Braveheart (5 page)

“Oh, but it did happen! I heard my father and his friends discussing it, though it was some years ago. The king of some seafaring nation wanted a grand warship to display his power by sailing up and down the coast of his country. He had a favorite builder and ordered the largest vessel the builder had ever made. He had a favorite captain and the put him in command. They launched the ship, it looked glorious, and the king ordered many of his subjects out to the shore to watch the great ship as it passed.”

“My darling, I don’t see how any of this could be of interest to your future husband unless you wish to put him to sleep.”

But Isabella could not be reined in once she had the bit in her teeth. “Since the builder had been ordered to make the ship as grand as possible, he had added extensive carvings above the waterline; he had given a wide flat bottom to make it ride high in calm seas. He had given it tall masts. But the sailing master was unfamiliar with such a design. He packed on sails to make the ship look more impressive. And there, just off the coast, on a fine sunny day, in front of several thousands of the king’s subjects, the ship hit a light cross wind, flipped over, and sank without a trace.”

Madame Bouchard sat motionless, like one of the mummified saints at the cathedral. Isabella was afraid her teacher still didn’t understand the point she was trying to make.

“His pride, you see? Wouldn’t it be better to ask him those questions that guaranteed he would not make such a mistake?”

Madame Bouchard was blinking, coming back to life.

“Of course, it would never be necessary for me to tell my husband such things after he had had a ship built.”

“Precisely,” Madame Bouchard said.

“I would have informed him of the importance of good planning when he first mentioned the idea of building a ship, and then he could be very proud of himself.”

Madame Bouchard was speechless again.

“And confident,” Isabella added, hoping to please her.

But Madame Bouchard, quivering from the tip of her nose like Isabella’s uncle Pierre, who died of palsy, stood without another word and left the room.

Lying in her bed now, on her wedding day, Isabella wondered what had ever happened to Madame Bouchard. She hoped her old teacher was still alive. She hadn’t looked healthy at all that last time they saw each other.

What if her betrothed, Prince Edward, son of Longshanks—what a peculiar name; did his subjects dare use it openly?—was a sullen man, suspicious, always watching others for the thoughts they kept hidden, as he hid his own? She had observed many of that kind of man in the courts of France, and surely there were many like that here. It would not surprise her, but she would be disappointed. She had met the prince but once, and that at a distance, nodding to him from opposite sides of a U-shaped table at a dinner given in her honor to welcome her. The prince and his friends had sat on one side and the princess, with her attendants from France and the new ones now provided her from the English court, had sat on the other. The center table was empty; Longshanks was in Wales, someone had said, advising his military advisors.

The prince was a slender young man with fine features. She had not spoken to him except to curtsey and say, “The pleasure is all mine, m’lord,” after he had said he welcomed her with great pleasure before sitting down to start the meal. But she had watched from the corner of her eye while exchanging whispers with Nicolette. She had noticed young Edward had a quick smile, though he kept watching his friends as he smiled as if he needed their approval. A strange habit in a prince.

Isabella of France lay there in her English bed and thought on all these things without opening her eyes.

Nicolette, moving soundlessly by her bed on her way to tend the fire, thought,
What a strange girl this princess is, frowning in her sleep on her wedding day.

She sponged her body in warm water scented with the petals of roses brought live all the way from Italy. She put on new undergarments, and a whole flock of attendants, chattering with excitement, dressed her for the wedding. Yards and yards of fabric, light as air, bleached white, wrapped around her shoulders and flowed to the floor; a royal blue bodice hugged her wait; tiny gold chains adorned her shoulders and a necklace of diamonds embraced her throat. Two more attendants brushed her hair, plaited and coiled it, then placed the veil, falling like a cloud from her head to her waist. Nicolette oversaw it all, inspecting each button, each chain, each buckle; snapping instructions; making adjustments; and always beaming.

The attendants kept flapping; it seemed the more beautiful she became, the faster they worked, until finally Nicolette clapped her hands together loudly and said, “It is done!” They all stopped and looked at the glory they had created, a princess they would all be proud to serve.

Isabella turned to the polished silver mirror and studied herself. She barely recognized the reflection. It was rare for royalty to show gratitude—servants were expected to do no less than their best, and appreciation was thought to ruin them—but Isabella turned to the women who had dressed her and said, “Thank you. I . . . thank you.”

It seemed to embarrass them. Nicolette stepped forward and commanded, “Tell them we are ready.”

The attendants snatched up all their spare cloth, their shears, needles and pins, and hurried out; but as the last one was leaving Isabella said, “Wait. Tell them I need a few more minutes. Just a few. Alone with Nicolette.”

The last attendant curtsied and was gone.

“Last-minute nerves?” Nicolette asked.

“No, I…”

“Well, what is it?”

“I need … to speak with you.”

“Of course. What about?”

“I … we must talk.”

“You just said that! Please, Isabella! Would you stop this fidgeting? Don’t you understand we have the whole country waiting? What could you possibly need to talk about now, enough to keep the king, the prince, the elite of the entire kingdom standing around scratching their noses?!”

“Sex.”

At that moment another attendant knocked on the outer door and called, “M’lady, please! We are all ready!”

“Tell them to wait!” Nicolette shouted, then snatched the door open and barked even louder. “We are
not
ready!” She slammed the door and spun around to face Isabella. Nicolette’s features were frozen for some moments in a blank stare as she tried to consider what to do next while concealing her concern. It only made her appear to Isabella to look panicked.

But then Nicolette shrugged and moved to Isabella, taking both her hands in her own. “Now,” she began with the patient tone of a grandparent speaking to a confused child, “haven’t we talked about such things many times before?”

“Yes, we have, of course we have. But you were always telling me how it came about. How you met, the first glance and then the second one, the one with real meaning, the brushing past each other, the sudden kiss in a dark corner of the palace corridor, the rendezvous—“

“Yes! Yes! Exactly! Exactly!” Nicolette’s head kept nodding and nodding.

“But you’ve never told me about the actual thing. The actual thing itself.”

“The thing. The thing. The actual thing itself,” Nicolette repeated, and then, when there was another knock at the door, she bawled at the top of her lungs, “
We are not ready!”

Nicolette began to pace. “The thing. Yes, of course. The actual thing itself . . . Weren’t you listening when I told you all my stories?”

“I
was
Nicolette, I
was
listening! But I need to know exactly what to do!” Isabella felt her own rising panic and was angry at herself for it. It was not like her to lose her head this way; whatever was the matter? She liked to be in control; and with her intellect coupled with her position of privilege, she always had felt in control of every situation. But now she was about to step into a secret, intimate place, about which she knew absolutely nothing. And no one would tell her not even Nicolette! Suddenly Isabella began to suspect that her friend may have lied when she was described her many romantic liaisons.

But Nicolette had not lied. She was an experienced lady of the court of France, even if she was still only nineteen. And while Isabella, reared in the expectation that she would someday wear a crown, had been wrapped in the regal requirements of chastity, the customs of Nicolette’s life had been just the opposite. It would be many years before she delighted some nobleman or even a royal cousin by consenting to become his wife; until that time—and, the truth be told, even after that time—she would enliven the world of court romance like a willing participant at a royal ball, doing one of those dances in which everyone is always switching partners.

“Isabella!” Nicolette said in a demanding tone that only she could take with her friend, and only now. “You mean you know nothing? Absolutely nothing?”

“I tell you I can’t think of anything to do! With you, with everything you’ve ever described, there is some kind of—of—of courtship! Some kind of gradual…. But I haven’t even spoken to the prince, not really!”

“Madame Bouchard! She’s the one who should’ve told you!”

“She isn’t here!”

“All right, all right, listen to me, this is what you do! Tonight, when you are in the bedroom waiting…”

“Yes?”

But suddenly Nicolette didn’t know what to advise either. “Yes, let me think, let me think. Well, you don’t really have to do anything. Exactly! That’s it! He will come in and
he
will know just what to do!”

“What if he doesn’t?” The two young women stood blinking at each other. “I mean, I don’t know anything about such things, but did he appear to you to be someone who knew a great deal himself?”

Another knock at the door, and a voice from outside pleading, “Please, ladies! Please!”

“All right,” Nicolette said decisively. “You will lie down upon the bed, you will close your eyes, and you will say as softly as you can,
‘I am ready.’
Do that, and everything will be…acceptable.”

“1I am ready?’”
Isabella repeated.

“1I am ready?’”

Arm in arm, the princess and her lady-in-waiting moved to the door. Nicolette opened the latch and pushed the door open, revealing dozens of relieved attendants dressed for the wedding and perspiring in their scarlet smocks trimmed in white ermine. “I am ready,” the princess declared, and with a slight glance at Nicolette and a faint smile upon her lips, the future queen of England walked slowly into the corridor to join the great procession that would take her into Westminster Abbey.

9

HE WEDDING WAS A BLUR FOR HER. IT WAS NOT THAT SHE missed all the details; quite the contrary, she felt and saw so many things that she could scarcely take them all in. Her attendants looked so beautiful, with flowers in their hair, sewn into garlands draped around their shoulders, strewn in petals at their feet; the flames of a thousand candles danced in ranks in the abbey to the tunes of harps and lutes; and the faces of the dignitaries crowded into the pews, all of them watching her.

But there was one face that would wipe all of this from her memory: Edward I of England, Longshanks himself. She saw the king for the first time in her life as she reached the altar of the abbey; she was just about to kneel to receive the initial blessing when she became aware of his presence. It was strange, this presence of the king; she had been with kings before and knew the strange sense that came into one’s stomach when a king was about. All attention was directed to him, and yet everyone pretended to be looking away. She sensed that same breathlessness as she came to the end of her walk down the abbey’s central aisle and looked in the direction that everyone else was pointedly not looking. There she saw Longshanks.

He was tall, as tall as they had said. But nothing she had heard, in France and later in the court in London, had prepared her for what she was seeing now, for he was handsome. There was no doubt about that. It was in his carriage more than his features; he stood like a statute, like a living statute, with the posture of a man who has never questioned his own judgment, has never had to. He was dressed in the grandest clothes of the kingdom; he wore his crown lightly as if he had been born with it on, and in effect he had. The face itself—well, some people had told her it was cruel. Certainly the nose was too long, the chin too sharp for his face to look kind. But his long dark hair was luxurious, the skin smooth, the—

The eyes! He turned them to her just then, and it was then that she understood what everyone had meant. There was no feeling in them, none at all. They were dead eyes, like one of those Greek statues in which the shape of the irises had been carved but the pupils had not. When he looked at her, it was clear to Isabella that he felt nothing. The young beautiful princess was used to being appraised, considered for her beauty, her value to the realm. Or if not appraised, then admired. But this man showed nothing, and Isabella was sure beyond doubt that he felt nothing. She had heard a story about him, how his wife had died while visiting him during a campaign against the Celts in Wales. Longshanks, so the story went, had been shattered by grief; he ordered her body carried back to London on the shoulders of his proudest soldiers. Wherever they stopped to rest and set the litter bearing her body down upon the earth, his builders were ordered to erect a cross. In the Norman French of Longshanks’s court, these were called
chère reine
crosses, for “precious queen.” English commoners, in that peculiar mongrel tongue they called the English language, corrupted the term into charging cross. It was the decree of a grieving man, a romantic, a man with a heart. The story had put Isabella off guard. This man who looked at her now, with those dead eyes, had no heart and no soul.