Mortimer moved rebelliously beneath her restraining hand. “Do you expect me to come to heel like a little dog? I, without whom he would not have become king for years. As you yourself just said, I have taken his father’s place. And in any case your precious son is only a gangling boy.”
Isabel withdrew her fondling hand and sat back in her chair, her head held high. “But a Capet and a Plantagenet,” she snapped haughtily.
“As I am a Mortimer, with blood from the old British kings. All north Wales obeyed me, and now it is England’s turn,” stormed Mortimer, springing up and kicking aside his chair. But the next minute he had crushed her in his arms. “We must always fight, we two,” he was whispering laughingly between his passionate kisses. “It is the fiendish pride which is in us both. But I told you long ago I want no mouse of a woman, did I not my sweet? And your spitfire thrusts but make our love-making the fiercer.”
Overborne by the undiminished mastery of his embrace, Isabel capitulated as usual. “If not Lincoln, then whom had you thought of to take charge of Edward?” she asked, when the passion of the moment was past.
“Sir Thomas Goumey, perhaps, or Sir John Maltravers of Dorset who was with us in exile,” suggested Mortimer. His tone was negligent but Isabel felt intuitively that the whole matter had long been arranged in his own mind.
“I do not like the faces of either of them,” she said. “And Maltravers, having fought for my uncle of Lancaster at Boroughbridge and been forced to fly the country, would certainly bear a sore grudge against Edward. Perhaps that is why you have chosen him?”
He did not answer directly but pulled a roll of parchment from the leather pouch hanging from his belt. It appeared to be an order of some kind upon which she caught sight of Gourney’s name. Mortimer laid it before her as if he would have had her sign it but she shook her head, walking away towards the window as though she would none of it. “I am the last person — ” she began unsteadily. “It is for Ned, the King, to sign. And if he too dislikes these two men I doubt if he will.”
“He can be as obstinate as a mule,” agreed Mortimer, remembering how steadfastly he had refused to wear the crown in his father’s lifetime.
The thoughts of both of them pursued the subject in the silent room. Mortimer knew that once Isabel had capitulated to his wishes she would work with him, whatever the opposing drag of personal feelings. And presently she turned from the window. “I think I can persuade Ned,” she said, in that pleased silky tone which so often now clothed her cleverly-thought-out designs. And meeting her lover’s questioning gaze, she smiled reassuringly. “There is that girl Philippa whom he has set his heart on. Left to himself William of Hainault would certainly give him the eldest daughter and they are all much the same to us. But I could promise to drop a hint to Joanna, my sentimental Valois cousin, to persuade him. And if I win Ned’s gratitude he may prove more amenable.”
Mortimer’s admiring grin was reward enough. Isabel returned to her chair and picked up the documents distastefully. “‘Sir Thomas Gourney and Sir John Maltravers to conduct the said Sir Edward Plantagenet to Corfe Castle in Dorset,’” she read. “Why Corfe?”
“It belongs to Maltravers. It will give me time. Until Gourney — or both of them — can take him farther westward.”
Isabel laid it down again. A part of her was still fighting, however feebly, on her husband’s side. “Roger,” she said, on a sudden inspiration, “why not Berkeley eventually?”
“Berkeley?”
“That charming castle you took me to from Gloucester. Oh, I know it is on this side of the Severn, but they are all your good friends and neighbours there. And Thomas Berkeley is your son-in-law. It will be a way in which he can serve you, since I imagine that wretched fever he caught will scarcely allow him to go fighting the Scots. And Ned likes and trusts him. He would willingly sign an order for putting his father in his care.”
Mortimer, with his slower mind, stood absorbing the new idea. “No man ever had such a partner,” he said. But he pulled her to her feet and looked searchingly into her eyes. “You suggestion is wholly to satisfy Ned, I hope,” he said. “You are not still a little in love with that handsome husband of yours?”
His uncharacteristic spark of intuition and the shred of truth it held shocked her. But she gave him back gaze for level gaze. “What love I had for him was killed when he ran away at Bannockburn,” she answered.
Yet the pleading letters which Edward managed to send her from time to time still wrung her heart. Once he had reached Corfe they became much less frequent, mere smudged notes on the back of used pieces of parchment, or a page tom from a book, for which she judged he must have found difficulty in finding a messenger. They were usually handed to her secretly, so that she seldom mentioned them, not wanting to close her last means of contact with him. But there came a time when she felt impelled to speak for him. “Edward writes to tell me how much he yearns to ride in God’s free air again,” she once told Mortimer, during the deposed king’s imprisonment at Corfe.
“A yearning for which he condemned me to many months in the Tower,” he retorted grimly. “Besides, Orleton was right when he said that the people in country districts are inclined to forget his follies and press about him too sympathetically when he rides abroad.”
“Perhaps if he were to change clothes with his groom — ”
Mortimer stared at her in surprise. Obviously she still pictured him with some of his own servants about him. But he did not disillusion her. “My dear Isabel, is he easy to disguise — with his height and his trimly curled brown hair and beard?”
She was thinking now more of the dangerous sympathy than of Edward’s desire for fresh air. “If someone could persuade him to shave off his beard — ”
“I am sure Gourney could persuade him. And it would make it safer moving him about.”
Isabel looked up too quickly, catching the fleeting ruthlessness of his smile, and wished she had not pressed the matter. A sense of inexplicable foreboding seized her. “You used to like him once. I remember how he greeted you that day before Bannockburn when we first met.”
“I was loyal to him. I do not like incapable perverts. But do not worry. He will have all the riding in God’s free air he wants next week, when Gourney and Maltravers will be escorting him to Bristol.”
“Bristol is a long way round to Berkeley. Why do you keep moving him from castle to castle — and in such misfortunate weather?”
“It could be fortunate for us. Particularly as I now think of having him moved by night.”
Isabel saw the sinister smile still on his lips and recoiled. “If you hope to rid yourself of him that way you will not succeed. It is useless to ill-use him, Roger. He is sound and hardy as a horse.”
But even Edward was only human, and never had there been such a wet and blustering April. The roads near London were quagmires, so that one could scarcely imagine what the tracks and lanes in the west must be like. All day as rain and wind beat against the palace windows Isabel’s thoughts kept turning unwillingly to her husband. If she sat quiet for a moment or closed her eyes in chapel she found herself picturing him riding sodden, weary and shivering through the darkness. That evening she sent for her favourite French musicians and the best troop of players in London because she did not want to think of him, but before nightfall she had called Ghislaine to accompany her along endless passages to the deposed King’s wardrobe. With a few of her women and a single page holding a torch she looked through such of his possessions as were left. Although all his jewels and valuable robes had been removed at the time of their son’s coronation many of his familiar garments were still folded away in the great oak chests or hanging from the tenter pegs in his closet. As the women took them down and shook them out, the scent of musk which he affected filled the stagnant air so that Isabel was almost fearful of turning about too suddenly lest she should see him staring at her accusingly from the shadows. Hurriedly she chose his warmest riding cloak and a favourite fur-lined
, rose-embroidered houppelande of tawny velvet and his riding boots of crimson Cordova leather, and had them bundled into saddlebags for a messenger to take to him for his journey to Bristol, and when her women kept looking at her curiously and wondering for whom the fine things were destined, she said negligently and audibly to Ghislaine, “God knows we should think of the poor and needy during this cruel weather!”
The poor and the needy — who had been King of England, she thought. And remembering that he had a passion for honeyed marchpanes she sent the page to beg a basketful from his young sweet-toothed successor, knowing how much Ned would wish to contribute them to her parcels. Warmed by her forethought, she hoped, Edward arrived in Bristol. But she learned from Mortimer that it had been impossible to keep him there for long owing to an unexpected rising of the citizens in his favour. Why, oh why, she thought, could people not see how their well-meant sympathy only made things harder for him? And a week or two after he had arrived at Berkeley she returned from evensong to find Ned waiting for her in her private apartments. He was standing without ceremony before the hearth, the firelight sparkling on his golden circlet and his red-gold hair and on a sheet of paper which he held. Reading suppressed excitement in the abrupt way in which he turned to her, Isabel dismissed all her attendants from the room.
“It is from the K — from my father,” he said, holding out the piece of parchment. “One of Glaunville’s grooms brought it.”
“And who is Glaunville?”
“Milord Berkeley’s steward, Madam.”
“Ah, yes, I remember him.” Isabel wondered anxiously what Edward could have told their son, but looking down at the paper she saw that it was nothing more innocuous than a poem of some kind.
“See, Madam, it is undoubtedly in his own hand. The niggly little letters and the tall looped l’s,” Ned was saying excitedly. “And the man said that milord Berkeley specially wanted me to have it.”
Between the effect of his agitation and her own limited scholarship the verse seemed meaningless. “It is in Latin, Ned. I pray you translate it for me into French.” Being now taller than she, he read it over her shoulder as she held it. “‘Mamnum mihi contulit tempore brumali’
My tutor will tell you that my Latin limps like a spavined horse. But it goes something like this.
“On my devoted head Her bitterest showers,
All from a wintry cloud,
Stern Fortune pours.
View here her favourite Graced with fair comeliness!
As fortune worsens Each grace has vanished,
Wisdom and wit depart Beauty is banished.”
“Without the least trace of vanity he must always have been aware of his comeliness,” smiled Isabel, relieved that Edward had made no specific appeal to his son. “And though I doubt if there was ever much wisdom it would take a great deal of misfortune to banish his beauty!”
“But he speaks of fortune worsening. Why was he ever moved from Kenilworth? How can you and that devil Mortimer do this to him?” The words burst from Ned with boyish impetuosity, and then he stood abashed. His kingship was too new and too circumscribed for him to dare to speak to her so. But because she secretly shared some of his anxiety Isabel was gentle with him. “You know that my cousin Lincoln is too much occupied with affairs of State in London to care for him. And you trust Thomas of Berkeley, do you not?”
“With all my heart, Madam. But he is not there. Glaunville’s man said that Thomas Berkeley was taken ill at Bradelye or some such place while making a tour of his estates. And that for some reason or other he particularly wanted me to have my father’s verse.”
“It must be a recurrence of that vicious fever Berkeley caught when your father and Despenser had him gaoled, yet he sends you the poem.” Isabel spoke half to herself, gaining time to think. Young Berkeley was Mortimer’s friend, he could have little love for Edward, but he had shown himself a man of humane gentleness and honour. Could the verses be some kind of warning, sent desperately to the highest quarter of all, because he himself was powerless to move? But of course that was absurd. She must have become fanciful of late. And she recalled how often she had seen Edward and Piers Gaveston with their heads together composing frivolously artistic odes to a broken heart or a dying swan. “Do not take your father’s durance so seriously, Ned,” she said. “I myself have sometimes received letters from him which were far more wretched than this, and I have more than once written to him of you children and sent him warm clothing. But now he is in Berkeley Castle all will be well with him. You have only to look at this verse, my son. Exquisitely written and carefully composed. And in Latin, which does not come too easily to him. I have been in Berkeley Castle and I can imagine him sitting before the fire in Thomas’s comfortable hall, with the musicians playing softly in the gallery and a fine hound or two at his feet.” As she drew the reassuring picture, her own momentary doubts vanished. With a gay flip of her jewelled fingers and a cynical smile she handed the paper back to him. “No, no, Ned. It is only the man who had my dear uncle of Lancaster put to death being dramatically sorry for himself.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
All through the long hot day people had been roaming restlessly about the streets, cheering and laughing, weeping and waving. Baggage wagons had been rumbling over London bridge from the newly acquired borough of Southwark on the Surrey side of the river and bands of soldiers were making for some assembly point among the open fields of Aldersgate. The tranquillity they had hoped for with the Queen’s return had been short-lived, and now they were off again to drive the persistent Scots back over the oft-harassed border. But at last the round red September sun went down, curfew sounded and within the palace of Westminster the Queen’s women withdrew from her bedchamber. They knew that her lover would come. Mortimer, in his arrogance, made no secret of it now. After being separated since morning by various public engagements he and Isabel faced each other anxiously at the foot of her bed, released at last from the necessity of public graciousness. “You have heard that Edward has managed to send an appeal to the Pope?” he said, having waited all day to discuss this thing.
It was clear from the drawn look of her face that she had. “Bishop Orleton whispered it to me as I was on my way to the review,” she said.
“And he should know, having just returned from a visit to his Holiness at Avignon.”
“Edward must have contrived to send his petition weeks ago.
“From Kenilworth probably. We did well to move him.”
“And to think that I tried to dissuade you from it.” The Pope’s intervention was the one thing which Isabel had been secretly dreading, and which she would do anything to avert. “And now the damage is done.”
“Orleton thinks his Holiness will tell you to go back to your husband.”
“I can’t! Oh, I can’t!” In her distress, she began to pace the floor, clasped hands pressed to her mouth and the silken hem of her bedgown swishing back and forth after her.
Mortimer watched her half-calculatingly, half-pityingly. “He is still your husband — as long as he lives,” he said.
“And if the Church drives me back to him it will mean leaving you.”
“True, you cannot have us both in your bed.” Mortimer smiled and stopped her agitated pacing by taking her hand and kissing it. “Could you face excommunication even for me?” he asked, regarding her over their joined hands which were still at his lips. “Or could I, for our bodily joy, condemn your soul to eternal damnation?”
“Oh, Roger, must you so torment me?” She pulled away her hand with an agonized gesture. “And even in this world it would mean throwing away all that we have striven for — the success and the power. The chance to use one’s talents, the complete partnership, the perfect mating. And all for a marriage which was rotten from the start. It is a cruel decision the Church would thrust upon me.”
“But one which must hang over us as long as Edward lives.”
“‘As long as he lives! As long as he lives!’ Why
must you keep saying that?” she cried. Suddenly her control snapped, and she beat upon his breast with clenched fists then flung herself upon him, weeping passionately, and crying out that she wished she had never seen him. But Mortimer knew that it was only the strain she had been living under for months taking toll of a strongly emotional woman. He held her close and was patient with her, still working towards his end. “You are not usually unintelligent — or obstinately blind — my sweet,” he said with gentle relentlessness. “You must realize that it is not only the Pope. Edward’s precious half-brothers — and Lincoln — and hypocritical public opinion are all beginning to mutter about us. And the muttering is growing dangerous. And the people are already forgetting Edward’s wrongdoings and growing pitiful for his misfortunes. One day it may well be their deposed Plantagenet or us. So he must die.”
She drew herself away from him sharply. She knew that he was exaggerating the situation — trying to coerce her to his will. “The people still cheer me. I can still twist most of the counsellors round my little finger,” she reminded him defiantly. “What harm can poor Edward of Caernarvon do composing sad poems in some lonely Gloucestershire castle?”
“Nothing, except breathe. But even that is enough because, deposed or not, he is still Sir Edward Plantagenet. No one can take away either his knighthood or his name.” Mortimer unbuckled his belt and threw it down upon the bed as if to breathe more freely himself. “Ask Orleton how dangerous he still is, if you doubt me.”
“Orleton? Who is he to advise upon so private and terrible a thing as you suggest?”
“He could at least convince you of his Holiness’s intentions.” Mortimer sprawled across the foot of the bed, his face shadowed by the half-drawn curtains, his voice hurried, shamed and urgent. “Listen, Isabel. We must decide how to act in this matter — and decide quickly. You yourself told me that Thomas Berkeley is away from home. And I have set Maltravers and Gourney in charge there in his place. And Gourney is awaiting his instructions. He has sent a man to me to warn me that my incorruptible son-in-law may soon be well enough to travel home.”
Isabel the Fair Page 28