She fell silent a moment and then went on: ‘Do you think we would be right? I have plighted my troth to my husband, wicked though he is. And you, for your part, have a wife who is without reproach. We have contracted alliances before God. And I have been so hard on the sins of others.’
Was she seeking protection against herself, or did she wish him to take the sin on himself?
He got to his feet.
‘Neither you nor I, my Queen, were married of our own free choice. We have uttered vows, but not towards people we chose for ourselves. We obeyed decisions made by our families, not the wishes of our own hearts. To people like us, made for each other as we are …’
He fell silent. A love that fears to declare itself can lead to strange actions indeed; and desire can take the most circuitous ways to assert its rights. Mortimer was standing in front of Isabella, though their hands were still clasped in each other’s.
‘Shall we make a vow of blood-brotherhood, my Queen?’ he went on. ‘Shall we mingle our blood so that I may always be your support and you always my lady?’
His voice was quivering under the influence of this strange and sudden inspiration; and the trembling had communicated itself to the Queen’s shoulders. For there were sorcery, passion and faith, all divine and diabolical things, and all that was chivalrous and carnal in what he was proposing. It was the blood-bond of brothers-in-arms and of legendary lovers, the bond the Templars had brought back from the Orient in the crusades, the bond of love that united the unhappy wife to the lover of her choice, and sometimes even in the presence of the husband on condition their love remained chaste, or at least was held to be so. It was the oath of the body, more powerful than that of words; and it could not be broken, disavowed or annulled. Those who pronounced it became more united than identical twins; what each possessed belonged to the other; they had to protect each other at all times and might not survive each other. ‘They must be blood-brothers …’ people whispered of certain couples with a shiver of fear and envy.27
‘I can ask everything of you?’ said Isabella in a low voice.
He replied by lowering his lids over his flint-coloured eyes.
‘I put myself in your hands,’ he said. ‘You can ask of me anything you wish. You can give me as much of yourself as you want. My love will be what you desire it to be. I could lie naked beside you naked, and never touch you if you forbade it.’
The reality of their love did not lie in this, but it was a sort of rite of honour they owed themselves in conformity with accepted tradition. A lover bound himself to show his strength of spirit and the force of his respect. He submitted himself to ordeal by courtesy, but its duration was subject to his mistress’s decision; it depended on her whether it should last for ever or cease forthwith. The knight, who was to be armed, remained standing in prayer all night, his arms lying beside him, and swore to defend the widow and the orphan, but, as soon as his spurs had been buckled on and he had gone to the wars, he pillaged and raped, and used his sword to make widows and orphans by the hundred amid houses in flames.
‘Do you agree, my Queen?’ he said.
It was her turn to answer by lowering her lids. They had neither of them ever been blood-brothers, nor ever seen anyone so made. They had to invent their own ceremony.
‘Shall it be the finger, the forehead or the heart?’ Mortimer asked.
They could prick their fingers, let their blood drip to mingle in a glass and each drink in turn. They could make incisions on their foreheads at the hair-line and, standing brow to brow, exchange their thoughts.
‘The heart,’ Isabella replied.
It was the answer he had hoped for.
Somewhere in the neighbourhood a cock crowed and its cry tore apart the silence of the night. Isabella thought that the day about to break would be the first of spring.
Roger Mortimer undid his tunic and let it fall to the ground; he tore off his shirt. He stood there with his muscular chest bared to Isabella’s gaze.
The Queen unlaced her bodice; with a supple movement of the shoulders she drew her slender white arms from the sleeves and uncovered her breasts with their rosy nipples; four maternities had not impaired them; her gesture was proudly decisive, almost defiant.
Mortimer drew his dagger from his belt. Isabella withdrew the long pearl-headed pin that held her tresses in place, and the handles of the amphora fell softly down. Without taking his eyes from the Queen’s, Mortimer gashed his skin with a firm hand; the blood ran in a little red rivulet over the sparse chestnut hair of his chest. Isabella did the same to herself with the pin, near the left breast, and a bead of blood came out like the juice of a fruit. The fear of pain, rather than the pain itself, for an instant twisted the corners of her mouth. Then they moved towards each other across the three feet that separated them. She placed her breast against the man’s tall torso, rising on her toes so that the two wounds might meet. They each felt the contact of the other’s body for the first time, and the warm blood that now belonged to them both.
‘Dearest,’ she said, ‘I give you my heart and take yours by which I live.’
‘Dearest,’ he replied, ‘I take it and promise to keep it in place of my own.’
They did not move apart, prolonging indefinitely this strange kiss between lips that had been voluntarily opened in their breasts. Their hearts beat with the same quick and violent rhythm, seeming to reverberate from one to the other. The three years of chastity on his side and the fifteen on hers of waiting for love made the room reel about them.
‘Hold me tight, dearest,’ she murmured.
Her mouth rose towards the white scar that marked Mortimer’s lip, and her little carnivore’s teeth opened to bite.
The English rebel, the escaped prisoner from the Tower of London, the great Baron of the Welsh Marches, the former Justiciar of Ireland, Roger Mortimer, Baron of Wigmore, who had been Queen Isabella’s lover for two hours past, had just left in triumphant happiness, his head full of dreams, by the private staircase.
The Queen was not sleepy. Perhaps she would feel tired later; for the moment she was dazzled and astounded, as if a comet were aglow within her. She gazed with tremulous gratitude at the huge and ravaged bed. She was savouring her astonishment at a happiness she had never known before. She had never realized that one might have to crush one’s mouth against a shoulder to stifle a cry. She had opened the painted shutters and was standing by the window. Dawn was breaking in misty enchantment over Paris. Had she really arrived only yesterday evening? Had she ever lived before this night? Was it really this same city she had known in her childhood? The world had suddenly come to birth.
The Seine was flowing grey at the foot of the Palace, and over there, on the farther bank, stood the old Tower of Nesle. Isabella suddenly remembered her sister-in-law Marguerite of Burgundy. And a great horror seized on her. ‘What have I done?’ she thought. ‘What have I done? Had I but known!’
All women in love, in every part of the world and since the beginning of time, were her sisters, were women elect. The dead Marguerite, who had cried to her after the sentence at Maubuisson: ‘I have known a pleasure that is worth all the crowns of the world, and I regret nothing!’ How often had Isabella thought of that cry without understanding it! But this morning, in this new springtime, having known a man’s strength and the joy of taking and being taken, she understood at last. ‘I would certainly never denounce her today!’ she thought. And suddenly she felt shame and remorse for the act of royal justice she had instigated long ago, as though it were the one sin she had ever committed.
6
The Happy Year of 1325
FOR QUEEN ISABELLA, the spring of 1325 was an enchantment. She marvelled at the sunny mornings shining on the roofs of the city; thousands of birds twittered in the gardens; the bells of all the churches, convents and monasteries, even the great bourdon of Notre-Dame, seemed to be ringing out hours of happiness. The nights were scented with lilac under a starry sky.
Each day bro
ught its meed of pleasure: jousts, feasts, tournaments, hunts and picnics. An atmosphere of prosperity lay over the capital, and there was a great urge for amusement. There was profuse expenditure on public pleasures, even though the Treasury accounts showed a deficit for the last year of thirteen thousand, six hundred livres, due, as everyone was agreed, to the war in Aquitaine. But to obtain the necessary funds the Bishops of Rouen, Langres and Lisieux had been fined respectively twelve, fifteen and fifty thousand livres, for using violence against their chapters or the King’s men; and thus these too authoritarian prelates had more than made up for the military deficit. And then the Lombards had been summoned once again to repurchase their rights as burgesses.
In this way the luxury of the Court was maintained; and everyone hastened to take a part in the diversions, for the prime pleasure which consists of showing oneself off to others. And as it was with the nobility, so it was also with the bourgeoisie and even with the common people, for everyone was spending rather more than he could afford on the mere pleasures of life. There are, every now and then, years of this sort, when Fate seems to smile and to be affording a rest and a respite amid times of affliction. People buy and sell what are called unnecessary luxuries, as if it could ever be unnecessary to adorn oneself, to charm, to conquer, to lay claim to the right to love, to taste the rare fruits of human ingenuity and to profit by all that Providence and nature have given man for his pleasure in the exceptional place to which he has attained in the world.
Of course people complained, but not so much of being destitute as of being unable to satisfy all their desires. People complained of being less rich than the richest, of having less than those who had everything. The weather was exceptionally clement, business miraculously prosperous. The crusade had been given up; there was no longer talk of raising an army nor of devaluing the livre to the angel; the Privy Council was concerned with the conservation of fish in the rivers; and the fishermen with rod and line who occupied both banks of the Seine were warming themselves in the gentle May sunshine.
Love was in the air that spring. There were more weddings, and more little bastards too, than for a long time past. The girls were courted and happy, the boys boastful and enterprising. Travellers’ eyes were not wide enough to take in all the marvels of the city, nor their throats large enough to savour all the wine poured out for them in the hostelries, nor their nights long enough to enjoy all the pleasures offered them.
Oh, how that spring would live in the memory! Of course, there were diseases and deaths, mothers carrying new-born children to the cemetery, paralytics, cuckolded husbands complaining of a decline in morals, burgled shopkeepers accusing the Watch of neglecting its duty, men ruined from too great a thirst for pleasure or simply from mere heedlessness, fires that left families homeless, and crimes here and there; but these things were due to the common mischances of life, not to the fault of the King and his Council.
Indeed, it was a blessing, and due only to a happy and fleeting concatenation of events, to be alive in 1325, to be young or, at least, still active, or merely to possess good health. And it was grave folly not to appreciate to the full what God was giving, and not to thank Him for it. How much more greatly would the people of Paris have soured that spring of 1325, had they guessed what was in store for them! It was a fairy story, which children conceived between lavender-scented sheets during those wonderful months would find it hard to credit when one day they were told of it. 1325! The great days! And how very soon that year would come to be known as the ‘good times’.
And what of Queen Isabella? The Queen of England seemed to unite in her person all the magic and all the joy. People turned as she went by, not only because she was the Queen of England and the daughter of the great King, whose financial decrees, burnings at the stake, and terrible prosecutions were now forgotten and only the laws that had brought peace and strength to the realm remembered, but because she was beautiful and seemed immeasurably happy.
Among the people it was said that she would have worn the crown better than her brother, Charles the Fool, a charming prince but very weak, and they wondered whether Philippe the Long’s law which set women aside from the throne was a sound one. The English were very stupid to make so charming a Queen suffer so much.
At thirty-three, Isabella’s beauty was unrivalled by that of any young girl, however fresh she might be. The most renowned beauties among the young women of France seemed to retreat into the shade when Queen Isabella passed by. And all the young ladies dreamed of resembling her and took her as their model, copying her dresses, her gestures, her high-piled tresses, her way of looking at you and smiling.
A woman in love is characterized by the way she walks, even seen from the back; Isabella’s shoulders and hips, every step she took, all expressed her happiness. She was nearly always accompanied by Roger Mortimer who, since the Queen’s arrival, had made a sudden conquest of the town. People who the year before had thought him gloomy and proud, rather too arrogant for an exile, who had detected a certain censure in his virtuous air, suddenly discovered in Mortimer a man not only of admirably high character but of great charm. They ceased to think his black clothes, which were relieved only by a few silver clasps, lugubrious and now saw them as the elegant affectation of a man who was in mourning for his lost country.
Though he had no official position about the Queen, which would have constituted too overt a provocation to King Edward, Mortimer in fact led the negotiations. The Bishop of Norwich submitted to his ascendancy; John de Cromwell did not hesitate to declare that the Baron of Wigmore had been treated unjustly and that it was folly on the part of the sovereign to have alienated so meritorious a lord; the Earl of Kent had struck up a definite friendship with Mortimer and could decide nothing without his advice. And Mortimer received much evidence from England which went to prove that he was now looked on as the real leader of the opposition to the party of the Despensers.
It was generally known and admitted that Mortimer remained with the Queen after supper, for she required his counsel, so she said. And every night, as he came out of Isabella’s apartments, he found Ogle, the ex-barber of the Tower of London, now promoted to the position of butler, sleeping on a chest as he waited for his master. Mortimer shook him by the shoulder and they stepped over the servants asleep on the stone floors of the corridors, who never even raised the skirts of their coats from their faces, so accustomed had they become to these familiar footsteps.
Mortimer went home to his lodgings in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, to be welcomed by the fair, pink-complexioned and attentive Alspaye, whom he believed – how ingenuous lovers are! – to be the only man who knew of his royal liaison. He breathed the fresh dawn air triumphantly.
It was now settled that the Queen would not return to England until he could do so himself. The bond between them, renewed day by day and night by night, was becoming closer and more firmly knit; and the little white scar on Isabella’s breast, to which he ritually placed his lips before leaving her, remained the visible sign of the fusion of their wills.
Though a woman may be a queen, her lover is always her master; Isabella of England, who was capable of facing alone marital discord, the King’s betrayals, the hatred of a court, trembled long when Mortimer put his hand on her shoulder, felt her heart dissolve when he left her room, and took candles to the churches to thank God for having given her so wonderful a sin. When Mortimer was absent, even for an hour, she enthroned him in the forefront of her thoughts, and talked to him in a low voice. Each morning, when she awakened, before calling her women, she slid across the bed to the place her lover had left. A midwife had taught her certain secrets useful to ladies who seek their pleasure outside marriage. And it was whispered in Court circles, though no one saw offence in it, because it seemed only just amends on the part of Fate, that Queen Isabella was in love, as one might have said she was in the country, or better still, in raptures.
The treaty, whose preliminaries had been dragging on for some time, was at
last signed on May 31 between Isabella and her brother, with the reluctant agreement of Edward, who was to recover his domain of Aquitaine, but shorn of Agenais and Bazadais, that is to say of those districts which the French Army had occupied the previous year, and this only in consideration of an indemnity of sixty thousand livres. Valois had been inflexible on that point. It had required no less than the mediation of papal envoys to reach this agreement, which was still subject to the express condition that Edward should come and render homage, and this he was clearly reluctant to do, not now merely from considerations of prestige, but from motives of safety. It was agreed therefore to resort to a subterfuge which seemed to satisfy everyone. A date would be appointed for his rendering homage; then, at the last minute, Edward would pretend to be ill, which indeed would scarcely be a lie, for whenever there was now any question of his setting foot in France, he was attacked by all the symptoms of extreme anxiety; he turned pale, grew short of breath, felt his heart beat to an irregular rhythm, and had to lie down, panting, for an hour. He would therefore make over to his eldest son, the young Edward, the titles and estates of the Duke of Aquitaine, and would send him to take the oath in his place.
Everyone thought himself the gainer by this arrangement. Edward escaped the necessity of making a terrifying journey. The Despensers avoided the danger of losing their hold over the King. The Queen would recover her favourite son, for, involved though she was in her love affair, she suffered from being separated from him. And Mortimer foresaw the support to his future plans to be derived from the presence of the heir to the throne in the Queen’s party.
This party was continually growing, and in France itself. Edward was surprised that several of his barons, in this late spring, should have found it necessary to visit their French possessions, and he was even more disturbed by the fact that none of them returned. On the other hand, the Despensers had a number of spies in Paris who kept Edward informed about the attitude of the Earl of Kent, the presence of Maltravers in Mortimer’s household, and generally about the opposition party which was gravitating to the Court of France about the Queen. Officially the correspondence between husband and wife was still courteous, and Isabella addressed Edward as ‘sweetheart’ in the long letters she wrote explaining the slowness of the negotiations. But Edward had given orders to the admirals and sheriffs of the ports to intercept all messengers, no matter who they might be, carrying letters sent to anyone by the Queen, the Bishop of Norwich or members of their entourage. These messengers were to be sent to the King under safe escort. But was it possible to arrest all the Lombards who travelled about with letters of exchange?
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