Isabella: Braveheart of France by Colin Falconer Page A

knows from her private conversations with Edward that he does not blame him over Gaveston’s death. Mortimer is there, too. His looks are smouldering but she ignores them. She is a wife now, not a simpering girl.
    Surrey, Richmond, the Despensers, father and son, they are all there; only Lancaster, Warwick, and Arundel have not appeared for the mustering of troops. “They say I have to wait, that I may not move against the Scots without the consent of the Parliament or I am in defiance of the Ordinances! The Ordinances! They still wish me to bow and scrape to them for permission to visit my own privy!”
    She is resting in the rooms he has put aside for her in the castle. Her arm is healing at last, though she fears it will leave a permanent scar. But no one will see the disfigurement but her husband, and even he sees it seldom enough.
    After the journey home from France she had gone directly from Dover to London, then on to Doncaster and Pontefract and finally here to the wild borderlands. The travelling was hard and difficult, but she is Edward’s queen, her place is beside him.
    “Thank you for coming,” he says when they are finally alone.
    “I would be nowhere else at such a time. Win this one battle and everything will be restored to you.”
    “The die is cast. I will make Lancaster regret what he has done.”
    He cannot lose. Even without Lancaster and Warwick, his army outnumbers the Scots by three to one. The King’s only fear is that the Bruce will run and deny him the victory he needs.
    “I have heard disturbing news from France. Is it true?”
    She nods. “The adulteries were proven. Jean, their sister, was a witness. I was right in my suspicions. The d’Aulnay brothers were convicted of treason and will suffer their fate accordingly. “
    “What has your father done to your Marguerite and Blanche?”
    “Marguerite has had her hair shorn and is sent to Château Gaillard, her marriage annulled. Blanche as well. I fear they will never see the sun again.”
    “And Jean?”
    “Under house arrest. My brother argues her case. I do not think she had any part in it, but she is disgraced for not speaking out sooner.”
    “As you said yourself, a royal lady who commits adultery knows the sin she commits in God’s eyes.”
    “Indeed, your grace. They knew the risk.”
    She thinks of Marguerite, that stupid giggling girl, how she had stared at her doomed knight through the curtain that day in the Notre Dame. “All my husband ever wants to do is play tennis.” A woman might have private longings, but if she were royal, she could not indulge them, no matter how she burns for more. What had happened to her was not Isabella’s fault. She had been obliged to tell her father what she knew.
    That night she keeps a candle burning in her chamber and waits for Edward to come to her again, after all these months and so many letters. But he stays awake, drinking and gambling and laughing at his tumblers and fools, and the nights are cold in Berwick, and she shivers alone.
     
     
     

Chapter 22
     
    She waits for him at Berwick Castle while he goes in search of the battle he must not—cannot--lose. At last a foot soldier arrives ahead of him and is ushered into the court to tell his story. The Bruce did not flee, it appears. Instead, he waited for Edward at a place called Bannockburn. He had chosen the battlefield and dug pits on the carse, funnelling Edward’s army into the killing ground. Edward had fallen into the trap, and in the ensuing carnage Gloucester has been killed, along with ten thousand English foot soldiers. Henry de Bohun, one of England’s greatest knights, has died at the hands of the Bruce himself, and the Scots had captured the Earl of Hereford.
    The next day a fishing boat docks at the castle. Isabella and the rest of her women rush down the narrow walk to the Tweed to meet it. Pembroke, the Lady de Vescy’s brother and Edward himself are both on board. Old Hugh is there as well. He carries