Isabel the Fair

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  After that only constant surveillance kept Ned from trying to persuade some of the younger men in his suite, such as John de Bretagne and John Cromwell, to help him to return to England, and it was clear that he must have sent messages to his father by the Bishop of Exeter who had hurriedly and rather mysteriously returned thither.

  When Mortimer tried to exercise authority over the young Duke, and to restrain his freedom, the boy naturally resented it. “He grows sulky,” he complained, being accustomed to dealing firmly with grown men and having small tact with youngsters. And Isabel — in order to keep the peace between them — tried to talk reasonably with her son and to persuade him that right was on her side. She spoke of the misrule and unhappy state of England, blaming it with more personal enmity than justice on the Despensers. She reminded him how money and freedom had been denied her, and how her faithful French attendants had been sent away. Of her more personal wrongs she tried to speak guardedly, but she was living in a state of strain and was at all times a woman whose emotions must flare up urgently. Ned had no choice but to listen to her, and she felt that many of her arguments were beginning to colour his hitherto uncritical viewpoint, but she knew how much he hated it when she said anything which seemed to disparage his father. And as the months passed Edward wrote to the boy again pointing out bluntly that she had shamed both himself and Ned by appearing at the French coronation in the company of that “traitor and mortal enemy” Roger Mortimer. Isabel would have intercepted the letter if she could, because King Edward made her relationship with Roger Mortimer quite clear to his son, and from that time Ned, inarticulate with the raw hurt of being young and shamed and helpless, closed up his heart against her, and never spoke to Mortimer unless he was obliged to do so. Only the arrival of his uncle, Edmund of Kent, provided him with congenial company at that time. For in that gentle younger son of Marguerite Capet he found someone as bewildered as himself. A man who, while hating the Despensers, and having natural sympathy with his French relations, still loved England’s unsatisfactory King.

  To Isabel’s grief, her brother Charles’s attitude gradually changed towards her. Although he still allowed her hospitality, she knew that he avoided her and that his court would soon follow suit. She knew, too, that the remedy lay in her own hands, but she could not bring herself to break with Mortimer. Her body was utterly his, and the conviction that they were born to share some vaguely shaped destiny grew strongly in her mind. All Europe knew how she had deserted her husband to take a lover, and tattled of her shame. And she was honest enough to realize the uncomfortable position which she had created for Charles. There was a sincerity about Edward’s letter which must have moved him in spite of all his cynicism and, whatever his private feelings, she knew that he would feel bound to support a fellow monarch against the treachery and insolent adultery of a subject. Edward’s unjust and foolish provocation in rewarding years of loyal service by taking Mortimer’s lands and giving them to a new favourite would not interest him, nor Europe either. Only the people of England seemed to take into account the marital difficulties which she had been forced to endure. Isabel ate the bread of humbleness at his court until the Pope himself intervened. His Holiness must have been prodded, she supposed, by Hugh Despenser. He censured Charles for harbouring the Queen of England against her husband’s wishes and threatened to excommunicate him unless he turned her out of France immediately.

  It was a sad day for Isabel when she knew that she must leave her native land. Charles ordered her and all her entourage to go, and threatened to confiscate the estates of any of his subjects who offered them assistance. But Isabel half suspected that it was with his knowledge that a mutual cousin, Robert of Artois, came at dead of night to warn her that orders had been given for her arrest, together with that of her son, the Earl of Kent and Lord Mortimer, and that they would be shipped back to England by force unless they were gone from Paris by the following morning.

  All of them knew that to return would mean immediate execution for Mortimer. “I have had horses ready these three days for just such an emergency,” he told her, as soon as the kindly cousin was gone.

  Isabel was already giving orders to Hawtayne to waken her son and her brother-in-law. “But where shall we make for?” she asked, remembering how she had once asked the same question of her husband during another terrifying night, and been left behind alone at Tyneside. At least that would not happen to her now. Her lover would think and act for her. He was the kind of man she had always wanted.

  “Across the northern border into Hainault,” he said. “It will be the quickest and safest way out of France.”

  Her eyes met his consideringly. “The Count of Hainault is married to a cousin of mine,” she recalled.

  “Do you know them?”

  “I scarcely remember them. But I remember Queen Marguerite saying that she liked them, and how sad it was that they had a family of small daughters and despaired of ever begetting a son.”

  The mention of Marguerite’s name at such a moment was unfortunate. “If I had only learned to accept life as she would have me do, instead of fighting it!” she found herself thinking, as the full horror of the situation in which she had landed herself forced itself upon her. At the thought that she, Isabel of France, was escaping like a thief in the night to some strange country without state or welcome the blackness of the curtain shrouding her future seemed more impenetrable than ever. But there was no time for regrets, and she strove to stem her rising panic and to give coherent orders to her distracted women.

  Mortimer had sent Dragon to fetch Sir John Maltravers, a friend who had fled to France after the execution of Lancaster, and it seemed that they two were the only men whom he intended to take. She could see him through the doorway of an outer room sketching a rough map of their proposed route for Maltravers and giving Dragon orders about the horses. By the time he returned to her she was already dressed for their journey. “Capable woman!” he said, smiling for the first time since the news came. “One day I must put you in command of a successful army.”

  “You had thought all this out before?” she said, pointing to the map which, together with all the ready money he had, he was cramming into the pouch hanging from his jewelled belt.

  “We knew this had to come, you and I.”

  “Yet we never spoke of it. I was content, I suppose — for this short time stolen out of life — to be with you.”

  “Why speak of our partnership as if it were impermanent? It can go on, if you will have it so.” He grasped her shoulders with his strong, square hands, and looked down searchingly into her face. “This route I traced for John Maltravers leads to the French border, but eventually it can lead to London.”

  “You always intended to go back?”

  “Surely you know that?” He pushed her gently into a chair, poured wine for both of them, holding hers to her lips because her shaking hand would have spilled it. Then he perched on the table beside her and drank his own at a single draught. The light of a candle set in a tall sconce beside him threw into relief the strong lines of his clean-shaven face. “Isabel, it is time we talked of this with no shadow of pretence,” he said, when the warm Bordeaux had steadied her. “What is in your mind for the future?”

  “To go back to England with you — if you dare risk the return. Alone, I could never face that tormented life again. All the more, now that my conscience knows that my husband really has something against me. I can go only as an enemy.”

  “And when we get there?” he urged, not deeming it necessary to assure her that he would go, but leading her on that he might read her inmost mind.

  “We shall find many friends.”

  “Friends, yes. But to the point of being supporters?”

  “My cousin, Lancaster’s son, could scarcely be anything else.”

  “Orleton, Bishop of Hereford, is busy on our behalf and writes me that more than half the barons would rise to our cause.”

  “And the people” Isabel’s lips cur
ved into a reminiscent smile, and Mortimer grinned with satisfaction. “They worship you, their beautiful and injured Queen, do they not? Your uncle of Lancaster worked on them well.”

  “They love me for myself, without his scheming. And Marguerite used to say that if the people are on one’s side — ”

  Their voices had sunk to whispers inaudible to her bustling women in the next room; their minds were so well attuned that half-sentences sufficed. “Roger, what is our cause?” she asked. “What do you plan to do when we get there?”

  He twirled his empty tankard thoughtfully on the table before him. “Reclaim all that is mine. And yours. See you reinstated as an unhampered Queen. Help you to rule.”

  His daring outran her wildest thoughts. “And who,” she asked, picking her words slowly, “would be King?”

  “Your son.”

  “A puppet king, with the real power in our hands. Until England is in better shape again. Roger, you yourself would not want to be — ”

  “No, I swear it. The boy should be King, at least in name. Edward the Third.”

  “You had this in mind when you persuaded me to send for him?”

  Mortimer did not deny it. He threw back his head and laughed. “Lord, what fools they were to let him come!” Then suddenly he was deadly serious, leaning forward so that the candlelight was glitteringly reflected in his strange, brown-flecked eyes. “Say that you are with me in this, Isabel.”

  She stood up and faced him across the table. She remembered the tempting tingling of power that had sometimes taken her unawares when Edward had been particularly foolish. “I believe that I, a woman, could rule England better than that tortured country has been ruled for years. I have often felt it. And with you beside me — ”

  “Then that is our cause. Does it satisfy you?”

  She did not answer. Her momentary elation passed — elation for something which she felt to be full of fine possibilities. Mortimer leaned closer and his eyes compelled her. “I have told you my inmost thoughts, but time presses and you still withhold a part of yours. If we are in this fierce enterprise together there must be ruthless candour, without reserve or shame, between us. Deep down in your heart there is something more. Some goal that you have lived towards as I have lived towards this pageant of power. What is it, Isabel?”

  She was surprised by his unusual perspicacity, and the steadiness of his gaze seemed to have some hypnotic power. Sometimes of late she had wondered if he really had some such power over her. The words were drawn out of her slowly, as though she were sleepwalking. She did not even know that she was going to say them. “To break Hugh Despenser for all that he has broken of mine.” Shamelessly, she had put into words her most pressing immediate desire. Desire to revenge her broken marriage. Beyond that all was still dark and unmaterialized.

  “That I can promise you,” said Mortimer, as hurrying footsteps on the stairs proclaimed that all was in readiness for their departure.

  Neither of them had mentioned Edward. For the present it was as if they had extinguished his unavoidable existence by pushing the thought of him from their minds.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It was pleasant and peaceful in the privy garden at Valenciennes and Isabel, tired by her long and anxious journey, was thankful to wander without ceremony in the late spring sunshine. Sweet-scented gilly flowers blossomed around her, and she found it soothing to listen to the contented cooing from the tall stone dovecote, or to sit lazily watching a procession of small white clouds floating across the vast inverted bowl of sky above the flat fields of the Netherlands.

  Although grave hazards still remained to be faced in the future, most of her immediate anxieties had proved groundless. No one could have received greater kindness than she, ever since her party had come over the French border into Hainault. It had been like living in another world. No scandalous notoriety seemed to have preceded her into this sleepy province of the holy Roman Empire, and her cousin, Joanna of Valois, and the chivalrous Count of Hainault had received her with open arms. Her fragile beauty and obvious distress had won sympathy for her from their subjects. “Banished from her own brother’s court,” people said. “And unkindly treated by her husband before that!” Isabel could not understand their guttural tongue, and it was her cousin Joanna who translated the remarks overheard in every street crowd that turned out to do the English Queen honour and to marvel at the latest Paris fashion of her elaborate winged headdresses. And it was Joanna, kind credulous creature, who had repeated in shocked tones to her husband William of Hainault the whole tale of wrongs that Isabel poured out to her.

  “She shall not want for money or freedom here,” he had vowed in a rumbling attempt at French, nodding and smiling encouragingly at his wife’s distressed relative and finding himself rather pleased to be able to tell his friends that he had a Queen staying in his comfortable castle.

  And so in the kindness of their hearts they gave several of their prodigious banquets, and between whiles received Ned into their family circle of growing daughters and frequently left Isabel to sit in their own private garden with her own people — with her gentle, good-looking brother-in-law who was also related to them through his mother, and with the devoted Welsh lord who had brought her out from Paris with so much efficiency and who seemed to be in charge of her affairs.

  “How right Roger was to come here!” exclaimed Edmund of Kent with a sigh of grateful relief, as soon as the three of them were left alone.

  Isabel smiled at them both impartially, but Mortimer was standing a little apart with a foot on the coping of a small fish pond, chin buried in palm, his mind clearly on something else, so she went on talking to her husband’s half-brother, who looked at times so disconcertingly like him. “I shall not soon forget the surprise or the kindness of that knight who took us in at Ostrevant. Nor of the way his wife cared for us. It was a poor sort of place and they had a family of growing children to feed, but they gave us of their best. What was his name, Edmund?”

  “Sir Eustace d’Ambreticourt.”

  “I pray you remember it so that I may one day do something to repay them.”

  “As meticulously as you insisted upon doling out coins to pay your creditor before we left Paris, even though Roger was fuming and the horses were champing at the door!” teased Edmund, breaking a manchet of bread which he had brought to feed the rising carp. “But it is true that we have much to thank the d’Ambreticourts for. It was they who thought to send news of your arrival immediately to Valenciennes.”

  “And then that eager young brother of William’s came to fetch us here.”

  “The impressionable Sir John of Hainault,” said Kent, smiling at the pleasant recollection.

  “A very knight-errant out of the Arthurian legends, with his Saxon blue eyes and his wavy flaxen hair.”

  “And all ready to fall beneath the spell of a beautiful damsel in distress, and to tilt for her against the whole wicked world!”

  They laughed at the thought of how completely the inexperienced young knight had been bewitched by her beauty. “Well, if there was no such dramatic need to do that, at least he brought us all here in comfort and with an adequate escort,” said Isabel, holding out a hand for a piece of the bread. The fish were jumping greedily and she began feeding them too, and would have been content to sit there in pleasant idleness for the rest of the morning.

  But Roger Mortimer seldom suffered people to sit idle for long. His own mind had been on his next move ahead. “In spite of the kindness which your Grace’s relatives have shown us we cannot afford to outstay our welcome here as we did in France,” he said, “And it seems to me that now, at the flood tide of Flemish sympathy, we may be able to raise some supporters.”

  Isabel was relieved to notice that before her brother-in-law he had the good sense to address her more formally than when they were alone. Reluctantly, she ceased throwing breadcrumbs into the sunlit pool. “You mean, milord, that you think we should be preparing to leave as soon as possib
le?”

  “I do, Madam. All the more so because it will give us the invaluable advantage of taking our enemies by surprise. But the question my mind has been working on is where shall we land? Naturally, I would suggest Wales, where every man would be for me, were it not for the twin facts that it would necessitate a much longer sea voyage and that, in my opinion, we should strike first at London.” He turned to Kent. “Have you any ideas about a landing place, milord?”

  “Why not East Anglia where my brother of Norfolk’s lands lie? Somewhere near his great stronghold of Framlingham?”

  “What port would you suggest? I do not know that part of England.”

  “There is the river Orwell, where the Flemish weavers’ ships put in, and our own wool merchants’ wherries set sail. It is a sheltered place, and not too far from London.”

  “We could run up this river Orwell at night. And you think that your brother the Earl of Norfolk will join us?”