Since she had taken over the government it seemed that she must keep her finger upon a dozen things at once. She realized how much Edward, with his pleasure-loving indolence, must have hated it all, and of late there had been so many matters which she and Mortimer must keep locked privately in their own minds. “The accounts in that other book, Fontenoy? The locked one with the precise amounts of how the Flemish dowry was spent. You have never left the hasp for a moment unlocked?”
“Your Grace will see that no other hand but mine has ever written in it. And here, Madam, is the key.”
“‘Travelling expenses for Sir Thomas Berkeley’s steward to York. And for the woman Druscilla from Berkeley.’ God’s grace!” cried Isabel, studying the accounts. “Is the royal Exchequer expected to pay for his pleasures as well?” When her clerk did not answer, she looked up sharply. “She is not that kind of woman, Madam,” he said, with slow reluctance.
Fontenoy leaned forward to point to a line below where her own finger still kept the place, where she saw an entry, stark and undetailed, for the embalming of the late King. “She is the woman who did it,” he said.
“The woman!” repeated Isabel. Her hands slid from the book, which had unexpectedly opened up so much information for her. She sat back in her chair and stared at him incredulously.
The woman could not have gone far, but the embers were dying on the hearth by the time Fontenoy had brought her and gone away again. In spite of all her impatience Isabel had become so deeply wrapped in thought that she did not realize how cold her limbs were, nor hear the heavy oak door open and shut, but when she looked up the woman was standing there. “What is your name?” she asked, motioning to her to come into the circle of candlelight and take off her snow-flecked cloak.
“Druscilla Dunheved.” The woman answered clearly, and although she could never have been in the presence of a queen before she seemed to be in no wise over-awed. The macabre thought occurred to Isabel that perhaps the reason lay in the fact that she had so recently had the intimate handling of a king. “Why did Master Glaunville bring you?” she asked.
“My husband was the chandler in Berkeley. He often embalmed the local gentry when they died.”
“Then why was he not sent for?”
“Madam, he has been dead these six months.” For the first time Isabel noticed the little woman’s white linen barbe and black dress.
“Then Sir Thomas Gourney sent for you — as soon as it happened?”
“Before the corpse was well cold.”
Isabel shuddered with cold herself. She supposed that it was the woman’s calling which had gradually deprived her of all imaginative human feeling. “And you saw no mark of violence upon it?” she asked.
“No, Madam.”
“Then why stand there like a dumb, unfeeling block of wood? If your sons are in Sir Thomas Berkeley’s service,” she added questioningly, “I suppose they must have seen something of the late King’s life there?”
“As much as any man, Madam. They were both among the escort that fetched him from Corfe to Bristol, and then — when the burghers there protested at the way he was treated — they brought him on to Berkeley. At first they baited him — like the rest — jeered at him, like. When they were getting the horses out of the stable of a morning they’d plait a crown of filthy straw and stick it on his head when they waked him, and bellow out ‘Come forth, Sir King!’ Or pretend that a messenger was coming from his son to set him free. Oh, nothing to injure him, Madam! Nothing more than milord Mortimer’s orders.”
“And what exactly were milord Mortimer’s orders?” asked Isabel, blaming herself because she had so often of late deliberately spared herself the pain of finding out.
Druscilla Dunheved looked puzzled. “All I know is that Gourney’s men were told to move him after dark from one castle to another, and that the nights were cold and they were forbidden to lend him their cloaks to put over his threadbare hose and thin shirt.”
Isabel rose, walking with stiffened limbs to the hearth to induce a small last blaze with a poke from her own satin slipper. “What else do you know? What else did those sons of yours tell you?” she demanded.
“Towards the end they seemed reluctant to talk about him much. But I remember a man called William Bischop telling how Gourney’d given orders to shave the prisoner’s beard off. Queen’s orders he said it was, saving your Grace, because of the way folks would call ‘God have pity!’ when they recognized him. And a fine play those young blades made of the barbering, bringing him dirty water from a ditch in an old broken helmet and making him sit on an ant heap.”
Isabel seemed to shrink away from her. “They did that to him — by my orders?”
“And he was so cold and humiliated he wept like a child. ‘At least my tears may warm the water,’ he said, half jesting and half pathetic like. ’Twas after that that my lads Steve and Tom came over all pitiful about him.”
“Dear Mother of God, was it not time someone did?” muttered his wife brokenly, going back to her chair.
She stood waiting, both hands clutching the chair back. The last log fell in a soft shower of red ash to the hearth, and two of the three candles were guttering out. In the gloom it was easy to imagine that Druscilla Dunheved was back in Berkeley Castle, seeing again what she described. “They told me to bring my husband’s things — the surgeon’s knife, the herbs, the wax, the flaxen cloths, the needle and thread and all. Gourney himself was in the courtyard at the foot of the guardroom stairs. He knew my husband had died, but told me to do the best I could. The lower room was full of soldiers, some of them I knew. But they looked away and not one of them spoke to me as I passed. And they weren’t talking among themselves either. In the warm light from a brazier they looked scared and white, and one youngish fellow was vomiting in a corner. Serjeant had a curious long pipe made of horn in his hand, and a couple of iron rods were still stuck heating into the hot coals. And about all there was a sickening smell of scorching flesh like you catch on the breeze at the end of a hunt when they bum the stag’s umbles. The serjeant put down the horn pipe and led me up the stairs, and called to a couple of his men to bring torches. As the light and shadows wound up round and round the stair walls, the stench grew worse. And as soon as my eyes came level with the top, I saw him. He was lying on his back on the bed with his knees up. The guard-room table lay upside down beside him as if they’d used it to hold him down. He must have been still strong when he came to die. They held the torches aloft for me though there wasn’t much left for me to do really. I was only a village woman, not one of these prying physicians who might have talked. And it would have been useless, anyway, trying to hide from me what they’d done. They’d passed the hot irons up through the pipe to bum his bowels out.”
Druscilla did not seem to hear the moaning sound the Queen made, nor to notice that she had slumped across the table with her head on her extended arms. In the semidarkness she was still seeing what she had seen back in the guardroom at Berkeley Castle. For the first time there was pity in her voice. “His face was twisted in pain, poor soul. And several of us had heard his screams down in the village. But neither those folks who came crowding from Bristol nor the physicians sent by Parliament could have guessed a thing. There wasn’t a mark on him. May I go now, Madam?” she added after a long silence.
With an almost superhuman effort Isabel dragged herself back from the brink of unconsciousness. Fear made her keep her wits. For Mortimer’s sake she forced her thoughts forward. She even managed to pull herself upright. “You do not suppose, do you, that I will let you go with that tale on your tongue?” she said, and even to her own ears the words sounded like the hissing of a startled serpent.
She would call Fontenoy. Send for Robert Eland. Have her put to death or incarcerated somewhere down in the dungeons for the rest of her life. Some early remembrance flashed across her mind of how earlier French kings had dealt with people who knew too much by having their tongues cut out. She had no personal hatred for
the woman. It was only that she dared not let her go. But even now, to her amazement, Druscilla did not seem afraid. She drew a crumpled paper from the pouch hanging from her belt and laid it down beneath the light of the one remaining candle. “That is a copy of the message Goumey had. Master Glaunville saw it and made a copy of it, lest he and the rest of milord Berkeley’s men should be blamed.”
Isabel passed a trembling hand across her eyes before she could read, and then she knew the extent of Orleton’s cunning infamy. It was the same single line of Latin words that she had seen before. Only the placing of a single comma had been altered. And that had altered everything. “Ed-wardum occidere nolite timere, bonum estshe read. And even her superficial knowledge of Latin told her how she had been tricked. The single comma completely changed the meaning. “Edward to kill fear not, the deed is good.”
And Roger Mortimer, almost certainly, must have known of it and approved.
“Why did Glaunville send you to torture me?” she cried.
“He did not. He but took me to York to show that message to the King and to have me tell him what I have told you, so as to clear our beloved lord of Berkeley,” repeated the woman obstinately. “And it is not you who are tortured, Madam. I, who embalmed the late King’s body, should know.”
Isabel was staring at her with far more fear than she could ever hope to instil. “Then — my son — knows?” For all her effort, she was only mouthing the words. She recognized this as the end of filial love, of her own security, of her lover’s day-to-day safety.
“It was the young King himself who sent me to your Grace.”
All power of practical thought was beyond Isabel. “At least he knows that I was tricked,” she kept whispering over and over again. And when the trance of horror cleared, dawn was breaking palely behind the curtains and the woman was gone.
Chapter Thirty-One
“He knows what you have done,” said Isabel, still white and exhausted, when Roger Mortimer rejoined her at Westminster.
“What I have done?”
“Otherwise he would not have sent the woman who did the embalming.”
“And you were crazy enough to let her go!” Mortimer, who so seldom showed agitation, walked restlessly about her room between hearth and bed.
“I think I must have fainted.”
He stood looking at her, gnawing at his fingernails as he did in moments of uncertainty. “You do not suppose that I planned this horrible thing? I left the details to Gourney. All I stipulated was that his captive should die — or seem to die — naturally.”
It seemed unnecessary to Mortimer either to deny or to admit her unspoken accusation. Since the deed had been accomplished there were more urgent considerations. “You think that this woman talked? That it is generally known around Berkeley?”
Isabel shrugged her uncertainty. “In any case there were the soldiers. Though they were well paid no doubt to keep their mouths shut.”
“All the same, one knows how these rumours spread. And now young Ned knows. How convenient it would be if he could go abroad for a few months until things have simmered down!”
Ned as a boy king had been a useful prop for his plans, but Ned the very young married man, nearing his majority and knowing too much, had become a problem. Every time Isabel saw him, tall as Mortimer and almost as martial looking, she wondered how much longer England could hold them both.
But events were happening in France just then which were of great personal moment to her, so that local anxieties and for a time even the horror of Edward’s end could be pushed to the back of her mind. She had been widowed only a few months before her brother Charles died, leaving no son. This was the situation of which he had once spoken to her, and Isabel became obsessed by the consciousness that she was the only remaining child of Philip le Bel.
Ned himself she found more easy to inflame than Mortimer on the subject of the French succession. “To think of the son of a Capet bending the knee in homage to a Valois!” she would say, tom between personal indignation and relief that a new and vital interest had cropped up at the right moment to get him out of England, and turn his mind from his father’s death.
Unwillingly, the young man who, besides being King of England, was Duke of Guienne crossed the Channel again to do homage for it, but this time not to a pleasant, indulgent uncle but to a cousin of a younger branch whom he considered an usurper. He hated what he had to do. “Wait until I am of age and can get a well-trained army together!” he said openly to his entourage before he left.
“He very soon will be of age,” Mortimer would mutter uneasily.
“And a father, by what Philippa’s women say,” said Isabel, reluctantly picturing herself as a grandmother.
Yet, even though she was so deadly weary and only the Queen Mother now, she could still make that pleasant-faced Flemish girl, good as she was for Ned, look like a pink and white milkmaid. Everyone would soon be gathering in the town of Nottingham for the Parliament. There would be the usual arguing and snarling against her lover, and his high-handed over-ruling of the King and shouting them all down. The plan to snatch a little pleasure for herself first was forming in her mind even while Mortimer was holding forth to his officers about where the various members were to be accommodated and insisting that no more than two of the King’s personal friends should be admitted within the castle itself.
With a warm thrill of anticipation she had herself made specially beautiful on Michaelmas morning. But by the time she was ready to start she was already a trifle tired and her mind was exercised with the problem of how, to please Mortimer, she could persuade the young King to bring no more than two of his nobles into the castle, and whom it would be safest to have.
As she rode forth at the head of her retinue, half her mind was already in Nottingham, so that she did not at first notice the strange silence. It was not that the people were not there to see her pass. She had been right about the streets being crowded. But they had had a great deal to think about since she had last ridden through London. There had been all the ugly rumours about their late King. They had seen the regalia of Scotland being taken from the Jewel House and borne away back to the Bruce. And although the crowning stone of Scone had not been returned the famous Black Gross of St. Margaret had been sent instead, which they found it hard to forgive. And then there had been the cruel end of Edmund of Kent.
Just as she passed through the Palace gate she heard a woman’s voice call shrilly, “Look, there she goes, the she-wolf!”
Chapter Thirty-Two
It was a stormy Parliament with Mortimer at his most domineering. He sat in the presence of the King and insisted that all men should address him as the Earl of March. So that by the end of the week little had been achieved except a deal of quarrelling. “We make more and more enemies,” thought Isabel, seeing men standing about in separate groups talking angrily among themselves.
And from that day the keys of Nottingham Castle were handed over to her as soon as the great gates had been shut for the night. Foolish as it was, she felt happier so. For all his suave efficiency, she did not quite trust Robert Eland.
It added to her growing ease that her son had accepted all the quarrelling and unpleasantness good-naturedly, although he was clearly anxious to get away from it all. As soon as Parliament rose he came to her room to wish her goodbye. He and William Montague had been planning a few days hunting in Sherwood forest, and the Constable had been most helpful in sending one of his men as a guide. It was only natural that her son should be so keen to get away from his quarrelsome elders for a while, she supposed. He would come back and see her, he said, before rejoining Philippa, who was already on her way northwards. Both she and Mortimer did everything to facilitate his project, preferring to have the castle to themselves. But for Isabel it was still full of unhappy memories and foreboding, so that she kept moving restlessly from room to room.
At last she retired; her bed covers were turned down invitingly and her two women were waiting sl
eepily to undress her. The friendly laughter of her lover and his friends followed her from the ante-room. But when she had taken only a few steps into her bedchamber and while the door still stood wide she became aware of another sound overriding and stilling their lively voices. It sounded like a scuffling of mailed feet, followed by a battering and splitting of wood. It came from the far side of the ante-room and, turning to look back, she saw Dragon holding fast the bolt of the outer door — pushing against it with all his weight — until an axe clove right through an oak panel and his neck, pinioning him to the splintered wood.
Her hand flew to her throat and she heard her women scream. The door burst open and the round ante-room was suddenly full of armed men, among them William Montague and her son. “Take him who had my father murdered,” she heard the young King order. “He has stood in my way too long.” She saw Mortimer, with his back to her, dash the metal tankard at his assailant’s face. He whipped the dagger from his belt and plunged it into another man’s throat, but he had no other weapon and before he could withdraw it half a dozen others had overpowered him.
The scream that Isabel had stifled croaked to a sob in her constricted throat. “Sweet son, have pity on Roger Mortimer!” she heard herself crying over and over again. But he, who had always been so politely dutiful, merely hurried his men away.
With a shock as sharp as when the people had called her a she-wolf, Isabel realized that the power which she and her lover had held for so long had suddenly been stripped from them and had passed to the young man to whom it legally belonged.
The shattered door hung drunkenly on broken hinges. Still transfixed against it hung Dragon’s dead body, and as she ran after them her silkshod feet slipped in the dark, spreading pool of his blood.
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