The Knight And The Rose

by Isolde Martyn

  The Earl of Leicester was sad and grave in his utterance: “You executed my noble brother, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, without justice and for no true cause.”

  “You committed robberies and depredations,” bawled red-faced Trussell, his saliva flying midge-like in the motes of morning light.

  They allowed the old man no response. He deserved none; he had given Thomas of Lancaster no right of reply.

  “Have you reached a verdict?” asked the queen, sitting like God, her chair on a plinth behind the judges.

  “Madam,” Mortimer bowed. “We declare him guilty.” He handed her the judgment.

  In the hush, the noise of the parchment unrolling between Isabella of France’s fingers seemed incongruous. Johanna reached out a hand to steady herself against the back of the royal chair.

  Isabella rose. “Hugh Despenser the Elder, styling yourself Earl of Winchester, you are found guilty and sentenced as follows: you shall be drawn for treason, hanged for robbery, decapitated for the crimes you have committed against Holy Church and your head shall be taken to Winchester.”

  Old Hugh Despenser seemed to give a great sigh.

  “Is the gibbet prepared?” asked the queen.

  “Madam, it is,” barked Trussell.

  “Then let it be proclaimed that all are to assemble to see justice done. The prisoner is to be executed at the next hour bell.”

  A great cheer rose and the crowd spat and jeered as the old man was cuffed and hauled out.

  Isabella’s face was stony. “And I will have the rest of this unholy trinity.”

  JOHANNA REFUSED TO go to the execution.

  “What is the matter?” exclaimed Isabella, sending her a warning glance indicating the prince’s presence. “I will have no sympathy for any Despenser.”

  “No, madam, the man is guilty, but I think the punishment barbaric.”

  Elizabeth Baddlesmere nodded. “The Despensers and the king did the same to my father, but I agree with Johanna, I should not wish this on any man.”

  “I want this to be a lesson, mesdames. There shall be no more Gavestons, Despensers or Thomas of Lancasters. Let them learn,” the queen thrust a finger towards the hall of nobles where Mortimer’s laugh was recognisable, “that if any one of them dares to usurp the powers of a king, he will die a foul and bloody death.”

  “Without exception, mother?” The Prince of Wales’s voice broke through the women’s argument.

  “Without exception. Remember that, my son.”

  “I will remember.”

  JOHANNA HEARD THE roar of the mob and knew it punctuated each dreadful, painful stage of the old man’s death. Elizabeth had been ordered out to watch by the Mortimers. Of the royal household, only Agnes remained with Johanna within the keep, the silence compatible between them. Was she being cowardly? Were her principles a rationalisation, a failure to accept that people could inflict such suffering on each other? Even in the castle solar, she could smell the smoke, or was it just imagination that made her want to retch?

  The rest poured back into the keep an hour later. Isabella and the other women were sternfaced and white as ashes. The Prince of Wales was green and declared he could not face dinner in the hall. Mortimer, ebullient, chided him but the boy turned on him. “My lord, it pleases me not to do so.”

  The room fell silent, everyone not exactly embarrassed but rather uncertain, and Mortimer, no less astonished, his dignity a little grazed, bowed. “As my lord prince pleases.”

  A page tugged at Johanna’s sleeve. “My lady, my lord of Leicester’s jester stands without the hall and begs you will go and speak with him.”

  Jankyn, for once unsmiling, bowed and took her hand. “Come.”

  She and Agnes followed as he circumnavigated the ale spills, piss and vomit of celebration in the courtyard. He led them into one of the towers and up its spiral stairs to the ramparts.

  “Jankyn! Where—”

  He put a finger to his lips. “ ‘The fuller the cup, the more careful you must carry it.’ There lies your way. Come, fair Agnes, you and I must play sentry, for Paradise is turned inside out like an old cote.”

  For an instant she did not see the man prostrate, hidden by the curve of the tower. His face cradled in his arms.

  “Gerv—Geraint?” A full cup? Was he drunk again? Her fault? No, surely . . .

  “Sir, did you send for me?”

  “Johanna.” It was a plea.

  “Are you hurt?” She stooped beside him, reaching out a hand to smooth away his tumbled hair so she might see his face.

  “Jo . . . I-I . . .” He struggled up onto his elbows, his cheekbones limned with tears. He swallowed, too choked to speak.

  Shocked, she eased her kirtle, knelt and waited until it pleased him to find his voice.

  “D-Despenser? Did you see?” Was this what ailed him? Disgust of mankind?

  “No,” she declared stoutly, “I refuse on principle to watch men behave like savages.”

  “Oh dear God, Johanna.” He tried to laugh and smudge away the tears, but his mesh mitten was useless. “Only you could . . . I love you so much.”

  “Here,” she dragged her veil round. But before she could lean down to dab his cheeks, he buried his face in her lap with an anguished howl, his shoulders heaving.

  Johanna eased her enigmatic husband up into her arms and rocked him like the babe she never had, stroking his beloved head while his tears wet her bodice. This grief was not the harvest of unrequited love unless the execution had somehow exorcised whatever demons struggled within him. “Hush, hush, my darling, my dearest lord, all will be well.”

  “No! No, it cannot be! I should not have sent for you.” He was shaking his head from side to side, tormented.

  “Gerv—Geraint,” exclaimed Johanna firmly, gripping him by the shoulders. “Will you for once explain to me what is going on in that deluded head of yours? It is time you trusted me! Understand!” She shook him to make sure he did. “I am your wife. I will share your joy and your troubles. Trust me.”

  “Lady, I fear to do so. You will hate me.”

  “Of course I shall not.”

  “Johanna, it is my father.”

  “Yes, Orleton. I guessed.”

  “No!” He pulled back from her and angrily brushed the saltwater from his upper lip. “It is my father they have pulled apart and thrown to the dogs out there.” He pointed beyond the wall, his hand shaking.

  Thrusting a knuckle to her lips, Johanna stared at him in horror. He broke away, his fist slamming against the wall, as if the pain could assuage whatever guilt or sorrow raged within.

  “Now you will hate me.” His face was against the harsh stone, hidden from her.

  Touching his cheek, she tucked the damp golden hair back behind his ear. “Why would I hate you, sir, when I love you beyond all the world?”

  She waited. Had he heard her? Was he too deep within the well of his own misery to reach the firm ground she offered him? But turn he did.

  “Oh, my Johanna,” he reached out a hand to take hers. “How can you love me when I have been so callous, leaving you to make your own way and not protecting or acknowledging you as a husband should? But all the while I loved you. Do you understand now why I could not be honest?”

  “No, I do not. I cannot see that being the Earl of Winchester’s bastard should make any difference to us now.”

  “I am not his bastard.”

  “But . . .”

  His blue eyes were awash with sorrow and pity at her confusion.

  “I am his youngest son, Johanna. I am Geraint Despenser.”

  Thirty-two

  HE WAS DESPERATELY seeking absolution in her face. “Geraint.” It was spoken softly as one might soothe a creature frantic with pain. “It is a good name.”

  “And the other? Men spit on it. My brother is the most despised man in England since King Harold’s mourners cursed William the Bastard.”

  “So . . .” Johanna was careful as she chose her words. On one s
ide lay the quagmire of pity; on the other, the laughter of madness. Despenser! She had married into the Despensers! “So you disowned your family?”

  “My father disowned me when I refused to return to the abbey. You must think I am always running away. I fled from you once, did I not, dear heart?”

  “With good reason. Perhaps it is as well you left the church. You would have made a most rebellious bishop. And I thought you were a saddlepack babe.”

  Geraint’s expression lightened. “Adam Orleton’s? No.” The anguish had weakened and he eased himself back against the wall and tucked her possessively into the crook of his arm. “I might have stayed at the monastery. As I told you before I loved the learning. It was because of the master of novices that I ran away. You should have seen the way he looked at young boys, Johanna. It would have made your flesh crawl. I refused to play his unholy, his unnatural, games. A murrain on him! If I had a silver penny for every time he had me scourged . . . So, I sent word to my family, and Hugh, my splendid brother whom I had always idolised, visited me on his way back from the court and raised the matter with the abbot. Of course they were anxious to refute such a grave charge and since a Despenser was a wealthy acquisition for an abbey, they had no intention of losing me.” He stared up at the clouds with a sigh. “In a nutshell, Hugh sided with them. He told me I must stand up for myself. I ran away within the month.

  “They set the sergeants-at-law on my trail and it was in Hereford that they caught me. The matter was reported to the new bishop, Orleton, and he ordered me to Sugwas and there questioned me for several hours.”

  “Did he know who you were?”

  “Oh, I poured it all out to him. He lent me parchment to write to my father and let me stay in his household until the answer came. My father replied he would disown me if I did not return to the abbey. I refused.”

  “That was a great step for you.”

  “My cursed family already had an evil reputation for exploiting others and seeking earthly riches. The abbey opened my mind to that at least. Bishop Orleton suggested I should start anew, style myself differently and disdain my kin. The Mortimers owed him a favour so he wrote to them at Ludlow, saying I was his protégé, requesting that they give me a place in their household. I thought it a great jape, perfect revenge on my family.”

  “Because of the feud. And do the Mortimers know who you really are?”

  “Upon my soul, no! But I wish I had come clean with them years ago. It is too late now. Anyway, I was made esquire to Edmund who was a few years younger than me. I loathed it at first, especially as I was older and larger than the other esquires. Like a great bumblebee.” He smiled wryly down at Johanna. “Is this a devious method to calm me? Making me babble on like a marketplace gossip?”

  “No,” she declared candidly, snuggling in further to his shoulder. “It is an explanation long overdue. So it was your own brother who summoned us to Richmond?”

  “Yes, he could have made an end of me, but he wanted me back in the family fold. We made a bargain. In return for your divorce and appointment to the queen’s household, I agreed to serve him in the Scots campaign. You are catching flies, Johanna.”

  She closed her lips. So it had been Gerv—Geraint who had arranged her future.

  “The rest you may guess at. The war was a failure. We quarrelled again. He desired me to work for him, use his methods, threaten, force, extort and all for short-term greed, no thought of Heaven. He wanted me to spy on Orleton, play a double game. I refused. I had fulfilled my part of the bargain. In any case, I had resolved to keep my oath and set my former lord, Roger Mortimer, free. I helped with his escape and fled with him to France. You realise it was because of Edmund Mortimer that your mother made me play your husband?”

  “Why did you not confide all this to me at Conisthorpe?”

  “Lady, I was with you scarcely a month. I had no prospects. Does it make a scrap of difference? If you had counselled me to throw my lot in with my brother, I might be a wealthy baron by now but, like him, hunted and like to die.” He unlooped his arm from about her and sat forward. “You see why I cannot acknowledge you until all this foulness is over and men are sane again. If they discover I am a Despenser . . .”

  She rested her cheek against his back. “Be rational, Geraint. You have to be guilty of something.”

  “Tell that to a mob. Their brains are in their arses.” He stared stonily ahead.

  “Then be silent.” She knelt beside him, her hands curling comfortingly around his arm.

  “And endure not being able to hold you, touch you. You are mine, Johanna, I shall not let you go. You are my comfort and my joy.”

  “Then be my suitor. Can you hide your grief and play the part?”

  The translucent blue gaze blessed her. “I may be rusty but, would you believe, I have had experience . . .”

  IT WAS A relief to leave the stench of Bristol and its satiated dogs. Geraint, by permission of Sir Roger Mortimer, was gone king-coursing in Wales with the forces of Leicester and John of Hainault. It was better so. Even for Johanna’s sake, he could not kick his heels while they tracked his brother with hunting dogs.

  The remainder of the army, led by Mortimer, swarmed north, the queen protected within its midst, to be feasted by Orleton in the shadow of his cathedral at Hereford.

  Johanna, alone and unacknowledged still, but for reasons she now understood, counted the days as the wind tugged the leaves off the trees around the bishop’s palace where the queen’s ladies were comfortably housed. Had she wished, she could have sought Adam Orleton’s permission to visit the fine library. Yesterday she had stood with Elizabeth before the wondrous Mappa Mundi and marvelled at all the realms shown there, but she soon fell to thinking of the man who filled her own small world, and instead went and lit candles in the cathedral at the shrine of St. Ethelbert, praying for Geraint’s soul, and for those of the newly acquired kinsmen she had laboured to destroy.

  And if the queen’s men caught Hugh Despenser? What then? Would Geraint try to save him and be caught in the same net or would he have to stand by and watch the barons slay him? Did he hope Hugh would escape? Or recognising his brother’s irrepressible greed and the unabating hatred all held for him, would he cheer them on?

  After four years to have her lost love unfettered in her arms only to let him go again was torment for Johanna. Every one of her fears seemed gargantuan. Supposing King Edward mustered sufficient Welshmen to turn on his enemies? Would Hugh slay his brother for treachery?

  The waiting seemed endless. It was nigh on two long weeks when Leicester’s messenger came galloping through the city gates exultant with the news. The hand of God had turned against the king. He and his favourite had tried for two weeks to sail to Despenser’s Isle of Lundy, but the wind had refused to change. Every day their boat had been forced back to land. Finally they had gone from abbey to abbey claiming sanctuary until they had been caught at Neath. My lord of Leicester had taken the king for safekeeping to Monmouth Castle, but he was sending Despenser to Isabella.

  Five days later Johanna heard the horns sounding and knew they were bringing Hugh through the jeering streets to Hereford Castle. And where was Geraint? Would he be with them? She was hard put to elbow her way through the surging throng of onlookers in the old Norman bailey as Leicester’s men dismounted.

  “Sir.” She had to thump against Geraint’s backplate to be noticed. He was haggard, crescent shadows pouched his eyes and a half-grown beard covered his chin.

  “No, my love.” He unclasped her arms from chaining his neck. “I stink like a London sewer.” Pain was webbed like spider lace across his face. Beyond the gatehouse, the shouting escalated and the crowd around them gave voice like dogs taking up the chorus as the cart came in.

  “Oh, Christ Almighty!” she muttered, looking across his shoulder.

  Two prisoners were manacled by the ankles to iron rings in the wooden floor of the tumbril. Despenser’s lieutenant, Simon de Reading, his bald head spattered
with filth and excrement, stood full square. The slighter, younger man was unhealthily pale, his eyes closed. Only his wrists, shackled to the rail of the wain, kept him upright.

  Was this the king’s chief minister whom she had last seen adorned in velvet and miniver, his fingers glittering with gold and lodesterres? The once-fine shirt hung half out of Hugh’s breechclout which showed, stained and unkempt, above the sagging hose. Dribbles of spit spattered his clothing and drips of ordure tributaried down all over him. The brown hair was plastered to his brow with fresh piss and he could not even wipe away the human dung that was sliding off it to clog on the luxuriant lashes and running down his unshaven upper lip and over his mouth.

  “He has not touched food or water since they caught him.” Geraint’s voice was cracked as he fingered her hands upon his shoulders.

  “The queen intends to have him taken to London, to be tried at Westminster.”

  “No chance of that, my love. It will be over tomorrow, believe me.”

  THEY STOOD LATER in the dusk in the Bishop Adam’s herb garden. A nightingale, unbidden, sang a descant over the sounds of the hall that eddied around them and the waves of the Wye lapped hungrily at the bank as a fisher boat rowed past.

  Johanna leaned back against an oak’s trunk, her arms cradled across her breasts, trying to keep out the unhappiness. Just being alone with him for a few precious moments was insufficient reward for the longing that had lain with her as a bedfellow, but now she needed to send him away again for his own sanity. “Why do you not leave tonight?” she repeated. “You cannot want to watch.” She did not want to tell him of Edyth’s waxen images.

  He stood pensively, his elbow leaning upon his folded arm, his forefinger stroking across his upper lip. “And compound suspicion. Of all people, Fulk, curse him, saw me talking with Hugh. A pitiful snatch of words, but. . . he saw me set my hand on his arm.”

  “Forgive me, I should not judge, but that was foolhardy of you.”

  “Yes, a bad mistake. I have not changed, have I? Too impulsive for my own good.” He groaned, placing his hands in the small of his back, and stretched. “Do we have to evaluate everything from self-interest, Johanna? You think I should not show some compassion for my own brother?”