Isabel the Fair

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  Ghislaine crossed herself, wide-eyed with horror, and Isabel stretched out a hand blindly towards Bringnette. She suddenly felt ill, as though she must faint or vomit. “Our Constable will see that a meal is prepared and that such poor hospitality as he can offer is yours, milord Pembroke,” she said unsteadily. “But if you will forgive me I will retire. This will be a terrible blow for my husband, and I — must go to him — somehow — ”

  Bringnette’s arm was about her, supporting her. “If only we could go to Windsor, my sweet poppet! It is not fit that you stay here,” she soothed, helping her to a chair before ever she reached the door. “But dare we, with the country in such a state, and without his Grace’s permission to leave this horrible place?”

  “When the King hears of this he will be too heartbroken to so much as notice whether I come or stay,” murmured Isabel.

  “I would that I could have that same assurance about myself!” said Pembroke. “Warwick he will never forgive, and if his supporters try to lessen his fault by persuading his Grace that I purposely betrayed Gaveston to him, I am ruined. I pledged my estates that I would bring Gaveston to Wallingford.”

  Isabel sat silent for a minute or two, weighing what advantage she could cull from his distress. “If you will take me and my ladies to Windsor with you I will do what I can,” she bargained.

  Pembroke looked up. His shrewd eyes met hers, and smiled. “I dare not stay after to-morrow lest Warwick’s men get the King’s ear first,” he temporized.

  “We shall be ready by sunrise. We will pack our possessions now,” promised Isabel, rising with renewed vigour.

  And because she had always liked the man she smiled at him in passing. “Though you must not expect me to have much influence with the King.”

  With her movement the draperies she wore fell away from her gown and for the first time his eyes rested observantly upon her swelling body. Because he was a born opportunist, a brightness snapped into them. “Not now, at this misfortunate moment, perhaps, but in a few months’ time you will have every influence,” he prophesied, bending a knee to kiss her hand with all his old courtly grace.

  His words seemed to open up a vista of happier times. He was cleverer than the rest of them, and more gentle. More like the cultured nobles she had been accustomed to in France. He had the sense to see that her interests and his own might well run together, and so long as they did so he would be an astute ally.

  Chapter Twelve

  Isabel lay snug and triumphant in her great state bed at Windsor. From beneath half-closed lids she could see the Queen-Dowager smiling down at the infant, and looking, in her nun-like wimple and plain girdled gown, more like a pensive Madonna than ever. Although she felt too tired to make any effort to call her, she was glad when Marguerite came to her bedside. “My dearest Isabel,” she said, bending to kiss her. “I have been so concerned lest all you went through during the early part of your pregnancy might have harmed you. But already the colour is coming back into your cheeks.”

  Isabel smiled, and clung to her hand. “I am stronger than I look. But, oh, I am glad it is all over!”

  “And, God be praised, you have a boy. All across the country, as the news spreads, they will be lighting bonfires and rejoicing,” said Marguerite, for whose sons — offspring of a second marriage — there could have been no such wild rejoicings.

  “My women were so anxious to clutch him away and array him in all those clothes they have been embroidering that I have scarcely seen him.”

  “They will be bringing him back to you as soon as he is washed and oiled and grand enough to please them. He is strong as a little lion, ma chere. Bigger than either of my boys were. And you such a fragile little thing!”

  “He takes after the Plantagenets, no doubt.” As everyday thoughts began to flow into Isabel’s torpid mind, she turned her dark head petulantly on the pillow. “Where is Edward? Has no one told him I have done my duty at last and provided him with an heir? Does he not care?”

  “Your steward rode out at once and caught up with him before hounds were away, and the King was so delighted with the news that he gave him a pension for life.”

  “Another of his sudden, disproportionate extravagances! Did he have to go hunting this morning?” Isabel sighed and closed her eyes so that Marguerite supposed she had fallen asleep, and moved away. But behind defensively closed eyelids the new young mother’s thoughts were resentfully busy about her husband. She recalled how he had looked when the Earl of Pembroke had first brought her home from Tynemouth. She had expected Edward to be heart-broken over Piers Gaveston’s death, but his white and stricken face had appalled her. It was as if all the gay youth in him had been quenched. He would shut himself up and weep for hours, or pace about his room planning vengeance on the barons, or go out walking for miles, forbidding even Gilbert to follow him. His complete detachment from any other call which life might make upon him made his physicians fear for his sanity. And in spite of all her wrongs, Isabel’s heart had bled for him. Instead of reproaching him for deserting her, she had tried to soothe him, but — as she had foreseen — he scarcely seemed to notice whether she had come home or not. Forgetting how she had stood at her window and sworn to kill him, she had forced herself against her nature to be gentle and patient, but all to no purpose.

  “Why feign sorrow?” he would ask. “Everyone knows you hated him.”

  “Not altogether — not at the end,” she had once tried to explain.

  But in his frenzied grief he had not heard her, or saw her newborn sympathy only as hypocrisy. “You bayed with the rest of the jealous, bloodthirsty pack, helping to hound him to his horrible death.”

  “I?” she had protested. “How could I have done anything, mewed up like a winged bird in that bare fortress?”

  “You could have sent out messages to Lancaster. One of the accusations they brought against my beloved friend was that he was the son of a witch.”

  “That! Oh, no!”

  “That he used his mother’s sorcery to enslave my affections.”

  “Her charm, perhaps. The charm which he inherited. Fatal, he called it. He spoke about it once, the last time I was with him. That evening when you both — ”

  “Then you admit you knew. And you hated him. Only you could have told them,” Edward had reiterated.

  “I swear I did not.”

  “You expect me to believe that you had this weapon in your hand and did not use it?”

  “He believed I would not.”

  Lying in her sumptuous bed, Isabel recalled how Edward had still stared at her, sullen and unconvinced. “They held Dragon prisoner at Scarborough, but he would not have spoken even had they tortured him.”

  “Other people besides us three must have known about Piers’ mother, and in any case there were other, far more important reasons why he had to die,” she had pointed out. But she had never known whether she had really convinced her husband, nor whether he forgave her past animosity towards Gaveston. During all those unhappy weeks after her homecoming Edward had been wrapped away from her in the wildness of his grief and anger. He expressed appreciation when she sent for his friend’s distraught young widow, but only as the time for Isabel’s delivery drew near had his thoughts begun to reach out to her again. With his own hands he had wrought the handsome iron candle sconces for her room, he had seen to it that his cleverest physicians attended her and given orders that everything possible should be done for her comfort. “He gave me everything but his companionship,” she thought. “And now, while I have been needing him most, he had gone out hunting.”

  Although she knew that it was the way of most anxious royal husbands, two hot tears of self-pity slid beneath her long lashes and coursed slowly down her cheeks. Marguerite must have noticed and mistaken the cause of her weeping. She whispered to Bringnette, who brought the baby in all his princely finery to the bedside. But Isabel glanced at him only briefly, then turned her face away. The unhappy conditions of her marriage had soured even
the triumph of motherhood. How ugly he is, she thought, with his crumpled red face and crop of straight auburn hair! All new babies must be disappointingly ugly, she supposed, and as though, having been so recently a part of her, he could instantly divine her thought, her son endeared himself to her still less by setting up a protesting howl.

  “I should have kept my resolution and denied Edward my bed,” thought Isabel, shocked out of natural emotions because she had been so callously abandoned at Tynemouth.

  Suddenly she was aware of a stir at the door. Eager voices shattered the quietness of the room, and the King came striding towards her bed. Isabel opened her eyes. Resentments were momentarily forgotten, and because there was something of the old light eagerness in his step life was suddenly exciting again. Edward was still in his plain leather hunting tunic, which showed up the splendour of his limbs and made him look so young. The men who came crowding after him were all peering curiously over each other’s shoulders, the women who attended her were curtsying like a windswept field of multi-coloured flowers. It pleased Isabel that, in spite of the lusty insistence of his son’s yells, her husband came to her first. He lifted her hand from the coverlet, kissed it gratefully and enquired kindly how she felt. Then Bringnette proudly held out to him her berib-boned wailing bundle.

  Isabel watched him take his firstborn, not awkwardly as most new-made fathers do, but with such efficient gentleness that the wailing stopped instantly. After the ministrations of a bunch of over-anxious women, his strong arms must have provided a satisfying sense of security. He put out an exploring forefinger, and a tiny red hand ceased waving aimlessly and clutched it tightly. The new-born, wrinkled ugliness of his son meant nothing to him, only his helplessness. From her vantage point against the pillows Isabel saw the smile of dawning delight, the tenderness on his face. Edward Plantagenet had found something weaker, more dependent, than himself. A small being who, for years, would be dependent upon his knowledge, his strength, his love. Someone infinitely dear, and so guileless and royally important that no one would resent or try to bar his love. Someone, thought Isabel, who had succeeded in driving that bereft look from his eyes — who had succeeded where she herself had failed.

  “What is our son to be called?” she asked, with awakening interest in him.

  Trumpets had already sounded shrilly from the battlements, and church bells were ringing out down in the town. “How shall the heralds announce the birth of England’s heir?” the returning bishops and barons wanted to know. Her uncle Evreux was saying how much pleasure it would give his countrymen if the child might be called Philip after the King of France, and her uncle Thomas of Lancaster, now back at court, was smiling at her and backing the suggestion. But Edward, with the child still in his arms, glared across the room at him with unforgiving aversion. “So foreign a name would not be pleasing to my people,” he said, with a new crisp decisiveness reminiscent of his father. “He shall be a third Edward, thoroughly English. And by God’s grace he will grow to be the kind of man who will revive all those glorious exploits of my late father which you are all so constantly lamenting.” For once his allusion to them was not wholly cynical. He spoke with a dignified humility, as though wishing for his son much which he knew to be impossible for himself. Carefully, reluctantly, he handed his new-born heir back to Bringnette and turned back to Isabel. “What can I give you, my wife, in return for this inestimable gift you have made me?” he asked.

  For once Isabel the Fair found herself unprepared to profit by a propitious situation. There was so much that she wanted. Happiness, a great love affair, first place in her husband’s heart — all intangible things which could not be handed over as a gift, nor even put into words. But all of them things which she now dared to hope might be coming nearer to her grasp. Because she had wanted them so passionately and for so long, no lesser material gift would come into her mind, but her eyes happening to rest on Ghislaine’s sweet face, so alight with happiness for her, she said involuntarily, “I should be well pleased if your Grace will pardon my Master-of-Horse, and release him from the Tower.”

  Edward looked surprised, and frowned. “I had not supposed that you entertained for him such high regard.”

  “Say rather, pity,” pleaded Isabel. “To be young and eager, and shut behind stone walls — ”

  Without passion, jealousy finds poor breeding ground; and the rash young man’s offence against him and Gaveston lay in the regretted past, over-shadowed by the murderous deeds of more powerful men. “It shall be as you wish,” Edward promised, almost negligently. “But I meant something you want for yourself, dear Isabel.”

  Because his eyes and voice were kind there did not seem to be much that she could want. She felt, as she so often had of late, that Edward possessed two separate personalities — the man obsessed by another who had tricked her at Tyneside, and the attractive bridegroom whom she had fallen in love with at Boulogne. And now the bridegroom had come back to her. Her lovely eyes filled with tears. In a sudden overwhelming realization of all she had been through, she had a great longing for her own country. It was years since she had seen her parents and her beloved Charles. “Some day will you take me home to France?” she begged.

  “To go abroad could be good for both of us, and it is high time I visited my subjects in Guienne,” she heard him saying above the luxuriant disorder of her hair. “We will go, my poor sweet, as soon as you are strong again. But first we must prepare for our son’s christening. Here, in the chapel of St. Edward. If your people carry you in a litter do you think you can be ready for that in four days’ time?”

  It was cheering to have fresh things to think about. Delighted, Isabel assured him how resilient she was, and they began making their plans, just as he and Gaveston had planned so many ceremonies in the past. “We must ask your uncle of Evreux to stand as one of the godfathers, of course. And my sister’s husband, John of Bretagne. And I should like to honour Hugh Despenser.”

  In their new hour of accord Isabel forebore to show how much she disliked the Despensers. “And Aymer de Valence,” she urged. ‘He has been kind to me, and I do assure you he is loyal to your cause.”

  Edward got up from her bed abruptly. “If he had not left Piers in that accursed Oxfordshire village — ”

  “So that he might rest, because the chains had chafed him so badly. Do not forget, mon cher, that de Valence of Pembroke was the only one who showed him humanity. He would have brought him safe to Wallingford.” Seeing that her husband’s eyes were still smouldering with anger, and knowing how much Pembroke’s support meant to her now that her kinsman of Lancaster was out of favour, Isabel ventured on a yet more urgent appeal. “You always say he is far cleverer than the rest of them. With him and Gilbert and your Despensers we could form a strong party against those who would for ever be coercing you. And do you suppose he will ever forgive Warwick for fooling him?”

  “Warwick’s enemies will always be my friends,” swore Edward with sudden violence. “We will have Pembroke, then.”

  Isabel sank back exhausted. He beckoned to her women to come to her, and went to look again at his sleeping son. “On the day of his christening I will make him Earl of Chester,” he said, with restored good humour.

  And so, after the solemn pomp of the christening and all the excitement of public rejoicings, the King and Queen of England sailed for Guienne, leaving a chastened and apprehensive baronage in England.

  Motherhood and happiness became Isabel, and weeks of sunshine in Guienne warmed the petal fairness of her skin. Afterwards, in holiday mood, she and Edward sang snatches of chansons to the cheerful strains of his fiddlers as they rode leisurely northwards towards Paris, where a wealth of lavish hospitality awaited them. There was the joy of meeting her family again, the long intimate talks, the exchange of gossip with girlhood friends. Philip le Bel tactfully made no reference to his former exasperation with his English son-in-law, but entertained his English guests with feasts and pageants and morality plays far more splendi
dly mounted than those which Edward and Piers had thought so fine at home. And all the humiliations which Isabel had been forced to bear because of the inordinate affection between these two young men seemed to be soothed away by the sense of superiority she was able to feel in the magnificence of her father’s court, and all her resentments were softened by the suave compliments which Frenchmen paid her. So that, moving about the luxurious rooms of the Louvre or riding through the formally kept forests outside the city walls, she could almost persuade herself that the jealousies and violent factions of her married life had never been, and that these two halcyon months were but a continuation of her honeymoon.

  The same idea must have been in the mind of her youngest and favourite brother, Charles, as he drew her away from the rest of the royal party to stroll with her quietly in the palace garden on the evening before her departure. “One would say a marriage made in Heaven!” he remarked, with an ironic glance in the direction of Edward’s departing back as he walked conversationally with his host in the opposite direction. “Were all those frantic complaints which so disturbed our father really necessary, ma soeur?”

  Isabel walked beside him with downcast eyes. “They were unbearably true — at the time. And I was the world’s most helpless innocent! I suppose you all knew — here — what sort of a marriage I was being sent to?”

  “We had heard rumours — my brothers and I.” Charles glanced down at her with a quizzing sympathy. “But now the worst of your troubles are over, it seems?”

  “Please God!”

  “Since the Gascon favourite got himself killed?”

  “Say rather since an heir was born.”

  “A felicity which, quite understandably, it took you years to achieve, ma pauvre. Every conceivable excuse that Adonis of yours wrote in reply to our father’s protests. Such abject letters! He must have guessed that French influence was stirring up his own subjects.”