The Traitor's Wife (66 page)

But the presence of Robert Bruce turned out to be quite unnecessary; the lieutenants could humiliate the English all by themselves. The Scots, as usual, had traveled light, slaughtering local cattle when they became hungry and supplementing their diet with oatmeal, which they baked into cakes on the iron plate each man carried with him. The English, as usual, had traveled heavy, their pace slowed by their groaning baggage carts and their lumbering packhorses. Only when the English army, which had set out from York on July 10, had traveled for days without encountering the enemy did the leaders—the Earls of Lancaster, Norfolk, and Kent (officially), Mortimer (unofficially), and the king (when anyone paid any attention to him)—decide to speed up their pace by leaving the baggage train behind. Smoke having been sighted billowing in the distance, they ordered each man to take a loaf of bread with him, strapped to his saddle, in the conviction that where there was smoke, there had to be Scots. No further provisions were deemed necessary, it being certain that the English would defeat the Scots the next day.

Instead, it began raining, and stayed raining for eight days. Those who had had the stomach to choke down their loaves of bread, sodden with rain and the sweat of their horses, were only slightly less hungry than those who had been more finicky. When provisions were sent from Carlisle and Newcastle, they proved barely edible. Horses were dropping dead, and men were shivering with ague. The Scots had long disappeared from sight.

By the end of July, the Scots, full of cattle and oatmeal, were getting rather bored. Having captured a young English squire, they released him so that he could bring the English army to confront them. Finally, on the banks of the River Wear, the English at last faced the Scots—and realized that with the Scots securely stationed on a hill, crossing the river would be madness for the English. Invited by the English to battle them on equal ground, the Scots refused, though not without admiring the heraldic crests on the English knights' helmets, the first they had seen, and puzzling over the peculiar weapons, called “crakys off wer,” that the English had brought with them. But the gunpowder that lined the iron buckets was so sodden with rain that no one standing by the River Wear had any inkling of the havoc it would someday wreak.

For several days the armies engaged in minor skirmishes, save at night, when the Scots employed every stratagem they could to keep the English from sleeping. Then, on August 3, the Scots camp grew strangely quiet. The next morning, the English found that they had moved to Stanhope Park, to yet another hill from which arrows could be showered down on the English.

Yet for once it appeared that the Scots were at a disadvantage; they could be surrounded and starved out. But this was not to be. On August 4, as the English camp lay sleeping, men woke to find their tents falling around their heads and spears being poked through the fabric into their bodies. James Douglas had arrived in person with several hundred men.

William la Zouche, hearing the commotion before his own tent could be reached, grabbed his sword and ran toward the direction of the king's pavilion, where Scots were slashing furiously at the ropes. As Zouche and others began to attack their attackers, the king emerged from the tent and had been all but grabbed by the Scots when his chaplain, having picked up a sword from somewhere, flung himself in front of the boy and began frantically striking about him with his weapon. His heroic gesture, fatal to himself, gave Edward's servants time to form an armed circle around the young king while the rest of the English camp, now fully roused, began to drive the Scots away. In minutes they were heading back out into the darkness, leaving behind a field of crumpled tents and dead and dying men.

The next evening, the English were on full alert for another night attack. Instead, while the Scots' campfires burned through the night, every one of Douglas's men rode quietly away toward the Scottish border, their absence undetected by the English until the next morning. With no enemy to fight, Edward and his troops headed back to York, Edward weeping tears of frustration and anger. His own father, he thought, could have hardly done worse.

“There's more bad news,” Mortimer said abruptly to the queen when the two of them were finally alone in her chamber there. “The Dunheved brothers prized your fool husband out of Berkeley Castle in July. Though he's back there now, by God, and closely kept.”

“He was freed from the castle? Why was I not told?”

“I am telling you now, am I not? We must make a decision, Isabella. Thomas Dunheved is at the bottom of a well, if you are interested, but Stephen Dunheved is still at large, and there will be more such attempts to follow. If not by this gang, then by others. Perhaps even by the Scots. There's your fool husband's old friend Donald of Mar, for one. He could free him, set him up as king again—provided that he dances to Robert Bruce's tune. And then where would
we
be?” He pointed in the direction of the city gate where Hugh le Despenser's left leg was rotting. “With Nephew Hugh, my dear.”

“That is impossible! The English people would never accept Edward as their king again. With all of his faults—”

“Men have short memories. So what shall we do with our former king, Isabella? Put him in a more secure castle and hope that he is forgotten eventually? Or take more final action?”

“I will not decide this, Roger!”

He shrugged. “Very well. I suppose it's to be expected that you would have some womanly indecision, some feminine weakness.”

“Womanly indecision! Feminine weakness!” Isabella's eyes blazed. “I saved this country from the Despensers, have you forgotten that?”

“Following my advice, have you forgotten that? Without me, today you'd be sitting in your chamber making altar cloths while your precious Edward let Hugh up his bum.” He paused. “Or perhaps by now they would have allowed you to join in.”

She started to slap him, but he caught her hand. “Admit it, Isabella. It's what you've wanted all along. You're not one for half measures. You and I took the king off the throne, but that's not good enough, not in this world. Don't you want to do it right? There's only one way, and you know it. And it's the best way. Good for me, good for you, good for your son. Good for your fool husband, even.”

“Good for
him
?”

“Certainly. Nothing separating him from Piers Gaveston or Hugh le Despenser then, will there be? A blissful reunion. Oh, we'll be doing him the greatest favor we can do him, my dear.”

She began laughing, was still laughing when he carried her to her bed, was still laughing when he stripped her. “Do whatever you want,” she gasped as he pushed inside her. “Anything you want. Anything.”

His first months at Berkeley Castle had not been so bad. The room he was assigned was small, nothing like the chamber he'd been given at Kenilworth, but tolerable at least. The food was plain, but wholesome and not terribly offensive to a man who had once bought cabbages from a peasant and used them to make soup in his barge, right then and there. Berkeley was gruff, Maltravers gruffer, but his guards were civil enough, and willing to tell him news. He was occasionally allowed to go to the chapel.

Then in July he was freed by Thomas Dunheved and his followers, and then recaptured, and after that everything changed for the worst—but he would not have traded those few summer days of freedom, of hope, for the most comfortable quarters in Kenilworth. On that dreadful day in Kenilworth when he had resigned his crown, he had thought he was utterly alone in the world, or at least that the few who cared for him—his son John, his little girls, his niece Eleanor, his sister Mary—were powerless to help him. On the night when he awoke to find his old confessor, Thomas Dunheved, standing over him, he knew he had been wrong. He did have friends, and surely those who could do nothing else to help him had led them to him with their prayers.

Even when he had been captured by Berkeley's men, now all action and vigor after their prisoner had so embarrassingly escaped from them, his hope had not died. “There are others,” Thomas had hissed to him as they were being hustled in opposite directions by their captors. “You'll see, your grace. Be of good cheer. You'll soon be free again.”

And he would be, one way or another, even though he was kept more closely than ever before and treated considerably worse than a common prisoner would be. In the last day or so, he had discovered that however cold, hungry, and dirty he was in his cell, he could take his mind anyplace it cared to go. Helping Lucy shear a sheep. Rowing down the Thames with Piers. Hunting with Hugh. Showing Eleanor how one of her birds would sit on his finger. He could retreat there and no one—not sour Berkeley, not cruel Maltravers, not the mean-faced guards who kept him now—could touch him.

He settled back into the window seat where he spent most of his days—his bed was a mere pile of rags on the floor now—and let his mind roam where it would.

Thomas de Berkeley looked through a grill at his prisoner, who huddled in the window seat staring into space. Since the restoration of Edward to Berkeley, Thomas had followed his father-in-law's oral instructions to the letter—a poor cell, poor food, poor ventilation, poor bedding, poor clothing, poor sanitation—and his former king seemed hardly worse for wear physically, although mentally he was clearly losing ground. Oh, he knew where he was and who he was and what he was doing there, most of the time at least, but in the last day or so he had acquired a strange ability to absent himself from whatever was going on about him, something that made him oblivious to the taunts of his guards and Maltravers, who took such relish in his role as jailer that one would think it was he, not Berkeley, who had spent the years after Boroughbridge in a cell instead of quite comfortably in France. “Your grace?” he called through the grill.

Edward blinked and started; being addressed with respect never failed to bring him out of his reverie. “Lord Berkeley,” he said as if being asked to identify him.

“Your grace, the queen has sent you a cloak. Here it is.”

He fitted the cloak—a plain woolen affair that would never have touched Edward's shoulders while he was king—through the grill. Edward took it and turned it in his hands. “That is kind of her,” he said distantly.

“She has not forgotten you, your grace. She still looks kindly upon you.”

“If that was true she would let me see my children, wouldn't she? The whore!” Edward subsided back into himself as quickly as he had erupted. “It grows chilly at night now,” he said politely. “This will be useful.”

“I've a mind to move him back to his old room and make him comfortable there,” Berkeley said to Maltravers later. “All this is for naught. He's growing worse in the mind each day, poor creature, but no less sturdy.”