The Traitor's Wife (42 page)

“You sent for me, Adam?”

Adam lay on a cot in the priory infirmary, one hand in his father's. “Yes, Lady Despenser. Is Hugh back from hunting?”

Hugh had wanted to go to Scotland too, but his parents deeming him too young to join the fighting, the king had ordered him, as a consolation, to hunt deer for his tables, expenses to be paid by the crown. Accompanied by the king's huntsmen and the best pack of hounds to be found in England, he had been traveling from county to county, having a fine time of it. His expenses to date had included several mysterious sums paid to such worthies as “Clarabelle” that had baffled Eleanor until her husband had said wryly, “Wenching, love, wenching. The boy has turned fourteen, after all. I daresay the king's huntsmen saw it as their duty to educate him.”

And now Hugh would come back from this happy junket to find his best friend dead. “He is not back yet, dear. I have sent for him, though. He will come to see you as soon as he gets the message, I know.”

“I want to give him my sword. Will you make sure he gets it?”

Eleanor's eyes filled with tears. “Yes, Adam. I will make sure of it, and I know he will treasure it always.”

“Tell him I hope he is better in the saddle now. He will understand.” The boy managed a grin.

“Imp.” Eleanor smiled as best she could and kissed Adam on the forehead. “I will certainly
not
give him such a scandalous little message. What do you take me for?”

“I like having you here, Lady Despenser. Will you stay?”

“Of course, Adam.”

“I used to wish you were my mother. Isn't that strange?”

Eleanor was about to manage a lighthearted reply when the king spoke. “Your mother, Lucy, was very much like Lady Despenser, Adam. I knew her for but a short time but I still miss her. If things had been different—”

He fell silent and Eleanor took the opportunity to get Adam to take some sips of wine and to lay a fresh, cool cloth on his forehead. Adam continued his rally, asking his father a few questions about the Scottish campaign, which Edward answered with brisk enthusiasm, and asking Eleanor if she remembered the time he had placed a mouse in her workbasket at Langley just to hear Eleanor's own squeak of horror. Then he too grew quiet and dozed off, Edward holding his hand and Eleanor stroking the bright hair that was so much like Edward's. By dusk, his breath had grown shallow and ragged, and before sunset the king's eldest son was dead.

Adam's death having pushed the queen's travails aside, nothing more was said about Tynemouth. But several days after the boy's body was sent to be buried at Langley, not far from Gaveston's tomb, Isabella announced her intention to go on pilgrimage to various sites around England, in thanksgiving, she said coolly, for her many blessings. She planned to be away from Christmas to Michaelmas. At York, where the court had remained for Christmas, the king bade her a cordial good-bye. “Good riddance,” said the king to Hugh the younger later. “Let her nurse her imaginary grudge on the road.”

The queen was not the only person on ill terms with the king. Shortly before Damory's death, his wife, Eleanor's sister Elizabeth, had been taken prisoner by the king and sent to Barking Abbey, where she had remained for six months. The king had then invited Lady Elizabeth de Burgh, as she preferred to be styled, to York for Christmas, where she had been called to a private conference with the king and Hugh and stalked out of the castle in a rage. Her council members had been put under arrest; evidently they had threatened the king in some manner. Then Elizabeth, halfway home to Clare Castle, had been persuaded to return to York, where, as Hugh explained it, she had settled Damory's considerable debts to the king by exchanging Gower, now back in Hugh's hands, for Elizabeth's more lucrative property of Usk. Eleanor had not been pleased with this transaction, but as Elizabeth as a traitor's wife might have been imprisoned and left with no land at all, Eleanor had kept her feelings to herself and sent Elizabeth a barrel of sturgeon and some cloth for her children's robes. The gifts had been returned straightaway.

England's two newest earls, the Earl of Winchester and the Earl of Carlisle, girded as such during the York Parliament held the previous May, had also traveled to York. The Earl of Winchester—none other than Hugh the elder—had enjoyed the Christmas festivities well enough, but Andrew Harclay, created Earl of Carlisle owing to his victory at Boroughbridge, had left court in a fury, deciding that not enough was being done about the Scots, who had finally taken themselves out of England, having left a path of devastation behind. Concluding that the Scottish situation was intolerable, Harclay took it upon himself to negotiate with Bruce. They reached an agreement that was sound and sensible—and completely beyond Harclay's authority to enter into. Humiliated by Harclay's ad hoc efforts, and furious at the agreement's terms, which amounted to a recognition of Scottish independence, Edward had the Earl of Carlisle executed as a traitor in March 1323. Yet he himself had little choice but to seek a truce with the Scots now. Days after the unfortunate earl's execution, a temporary truce took effect. By the end of April, four English hostages—including Eleanor's son Hugh—had gone to stay at Tweedmouth while two Scots envoys journeyed to England for further negotiations with Hugh the younger, Pembroke, Robert Baldock, and the Bishop of Exeter. A month later, they had entered into a thirteen-year truce.

The Earl of Lancaster, meanwhile, had achieved a following in death that had eluded him in life. Edward had had him buried at Pontefract, where within six weeks, stories were being told of miracles being performed at his tomb there. His hat, it was discovered, could cure headaches, while his belt was protection against the dangers of childbirth. (“Well, yes, if the woman puts it around her privy parts so she can't get with child in the first place,” Hugh said to Eleanor. “Maybe that was why Lancaster never begat children off of his countess.”) Disgusted and worried, the king shut off the chapel to the public.

But it was not the queen's anger, or Elizabeth's lands, or Harclay's well-meant treason, or Lancaster's miracles on which Eleanor brooded as Hugh, fresh from a meeting with the king and humming over his latest plans for the Exchequer, parted the curtains and settled in bed beside her: It was her sister Margaret. Hugh d'Audley, her husband, had been spared his life because of Margaret's pleas to the king, but he remained a prisoner. Margaret herself had been sent to Sempringham Priory, albeit with a maid and two yeomen. In her incarceration, sadly, she was like dozens of other wives or widows of the men who had fought against the king. The nunneries and royal castles were bulging with them: Lady Badlesmere (now freed from the Tower, though her husband had been executed after Boroughbridge) at the Minorites without Aldgate and Lady Mortimer of Wigmore at Hampshire were just a couple. Some of their children had been sent to nunneries to live, some to royal castles; some stayed with their mothers; some had even been made royal wards and lived comfortably in the households of the king's children. But all were, in one form or fashion, prisoners.

“Hugh.”

“What is it, sweetheart?”

“Can't you set Margaret free? She has been confined well over a year.” It was August 1, 1323.

“
I
can't set people free, Eleanor. That is the king's prerogative.”

These days the king's prerogative was also Hugh's. Eleanor shook her head impatiently. “You know full well you have the influence to do so, if you wished.”

“Eleanor.” Hugh's voice was even; Eleanor could not remember him ever raising it to her. “Have you forgotten that Audley devastated our lands—your lands? Killed and imprisoned our men? Where was Margaret in all this? Begging him to stop?”

“I know naught about what she said or did not say, Hugh, but neither then do you. For God's sake, Hugh! I am not asking that you make her rich again. Give her enough to live on comfortably and pleasantly, instead of being shut up in that nunnery—”

“Shut up? She has the run of the place, servants, plenty of company, her child by Audley.” Margaret's daughter by Gaveston, Joan, remained at Amesbury with her aunt Mary, where she had spent almost all of her life. “Interesting company, too. There's Princess Gwenllian.”

Princess Gwenllian, daughter of the last Welsh ruler, had been sent to Sempringham as an infant and veiled a nun on the first Edward's orders after her father, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, had been killed in battle and her uncle David, his brother, had been hanged, drawn, and quartered. A woman in her forties now, she had never left the convent. Eleanor shivered. Would Margaret grow old in Sempringham too? “Hugh, that is not amusing! Please, let her out!”

“No.” Hugh's voice was quiet. “Not now. Perhaps at some point, yes, when she can be trusted. What is stopping her from sending messages or aid to Audley, if she goes free?”

Eleanor knew not what to answer. She sighed. Hugh, considering their conversation over and done with, kissed her and settled to sleep. Soon she heard him snoring faintly. He slept well at nights; it was Eleanor who had tossed and turned since Boroughbridge.

She slipped out of bed, as she was wont to do these nights when she had difficulty sleeping, and made her way to the nursery where her newest little girl, born a few months earlier, lay in her cradle at the king's manor at Cowick, where Hugh and Eleanor were staying. Unusually, Eleanor had been ill after her daughter's birth, and the king had paid his own physician to attend her. There was nothing, he had told her when she thanked him, that he would not do for her and Hugh and his dear father, and he did not appear to be exaggerating. Since Boroughbridge, Edward had let his favor for Hugh and his father be known in no uncertain terms. These days, the Despensers had so much land that Eleanor, at least, could barely keep track of it. Even little Gilbert had been the unknowing recipient of the reversions of several forfeited manors, with Eleanor as the life tenant.

The new baby herself had been sick more than her older brothers and sisters, and it had been decided to send her to live in a country priory. Soon she would be leaving for there in the grand style to which Hugh was quickly making them all become accustomed, with a nurse and a great household. Perhaps, Eleanor thought, that, not her sister's problems, was why she was melancholy tonight.

The baby stirred in her sleep when Eleanor bent over the cradle and kissed her. “Good night, Margaret,” she whispered.

Eleanor and her baby were not the only restless ones that night. At the Tower of London, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore waited impatiently as his guards, drinking drugged wine to celebrate the feast day of St. Peter ad Vincula, the Tower's patron saint, sank one by one into stupors. His plan depended almost entirely on other people: the sublieutenant of the Tower, Gerald d'Alspaye, with his crowbar and rope ladder; the pepper merchant John de Gisors, with his boat and men waiting on the Thames to take him to Greenwich; four men waiting with horses at Greenwich; another merchant, Ralph de Bocton, who had made a boat ready at Porchester, then a ship at the Isle of Wight, bound for Normandy. If only one of them made the slightest misstep, he was done for, and he would undoubtedly be hung, drawn, and quartered. But if all went right…

Alspaye was digging with a crowbar now, and soon Roger could see a chink of light shining through his cell walls, then a larger one, then one large enough through which a man could fit. Sending one last prayer to St. Peter, he knelt and struggled out of his cell.