The Traitor's Wife

by Susan Higginbotham

  Eleanor's first few days of captivity had been relatively busy. After collapsing in a faint in front of the king and his council she had awoken to find herself back in her old quarters in the Beauchamp Tower, with two of Mortimer's men standing over her. Then, and for several days thereafter, they had questioned her. Eleanor had admitted her guilt. Some of the jewels, she had acknowledged, were still in Hanley Castle; the rest had been brought as security to Benedict de Fulsham, who was in no way involved in her felony. She did not know the whereabouts of any goods belonging to Hugh or his father, except for those she had taken from the Tower and the few worthless items that had been left behind on her Clare lands. Her husband, William la Zouche, had known nothing of her actions, nor had Gladys or any of her children. She'd begged, over and over again, to be allowed to see the king and explain. Surely he, or his kindly wife, could understand how grief-stricken and angry she'd been.

  How Mortimer had learned of her felony she did not know. Tom, hearing the charge against her as he and Hugh stood shackled nearby, had cried, “No! I did it. Not the lady! Not the lady!” before being dragged away. It was clear, then, that he had not been the one to incriminate her. (She herself, hoping to save him from hanging, had insisted that she had tricked him into believing that the possessions he took were hers by right.) One of Mortimer's spies among the guards, she surmised, had noticed Tom's comings and goings, heard that he had left the Tower for her household, pieced the information together, and told Mortimer. He had held on to his knowledge until it suited his purpose to inform the king. Probably, she supposed, he had planned for her to marry one of his puppets. When she had run off with William, he had sprung the trap laid for her.

  No audience with the king had been granted, and Mortimer's men, not daring to use more forceful methods to get the king's first cousin to confess more freely, had at last left her in disgust. Eleanor had then prepared herself to die. Theft was enough for a death sentence, and theft from the crown… Would she burn, the female punishment for treason, or hang? She'd occupied a good deal of her time wondering which Mortimer and the queen would choose for her. Then she'd occupied more time considering whether she should try starving herself, as Ogle had told her Hugh had. Suicide was a mortal sin, but if she ate just enough to stay alive, she might be so weak that she would die quickly.

  But the court had left London by late February, and she was still in the Tower, still alive. The saddlebags she had brought on her journey, containing some changes of clothing and some toiletries and other necessities, had been brought to her, as had a proper bed. (She'd had only a pallet when she first arrived.) So it appeared that perhaps she would not die, after all. Was the plan, then, just to let her languish in prison, like her son?

  She picked up the rosary that had been in her saddlebags and began to pray. Praying, though apparently quite useless, passed the time.

  By midsummer, her guards had warmed up to her and began to tell her news. Philip of Valois, who had become king of France after King Charles's widow had given birth to a mere girl, had been demanding for months that Edward pay homage to him. Though Isabella had icily responded that the son of a king was under no obligation to pay homage to the son of a mere count, England was in no position to stand by such hauteur. The treasury was nearly empty, and the money that had been sent by the Scots pursuant to the treaty had gone straight to the queen's own well-manicured hands. With no money to fight the French, the king, using money loaned by the Italian house of Bardi, sailed to France and did homage on June 6. The very next day, Robert Bruce died in his bed. The heir to the Scottish throne, little Joan's husband David, was but five years old.

  On a more personal level, Eleanor learned that Tom and Hugh were still alive, but were in Newgate. Benedict de Fulsham, despite Eleanor's vociferous protests that he had done nothing more than lend money to her, had also been arrested and imprisoned to Windsor Castle, though he had been released on mainprise shortly thereafter. Mortimer probably held a grudge against Benedict; he like many other London merchants had been a supporter of the Earl of Lancaster.

  It was about this time when a letter from William finally reached her. William had obviously written the letter with the idea that it would be read by one of Mortimer's men, but despite, or perhaps because of, its bare simplicity it reduced her to tears. Her children were well, he wrote, and had received visits from both their Despenser aunts. All three of the nuns had been allowed to visit in May. All of them longed to see her and prayed for her every day. He himself missed her beyond words and was doing all he could to see her set free.

  She tucked the letter under her pillow and slept with it in her hand every night.

  William did not tell Eleanor that he and her father-in-law's retainer, Ingelram Berenger, had borrowed five hundred pounds together in March and that they were getting ready to borrow another three hundred pounds in July. Nor did he tell her that the Earl of Kent had gone to Avignon, officially to press for the canonization of the late Earl of Lancaster, unofficially to enlist papal support for the freeing of his brother. From there, he would move on to Paris, where he hoped to get a favorable response from Henry de Beaumont and several other exiles who had fallen out with the Earl of March.

  In August, Eleanor was sitting at her window watching the activity outside— almost her sole diversion—when she saw the Earl of March striding across the green toward the Beauchamp Tower. In a few minutes he was standing before her. “I've news for you, my lady. The king and his council have agreed to let you go free, under your supposed husband's supervision. Here is the order.”

  He held it up, then snatched it away as Eleanor reached for it. “Not so fast, my lady. There are conditions that you must meet before you go free.”

  “The king's conditions?”

  “No. My conditions. They're straightforward enough. You give me Glamorgan, Tewkesbury, and Hanley Castle.”

  “You cannot bully me into doing that.”

  “It worked well enough for your late Hugh, did it not? But I'll give him credit for results where it is due, for he labored under a disadvantage that I am not. He was dealing with honorable women of irreproachable character, like your sister Elizabeth. I am dealing with a common felon.”

  “I am not a felon.”

  “Just a lady who deals in a spot of felony, eh? Just as Hugh was not a pirate. He would have been proud of you, now that I think of it. The lord pirate and the lady felon. You were a well-matched couple, weren't you?”

  “If we were well matched, so are you and Isabella. Two adulterers—and two murderers.”

  Mortimer did not flinch. “Ah, that tiresome rumor about the late king has reached even your ears, I see. There's no truth to it. He died of natural causes, and was viewed by half the clergy in Gloucestershire. Not a mark on him. But we are getting off the topic of your lands, my lady.”

  “And if I don't give them to you?”

  “Then you rot in prison.”

  Eleanor snorted. “The king won't let me stay here indefinitely. When he and the council find out that I have not been released as planned—”

  “Find out from whom? Nothing gets to the king unless it gets to me first. No one sees him whom I don't want him to see. Nothing leaves the council that doesn't go to me or my men. I have the order freeing you, and if you choose not to give me what I want, it'll go straight into the fire.”

  “The king won't put up with you forever, Mortimer.”

  “I am the Earl of March. You shall address me as such.”

  “I shall address you as I please. You are a jumped-up knight who owes all to that whore we must call a queen. I am the daughter of the Earl of Gloucester. I would be Earl of Gloucester myself if I were a man.”

  “If you were a man, my dear, I would have stabbed you with my sword six times over by now. The lands. Deny them to me, and this order will be destroyed.”

  “I'll save you the trouble.”

  The early morning being chilly, a fire had been lit in her room. Eleanor snatched th
e parchment from Mortimer's hands and threw the pieces into the fire. Behind her, Mortimer grinned. “You're a haughty bitch, aren't you? Your grandfather and father would be proud to see a lady of such spirit. Pity you didn't think first, though. Men.”

  Four men with vacant faces came into the room, arms crossed. “Well, look alive, you. You've a lady to escort. Don't think of taking your pleasure with her first, though. We're in a hurry.”

  Eleanor opened her mouth to scream, but before anything had come out, Mortimer had knocked her unconscious with a single blow. He watched coolly as the men tied her, gagged her, and bundled her into a sack. “Mouthy little slut. Make good time, you, in getting her out of London before she wakes up, and kept that gag on her. We don't want her screeching on the way to Devizes Castle.”

  Although the constable at Devizes Castle in Wiltshire knew the identity of his new prisoner, his underlings did not, and they listened patiently as their new charge, a knight's widow with pretensions to nobility whom the Earl of March had imprisoned for making wild and irrational threats against the crown, demanded that a letter be sent to her first cousin, the King of England himself! Then she launched into a tirade about the inadequacy of her lodgings, which were no more than a tiny cell with a chamber pot in one corner and a pallet in the other. The guards humored her for a while longer. Then they handed her some bread and ale, locked the door, and left her to rant in solitude.

  At Wigmore Castle a few weeks later, King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, otherwise known as Mortimer and Isabella, watched as each of two young knights tried his best to unhorse the other. Every knight in England, except for those out of favor with the court, seemed to have come to Wigmore for the Round Table tournament.

  The occasion was another double Mortimer wedding, the juvenile bridegrooms in this case being the future Earl of Pembroke, Laurence de Hastings (rescued by the queen in 1326 from the clutches of his earlier betrothed, Nora le Despenser) and Edward, the Earl of Norfolk's heir. The newlyweds sat in the stand next to the Countess of March, whom the Earl of March had graciously had escorted from Ludlow Castle to spend some time with the court.

  Between Arthur and Guinevere and the Countess of March sat King Edward and Philippa. Edward watched the proceedings morosely. It was not that he disliked tournaments. In fact, he loved them, unlike his father who had tolerated them while Gaveston was alive and besting all of his opponents but had afterward regarded them with a mixture of boredom and suspicion. The second Edward's enemies had delighted in plotting against him at tournaments, and who wanted to spend the afternoon trying to knock someone off his horse and watching others do the same when one could be galloping through the countryside in the company of a good friend or two, then cooling off with a swim? But his son thought differently. Had this tournament been somewhere else, in someone else's company, he would have been enjoying himself to the utmost. There was the thrill of competition, the danger, the surprise, the satisfaction in seeing an especially well-aimed thrust, the beauty of the horses and their trappings. There were the ladies, dressed in their prettiest gowns and giving their favors, the adoring looks sent to and from the stands as the young knights rode out, the charming flirtations—

  There was his mother, the Queen of England, playing the whore to the Earl of March. And their adultery became more blatant every day. No longer did the queen and Mortimer stand apart when England's bishops were around; the men of the Church either discreetly ignored the relationship or stayed far away from the court where they did not have to witness it. No longer did they hide their affair from their families. Even the king's younger sister Eleanor had guessed something of it. Only the other day, she had asked him, “Ned, if the Countess of March were to die, do you think Mama would marry the Earl of March?”

  Edward's stomach churned.

  Beside him, Philippa was talking gamely to the Countess of March. Edward had yet to meet a person whom his young wife could not put at ease, and the countess's mouth was actually curving into a smile as they conversed. Still, what must it feel like for the poor countess to come to court and have to make small talk? What was it like for Mortimer's young daughters to be overshadowed at their own weddings?

  He looked moodily at the play-crown Mortimer was wearing. Why hadn't his own wife been crowned yet? His mother said that it was a matter of money, that there would be a ceremony in due time, but the money had been found for this farce easily enough: a thousand pounds had been borrowed from the Bardi. In the crown's name! Mortimer could have easily financed the tournament himself without the Bardi's help, him and Isabella, with all the loot they had raked in from the Despensers and Arundel, with all the lands the queen had been granted by the crown. Meanwhile, his own household was so short of money that his keeper of the wardrobe periodically threatened to resign. What the king needed, he'd said, was an alchemist, not a humble clerk.

  In two months he would be seventeen. Too old to be ordered about by Mortimer and his mother. But would Mortimer give way? Edward doubted it. He was enjoying himself far too much to slip quietly into the role of mere trusted advisor. And Isabella would never encourage him to do so. It had been the loneliest day of Edward's life not long ago when he had realized, first, that his mother was the Earl of March's lover and, second, that her feelings for him were such that given the choice between loyalty to the earl and loyalty to her son the king, she would probably choose the earl.

  A new pair of knights rode out onto the field, and Edward's spirits lifted a little. William de Montacute, one of the few people in his household he trusted, was next in the lists. William was about to leave on a mission to the papal court in Avignon. What if William could gain a private audience with the Pope, to tell him the state into which England had fallen? Cash-strapped, cowering before the Scots and the French, run by a man who was intent only on self-aggrandizement, its rightful king cast into the shadows? Edward had no clear plan of what to do yet, it was true, but a change would have to come, and he knew that the change would have to be effected by himself. And on that day papal support would be necessary…

  He would have to seek out William alone, of course. No chance of simply seeing him alone in his chamber; Mortimer made sure of that. No, where other kings could talk to whom they pleased where they pleased about whatever they pleased, the King of England would have to sneak away to have a private conversation with his friend. But soon, he vowed, his days of sneaking would be over.

  “Jail fever!” The constable of Devizes Castle glared at Robert, head of the prison garrison and known to his fellow English speakers merely as Bob. “We've never had jail fever here before.”

  “Maybe, my lord, but our fine lady started with it five days ago.”

  “That creature? She is a vastly inconvenient woman.”

  “She is very ill, my lord, and has been out of her senses the entire time. Indeed, I believe she will die soon.”

  The constable sighed. Though the Earl of March had given orders for Eleanor to be treated as a common prisoner would be, he also had been emphatic that she not be treated so badly that she died of ill-use. He would not be pleased to have a corpse delivered to him. “We had best try to prevent it. My personal physician shall attend her.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “And move her to a guest room. I gather she is in no condition to escape.”

  “She is in no condition to know her name, poor lady.” The constable glared at him. “I beg your pardon, my lord. But after the jailors told me of her illness, I saw her myself, and I do find her a pitiful little creature. She must have friends somewhere—she cries out for so many people. William, and a Hugh, and her uncle, and a Gladys, mainly.”

  The constable snorted. “Hugh, is it? She'll cry out for him for a long time. I suppose I might as well tell you now who she is. What have you heard?”

  “The men say she claims to be daughter to the Earl of Gloucester, Gilbert the Red, and granddaughter to the first Edward, but I know that is a delusion of the poor thing's.”

  �
�No. She's right. Remember Hugh le Despenser? That's his relict.”

  Bob stared. “His widow? Here in rags, sick to death?”

  “The Wheel of Fortune turns,” the constable said philosophically.

  “Then, sir, I pity her all the more.”

  The constable harrumphed. “Then you take charge of her. As for me, I'm hoping the earl will soon take her off our hands. He told me in August that he'd trouble me with her only for a few weeks, and here it is December.”

  He went off, still grumbling, and after a while a young servant boy came to Bob to tell him that the lady's room was ready. Bob went to the cell where, by his own, entirely unauthorized connivance, Eleanor lay in some comfort on a clean pallet, wearing only a thin, coarse shift donated by Bob's sister but well covered with blankets. The lady's once pretty red hair had been so dirty and matted that after consulting with his sister, Bob had cut it; he hoped she wouldn't mind too much. Eleanor was mumbling to herself but seemed a little calmer than usual. He picked her up, easily as he might a kitten, and smiled at her as she opened her green eyes, dull with fever, and looked at him languidly. “Hugh? Where are you taking me?”

  “To a more comfortable room, where you can get better.”

  “Am I ill?”

  “Just tired out, my lady. You need a change of scene.”

  She was quiet as he carried her some distance away, to a part of the castle so bright with candles and luxurious it might have been a different building altogether. As he neared her new quarters, she whispered, “Hugh?”

  “Yes?”

  “I'm married to Lord Zouche now. Are you angry?”

  Bob set Eleanor on a bed, hung round with curtains, and patted her hand as he relinquished his charge to a woman who had been brought in from the town as a nurse. “No, not at all. You rest and get well.”

  During the two weeks Eleanor spent in a delirious haze, there were times when anyone who touched her, even the kindly physician, was an enemy, while at others she lay placidly and trustingly as a young child. It was not until a day in mid-December that she awoke from what seemed to have been an endless descent into another world altogether and knew perfectly well who she was. I am Eleanor de Clare, late the wife of Hugh le Despenser, now the wife of William la Zouche. My first husband still rots for all the world to see; my second husband is somewhere unknown; my children are scattered around the kingdom like so many stones; and where am I now? She moved her head to the left and felt the warmth of a fire nearby. She touched the covers she lay underneath and felt fine linen and fur. She might have been in her own chamber, except that there was no one around her whom she loved. “Am I still at Devizes?” she asked. “Are you a physician?”