“For bringing my grandchildren to visit me.” The baby rested her head on my shoulder and I rocked her in my arms. Her tiny heart drummed out a rapid beat. Soon, she began to blubber and then pule like a milk-starved kitten. “Oh, I think she’s hungry. Shall I fetch the wet nurse?”
“Here.” Philippa took the baby and laid her down on my bed, then pulled the corner of the blanket over her, tucking it tightly around her. She stroked little Joan’s fuzzy head until the baby settled. “She does that when she’s tired. A mother learns their cries.”
I stood for a long while, watching the baby drift off to sleep. Her chest rose and fell in a shallow, but sure rhythm, her plump cheeks puffing with each exhaled breath.
“The king,” Philippa began, her tone suddenly sober, “received a letter from Sir John Maltravers in Flanders.”
I had not heard his name or the others’ in years. Even thinking about that time yanked me downward into a lightless place. Why did she have to tell me this now? “When was this?”
“Some time ago.”
“What did the letter say?”
“He would not tell me.” She placed a hand lightly on my shoulder. “But afterward, it was as if everything had changed. Like he was no longer angry.”
As if everything had changed.
The time had come to banish the ghosts of my past. I wrote to Lord Thomas Berkeley and waited, my heart heavy with dread, my soul longing to be free of unspoken secrets.
***
Castle Rising — 1338
“They proclaimed you innocent, Lord Thomas,” I said. “Why, when they sent my gentle Mortimer to his death so long ago?”
Previous letters to Berkeley had prompted only vague responses, but at last I had insisted on his presence. To my absolute shock, he had finally come to Castle Rising.
“Because I am not guilty of any crime, my lady.”
A faint beam of evening sunlight penetrated the confines of the chapel and spilled over the floor around him. I had knelt so many hours of late before the silk-draped altar that my knees had developed calluses.
“But you knew of it?” I said.
A faint smile played at the corners of Berkeley’s mouth. “I told them that I did not arrange, agree to, or aid in his death.”
Within the twisting rope of words were a hundred loopholes. With Mortimer dead and Maltravers, Gurney and Ockle gone from England, Thomas Berkeley alone held both lock and key to the mystery of Edward of Caernarvon’s fate now. Had he simply turned a blind eye to Edward’s murder and then lied before Parliament to spare himself? Or did he guard another truth? I slumped against a column, trying to keep myself upright, but I began to slide downward.
Oh, Lord—your revenge on me will be nothing short of ironic. For keeping silent my knowledge of these sins, you will reveal them all and punish me more than twice for them—here in this world and for eternity.
Before I crumpled into a boneless heap, Berkeley caught me by the elbow. “Actually, they believed I knew nothing of the plot. Many thought me confused by too many questions—and a thousand of them they flung at me, for hours on end. At the least, they thought me too daft to be duplicitous. That ... or mad. I told them I had been ill at the time and away from Berkeley, unable to return. When it was discovered that the king was dead, I was not there. So they let me go.”
His tale was too convenient—an alibi of fishnet, with holes so big I could have stuck my fist through any of them. Berkeley had his secrets, and he had abandoned his own friends to keep them. How is it that I had ever thought him trustworthy? Had he made a pact for his soul with Mortimer long ago—a pact that, even in death, could not be broken?
“So, you absolved yourself of the sentence by pleading ignorance? Where is your loyalty, Lord Thomas? With me, whose insanity you find amusement in? With Lord Roger, defamed and dead now? With your ‘friends’, Maltravers, Gurney and Ockle, who ran for their lives because you spoke half-truths? What is the truth, Thomas? You alone, it seems, are the keeper of it. Before God, say it. If it will unfetter you, let me fetch you a gospel so we may undo our oath.”
Again, the flippant smirk. “You say that you swore me to an oath that I would never —”
“Then I release you from your oath!” I screamed at him. His ambiguity served no one but himself now. “If it pleases you to hear me say it, I was wrong to demand it so rashly. I only did so because I did not want to betray myself ... because I didn’t want Roger to know I was meddling in his plan. Now I know I should have stopped him altogether. His wrath should never have been a hindrance to me doing what was right. So let us begin anew. Say that it was never agreed between us, and if we cannot reveal it to the rest of the world, then let us speak it nowhere but here, in this room, only once between us, can we? What gain is there anymore in pretending? Say it, Thomas—the truth!”
The wry smirk melted from his mouth. He sidled toward the altar, as if some refuge from my vengefulness awaited him there, and sank to his knees beside it to lean his cheek against the plain white linen cloth draped over it. “What would you have me say? That I lied? That I have concealed the truth?”
He lifted his face from the altar, bearing a look so grave that I could see the angst deep inside him. “I had no part in any plan to murder Edward of Caernarvon. And yes, there was such a plan. Your beloved Roger Mortimer was its devisor. The others you spoke of—they were his intended instruments, mindless puppets that he could toy with, for he would not taint his own hands with royal blood. And I ... I was to carry the message to them, but I could not ... could not see it followed through.”
Something in his demeanor began to shift. His shoulders went slack and he slumped forward, hugging his knees hard like a hungry child left out in the cold. I moved around the altar to see him more clearly, for night was descending. The insolence had faded from his tone. The elusiveness—vanished, as if he were a base sinner bearing his darkest soul in confessional to his priest.
“Some months before Sir Edward’s funeral, as you know,” he continued, “Stephen Dunheved and his conspirators gained access to him at Kenilworth and tried to free him. They were thwarted before they ever got near him. They made a second attempt and succeeded. They were miles away when his pitiful cries threatened to betray them. He cursed the throne of England and said he did not want it back. That night, Sir Edward awoke in the forest where they were encamped and escaped from his liberators. He was found wandering outside a nearby village and was returned to Kenilworth. When rumors indicated the Welsh were also planning to rescue the king ... Sir Edward, I mean,” he corrected himself, “Lord Roger then decided something must be done. Gurney and Maltravers were given orders to withhold food from him, so that he would weaken and fall to some sickness of the flesh. But Sir Edward prayed, every day, and he remained strong, impervious to the deprivations forced upon him. He prayed to God to be free of the burdens of his birthright. He even prayed, my lady, that you and your ‘whoring slavemaster’, as he called him, should be forgiven. He shirked everything that was of this earth and gave himself completely to God. In all my life, I have never seen such ... such utter piety. He became more saintly than any holy man I have ever known.
“I knew him when he was king, only a little and mostly from a distance, but it was easy to see the man he was back then: vain, petty, selfish, greedy, and with an appetite for vengeance. Neither you nor I need deny how he sinned in private. His sickness was known to everyone but him. But a change came over him while he was at Berkeley. At first, he fell into silence. Not brooding, but rather contemplative—as if he were lost to our world, seeing and hearing things unknown to the rest of us. With time, he began to speak of his life and his errors, of God’s way, His will, of the Scriptures ... It was in earnest, that much I could tell.
“I took pity on him. I brought him bread and clean water—even a flask of wine, which he drank as Christ’s blood. But more than pity him, I was humbled by him. I wanted to help him, to give him a way to devote himself to God wholly. To do that,
there was only one way—to let him be dead to the world. Even to you.
“Your request to spare him came as a deliverance,” Berkeley said with gentle reflection. “A convenience. So I played along—on all sides. And to this day, I keep my word to everyone as best as I am able.”
“He lives then?”
“Still, you ask?” His voice was airy, strained nearly to breaking by the burden he had carried for so long. “Lord Roger was right, you know? Our young king’s conscience would be marred if he thought his father lived. Not only that, but he would never sleep well for it. Without the crown of England, he could never hope to win that of France, could he? Lord Roger knew—and you know better than any. So perhaps it is best that Edward of Caernarvon is dead to this world—better for him, for our king, for you —”
I threw myself at him and sank my fingernails into his thin shoulders. He winced. I lightened my grip, but shook him as if I could jar loose the one morsel of information that would put all the pieces in place. “He lives—yes or no?”
“He lives.”
My heart ached. Mortimer had died, not only on the premise of treason—a crime trumped up so that my son could free himself of Roger’s hold on power—but also for the murder of Young Edward’s father. Because of Berkeley’s reticence, however, he had died for all the wrong reasons. And I was partly to blame for that.
He slipped free of my hold and stood above me, swaying with the release of his troubles.
“Did Roger know it was not Edward of Caernarvon’s body that we mourned over and buried?” I asked. “Did he know then that he was still alive?”
Berkeley shifted on his feet to gain his balance and averted his eyes. He answered with a question. “If Lord Roger had known, beyond all doubt, that Sir Edward was dead, would he have hurried so to silence Edmund of Kent?”
No, he would not have. There would have been no reason to.
“So he did know?”
At last, Berkeley met my gaze squarely. “Yes, he knew. When Lord Roger received the news at York that another attempt to free Sir Edward had been made, he arranged with me to move him from Berkeley to Corfe Castle, but in secret. In his place at Berkeley, I put a man who looked incredibly like him, although not as tall and much thinner. The man, a monk and a halfwit, had been accused of raping and nearly strangling the daughter of the mayor of Oxford. They were going to hang him, anyway. Shortly after that, Maltravers and Gurney received word from William Ockle that Mortimer wanted Sir Edward dead. Although they discovered this other man in his cell at Berkeley, they murdered him anyway. Panicked, they hastily arranged for the midwife to embalm the body.”
I held my palm up to slow his stream of words. It was almost too much to absorb at once. “You mean Roger had you hide Edward at Corfe ... but then he told Ockle to have him killed, knowing all the while that it was another man they would find there at Berkeley?”
He nodded. “He knew they would kill the man anyway, rather than be faced with the failure of having lost Sir Edward again. There would be a body, a funeral. It was all that was needed.”
As swiftly as if I had been struck by lightning, I understood everything. Mortimer had spared Edward by entrusting him to Berkeley. Gurney and Maltravers murdered the other man to cover up their own assumed failure, and then passed him off as Sir Edward. If England believed him dead, then Young Edward’s crown was secure and as long as he remained king, then Mortimer’s position and power remained, as did mine.
Berkeley made to leave, but I snagged his sleeve to halt him and then leapt to my feet, blocking his path.
“But Kent,” I said, “somehow learned where his brother was and threatened to reveal all, didn’t he?”
“Yes. I never learned how he found out, but it was then that I decided to send Sir Edward to the continent, somewhere he could devote himself to God’s service and hopefully never be found. Lord Roger never knew his whereabouts. He never asked.”
“And when the king brought the charges of murder against Roger,” I said, “if either of you had so much as hinted Edward was still alive ... I would have been implicated, too.”
“He protected you—and your son’s throne—by sacrificing his own life. I once swore an oath to him that I would never reveal anything, that I, too, would protect your name and your son’s crown. And I have.”
I dropped his sleeve. His cloak snapped against my skirts as he swirled around.
“Wait!” I called before he could reach the door. “Where is he? Give me proof that you speak the truth.”
Air gusted through the window. The candle flames on the altar bent sideways, struggled and then brightened. “The king has proof.”
“What do you mean?”
“A letter from a Genoese priest named Manuel de Fieschi—ask your son about it.” He hurried away.
I turned back to the altar, the rapid click of his footsteps fading away. Behind me, I thought I heard a murmur, the closing of the door, muffled footsteps, slower in cadence. I held my breath, too afraid to look. But I heard no more, saw nothing.
It was only my imagination. Or perhaps it was Mortimer’s ghost, eavesdropping.
27
Edward:
Windsor — 1339
Her letter, curling upward at both ends, lay atop a table overflowing with maps of France and Scotland and documents awaiting my seal. I touched the barest fingertip to the black, swirling words. A blot, from a fallen tear perhaps, blurred the end of her name. Had I not known her handwriting well, I might not have known whose name it was at all.
My Beloved Son,
How do I begin? You will think it an old woman’s senseless prattling, desperation for a son’s love. But I know not how else to win your heart again. Let me simply begin then.
I have sacrificed much, sinned too often and suffered for it all a hundred times over. I have known what it is to feel everything and nothing: the drunkenness of power and the corruption of wealth; a husband’s loathing and the hollow ache of loneliness; the silent cut of jealousy; the guilty ecstasy of a dishonorable love; and grief too heavy to rise up from.
I tell you these things not to shrive myself, nor to elicit your pity. Nor do I tell you to receive your gratitude for bringing you to the throne. Without me, even ... in spite of me, perhaps, you will become one of the greatest kings England and France have ever known. To me, you will always be the small boy taking his first steps. To you, I do not know what I am anymore. I only ask that you remember more than my failings, see more than my flaws.
Whatever others may say of me as queen or woman or wife ... those things matter not. For whatever God may deliver unto me, I shall receive with due humility. More than His judgment, however, I fear yours, for I have kept a truth from you. A truth that would put all between us right, but a truth buried in lies to protect you and others.
You have in your possession a letter from the Genoese priest Manuel de Fieschi—one whose story, I pray, will change much between us. Maybe everything. When you read his words, a man beholden to none but Our Father, the truth will be less tainted to your ears than if it came from my mouth.
Our Lord keep you and protect you.
Your devoted mother, Isabella
Castle Rising, Norfolk,
The confession clutched in my palm, I went to the window and stared out over the Thames from the heights of Windsor’s ancient hill. Jagged chunks of ice clung to the river’s edge in places still. Snow was falling thick and fast from an iron-gray sky.
So, she had learned of de Fieschi’s revelation? But how much more did she know? When Sir John Maltravers wrote to me and confessed it was not my father he had killed, the admission had sent me on a quest for the truth that eventually led me to the continent.
Yesterday, it had snowed more lightly, the final leg of our return journey passing swiftly. Today, Philippa had risen at dawn, trying to soothe Lionel’s colic. The boy could wail rather loudly for such a small louse. She was a doting mother, my Philippa. I often warned her she would spoil our youngest
, but she never heeded my advice. After ten years of marriage and five children, I should have known that Philippa did what she wanted.
Philippa had accompanied me to the continent where I was made Vicar of the Holy Roman Empire and when that dull pomp was done with we had gone on to Antwerp and stayed for Lionel’s birthing. It seemed she was either perpetually with child or had just had one. The pleasing curves of her youth were giving way to an unflattering bulge of fat around her middle. The forced stint of chastity, however, always drew me back to her with renewed lust. Lionel being our fifth child, though, I did not sense it was the same for her. Each birth tired her, stretched her belly a little further, and took her mind from me more, as she adored her children immeasurably. I remember my own mother being that way.
My own mother—ah, I could not say I blamed her for running from my father. I could not even say I blamed her for falling into another man’s arms, putting her husband low and shutting him up like a biting dog that deserved no better. My father had not been worthy of his crown. All of England knew that. The crown was meant for me. My father’s failures simply hurried my fate along. I always knew it would come to me early, that there would be even more within my grasp. And it was Mother who sowed the seed in my head, watered it with her flowery words of ambition and shining promises of glory.
I would have conquered the world and given it to her on a plate of gold for believing in me so ... but for him: Mortimer. She could see no evil in him. Desire blinded her.
A knock at the door rattled me from my brooding. I shoved the letter beneath a document: a request to bankers in Florence for a substantial loan to finance the war in Scotland. Parliament had soured on my father’s failures before me and would extend me nothing because of that, parsimonious bastards. If need be, I would beg Flemish merchants for the money I required. They always had plenty.
The King Must Die (The Isabella Books) Page 30