The Stolen Queen (8 page)

Looking now into the king's face, I saw that he too thought he had dissembled. It was indeed a play, a comedy of disguises within disguises, with each man believing he had stolen something from the other. ‘More, perhaps, than my lord of Lusignan did, Majesty,' I replied.

The king leaned in closer. His beard was pushing through his skin, I could see grey hairs sprouting among the darker ones and his breath smelt sourly of wine. ‘Come, Lady Isabelle. We have played at ball together. You need not be so formal.'

‘I am sorry, I didn't know …'

‘I did not wish you to know. I hope we shall be friends, you and I.'

‘It's an honour of which I am unworthy, Majesty.' Agnes had heard me practise that. I too had my lines to get in this strange drama. A sudden ripple of irritation crossed the king's face, quick as a winter cloud. He spurred his horse. ‘You shall attend me after I have dined, madame.'

‘Agnes,' I whispered, ‘why does the king want to marry me and not the Portuguese princess? And why is Lord Hugh pretending not to know of it?'

Agnes drew the curtains of the litter together so that we swayed along in cold half-darkness. ‘It's men's business, little one. Just do as you are told, and don't fret.'

I thought suddenly of the silk man, setting out on his journey north about now, from the mysterious flower-covered plains he had told me of. I would not see him this year at Angouleme. It made me sad. I felt like one of the bundles in his pack, trundled about the country to be unrolled and inspected, first to Lusignan and now away into the winter's night to another place I had never seen. I thought of my white bed in the castle and my mother coming to kiss me goodnight and began to snuffle.

‘I don't want to be a queen, I think, Agnes. I just want to go home.'

‘I know, little one. I know. But you must please him. You must.'

I cheered up when we reached our lodging place, a moated manor house on the Bordeaux track. The lord and his household were waiting with torches to greet us. They knelt on the frozen ground as the king dismounted, barely acknowledging their carefully prepared greetings as he rushed inside to the fire. The king was given the chamber. The family would sleep that night among the rushes with their own servants, while the royal household had been dispersed among smaller houses and even barns nearby. Othon and Tomas would sleep in a field; I hoped they would not be too chilly. The mistress escorted Agnes and me to a small chamber in the roof, well lit with her best wax candles and smelling of lavender. ‘I know that it's not what the
lady must be used to,' she murmured anxiously, ‘but we have done our best. An honour, such an honour.'

The maids, accustomed to the size of Lusignan, were giving themselves airs, grumpily unrolling sleeping pallets and commenting rudely on the wooden shutters. I would dismiss the lot of them when I was queen, the gaggle of sillies.

‘I should be flattered if you would dine with me, madame,' I said loudly, so that they should see I at least knew how to behave. I left them to stand while the lady and I ate stewed partridge on a settle by the fire and then sent them down to collect their pottage from the kitchens, so that they could see I would not tolerate poor manners.

Later that evening, I had Agnes comb out my hair and I washed my face before descending to the hall where King John sat alone before the fire pit, the householder and his men standing at a respectful distance in the draughty shadows.

‘You did not find the journey too fatiguing, Lady Isabelle?'

‘Not at all, Majesty. I am very comfortable.'

‘Good. Will you take wine?'

He motioned to one of his liverymen who stepped forward with two tiny gold cups, like the halves of the ball we had played with. The veins of their mother-of-pearl lining showed through the yellow wine.

‘I would give you something to remember me, my lady.'

‘Thank you, Majesty,' I began to say but I recalled his little cloud of displeasure I had seen on the road. The king liked me to be childish, as we had been together in the garden. I clapped my hands and made my eyes big. ‘What is it, what is it?'

He chuckled, pleased, and I saw that I had guessed him right. ‘This.'

A tiny gold ring, with a huge pearl, as big as a quail's egg. He slipped it onto my finger, where it drew the light from the fire. It was like wearing a little moon. ‘Does it please you? Will you remember me?' he asked eagerly.

I pouted, looking up into his eyes and hoping that the heat had made my cheeks flush. ‘It's very pretty, Majesty.' Again the shadow of anger. Had I gone too far?

‘Would you have something else?'

‘Maybe.'

‘Tell me. Tell me what you wish,' John enquired.

I thought quickly. ‘May I have a lock of your hair? See, I have my knife.'

‘Is that really what you want, Isabelle?'

‘If it pleases you to give it me.'

He leaned forward and I cut a little piece from the end of one of the straggles that hung from his thin locks. His eyes shone, he covered my hand with his fingers for a moment.

‘It is you who have given me the gift. I thank you.' He put the fingers to his lips in a gesture that reminded me of the way Lord Hugh used to play at kissing my hand, but it did not look so graceful. I kept the hair between my fingers as I backed out of his presence, but on the staircase I let it fall, strand by greasy strand.

The next day King John rode north, towards Le Goulet, within the French king's lands of the Ile de France, where he would do homage to King Philip for his duchy of Normandy,
for Aquitaine, which he was to inherit from old Queen Eleanor, and for Brittany, where young Duke Arthur had finally given up his father's claim and conceded his uncle's right. The peace was celebrated with a royal marriage, between John's niece, Blanche of Castile, and King Philip's son, Louis. My mother would be there, attending on the queen; it seemed incredible to me that in time I should be a royal lady of even higher rank than the new princess of France. At twelve, Blanche was just a few years older than me, but while she was riding and dancing her way through the spring residence of her new home, I was bundled off to Langoiran.

The convent stood high on a cliff above the river Garonne, where it flowed wide and lazy on the last stage of its journey to the port at Bordeaux and the sea. It did not look much different from Lusignan, rearing up starkly through the low winter sky on its crag, but where Lusignan had been a place of men, of guards and dogs and horses, the bustle of Lord Hugh's household running to attend him, the smell of meat and sweat and leather always present in the air, the walls of Langoiran contained only women. A sister house of the royal abbey at Fontevraud, near Chinon, where Queen Eleanor had finally retired after delivering her granddaughter Blanche to the French court, Langoiran was a refuge for the well-born women of the south, who dedicated their days to the Holy Virgin. In sending me here, I saw Lord Hugh had been very clever.

I had plenty of time to consider why. I begged Agnes to allow me to ride each day, claiming that the fresh air would be good for my health, but the nuns were so strictly segregated
that the abbess, Mother Helene, would only permit me to walk him round the courtyard. Tomas delivered him to the gate, but a lay sister helped me mount and watched me as we plodded in circles. I didn't need to whisper between his ears, I could feel the rebellion in his blood mounting at this unaccustomed constriction, as I knew that he could feel mine, but I chattered to him anyway, murmuring all the things we would do together after I was married. How I would take him on a ship and we should have years of glorious gallops in the hot lands of the East, rather than this dreary trudging through the Garonne mists. Aside from my daily outing, I had to spend hours in the chapel listening to the nuns sing their interminable offices, hours of shifting my aching knees on the unforgiving stone, feeling its dampness creep into my bones, and hours again stitching and stitching at altar cloths and priests' surplices, my fingers clumsy with the chill and my stomach gurgling, for the nuns kept to a plain fast diet of bread, cheese and herbs, with only a muddy-fleshed and bony river fish on holidays, with no sweetmeats at all. Still, I had all those hours to think.

I was sure that Lord Hugh intended to break his vow to the English king, and that my revoked betrothal would be the means of his doing so. That was the meaning of his talk with my father. And Duke Arthur, now John's liegeman? He knew what they wished … but what could that be? Lord Hugh had apparently consented to my being brought to the convent, yet the connection with Fontevraud placed me here under the protection of the English. Lord Hugh had been so confident that the king would offer for me, but what was it that John was ‘known for'? And
what of my parents? Did they wish me to be queen, or did they have something else in mind for me? As the fat lady at Lusignan had observed, I was old enough to be married, and should soon be able to become a mother. Why then was I kept so ignorant of what I should become? Had all those months at Lusignan been an act, my betrothal to Hal the beginning of a scheme that had begun in Lord Hugh's supple mind the day that the messenger arrived at Angouleme with the news of the Lionheart's death?

I sorted the questions in my mind like beads on a clerk's abacus, yet no matter how I arranged them they still gave me no clear solution. Each day in the convent I was reminded of the trust, the patience, the faith of the Holy Virgin. ‘I am the handmaid of the Lord' – was that the precept I was to follow, to accept with glad submission whatever fate my father and Lord Hugh decided for me? And if the convent was a prison, were they not handing me the key? As queen, I should be subject to no man but the king, and it occurred to me that I knew how to manage him, as surely as I had known what to do when Tomas first set me on Othon's back. So I let my questioning grow idle, minded my manners and my needle once more, and waited like any princess in a romance for the time when a man should come to release me from my tower.

*

It was not until mid July that Mother Helene summoned me to her closet. The sky outside was white with heat, and below us the river was crowded with flimsy fishing boats, bobbing sleepily in the summer tide. The abbess had rarely spoken to me, indeed
she rarely spoke at all, preferring to keep to her pious meditations and communicate through her deputy, but today she sat beneath the statue of Our Lady with a parchment in her lap. Mother Helene was very learned: she could read, in both French and Latin, and she was reputed to compose her own prayers, which she dictated to her writing clerk through the grille in the convent's visiting room.

‘I hope you have been content here with us, Lady Isabelle.'

‘Most content, Reverend Mother.'

‘I have had a letter from your father, the count. He instructs me that you are to go to Bordeaux to prepare for your wedding. The marriage is set for Lammas day.'

The first of August, just a few weeks away.

‘My marriage?' I asked cautiously. I had been so long alone with my thoughts that I wondered, wildly, if my father had changed his mind again, and that I was to be married to someone else.

‘To the king, Lady Isabelle. You are greatly favoured.'

‘Indeed, Reverend Mother.' I kept my eyes on the patient face of the Virgin, pushing down the joyful skip of my heart. Just a few more weeks and I should be free.

‘But Lady Isabelle, there is something I wish to ask you.'

‘Certainly, Reverend Mother.'

‘Do you feel, that is, do you wish to be married?'

‘Have I a choice? I am my father's heiress, I must do as he bids me.'

Mother Helene had the same face as all the nuns I had seen, the pale skin smoothed as though with a pumice until nearly
all vestige of expression had been polished away, like the oldest statues in the cathedral at Angouleme. But her eyes were bright blue, alert and gentle, and now she fixed them on me with an expression that seemed almost pitying.

‘You are very young. You have not felt, perhaps, in the time you have spent here, that you might have a … vocation?'

My mother had told me a story of a Scots queen, a descendant of the royal house of England before the time when the Duke of Normandy conquered England, who had been kept in a convent by a wicked aunt. When the king of England, the first Henry, had wished to marry her, the bishops said that she might not accept, as she was already the bride of Christ, but this princess had torn off her veil and trampled it on the ground, and she was permitted to marry and be crowned since she had been put in the convent against her will. At first I could not understand what Mother Helene was asking of me, but then I saw that she was offering me a choice. I did not have to marry. I could stay in the convent and shave my head and take my vows and spend my days here, locked away from the world in its sacred peacefulness. I did not hesitate. ‘Reverend Mother, I confess I have felt no vocation. And I feel I must do the sacred duty which my father requires of me.'

Mother Helene looked at me for a long moment, then got to her feet, smoothing down her black habit.

‘Very well. I hope the Holy Virgin will bless your marriage. Let us kneel.'

As I prayed next to her, in that scrubbed, spare room, I felt almost sad that my answer had been so sincere. I had never been
offered a choice before. Ever afterwards, when I saw a statue of Our Lady, I remembered Mother Helene's eyes, the same colour as the folds of the Virgin's mantle, and I do not believe I ever saw it again without thinking that she had tried to save me, and that I might have chosen differently had she been able to tell me the truth.

CHAPTER SIX

A
LONG WITH MY FATHER'S INSTRUCTIONS CAME LADY
Maude de Braose. She was the wife, as she made sure to tell me very soon, of William de Braose, one of the king's most trusted magnates. She was a strong, thick-armed woman with the carriage of a peasant and a complexion roughened by years of travel on important royal business. She talked a great deal about important royal business. She swept into my chamber during the recreation hour before dinner while I was playing at cat's cradle with Agnes, clapped her hands to shoo away the maids and dropped a perfunctory curtsey. She wore men's riding boots under her gown and her upper lip was shadowed with a moustache.