“It is all part of a plot. Bartholomew Badlesmere openly supports his wife’s conduct,” he told her after he had demanded an explanation. Through the drawn-back curtains at the end of her bed she could see him standing by her table prodding at a scent pot with one of her jewelled pins like a petulant child. “I would like to pull their castle down about their ears!”
“Except that it is mine, and that I love the place. But you will punish the old virago and her impudent seneschal?”
“If I had the men I would. But Badlesmere boasts openly that Leeds is well victualled and evidently they both count on your uncle coming to their aid. And my soldiers are sick of war, my sweet, and glad to get home, as I am!”
He came and sat on the bed and would have taken her into his arms, but she held him off, her mind too set upon revenge for love-making. “I do not think Uncle Thomas would go so far as that,” she said. “But he deserves putting in his place. Surely you can raise enough men to take a small castle like Leeds. And in so just a cause. Appeal to the Londoners, Edward. You know how they love me. And you remember how Marguerite always used to say that the people’s sense of fair play is our best protection.”
She sat up in the great bed, vitally alive, with that familiar, heady sense of her own power rising within her. Here was a chance to put to the test that exciting conviction she had experienced when coming out from Westminster Hall after the barons had been pardoned at her request — the conviction that the people of England would bestir themselves for her when they would not move for Edward. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, and her husband was staring at her admiringly. This was her moment, with the Despensers away, to prove her power over him. And over them.
“If I ride out and appeal to them I believe the Londoners will rise as one man,” she said.
“And I myself will lead them,” he promised, catching her enthusiasm.
“And think, mon cher, in what a much better position you will be afterwards with that army behind you — to turn to your own uses.”
She let him take her then, surrendering with glad abandon. She did not want to bear him another child. Since Bannockburn she had sworn unavailingly that she would not. But her ardent senses were too easily stormed, and her vanity appeased. She had always seen herself as the partner of a great lover, a beautiful woman championed by a powerful husband. Ever since adolescence it had been her unfulfilled dream. And now Edward was stirred violently to military action, prepared seemingly to act with the strange, single-minded courage which he had shown when Piers Gaveston’s life was in danger. But this time it would be for her. It was the vindication which her jealousy had always craved.
The next morning he issued a proclamation explaining the way in which his beloved consort had been insulted and obstructed in the use of her own property, and mustering all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty to join him in an expedition against Leeds castle in Kent. And to his surprise and to Isabel’s deep, secret joy an army larger than their wildest expectations assembled, only too eager to fight on her behalf. The city of London, where her beauty and her previous wrongs were so well known, justified her boast and rose to a man. The King led them in person. And although Lady Badlesmere and Walter Colepepper, her seneschal, held out stubbornly in the hope that the Earl of Lancaster and Lord Badlesmere would relieve them, the days passed and no relief came. Clearly Lancaster, although he had not come to avenge his niece, had no intention of further affronting her. And before the last of the October leaves had fallen the castle had surrendered, and the bodies of Waiter Colepepper and eleven of his men were dangling hideously on gibbets before the gate. Two of them for each of the Queen’s servants who had been so wantonly shot there.
It was a vengeance to satisfy the pride of any woman. But thrilled as she was that Edward’s rare ruthlessness should have been roused on her account, Isabel did not particularly want to picture them swaying and swirling there in the first winterly winds. They had but done bravely as they were bid. “It will not hurt their mistress as the fate of my poor men hurt me. The woman has no feelings,” she said, thinking of poor gentle Thomeline. “Are you not going to punish the virago herself?”
“She will have plenty of time in the Tower of London to repent her rudeness to you,” Edward told her.
“But why do you let her off more lightly than her men? It was she who gave the treacherous orders.”
Edward had turned to look at her, surprising the hardness in her small, heart-shaped face. “My dear Isabel, you do not expect me to put women to death, do you?” he had asked, half-disgusted and half-amused. “We Plantagenets are accused of all kinds of faults, God knows, but scarcely that.”
She knew that she had wanted to retaliate by making the old lady suffer, had hoped to be able to picture her overfed body dangling with the rest, and was appalled at her own wickedness. Momentarily she suspected she must have had the instincts of a murderess. But Edward was no murderer, though she had suspected him of it that night after Guy of Warwick died. The punishment he had meted out at Leeds was stem, but would be accounted in most men’s eyes as just, and he himself would be thought the more of in consequence. Indeed, his stock had gone up throughout the land.
Isabel had supposed that after doing all he had set out to do he would return to her, but unaccustomed success and the size of his willing army seemed to have gone to his head. “While I have them I will use them to break up this growing opposition of Lancaster’s,” he wrote, and knowing that she herself had half suggested it and rejoicing in his sudden spurt of mastery she did nothing to dissuade him. Kind as Thomas of Lancaster had been to her in the past, and much as her annoyance with him had been mitigated by the fact that he had not come to the relief of Leeds castle, she wanted Edward to crush his power and reign more absolutely. It would do pompous Lancaster no harm to be shown who was master. And, as though sensing the coming conflict, men were still streaming in to join the royal cause. She was proud to know that for once the second Edward was leading them in person.
But there were two things which she had not counted on. The first thing Edward did after his success at Leeds was to recall the Despensers to his side, and although Hugh urged him to use his unexpected force to crush Lancaster and the rest of the resurgent barons once and for all, so that for once his council upheld her own, she knew that her hour of exclusive feminine influence was over.
With the King and all his fine standards marching northwestward towards Lancashire there was nothing to do but to wait quietly for news at Westminster. And one evening after her two younger children had been brought to say goodnight and they and their nurses were gone, Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, was announced. She always enjoyed his suave and entertaining company. Guessing at her loneliness, he stayed and talked awhile, praising his godson Ned’s achievements on his new pony and at the quintain, assuring her that the wool trade was gradually improving and the famine abating, speaking in his interesting way of this and that. “And now to add to this gratifying surge of loyalty on your behalf,” he added, “there comes good news from France.”
“Is Roger Mortimer back so soon?” she asked quickly.
“In the King’s absence I met him as he passed through London yesterday.”
“And he succeeded in his mission?”
Pembroke smiled, with expressively spread hands. “I imagine he is the kind of man who usually does.”
“Did he get on well with my brother?”
“Very well, apparently, since King Charles has promised to withhold his hand from Guienne for a few more
months, until such time as the King is free to come and do homage for it.”
Isabel bent over a childish posy which small toddling Eleanor had deposited adoringly in her lap. She busied herself smoothing out each wilted petal so that the revealing torchlight no longer illuminated her face. “In the King’s absence milord Mortimer did not come to see me,” she remarked.
“He bade me make his excuses to your Grace. On arriving in London
he heard of the Lady Eleanor’s marriage to Hugh Despenser.”
The Queen straightened herself up abruptly. “And about the lavish grants of land, I suppose?”
“He is already on his way to Wales,” said Pembroke significantly, bending to pick up the posy which the suddenness of her movement jerked unheeded to the floor.
“And what now, milord?” she asked, scarcely above a whisper.
Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, the most farseeing of them all, sighed heavily. “Yet more trouble in this quarrel-racked country, ma pauvre chere reine” he said. “And what will be the end of it God knows, with Roger Mortimer taking part.”
Long after he had bowed himself out Isabel sat there staring before her, her small strong hands gripping the mythical beasts carved on the arms of her chair. She thought of the powerful army Edward now commanded, of his sudden spurt of energy and of the part she herself had played in provoking it. She had thought with complacency of troublesome Uncle Thomas being taught a lesson. She had not said a word to deter her husband from using it to put down the power of the barons with whom she had for so many years been on good terms and whose pardon she had once obtained. But never once had it occurred to her that that very army might be used against Roger Mortimer. Never until now had she visualized the possibility of the King and his loyal border lord being on different sides. But now that Pembroke’s words had shocked her into seeing that Edward’s final folly must make them bitterly opposed, she knew beyond doubt whose side she was on. For much as she had enjoyed the triumph of being championed so fiercely by the King, she knew now — as she had known ever since Bannockburn — that her first wild physical love for him was dead.
“If only I had never set out on that ill-fated pilgrimage!” she thought. “That Badlesmere hag’s discourtesy may well cost far more than my servants’ lives and my own indignity. God knows I was in the right, but as usual I had to pursue my vengeful fury to the uttermost. And there was no Marguerite to tell me I was behaving like a fool!”
Chapter Nineteen
After all, Isabel saw Roger Mortimer before he left for Wales — hurriedly, soon after dawn, with the horses of his retinue champing impatiently outside in the street. Almost peremptorily he had sent Ghislaine to waken her. “I owe your Grace thanks for warning me about Eleanor of Glare’s marriage contract,” he said without preamble when she came to him. The torches had not been lit and he was standing in the shadows so that she could not well see his face, but he spoke in the half-angry way of a man who hates being beholden to anybody.
Her composure was ruffled as only he could ruffle it. “And that is why you are hurrying home to the Welsh border? Aymer de Valence says that you and my uncle have succeeded in persuading a strong party to use force if necessary to banish the Despensers,” she said, feeling how history was repeating itself and hurrying over the inept words like any nervous serving wench.
“What else did the King expect me to do, with Gilbert’s inheritance divided at my very doorstep between two men who hate me!”
His anger against her husband was like a tangible thing in the shadowed room and he made no effort to hide it, seeming to take her partnership for granted. She made no protest, but came and seated herself nearer to him on the deep window seat. “De Audley, the other Clare girl’s new husband, I should have thought is negligible,” she said, as if considering a tactical position which personally concerned her. “And in any case you did not seem to mind when Piers Gaveston had Margaret’s lands.”
“Gaveston did not hanker after political power. He wanted the glitter of possessions so that he might enjoy life. You of all people should know that this Hugh Despenser is the most ambitious man in England. And it is my lands, my castles, by which he thinks to climb.” Mortimer came nearer to her, resting one foot on the window step, beating fist into palm to emphasize his words, and yet retaining a quality of stillness which empasized his strength. Although he achieved more than most men his economy of movement matched his economy of words. “A Mortimer’s command was heeded throughout Wales. We practically ruled the country, and in return kept the King of England’s borders. I could have made a mort of trouble when Robert Bruce and the Black Douglas kept him busy in Scotland. Yet we kept faith with England. But now — ”
“Pembroke has no cause to like this redistribution of land either.”
Mortimer laughed harshly. “Pembroke will come in with me and Hereford and Berkeley, whose castle guards the Severn Valley. But do you suppose I shall allow it to happen?”
“Men say you know how to hold what is yours.”
“And if the King provokes me to it I shall know how to take what is his.” He did not move or touch her, but his eyes looked into hers so boldly that she knew it was not only Edward’s kingdom of which he spoke.
She rose and faced him, striving after dignity. “You forget, milord, that King Edward is my husband.”
“Is he?” At sight of his contemptuous grin she felt herself cringing before the blow of what she divined he would say next. “Or is he merely the lover of Hugh Despenser?”
“How dare you?” she cried.
She reached up and struck him savagely across the mouth, but he only shrugged, shaking aside her anger as a dog might shake drops of water from its coat. “Ask Pembroke. Ask that clever master-of-horse who is so enamoured of you. Ask anybody.”
“Why ask them — or you — ? It is I, who have lived with Edward amicably these many years and borne his children, who should know.”
“He has been away from you a great deal of late,” he reminded her, with a rough kind of pity.
“And so that is what men are saying — again?”
But this time she minded more that they should say it, sniggering behind their hands in palaces and taverns, than that it should be so. Roger Mortimer did not answer but watched her admiringly as she stood there tearing the King’s Christmas necklace from her throat and blazing with anger because she could not shout aloud that she no longer loved the King, nor cared with whom he might consort.
“How anger becomes you, Isabel!” he said after a while. “When I devastate Glamorganshire I shall be striking for you, too. And taking vast pleasure in the fact.”
He spoke as though he were her equal. As no man without royal blood had ever dared to do before. And the shock of it almost made her forget her anger. “Why tell me what you intend to do?” she asked, without hauteur.
“Have I not always said we should be partners?”
“But why trust me? How do you know that I will not warn the King — as I warned you a while ago.”
She was staring up at him, already regretting the savage red weal deepening on his weather-beaten cheek. When he took a step towards her she knew what he would do, and made no effort to stop him. He pulled her against his body so that she could feel the strong beating of his heart and, bending, crushed her mouth beneath his own. It was a long kiss of possession and surrender, and when he released her both of them were aware that it was not she who moved first. “That is why,” he said.
She sank limply to a nearby stool. She did not know whether she loved or hated him, and at the moment it did not seem to matter. All that mattered was that he could move her as no other man ever had, and satisfy the full capacity of her senses, and that in that close and silent embrace some power of proud resistence had gone out of her. “A woman like you was not made for that half kind of marriage,” he was saying, roused to a kind of tenderness, but more controlled than she.
In this first demonstration of what they meant to each other even what he had said about Hugh Despenser seemed of small account. She knew that he was on the point of leaving her, and only things which concerned themselves, however small, had any place in her mind. “I, too, am in your debt, Roger, and — unlike you, proud Welshman — I rejoice in it,” she said, smilingly pushing back a lock of hair which had escaped from her elaborate headdress. “I have not thanked you for those welcome food waggons.” Even then, with their mutual defences down,
she could not bring herself to tell him that all that time ago it had been his solicitude rather than the food upon which she had fed. “You must have cared to send them?”
He laughed and shrugged, dangerously attractive in his careless virility. “I had seen Englishwomen in Ludlow, who had managed to reach relatives over our border. All scrawny and haggard, they were, with withered breasts. I did not want your beauty to be blemished like that.”
Isabel sighed with pleasure. “You remembered me then. Am I so beautiful?”
“You have a mirror, vain woman.”
“It could lie. A woman can have perfect features and lack some lure which plainer women use. Her only true mirror is in men’s eyes.”
“Then look in mine.” He pulled her up from her stool and drew her close again, but was clever enough to leave her unkissed, so that she could only assuage her hunger by learning every line which life had fashioned in his face — the heavy reddish brows, the battle scar on his left cheek, the wide and sensuous mouth. “But you will not be here to keep me convinced. You are going away,” she complained. “Is Joan, your wife, very beautiful too?”
“Beautiful, but cold.”
“Yet I have been told you have a son.” Above her own preoccupation she heard approaching footsteps and the voices of her women, and turned from him reluctantly. “Is it for them you hurry away from me to Wigmore before it is well light?”
A horse whinnied impatiently down in the palace yard. There was a clattering of restive hoofs in the direction of St. Margaret’s Lane, and a raising of men’s voices. When her women came into the room to dress her for the day, the great border lord was gathering up his gloves and swinging a fine green cloak about his shoulders. “You will soon hear why I go, Madam,” he said, bending formally to kiss the Queen’s hand.
And soon all England heard. While the King was proclaiming Thomas of Lancaster a traitor and preparing to do battle with him in Yorkshire, Roger Mortimer called his fellow border lords together and devastated Eleanor of Clare’s property to the last acre so that when her ambitious new husband came gloatingly to take possession there was nothing but wasted pastures and burned villages to inherit. Mortimer took Newport, the capital. And four days later Cardiff, the main stronghold of all Glamorganshire, and then Caerphilly. The English, hearing of it, were appalled. But because of their sense of fair play and the dislike they had for the King’s new favourite they were not wholly sorry.
Isabel the Fair Page 16