The King Must Die (The Isabella Books) (26 page)

“A sentence of treason. An execution.” He reeled me in so close the heat of his breath singed my face. “Kent will never trouble us again.”

“But Roger —” I could not look at him, so possessed he seemed that I thought surely the devil would leap from his chest and devour my soul. “To accuse the king’s own uncle of treason? When will it end, Roger? When?”

He pierced his fingernails even deeper into my skin. His words seared into my ears like a burst of fire from a smith’s bellows. “When he draws his last breath, king’s uncle or not. This letter is his condemnation, his blood in ink. I need give no more proof than that.”

His fingers loosened and slipped away. My arm throbbed. I rubbed at it as Mortimer stomped about the room, grumbling on and on about Kent’s falsehoods.

He doesn’t know. He must not. He still thinks that Ockle carried out his orders and Maltravers and Gurney murdered Edward of Caernarvon. And I ... Everything rests on my shoulders. Everything that is the truth. The real truth.

And the price of keeping things as they are—is Kent’s life.

Kent, who opened his arms to me and helped me return to England and remove his own brother from power. Kent, who knows the truth. The truth that could take everything away from me. Everything. From me. From Roger.

From my son.

***

Edmund, Earl of Kent, sat teetering on the edge of a short bench before the appointed deputation. His hands alternately fluttered in his lap and kneaded at the tops of his kneecaps. He looked at each face in turn as he argued in defense of himself.

What look did Edward of Caernarvon wear when Lord Wake took him captive in Wales? When they demanded his abdication? When he knew that his days as king were done?

Did he look as Kent now does—his eyes sunken deep in disbelief, his mouth turned permanently downward in self-pity, his features shadowed with anger? Did he look as utterly, pitifully helpless?

My heart bled for him, but there was nothing I could do. Kent should have come to me. By secretly gathering allies, he had consigned himself to the role of traitor. Even if he truly believed Edward of Caernarvon to still be alive, what did he hope to gain by restoring him to the throne? There was only one answer: he wanted his nephew deposed and Mortimer and me ousted, as well. Such would be the path to England’s demise. How could he not see that?

Only yesterday, the king had argued with  me on his uncle’s behalf, for he loved him and believed there must be some way to spare his life. But hours later, I eventually convinced him that Kent had tried to incite insurrection and must pay the price.

The longer the trial wore on, the more hopeless Kent appeared.

“You went to Corfe Castle yourself and asked to be taken to your brother, Sir Edward of Caernarvon,” Robert Howel, the royal coroner, charged. He thumbed through a stack of documents and letters, finally pulling one aside to inspect it more closely. “When you were told he was not there, you presented Sir John Deveril with a letter—this letter.” He held it up for all to see. “Who told you that you would find him there?”

Kent hunched his shoulders and shook his head, whimpering.

“Who told you? Who?” Howel’s voice rose in volume and severity. “Answer!”

He flinched, then looked directly at me and shook his head again. “I cannot say his name ... for I never knew it. A Dominican friar. That is all I know.”

“A Dominican friar? One without a name?”

“He would not give it, to protect himself.”

“Convenient,” Mortimer mumbled.

“Did he not have a face?” Howel pressed.

“Not that I could describe to you now, no.”

“Did he hide it?”

“He wore a cowl. It was dark. I could not see.”

“Could not see his face. Did not know his name. Where did you meet this ‘friar’? From where did he hail?”

The questions went on for another hour thusly and in the end came back to where they had begun, but Kent did not change his nameless source. He did not withdraw his claim—that what he said he believed to be true. He did beg forgiveness. All for naught.

Without Edward of Caernarvon standing before us fully fleshed, Kent stood guilty. By Mortimer’s orders, Corfe Castle had been turned inside out, servants brought forth to give testimony that they had never seen the former king there, and locals questioned extensively. Yet no evidence of a living Edward of Caernarvon was found.

The only bit of rumor uncovered was that of an idiot monk, who had looked vaguely like the former king, wandering through the area the year before. Since very few from near Corfe had ever seen Edward of Caernarvon up close and of those only one or two had also seen this purported monk bearing similar features, the information was summarily dismissed as a mistaken identity and not presented.

The trial lasted half the day. Kent wilted on his rickety bench before me as Howel volleyed accusations and evidence relentlessly, occasionally backed by Mortimer. The handwriting was Kent’s. The seal upon the letter, as well. During all this, Kent would stare at his lap for long, sorrowful periods of time, unresponsive, and then raise his eyes to look my way—only at me, no one else—begging tacitly with those wistful, lipid eyes for his feeble life.

As his guards drew him up roughly by the arms, he resisted, reaching his hands out to me.

“Sister! Isabella, please! I have done nothing —”

But with a cursory black glance from Mortimer, they gagged him with a dirty length of cloth, tying it snugly at the back of his head so that his tongue was crammed into the back of his throat, nearly choking him, and they bound his hands behind him. Then they shoved him toward a side door as he stumbled and went down on one knee, again looking back at me before they hoisted him to his feet and dragged him away.

My heart shriveled. I could not help him. He should have kept silent. Should not have meddled so foolishly in Mortimer’s business. The guilt was one more mark of blackness upon my soul, piled high upon the mountain of secrets and lies already buried there.

Young Edward had refused to attend the trial. He was informed of the sentence: Edmund of Kent had been found guilty of treason, as charged. The punishment: death by beheading five days hence.

I thought surely the king would spare his uncle’s life and send him to the Tower to live out his years alone. But he kept his silence.

Kent was marched to the scaffold in an open field outside the gates of Winchester. Feet and legs bared to the chill March day, he stood trembling upon the raised platform as a brisk wind blew his shirt stiffly from his starved body, his features as white and bloodless as winter snow.

The executioner refused to carry out his task. When they tried to assign another, none would accept the heinous duty. Edmund of Kent was not greatly adored, but he was not a hated man, nor had the masses deemed him guilty of any crime against the Crown, despite what the court had hastily decreed. Finally, a murderer—a man who had strangled his wife in a fit of rage before the very eyes of his three children—was granted pardon and gleefully took the axe in his grip.

Kent laid his head upon the dark-stained block, muttering, they said, not prayers to God to beg for his own absolution, but words of forgiveness to those who had led him there. The blade fell cleanly. His blood spattered upon the faces of those nearest. Kent’s head rolled to the edge of the platform.

The executioner retrieved it and held it aloft for the crowd to see. The spectacle was met with silent revulsion.

The confessed murderer who had swung the axe walked free.

Kent was dead. His heirs were stripped of their lands and their livelihood. His wife, Margaret Wake, was also accused of conspiring to treason. One month later, she gave birth to their fourth child, John, a little boy whose only memory of his father would be a tomb at a church in Winchester, humbly marked and containing Kent’s body in two disconnected pieces.

The man who came to my bed at night ... the face I looked upon in the morning light, I did not know anymore.

21

Isabella:

Woodstock — June, 1330

T
he babe gave a hearty wail, displaying the back of his throat and a curving ridge of pink gums. He struggled against his swaddling until at last I freed his small, strong arms and cuddled him to my bosom. Small eyes wide and bright, he calmed and turned his mouth toward me, his tiny lips puckering for milk.

For a month now I had awaited the birth with Philippa at Woodstock. And now to finally see him, so full of life, it made me believe that the past was behind us now, that old ghosts had given way to new beginnings.

I laughed in delight, recalling the utter joy I had known when his father—oh, it was so hard to believe that this was
his
son I cradled in my arms now and not my own—had made his entrance into the world in precisely the same manner: abruptly, easily and absolutely. When Young Edward had hungered, he let the world know by gathering all the force of his lungs and caterwauling so loudly no one could have ignored him. As soon as his needs were met, his complaints turned to coos and he drifted off into blissful slumber. Later came John—the same loud wails, but most of it seemingly without reason or repair. The girls—they had been content, seldom in distress. In fact, it might have been easy to forget they needed anything at all, but Joanna had been so active that it was always necessary to keep a close eye on her, lest she wander away and drown in the fish ponds at King’s Cliffe. Eleanor was never far from my side and always, always full of questions. Her incessant queries were wearisome and occasionally tinted with worry, but she was curious and attentive and the swiftest at her lessons.

The emptiness in his belly consuming him, the tiny baby in my arms began to gasp for breath, gathering effort. Then he howled mightily enough to topple the walls of Jericho single-handedly.

I didn’t want to give my first and only grandson up, even with his plaintive howls piercing my ears, but at long last the old, barrel-bottomed, midwife pried him from my arms with her stubby fingers, and carried him over to a basin to wash him up. He protested the coldness of the water, but she paid no heed, rubbing him vigorously and going about her business without thought as she had a hundred times before this one. With a linen cloth, she sopped away the sticky wetness of birth and handed him to a waiting wet nurse—a tall, flaxen-haired woman, not quite twenty, with a fairy-like, delicate nose and full apple-red lips that contrasted starkly with the pearly translucency of her skin. She had been fetched from Ireland at the recommendation of Mortimer’s daughter-in-law Elizabeth Badlesmere, the wife of his oldest son Edmund, for precisely this purpose. It was a high honor to be settled upon a woman of such coarse breeding, but a calling to which she seemed naturally suited. I suspected her ancestry was Norse—a theory later confirmed when she told me her name: Grimhilde.

I sat down carefully on the edge of Philippa’s birthing bed. The sheets had been soaked through and already her handmaidens had peeled back a set and replaced them. They were due for another changing again. The old midwife darted about like an irritated hornet, grumbling that we were in her way as she rolled up old pieces of cloth and packed them between Philippa’s legs to absorb the drainage of blood.

Patrice mopped the sweat from Philippa’s forehead and cheeks. With tender fingers, she pushed the limp, wet tendrils of Philippa’s hair from her face. “He is healthy ... and strong.”

Just as the baby boy gave another cry, Philippa wrinkled her nose up and mustered a wan smile. “Loud, too.”

Patrice squeezed Philippa’s wrist lightly. “The noise is good, I’m told. It makes him draw breath and grow even stronger.”

“And when, dear Patrice, will you ever have children of your own?” she teased. “I hear you had a dozen suitors, all at the same time once.”

I would not have been so bold. It was still a delicate subject, even years later, with Patrice. She might have frolicked freely in bed with many a man, but Arnaud de Mone had been her one true love and he had offended her greatly. His wife yet lived, pulling turnips and scrubbing radishes for the Poor Clares.

“A dozen? Hardly. Maybe half that.” Patrice wound a ringlet of hair around one finger until she was pleased with the shape and length of the curl. “Most of them were too old, too smelly or too disagreeable to even think of punishing myself with for the rest of my life.”

From behind me came the tentative steps of a concerned, young father. Young Edward stood across the room, transfixed for a long while, gazing at his own son with a look that vacillated somewhere between wonderment and disbelief.

“Come closer,” Philippa murmured. She had been brave and determined, crying out seldom during the labor which lasted the better part of a day, bearing down hard in the last hours with all the strength of a plow horse straining against its harness to break rocky soil, until at last the baby’s head had crowned. With one long, last push, the infant had slid out, his cries shattering the solemnity of the wondrous spectacle before his feet were even clear of his mother’s birth canal. In that moment we were all snatched from breathless silence and were immediately hurled into the mundane normality of a newborn child’s primal needs.

Philippa batted her eyelashes as she fought against the draining pull of sleep. She held her hand out to her husband, beckoning him so she would not need to raise her voice. “Why so dumbstruck, my love? You look as though I have given birth to a calf, not a baby. You have a son—an heir. Does he not please you?”

Young Edward—and he seemed to me that day even younger than his seventeen years, all awash with astonishment—straggled toward the bed, pausing to look again at the babe as it burst out in a renewed fit of discontent.

“Is he ... n-n-normal?” Edward stammered.

“Completely,” Philippa assured him. She curled her fingers up around his dangling hand and tugged him to sit on the bed beside her. “There is one, very small problem, however.”

Concerned, Edward shaped his lips into the question that he feared to utter.
‘What?
’

“He is without a name,” Philippa whispered.

The king slouched in relief. “Edward.”

Pulled by curiosity, he went to the corner of the room where Grimhilde was reclining on a stool and cradling the sleeping prince. Carefully, he lifted his son from Grimhilde’s arms. The loose swaddling fell into the wet nurse’s lap to reveal a naked baby boy with perfectly shaped limbs.

“Edward,” he repeated proudly, holding him aloft. “Edward!”

But which ‘Edward’ will he liken to?

The little prince yawned, stretched his chubby arms, kicked his legs and smiled in dreamy agreement.

***

Nottingham — September, 1330

Hands clutching my knees, I bent over beside a rose bush, abundant with blushing blooms, and vomited onto the earth beside it. Again and again I retched emptily, each wave forcing me lower until I was scooting on my hands and knees deeper between the musky scented rose bush and a waxy row of boxwood hedges. There, I hoped I would be less visible to anyone who might be wandering in the gardens of Nottingham.

I dug my fingers into the musty earth, clenching my teeth to halt the tide of yellow bile from pushing upward. Then, a hand fell lightly upon my back. Startled, I gasped, so that my mouth fell open and, once more, I felt the unstoppable, acrid swirl shoot up from the back of my throat and over my tongue.

“Ohhh, Isabeau, Isabeau,” Patrice muttered. Finally, when I had ceased to spew out my insides, she knelt down on the ground beside me, mindless of the thorns that caught at her hair and snagged her pretty green gown. “You are not well. Not at all. Let me help you inside. I will have Ida fetch a physician for you.” She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead. “No fever. Something you ate, perhaps, did not agree with you? You never had a delicate stomach before, Isabeau.”

“Nothing I eat,” I said, drawing the sleeve of my kirtle across my lips, “agrees with me lately. It all refuses to stay down, and yet ... and yet I can hardly squeeze into the very gown I wore just last week.”

She stared quizzically at me for what seemed several minutes, before the clue finally caught on. Her dark eyebrows arched upward, pleating her forehead. In astonishment, she covered her mouth with both hands. “Nooo ...”

“I think ‘yes’.” Until that moment, I had refused to even believe it was possible that I was pregnant. I had been very careful, using the concoction that Patrice had taught me long ago with great diligence.

Suddenly, I felt the alarm of panic—of something wildly beyond my control. The looming shadow of disaster. The urge to run gripped me hard. My breath quickened. My heart raced so wildly that I thought it might explode inside my chest. A knot of emotions, I grabbed Patrice’s hand and squeezed it tight. “I did not mean for this to happen, not in a hundred years. Believe me. I didn’t, didn’t ...” I crumpled within her loving embrace.

“I know you didn’t. I know.” She stroked my back.

Finally, she asked the question that I knew would inevitably come. “Does he know?”

“No, I am not yet sure if I —”

“My lady?” Mortimer called out, sweeping down the grassy path toward us.

I clutched Patrice’s hands between mine and whispered to her, “Say nothing. This
cannot
be.”

Instead of condemning me with a look of judgment, she imparted a smile of compassion.

“Isabella?” Mortimer said. Then seeing Patrice huddled beside me, he quickly added, “My queen?”

He lent me his hand. Weakly, I rose, Patrice supporting me on one side with her hand firmly under my arm.

“My lady had some curds this morning that had gone bad. I’ll tell the kitchen maids to dispose of the rest.”

“Give the cook a tongue-lashing, too,” Mortimer told her.

She dipped at the knee and then gave me over to him before leaving us. My knees still shaking, Mortimer and I strolled along the garden path. My skirt brushed the hedges as I staggered sideways, despite his arm about my waist. He gripped me tighter.

“The council has been waiting, but I’ll tell them you are indisposed. We should get you to bed, Isa—”

“No, no ... it will pass.”

But things such as this—they do not pass. They stay with us forever. They carry on through the ages long after we are dead.

***

I claimed a lingering illness, but I imagined that those surrounding me began to suspect it was my mind that was troubled and not so much my physical being. I was living each day mired in the present, in dread of the future, growing more and more regretful of the past.

Every tomorrow became bleaker than the yesterday before. With every day that passed, the hope that some other ailment had caused my cycles to stop withered. It was useless to curse the physicians who had told me long ago that I would have no more children. Useless to be angry with myself for being in this predicament. Yet I did—every moment, both awake and in my troubled dreams. Pregnancy—an event which was a blessing to Edward and Philippa and had been once to me—it was the worst of the worst. Catastrophic. And I alone shouldered the tragedy of a life growing within me.

Parliament was due to convene at Nottingham in only two weeks. Mortimer was growing increasingly paranoid over rumors that Lancaster was part of a movement to oust him—or worse to put him on trial for crimes against the kingdom. Preoccupied with my own troubles, I did not care to hear Mortimer’s obsessive ramblings about plots and conspiracies, some of them involving mention of the king. It had been dealt with previously and put in its grave. I would not live my life in fear of shadows and whispers.