Isabella: Braveheart of France (13 page)

But what if I fail you?

You will not fail me.

But what if I cannot make Edward love me?

Love is nothing. You are my daughter. You were not born to trouble yourself about love.

But it’s not fair. You know what love is like, I saw you at mother’s funeral. And look at Edward, in the church he could scarce breathe. What is it like to love so much?

Just remember your duty.

“My duty.”

“What was that, your grace?” Eleanor asks her. She realises she has spoken aloud. She shakes her head. “It is nothing,” she says.

My duty, is that all there is for me?

Why should I complain? He is not cruel to me. Yet if I were to die, will Edward wrap my body in gold cloth and have all England’s churches say Mass for me? Will he sob over my tomb like a child, as he did for Gaveston?

He is more like a brother than a husband, pleasant company but never a kiss or an embrace, and comes to my bed for procreation only, like a good Christian, but not like a red blooded man.

But this she promises herself: one day she will have his heart. He will love her like he had loved
him
. She could not bear it if she were to live her entire life and never know what it was like to be Gaveston and be truly adored.

Chapter 23

Lancaster’s star is in the ascendant; Edward is under his heel. He needs her now and she will remember these as their best times.

While Lancaster skulks in his castle at Kenilworth, issuing proclamations and demands, the king holds his councils at Westminster. Isabella is invited to attend. Does he do this to irritate Lancaster, or because he is beginning to trust her?

Old Hugh’s son now becomes a regular petitioner at the court. The King says he does not like him. He refers to him as The Despenser, in a dismissive tone. Lancaster and his fellow dissenters forced him on the king as their chamberlain for a time and he has not forgiven him for siding with Lancaster when Gaveston was murdered. He tolerates him for old Hugh’s sake.

Now he wants the king to ratify some estates that once belonged to his brother-in-law, Gloucester, before he was killed at Bannockburn. The Despenser says they should pass to him. The King is slow about it. It is clearly an injustice and irks the Despenser to the point of apoplexy. In private Edward laughs about it.

“Let’s make him stew a bit longer.”

One wet night in May she meets him coming out of the Great Hall at Westminster, an appalling place, Exchequer clerks bawling at each other over the massive marble Chancery; the King’s Bench and the Court of Common Pleas are in the same chamber, and the din is overwhelming.

It is sticky and warm, and she has long dispensed with her furs, but the Despenser still wears a heavy mantle and is blowing on his hands. The king says he is like a lizard and has to lie on a rock in the sun to get warm.

He is not like his father; he frequently forgets to be obsequious. He knows only one song, and that is that the world owes him more.
Your grace, about these estates in Gloucester, your Grace, about this castle in Tonbridge.
He has the palest skin she has ever seen, and in a certain light he appears translucent. She thinks that if you cut him his blood would be the palest blue.

“Shall you be appearing regularly at these councils, your grace?” he asks her, and she thinks he is about to make a complaint about having women in the chamber. Instead he takes her to task over the king’s wavering in endowing him the Earl of Gloucester’s former estates. Gloucester’s wife has claimed that she was with child when Gloucester died and an heir was on his way, but it’s two years since Bannockburn, and unless the child emerges with a beard it is unlikely now to be Gloucester’s.

“I am sure the king will get to it in good time,” she tells him and passes on.

As an earl, he would make a fine bailiff. Owe him a penny and before the year is out he will have your castle, your horse and your wife.

Warwick comes to his last council that spring. He no longer looks like Warwick; he is thin and drawn, but not in the grim and poisoned way of the past. There are plum-coloured shadows under his eyes and he walks like an old man. It is the last time he is seen at court, and does not live to see out the summer.

Edward, of course, is grief-stricken. When he is informed that Warwick has asked for a simple funeral, he chokes off a further guffaw of laughter. “I’ll give him one - I’ll throw him in a shit pile in Whitefriars and the dogs can fight over his giblets. Would
that
be simple enough?”

There is a rumour, passed on by Eleanor and Lady de Vescy, that Warwick was poisoned. She asks Edward if he has heard this gossip. The king says no, but the king is lying. But he adds the pious hope that Warwick died slowly and in pain.

Because his son is yet a child, all Warwick’s estates pass to the crown in trust. She doubts any in his family will ever see them returned.

Lancaster has meanwhile made himself king of England in all but name. He replaces sheriffs and bailiffs with his own men and issues pardons and grants petitions while Edward sends embassies to Kenilworth to beg his leave should he wish to yawn or change his horse’s saddle.

At night she listens to him rage and vow revenge, and keeps him from a war that he cannot win. She counsels patience. He listens to her, lets her hold him sometimes and stroke his head as one might calm a frightened horse.

Lancaster might have the power for the moment, but it is Isabella whom the barons love. She laughs, she charms. She is no longer thin and pretty; people tell her she is beautiful, and if they do not tell her, she asks them. The barons puff out their chests and try to look manly whenever she enters the Great Hall. There are other ways to play at politics, you see.

She transforms the court. She has found the English recalcitrant when it comes to fashion, and she has the royal dressmaker in Paris send her low-cut gowns that she insists her ladies wear. Lady de Vescy is scandalized and claims she is too old to display her bosoms and is the first to wear one. Eleanor, even though she is youngest, is hardest to persuade. But eventually she brings them all to heel.

She receives from France a sideless surcoat trimmed with fur and a
pelicon
, a fur-lined mantle with a cowled hood. Soon all the other ladies of the court are affecting them as well. She abandons the matronly chin-barbe for a diaphanous veil worn over her gold chaplet.

Edward watches and smiles and indulges her whims. He commissions a circlet of rubies, sapphires, emeralds and pearls. He spends a staggering thirty-two pounds for a new chaplet and silk dress so that she might astound at the wedding of one of her desmoiselles. It is studded with silver and encrusted with three hundred rubies and two thousand pearls. Let Lancaster set an ordinance against that.

She is elegant, she smiles and she is beautiful. Edward basks in her reflected glory.

She announces a new son to be delivered at the end of the summer and withdraws to Eltham for her confinement. The castle is a gift from Edward, and he has refurbished her apartments there. From her window she can see the spires of Saint Paul’s.

Eleanor, the Dispenser’s wife, is irregular in her attendance these days for she is frequently in confinement herself. She is ten years married and has six children of her own already. Her husband is not cold-blooded all the time, it appears, though she imagines he has the conjugal visits recorded in a ledger by a clerk and demands her to account for those that do not result in issue. Perhaps he has a system of fines.

“I see your husband wishes to be Lord of Glamorgan now?” she asks her one day.

Eleanor bristles at this implied criticism. “Well what man would not?”

“He is certainly impatient for it.”

Eleanor flushes. She has a wicked little temper, and sometimes Isabella amuses herself by prodding her a little, watching how it gripes her to hold her tongue. “He only ever asks for what is his, by right, your grace.”

“And six children to prove it!”

Eleanor’s cheeks burn red.

Jacques de Malay’s curse still echoes around the Isle de Paris. Her brother Louis catches pneumonia from drinking iced wine after playing tennis. A king cannot have too many heirs, it seems.

So she is pleased to give Edward another son, John. Lancaster is informed of the birth but does not deign to remove himself from his estates to attend the christening.

There will be another war soon. There can only be one king in a country, and presently England has two. It is a state of affairs that cannot continue forever.

Chapter 24

January, 1317

The Royal Hunting Lodge, Clarendon

Edward looks up, gives her a reassuring smile. Pembroke’s expression is comforting, and Mortimer’s is unreadable. Lancaster is there, she feels his enmity as she walks in, a mere woman. He does not want her on the king’s council, even if she is queen. Let him issue an ordinance about it.

Old Hugh looks rattled. His son is here again today, perhaps Lancaster owes him money.

Even before she has taken her seat beside Edward on the dais, Lancaster is on his feet, blaming them both for the Bruce’s latest ravages in the north.

“One wonders why the Bruce plunders everyone’s lands but yours,” Edward says, making no effort to appear conciliatory. It is true; only Lancaster’s dominions remain untouched by the Scot
hobelars
.

“Can we not discuss what we may do about it, rather than apportion blame?” Isabella asks them.

She earns a nod of approval from Pembroke. She has assumed his role of peacemaker and he seems relieved to be rid of it. It is a thankless task when other men have no interest.

But Lancaster is not to be appeased. He moves on to his evergreen contention, recounting all of Edward’s failings against the Scots, one by one.

“And yet, Uncle,” she says when he is done, her voice so soft he has to strain to hear her, “you still have not explained to us why your own lands remain untouched in these raids.”

“Because he fears me,” Lancaster says.

“Some say that is not the reason!” Edward shouts.”

“What other reason could there be?”

“Could it be you are plotting with the Bruce against the crown?”

Lancaster looks from his niece to his king. He feigns outrage, but his eyes tell a different story and confirm both their suspicions of him. “To do such a thing is treason. Who accuses me?”

“You deny it then?”

“Of course I deny it! Where is your proof?”

There is no proof. The other magnates fidget in their seats. They can all see England sliding again to civil war. Mortimer says something ferocious, and soon everyone in the chamber is on their feet and shouting at each other and nothing is achieved.

Lancaster hurls yet more insults at Edward who cannot contain himself and rises red-faced to the challenge and hurls them right back. This is not about the Bruce. This is about Gaveston. Everyone knows it.

“Uncle.” She speaks so softly that they all stop their yelling to listen to her. “Uncle, you say the king allows this Robert Bruce to raid our northern borders with impunity, but you are the one that prevents him from going to war to stop him. With these restrictions you have placed on him, what is he supposed to do?”

Her voice is so sweetly reasonable it calms him for a moment. He leaves off shouting to reflect.

But this is not what the king wants. “You are a whoreson dog,” he growls at Lancaster, and the time for peacemaking is past. Lancaster storms from the parliament. She doubts he will ever return.

After they disperse she sees the Despenser with Edward. They withdraw to a window and converse in whispers, some private matter of the realm she supposes. But she does not like the way the Despenser looks at the king, as if he is something he would like for dinner.

But it is only a moment, and she thinks she must be mistaken.

***

A scandal, and one that brings Edward a great deal of merriment when he is not fretting about two more of his barons going to war. Lancaster’s wife, Alice, tired of her husband’s whoring, has absconded with one of Surrey’s knights. Lancaster blames Surrey, musters an army and marches south. He does not care about losing Alice as much as the damage to his pride.

By now Isabella is confined to Woodstock. She has two sons and now there is a daughter, Eleanor. A healthy brood, and no Gaveston to come between them. Surely this was her triumph?

Yet something is missing.

Lonely in her bed, she thinks of Marguerite and Blanche and their lovers; they paid dearly for their pleasures. They said her brother Louis had his wife strangled in the nunnery to stop the inconvenient breaths she continued to draw. It had allowed him to take a rather beautiful princess of Hungary as his new queen.