Isabel the Fair

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “He hates the Despensers as much as I do.”

  Mortimer drew a small folded note from between the buttons of his green and gold cote-hardie. “Madam, I had this from England but an hour ago. It is from Bishop Orleton of Hereford. He says that he and my mother and your late uncle of Lancaster’s son, Lincoln, have been working diligently for us. And that such is the response among barons and merchants alike all up and down the country, that they say they can promise success if only we will let them know the time and place of our landing and bring with us at least a thousand men.”

  “A thousand men! When we came here with only Maltravers and Dragon and a handful of Edmund’s squires and pages. No wonder you have been so ponderously silent!”

  “Foreign mercenaries are our only hope. They are usually to be got in these Empire states, and some of these German mercenaries are remarkably well trained.”

  “But how could we persuade them to cross the sea on what would seem to them a wild cause, unsponsored by their Emperor or by the King of France?”

  Even Mortimer was forced to admit uncertainty by an expressive shrug. “Only by paying them good wages, I suppose.”

  “With what?” asked Kent pertinently. It was he who stood apart now, as if marshalling second and more cautious thoughts with which to confound their hopes. “Who among us draws a penny from his estate, being banished? And of those supporters in England many are suspect. Since that unfortunate accident in the lists, poor Lincoln is half blind. And what, my dear sister, do you propose to tell Ned? Is he to accompany us to England in the certain knowledge that we shall be bearing arms against his father?”

  “His father and Hugh Despenser are, as we all know to our cost, indivisible,” retorted Mortimer. “And in any case the Duke is but a child.”

  Ned’s voice came to them at that very moment, calling cheerfully after one of Hainault’s daughter’s as they pursued some game on the other side of a tall box hedge, and Isabel could not but feel grateful that he was still a child. That his voice held again that note of boyish eagerness which had been silenced too long in sullen resentment. This Court of Valenciennes was a good place, free from cynicism and scheming, and a small maternal part of her wished that the boy could stay in it, undeceived and unexploited, to grow to decent manhood among those guileless-faced girls of Joanna’s. She saw Edmund go to join them, as if some element of simplicity in him were drawn from treachery towards their happy laughter. Mortimer turned too and watched him disappear through an arch cut in the thickness of the yew. “He is only half-heartedly in this,” he said regretfully.

  “Because his heart is still half with Edward. As a young man he adored him and now he is tom between that caring and his desire to destroy the Despensers,” answered Isabel, reading Edmund’s troubled state from her own.

  “The same desire for revenge which obsesses you.”

  He put a protective arm about her as if to wipe out the hardness of his words. “Perhaps he is even naive enough to believe that when we have achieved it Edward will be left to us just as he used to be,” she added, following her previous train of thought in spite of her lover’s proximity. And he, with disconcerting suddenness, moved away and remarked that Kent had been quite right about the difficulty of dealing with Ned when he should find himself placed in unwilling opposition to his father. And asked, in his most practical tones, how much she intended to tell the boy. It was, she supposed, a proof of the protection of their partnership, that they found themselves as close in matters of policy as in the union of their bodies.

  “At least he should be glad to get back to his own horses and hawks and to the lively companionship of that lad of Griffin’s,” he said. “With all his martial aptitudes he must be most uncommonly bored playing foolish games with all those girls.”

  “On the contrary, he seems to be enjoying himself immensely,” said Isabel a little sharply, as another peal of concerted laughter reached them. “Have you not noticed, Roger, how much happier and more tractable he has been since we came here? It may well be that — ”

  “That what, my dear?”

  But the thought taking shape in Isabel’s mind was as yet too unformed, and too daring, to be spoken of. She was merely a woman, unauthorized to promote national alliances, so far-reaching in their results. But one of the immediate results of such a move might help her lover, and win that approving smile of his and the high regard for which she lived. “Leave him to me,” she said. “I will go and enter into their gaiety — do all I can to prepare a happy approach — before I talk to him — persuasively.”

  She would have left the garden for the tiltyard where the younger people played, but before she reached the archway, Mortimer’s words halted her like a sharp command.

  “There is another to whom it is of yet more importance that you should talk — persuasively,” he said.

  “Of whom do you speak?” She stopped short and turned to look at him. He was smiling at her from across the pond, and for once the practical leader and the ardent lover seemed to have become a little mixed.

  “That latest victim of your charms. Young John of Hainault. I am told he has the ordering of more than five hundred men. He could be useful to us.”

  “You think he would come and fight for us?”

  “For you.” Mortimer came to her quickly with that almost cat-like tread which never failed to surprise her in so muscular a man. Without touching her body, he bent and kissed her on the lips. “You could drive a man into doing anything, my woman. I hate the very thought of it, but go on bewitching him, the young fool. Offer him — anything. If only he will come and bring those five hundred men. After all,” he added, standing back with a half-shamefaced laugh, “I can always hide behind the arras and kill him at the last moment if he tries to take too much.”

  But Isabel neither laughed nor fumed that he should ask it of her. She stood, eyes wide agaze, seeing something which would always be beyond his vision. “No, no, my love,” she said softly, taking his weather-roughened face between soft fingers. “You need not so torture yourself. That is not the way to come by them at all.”

  “What surer way is there with a man?”

  “All men are not the same. Some serve their ideals rather than their passions. They would sooner reach out for some unattainable Fata Morgana than possess a sinful woman. Oh, not many!” she admitted, seeing his restive shrug. “But when their mothers have made them that way it shows in the aspiring selflessness of their eyes. And what Edmund said in jest just now of John the knight-errant is true. We shall carry him further with us by leading him on some selfless crusade than by tempting him to my bed.”

  “You may be right,” said Mortimer, who was always willing to allow the value of her more intuitive knowledge in such matters. “For myself, I am more at home with the workings of a siege-mine or an ambuscade.”

  “But you must have seen some of this gentle idealism in Edmund, too. He has some quality inherited from the loveliness of his mother but lacks strength to transmute it into the dedicated strength of a great leader, as we hope Sir John of Hainault will.”

  “So long as you persuade him to espouse our cause, no matter by what means — ”

  Isabel went to him and slipped her arms coaxingly about his neck, noticing as she did so how much less tall he was than Edward. “And as for you, my dear Roger, to whom such visionary qualities are not granted, the least you can do is to refrain from disillusioning him. I pray you curb that arrogance which I adore and do not come too openly as my lover. A too-blatant display of our relationship may blur the appealing picture of a much-wronged wife. Besides alienating Ned when I would most wish to influence him.”

  He gripped her wrists as if to disengage them. “You mean,” he flung at her furiously, “that once in England you would have me keep away from your bed?”

  But she pressed herself against him with sudden passion. Her small forefinger smoothed the sullenness from his mouth. “No. dear fool! I mean only — come softly and come late. Co
me disguised as my confessor or the chandler’s apprentice or what you will. Only come — ” She clung to him, laughing, then with closed eyes lay for a moment or two against his heart. “For truly I think that if you ever cease to do so life will end for me.”

  He held her then at arm’s length so that they looked closely into each other’s eyes. “I myself will die before that happens,” he said slowly, as though he were looking into the future and making her some solemn vow.

  “Then anything else I can endure. Leave me to deal with awkward sons and dragon-slaying knights,” she said, hiding beneath a show of light-hearted gaiety how much his words had moved her.

  She left him then and went to join Ned and his newfound friends. With Edmund, she would have sat on a grassy bank to watch them play with their shuttlecocks. But at the sight of her the straight-limbed girls, redeemed from plainness only by the freshness of their youth, sank to the ground in over-awed curtises. The laughter died on their wide, kind lips. She perceived that to them she was not just their new friend’s mother, but Queen Isabel the Fair and the pattern of all fashion and beauty, with a knowledge of court etiquette far exceeding their own. In an effort to put them at ease she would have set them all to dancing, herself trying to teach them the whirling steps of a gay new Provengal dance called a Waltz. But her efforts were useless. They clung together shyly, their good Flemish faces all looked alike, she could not even remember their names. All except the tall, dark one whom Ned had chosen as his partner in the short-lived dance.

  But at least she had the satisfaction of knowing that Ned had been pleased by her attention. He was obviously proud of her beauty and her grace which still, in her early thirties, could make a group of almost marriageable girls look and feel like a posse of raw milkmaids. He escorted her back to her apartments, more smiling and talkative than he had been for months, and she took advantage of his closer filial approach to say what she had come to say.

  She paused by the gate of her cousin’s herb garden. “Just before we left Paris I had another letter from your father.”

  She saw Ned’s face light up. “He is well?” he asked, with all his old naturalness. “And we shall be returning soon, Madam?”

  “Yes, we shall be returning to England soon. The King did not mention his health, perhaps because there were graver matters afoot. His Grace is negotiating for a betrothal between your sister Eleanor and the King of Aragon.”

  Ned made a cheerful grimace. “Poor child, if she has to learn all their stiff Court etiquette!” he said, with the casual uncomprehending pity of fourteen. “But it will be some years yet before she will be old enough to go.”

  His face was turned towards her in full sunlight so that Isabel could read his least reaction, and she sprang the rest of her news upon him with purposeful suddenness. “His Grace is also arranging for you to marry the King of Aragon’s daughter.”

  The youthful Duke of Guienne stood stricken. All happiness was quenched from his face. He put a hand to the neck of his cote-harde as if to loosen it so that he might breathe. “No! Oh, no!” he cried, in a hoarse incredulous whisper.

  “But why should you mind so much?” she asked reasonably. “You must have known that a marriage would soon be arranged for you with some eligible princess.”

  “But I — I cannot spend the rest of my life with some Spanish girl who gabbles in a foreign language,” he broke out.

  “Marriage is certainly for a long time,” she agreed, full of pity for him. “But we all have to accept this — political bartering — which takes no account of personal happiness. Particularly a King’s elder son.”

  He did not answer, but she saw the desperation in his eyes. She wanted to console him by saying, “Some of us are driven to take our pleasure elsewhere,” but she was his mother. She did not want it to be like that for him. She went and laid a hand on his arm. “Is it only the matter of the language, Ned? Or would you not have minded so much — before we came here?”

  She knew that she had crystallized into words a fact which he himself had scarcely realized, and that in his deliberate way he was digesting it. “Come, come, Ned. Which one of them is it?’ she teased, with a rallying smile. “The dark one whom you were dancing with?”

  He shot her a quick glance as though resenting her frightening feminine divination. “That was Philippa,” he said, in what he hoped were non-committal tones. “She can talk quite intelligently about herbal remedies for a wound or training a hawk — for a girl. And she cried when she heard I might be leaving — soon.” He would probably mature into one of those huge strong men who are rendered ludicrously helpless by a woman’s tears, thought Isabel, repressing a smile. And suddenly he was appealing to her and, as he did so, looking almost a grown man already. “Can you not do something, ma mere — can you not persuade the King — you who can persuade any man to anything — ” he was saying, incoherent as usual where his emotions were concerned. And saying it in that gruff, breaking voice of his which had a way of catching at her heart.

  “We will see, my son,” she promised soothingly. “Milord Mortimer and I will see what we can do.” It would be good to win Ned’s gratitude as well as to be making him an unwitting partner in their plans.

  That evening at supper she took more careful stock of the girl with the blue-black hair and the kind, honest eyes who might one day be her daughter-in-law.

  “Heaven knows what he sees in her,” she said a few hours later, lying warm in Roger Mortimer’s arms. “Of course, it may be only the type of woman he wants. The untemperamental, help-meet type which Flanders breeds. He once swore to me — rather unflatteringly, n’est ce pas? — that nothing would induce him to marry a Frenchwoman. This Philippa is not the eldest, and any one of them might do. But Ned has one of those tenacious memories and a kind of slow determination — ”

  “A most damnable obstinacy at times,” agreed Mortimer feelingly.

  “I told him that you, too, would try to help him in this. In the hope that it would make him like you better.”

  “That will be pleasant,” said Mortimer with irony. “But I do not see how even between us we can betroth a lad without his father’s consent. Particularly in face of these almost completed negotiations with Aragon which you speak of.”

  “Edward will not be in power for long after you land, and for a Valois my cousin Joanna tattles most indiscreetly. She is always bemoaning the fact that she cannot bear sons. ‘William and I find it hard to make good marriages for all four daughters,’ is a favourite theme. Pressed upon me with intent, perhaps. So I do assure you there will be no difficulty in arranging an alliance before we leave.”

  “Before we leave?” Mortimer sat up to run frenzied fingers through the dishevelled crispness of his hair. “But who, in the midst of trying to raise money for an invasion, wants to be encumbered with the fripperies of a royal bride?”

  Isabel laughed and drew him back against her pillows. “The bride is far too young to take,” she said. “But considering the prosperity of these Flemish towns, William might be persuaded to pay her dowry now. Which would pay our troops.”

  Mortimer let out a long breath of amazement. Even up to that moment he had not realized the driving skill of his partner. Admiringly, he had to admit that it surpassed his own. “But Ned,” he objected, with unaccustomed caution. “One day, I suppose, he must come to some sort of power. And one day he and his bride must know. They could say that we stole her dowry.”

  Isabel lay back against his shoulder with a sigh of content. “Without the troops — and the risks we take — he could not marry her at all,” she pointed out, with incontrovertible logic.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “There are some women who live gently all their lives, Ghislaine, but to me, whom men call ‘Isabel the Fair’, every conceivable adventure must happen.” Laughingly, yet with tears of gratitude still glistening in her eyes, the Queen of England stopped dramatically in her restless pacing of a tavern room in Harwich. The light from hastily brought
candles shone on the travel-stained grandeur of her rich brocades, on cheeks white with weariness and on eyes blazing with the heady excitement of success.

  Ghislaine, who had come with her husband to be among the first to greet her, marvelled how anyone so utterly exhausted could still manage to look so spectacularly beautiful. “Or does she only bewitch us all into thinking so?” she wondered. “Let me take off that poor torn dress and unbind your Grace’s hair,” she urged, prodding doubtfully at the unpromising hardness of the bed.

  Touched by her solicitude, the Queen stopped her pacing and went with swift steps to kiss her. “Oh, Ghislaine, it is good to have you back! Now that I have had to part with Bringnette there are so few people I can really speak my mind to. But her poor rheumatics were so bad that she begged me to leave her to rest awhile in that property the King provided for her old age at Ponthieu.” Even present relief and success could not protect Isabel from a stab of sadness at the thought, and the loneliness went all the deeper because she knew in her heart that it had been disapproval of her adultery with Mortimer rather than rheumatics which had prompted Bringnette’s request.

  “I can make your Grace a soothing posset as she used to do. She taught me her special brew. ‘Against the day when I am dead and the Queen might need one,’ she said.”

  So here, in this humble impersonal place, her old nurse seemed to be caring for her. Isabel threw open the casement, low under the thatched eaves, and the clang of church bells seemed to fill the little room, while out in the darkness the low Essex coastline was fringed with blazing bonfires. “How can I even want to sleep to-night?” she exclaimed, then turned to speak more soberly. “You know, Ghislaine, I never really believed that we should land — much less be so received. At first, when we planned this in Hainault, we had nothing. Except,” she added with a laugh, “a very doubtful reputation!”

  When she laughed like that Ghislaine recognized some subtle difference in her — a new and brittle hardness — which made her want to look away. “But Robert says you landed with twice the number of men we dared hope,” she said.