The She-Wolf (The Accursed Kings, Book 5)

by Druon, Maurice

  Edward, ruined, in debt and unable to get any more credit, had been unable to send troops to defend his fief; but he sent ships to bring back his wife. She had written to the Bishop of Winchester, so that he might communicate her letter to the whole English clergy:

  ‘Neither you nor others of good understanding must believe that we have left the company of our lord without grave and reasonable cause and without our being in bodily peril from the said Hugh, who has our said lord under his dominion as well as all our kingdom and who wishes to dishonour us, of which we are most certain from having suffered it. So long as Hugh remains as at present, with our husband under his sway, we cannot return to the Kingdom of England without exposing our life and that of our very dear son to the danger of death.’

  This letter crossed the new orders Edward sent the sheriffs of the coastal counties at the beginning of February. He informed them that the Queen and his son, the Duke of Aquitaine, whom he had sent to France to establish peace, had, under the influence of the traitor and rebel Mortimer, made alliance with the enemies of the King and the kingdom, and that should the Queen or the Duke of Aquitaine disembark from such ships as he, the King, had sent to France, his will was that they should be courteously received, but only if they arrived with good intentions; should they, however, disembark from foreign ships and show that they were bent on a course contrary to his wishes, the order was to spare only the Queen and Prince Edward, and to treat everyone else who landed as a rebel.

  To gain time, Isabella got her son to write to the King that she was ill and in no condition to travel.

  But in the month of March, when King Edward had learnt that his wife was enjoying herself going about in Paris, he had another attack of epistolatory fury. It seemed to be a cyclic disease that attacked him every three months.

  Edward II wrote to the young Duke of Aquitaine as follows:

  ‘On false pretexts our wife, your mother, has withdrawn herself from us because of our dear and faithful Hugh the Despenser, who had always served us so well and so loyally; but you can see, and everyone else can see, that she has openly and notoriously, departing from her duty and to the prejudice of our Crown, taken to herself Mortimer, the traitor and our mortal enemy, as he has been proved, attested and judged in full Parliament, and keeps company with him at home and abroad, in despite of us, our Crown and the rights of our realm. And she does even worse, if it be possible, by keeping you in company of our said enemy before the whole world, in very great dishonour and villainy, and in prejudice of the laws and usages of the Realm of England which it is your sovereign duty to safeguard and uphold.’

  At the same time, he wrote to Charles IV:

  ‘If your sister loved and desired to be in our company, as she lyingly told you, if your Grace will excuse the expression, she would not have left us on the pretext of furthering peace and friendship between us and you, which I believed in all good faith when I sent her to you. But really, very dear brother, we perceive clearly enough that she does not love us, and the reason she gives, concerning our dear kinsman Hugh the Despenser, is feigned. We think she must be out of her mind when, so overtly and notoriously, she retains in her counsels the traitor and our mortal enemy Mortimer, and is in company with this wicked man both at home and abroad. You might also see, very dear brother, that she corrects her behaviour and conducts herself as she should for the honour of all her relations. Have the goodness to let us know what you intend to do, in accordance with God, good sense and good faith, and without regard to the caprices of women or other desires.’

  Letters to the same effect were sent out once again in all directions, to peers, dignitaries, prelates, even to the Pope himself. The English sovereigns were each denouncing the other’s lover in public, and this double affair of two couples consisting of three men and one woman vastly entertained the courts of Europe.

  Discretion was now no longer possible to the lovers in Paris. Rather than seek to conceal things, Isabella and Mortimer lived openly together, and appeared on every occasion in each other’s company. That the Earl of Kent and his wife, who had joined him, were on intimate terms with the adulterous couple seemed to constitute a sort of guarantee. Why should anyone be more concerned for the honour of the King of England than his own half-brother seemed to be? Indeed, Edward’s letters had done no more than confirm the evidence of a liaison which everyone accepted as an accomplished and immutable fact. And all the unfaithful wives thought there must be some special forgiveness for queens and that Isabella was very lucky to have a bugger for a husband.

  But there was a shortage of money. No funds now reached the emigrants, whose property had all been confiscated. And the little English Court in Paris lived entirely on loans from the Lombards.

  At the end of March they had to summon old Tolomei once again. He came to see Queen Isabella, accompanied by Signor Boccaccio, who had on him her account with the Bardi. The Queen and Mortimer received him most affably and explained their need for more money. With equal affability, and many expressions of regret, Messer Spinello Tolomei refused. He had good arguments to support his case; he opened his big black book and showed them the figures. Messire de Alspaye, Lord de Cromwell, Queen Isabella – as he turned the page, Tolomei bowed low – the Earl of Kent and the Countess – another bow – Lord Maltravers, Mortimer … And then, on four consecutive pages, the debts of King Edward himself …

  Roger Mortimer protested: King Edward’s account was no concern of theirs.

  ‘But my lord,’ said Tolomei, ‘as far as we’re concerned all the English debts are lumped together. I am grieved to have to refuse you, greatly grieved, and to have to disappoint so beautiful a lady as Madame the Queen; but it is really asking too much of me to expect from me what I no longer possess and you have had. This great fortune we are supposed to own is made up of nothing but debts. My whole wealth, my lord, consists of your debts. Consider, Madame,’ he went on, turning to the Queen, ‘consider, Madame, the situation of us poor Lombards, who are always being threatened, and always having to pay each new king the dues customary on a happy accession. And, alas, how many we have had to pay in the last twelve years! And then under every king our right of citizenship is withdrawn so that we must repurchase it at a high fee, and sometimes even twice over if the reign be a long one. Yet, look at what we do for the kingdoms! England has cost our companies a hundred and seventy thousand livres, the expenses of her coronations, her wars and her rebellions, Madame. Think of my age. I should have retired long ago, had I not to be ceaselessly going to and fro recovering these debts which we need to assist other purposes. We are called avaricious, greedy for what is due to us, yet no one considers the risks we take in lending everyone money and enabling the princes of this world to carry on their affairs. Priests are concerned with the lower classes, with giving alms to beggars and opening hospitals for the unfortunate; but we are concerned with the difficulties of the great.’

  His age gave him the right to express himself in this way, and the gentleness of his tone was such that it was impossible to take offence at what he said. And all the time he was talking, his half-open eye was fixed on a jewel shining at the Queen’s neck and which his book showed Mortimer had bought on credit.

  ‘How did our business begin? Why do we exist? No one remembers it now,’ he went on. ‘Our Italian banks were created during the crusades because lords and travellers disliked carrying gold on the unsafe roads, where people were always being robbed, or even in the camps which were not peopled only by honest men. And there were also ransoms to pay. So that we should transport the gold on their account and at our risk, the lords, and particularly those of England, pledged the revenues of their fiefs to us. But when we presented ourselves in these fiefs with our accounts, thinking that the seal of a great baron was a sufficient guarantee, we were not paid. So then we appealed to the kings, who were prepared to guarantee their vassals’ debts provided we lent money to them too; and this is how our resources came to be laid out among the kingdoms. No, M
adame, to my great sorrow and regret, this time I cannot.’

  The Earl of Kent who was present at the conversation said: ‘All right, Messer Tolomei. We shall have to go to one of the other companies.’

  Tolomei smiled. Did this fair young man, sitting there with his legs crossed and casually stroking a greyhound’s head, really think he could take his custom elsewhere? In his long career Tolomei had heard that phrase a thousand times and more. What a terrible threat!

  ‘My lord, when it is a question of such great borrowers as you royal personages, you must realize that all our companies are informed, and that the credit which I must regretfully refuse you will not be granted you by any other company. Messer Boccaccio, whom you see here with me, represents the Bardi interests. Ask him. For, Madame’ – and Tolomei turned back to the Queen – ‘this total of indebtedness has become very vexatious owing to the fact that none of it is covered by any guarantee. In the circumstances of your present relations with the King of England, he will most certainly not guarantee your debts. Nor you his, I imagine. Unless, of course, you do intend taking them over? If that were the case, then I think we might still perhaps be able to help you.’

  And he closed his left eye completely, clasped his hands over his stomach and waited.

  Isabella understood very little about finance. She looked at Roger Mortimer. What did the banker intend by these last words? After all the talk, what did this sudden overture mean?

  ‘Make yourself a little clearer, Messer Tolomei,’ she said.

  ‘Madame,’ went on the banker, ‘your cause is good and your husband’s far from pretty. The whole of Christendom knows of his wicked treatment of you, of the morals that blacken his life and of the bad government he inflicts on his subjects through his detestable counsellors. On the other hand, Madame, you are loved for your kindness, and I guarantee that there is no lack of good knights in France and elsewhere who would be ready to raise their banners for you and restore you to your place in your kingdom, even if it meant turning your husband, the King of England, off his throne.’

  ‘Messer Tolomei,’ cried the Earl of Kent, ‘does it mean nothing to you that my brother, detestable though he may be, has been crowned?’

  ‘My lord, my lord,’ replied Tolomei, ‘kings are really only such by the consent of their subjects. And you have at hand another king to give to the people of England, the young Duke of Aquitaine, who seems to show great sense for his age. I have seen too much of human passions not to recognize those that cannot be altered and lead the most powerful princes to disaster. King Edward will not rid himself of Despenser; but, on the other hand, England is perfectly prepared to acclaim any sovereign presented to her in exchange for the bad king she has and the wicked men who surround him. No doubt you will argue, Madame, that the knights who come forward to fight for your cause will be expensive to pay; they will have to be furnished with harness, food and their pleasures. But we Lombards, who can no longer face the prospect of supporting your exile, could still face the prospect of supporting your army, if Lord Mortimer, whose valour is known to all, would undertake to lead it, and if, of course, we had your guarantee that you would take over Messire Edward’s debts and liquidate them on your success.’

  The proposal could not have been more clearly put. The Lombard Companies were offering to back the wife against the husband, the son against the father, the lover against the legitimate husband. Mortimer was not so surprised as might have been expected, nor indeed did he pretend to be when he replied: ‘The difficulty, Messer Tolomei, is to assemble these banners. You can’t do it in a cellar. Where can we muster a thousand knights in our pay? In what country? We cannot ask King Charles, however well disposed he may be towards his sister, Madame the Queen, to allow us to assemble them in France.’

  There was a certain connivance between the old Sienese and Edward’s former prisoner.

  ‘Has not the young Duke of Aquitaine,’ said Tolomei, ‘received as his personal property the county of Ponthieu, which came to him from Madame the Queen, and is not Ponthieu opposite England, and next to the county of Artois where Monseigneur Robert, though he is not its present holder, has many partisans, as you well know, my lord, since you took refuge there after your escape?’

  ‘Ponthieu …’ repeated the Queen thoughtfully. ‘What is your opinion, dear Mortimer?’

  Though there was only a verbal agreement, it was nevertheless a bond. Tolomei was prepared to give the Queen and her lover a small credit at once so that they might deal with immediate necessities and leave straightway for Ponthieu to organize the expedition. And then, in May, he would supply the major part of the funds. Why May? Could he not make it an earlier date?

  Tolomei was planning things in his mind. He was thinking that, together with the Bardi, he had a debt to recover from the Pope, and that he would ask Guccio, who was in Siena, to go to Avignon, since the Pope had happened to let him know, through a Bardi traveller, that he would like to see the young man again. And advantage must be taken of the Pope’s benevolence. It would also be an opportunity, and perhaps the last, for Tolomei to see once again the nephew he missed so much.

  And there was a flicker of amusement in the banker’s thoughts. For, like Valois over the crusade and Robert of Artois over Aquitaine, the Lombard was thinking: ‘It’s the Pope who’ll pay for England.’ But when he had calculated the time it would take Boccaccio, who was about to set out for Italy, to reach Siena, and the time it would take Guccio to travel from Siena to Avignon, do his business there, and come on to Paris, he said: ‘In May, Madame, in May; and may God prosper your affairs.’

  And thus began the war of incompatible loves which was to make the destiny of nations totter.

  2

  The Return to Neauphle

  WAS THE BANKING HOUSE at Neauphle really so small, the church beyond the little market-square so low, and the road winding up towards Cressay, Thoiry and Septeuil so narrow? Or was it Guccio who had grown bigger, not in inches of course, for the body grows no taller after the age of twenty, but bigger in mind and in importance, as if his eyes had become used to vaster spaces and his sense of the place he held in the world had expanded?

  Nine years had gone by! The façade, the trees, the steeple, all suddenly made him feel nine years younger. Or, on the other hand perhaps, older by all the time that had elapsed.

  Guccio had instinctively bent his head, as he had in the past, when he went through the low door that separated the two rooms of business on the ground floor of this branch of the Tolomei bank. His hand had instinctively sought the handrope on the oak pillar round which the corkscrew staircase was built as he went up to his old room. And so it was here that he had loved, as never before and never since!

  The tiny room under the eaves was redolent of the countryside and of the past. How could so small a room have contained so great a love? Beyond the window, which was barely more than a loophole, the landscape was unchanged. It was the beginning of May and the trees were in blossom as they had been when he had left nine years ago. Why did trees in blossom arouse so intense an emotion, and why should the snow that dropped from cherry-trees or lay, tinged with pink, under apple-trees seem to fall from the heart? Between the branches that curved upwards like arms he could see the roof of the stable from which he had fled on the arrival of the brothers Cressay. How frightened he had been that night!

  He turned to the tin mirror, which still stood in the same place on the chest. At the memory of his weaknesses, every man tends to reassure himself by staring at his own face, forgetting that the signs of strength he detects in it impress only himself, and that it was before others he showed weakness. The grey reflection on the polished metal showed Guccio the likeness of a dark-complexioned young man of thirty, with a deep line between the eyebrows, and two dark eyes with which he was not wholly displeased, for they had already seen many and varied landscapes, mountain snows and ocean waves, and they had aroused desire in women’s hearts, and met the gaze of kings and princes.


  ‘Guccio Baglioni, my friend, why did you not go on with the career you began so well? You travelled from Siena to Paris, from Paris to London, from London to Naples and then to Lyons and to Avignon; you carried messages for Queen Isabella, treasure for cardinals, and a demand for the hand in marriage of Queen Clémence. During two fabulous years you lived and journeyed among the great of this world, charged with their interests and their secrets. And you were barely twenty! And all you did succeeded. The proof of it lies in the welcome you receive everywhere after nine years’ absence, and in the memories you left behind you and the friendship you inspired. And, in the first place, with the Holy Father himself. As soon as he saw you on a matter of business, the Sovereign Pontiff, from the elevation of the throne of Saint Peter, and though beset by so many tasks, showed an interest in your fate and fortune; he remembered even that you had had a son in the past, was concerned to learn that you had been deprived of your child, and devoted several of his precious minutes to giving you advice. “A son should be brought up by his father,” he said; and he furnished you with a papal messenger’s safe-conduct, the surest there is. And then Bouville! Bouville, whom you went to see, bearing Pope John’s blessing, and who treated you as a long-awaited friend, wept on seeing you, and gave you one of his own sergeants-at-arms to accompany you on your journey, as well as a letter, sealed with his own seal, addressed to the brothers Cressay, so that you should be allowed to see your son.’