She saw the Constable coming back into the courtyard. “Bring a couple of your men to close the passage, Jevan,” he called to the fair-haired young captain of the guard. The four of them walked leisurely to a spot just within the castle wall not far from where she was standing. One of the men-at-arms held aloft a lantern and to her amazement she saw the yawning gulf of a passage-way which appeared to burrow down beneath it. The captain took the lantern while his men bent to replace the heavy flagstone which had concealed it. “No more visitors tonight! But the old tunnel has served its turn,” he said laughingly.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Outside in the bailey a belated blackbird was singing, and Ghislaine was there beside her with a cup in her hand and her sweet fair face full of anxiety.
“I hoped I had died,” Isabel heard herself saying, out of the pool of stillness in which all the vivacious activity of her former life seemed to have foundered.
“You have been lying here for days — ever since the Constable picked you up by the outer wall. You must have been trying to follow milord Mortimer. Quite wandering from your senses, you have been, poor sweet. So the King sent his personal physician and allowed me to come with him.”
“From London?”
“Yes,” said Ghislaine, perceiving that her mistress’s senses were indeed coming back to her with cruel sharpness.
Isabel closed her eyes, but clutched Ghislaine’s hand tightly. “Then you must know,” she whispered huskily. “Is it all over — for Roger?”
Ghislaine bowed her head. “All over. With merciful quickness.”
“Tell me,” said Isabel, lying rigid.
“They took him to the Tower — ”
“How hard to be dragged back there when one had once had the courage and ingenuity to escape!”
“Where did they do it?” she asked sharply. “I must know — so that I may add it to the other — terrible pictures — which I must always carry in my memory.”
“It was at a place called Tyburn, just beyond Westminster. There is a little stream there, and a group of elm trees. But your Grace would scarcely remember it. Robert says no one was ever executed there before. Oh, my poor lady!” Ghislaine, fearing that she would faint away again, called to one of her ladies to raise her up, and held some medicinal draught to her pale lips. “The doctor says you are to drink this. It will quieten your nerves. And if only your Grace can gather strength to receive a visitor — ”
“A visitor? But the gates are locked against me. I seem to remember the portcullis coming down, down, shutting out the world.” The shadows were closing in on her but she made a great effort to do as they asked and gradually some colour came back into her face, and curiosity prevailed. “Who would come to see me — now — in the hour of my disgrace?”
“None other than the Queen. Queen Philippa. By her own request.”
Helped by the releasing balm of weeping as much as by the potion Isabel fell into a brief, healing sleep; and when she awoke her daughter-in-law was there, alone, regarding her from between the drawn curtains at the foot of the bed. The last person whom she had wanted to see. The new young Queen who had taken her place, who had a loving husband and a son born without all the tattle of humiliating delay, and who had even without any particular intent won the people’s enthusiastic cheer. Yet only a modestly trained daughter of so good a mother as Joanna de Valois would have come with so little ostentation. “I cannot rise,” said Isabel. “I pray you be seated, Madam, and tell me why you have come. For amusement, curiosity or condemnation?” The morning sunlight shone on the Flemish girl’s tall, well-built body, on her kind grave eyes, and on the distressed pucker of perplexity on her wide forehead. “For none of those reasons,” she said, seating herself with unstudied young dignity beside the bed. “But in hope that I could comfort you a little.”
Her naivete, while it hurt, was touching. “Why should you?” asked Isabel with a kind of bitter generosity. “You, with your native goodness and your devoted husband. And let me tell you, Philippa, that even if you grow fat and lose the fresh sweetness of your youth you will keep his love. My son is like that. He is tenacious. All through the years you will be the adored Queen and wife and mother. You will have the one crowning thing I wanted.”
She turned her head away that she might not see the glow of happiness suffusing Philippa’s face. “Every night and morning I thank God that my husband is so kind,” she was saying softly.
And presently she leant forward with a tentatively outstretched hand. “I have been wondering,” she suggested humbly, “would it not be easier for your Grace to enter some Convent than to live this — lonely — secluded life at Castle Rising?”
Isabel touched her hand with her own, all distrust and antipathy gone. “I have had the same thought in mind,” she said. “Easier it certainly would be, but alas! I have no vocation. I may never expiate my sins, but a man who had wronged me once said that whatever I might become or do would to any thinking mind be justified. ‘Because of two worthless fools,’ he said, ‘an eager, generous girl, exquisitely moulded for high destiny, grows bitter with good cause, harbouring the seeds of cruelty’.”
Isabel was picking the words carefully from her memory, and Philippa supposed her to be wandering again. “What became of him?” she asked, humouring her and preparing to depart.
“What became of him?” Isabel’s voice quavered like an old woman’s, her mind was too weary to concentrate. “Oh, young and loving life excessively, he went to his death on a sunny hillside overlooking the Black Dog of Warwick’s town. I forgave him. Because he once let me see his soul beneath his facile charm — or perhaps because I was half in love with him? Who knows? God knows I forgave him. But it all happened again. With another man who cruelly, deliberately destroyed all that I had rebuilt. And how often must one forgive? ‘Unto seventy times seven’, the Book says … ”
With one last pitying glance the new Queen of England had moved towards the door, but while someone on the other side sprang to fling it wide for her she could still hear Isabel the Fair murmuring, first in French and then in English, “Notre Pere qui es aux cieux, pardonne-nous nos offenses, comme aussi nous les pardonnons … Oh, compassionate Christ, forgive us our trespasses, as we must somehow learn to forgive those who trespass against us!”
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Isabel the Fair Page 31