my ear those sweet promises of love, come to my bed without invitation, touched parts of me that others never laid eyes on, taken me in lingering rapture, spilled his seed within me and never once asked what if a child came of it? How easy to take his ecstasy in me, as long as there was no natural, inevitable consequence to it all.

  Tears flooded my eyes, gushed down my cheeks, spilled between my cold fingers. I had not realized that I still had no clothing on, or that I was sobbing so heavily, until I felt the searing heat of his touch upon my back like a branding iron leaving its mark. He crouched beside me, trying to draw me to him as his hand slid around my waist.

  “Isabeau, Isabeau ...” The wrath in his voice had melted away. His touch was meant in comfort. “It is our circumstances that make it impossible, not that I do not love you.”

  Liar! You brazen, heartless liar! You shun me ... and our child, because it inconveniences you, nothing more. I rue that I ever fawned after you, worshipped you, thought that I loved you.

  On hands and knees, I crawled away from his vile hold. Snagging the tail of the bed sheet, I pulled it loose and wound it around myself as I rose to my feet.

  “Bastard,” I spat, conjuring even more hateful insults in my head. “Get out of here. Out! Out—damn you!!!”

  He held his hands out to me, beckoning me near. “No, Isabella, we must talk ... think this through.”

  “Why?” I shot back snidely. “So you can convince me that I should kill an unborn child?” I gathered the sheet into a knot between my breasts. “One sin to cover another?”

  He tilted his head at me, one eyebrow arched in disbelief. “You cannot be thinking that ...” Suddenly, he looked away. “I have a wife, Isabella. You are the widowed mother of a king. A child of ours, if ... if allowed to live—it could never be acknowledged. Never. A male child, a bastard, could bring ruin upon your son’s rule. Strife, contention ... war. You know that, don’t you?”

  Regretfully, I did. Bastards had had their share of upstarts throughout the ages. England had even been conquered by one: William of Normandy, the Bastard King. I regretted that I had ever allowed Roger Mortimer to manipulate me in order to garner power, or to use me at his leisure for sexual pleasures. I let the sheet fall to the floor.

  “Look at me, Roger. Look!” I commanded. He resisted a moment, not wanting to acknowledge the temptation that had driven him to this life of scandal. Finally, reluctantly, he turned his face to gaze at me. Only the thin, gray light of predawn separated us. “Look long and well at what you have spent your lust upon, night after night, in every bed from York to Fontainebleau, while we stifled our moans and whispered the words we yearned to cry out. Sometimes we coupled in frenzy like a sailor and his tavern whore after a year’s voyage, did we not? Sometimes, you were slow and tender with me, as if I were a young, frightened virgin on my wedding night. Other times, we were like old, familiar lovers, talking and holding each other for hours afterward, sometimes not talking at all, but falling asleep in one another’s arms. All this we kept from those around us, shared it only between us—as if we lived in two separate worlds: ours and everyone else’s.”

  I stepped over the sheet, closer to him. His body twitched in response to my nearness, although he may as well have wanted to take me to bed again as to strike sense into me ... or perhaps go from me forever. “But it is no more, Roger. We are guilty of adultery. Not once, not for only a while, but time and time again, shamelessly. You cast off your vows to Joan. I gave no regard to my son’s dignity. Did we think we could sport about in bed forever and not suffer for it in the end?” I came within arm’s reach of him, lowered my chin, and drew my hand softly across my belly. “Can we right a thousand sins with another, even greater one?”

  He turned his head away. “No, our sins are ours—forever.” Then he strode abruptly from me, picked up a loose-fitting nightshift of mine and handed it gruffly to me. “But sins can be forgiven, Isabella. A reputation, once sullied, is always stained. And power, once lost, is almost never salvageable.”

  Mortimer retrieved his shirt from the bed and the rest of his clothing from the floor. I kept my eyes from him as he dressed himself, the cold air from a dwindling hearth fire raising goose bumps on my flesh. I shivered, but I could not move. I only wanted him to go—away from me, forever—and let me deal with this alone, somehow.

  Before leaving, he said one more thing:

  “If you have the child, Isabella, I will not claim it. Someone, conveniently, will have seen another man, or perhaps several, entering and leaving your private chambers at all hours. They will call you a whore, cram you in the dungeon and let you deliver the child alone, in the darkness and filth, then rip it crying from your arms.” There was a hint of smugness in his voice—a tone I had heard him use often with others, but never once before with me.

  He went toward the door.

  “And I will say you raped me,” I threatened.

  He shut the door firmly behind him. I would never have said that he had raped me—never. Not even if he levied ridiculous claims of my own lechery to foul my name and exclude himself from accusations of having fathered a child on me. I only meant to make him pause, to reconsider his ultimatum. He could not dictate what I would do with the life inside me. Such decisions did not belong to either of us, but to God.

  And yet, as I stood there shivering, my knees wobbling, the sloshing bile in my stomach threatening to spew fire over my tongue, I wanted to melt into a puddle on the floor and never rise up again ... wanted this cruel irony of a nightmare to vanish like a thinning mist in the pale light of dawn.

  I did not know what to do. Did not know what was right. I only knew that so many things that I had done ... were wrong.

  By letting the child live, I would be inviting a series of calamities on Mortimer, on myself, on my son, on France and England and a hundred thousand untold souls.

  Yet of all the terrible things I had done in my life, reasoning them away, I always told myself that the good in the end was worth the wrong in the moment. But this time I resisted turning down that path once more, for I did not know when it would ever end, this ugly, damning life of lies and secrets.

  What I have known with you, Mortimer—a joy so intense and private it has riddled my heart with scars that will never heal—it cannot go on forever.

  This stirring within me ... if I must choose between it and you, Mortimer—this is my new beginning.

  My soul drained dry, I slipped my nightshift over my head in a haze, slinked back to bed, gathering the sheets and blanket along the way, and crawled beneath their crumpled mess. I lay awake for a long, long while, wishing that I could feel something ... anything. But it was as if I had nothing left within me—neither love, nor hatred, neither joy, nor dismay, certainty nor doubt.

  Nothing but an emptiness so big that it could douse the light of day and darken all the heavens forever.

  Nothing.

  ***

  Patrice pinched my upper arm, rousing me abruptly from a hard sleep. I cracked open my eyes to blindingly bright morning l
ight, then swiftly shut them again to close out the world.

  “What time is it? Have I slept the day away?” I drawled. I did not want to rise from the warm security and solitude of my bed and set my feet upon the cold floor to pretend my way through another impossibly bleak day. “Oh, let me be, Patrice. Go away.”

  “Isabeau,” she whispered urgently, “I must tell you something. Please, it cannot wait.” She shook me so hard that it rattled the bones in my neck.

  Scowling in objection, I sat up and scooted beyond her clawing reach. My own sudden movements elicited a wave of nausea, reminding me of the previous night’s happenings. I sank back into my pile of pillows, wishing that they would swallow me up and spare me whatever crisis Patrice was about to deliver. With all the troubles this past year between Lancaster’s insurrection, Kent’s death and now ...

  Dare I ask what more could go wrong?

  “Do I want to know, Patrice? Tell me good news, or tell me naught at all.”

  A pout tugged at her lower lip. She looked down at the floor, concern evident in the lines of her face. “Lord Roger’s life is in danger.”

  It felt as though a knife had been punched between my ribs, letting all the air in my lungs rush out. “How so? By whom?” Brutally awake now, I scrambled to the edge of the bed to sit beside Patrice. I tried to steady myself, but my head was suddenly throbbing in whiteness, my heart accelerating to an impossible pace. I held my breath. “Lancaster?” But even as I asked it, it did not make sense. Lancaster had been subdued, the fight whipped from him. There had not been so much as a grumbling of discontent from his diminished domain of late.