Isabel the Fair

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “A wicked thing to say,” chided the May Queen. “You do not know what it is like to lose the man you love.”

  Isabel lifted her head and stared unseeingly before her. “Even that could be less bitter than to realize that the man you loved has never really existed.” While the older woman assimilated the full meaning of her cry, Isabel just sat there staring into her future. She had forgotten that she was a queen, and even her resentment because she must share the uncomfortable consequences of Edward’s ineffectual rule.

  She was only a beautiful young woman, capable of passion, with the bright image of her love-life lying in fragments like a broken mirror about her. “Oh, Marguerite, must I go back to him?” she cried. “And bear yet another Plantagenet babe?” Without turning she reached up a hand and the May Queen came and held it. Her own was warm and comforting, as it had so often been when Edward had clutched it as a boy, battered by paternal wrath. “He is a good and loving father,” was all she could think of to say.

  “But every time he makes love to me I shall see him running away from that battle at Bannockburn.”

  Her aunt, who loved them both, sat down beside her where Lancaster had sat. “You were so romantically in love with him at Boulogne — on your honeymoon. Have you no pleasanter pictures of him to remember? None culled from the years when you cried for him as children cry for the inaccessible moon?”

  Isabel thought back, relaxed and smiled. “Strange that you should ask me that, ma chere. There is one picture that will always stay in my mind. I see him — not often, but at the oddest times — as he was that crazy Christmas at Langley. Before he and Piers went to Scotland. I have only to shut my eyes sometimes to see them carefree and laughing, tossing poor Robert the jester up to the ceiling in one of your best tablecloths. Do you remember? I can see the blazing logs on the hearth, the wreaths of holly hung against the tapestries, the torchlight on their lithe bodies and lovely clothes. And Edward’s happy face. Do you know, Marguerite, Edward never looks like that now.”

  “But he needs you and seeks your advice. It is as I said, about the ivy clinging to the fleur-de-lys.”

  Isabel shook her head. “Although I am his wife and the mother of his children, I believe that he has never really loved anybody as he loved Piers Gaveston. I cared so much then. I was sick with jealousy. And now it is only my pride that minds. Now I see the poor — popinjay, did my uncle say? — as he really is.” She laughed, unsteadily; and, rising, began pacing back and forth between the small, square flowerbeds. “Alack-a-day, how handsome he was! And how I loved him!”

  “He is handsome still,” said Marguerite.

  “And beginning to grow a beard!” agreed Isabel lightly. “He says it will make him look older and will help to overawe the barons.”

  “And even that suits him.”

  “It would! His beauty is incorruptible. Neither dissipation nor his country’s ruin can lessen it.” Isabel swayed dancingly between the flowers, arms hugging her breasts, her very insouciance a barbed mockery born of suffering.

  “Oh, Isabel, try to see him more tolerantly. All men are not military heroes. My youngling Edmund is rather like him, but neither you nor I love him the less for it.”

  Isabel looked up quickly and instantly stopped her irritating perambulation. For the second time of late she noticed that her aunt’s face was white and drawn, and recalled how she had stumbled hurriedly from chapel during Vespers, with both hands pressed to her abdomen and Lady Vaux helping her. “Perhaps she is often suffering, though she never speaks of it,” thought Isabel anxiously. “I must ask Lady Vaux.” Aloud, to cover her sudden panic, she remarked with careless disloyalty. “My brother Charles says that if Edward is incapable of ruling he deserves to lose his crown.”

  Mentioning Charles turned her thoughts from England’s difficulties to the changes that had taken place in France, and to the last conversation they had had together in the gardens of the Louvre. As he had foreseen, Philip the Bel had not lived long, and then Louis, her eldest brother, had died, childless, after a brief reign. So that only her second brother now stood between Charles and the throne. “If only I could talk to Charles!” she thought, as she always did during the disappointments of her life.

  It was no small task to remove a whole royal household. The sun shone through a golden mist and the trees were turning to russet on the mid-October morning when she started, and to one of Isabel’s mercurial temperament the beauty of the day lent cheerfulness to begin life afresh. All was excitement and the courtyard packed with her gay cavalcade. Her steward was shouting last-minute instructions and her household servants were spruced with new fleur-de-lys badges on their cloaks. Her women were already seated in their charettes, a special one for the children and their nurses followed her own, and grouped in the background were the baggage wagons with her tapestries and bed linen and clothes presses, and a string of sumpter horses laden with the possessions of the rest of the company. Before the palace doors stood her own eight-wheeled charette with the arms of England, and France painted richly round the woodwork of its sides, and the seats furnished with the cushions of new scarlet silk as she had wished. It would be pleasant riding through the country, and the people in the towns and villages would all turn out to welcome her. And the Dowager Queen and the Earl of Lancaster had both come to see her off.

  “If the King wants you to stay long in Yorkshire you must use my castle at Brotherton,” offered Marguerite, kissing her good-bye.

  “Brotherton, Marlborough, and Leeds in the middle of its Kentish lake — what lovely castles you have!” called down Isabel laughingly, as Robert le Messager helped her climb up into the charette.

  “They will all be yours one day,” smiled Marguerite.

  “Not for many a day, let’s hope!” called back Isabel, spreading out her stiff damask skirts and putting a white hand out through the drawn-back curtains of the vehicle for Lancaster to kiss. “Take care of her while I am gone, will you not, milord? She grows much too thin.”

  “I will send her venison from my own forests every day,” he promised gallantly.

  “And she will give all the best pickings of it away to the poor!”

  Marguerite was bidding the children farewell and marvelling that they should be taken so young. At the time of her own more spartan journeyings towards the seat of war her husband had always left his heir at home. But not so the second Edward. He would sooner a thousand times be playing with young Ned than killing Scotsmen. She supposed that Thomas of Lancaster must be remembering and marking the difference, too. She came close to the open side of the charette and spoke more privately. “I hope Edward will let you stay at Brotherton. For me it is full of happy memories because my first child was born there, and men say it is impregnable. You and the children should be safe there.”

  “Safe?” echoed Isabel, surprised. “But of course I shall be safe anywhere in Yorkshire. Edward will only come to visit me from time to time. The trouble is further north.”

  “Isabel is right,” corroborated Lancaster. “There is no fighting going on within a hundred miles.”

  Marguerite glanced uneasily at Ned, jumping about the nursery cart and clamouring to hold the reins. “All the same, I shall be happier to know that she and the children are at Brotherton with a double curtain wall and my own loyal people about her,” she persisted.

  “All will be well with us,” Isabel reassured her, forgetting how loath she had been to go. “My only regret, dear uncle, is that we did not have that procession for the Londoners which you suggested,” said Isabel, sorry that on that occasion she had parted from him in anger.

  “A strange, tortuous sort of man, though he be my own kinsman,” whispered the wise May Queen warningly, but Isabel was already waving a flowered scarf and the high wooden wheels of the charette had begun to turn. Only Robert the Fool heard her, and he was full of his own ideas for new jests and junketings against the glad day when he would be reunited with his master.

  Chapter Sixte
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  As though to reward her for her docile acceptance, Isabel did not have to stay long in Yorkshire. The Scots, it seemed, swooped down in sudden raids but avoided another decisive battle, so that Edward soon tired of the long-drawn-out border warfare and brought her back to Westminster. He wanted to be home for Christmas and Twelfth Night, and Isabel was only too thankful to find herself in the midst of preparations for revelry instead of preparations for battle. Being by nature as luxury-loving as he, she tried to shut her mind to the fact that, with his usual thoughtlessness, he was giving lavish rewards to all those stay-at-home members of his household who provided him with amusement and soft living while up in the bleak north half his army remained unpaid.

  “It is not every day a Plantagenet gets married. We must make a show for my niece’s wedding,” he said, when the Archbishop of Canterbury had the temerity to try to restrain him.

  “It is all arranged then that Margaret de Clare is to marry Hugh de Audley?” said Isabel.

  “And half of poor Gilbert’s inheritance she will bring him.”

  This time Isabel made no protest on the girl’s behalf. She stood with Edward on the steps of the Abbey and helped to fling marriage money over the heads of bride and groom as they plighted their troth before the crowds before passing in to the more solemn part of their nuptials before the high altar. “After all, Gaveston has been in his grave a long time now, and she does not seem to mind this new marriage as much as I thought she would,” said Isabel, when sitting with her women after the ceremony was over.

  “She seems to accept it,” agreed Bringnette. “She is always quiet and withdrawn now — even with Ghislaine.”

  “It is because of what her sly-faced sister told her,” said Ghislaine, stabbing her needle with quite unnecessary violence into an unoffending heraldic beast on her embroidery frame.

  “Eleanor of Clare?” said the Queen, laying aside her own work before it was well begun. “What did she tell her?”

  “About her husband.” Feeling the warning pressure of Bringnette’s slipper upon her own, Ghislaine stopped short. She bent lower over the frame hoping the padded wing of her headdress would hide the hot blood sweeping up into her cheeks; but the Queen bade her go on and the girl had courage. “About Piers Gaveston and — the King,” she said.

  Isabel rose, cold with fury. The bright-hued silks cascaded from her lap, and the eyes of both women followed her apprehensively as she went with sweeping skirts towards the hearth. “I never could abide that sleek, precocious little cat!” she exclaimed. She stood tensely, staring down upon the leaping flames while an awkward silence hung in the room. “Ghislaine,” she called presently, making an imperious little beckoning click with her fingers.

  “Madam?” Ghislaine, all frightened repentance, was instantly at her side.

  “You think — that Margaret of Clare never realized?” she asked so softly that no one else could hear.

  “I am sure of it. She always had a kind of naivety about her which armoured her against gossip, and she worshipped him.”

  “That is why it was so wicked of Eleanor. To destroy the thing her sister loved. To destroy it forever. Even his murderers had not done that. It would have been better and more merciful had Margaret gone to her new marriage bed with loathing, keeping a shining image in her heart.” Ghislaine saw that the Queen’s eyes were closed, her forehead bowed against the cold stone of the chimneypiece. “I know! I know whereof I speak!” she kept murmuring inexplicably. But when at last she turned, the pupils of the eyes were bright pinpoints of anger, and her lovely mouth was hard. “Send the others away, Ghislaine — all but Bringnette. And have one of the pages see if the Lady Eleanor of Glare is anywhere about the palace. Bring her to me, and I will make her rue the day she broke the brightness of another woman’s dream.”

  “Yes, Madam,” said Ghislaine, wishing she had never spoken so unguardedly. She had supposed that the Queen would be hurt by her words — so hurt and humiliated that she might even send her away. And surely, she deserved it. Old Bringnette, with her sharp warning frown, must have thought so. For had she not blurted out the thing which was never spoken of by those who loved the Queen? The thing which everybody but fond, foolish Margaret had always known. Yet the Queen had not upbraided her, and somehow Ghislaine sensed that although her mistress’s humiliation remained, she was no longer tearingly hurt by past memories.

  And when Eleanor of Clare was found she came readily, with no sign of fear or reluctance; but rather, one would have said, with some strange secret elation. But once in the Queen’s presence she was far too sly to show it. With clasped hands and downcast eyes she listened humbly to the flaying words of her uncle’s French wife. She never once excused herself or answered back. She kept her enjoyment until the last, savouring the anticipation of it as one might push some tit-bit of food to the side of one’s plate. She was a Plantagenet, like Margaret, and she could afford to wait. Only at the end of her royal aunt’s tirade did she open her cruel little mouth to speak.

  “Did you know that the King has promised my husband the whole of Glamorganshire and several strong castles including Ludlow!” she asked, looking up at last.

  The triumph was hers. Clearly Queen Isabel did not know. And nothing could have displeased her more. Neither dared she harangue the wealthy Lady Despenser further.

  Eleanor Despenser allowed herself time to look round at the amazed faces of the two women who had been allowed to overhear her dressing-down, and to savour her patiently awaited moment. Then she added insolently, “And he has promised to give him Gilbert’s earldom.”

  With the Queen’s covertly watching women she saw Isabel’s face whiten with anger. With hate or love, according to their allegiance, they all noticed the trembling of her hands. All three of them were forced to admire her proud effort at self-control. “Then I wish you and your husband joy of it, and of each other,” she managed to say, realizing how her just rebuke had been made a mockery of. “It grows dark, no doubt, along the stairs and passages. Ghislaine will go with you to your apartments.”

  “I would like to whip the smirk from her meek, sallow face!” broke forth Bringnette, before the door was well closed behind them. “No two sisters were ever more unlike than she and this day’s sweet bride.”

  “Have you heard rumour of — this second marriage — before, Bringnette?”

  “No, or I would have warned your Grace.” The old lady went down on stiff joints to gather up the scattered silks, grumbling to herself the while. “Eleanor Plantagenet and that upstart Despenser! A pretty pair they make.”

  “A dangerous pair.” Isabel began to walk thoughtfully about the room, trying to estimate how grave the danger might be to her hardly won influence over Edward. The danger of two clever people so ill-disposed towards herself, so close to the King’s ear, now being united in their mutual ambitions. “Before he left me for this last campaign — a few months ago even — Edward would not have done this without telling me,” she thought. “Mon Dieu, how high the Despensers grow!”

  The servants were bringing in lights and soon Robert le Messager came, bowing before her and asking if she would be pleased to join the hunt over Nutting Hill on the morrow. While scarcely heeding his suggestion she was glad of his presence, welcoming him unceremoniously as one who could ever be counted on as an ally. “Robert,” she said, pursuing her thought, “what was the extent of the late Gilbert of Clare’s possessions?”

  “Immense, Madam. Except for milord Pembroke’s lands the Clares and the Mortimers between them owned most of Wales and the border marches.”

  “The county of Gloucester, of course — ”

  “And Hertfordshire and all their lands in Ireland.”

  “Send for that map your late King had made and show me.” Almost from habit she glanced up at him sideways with an effective trick of feminine allure. “You forget I am a Frenchwoman. I still find your little patchwork counties confusing.”

  When the map was brought and unrolled
across a table they pored over it together, but their touching shoulders and the closeness of their bent heads no longer stirred the old delicious excitement in her blood. Her whole mind was absorbed by the names and contours on the parchment which he held outspread before her. “Ludlow,” she read, picking out the strong Shropshire castle. “Surely that should be Mortimer land?”

  “I have heard my father say that it came to them through marriage with the Genvilles, and that the Mortimers grew strong and kept the border well throughout the last two reigns. I suppose that bit by bit they have taken over the supremacy. There have been two minorities in the Glare family, and neither the late Earl Gilbert, nor Piers Gaveston when he married the Lady Margaret, bore milord Mortimer any ill-will. They were all very good friends.”

  “And now the King is intending to give Ludlow to the Despenser.” Isabel straightened herself and faced the man who had so adoringly championed her but whose body no longer stirred her. “Robert, do you know that he is also to get Gilbert of Gloucester’s title and half the inheritance?” The young man busied himself rolling up the map again. “I had heard a rumour of it,” he admitted harshly.

  “And you bear him no more liking than I do?”

  “Madam, you know that I do not. Nor any man whose very breathing bodes you ill.”

  “Bodes me ill? What do you mean, Robert?” she asked, with fear in her voice.

  He shrugged, but would not meet her eyes. “He grows too strong, even without his royal marriage.”

  “But Roger Mortimer is stronger,” she said quickly.

  “He certainly knows how to hold his own.”

  Isabel smiled, a warm joy about her heart. “I have been told that before.”

  “All men know it to be true, Madam. But hitherto he has held land for the King. I do not see how even he can hold what the King desires to take from him.”