My heart lurched. I had never for one moment considered remarrying. How could any man take the place of my husband? It was unthinkable.
‘It is too soon,’ I said quickly. ‘It is not something I wish to consider.’
‘It may not be your choice,’ said Louis, ‘Your king may need your help just as Philip did. But our brother says you may prefer to take the veil. You’ve done your duty and given your husband sons and Philip, at least, is content to let you please yourself.’
Next morning I was summoned to the king’s presence. He eyed me as I came towards him and made my reverence. I remembered to lower myself and use the correct form of words but it felt wrong. This was Ned and I had loved him as a son.
‘Now all this pageantry is over, I have no further need of you, my lady. You may retire to your castle at Marlborough and do whatever it is you wish to do there.’
He was being deliberately distant and unfriendly.
‘My boys, your grace? Edmund and Thomas?’
‘My brothers shall remain with me.’
He must have seen my stricken face and the tears in my eyes.
‘They are old enough or did you plan to keep them hidden behind your skirts for ever?’
‘No, your grace. But may I keep my daughter?’
‘My sister will remain at Amesbury. She is in my care now and I will say where she is to stay. Do I make myself clear?’
I lowered my head. ‘Yes, your grace.’
‘And when I marry my wife will need women to serve her so my nieces will leave your household.’
Two of Joan’s de Clare daughters were in my care but now it seemed I was to lose them too.
‘You will live quietly so you won’t have need of them. I plan to give Margaret to Piers as a wife.’
I gasped. I couldn’t help myself. This was totally inappropriate. Margaret de Clare was my husband’s granddaughter and Piers Gaveston was nothing but a parvenu, a common upstart Gascon.
Ned smiled. ‘I’ve also given him the castle at Berkhamsted.’
I shivered. Berkhamsted was mine and had been mine since the day I first married. Why had he taken it away from me?
‘You must understand, my lady, that Berkhamsted has always been part of the earldom of Cornwall, and while my father may have felt he had the right to remove it from his dead cousin’s estates and give it to you, my lawyers inform me that he was wrong. I sent them to pore over their dusty tomes and eventually they agreed with me that the manor of Berkhamsted does indeed belong to the earl of Cornwall. So there we are. I know you won’t begrudge it to Piers because you have so much and he, poor boy, has so very little.’
So this was the way things would be from now on. I could see no happy resolution in the years ahead. Ned was utterly determined to plough his own furrow without regard to anyone else other than his beloved Perrot. I couldn’t see Philip’s daughter managing to navigate a course through the dangerous waters of my stepson’s obsessive love for this man and I didn’t know how long the goodwill of my husband’s friends would last. But whatever lay in the years ahead would be nothing to do with me, Ned had made that abundantly clear.
I lowered myself once more and murmured a farewell. I kissed his hand and made to leave but he stopped me. He walked over to where I stood near the door and lifted my fingers to his lips.
‘I could have loved you,’ he said. ‘If they hadn’t given you to him you could have been mine and I would have been a good husband. You have no idea how much I wanted you in those early days when you had eyes for no-one other than him. But he didn’t want you. He wanted your sister. He needed a truce and His Holiness was pushing hard. He thought he’d get the beautiful Blanche but he had to make do with you.’
I felt cold. My husband hadn’t wanted me, he had wanted my sister and despite his protestations this was something I’d always known.
‘It’s not very pleasant to feel second-best, is it?’ said Ned, looking at me with a little mocking smile. ‘But I understand. I know what it’s like. All my life I was the son my father had to make do with, the son who lived when all the others died. I wasn’t good enough for him so he put me to one side and ignored me, I who could do so much but whom nobody loved.’
As I hurried away I noticed Lord de Lacy standing quietly in the shadows, waiting for an audience. He put out his hand and touched my shoulder.
‘He loved you, my lady,’ he whispered. ‘It was in his nature to love women but he prized you above all. Don’t listen to the king, he only wishes to wound you.’
I would go home. I would turn my back on the glittering splendour of the royal court and slip back into the shadows. I would not remarry. There would be no second husband. I had known this on the day we laid him to rest on the Island of Thorns, and I knew it now. I had always known. Loving my husband as I did, I could never take another. It was a simple truth - when my husband died, all men died for me.
Epilogue
It is a cool March morning in the year of Our Lord 1318, the eleventh year of the reign of the English King Edward, the second of that name. In the shadowy depths of the church of St Mary at Southwark, built on the south bank of the river just across from the city of London, a tall man of about thirty years or more is weeping. Dressed in an immaculate tunic of black cloth-of-gold, he stands alone. His friends know better than to disturb him at a time like this and his wife he has left in her chamber retching uncontrollably into a silver basin.
Through his tears he can see the thin, wasted body resting on its velvet bier in front of the high altar, surrounded by the glow of a hundred beeswax candles. He wanted her dressed in purple and gold, proclaiming his right to acknowledge her as his mother although it was well known she was only his father’s second wife, but she herself requested the simple habit of a Franciscan nun: rough, grey and poor. Despite this unattractive garment there is something magnificent about her - a purity, an aura of sanctity, of love.
‘Why did you leave me?’ he whispers. ‘I pretended I didn’t need you, I didn’t care, but it wasn’t true. The others mean nothing to me. They are there to stem the loneliness, to fill my life with noise and gaiety, to stop myself from going mad. But that’s all they are, just friends, nothing more. I don’t love them. Not the way I loved you. There was only ever you and Perrot.’
Tears fill his eyes until all he can see is a blur of shadows and flickering light. The kneeling women, the paid widows who surround the body, see no-one and hear nothing. A low rhythmic chanting fills the church, rising and falling in perpetual waves, as the brothers pray for the soul of the dead woman.
Tomorrow they will carry her in procession across the bridge to the church of the Greyfriars at Newgate, the one she endowed with her own money. She requested that she be buried there and he will ensure her wishes are carried out. It is the least he can do for someone who, despite everything, was beloved of them all. Thomas and Edmund will attend. His brothers are sad as one would expect, but young men of that age are careless of the old and don’t fear death, not like he does.
His father never feared death but he won’t think about his father today. He has spent too much time trying to forget the old man to think of him now. And yet she told him he must forgive his father.
‘He loved you and only ever wanted the best for you,’ she said.
That was the last occasion he saw her, at their Christmas celebrations. She claimed she wanted to visit Isabella and the children and of course Thomas and Edmund, the boys she gave up to him so long ago. She looked pale and ill, but he wasn’t expecting her to die. Not so soon.
‘You are very dear to me,’ she said that last evening as they sat together by the fire. ‘You always have been. I may have misjudged you in the past but when I’m gone I pray you won’t forget me.’
Of course he won’t forget. If you love someone, you never forget.
What happened after Edward I’s death?
/>
In January 1308 Marguerite attended the marriage of Ned to Isabella of France in Boulogne where, in secret, she offered help to those who wished to remove Piers Gaveston from her stepson’s side. Afterwards she retired to her castle at Marlborough and devoted the rest of her life to helping others.
Marguerite and Edward’s daughter, Eleanor, died in the priory at Amesbury in 1311. She was five years old. Marguerite died in February 1318.
The relationship between Ned and Piers Gaveston ended in tragedy. In the summer of 1312, after two unsuccessful attempts to get rid of Gaveston, the earls of Lancaster, Warwick and Hereford arranged to have him abducted and killed.
Alice continued to live apart from her husband and they were never reconciled. She had no children. Elizabeth and Humphrey had at least seven children. Elizabeth died in childbirth in 1316. Humphrey was said to be heartbroken.
In the summer of 1314 Robert Bruce and the Scottish army defeated the English army of Edward II at Bannockburn, paving the way for an independent sovereign Scotland.
Acknowledgments
I could not have written this book without help and among the many hundreds of books and websites I consulted I would particularly like to mention the following which proved invaluable:
G.W.S. Barrow
Robert Bruce
Marc Morris
A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain
Ian Mortimer
The Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England
Kathryn Warner
edwardthesecond.blogspot.com
I would also like to thank Frances Kline and Ken Cooper for their assistance with editing; Jackie, Jane, Kat and Ken of the writing group for advice and sustenance; and Richard, as always, for his patience with me being marooned somewhere in the fourteenth century.
Also by Caroline Newark
The Fair Maid of Kent
It is 1341 and Joan, the beautiful young cousin of the king of England, is poised on the brink of marriage with the earl of Salisbury’s son. While plans are made for the king’s continuing war against France the families gather to celebrate the wedding. But the bride is in tears. For unknown to everyone, Joan has a secret and it is one so scandalous, so unspeakably shocking, that discovery could destroy this glorious marriage and place the lives of those Joan loves in danger.
Faced with a jealous and increasingly suspicious husband Joan must tread a careful path precariously balanced between truth and deception, where love is an illusion and one false step could spell disaster.
From the glittering court of Edward III to the lonely border fortress of Wark and the bleak marshlands before the walls of Calais The Fair Maid of Kent tells the story of an enduring love in a dangerous world where a man may not be all he seems and your most powerful enemy is the one you cannot see.
Coming soon
The Queen’s Spy
Who do you trust?
Whose footsteps echo in the silence of your heart?
It is 1325 and the wife of the English king is plotting vengeance on the man who has taken her place at her husband’s side. Ensnared in Queen Isabella’s plans are the king’s “worst enemy”, Roger Mortimer, and Roger’s newly married cousin, Margaret.
When Isabella and Mortimer seize power in the name of the queen’s fourteen-year-old son, Margaret and her new husband become willing accomplices. But unknown to them, a pathway is being prepared for murder. As uncertainties deepen and suspicions grow, unable to tell enemy from friend, Margaret must decide where her loyalty lies.
Set in the French king’s magnificent palaces and the claustrophobic confines of the English court, The Queen’s Spy tells the story of a dangerous secret forged in the fires of treason and betrayal, where no-one can be trusted and love will not protect you from the sins of the past.
About the Author
Caroline Newark was born in Northern Ireland. She has a degree in Law from Southampton University and her career spans such diverse activities as teaching science, starting a children’s nursery business and milking Jersey cows.
In the 1950’s Caroline’s father began researching his wife’s ancestry and Caroline has used his findings as the basis for her series of books about the women in her mother’s family tree. There will be one book for each generation starting with The Pearl of France, the story of Marguerite, the young sister of the French king who marries her brother’s enemy, the elderly Edward I. Marguerite is Caroline’s 19 times great-grandmother.
The Queen’s Spy (to be published in 2018) tells the story of Marguerite’s daughter-in-law, Margaret; and The Fair Maid of Kent (already available) that of Marguerite’s granddaughter, Joan, the first English Princess of Wales. In all there will be twenty-one books.
Caroline Newark lives in Somerset with her husband and their border collie, Pip. She has two daughters and five grandchildren.
Website:
www.carolinenewarkbooks.co.uk
Contact:
[email protected]
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caroline newark on Facebook
The Pearl of France Page 32
