by Lisa Hilton
And then the comet came. It was February, the feast of St Bridget, and though the day marked the change of the season, the world remained grey and sodden with melting ice, the dung heaps in the yards frozen and reeking, the stabled horses fat and restless. That night the sky was clear, pierced with stars above the smoke of the humming city, the hall at Westminster was thick with wood smoke and the scent of roast meat. A monk had come from the abbey at Wendover some days earlier, with a set of curious metal instruments and a heavy manuscript of charts, which showed the movements of the moon across the heavens. God was sending a sign, he said, in the sky, and the king would do well to mind it. It seemed like sport as we trooped dutifully out onto the palace walls, huddled in our furs, peering eagerly at the dark heavens. I could not see Aliene among the crowd, and for a few blessed moments I forgot her, and looked eagerly for the comet.
I had seen it like a huge shooting star, a red blaze across the heavens but it was not like that at all. The little monk in his dingy habit was hopping with excitement, his sandals slipping on the frozen stones, gesturing at the moon, which hung low and heavy in the sky. Slowly, the surface of the moon dimmed, from silver to pearl and then to the colour of blood. There was silence on the walls as we watched. God was not making fireworks for our pleasure. This was something else. The bloodied moon gleamed malevolently through its shroud, then dimmed to a greasy grey. For a few seconds, the whole of London was still. The cries from the alehouses, the watermen’s calls, the creaking of carts, the bustle from the kitchens, all ceased. We were entranced, watching the sky that seemed as though a huge vial of ink had been upset across it. Some of the maids made the sign of the cross, the little monk was praying into his cowl. Then the murmurings began. It was a sign, people whispered, a sign of God’s wrath. And then the eyes of the crowd slid towards their king. John was standing apart, his eyes fixed upon the skies, one hand resting tautly on the hilt of his sword. I made my way towards him, my women trailing carefully behind, holding up their gowns away from the treacherous stone. From the city beneath us now came the sounds of prayer, and the church bells began to ring. I came up beside John and removed my glove, trying to work my fingers between his own. ‘What does it mean, my lord?’
He started as though roused from sleep, and stared wildly at me for a moment. ‘Nothing. It means nothing.’ At the motion of his hand the heralds sounded and the servants began to light torches and braziers, burning the night back into its familiar state. The king would return to the hall, he began to make his way along the walls. Then there was a sharp whistling sound, and a whip crack of impact, and the page that walked before my husband fell to his knees. There was a shout from the street beneath us, ‘There he is! Henry’s bastard!’ Then a wave of thin, humming noise that I recognized from Mirebeau. Arrows. There were arrows being fired on the palace. John’s face was barely visible in the torchlight under the dimmed moon; for a breath his eyes gleamed black as the sky, still transfixed by what they had seen, then he shook himself to life as the barons rushed up around him and the screams from the street told us that the guards had found whoever was firing. The little monk, Roger, his name was, was flapping and babbling frantically about God’s anger. John pushed him aside so violently that he almost toppled from the wall, and he strode towards the court, calling over his shoulder that the queen and her ladies should be escorted to their chambers. As I was hustled along amidst my maids, I saw the orange glow of fire begin to crack and shimmer across the rooftops, and where a few moments before the town had been so still, now a great yell of sound bellied up towards us, like the explosion of a fool’s bladder. The curtain of blood across the moon had been drawn back, exposing the roiling anger of a people whose discontents I had simply not known. Why were they so furious? What did they mean to do?
‘What’s happening?’ I called, stumbling on the hem of my cloak.
‘A riot in the city, my lady. Nothing to fear. His Majesty’s guards will quell it in no time,’ a soldier responded.
The walls were writhing in a confusion of bodies, John and his men trying to descend, the guards roaring as they barred the palace gates, the servants in the kitchens below running about like startled fowl. The children. Were the children safe?
‘Take me to the nursery,’ I hissed at the soldier who had answered me. The good man squared his shoulders against the shoving cluster of courtiers and pulled me in front of him.
‘Make way! Make way for the queen!’ he bellowed, and then we were moving, his arms keeping off the crowd, down through the wall gate and along the passage, until we came to the great staircase, where I stooped and threw my slippers aside, feeling the hard stone beneath the wool of my stockings, and then I ran, leaving him behind me, passing a kitchen hand with his arms full of plates, who screamed in terror and dropped it with a great clatter – was he stealing in the commotion? I ran across the hall and up to the gallery, turning left, shocked with the cold again as I came out on the open balcony, then plunging back into the palace, my mind ablaze like the burning town with what I might find. There was no guard at my children’s door. I pushed it ajar quietly and walked softly into the room. The nursery was a large square chamber, where the children ate and played, with four rooms off it on either side. On the right, the river side, the casements were fastened tight, but the nightlight was burning in its dish of oil and I glimpsed Joan, sleeping soundly, her brother Richard likewise, both children sprawled half-out of their bedclothes, their faces flushed with dreams. I released the huge breath gathered in my lungs. They were safe. But where was Henry?
I passed out of the sleeping chamber and crossed the main room to the left side. The first alcove was empty except for the small altar where a candle burned. My son’s room lay beyond.
‘Henry?’ I called softly, so as not to frighten him.
Aliene was stooped over my child’s bed, the low hanging cloth of estate touching her hair. Henry lay before her, sleeping soundly on his front. But his nightshirt was off, the pale glow of his skin illuminated in the candle the girl had set in its bracket by the bed. She was muttering something, a high drone in a tongue I might have recognized if I had listened, but I did not listen, for in her right hand she held an awl, bright as an icicle, and she was reaching her left hand to my boy’s mouth, to stay the scream that would come when she marked him. I had not felt such rage since I had fought with Hal, so long ago in the garden at Lusignan. No. I had never felt such rage. I sprang at her, knocking her off the bed, grabbing for a handful of her hair to twist her face towards me. She stabbed at me with the awl, though I did not feel it pierce through my heavy winter cloak, and tried to scrabble to her feet, even as I battered at her with my fists, the pair of us fighting in silence while Henry, improbably, slept on between us. I managed to force her down on the carpet and straddled her body, pulling her throat back and banging my knee against her heart. Her eyes were wild, unseeing, I think that she did not know me, so entranced had she been with her task. I pulled up her gown, feeling for the red thread I knew would be bound about her leg. I grasped it and pulled against her flesh, snapping it in one movement. Perhaps I thought to strangle her with the evil thing, but just then I felt myself pulled off her, kicking out at her prone form as I did so, and I turned, limp but unsurprised, to face Pierre.
‘Sister, you shock me,’ he drawled. ‘Brawling with the servants while your husband’s city burns? Hardly queenly conduct.’
I was limp against him, panting. In full view of Aliene, who remained prone on the floor, he insolently dipped his head to my throat and traced my collarbone with his tongue.
‘Or were you missing something else, Sister?’
I had no strength left to strike him for the outrage. I glanced towards Henry, who still slept on. ‘Get her out of my sight. Now!’
Pierre released me and stooped towards Aliene. Her neck showed red weals where I had grasped it. Good. He helped her tenderly to her feet and smoothed her gown, holding out his hand for the garter, and then he whispered somethi
ng into her ear. She made me a dazed curtsey and staggered from the room, feeling for the doorframe as though intoxicated. I seated myself next to Henry and fussed with his nightshirt, covering him with his linen sheet and woollen blanket, stroking his tumbled hair from his face. He stirred, but did not wake. I rested my lips a moment against his warm brow, breathing him until I had recovered my countenance. ‘When did you return?’ I asked Pierre.
‘Today. It is an important night, Sister. Imbolc The time between the winter solstice and the summer. You ought to have paid better attention to your old nurse.’
‘And this? That girl?’
‘Your son is one of our own. As are you, however much you deny it. It was time.’
‘I will not have it.’
‘What will you do, Sister? Have you heard the people outside?’
‘There is unrest. The comet has disturbed the people. They are angry with the king.’
‘And why?’
Always this slow drawing out with him that I hated so much, the agonizing drip of his knowledge, filtered like amber through pine bark. I always felt like a child with Pierre, stumbling to catch up. I did not know why the people were angry. I had paid so little attention to John’s business of late.
‘The taxes? The bishops? The war in France? For God’s sake, tell me clearly!’
‘Come. They shall tell you themselves.’
He guided me, unresisting, towards the casement, reached up to unbolt the shutters. Henry’s room lay on the city side of the palace, and with the sharp air that rushed in came the sound of shouts and the smell of smoke. I glanced anxiously towards the bed where my son lay.
‘Listen,’ instructed Pierre.
At first, I could make nothing out amidst the babble of voices and the thud of rushing feet. Somewhere a horse was shrieking wildly, perhaps a stable was burning. I had a sudden vision of Othon, rearing in panic. And then I caught my name: ‘Isabelle’, ‘the queen, the queen!’
‘They are calling for me.’
‘They want you.’
‘Why?’ I breathed, pushing my hair back from my face. ‘Please, Pierre. Tell me what is happening.’
‘They blame you. It was unwise, Sister, that merciful business of yours with the witch. Susan, wasn’t it? They blame you for all the evils the king has visited on them. They called you whore, and now they call you witch.’
‘But why? The people love me. I have heard them, when we pass through the streets? I give them charity. They bless me. I am their queen, the mother of their prince! I have done nothing.’
‘Yet they seek a source for their discontent. Much easier to blame their queen, the foreign slut, than their true-born English king.’
‘Does John know of this?’
‘He has ears.’
‘This is your doing. You are conspiring with that-that Angouleme bitch!’
‘Very good, Sister, very good. It does not suit me to have you at court at present, or to see you recover your husband’s favour. So touching, those little entertainments. And so now the citizens of London are calling on the king to put you aside. The comet is a sign of God’s displeasure towards England. They are afraid.’
‘I will not leave my son.’
‘Oh you will, Sister. You will.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE DAY AFTER THE MOON TURNED TO BLOOD, IT seemed that the sun had lost the heart to rise over London. Like clouds of slut’s wool billowing from a beaten blanket, great clouds of wet mist rolled up the Thames to Westminster, where they met the hanging wood smoke of the rioters’ burnings. The mist and the smoke crept stealthily into our lungs like death’s own fingertips. Even in the palace, where torches had burned all night and the fireplaces were stoked high, there was a tangible humour in the air, as though the fear and suspicion borne on the comet’s tail were made solid. We were a house of spectres, and in the streets the market carts rolled against the corpses of dead men, their vitals blistering in the cold.
I was to become a spectre, too. I had lain awake all night in my chamber, frantically passing over in my mind the names of anyone I might call upon to help me. Not my mother. The king of France? Even if I were to succeed in sending a messenger, claiming our kinship and seeking his royal protection, it should be days before he received my appeal. William Marshal was a good man, but he had not attended the Christmas court and I had no notion of where he might be. Among my women there were good Christian ladies, whose husbands had castles and manors where I might seek shelter, but which of them could I oblige to take the risk of harbouring me? I was queen, and therefore I was powerless if the king’s displeasure was fallen upon me. I was property. I could enter a convent, I thought wildly, as I had once feigned I wished to do. I could ride for Winchester, where I had birthed my boy, but John’s disputes with the Pope, so far as I understood them, would not encourage any abbot to further anger his king. And if I entered a convent, I should be shut away from the world, and never see my boy come into his own. I wondered on Hal of Lusignan. He would be lord of the castle, now. Could I trust Hal? I, who had witnessed his shame? Perhaps he had forgotten our childish misliking of one another? But I was being foolish: he would never forgive, even if I could fly to him over the sea and the Poitou hills like Melusina herself.
I expected John to summon me the next morning. Would Aliene tell him that her lover’s wife had attacked her? Or would the aldermen of London already have made suit, calling on the king to give up his wife to keep the peace? But no page came with any message, and there was no sign of John, or of Pierre, or of Aliene. I spent the day sewing with my women in my great chamber, my presence suppressing the gossip that shivered through that cloying air. My maids were respectful as ever, but I knew that as soon as I left them their tongues would be flying swift and sharp as their needles. We ate dinner and supper in the hall, once more a court of women as the barons had followed John downriver to the Tower to meet with the justices over the riot. Before I retired, I visited the nursery and asked that the children should be bathed. The nursemaids looked askance at such a request, did I not know of the dangers of washing in the wintertime, but I had never had any patience with such filthy English customs, and less so, now. I wanted to see my babies’ bodies, smooth and clean and flushed with warm water, to see that Aliene, wherever she was gone, had left them at least unmarked. I watched the children at their baths, and we ate a dish of raisins together, counting out rhymes with the stalks on the brim of the platter, and I helped each of them into their nightshirts, warmed before the fire. I heard their prayers, and blessed them, and returned to my chamber to sit out the night hollow eyed in the darkness. I should not have done so if I had known then that I would never see Henry again.
*
I was wakened from a restless doze by the sound of hooves in the palace yard. All through the first hours of the day I heard them, a gathering, urgent rhythm that sounded a counterpoint beneath the slow rituals of my rising, my dressing, my prayers. As my maids sponged my face and hands with rosewater, as they handed my shift and laced me, as they combed my hair and fitted my mantle, as I knelt and turned the leaves of my breviary, I listened for them, and heard grooms calling and the sound of spurs on stone. When I had sent my chaplain away and taken some milk with honey, I sent to the chamberlain’s rooms to discover the news. While I waited, I sent to the buttery to ensure that the guests, whoever they were, were served. Even while my heart scratched in my throat as brittle as a bird’s nest, I tried to move as slowly and graciously as if the king of France himself were leading me out to dance. Perhaps those men had ridden through streets where my name was being proclaimed as a witch at street corner crosses, perhaps even now my husband was having faggots piled for me in the Tower yard, but I should be a queen still. The mist and the smoke of the riots had dissipated, but we were old acquaintances, death and I, and I was not afraid.
The visitors were the sheriffs of the counties close to London, ridden in on the king’s command. Many of them must have been on the road all ni
ght. When John finally summoned me to the council chamber, some time after noon, they knelt to me as I passed, some with their hands to their breasts, and if I had not known better it should have lifted my heart to see them so loyal, so good, so willing. John handed me courteously to my chair and I remained next to him as he received each of the sheriffs in turn, charging him to keep the peace after the disturbances in London, and directing him to the treasury for funds. One by one, the men made their bows and departed, so as each left I felt the dryness in my throat ease a little, the stiffness in my smile relax. Until the last of them rose from his knees. A huge man, a good two heads taller even than I remembered Lord Hugh, his massive shoulders straining his muddied surcoat. His face looked oddly small, smooth and pink, with close set periwinkle eyes. He looked like a cunning pig, I thought, a forest boar with a coarse tuft of fair hair and dimples where his tusks should be.
‘Terric!’
It was not John who spoke, but Pierre, entering the council room with familiar ease, behind him, between two liveried servants, Aliene. She was no longer the haunted, frenzied creature I had caught on the night of the comet. Her hear was braided and modestly covered in beautiful ivory lace. My lace, a New Year’s gift from the wife of a Marcher baron. She wore a soft gown of blue wool and a cherry-coloured velvet cloak with a gold fur trim. Quite the lady. At least she had the sense not to look in my face.
‘Majesty,’ the gross man was lowering his bulk before John’s throne, then turning and inclining his head towards Pierre, ‘My Lord de Joigny.’
