Isabella: Braveheart of France (23 page)

The Despenser has the grace to blush at this. He sits back, having failed to provoke her. Edward looks rueful. He wonders if he has misjudged her.

He is right; he has.

***

The King joins her at the dock, while the Despenser stands a little way off. She makes her obeisance and he kisses her chastely on the cheek. She lingers, though she is eager to be aboard. Even the churning sea is welcome after so long wandering like a spectre in the towers and gardens at Langley.

“Help me, Isabella,” he murmurs.

“I will do all I can.”

“Do this for me and all will be as it was between us. You have nothing to fear from the Lord Despenser. You will always be my Queen.”

She watches him from the rails of the ship as it leaves the harbour. He stands at the dock’s edge until she is out of sight, the loneliest king she ever saw.

Chapter 42

Boulogne depresses her; she has bad memories of the town. Her household is soon overblown, the thirty bodyguards and servants who accompany her from England swells to a retinue of hundreds as supporters come to welcome her, among them a good many knights sent at her brother’s command to ensure her safety.

Her retainers from England stick close. She will not believe she is free of England and Despenser until she sees her brother again.

The crossing was rough, and her nervous energy is exhausted. The countryside beyond the town is rutted and badly made roads ploughed through ice-bound pasture and soaring hedgerows. Finally, late one afternoon, they arrive at Charles’ camp, a sprawl of fine pavilions flying banners bearing the golden fleur-de-lys of France.

Isabella emerges from her litter in her widow’s weeds, carefully trimmed with Bruges lace at the cuff and neck. One needs to look dowdy but not
too
dowdy. She is greeted by boisterous shouting from the French side.

Charles is reclined in a cushioned chair in his pavilion, his slippered feet resting on a stool. A clutch of tittering women watch her from behind his throne, and courtiers in velvets and silks whisper about her behind their hands. .

She sinks to her knees. He looks like her father; the resemblance is uncanny. It is like seeing him again, in a younger time. Charles is the last one left, the rest of her family are dead.

He does not let her stay on her knees long. He jumps up and takes her hands, keeping her on her feet, preserving her dignity. He smiles and brings her close. “Sister, do not be downhearted. We will find some remedy for your condition.”

She rediscovers her resolve. It has been so long, she has almost forgotten who she is, and where she is from.

***

The negotiations are a public spectacle. The Pope’s
nuncios
are there, as well as Stratford and Richmond, Edward’s envoys, Sully and all the French ministers. She bargains hard for Edward, but even if she had not a prior understanding with her brother she doubts if she would have had much sway. Certainly no more than she would have had with her father. The Capets did not become royal by being soft at the bargaining table.

It is one thing to give assistance to your family, another to sell the birthright.

Eventually a treaty is agreed: if Edward comes to France to pay homage before the end of summer then Charles will return Ponthieu and Montreuil. But he will not give up the Agenais, its fate he leaves to a court of French judges “at some future time.”

She knows the vagueness of this last resolution will set Edward’s teeth on edge. And at the last moment, Charles feigns to argue over the terms of the
existing
truce. He is playing for time. His intransigence is reassuring.

The
nuncios
, Norwich, Winchester and Orange, are charged with taking the resolution to Edward. She does not envy them their task. He will erupt when he hears it.

She says she will stay in France until it is all settled.

After all the diplomats and professional dilettantes have gone and she is alone once more, she walks out onto the terrace with her cloak wrapped around her shoulders and watches the moon rise over Poissy.

We make such plans for our lives
, she thinks,
and this is the way they turn out, nothing like what we imagine.

It seems I am not the woman I thought I was. I wonder what it would be like to have a man who wants me?
But this is a thought she can share with no one. She is ashamed for even harbouring it.

And yet, just once I should like to know.

***

April finds her in Paris, in the king’s salon, among friends again. Life here is simple, the king is the king, and the magnates do not stamp about with threatening looks. The women, though, are empty-headed. She thinks of Marguerite and Beatrice--that is where an empty head gets a woman. There should be a law.

“It is a terrible position you are in,” Charles tells her. “What are you going to do?”

“I cannot go back to England, not while Despenser is there.”

“You think if you threaten to stay here then he will send him away?”

“If he does, he will only invite him back again, and I shall be worse off than before. He has done it twice before, he will do it again.”

“Then what will you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“A wife is a husband’s property and his honour is invested in her no matter how wronged she may be. This is true if he is a king or a carpenter.”

She thinks of Marguerite, how she laughed and flirted with d'Alnay. Empty-headed women do not anticipate the risk. She imagined her in a bare cell in her sackcloth, seeing the shadow fall over her face when her assassins came for her. They said she was half mad by then and didn’t understand what was happening even when they put the pillow over her face.

She imagines them dragging her out by her feet, her head bumping on the stones down the stairs. This was a woman who might have been queen of France if she had kept her legs closed.

A lesson for us all.

Stratford returns from England. He is supposed to be the king’s man but she sometimes catches him regarding her with a quizzical expression, as if he is imagining what life might be like if she were his employer and not Edward.

He looks ecclesiastical and businesslike; he spells it out. The king is not happy that the Agenais is not returned. He is blaming the Pope’s legates for holding out false hope of success. They had suggested her mission, and now it seems to him the queen may as well have stayed home.

But he has agreed to the terms she has negotiated, he will come to France and do what must be done. Now he should like his queen to return at once to England and let’s be done with it. That is the gist of the message.

Isabella looks at Richmond, and Richmond looks at Stratford. “Does the king say when he shall make his journey to France?”

“He says he will do it by the end of August.”

“And the Lord Despenser will let him go?”

Stratford shrugs. “He is not well pleased by it, as can be imagined. He fears being left alone in England like a child fears being left in the dark without a candle. But with much better reason.”

“I hear,” Isabella says, “that he has cheated Pembroke’s widow out of twenty thousand acres of her estate.”

“Your grace, he has cheated everyone at some time or other. But while the king protects him, who is there to gainsay him? The only men who can stand up to him are in France.”

Richmond leans back, sighs and looks at the ceiling. “I once had a dog,” he says. “I used to toss it morsels from my plate. And every time my wife’s cat would jump on the titbit first, take it from between his very paws. And he would just lie there and watch her do it. Sometimes she would eat it, right under his nose. And he was a fearsome dog. I used him for hunting. But never once did he chase the cat away, no matter he was twice her size.”

“Perhaps the dog loved the cat,” Stratford suggests.

“Perhaps. But to truly know the answer for his behaviour, you would have to be the dog.”

“Why did you not stop tossing him the meat,” Isabella asks Pembroke, “if you knew the cat would always steal it?”

“Because I hoped one day he would learn. But he never did.”

“And neither has Edward,” she says.

He smiles. “No. Neither has he.”

***

It’s a windy night, summer has still not found France, and there is rain on her visitors’ cloaks. Isabella is dressed in her widow’s weeds, all in black with a veil. She has made it clear to the
nuncios
and to all of France that she has been supplanted in her husband’s affections by another, and so she has retired to live as a nun. Some are very affected by the position she has taken. There is much disgust about how Edward has treated her.

The King of England meanwhile says he wants Isabella back in England. Charles refuses to expel her.

Her guests in the palace tonight need no persuasion to her cause. They are England’s disaffected, those who have fled or been expelled by the king’s favourite. They are all men who are guests here but would find themselves in chains in their own country, desperate men living as landless exiles.

Treason is not spoken but is implied in every whispered conversation. They are there to pledge their loyalty to the Queen, who is now the focal point for their disaffection.

They listen as she grieves her lost estates, her lost position; she grieves the loss of her children; she grieves the loss of her income and her lands; she grieves most of all the loss of her husband to another who has supplanted her in her husband’s affections.

And when they have gone, she lets the candle burn down and thinks about the one man who has not yet appeared. France’s most celebrated exile is raising an army in Hainault. They say he is the one man who can turn England’s fortune.

She wonders if he is all they say he is or just another robber baron like the rest. She thinks about the shadow she saw on the roof of the tower that night. Why did she not give him up? Perhaps even then she imagined how he might be useful to her one day.

Every night more shadowed figures pass in and out of the gates to whisper over candlelit suppers and plot over the wine. They are careful what they say, and she is careful who listens. There is yet a part of her that hopes Edward will change his mind.

He sends letter after letter, insisting that she return, but there is always a reason to delay. Let him come to her. If she can get him away from the Despenser things might be different. In England he is never alone. He is constantly surrounded by that toad and his people. Before summer is out he has promised to come to France, and even if he is not vulnerable to her sex, surely he will listen to reason and to friendship. At heart he is a good man, and she will not let him destroy himself this way. It seems impossible to her that he might not finally see the danger and save his throne.

Chapter 43

Edward changes his mind. She can imagine the scene: the Despenser almost on his knees, begging him not to leave him at the mercy of his enemies - almost everyone in England aside from his father, his wife and his dog. He will have reminded him what happened to Gaveston without his king’s protection. He will have whispered endearments or pleas in his ear, probably both.

But invoking Gaveston’s name will touch the king. He will remember that day in June when his barons dragged him up a hill and gutted and beheaded him. He is never far from it, even in his dreams.

Stratford and Richmond look abashed when they bring the news. The king was at Dover, ready to board the ship: “He was taken ill,” Stratford says.

Richmond shakes his head. ‘
No, he wasn’t’,
he mouths to her.

“What shall you do now?” Charles asks her. They walk along a wide gallery, out of earshot of his courtiers, of her spies.

“I must do something. I am unable to meet my expenses. He has cut off my funds.”

“Can you blame him?”

“This was his last chance. He has showed his hand now.”

“He has shown his hand many times, dear sister. It is just that those who love him persist in ignoring it.”

“He cannot love the Despenser more than me, more than his country. More than the crown.”

The King of France considers this proposition. Finally, he asks her: “Why not?”

Why not.

***

She meets with Richmond and Stratford again on the first day of autumn. Charles’ proposition is this: he will yet make the young prince Edward Duke of Aquitaine, if he comes to France and pays homage to the king in person.