Isabel the Fair

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  A chill little breeze was blowing up river with the tide. A faint streak of yellowish light above London Bridge heralded the dawn. There was nothing else to stay for. She turned, and saw gratefully that the welcoming warmth of candlelight still shone from her own window. Her feet and legs ached with standing, so that she almost stumbled along the path towards it. For the first time she considered the danger of suspicion if she herself had been seen, and was startled by a hoarse angry croak and a whirring sound swooping towards her out of the thicker shadows by the wall. She stifled a scream as something black flapped within a few inches of her face. Then forced herself to walk on, realizing that she had only disturbed one of the ravens which were said to have nested in the Tower since the Norman Conqueror’s time.

  Bringnette, still sitting in her chair, had hours ago nodded herself into the facile sleep of old age; and Isabel, having no heart to waken her, had lain sleepless on the curtained bed. And when morning was fully come the whole Tower seemed to be abnormally astir. She sat up against her pillows and listened with fast-beating heart. She could hear men running, sharp orders being given, and horses being brought round and clattering out under the archway of the Byward tower, and the curfew bell giving tongue in broad daylight. And as soon as she was dressed the Constable himself came to her. He looked sallow and unshaven and horribly afraid. “Madam, my most important prisoner, Sir Roger Mortimer, has escaped,” he blurted out, all unwittingly giving her the news she seemed to have been waiting a lifetime for. He said a great deal after that, about some wine that had been tampered with, about Mortimer’s servant being held for questioning, about the necessity of questioning even her own household. Only as a matter of form, he was assuring her, since in so grave a matter no stone must be left unturned. But Isabel scarcely listened to the rest, her relief being like a lightness flooding all her being. She knew that the man was terrified, not knowing how to face the King — or worse still, she supposed — the quiet fury of the Despensers. She guessed that Dragon was down in some foul dungeon being tortured, although she felt sure that because Gaveston had loved the man the King would set him free. But nothing mattered at the moment save that Roger Mortimer had done this impossible thing. And that because he had done it she belonged to him.

  She herself was the one person within the fortress whom the distracted Constable never dreamed of questioning. So, complaining of all the turmoil, she bade Bringnette bolt her door and, exhausted by hours of tension, threw herself fully clothed on her bed and slept for hours.

  But on waking she found the first flush of relief was gone and fresh fears beset her. “Bringnette,” she called, when a servant had lit the candles and withdrawn. “Anything might still happen to milord Mortimer. You heard all those men-at-arms clattering over the drawbridge in pursuit. He had so short a start.”

  The old Countess hurried to the bedside with a soothing drink. “A man who could escape from the Tower could do anything. It would be child’s play to him to get back to his old haunts.”

  “But he is going to France.”

  “All the better,” declared the indomitable old woman, “because all those goggle-eyed men-at-arms will be frantically searching for him in Wales. Now drink this, hinny, and call Ghislaine and the others to dress you in your coolest silk. If you dine gaily in hall it will look as if you could not care less what happens to Sir Stephen’s escaped prisoner.”

  The old Countess had been right, and a few days afterwards Isabel blamed herself for not having had enough faith. Hers was a man indeed. News came to her through one of those London merchants who so much admired her. Taloise, her tailor, fitting her for a ruby red gown, said that he had bought the lovely Utrecht velvet from a merchant called Ralph Botton whose ship had just returned from the Continent. And folded in the velvet was a letter from Roger Mortimer.

  Like all his communications, it was brief and unemotional. Instead of the two episcopal horses which he had hoped to find in some stable, seven of his own men were waiting for him on the Surrey side. Men whom the Bishop of Hereford had thought to summon and who would fight for him to the death. Making the most of their few hours start, they had all managed to reach the Hampshire coast. At the little port of Lymington they had hired a rowing boat, letting it be understood, in case of pursuit, that they had business on the Isle of Wight. But instead of putting in at Yarmouth haven opposite they had rowed round to the extreme westerly point of the island and there, in a little bay under the lee of the dangerous Needles rocks, Mortimer and two of his men had climbed aboard Ralph Botton’s trading ship, leaving their companions to return the rowing boat next day. The wind was fair for France. Botton had set him ashore on the Normandy coast, and he hoped soon to arrive safely in Paris.

  “Would I were with him!” thought Isabel. It was her first letter from him and her instinct was to cherish it in the bodice of her gown as Ghislaine had carried Robert Le Messager’s, but — caring so much for Mortimer’s safety — she resolutely tore it into shreds.

  There was nothing more to stay for in the Tower. Hoping she might never see the inside of it again, she returned to Westminster. And there, as in London, all the talk was still of Mortimer’s escape. That any man, taken in through Traitors’ Gate, should get out again save by the King’s favour seemed incredible. And the King, still up in Lancashire, had immediately set a huge price on his head, and urged by Hugh Despenser, had roused the whole country to search for him. Sir Stephen Segrave was arrested for neglect of duty, and Lord Badlesmere had been caught and executed for his part in the Earl of Lancaster’s rebellion.

  “Half the King’s army is out searching for Mortimer,” Despenser told Isabel, with gloating satisfaction, when they were all back at Westminster and he had followed Edward unbidden into her apartments.

  “And where are they searching?” enquired Isabel, ostensibly giving most of her attention to some materials she had ordered for her costume in a Michaelmas mask.

  “Where else but in Wales?” answered Edward with that hint of impatience which now so often marred his manner to her when his new friend was about.

  “Where else indeed?” agreed Isabel politely, slanting her lovely head this way and that the better to admire the result of her selection.

  But it was Hugh Despenser, as usual, who had the last word. With all the assurance imaginable he, too, came and admired her draperies for the part of Saint Catherine. “One must commend your Grace’s skill in blending colours,” he said condescendingly, just as if she and Piers Gaveston had not devised some of the most striking masques in London in the old days when people had peace in which to enjoy them. “A splendid piece of blue velvet, with just the right touch of silver tissue to lend it sheen.” His long, tapering fingers tested the material as sensitively as any woman’s, though his thin lips were pursed disapprovingly. “But one trembles to think what your Grace must have paid for it. A pity it is for the entertainment of but a single night!”

  It was not the first time he and his sharp-faced father had made remarks like that, drawing her husband’s attention to some extravagance or other, and Isabel could have killed him for it.

  “It would probably have paid for one of those new siege bombards of which we stand in so much need, Hugh,” remarked Edward.

  Isabel noted the look which passed between them and opened her mouth on a stinging retort about the cost of their everlasting disputes with her late uncle’s party, but Despenser silenced her with a pleasant and seemingly innocuous remark. “You had the velvet from Ralph Botton, did you not? I see he has a ship just in. One of our most enterprising merchants, I always think.”

  She was afraid to say another word. What had he heard of Ralph Botton’s enterprises? Had one of the crew talked? What did he know of her own part in Roger Mortimer’s escape. Had his sharp-eyed cat of a wife wormed some significant detail from one of her women? Had gossip got busy about the Queen’s long sojourn in the Tower? “Probably I shall never know. He is the first of these stolid Englishmen who has been too clever
for me,” she thought. And from now on she must put her wits against his. It was a battle a outrance for the King’s favour, and Hugh Despenser’s star was in the ascendant.

  Their struggle began on the level of finance. Leeds castle had been captured by the King and therefore must belong to him, Despenser argued. And other domains which had been included in her dowry or which she had inherited from the May Queen were gradually taken from her, to be handed over to the favourite. It was the Piers Gaveston situation all over again.

  In return, and because she never had been able to accept injustice tamely, Isabel made a belated outcry about the execution of her Uncle of Lancaster, never losing an opportunity of holding up the bungling, discontented traitor to the people as a martyr for their liberties and for better government. And such was her popularity that she soon had them making pilgrimages to his tomb at Pontefract. What good it may have done them she did not care, not did she greatly miss Thomas Plantagenet’s amiable championship of her wrongs. She herself had grown more worldly wise than he. But during the difficulties and humiliations she was now forced to endure she would have given anything for the quiet converse and far-seeing advice of Aymer de Valence. But his power was as eclipsed by the Despensers as her own, and he had been away in Pembroke holding his Welsh possessions secure from their greed until the King had sent him to propitiate Charles in France for his own still delayed visit of homage.

  Hating the constant presence of the Despensers at court, Isabel retired to Haveringatte-Bower in Essex, where she seldom saw her children. The two young princes were often with their father, and the only friend who still visited her in her retirement was Edmund of Kent, who, for his mother’s sake, showed her what kindness he could. But to Isabel the value of his visits lay rather in the fact that his attachment to the King rendered him a prey to jealousy, and sometimes when alone with her he would let fall complaints about their common enemy.

  “Despenser is always urging Edward to dismiss those attendants whom you brought from France and who are so specially dear to you,” he reported regretfully, having entertained from childhood a great affection for Bringnette. “I am sure that Edward would never have harboured so unkind a thought, but the King’s Shadow, as we call him at court, argues that they keep your thoughts too much in France.”

  That her thoughts were often in France Isabel could not deny, but none save Bringnette knew why. Each day she thought of Roger Mortimer in Paris and hoped that he had met Pembroke and had an audience of her brother and given him an account of how impossible things were for her in England. And what was there, save her children, to keep her unhappy thoughts in England? “If the King sends my fellow countrywomen away, I shall go with them,” she told Edmund, impressing his gentle mind with admiration of her daring spirit.

  But a Queen could not just give orders for her possessions to be packed, charter a ship and return to her native land.

  Not even with a world of provocation. Such things could be brought about only by diplomacy, she supposed. But more provocation was yet to come.

  She knew from chance words of Edmund’s that the Despensers, with devilish cunning, were always harping on her popularity, and she guessed that Edward, in his easy purblind way, was for the first time being made to see it as a menace to his power, and beginning to mind. He did not want her to go travelling about the country from castle to castle, charming the hearts out of his subjects as she went. And his new favourite was always casting envious eyes upon more and yet more land. So in order to clip her wings and to load yet more gifts on Hugh Despenser he offered her a totally inadequate pension in place of her royal demesnes.

  “A pension! While I am still Queen of England!” cried Isabel, and, while still in the white heat of her fury, called for quill and paper and poured out the whole of her grievances to her brother in France. “The griping miser would keep me like a servant in his palace,” she complained, forgetting how often she had railed against Edward’s thoughtless extravagance. And she complained that she went in fear of her life, through the hatred of the Despensers. Much of what she said was unreasonable, but she was far too angry to care. And Charles le Bel shared her high temper. He made a far more satisfactory answer than her Uncle of Lancaster had done when appealed to for aid. He struck immediately. He raided Guienne and let Edward know that he intended to keep it until such time as he bestirred himself to come and do homage for it.

  Proud and vindicated, Isabel walked on air when the news came. She might be robbed. She — one of the most beautiful women in Europe — might no longer be wanted by her husband, but the powerful arm of France could still stretch out to protect her. She dressed in her richest scarlet and gold brocade, wore the great Charlemagne jewel and dined in great state to celebrate her victory. And that night for the first time in months Edward came to her. She had been enjoying a selection of French chansons performed by her minstrels and had not yet undressed and, when her women warned her, she made no effort to do so. “I will never have him in my bed again,” she said, without troubling to lower her voice.

  He found her standing between the two tall candles by her reading-desk, turning the pages of some book. She looked up in assumed surprise and gave him a cool greeting. Her dark eyes challenged him, and either the candlelight or the grandeur of her garments seemed to make her look taller and to lend her an air of mature authority.

  “I will see that you do not write to France again,” he said without preamble, slamming her door behind him.

  Isabel showed no sign of fear. Only her delicately drawn brows lifted a little. “Surely it would be inhuman — and difficult — to prevent me from writing to my own brother.”

  “Your family has been the bane of my life,” he cried, kicking like an angry boy at a stool that stood in his path. “You know that he now insists upon my doing homage like some insignificant retainer for Guienne?”

  Isabel shrugged and closed the book. “He has waited a long time,” she reminded him. “And your Grace has always the option of fighting for it as your father would have done.” She had struck at his most vulnerable point and his light eyes shone with surprise and anger. “You grow too high. Answering back like any cheap market jade!”

  “True, mine is only a woman’s point of view,” she admitted, with assumed humility. “And it is common knowledge, is it not, that your Grace has little use for women?”

  “Vindictive shrew!” he cried, seizing her by the wrist with cruel strength.

  “Ah, that is better,” she jibed. “I like a man of spirit.”

  She thought that he would have struck her. Some frustrated part of her hoped that he would. Instead his fingers slackened. “Did I not come and take Leeds castle for you?” he asked, harking back to what must have been his highest hour with her.

  “And then took it back again for yourself. And put my uncle to death — quickly, purposely, before I could interfere.”

  “You interfere too much.”

  “I seem to have heard those words before, a constant cry against me on your chief adviser’s lips.”

  He took a turn about the room and let her stand there sucking at her smarting wrist. It was a new thing, totally outside of his experience, to be answered back like that. When he came back to her he looked more like the gentle, smiling Edward she was accustomed to. “Can we not be friends?” he pleaded.

  “Friends? Ah, yes, I could wish it so.” She wished it sincerely, but knew that because of her infidelity even that was something which she could no longer have of him.

  But he took her words as half-surrender. He reached for her and was angered because her small hands held him off. “Take off that gown and gee-gaws. You are my wife,” he ordered.

  “I should do us both a greater wrong than you know.” She still resisted, but felt herself helpless beneath his strength, and the thought came to her that he knew that he had always before had his way with her. He knew how easy it had always been to make her respond to his desire, remembered that more often than not the desire had been
her own and that on the rare occasions when she had resisted him he had always had his way with her in the end. But this time she fought him like a tiger. There was no half-hearted reluctance, no dalliance with surrender. She was embattled against him by far stronger desires. Not for worlds would she conceive by him this night and so jeopardize her future plans. And suddenly in a flash of intuition a thought came to her. “That devil Despenser sent you,” she accused breathlessly. “He encouraged you to come — or you had some coarse wager together that I would let you take me — so that I should bear you another child, and be out of his ambitious way for months. All you have ever wanted of me is children. All your anxiety about the Black Douglas at Brotherton was for your heir, not me!”

  He let her go so suddenly that she fell back against the pillows. “That is a lie, and you know it,” he said with more restraint. “For years we were happy together — ”