The Templar, the Queen and Her Lover

Chapter Twenty

Jean had seen nothing of them. The little store of coin which he had in his purse was all but used up, and now he was husbanding the remainder by working in a little cookshop not far from the palace gate. The money was poor, but he could eat as many pies as he wanted while the cook was in the front of the shop, and there was enough to pay for his room and buy a cup or two of wine each day.

He couldn’t stay here for ever, though. The whole town was full of talk of the protracted negotiations which were continuing here between the King and the English queen, she who was his sister. Not that it meant there was too much love between them. She had new loyalties now, to her husband, her son, and her adopted country. So the haggling went on, and meanwhile the men who had travelled here with her were all closeted up in that palace. And all he wanted to do was get to see le Vieux and explain what had happened so that they could both overwhelm and kill that madman, Arnaud.

It was ironic that he should have come to this conclusion now. In the past, all the while they had been guards at the Château Gaillard, he had loathed Arnaud for what he had done to Agnes and Raymond.

Jean had known many men who had killed. He had done so himself. When a man joined his lord’s host, he must expect to be sent to fight; unless he went with the intention of dying, he must expect to kill. But that was in hot blood, when the energy fizzed in a lad’s arms and legs, when he shouted, his heart warmed by the thought of standing with friends and comrades in defiance of another’s will. It was easy to kill when a man ran at you trying to cut your throat.

Others were put in the hideous position of having to kill in cold blood. He was fortunate, he’d never been forced to that, but he knew other men who had. Men who’d been told to execute prisoners, thrusting a sword down into their bodies while they knelt with hands and feet bound, like cattle waiting to be slaughtered. Yet that was removing dangerous enemies. Even that was more acceptable than the actions of a man like Arnaud.

An executioner could show pity, sympathy, compassion or even regret. Any display of that nature was good for the heart of the victim. And no one would wish to be killed by a man who had no feeling at all. That would serve only to denigrate the entire life of the condemned. Yet there was one worse possibility — a man like Arnaud.

Jean had seen him. Yes. He’d seen him when Agnes screamed and wailed in the flames. It was inhuman to kill a woman in that way. Worse than bestial. The law must be upheld, of course it must, but to kill like that, in a way specifically designed to terrify, was no form of justice.

Some executioners went out of their way to prevent too much suffering. Jean had seen them: men who cast a rope about the throat of the victim, so that as the flames crept higher they could strangle the man or woman before the pain became unbearable. Others came to their duties with fear; weakly souls, these, who would cause the prisoners untold anguish because they detested what they must do. Often they would be drunk, intentionally overindulging in wine or ale so as to be incapable of feeling when they set the pyre alight.

Arnaud was that worse type, though. He gloried in killing. He enjoyed it. He would go to the executions with a smile on his lips. He would listen with delight to the pleading of the condemned; he would laugh and caper in appalling mimicry of their death throes; he would revel in their horror.

Jean had been arrested within hours of Raymond’s death. It was one of the few things in his life he had done for which he could be proud, standing up in the tavern and declaring Raymond and Agnes innocent. But it had cost him dear. Christ! So dear.

Sir Charles was in the main court before the castle’s hall when he saw the man.

Many men would have bellowed for guards, demanded that the fellow be arrested immediately, or, more shrewdly, slowly sidled away to seek for more English knights to help capture the man. After all, Roger Mortimer was no felon by French law.

But Sir Charles of Lancaster was an astute, thoughtful man. Years of wandering after the destruction of his earl’s host at Boroughbridge had made him cautious about over-hasty action. Especially when it came to French sensibilities. He had been overwhelmed in a tavern because of some French peasants who were insulting him. He’d killed them all, with Paul, his man-at-arms, and a Portuguese man they had met. Since then he had been a little wary of bringing attention to himself.

He saw Mortimer leave the court and walk out through the main gate. Strolling as though idly, he followed the man out into the town itself, and was doing well enough, until his careful passage was obstructed by a cart that happened to shed its load in a narrow part of the street. Immediately people blocked the way, and he could only stand and curse quietly. Coming to a quick decision, he turned round and made his way back to the castle.

He took a little passage near the main hall, and walked down the corridor to the chamber where the servants tended to meet. It was a large room like a calefactory, in which there were several barrels of cheaper wine and ales. After peering about him, he caught sight of Paul negotiating with a friendly woman in a corner.

Seeing his master, Paul hastily concluded the haggling, and marched to see his knight. ‘Sir Charles?’

‘When you’ve finished here, I’d like to walk about the town a little,’ Sir Charles said.

‘I am ready, sir.’

‘Good.’

He led the way through the gates, under the strong portcullis, and out into the town’s streets.

The weather had improved steadily in the last few days, and now all around there was the proof of springtime. Flowers were bursting open everywhere. Lent was still in force — Easter was to be late this year, and was still over a week away — but the scents and colours of the renewed year were enough to lift everybody’s spirits.

‘Do you know why I asked you to join me?’ Sir Charles asked.

‘No.’

‘An elegantly simple response. Very well, then. I am alarmed to have noticed a man in the town who appears to be all too familiar. Roger Mortimer. I’ve seen him.’

‘What’s he going to be doing around this place?’

‘That is a good question — but I have a much better one: how much would the King, or my dear friend Sir Hugh le Despenser, pay for his head on a plate?’

‘A large amount, I’d think. They’d pay well to see Mortimer destroyed. He must be the King’s most feared enemy.’

‘I should think so.’

‘You sure you’ve seen him?’

They were entering a little alleyway. Sir Charles looked at him, and did not answer. Paul pulled a face. It had been a foolish question. They both knew Mortimer. Any man who had fought with, for, or against the King in the last twenty years would know the King’s general. Shrewd, quickthinking, an excellent strategist, Roger Mortimer had cowed the Irish and the Welsh, and had probably been the best warrior to begin planning an invasion of Scotland. All in all, if there was a fight anywhere within the King’s lands, it was likely that Mortimer had been there, and had succeeded in winning victory for the King.

‘What do you want to do?’

‘Find him, kill him, conceal the body, and send you with the head back to London. Or Beaulieu in Hampshire — I believe the King is there presently. That way you and I can reap the reward without anybody else’s being aware. I shall remain here, naturally, so you’ll have to hurry back with the money. Clear?’

Paul nodded. ‘He’ll be in a not-too-lowly place, I assume.’

‘He may well be inside the castle — but I doubt it. I think if he’s here, he isn’t here with the King’s approval. No, I tend to the view that he’s here because he wants something. Perhaps to attack the Queen? Whatever the reason, we must catch him when there’s no one else about to share the winnings. Is that clear? Good. You know what he looks like as well as I do. I think we need to wander about the town and see if we can spot him.’

They had reached the cart. The crowds had thinned, and they could pass by it without trouble.

‘This is where I lost him, Paul. He was going down this street somewhere. All we have to do now is find him.’

Abbey de Maubisson

Blanche de Burgundy was delighted to have arrived, but the experience was still overwhelming.

The smell of fresh flowers greeted her every morning from the other side of the wall. She could hear birds singing in the trees, the gentle sussuration of the wind in the corridors, the occasional bark of a dog — and voices. Voices raised in song, the words irrelevant to her in God’s own language, but the sounds of the tunes uplifting and wonderful to ears which had only heard the rasping voices of gaolers for a decade.

There had been times in that cell when she had seriously considered the final, irredeemable sin. She was guilty of so much already — adultery, fornication, pride, envy, gluttony … there was little she had not done, and for which there could be no forgiveness in a cell beneath Château Gaillard. At the last, she had thought of taking her own life. She could throw herself before God, if He allowed her, to beg forgiveness. The priests said that suicides would all be damned, but she already suffered so much that the thought of eternal damnation was not so terrifying. At least it would be a release from the misery she had been forced to endure every day already.

She wasn’t sure what it was that stopped her. Perhaps a mortal fear of so irrevocable an act, or maybe it was the thought that by dying she would indeed make her husband’s life — her ex-husband’s life — a little easier.

If he had wanted, he could have pardoned her. He didn’t need to keep her down there in the dungeon. It was three years ago that the marriage was annulled, they told her. So he could have removed her at any time, and stopped the appalling degradation she was forced to endure.

But that was a part of her punishment, surely. The rapes and indignities. And then the birth of her child.

Lord Roger Mortimer heard the two men approaching long before they actually appeared along his alleyway, and he had plenty of time to turn back and march up the alley.

There was a distinctive sound to men-at-arms. It was the clattering of their metalwork, the rattle of spurs, or simply the ribald laughter and foul language. They were like troopers in any host from that point of view. Usually he was more than happy in the company of men from any lord’s retinue, but not here and now. The King had clearly ordered him to leave the environs of Paris while the English queen was here, and he had deliberately ignored King Charles’s command.

It was stupid, perhaps, but he had responsibilities. At least Queen Isabella had shown him pity before. When he had been stuck in the Tower of London two years ago, without any hope of regaining his freedom, she had visited him, and generously offered to try to help him.

Ach, she was a lady, and a kindly gentlewoman at that. It shouldn’t have surprised him, but it did none the less. Poor Queen Isabella had enough problems of her own. Everyone in the blasted country knew that. The King had turned from her to lie with a man, from all accounts, and there she was, her authority eroded, without the company of her own husband.

Still, even with her own tribulations, she had made the effort to help him. She’d heard of poor Joan’s predicament: all her clothes and possessions confiscated, and a meagre pittance given for food and drink. The Queen had written to the treasurer to persuade him to be generous; and knowing her own position in the hierarchy of the palace was already diminished, she also enlisted the aid of Eleanor de Clare, Despenser’s wife. Roger only hoped and prayed that his darling Joan would have been accorded slightly better treatment as a result.

Perhaps it was a forlorn hope. When the King’s father, Edward I, had captured the sister and mistress of one of his bitterest enemies, Robert Bruce, Edward in his wisdom had seen fit to have them both caged and put on show. Mary Bruce, the sister, was held in her cage at Roxburgh Castle, while Isabel, Countess of Buchan, was held in a similar cage at Berwick. The sole token of privacy these poor women were accorded was the use of a hidden privy. Apart from that, both must suffer the indignity of constant display for more than three years.

He had mentioned that to the Queen, and she had confessed to being appalled by her father-in-law’s treatment of the two. It was one thing to take vengeance on a knight or some other man who had been disloyal, but this extension of revenge on to the womenfolk and children, both of whom were clearly innocent, was distasteful in the extreme. Still worse was to come, though.

After Boroughbridge and the King’s successful quashing of the attempted insurrection of Lancaster, he had launched an attack on Scotland again to quell the rebels there. But the Scots soon outflanked him, and the King and Despenser were forced to beat a very hasty retreat — leaving in their wake Isabella, trapped at Tynemouth. In her speedy escape by boat, two of her ladies-in-waiting were killed.

That, Roger reckoned, was the turning point for Isabella. Up until then she had tolerated Despenser’s ruthless tyranny. She despised his tactics, his terrorisation of any noblewoman who stood in the path of his single-minded avarice, but she was prepared to be coolly polite for the sake of her marriage. But not after Tynemouth. That her husband could desert her to the mercies of the Scots after the treatment his own father had meted out to the Bruce women showed he no longer had any feelings for her.

It was after that, really, that she had begun to work for Roger Mortimer’s release from prison. After all, as she said to him, once Mortimer was in the ascendant Despenser must be deposed and destroyed, and that could only be good for her marriage, for the kingdom, and for all who lived in it.

He only hoped that Joan was all right. Apparently she had been transferred to a fresh prison, but he had heard that her treatment had improved. Perhaps Despenser was a little troubled by the thought that Mortimer could return to take his revenge for the treatment of his family.

One son at least was free. Thanks to God, when Roger had escaped from the Tower Geoffrey, his third son, had been in France to take over the lands he had inherited from Joan’s mother and swear his allegiance to the French king. Both Geoffrey and his money would be needed if Roger’s plans were to come to fruition.

But he would have to be cautious. He had no wish to suffer the fate of men like Robert le Ewer. When it was learned that Ewer had helped plot to assassinate Despenser, he was taken and condemned to die in the slowest, most horrible manner. He was chained to the ground and iron weights were set upon his breast, slowly crushing him until he died several days later.

Roger Mortimer would not see his family suffer any more. He had already paid his debt of honour; he would see his family released.

The sound of the men’s footsteps was quite loud, but Roger was confident he could escape them. He increased his pace, took a quick right turn into a short passageway, bore right again into a wider thoroughfare, and then went left and down towards the town’s gate. He would double back in a short while.

He didn’t want to be caught by the French or the English.