Isabeau, A Novel of Queen Isabella and Sir Roger Mortimer by N. Gemini Sasson Page B

knee and dreams of being a knight. When I was done telling my story, he gave me news of the outside world: Lancaster had been brought to battle by Andrew Harclay, the Earl of Carlisle, at Boroughbridge. He was captured the next day and taken to Pontefract. His end came as quickly as Edward – and the recently returned Hugh Despenser – could get there.
    Had I known that they would lop off Thomas of Lancaster’s red-faced head in a fit of revenge for trying to make peace with the Scots ... I would have swum to Ireland before laying down my arms. Great lords by the dozens were sent to their deaths, including the meek Bartholomew de Badlesmere, who was taken to Canterbury and hanged. Every day, I expected them to come and escort me to the scaffolding. Yet days stretched miserably into weeks with no word of what was to become of me.
    While I languished, Edward marched into Scotland. I wondered how he would fare there, failure that he always was at war.
    I might have gone mad, shut up in the Tower with the rodents, muttering to myself. A likely outcome. No doubt many a man had, as he picked at putrid scabs and retched his guts dry from hunger. Had I more faith in God’s plan than my own, I would have turned monkish and welcomed my death. But I was not so certain that heaven awaited me. Souls bound for heaven ought to be pure and repentant and full of forgiveness.
    I was not.
    For every night that I lay my head down on my pillow crawling with lice, I dreamed of revenge. It was the only joy I had.

 
    7
     
    Isabella:
    Tynemouth Priory – October, 1322

    EDWARD SAID HE WOULD come. He told me to wait for him and when he did not come I thought surely he would send someone to bring me to his side. Yet the days crawled by like years and there I waited, praying to the dusty bones of a trifling saint, far from the places I had come to know as home, far from my beloved children.
    Once, he had abandoned me in York. He would again, I feared – this time in a remote, holy place, as if God and His saints would guard me.
    I raised my face to the new light. Three silver-yellow fingers reached through the tall, lancet windows on the eastern wall of Tynemouth Priory. They crept silently across the length of the nave, stretching moment by moment, illuminating the dusky tiles of the floor and the spindly columns that aspired heavenward, until at last they brushed my face. I blinked at the intrusion and shifted on the velvet cushions beneath my knees until the prickling sensation in my feet lessened and the steady pulse of blood returned.
    I folded my hands to pray, the beads of my rosary bunched between my palms; but prayers did not pass my lips or fill my mind. Instead, a thousand screaming visions battled in my head. Terrible and haunting. Visions of Scottish hobelars with their swords high above their heads; of arrows hissing and twanging, leaving bodies sprawled in bloody puddles; of people stumbling from burning homes, their crying children clutched in their arms; of women being brutally raped. Visions of war. Nightmares of the daylight hours.
    I had seen the aftermath with my own eyes. Heard the tales. I wished not to live it.
    Inside the priory church there was no rote chanting of monks, no shifting of the congregation on weary knees, nothing but the pregnant stillness of dawn. The ominous silence – the nothingness of it – only blew breath into my grotesque visions.
    Kneeling next to me, my damsel Patrice drew her hand from the folds of her skirt and touched me on the forearm. Her touch gave me solace, as only the closeness of a friend could.
    Sensing a shadow, I looked again toward the windows. Outside, a cloud must have scuttled across the sun, for its darkness fell upon me and I shivered deep in my bones. Patrice fumbled with the clasp on her mantle to give it to me, but I shook my head, foregoing the gesture.
    “Shall I fetch your mantle, then? With the fur lining?” Patrice kept her voice low, mindful of the sanctity of our