Isabeau, A Novel of Queen Isabella and Sir Roger Mortimer

by N. Gemini Sasson

  Though spacious, the room was austere, furnished with only a four-postered bed, a square table, two chairs, and an unadorned hearth. On the wall to the right of the bed hung a wooden cross, carved with a crude figure of the Christ, who dangled with arms outspread and his face turned upward in agony. Beneath, four tallow candles flickered meagerly.

  A sigh wafted across the room.

  I looked toward the single window, its shutters open to the cool night air. There, hugging her knees to her chest, Isabella sat on the narrow window ledge. The pointed, satin toes of her slippers peeked from beneath the hem of her nightshift to show bare ankles. Her favorite red mantle, plush with fur, had slipped from her shoulders, as though she had grown mindless to the chill in the room. Her breath fogged the air.

  I tended to the neglected hearth, until the fire within it sent up flames that licked the mantle. The sparks jumped from the kindling and the heat rose so rapidly that I stepped back to avoid being scorched.

  Still, Isabella had not moved. “I knew I would not be able to sleep,” she said. “All day I prayed to God to deliver my girls and John safely to me.”

  I poured two goblets of wine and handed her one.

  Finally, she looked at me. “You must have felt as I do, at times.”

  “And how is that?” I drank my cup halfway down.

  “Guilty ...” She looked long into her goblet before taking a sip. “Guilty that I could not always keep my children with me. Or protect them.”

  “Why should anyone, father or mother, feel responsible for another’s cruelty?” My own children had been shut up all over England. I hardly thought it my fault. I leaned against the wall next to her, close enough to reach out and touch her, but not so close I could not admire her beauty. A single golden strand of her hair dangled over her shoulder. The neckline of her nightshift dipped down to her breastbone. With every breath she took, my eyes were drawn to the gentle rise and fall of her bosom, as small and firm as a young girl’s.

  In one long gulp, she drained her goblet dry, as if she had not wetted her throat for days. Then she pulled the shutters closed, finally drawing her mantle up around her neck. “I left them.”

  “Despenser took them from you. You left because you had no other choice. You will see them, Isabeau,” I told her as I poured her another glass, “very soon. I promise you. And word from London is that things are settling well. John of Hainault will look after your son there. Few are more trustworthy than him.” Moving nearer to her, I set my own goblet down and lifted her cold hand to my hungry lips. “You will have the girls back soon, my love. Tomorrow. A few days. A week, at most. Winchester cannot last.”

  A shiver ran through her body and I leaned back to look into her face. “There is something I must tell you. Something I learned today.”

  “What?” she whispered, as if someone might overhear us.

  “When we arrived here at Bristol, Leicester and I were told that Lord Despenser was inside the castle.”

  At that, her hand crept up to cover her mouth. I could sense the fear flowing in her veins and so I went on quickly. She had suffered enough worry already. “But he isn’t. Not anymore. He had already gone from here and was on his way to join the king.” Her shoulders slackened with relief. “Only hours ago, I learned that Edward and Despenser boarded a ship in Chepstow and set sail. They are no longer in England, Isabeau. Do you know what that means? It means that your son, Young Edward, can take his place, with you as his regent. You need not fear them anymore.”

  I kissed her fingertips, her wrist, her forearm. Her mouth quavered. I peeled back her shift at the shoulder and inched closer, my arm sliding around her, pulling her to me. With wine-wet lips, I kissed her neck. Her head lolled to the side. A shiver of longing, a response I had come to know well, ran through her. Every muscle in me wanted to feel her beneath me, to move inside her until we were both drenched in burning sweat. But more than just making her willing to bed with me, I wanted her to love me in a way that flouted what others might think or say. As I did her.

  Dear God, I loved her. Not just that I had stolen her from Edward and had her a hundred times over ... but, I loved her. The woman, not the queen.

  Yet for as much as I loved her, I bloody hated the torment she inflicted on me. The way she made my guts twist inside out and my head go light even at the sight of her. Like now. Perhaps that was why I fought so hard to keep some measure of control over her, because I had so little when it came to being alone with her.

  I whispered, “Tell me what you want, Isabeau.”

  One of her hands drifted across her body and up to her shoulder. She tugged her nightshift free, letting it fall in a drift of white at her feet. As she stepped over her clothes and past me, she brushed me with a hot hand. I heard the sigh of the covers as she peeled them back from the bed. The creak of the frame as she lay down. Her voice, soft as a swan’s feather in my ears: “You, Roger.”

  Over my shoulder, I gazed at her. Arms sprawled above her head. One knee drawn slightly to the side. Her open mouth, her hand held out to me ...

  I went to her, leaned over her and touched my lips to hers. A low moan rose from her throat to hum against my tongue. I cupped the back of her head, tasting her, inhaling her. The heat of her flesh seared into my fingertips. I drew back slightly, gazed down into her glistening face and kissed her eyelids. Then, I plucked up the corner of the bed sheets, drawing them over her.

  As much as I wanted her, there was something far more important that I had to do.

  For a few moments, she blinked in confusion. Slowly, as if in a daze, she clutched the covers close to her bare body and sat up. Before she could part her lips in question, I told her, “I cannot be with you now, Isabeau, my love. Not tonight.” I withdrew toward the door, my eyes never leaving her. “Tomorrow, before first light, Leicester’s men will scale the castle walls. I must be there. Because I’m going to give you your daughters back, Isabeau.”

  And I’m going to find my uncle, so I can take him home to Chirk.

  Isabella closed her eyes and sank back against her pillows. “Go.”

  And I left a queen alone in her bed. So I could do as I had sworn to.

  42

  Roger Mortimer:

  Bristol – October, 1326

  FAR AWAY, A DOG howled. Restless, I lay awake, listening to the sounds of an army in the night. The low, hushed voices of sentries as they passed one another. A horse nickering. Scattered coughs. The delusive titter of a camp whore. The crackling of a fire.

  A cold, gusting wind rapped at the side walls of my tent. I clenched the handle of my knife tight beneath my blanket and held my breath, peering through the darkness at the tent flap even as my eyelids sank with weariness.

  I should have sworn Kent to keep the news to himself. Better yet, I should have gone elsewhere with Simon before I allowed him to speak. If Leicester learned of this before morning ... he would not launch the assault. Instead, he would come at me in a rage, blaming me. We would not take Bristol’s castle.

  And we would never find the king. Never bring Despenser to trial. Never ...

  *****

  Maltravers roused me well past sunrise. I scolded him for not waking me sooner. With the help of a flustered body squire, I prepared hastily. Gerard, who was with him, had seen to it that my mail had been finely polished with sand and vinegar until it shone in the day’s first light. I stepped from my tent, sword at my side and my shield strapped to my arm. We went on foot with haste to St. Ewen’s Church, a stone’s throw from the walls of the outer ward of Bristol Castle, where Leicester greeted me in high spirits.

  “They’ve taken St. Nicholas’ Gate at the bridge,” he crowed, thumping me on the arm with a gauntleted hand. “No escape now. We have them, by God.”

  So, he had not yet learned Simon’s news. My reprieve, I knew, would not last. Once the keep was searched and Despenser was nowhere to be found, the truth would come out.

  I flipped the visor of my helmet up. “I’d have th
ought you’d be in the thick of the fighting, Henry.”

  He bristled. “When I sent for you, Sir Roger, I expected you straight-away.”

  Shielding my eyes from the morning sun with my hand, I looked toward the square, white keep, towering above the walls. Hurriedly, I scrounged for a plausible excuse – one I knew he would condone. “The town is filled with whores, Henry. Can’t a man take a little pleasure when it’s given to him?”

  “Given ... or bought?” He cuffed me on the shoulder blade. “If we go to Hereford, I’ll introduce you to a girl there named Gwenllian who, for nary a penny, will do things I wager your wife has no knowledge of.”

  He was lecherous, just like his brother Thomas had been. If I let him, he would talk of such things until after the assault was long done. “I trust you told them to find Lady Eleanor and Lady Joanna? If any harm should come to – ”

  “Do you take me for a fool?”

  “Not at all. I only wanted to make certain your men understood their welfare is of the utmost importance. Winchester is desperate by now. We can’t trust him not to – ” I broke off. Shouts burst from within the outer ward. Insults and jeers. Whoops. The noise of triumph.

  I rushed through a clutch of archers arrayed in front of St. Ewen’s. Their quivers were still full. They had not yet spent a single arrow in the attack.

  With Maltravers and Gerard at my heels, I went across the narrow drawbridge spanning the moat. At the gate, more than a dozen pikemen stood on guard. They had stopped a knight and his squire who were escorting a prisoner from the castle.

  A paunch-bellied guard lowered his weapon, aiming its pointed end at the knight’s chest.

  “Who’s the prisoner?” the guard said.

  The knight puffed his chest out and lifted his chin like a sparring cock. “The constable,” he said with a shrug, indicating the gray-haired man, so slight in build and sunken in the face he resembled a skeleton.

  “And who are you?” the guard interrogated.

  He lifted his helmet from his head. “Lord Thomas Wake. Now let me by.”

  I shoved my way to them and said, “You did not hear? All prisoners are to remain inside the castle.”

  “But my lord,” Wake protested, “the Earl of Leicester, wanted them to be brought to the camp.”

  I cast a look over my shoulder. Leicester had not followed us. Probably, he was waiting until he could be assured it was safe to enter the fortress. “They are to remain inside. No one is to take prisoners for ransom. Queen’s orders,” I added, although she had said no such thing, leaving all to me. One of these lump-headed dolts might let an important prisoner slip past them and I would not run that risk. “Have we captured the keep?”

  “An hour ago,” Wake replied with a sneer.

  “Good, then you’ll take the constable here back to the great hall. And you’ll shove him into a clump with all the other prisoners and do nothing further with them until you hear from me. Understood?” Without waiting for an answer, I searched the faces of the other pikemen until I found one with an honest look to him, a boy of eighteen or so who met my eyes without defiance. “You, go to all the other gates and tell them the same thing. Quickly, boy.”

  Spurred by the commanding urgency of my voice, he hurried beneath the archway of the gate and went right, off toward St. Nicholas’ gate. We followed him beneath the portcullis and found ourselves in the outer ward. Despite the mess that met our eyes, there appeared to be some kind of organization. The remaining garrison – those who had attempted to defend the castle, and judging by the scattered bodies, broken and bleeding, many had tried valiantly only to fail – were being dragged from the inner ward and forced to their knees just outside the keep. Behind me, Lord Wake could not stop his grumbling as his men yanked the simpering constable toward the keep. I had robbed him of a sizeable ransom. He would harbor a grudge toward me.

  Though still shrouded in morning shadow, above the inner curtain the limewashed walls of Bristol’s keep gleamed as white as a gull’s breast feathers. Somewhere, in this sprawling expanse of stones jutting skyward, were the Earl of Winchester, the queen’s daughters, and my ill and aged uncle. Once found, the earl would be brought before a tribunal, the gruesome outcome already decided.

  Father Norbert, the queen’s shrew-eyed confessor, stumbled through the maze of prisoners. He wrung the wooden crucifix that dangled from a piece of rope around his goose-like neck. Finally, he dropped to his knees and laid a hand on the forehead of a wounded man. The leather brace on the fallen man’s wrist told that he was an archer, but his clutch of arrows was either spent or had been stolen. The angle at which one of his legs lay twisted indicated he had fallen from the wall. He was still alive, barely.

  “Do you make a habit,” Father Norbert complained as he caught sight of me, “of waging war on holy days?”

  “You’re wasting your time,” I told the priest, before he could utter the first word of a pater noster. “Save your prayers for the living. Better yet, someone other than our enemies.”

  Father Norbert drew the sign of the cross in the air and uttered a few words of Latin, of which he probably did not even know the meaning. “All are God’s children, Sir Roger. And he is a fellow Englishman. Men do not always choose on which side they will fight. Most are simply following their master’s orders, as you and I do.”

  The archer’s eyes rolled far up into his head. His body jerked as he gulped his dying breath, and then went slack. Father Norbert reached to pull the man’s eyelids shut. Before he could, I grabbed the back of his black frock, twisted it to gain my grip and yanked him to his feet. “I follow no one’s orders. But here’s one for you, Father: go to the dungeons; if you find my uncle, Lord Roger of Chirk, come back and tell me where he is. And if you need to say a prayer, pray you find him alive. I didn’t come all this way to bury him.”

  I told Maltravers and Gerard to go with him, to make certain he did not stop to dribble prayers over more corpses. As I shoved the quivering priest toward the gate to the inner ward, I caught sight of my son Edmund, lowering himself wearily down the bottom rungs of a ladder that leaned against the wall. Blood ran in streaks from a gash on his left cheek, dripping onto his surcoat, although he paid no heed to it.

  “I thought I told you once,” I said as he neared, “never to lower your shield until your opponent has exhausted himself first.”

  Edmund wiped at his cheek, smearing bright blood from ear to jawline. “It was strapped to my back.” With a grin, he added, “I was one of the first up the ladders and over the wall.”

  “A foolish thing to do. A wonder, it is, that you’re not dead.” I had not spent two years in the Tower and as many in exile only to have my firstborn son throw himself on the first blade raised at him. The boy needed to learn caution. “Next time let the men-at-arms take the first assault.”

  At my admonishment, he hung his head, then sucked in a breath and raised his chin. “I killed three men on the wall.”

  “Who could’ve killed you,” I reminded him. “I suppose, though, it’s proof of your skill they didn’t.” As he soaked in the mild compliment, I realized I had not seen my other son in more than a day. “Your brother, Roger – where is he?” I asked.

  “Scouring the keep with Sir Henry de Beaumont.” Edmund stepped close and lowered his voice, as if guarding a great secret. “It seems Lord Despenser was hoarding half of England’s treasury here. There are rooms stuffed with gold and jewels in there. Piles of it. Beaumont was doing all he could to keep the Hainaulters from pilfering any of it.”

  “No more the Hainaulters than our own. I just stopped Lord Wake from trying to abscond with the constable, no doubt hoping to barter his freedom with the man’s kin for a fair sum.” I surveyed the ward. “The queen’s daughters? Have they been found?”

  “In the chapel of St. Martin’s, over there.” He raised a reddened hand toward the little chapel tucked in the northwest corner of the ward.

  Relief swept through me. “Unharmed?”
r />   “Afraid, but without a scratch.”

  “Good. Send for the queen.”

  I wended my way through the chaos of bodies, climbed the dozen steps and entered the church through the half-open doors. At first, it appeared empty. Light filtered through a stained glass, rosette window high on the wall behind the altar, flooding the serene expanse of the nave in a wash of rose-red and violet. Within, all was quiet, but from outside, the desperate pleas for mercy that ensued from the lips of the defeated penetrated the walls.

  Beyond the fluted pillars, I explored its depths cautiously. A whimper, followed by a small, shushed voice, emanated from a vestibule to the left. I walked beneath an archway toward the sound, stopping before a door that hung askance on its iron hinges. Gouges marked where it had been hammered at by the butt end of weapons. An axe had cleaved at the planks, leaving long, jagged splinters. I unstrapped my shield and laid it aside, then grappled at the handle, finally removing my gauntlets to gain a firmer grip, and dragged the door’s bottom over the rough flagstones.

  I gazed into a small, private chapel, its vaulted roof moored by closely spaced, squat columns. At its end was a humble altar and upon it a plain wooden cross and three lit candles. I moved toward the altar, watching for shadows to spring from behind the columns.

  Again, a whimper. But this time a muffled growl followed it. Slowly, I slid my sword from its scabbard at my hip. I cursed myself for not having taken men in with me. If I turned my back now, whoever was there would have a clear target. I debated whether to retreat or advance. There could not be many of them, as there were only a few columns to hide behind and perhaps an alcove to either side of the altar.

  But the queen’s daughters were here somewhere. And if they were in this room, if those sounds were one of them in distress ...

  “Show yourselves,” I called. No one spoke out. No one appeared. But I heard short, ragged breaths and knew I was not alone.