The King Must Die (The Isabella Books)

by Sasson, N. Gemini

  Not long afterward, Edward and I left Leicester and rode to join Mortimer in Northampton. Philippa had stayed safely behind, but I was not about to remove myself from this crisis. We had no sooner arrived than we were riding south again—this time through the frozen night. At Edward’s insistence—or perhaps it was Mortimer who urged it—we hastened southward, unimpeded by mud or rain or snow, pressing our soldiers at double pace long into the night. Our way lit by a crescent moon, we finally stumbled to a halt between two woods within striking distance of Bedford, where Lancaster was known to be.

  Thankful for the respite, however brief, and no matter what daybreak might bring, the soldiers collapsed in their lines and bedded down on their cloaks beneath an open sky. They quickly drifted off to sleep, their weapons hugged close to their bodies in readiness. No one dared loosen a single strap of their armor—Lancaster was too close.

  Edward claimed right to a small farmhouse at the edge of the woods, ejecting its confused residents to a shed, which they were forced to share with pregnant cows. When the scouting party returned, he called a council of war immediately.

  “Lancaster is still encamped at Bedford,” Arnaud de Mone reported, standing before us.

  The night sky was aglitter with pinpricks of silver starlight. White hoarfrost shimmered on every blade of grass and tree branch. My breath hung suspended in a pillar of ice. I tried to breathe through my nose, but felt the tickling of a winter cold. With numb fingers, I tugged the edge of my cloak across my lower face and drew air in through my mouth. A lump of pain at the back of my throat the size of a small egg made swallowing difficult. The inside of my mouth was as dry as ground bones.

  “How far?” Young Edward asked.

  “Mere miles,” Arnaud said. “Five maybe, close to six. It’s hard to gage at night, especially when riding swiftly.”

  Mortimer gripped the hilt of his sword. “We can be upon him well before dawn if we leave now.”

  “Attack at night?” I said, the corners of my mouth splitting and bleeding as I did so. It was unusual to pursue battle in the winter at all, let alone in the dead of night, I knew that much. “Edward, I beg you, do not hasten to your death. Lancaster and his soldiers are rested. Yours are not. We have not—”

  “Lancaster and his soldiers are asleep,” Mortimer interrupted with a sharp edge to his voice. “If we hesitate, opportunity flies from our fingers.”

  I had thought Mortimer more prudent, but it was what I heard next that surprised me most.

  “We go then. At once,” Edward said.

  I had begun to suspect that Edward was perhaps toying with Mortimer—letting him believe he both needed and trusted in him, simply to keep him close. And Mortimer, thriving on the compliment, would go with the opportunity for as long as he could, just as he once had with Edward of Caernarvon before he turned against him. If there was any chance that Edward’s outward trust of Mortimer was only a ruse, I had to know so I could keep him from destroying Mortimer in the end.

  Power and the thirst for it—it changes people, especially those bred and born to lead. It makes them forget who they once were. I understood this. I saw it happening before me, in both of them, and even so I could not stop it.

  ***

  It was too easy. Lancaster had snapped and crumpled like a splintery piece of dry-rotted lumber. The moment the earl got word that Mortimer and the king were approaching in the night with a full and ready army, he sent a messenger bearing the promise of a full submission if the king would return leniency. Edward sent back word that he would do so, but Lancaster was to leave his retainers behind and come with no more than a dozen attendees.

  Lancaster must have believed he had run out of options, for when we came upon him in a broad open field, a perfect site for a battle, he had done as requested. I recognized with him Simon Meopham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Lord Thomas Wake.

  Daylight was but a hint in the east as Lancaster stumbled forward, alone, fell upon his stiff, old knees and bowed his thinning head of hair.

  “I yield to you, my lord king.”

  Edward waited a moment before replying. “Hardly good enough, Cousin. What more have you to say? Do you still stand by your accusations?”

  Anything less than a confession of guilt, Lancaster must have known, was to lay his head on the block and bare his neck for a sharpened blade. He trembled slightly, as if afflicted with palsy. “I retract them all, my lord king. They were said in anger ... and stupidity. I had taken offense over small matters. I should have spoken my mind sooner.”

  “Speak now. What small matters, then, are you referring to?”

  “It is ... unimportant. Your uncles, Kent and Norfolk, their jealousies fed my discontent. I should not have listened. I should have come to you and told you everything.” He lifted his head, opening his eyes wide and then squinting strangely into the half-light of pre-dawn. The folds beneath his eyes drooped heavily from years and lack of sleep. Every crevice in his countenance was cut more deeply than the last time I had seen him. He looked pale, ill with worry, and by the tremor in his voice sounded completely broken in spirit.

  But Mortimer was not so easily moved to pity, nor was he convinced of Lancaster’s contrition. “What if Kent and Norfolk have a different story to tell?”

  Lancaster turned his head, not to look, but to listen more closely. “Your pardon? I do not understand what you’re —”

  “What if they say,” Mortimer cut him off, raising his voice and spacing each word as if he were talking to a near-deaf invalid, “that it was you who incited them to rebellion?”

  Lancaster’s upper lip lifted in a snarl. “I would expect as much of them, given the circumstances, my lord ... ‘Earl of March’, is it?”

  There was no mistaking the mockery in his tone. Mortimer’s arms and shoulders drew up in tension. I thought he would spring from his saddle, whip loose his sword and be done with Lancaster, but it was Edward who spared us from that ugly scene.

  “You were not there, Cousin Henry,” Edward said, erect and noble in his crowned helmet and fur-trimmed cloak, “when I honored him thus for his loyalty to me. You have not come to council meetings of late. But as you said, it was your own doing.”

  “It was,” Lancaster grumbled.

  Mortimer twitched and drew breath to lash back, but again Edward interceded.

  “In the end, you lost far more than you gained, wouldn’t you say?”

  Lancaster forced a dull nod.

  The king was satisfied. There would be no battle at Bedford, not today. Roger Mortimer had served his purpose. Kent and Norfolk had vowed their allegiance. Lancaster was not only subjugated, but he had been properly cowed to make an obedient vassal of him.

  The Earl of Lancaster was losing his sight. Perhaps it was not so much the ravaging of his lands at Mortimer’s hands and loss of his royal allies that had forced him to his knees before the king, but his disease. Thanks in part to Archbishop Meopham, who had urged him there, his life was spared and he kept his freedom. But his personal losses were to be heavy. The fine levied upon him hurled him into abject poverty. He was formally removed from the regency council and stripped of his high offices.

  It should have been that the worst of our fears was blotted out—squelched like a smoking fire in a steady rain. But we do not always see the danger that lies so close, straight ahead.

  19

  Isabella:

  Langley — February, 1329

  Philip of Valois—I refused to call him King of France—demanded homage of Young Edward.

  Envoys from France had arrived without forewarning at Westminster, where the king was in residence. We had known that eventually Philip would assert himself, only not as soon as this. Along with the king, Mortimer withdrew to an urgent meeting of the regency council, debating it well into the night. Without sleep, he left Westminster before dawn and rode to Langley to seek my input.

  A cold fog hugged the forest about Langley, reaching its white, shifting fingers between
the leafless trees and resisting the light of a rising sun. Mortimer and I were walking along a wooded path, when he told me of it. His voice cracked with fatigue. “The king refuses to go. I warned him that we cannot afford war.”

  Is war ever well-timed? Is it the only way of settling matters that men know of?

  Mortimer shook his fist in frustration. “Does he seek to repeat his father’s obstinate stupidity?”

  “My son is not obstinate, Roger. He is determined ... and patient enough to wait for whatever it is he wants to come to him in its own time.”

  “Call it want you want. This is not a waiting game. Philip will take action.”

  Frost sparkled like crushed glass on every blade and twig as morning mist drifted thick on the path before us. I could not see more than a few feet ahead—perfect cover to hide from those whom we did not wish to see us, but also a danger in treading so far from the castle alone in it. Even the tender crack of twigs beneath my own feet jolted my heart.

  “Philip is not worthy to sit upon the same throne as Charles,” I complained bitterly. “I should have pressed my brother to name an heir. But I believed it had to be his thinking, not mine. Why did they pick such an arrogant fop as Philip of Valois over Edward? He’s naught but a faithless pretender. A sham. An idiot with the brains of a cart ox.”

  “Insult him if it makes you feel better, Isabella. But it changes nothing.” Mortimer swung before me to block my path and seized my fur-gloved hands in his. “Besides, did you think, for even a breath, that the nobles of France would not want one of their own blood, born on their own soil, to rule? I refuse to believe you are that naïve, my love.”

  “I am not naïve. Nor am I disillusioned. I have studied the laws of inheritance. I know where the flaws are and the frail, disjointed reasoning they used to get around them. I also know that just arguments can be made on Edward’s behalf—ones that a knowledgeable court would uphold. He is French—half so, at least. I am his mother—sister to the last three Kings of France and the daughter of a king. My son stood next in line. No other. Certainly not Philip of Valois. But they rushed it, out of fear and prejudice, and would not even let their own courts decide the matter, as should have been done.”

  “It would have been a wasteful formality. You know that. They are not about to let France become a possession of England. Even so, had Edward been chosen to rule in France, what would he have done—divide himself in two?”

  “He could have entrusted us, Roger. We would have taken care of things for him here.”

  “As we have already. And then there would have been those who would have loved us even less for it than they do now. It would have been too much, Isabella. For him ... and for us.”

  I shook his hands loose and shouldered my way past him on the narrow path as branches scraped at my face and arms. My foot sank deep in a frozen pool of muck. I pulled it loose and scraped the bottom of my shoe clean on the weathered stump of a fallen tree. “It is his birthright to rule—both here and in France.”

  He retrieved my hand abruptly. “Yes, Isabella. But sometimes ... sometimes we have to accept that what we have is enough. France should have been yours, Isabeau. But the matter is dead. Do not use your son for your own vengeance.”

  I spun around so hard I nearly lost my balance. “Roger, you don’t understand. This is not about me. It’s Edward’s ambition of which I speak. He tried to earn Charles’ favor at every turn when we were in France, all with the same hopes that I had. And all for nothing in the end. It is not that I feel slighted for myself or my son, but that I know my son. Had Jeanne given birth to a boy, then Edward would have ceded humbly, even to an infant—but one rightly born into its place. Philip’s claim is thin. Edward is painfully aware of that. I know he will never let what he believes is his to be so easily taken from him.” I felt the cold kiss of a distant sun upon my face as it broke above the mists. “You have seen it in him—at Stanhope Park, at Kenilworth. Edward will fight. There will be war ... one day.”

  “That is inevitable.”

  “Is it?” The mud had soaked through the loose leather sole of my shoe, squelching cold against my foot, but I turned and strode on, eager to get back to a warm fire and hungry, the gnawing in my belly reminding me I had not yet eaten that day. “He will not go to France, Roger. Tell them that.”

  “He will have to, or else Philip will seize —”

  “I know”—I wheeled around to face him—“what will happen. I know the consequences!”

  “Then if what you say about the king is true, this war will be long and hard. It will be severe. Bloody. Costing lives by the thousands. Tens of thousands, maybe. The lesson should have been learned. He must pay homage so that —”

  “No! Hear me on this. I do not trust Philip of Valois, not in the same way I trusted Charles. I would fear for my son, for his life, every moment, if he were to go to France.”

  “Whether or not you believe in Philip’s right to rule, he is not stupid enough to make such a move.”

  “Sometimes, Roger, I do not speak as a queen, but as a mother. I don’t want any harm to come to my son.”

  I thought he would go on arguing, but his stance had softened. He gave me his arm. “I will tell the council you are reluctant. I’ll tell them why. But they will have to give an answer to the French envoys and they will not buy a bluff so many times as his father gave. He will have to go, eventually.”

  We walked along the narrow path as one. “I know ... but ...”

  I knew. Edward would have to go to France, in time. It must be done.

  ***

  Wigmore — September, 1329

  Young Edward delayed magnificently, carefully tidying his words in furls of diplomatic courtesy as three months slid by before he finally boarded ship and sailed for France, accompanied, much to my displeasure, by his uncles Norfolk and Kent. Both were in a perpetual state of groveling toward the king since disassociating themselves from Lancaster.

  William Montagu, who had been made a Knight Banneret for his service to the king, was told never to let him out of his sight, on pain of death, although even saying it was superfluous. Montagu would have tossed himself into the fires of hell to spare Edward any mortal danger.

  On the 6th day of June, resplendent in his yellow leopards of England flowing from the scarlet robe about his shoulders and the jeweled crown balanced perfectly on his fair head, King Edward III paid homage to Philip of Valois. They said that Philip scowled in disdain and afterwards referred to him as a precocious cockscomb. Before two days had passed, Edward fled France. Montagu had received details that Philip was poised to take the king into custody in order to charge him with a plot of usurpation and so Montagu ushered his lord from Amiens in the deepest, stillest hour of night. The king, they said, escaped from France on a nag, dressed as a nun.

  By the time Young Edward rejoined us in Canterbury, there was yet more news: Robert the Bruce, traitor to England, victor of Bannockburn and acclaimed deliverer of Scotland, was dead. His heir, the whimpering David, would become king at the fragile age of five—and my Joanna his queen.

  Soon after, two more of Mortimer’s daughters were wed—Beatrice to Norfolk’s son Thomas and Agnes to the son of the Earl of Pembroke. Prudent matches, but they only served to further incite contempt across the land toward Mortimer’s deserved good fortune. Lands and fineries that I bestowed upon him fanned even more jealousy. I would not, however, allow such pettiness to trample upon my tokens of gratitude, toward Mortimer or anyone. If my enemies ever succeeded in poisoning me, or by some other bloody act ended my life, then I would make certain that Mortimer and his heirs were properly endowed.

  It was a frail thread from which we dangled, Mortimer and I. As we reveled in the ecstasy of profane pleasures, I sensed the eyes upon us becoming ever more watchful ... and more damning day by day.

  If not for Roger Mortimer, rightly Earl of March, England would have stumbled and fallen to forces from both without and within. I did not give one whit of care
for those too blind with envy to see that. I kept buried the secrets of my heart, believing that if I did not admit to them, they would remain dead, just as no arrow flies from the bow that is not strung, nor music comes from the harp that is not plucked.

  It was not until the tournament at Wigmore in September that the first worn threads began to fray and snap.

  The pavilions stretched outward from the castle grounds and wound around the town walls, spilling out in a ramble of colors toward the woodland hunting grounds. The blast of trumpets opened the day and a herald galloped onto the tilting field with a scroll in one hand, from which he proclaimed the tournament open to all comers.

  I sat in a private box in the stands, shielded from the sun by a striped awning of red and gold. Mortimer passed behind the row of empty chairs, paused at mine and leaned over me. He plucked a grape from the platter on the arm of my cushioned chair and offered it to me “Shall I be your Arthur,” he whispered, a grin teasing at his lips, “or your Lancelot?”

  “The latter is more fitting between us, do you not think?” I licked at the smooth flesh of the grape and then bit it in half, sucking its sweet juices dry before swallowing what was left. Roger’s eyes followed my actions, knowing full well what I implied.

  “Arthur was the jilted one, yes, and Lancelot—who would not argue that he was the lucky one? But I rather prefer being ‘king’ for once. A man can pretend, can’t he?”

  “Come, sit beside me.” I patted the seat of the vacant chair to my right in invitation. “I will crown you ‘King Arthur’. All in goodhearted play, naturally. Look over there, even Young Edward is in high spirits. He can be your Galahad, bravest of all knights of the Round Table.”

  He settled beside me. “Here comes Galahad now, my queen.”

  The king approached on a bay, wearing full armor but no helmet.

  “Edward, dear,”—I beckoned him to the edge of the box—“will you take a pass or two at that upstart Sir Walter. I say his skill does not match his boasting of it. You can unseat him with a single blow—two if he’s not drunk.”