The Stolen Queen (31 page)

And then for a while, I stumbled through a world of dreams, where my mother waited for me beside a clear cold fountain in a glade, and as I reached for the cup she offered me, already feeling the blessed rush of water in my throat, I spied John and
Pierre, leading Henry by the hand, walking away into the forest. I cried out and tried to follow them, but the trees turned to the bodies of the men I had seen fall at Mirebeau, and I pushed my way through a maze of gore, dangling limbs with hideous sores sprouting like mushrooms of their trunks. As I pushed them from my path, my face was splattered with blood, which became Arthur's hair, slimy with river water, twining about my neck. I screamed, and came to myself huddled at the roadside, my temples throbbing now with heat and my eyes filmed with sickness. I hauled myself upright and took a few steps. I had to go on. But in time the coldness came on again, though I clenched my teeth against it, and I sank once more to the ground.

I must have continued like that, fainting and falling, until dawn, for when I woke again it was light and the hunger was gone. I felt weightless, as though I could glide along the road like a feather puffed in the breeze. My ankle throbbed, and the blue had grown, throwing out tendrils of deep colour along my veins, answered by the hum in my arm. If the two strands met, I should not live. I had to go on, I knew, but first I should rest a little. Just a little more …

*

‘Does she breathe?'

‘I think so.'

Two wrinkled faces peered down at me, pitted with deep lines like earth cracked in the summer. Agnes? I tried to speak, but my parched throat emitted only a low, rasping growl.

‘She is ill. Come away.'

‘It's not Christian. See, she is young.' I felt a twig-like finger brush the matted hair from my face.

‘But she's sick.'

‘Like as the soldiers have had her.'

I tried to shake my head, but somehow my muscles would not obey.

‘It's not right, wandering on the road alone. Leave her, now.'

‘We should fetch the priest. He'll know what to do.'

‘I don't know. A beggar woman. She'll be stiff before we get back.'

‘Still …'

‘Very well.'

The voices floated away from me, drifting back to dreams. I rolled over on my face and reached in my pocket for my trio of charms, the garter, the brooch and the seal, bunching them beneath my body, then slept once more. This time, my fancies conjured Lusignan, I dreamed that I woke and saw the cobbled rise to the keep, where horses could ride into the great yard, and that I heard the noises of the château about me, those same noises which had been so familiar to me as a child, the clanking of the guards' drills, the bustle from the kitchens. The seal burned beneath my frozen hand; it would be a weapon, I thought, when they brought me to Lord Hugh.

‘Isabelle?'

I was not Isabelle. I was a poor silk pedlar, selling my fancies through the villages.

‘She raves. She must be bled. Fetch the surgeon, ask for leeches.'

I would not be bled. I had seen enough blood, at Mirebeau, blood shining the river at Rouen, blood on Pierre's pale body. So much blood. My seal and my brooch were gone, the old gleaning women had taken them from me. I was a ghost, at last, and the thought made me laugh, though all I heard was a strange croak.

‘The snake,' I tried to whisper, ‘give it back!'

‘Hurry! The surgeon!'

Then I dreamed a halcyon's tail of a knife, dipping and cutting my flesh like marzipan, and a sweet liquid in my mouth that made me retch at the flavour of rot it carried. I was poisoned, surely. I was in a dungeon with Hal of Lusignan, and we were starving together. I would eat him, nibble him like a rat and then we should see which of us was the stupid girl. I screamed again.

‘Isabelle?'

Hal's face, disappearing in a scowl strapped to the back of a cart. Charcoal eyes and soot for hair, black like all the Lusignan men, bound next to Arthur, my husband's heir. Where was the silk man? Where was Lord Hugh, my father, my lover? Hal. My betrothed, my brother. I could not see him, he was drifting from me along a black river, where the horned man waited the coming of the tide.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I
LAY A LONG TIME SICK AT LUSIGNAN. WHILE I TURNED
and tottered through endless dreams, a wild hermit man in the north of England made a prophecy that the reign of the English king would soon come to its end. When John heard of his vision, he had the poor man brought to court and questioned before all the barons, where the man stood firm and declared that he should lose his crown by next Ascension Day. John sent him in chains to Corfe to wait out his claim, and all who heard it put faith in it, they said, as though his prediction had been declared from Heaven. The comet was recalled, and John's power, which had seemed so assured, began once more to slide away as his magnates began to call for new laws and justice in his kingdom.

It was Hal who told me of the prophet, Hal who sent word to the court at Westminster that Isabelle of England was gone to inspect her lands in the Poitou, a charter with her own seal affixed. It was Hal who ordered a doctor, and women to tend me, who sent for hangings for my bed and sweet herbs to burn in my rooms. It was Hal who told me of the strange woman
who had circled the walls of his citadel like a lost fairy, and lain down by the roadside for the peasants to find. Of the priest who had run to him at dinner and told of the delirious creature who muttered of ships and courts and soldiers and carried a royal symbol in her bedraggled gown. Hal was properly Lord Hugh now, since his father's death, but I told him I should never call him by that name.

‘You called me by plenty of others, I remember.' We were seated in the garden where once I had fought him. My hair, which had been shorn during the fever, was beginning to curl out under the edges of a neat black velvet cap. It had darkened to a warm brown, no longer the gleaming burnish I had shared with Pierre. I was too relieved to be vain of its loss. Hal's finger played idly with it, tucking it back against my cheeks. In turn, I traced my fingers along the taut strength of his arm beneath the loose sleeve of his mantle, finding the serpent curve of his mark in his flesh, tracing the shape I knew so well from my own. On his shoulder, the serpent brooch clasped his cloak. They had prised it from my hand in my delirium, and thus Hal had known me.

‘But how did my mother come by it?'

‘I sent it to her.'

‘You?'

‘When my father died. I wanted to remind her. That you were mine, and so was Angouleme. I marked it first, and I asked her to send it to you.'

‘A love token?'

He was serious a moment. ‘No. I did not love you. But you belonged to Lusignan. I knew I could not rule well here without
your presence. And I felt that you would come. Somehow, you would come, Sister.'

I had never liked to hear that word, before.

Then a smile broke across his face once more. It was Melusina's power, my husband joked, that had drawn me back to Lusignan, and kept me safe until he had found me. He had heard her, he smiled, the night of our father's death, shrieking like a storm around the walls, and she had come to him in a dream, a beautiful woman with golden braids that reached her ankles, the night before they found me at the roadside. She had twined herself around him, and whispered that his bride had come. I said that was a pretty dream to tell me, of lying in a snake woman's arms, and he smiled and said that there were consolations to be had in being the lord of Lusignan, and that I should thank her for a fairy godmother.

That was how it was between us. What was impossible to change, we made light of, and all the severity of sin and the recollection of blood, all the pain and confusion and loss, we put behind us, for how else could we live with what hovered in our blood except to make a jest of it, and live as best we could?

For we were married, Hal and I. According to the laws of the Church, we always had been, for we had exchanged the words at my betrothal. When I was strong enough, Hal took me one evening at dusk to the river glade where I had first seen my mother dance with the old gods, and told me we should seal our compact among them, in the old way. The poor silk man's garter was my only wedding fancy, and for a church we had the arch of the turning trees and Hal's sword, the blade laid crossways
in the embers of a fire. We took off our shoes and stepped barefoot across the whitening ashes, and it was done. Once my son was king, we would hold a wedding in a cathedral, with singing and incense and all the rites of the church, so that our lands could be held securely together in the eyes of the world, but for now, he was my true husband. Already, I rejoiced that I grew fat with his child. I had a letter put aside, against the time of Henry's crowning, though the parchment had been left empty at the top, for the ink of the date. If Hal de Lusignan should take a royal French wife, the writing explained, then all the English lands in Poitou and Gascony could be at risk from the greed of her allies. Therefore, ‘Seeing the great peril that should accrue were such a marriage to take place … ourselves married the said Hugh … and God knows we did this for your benefit rather than our own.'

Long ago, when I was still a child, I had liked to play at cat's cradle with Agnes. Sometimes we used red wool, winding and pulling it between our fingers, twining and separating them until the patterns came out, taut between our hands. If I traced the strands of my life back, was it really Melusina who had drawn me to Lusignan, or was it the horned man, or my mother? Perhaps it had taken them all to lead me back where I had no choice but to belong. I was not certain that I believed in the old ways any more than I did in the new, yet here I was, alive. In marrying Hal, I had kept many promises, those of men and those that were of something far older than men. It was true enough, that stately letter. Women were to weave peace, to bind lands and blood in a cat's cradle of alliances and loyalties, and
this was done. My boy's lands were secured, and perhaps there could be peace, for a time. Perhaps Henry would hate me for the choices I had made for him, choices which he should never comprehend, yet I hoped that he would forgive me too, as I had forgiven my mother, who had given me what I needed, in the end, to steal myself home.

Love makes a honeycomb of the heart. Too much and it grows friable. Better to seal off each chamber of sweetness so that the whole will stay rich and endure. I knew that Henry would never again love me as his mother, that my beautiful boy was lost to me, but as I closed that little part of my aching heart, I knew too that I had done everything to keep him safe, and I believed that no god would judge me for it. I knew that Hal did not love me as Arthur had, or even as John had done. He loved my titles and my dower lands and the salving of a wounding score. And nor did I love him. Yet there was room for him in my heart, not perhaps the sweetness spiked with spring flowers that had flowed so abundantly for Arthur, but something richer, as deep as the sugar of old wine, sweetness preserved for one who had known me as a child, when I believed in pink marble palaces and Saracen pirates. I could love his strength, and his certainty, and the safety they would give me, after so long wandering. And I would breed sons to him, a whole quiver of Lusignan boys, and they he should love, and perhaps I might be allowed, this time, to love them too.

I yawned, and stretched, feeling the rise of my belly beneath my gown. The air in the garden smelled of lavender and quinces.

‘Are you tired, Isabelle?'

‘A little.'

‘Then we shall go in. You must rest before the journey.'

I was tired, bone weary and drained, but not with the life that was in me. It was the lives I had lived that exhausted me, too many of them. I wondered if my mother felt that, too. Tomorrow we should begin our journey home, that I might repossess my city. This time, I would make a story for her. I would tell her of my journey, and of how Melusina had brought me home to Lusignan, just like her own long-ago tale had promised. My story should have monsters, and sealed pacts, betrayals and love. It would have fairies and changelings and fountains and banquets, jewels and silks and charging horses and crowns. She would stroke my hair, and I should kiss her.

‘Come, then, Sister. Come, Isabelle.' Hal's voice was warm. There was no shame between us. We were unlike others, that was all. This is what my mother knew, that was the true story of Melusina. Royal blood takes magic of one kind or another. So in a little while, I should give thanks for my return alongside my mother in the church her husband built, and then, together, we should go down at dark to the waterside, and make our thanks in a different kind. I knew I should find her there, my maman, in Angouleme.

The

Stolen
Queen

Lisa Hilton is the author of four historical biographies and two historical novels,
The House with Blue Shutters
, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Fiction Prize and
Wolves in Winter
. She has made several historical programmes for television and is a regular art and book reviewer. She lives in London.

Also by Lisa Hilton:

The House with Blue Shutters

Wolves in Winter

Published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2015 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Lisa Hilton, 2015

The moral right of Lisa Hilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.