‘I’ve heard your betrothed is wildly handsome,’ whispered one, smiling hopefully at me, expecting a confidence in return for her interest.
‘Has he kissed you yet?’ asked the youngest, a small thin-faced red-head from Beauvais who reminded me disconcertingly of Eleanor Despenser.
‘Why her?’ I heard someone say to her friend. ‘What has she got to recommend her that she should make such a good marriage?’
‘She’ll be sent home,’ said the friend who had never liked me.
Isabella, who had been talking to her chamberlain, smoothed her velvet gown, and turned her attention to Lady Jeanne. I knew Isabella would pick on me before long so I kept my head bent and concentrated on my stitches. The air was heavy with the weight of unspoken words and my tongue felt too large for my mouth. My hands began to tremble and I nearly dropped my needle.
‘It is a disaster.’ the queen spoke in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘I suppose he fancies himself in love. A wholly unworthy reason for marriage. Lord Edmund is not a plough boy, even though he may behave like one, poking with his stick in the furrows.’
A suppressed giggle from the girl next to me.
‘No indeed, it is not acceptable,’ agreed Lady Jeanne.
The queen smiled at her friend. ‘Lord Edmund cannot please himself as to whom he will marry. He is my husband’s brother and has responsibilities. I do not like to admit it but I fear he has taken leave of his senses. Some temporary madness perhaps?’
I jabbed my needle fiercely into the cloth wishing I could stab Isabella. I knew she was trying to provoke me so I set my lips together, determined to say nothing. But I couldn’t escape her voice.
‘Men who marry for love fall out of love just as easily and then what is a woman left with? You only have to look at the countess of Norfolk to see what lies in store for Lady Margaret. But in our charity we must pray for her as she is to be greatly pitied.’
The countess of Norfolk, for all her pretty looks, had been sent away to one of her husband’s manors in the country. There, it was said, she sat stitching napkins for her lord and weeping into a bowl of pottage. The earl regretted his hasty marriage but could do nothing other than make the best of what his brother the king had said was a mess of his own making.
‘A marriage cannot be founded on a moment of folly when the candles are dimmed, ladies. We all know that, don’t we?’ the queen laughed gaily, looking round for our agreement.
There was a murmur of assent, although I noticed one young lady was less eager to nod her head. She was doubtless dreaming of a lover in the greenwood while her father was tying up a betrothal contract with the dull middle-aged widower whose lands bordered his own. She knew better than to voice her opinion because no matter what she thought, the queen was always right.
‘Love makes fools of men. And you do realise what he’s like, don’t you, Lady Margaret?’ she said, dropping like a hawk onto its prey. ‘He’s a wild young man with very little to his name. I trust that was not your reason for pursuing him.’
She couldn’t accept that Edmund was the pursuer. She thought me an avaricious harpy digging my claws into Edmund’s unresisting royal flesh. I said nothing. With Isabella it was wiser to remain silent.
‘If he marries you,’ she continued, ‘my husband will punish him. A thousand marks your brother, Lord Wake, paid for his presumption in marrying without permission. Just think how much more the king will wrest from Lord Edmund. If later my husband should feel inclined to forgiveness I’m certain his chamberlain will ensure he is steadfast. And don’t look to me for help, I have enough difficulties of my own.’
It would have been impossible not to know about the queen’s difficulties. She hosted daily gatherings where she complained of her situation to all those present. Her most devoted admirers - apart from her brother Charles and his new wife, little Madame of Evreux - were the elderly earl of Richmond and the queen’s cousin, Robert of Artois.
The earl had come to Paris in the spring as one of the king’s envoys but was refusing to return to England. Every time he received a command from the king to quit France the queen entwined her arm with his, looking up from under her lovely dark eyelashes, ‘Go back to England? Surely you won’t desert me, dear Britto? What would I do without you? Who would advise me? Who would protect me?’
And so of course he stayed.
Isabella’s kinsman, the gigantic Robert of Artois, count of Beaumont-le-Roger, lord of Conches, was the most ardent of her royal cousins. When he visited he caused the queen’s ladies to withdraw to the side in case they got in his way. We’d had years of practice in sweeping our skirts out of the paths of large men like the count but I felt sorry for his wife who must endure being embraced by this great bear of a man.
‘Isabella, dearest cousin,’ he growled, a surprisingly low and tender voice in a man of such vast proportions. ‘You know I worship daily at your shrine. Anything you want shall be yours. You only have to ask.’
The French ladies said the count had spent all his wealth in endless legal wrangling with his aunt so I doubted he had much to offer but perhaps Isabella didn’t know. Perhaps she thought he had vast wealth to place at her disposal. I wasn’t privy to the details of her finances but I knew she borrowed from her brother as well as from the bankers. Understanding a little of money matters myself, I wondered what they hoped to gain from an exiled and impoverished queen whose husband had taken everything that was once hers.
‘Robert, dearest cousin.’ She stroked him tenderly with her words if not with her fingers. ‘I am in your eternal debt, as you know. I depend on you entirely and the days when you are not here are dismal indeed.’
This kind of exchange was commonplace as Isabella wove her web around those she wished to ensnare in her endless campaign against her husband and the Despensers.
The next day I could smell the excitement in the air. The queen’s ladies fluttered about the chamber like a flock of panicked hens, smoothing their gowns, adjusting their girdles and checking each others faces for blemishes.
‘What is happening?’ I asked.
‘Don’t you know?’ said one of the French ladies. ‘Madame’s cousin has arrived in Paris and is coming to pay her respects.’
There were dozens of these royal cousins littered across Christendom, from the shores of the Narrow Seas to the burning lands far away in the south where people’s skin was darker than ours and olive trees grew like weeds. I wondered which one this was.
Despite the joyous occasion Isabella remained dressed in unrelieved black. Lately she had taken to wearing a conventual veil and the unflattering barbe which enclosed her face but oddly made her look more beautiful than ever. I swear she could have worn sackcloth tied with a rope and still stopped a man in his tracks, whereas we less fortunate women struggled to make the best of what God had given us, with silks and ribbons and pots of paste.
‘The countess of Hainault is on her way to Perray, to her father’s bedside,’ the queen informed us. ‘My uncle of Valois, is sick and, as befits a dutiful daughter, she wishes to see him.’
In the late summer while we’d been idly journeying around the French king’s palaces and visiting holy shrines, the elderly count of Valois had been struck down with a malady which had left him confined to his bed, barely able to speak. The royal physicians were in despair. They had tried every remedy at their disposal but to no avail and now the king’s astrologer was foretelling a death before the year turned. Nobody spoke of it, but the arrival of the countess must mean the end was near.
The countess was her father’s eldest daughter and had travelled to Paris without her husband who, the queen’s French ladies told me with much silly giggling, was riddled with gout and unable to sit on a horse. We were gathered at one side of the room in small groups, huddled together, with the younger ladies clutching each other in suppressed excitement. Who knew what good-looking y
oung men the countess might bring in her train?
‘I’ve heard the men from Hainault are particularly handsome,’ whispered one.
‘My cousin says they kiss with their mouths open,’ replied her friend.
‘Sainte Vierge!’ squeaked the first, giggling into her hands.
I wondered if I was ever like these young women. Their fathers and brothers might shield them from unsuitable men to keep their reputations pure, but they were helpless when it came to a little flirtation taking place right under the queen of England’s nose.
Madame Jeanne de Valois, countess of Hainault, breezed into the room with all the confidence of one who knew she would be welcome. She was small, plump and dark with a long nose. Accompanying her was her daughter, Philippa, a stout girl of about eleven years old.
Isabella rose in a rustle of the very blackest of brocades and, stretching out her arms, embraced her cousin with genuine emotion. Behind the countess, her many ladies and gentlemen crowded into the chamber hoping to be presented to the English queen, their black garments fluttering one against the other as they settled down to roost.
I watched the formal greetings and exchange of gifts and resigned myself to a lengthy ritual of presentations of the senior men, all dull flat-faced Hainaulters with burly bodies and short legs. There was not a single handsome young man for the French ladies to sigh over which was perhaps just as well. The younger ones could be extremely tiresome, wanting to send little notes and behaving in a very foolish way.
On the opposite side of the chamber, stretching all the way across one wall were the queen’s favourite tapestries, a present from her brother: Guinivere and her women tending the dying Arthur. As my eyes travelled across the pale-coloured limbs of the legendary queen, marvelling at her woven elegance and womanly compassion, my thoughts drifted to Edmund and our wedding.
I was lost in a delicious reverie of sweet music and soft candlelight in which my husband was holding my silk-clad body close to his when suddenly I felt I was being spied upon. I lowered my gaze and looked around. Nothing but dozens of men, their arms neatly at their sides, all with their eyes fixed firmly on the queen and the countess. Then I saw a familiar pair of dark grey eyes looking at me.
‘Lord Mortimer!’ I put my hand over my mouth.
He saw me gasp and smiled, then turned his face back to the queen.
Roger Mortimer! Lord Mortimer of Wigmore! My cousin. Ten years older than me and the hero of my girlhood. Two years ago he’d escaped from the Tower and disappeared and I hadn’t expected to see him here.
The countess was still presenting her people. When at last she came to my cousin, she smiled beguilingly at Isabella. ‘See! I have saved the best till last. Someone I know you have been hoping to meet, someone who has been safe with me these past months - your loyal servant, Lord Mortimer.’
My cousin sank to one knee and pressed his lips to his queen’s ring. Beneath the heavy black veiling, and probably unnoticed by the others, a faint flush rose in Isabella’s cheeks. I couldn’t hear what my cousin was saying, his voice was too low, but whatever it was took him an exceedingly long time. The baron and the queen were engaged in a very private conversation which precluded the rest of us, even the countess, who looked on in a most proprietary way.
‘You see my friends,’ she said, favouring us with a little smile. ‘This is how I honour my dearest cousin, by bringing her exactly what she wants.’
The Hainaulters laughed. My cousin rose, giving the queen a final kiss on her slim white fingers, and moved backwards. The countess beamed as if she had just performed a miracle which, in the queen’s eyes, I was certain she had.
Isabella had wanted a champion and who could be more suitable to slay her dragons than Sir Hugh Despenser’s bitterest enemy, my cousin Roger, Lord Mortimer of Wigmore.
He bowed over my hand. ‘Cousin, I barely recognised you. You were no more than a child last time we met.’
I looked carefully at his face: slightly older, thinner and more lined than before but still attractive; the same wide-set eyes, the full lips, the slightly curved nose and hair which was dark with hardly a trace of grey, just a slight touch at the temples. They said he was a brutal, violent man but to me he had never been unkind.
‘You haven’t changed one bit, my lord.’
‘I think my time in the Tower may have given me a more sombre manner.’
‘Your escape was the subject of much discussion amongst the queen’s ladies. Lady Eleanor swore you had been changed by magic into a raven and flown from the window.’
He snorted. ‘If anyone was flying around the walls of the Tower festooned in black it was my Lady Despenser mounted on her broomstick.’
I smiled at the thought of Eleanor Despenser dealing with the devil. I was certain she’d spied on the queen for her husband so I could believe her guilty of almost any foulness.
‘The king had half the country out looking for you,’ I said, wondering if he’d known. ‘We were told you were coming to invade with an army of Frenchmen and no-one was safe in their beds.’
He laughed. ‘I went to our de Fiennes cousins in Picardy. They took care of me, and King Charles has been more than generous. He sent me to his cousin in Hainault and my six months with the countess and her husband have proved most instructive.’
‘Will you make your home there?’
‘Of course not. How could you think such a thing? I intend to go back to England.’
I gasped in horror. ‘You can’t go back, my lord. You’ll be killed. Sir Hugh Despenser will have your head on a stake before you’re half-way to Wigmore.’
‘You expect me to spend my life living in someone else’s house?’
‘N-no,’ I stammered. ‘I understand that would be impossible.’
He looked at me coldly. I remembered my cousin’s displeasure from the days when I was young. I’d endured many a frightened hour at Wigmore hiding with the Mortimer children in the nursery while men’s voices raged in the hall.
‘I hear you are to be married,’ he said, not seeming much interested. ‘My mother said youth was your only advantage and she doubted you’d find another husband.’
I pressed my lips together, wondering yet again at the way people regarded my chances of a good marriage as so very low.
‘Who has agreed to take you?’ he asked.
I eyed him coolly. ‘Lord Edmund, the king’s brother. We are to be married on Saturday.’
He stared, his eyes widening in disbelief, then said with a broad smile. ‘I congratulate you, little cousin. You’ve done well.’
Of course he realised that as the wife of the king’s brother I would be one of the most important women in the land, only a step behind the queen. The Mortimers would bend their knees to me. After years of casual indifference when I was nothing more than another child under his feet or a needy young widow laying claim to his assistance, he now saw me as a woman of importance. There was a delicious warmth in savouring this moment of close kinship with the great Lord Mortimer.
To show his approval he kissed my lips and held me close. I breathed in the scent of his skin and his clothes, a smell I remembered from a day long ago in the hall at Wigmore when he was going away to Ireland. There was a time when this would have been the fulfilment of my dreams, to be held and kissed by my big cousin. But not now, not now that I had Edmund; not now that I so very, very nearly had Edmund.
I awoke to the sound of gentle tapping on the door and a muttered conversation. The bed was strange: oak posts hung with blue and green figured damask, golden cords and knotted tassels, and sweeping curtains of rose-coloured silk.
Strands of hair lay across my face and by some means I had lost my pillow.
There was a cough and a, ‘My lord!’ from beyond the curtains. Edmund lay sprawled on his back, half-entangled in the bed sheets.
Another cough.
Edmund opened an eye. ‘Go away, damn you, this is my wedding night.’
‘My lord!’ It was the voice of Edmund’s squire, William de la Mote. ‘It is your uncle, the count of Valois.’
‘Valois? What of the old bastard?’
‘He is dying, my lord.’
‘Again?’
‘It may be he is dead already, my lord. The messenger says he has only a few hours left.’
There was a long silence before Edmund raised himself onto his elbow and said, ‘God rest the old bugger’s soul.’
‘Her grace, the queen has requested you attend, my lord. She has already set out for Perray.’
Edmund muttered something under his breath, then sat up. ‘Get the boy to lay out my clothes and ask the countess’s maid to attend her shortly.’
At the sound of the closing door he turned his attention to me. Last night he had proved a surprisingly hesitant lover, treating me with a tenderness I’d not expected. Instead of the eager young prince impatient to prove his manhood, I’d found myself with a man, somewhat shy, almost a stranger, but one who came to our marriage bed full of kindness and generosity.
‘I remember the day I first saw you, ‘ he had murmured into my hair.
‘You called me the queen’s lapdog.’
‘And you asked me to trawl through my brother’s dungeons looking for Lord Everingham.’
I’d twined my arms round his neck, smiling. ‘Were you jealous?’
‘Yes, I thought you meant to marry him.’
‘No, my lord, I meant to marry you.’
After eleven years alone I had forgotten the joy of a man’s body and Edmund didn’t disappoint me. By the time I had fallen asleep, wrapped in my new husband’s arms, I felt truly married and glad of it.
But this morning was another day.
‘Oh Jesu, Margaret,’ he murmured kissing my bare shoulder. ‘I’m glad I married you and not the Infanta.’ He looked about him. ‘And now for Perray and the family. I hope to God he’s made a will.’
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