Isabel the Fair

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “Then some of you have already discussed this thing.” Isabel stood white and tragic-eyed against the uncurtained window, with a rising moon making a silvery radiance behind her unbound hair. “And you expect me to decide, to give that vulturine-looking man his orders?” she gasped.

  Mortimer jabbed thoughtfully with his sheathed hunting knife at an inoffensive peacock embroidered on the bedcover. “It might be safer if neither of us gave them,” he said. And almost immediately suggested that she should grant audience to Orleton, and abide by his counsel.

  “Now? So long after curfew?” she exclaimed. “Surely after his return voyage the poor man must be abed.”

  “When I came through the ante-room he was still there — alone — trying to finish some urgent despatches. And Gourney’s man will be leaving soon after sunrise.”

  Isabel guessed that the urgent despatches might be only a pre-arranged excuse for the prelate to be at hand. After a moment or two of uncertainty she fastened her bedgown more closely about her and walked to the door. “You will be content to abide by what he says?” she asked, with her fingers on the bolt.

  “He can write the message if it will ease your conscience,” said Mortimer almost negligently.

  “And as a churchman he cannot condone murder,” she told him triumphantly.

  In the ante-room the Lord Bishop of Hereford rose from a table littered with important-looking documents. If his surprise at seeing his Queen was not genuine, it was at least well simulated. “Arrears of work and letters to Papal officials,” he apologized, rising with a flurry of scarlet robes to set a chair for her. “And I supposed your Grace to be long since asleep.”

  “I sleep ill of late, milord, and would have your immediate advice,” she told him without subterfuge. “Late as it is, I pray you be seated again and spare me a little of your time.”

  “It is about this misfortunate husband of yours that you seek help, my daughter?” he asked, in the suave encouraging tones he usually kept for the Confessional.

  “Is it true that his Holiness the Pope will offer me the choice between excommunication from Holy Church and going back to him?” she asked bluntly.

  “He is still your husband, and when I left Avignon the document was being prepared.”

  “And you know milord Mortimer’s mind in this?”

  The corpulent prelate bowed his head in assent.

  Stark honesty poured from Isabel’s lips. “God knows I have suffered much from Edward. And that for my own sin’s sake I would be free of him. For my son’s sake, too, who now wears the crown. And for milord Mortimer’s, who would assuredly die if Edward were to come to power again,” she confessed. “But I cannot take part in this desperate thing which is in my lover’s mind.”

  “It is not meet that any of us should ask you to, my child,” soothed Adam Orleton. “If Sir Edward were to die naturally — and soon — by some fever or by the rigours of imprisonment as old Lord Mortimer of Chirk did — well, we are surely sufficiently worldly-wise to admit that it would be — er, convenient — for you both. But beyond that we cannot in good conscience go.”

  Isabel saw his fleshy red face and shiny tonsured head as a warm round beacon of comfort, and let out an audible sigh. “I felt sure that you would say so, milord, but I have to know tonight because, as you are probably aware, a messenger will be leaving for Berkeley in the morning. And I was afraid that my — that Roger Mortimer would” Faint with relief and with terror of the price which she might have to pay for that relief, Isabel found herself beyond speech.

  “To save you pain, Madam, and with your Grace’s permission, I will myself write accordingly to Sir Thomas Gourney,” the Bishop was saying. He settled himself more comfortably at the table and turned back his flowing sleeves. Pen and paper were already before him. She could only sit quiet opposite to him, watching the candlelight gleam like blood on the ruby of his great episcopal ring and striving to control the trembling of her limbs. For a long time, it seemed, the only sound in the room was the scratching of his goose quill, so that when he laid the piece of parchment before her she was surprised at the shortness of his message. The delicately formed letters danced before her eyes. She wished that he had written in homely unequivocal French or English, but ecclesiastic minds moved in Latin, she supposed. “Edwardum occidere nolite, timere bonum est,” he read, leaning forward to point carefully at each word with the feathered end of the quill. “Literally construed, ‘Edward kill not, to fear the deed is good.’”

  The words lay before her, quite intelligible now and bringing — in spite of all future fears and difficulties — immeasurable spiritual relief. “You will be sure that Sir Thomas gets it?” she insisted anxiously, wishing the message already in harsh Goumey’s hands.

  “I will have his man roused at once and you shall see the paper given into, his keeping with your own eyes,” Orleton assured her, with the paternal patience which he might have shown to some over-wrought child.

  Isabel smiled apologetically for her nervous stupidity and laid a grateful hand on his, but he waved aside her thanks with the ponderous bonhomie of the obese and, while waiting for his servant to bring the messenger, busied himself with the final preparations of his parchment. Although the rich fullness of his sleeve lay like a scarlet barrier between them she saw him take up his pen again to sign it, to add some stop or comma, and then to address it. And then he was rolling it, tying it meticulously with red ribbon and setting his seal upon it. And so the thing was done which would save her from being a party to murder. Her eyes never left the rolled parchment until she had seen it pass from the Bishop’s plump white hand to the rough weather-beaten hand of Goumey’s man, and had heard Orleton’s clear instructions to ride with it immediately to Berkeley. And then, gratefully, she knew that she would sleep that night. Beyond that she dared not look.

  By the morning most of her fears were calmed. Roger Mortimer neither questioned nor gainsaid her, allowing the Bishop’s order to go unintercepted as he had promised. And both of them suggested that it was now the moment to send to Hainault for Ned’s bride and to make arrangements for the wedding.

  “It will keep the Queen from worrying,” said Orleton.

  “And the puppet king from poking his nose into our affairs,” muttered Mortimer, incensed because Ned had questioned him in open Council about the extraordinary augmentation of the Queen’s dowry.

  And so Isabel’s flair for arranging things was called into play again, and her mind kept far too fully occupied to think often of her imprisoned husband. With her own hand she wrote to invite Sir John of Hainault to accompany his niece as England’s principal guest. She rewarded Orleton by sending him as royal envoy to Valenciennes, and kept Ned in a state of grateful good humour by backing up his request that Philippa should be chosen.

  “I see the matter was loosely worded,” pointed out Orleton, consulting the original betrothal contract. “It says here ‘a daughter of William Count of Hainault, Holland and Zealand’, and since I understand there are four he may well wish to send us the eldest.”

  “In that case appeal to my cousin, his wife, to persuade him,” Isabel urged him, knowing that Ned’s long memory would never forget that she had done this for him.

  “To me they looked all alike,” remarked Mortimer, when he and Isabel were alone. “Why make possible difficulties by pandering to his calf love?”

  Isabel, looking down from her window, watched her elder son mounting Cher Ami and riding off with a company of robust young men for a day’s hunting. “I do not think it is calf love,” she said reflectively. “Nor, perhaps, love at all — as we know it. But rather the relief of a reserved, woman-shy youth at finding one girl with whom he is at ease and to whom he can speak his mind. Even about us, probably. Has it never occured to you, Roger, that apart from all his military companions and his tournament opponents and his adoring grooms, Ned must be a very lonely person?”

  And before his marriage could be arranged Ned was to become yet lonelier.
No word had come from the Pope, and Isabel was beginning to wonder, with a mixture of resentment and relief, whether her lover and Orleton had been playing on her fears for their own ends. And then, quite suddenly, all fear of what the Pope might say was groundless. During the last week of September news reached London that Edward, her husband, was dead.

  Her mind had been so full of festive affairs — she had pictured him so clearly moving about the hall and battlements of Berkeley Castle — that the news shocked her profoundly. It shocked the whole nation. “How did he die?” she asked, as she knew only too well every man and woman in England and Wales must be asking. As Parliament would be asking on the morrow.

  “I know no more than you, milords. I was not there,” she heard Mortimer answer coldly before an aghast Privy Council. “All I can tell you is that my son-in-law, the Lord of Berkeley, is still sick at Bradelye, and that his steward, Glaunville, sent a messenger to tell the Queen that Edward of Caernarvon died during the night of the twenty-second of this month, and that this Glaunville was asking for instructions about his burial.”

  Averting his eyes from his royal nephew’s grief, Thomas of Brotherton broke the uneasy silence. “Does the man not say of what sickness my brother died?” he asked, in a curiously threatening voice. Edmund of Kent was weeping unashamedly. And blind Lincoln leapt to his feet and cried out that there must have been foul play. Pandemonium broke out, only to be silenced when the sixteen-year-old King rapped out an order that the murderer should be found. To the older men present the authoritative ring in his voice was singularly reminiscent of his grandfather’s, and many must suddenly have realized that he was now King beyond all question.

  But Mortimer was quick to nip such new and regal self-assertion in the bud. “I pray you have a care whom you accuse, Sir,” he warned. “Had there been foul play would the murderers have been such fools as to leave the body unburied?”

  “And it may comfort your Grace to know,” added Orleton, “that I have this morning received a letter from Abbot Thokey of St. Peter’s in Gloucester, telling me that he rode immediately to Berkeley to see if there was any service he could perform, and that he said prayers over the dead body of your father and was greatly relieved to find that there was no sign of violence upon it.”

  The letter he produced was passed from hand to hand, and although some members of the Council still muttered among themselves there was no immediate accusation they could make. Several of them cast covert glances at Mortimer, but he stood near the Queen, apparently unconcerned, staring them down. “Why not satisfy yourselves and the whole country by sending a party of physicians to confirm what this Abbot of Gloucester says?” he suggested.

  “I myself will go with them, if only to look upon his face once more,” began the third Edward. But even his relatives saw how unwise this would be in the circumstances and dissuaded him. and his brief flash of authority was gone. Some looked towards the popular Queen to see whom she would suggest sending; but they looked sheepishly, as if seeing her with new eyes — as if realizing for the first time that she, with grave marital wrongs in her memory and a lover beside her, had more cause than most to wish Edward of Caernarvon dead.

  She knew what was in their minds. “Send someone of your own choosing, milords,” she said haughtily, secure in the knowledge of Orleton’s message. “Someone whose word is above suspicion, and who has no axe to grind. If, in these turn-coat days, you can find such a being! And lest there should remain any scruple of doubt in people’s minds, for my sake and for my son’s, have my husband’s body embalmed and left exposed for all who wish to see. I pray you let it remain unburied until either foul play is proven or such hideous suspicion dispelled.”

  She saw the quickly concealed flicker of admiration in Mortimer’s strange eyes. The tongues of the Council were effectively stilled, even if their thoughts were not. She walked slowly back to her apartments, unaccountably weary, followed by her silent women. She sent for old Stephen Taloise, who in his hey-day had fashioned her wedding gown, and bade him make her trailing black mourning garments. With her own hands she discarded the gorgeous metal wings of her headdress and had her tiring women replace it with nun-like wimple and swathe her little pointed chin in the widow’s barbe of soft linen to which she must now grow accustomed. “I am a widow,” she kept telling herself, trying to compose her face to sadness and to fight down the rush of relief that made the very air seem lighter. “I shall never have to look Edward in the face again. The Pope will not threaten to excommunicate me. I shall never have to leave Roger.”

  When they had finished dressing her in her becoming weeds a page came to tell her that the King wished to see her. It was the first time that he had ever sent for her. Even since his coronation he had still come to her dutifully, as a son. “But now he feels himself King indeed and he is going to try to have his father buried in Westminster Abbey,” she thought, with that deadly intuition she had of other people’s minds. “And, weary as I am, I shall have to persuade him that it would make trouble among the people, without letting him see that it would be suicidal for Roger and for me.”

  Her surmise was right and Ned went on protesting about it intermittently for days. “What has he ever done that he should not be laid to rest in Westminster or Winchester with all our other kings?”

  “You must be content with St. Peter’s Abbey in Gloucester, where he can be taken privately,” Isabel told him for the tenth time. “Your father thought it very beautiful and was one of its benefactors, and this Abbot Thokey has recently had it enlarged. Although it is now in the See of Worcester it may one day become a cathedral. And Abbot Thokey is willing to give the deposed king suitable burial which, you should remember, many other communities are afraid to do.”

  “I shall see that he is recompensed and that every possible privilege is granted to Gloucester. And I shall have my cleverest masons make my father the loveliest canopied shrine in all England. A single tomb where he will lie alone, as he died alone.”

  “That will be for you to decide, my son,” agreed Isabel, who had no desire to lie beside her husband either in the flesh or in stone.

  Ned’s temper was rising, and of late it had shown promise of growing to true Plantagenet proportion. “And if Mortimer tries to interfere with the funeral ceremony or the daily Masses I shall have sung,” he raged. “I shall accuse him openly!”

  But there was nothing to accuse Mortimer of. The carefully picked party of renowned physicians and disinterested public officials sent by Parliament confirmed the Abbot of St. Peter’s statement. There was no sign of foul play and there was nothing in the stomach to suggest poison. They reported that the late King’s body lay reverently exposed to public view, between tall candles, in the chapel of Berkeley Castle. When pressed further they admitted that his athletic slenderness was perhaps a shade more pronounced than in lifetime, and that his face bore signs of strain or pain, though no more than was consonant with the grave troubles that had befallen him and months of imprisonment. Even the burghers of Bristol, who had raised so much tumult on his behalf, had been invited to see him and admitted that there was no single mark of violence upon him.

  Edward’s corpse lay there for three months and though his cousin and half-brothers left the Council and other supporters drifted away, not even Mortimer’s most jealous enemies could bring any accusation against him. Thanks to Isabel’s quick wit in delaying the burial, people began to tire of the subject and conjecture died down. And soon she was able to busy herself about the provision of a rich pall and the painting of the arms of England on a funeral chariot to be sent to Berkeley, and with letters to Glaunville telling him to have the best chandler in Gloucester come out to make the wax effigy to be borne before it, and then to fix the date when the Abbot and whole community were to come with sad chanting to form the cortege. She was glad to be occupied, for whenever she was sitting alone, which she contrived to do as seldom as possible, the words “no single mark of violence” ran through her mind, replaci
ng and refuting those other words, “as long as he lives” which had been so often on her lover’s lips. They became a kind of slogan such as the Scots used to gather their forces for battle. And every time she caught herself looking searchingly at Roger Mortimer, she dealt with her own doubts by making her mind repeat monotonously “Not a single mark of violence”.

  Chapter Thirty

  Bishop Orleton was successful in getting the bride whom young Edward the Third wanted. But by the time she landed at Dover the prospective bridegroom was away up north winning his spurs in a desperate if not very successful effort to push the Scots back over the Border. Even in the midst of the fighting he sent emphatic orders for her reception, telling the Governor of Dover Castle to provide for the comfort of her retinue and urging the chief citizens of every town through which she would pass to extend to her the warmest possible welcome. It was noticeable how little urging they needed, for Philippa’s fresh young simplicity made ready appeal to minds confused by so much scheming, and many of them were beginning to transfer their hopes from Isabel to the young king, if only he could free himself from the overweening mastery of Mortimer and the fondly expressed domination of his mother. The Londoners entertained the Flemish princess during Christmas, sparing no expense to give her pleasure, but she was a shy, reserved girl and clearly her only desire was to join her betrothed, so as soon as Ned had time to take up permanent quarters in York she was escorted there for their wedding.

  Isabel and Mortimer were already in the north, doing their utmost to conclude a peace treaty with Robert Bruce. And Isabel had taken her five-year-old daughter Joan with her to set the seal upon it by betrothing her to Bruce’s son David. She knew that the marriage would be unpopular with the English, but had the good sense to see that her son’s kingdom could never be secure or strong enough to keep his continental possessions unless these everlasting border frays ceased.