Isabella: Braveheart of France by Colin Falconer Page A

hears him though on the other side of the door, it sounds as if someone is slaughtering a pig.
    She sends the servants away. She wants none of them hearing this.
    A man who knew the shoe mender.
    She hears his dogs on the other side of the door yelping and scratching to get out. They are clearly terrified. She edges the door ajar to release them and they flee scampering down the passage. She glimpses Edward, drooling like a lunatic. He overturns an oak table it took four men to move the day before. He tears down a recess curtain and breaks a holy picture over his knee.
    She shuts the door and sits in a chair outside, listening to him rage. She sends orders to old Hugh that no one is to be allowed entry to his chambers.
    She finds him the next morning among the wreckage. It looks as if his apartments have been ransacked by marauders. Edward lies in the middle of it, clutching a goblet, wine spilled on the carpets and all over his clothes.
    She goes out again, lets him sleep.
    For days he wanders the halls and gardens, mindless in grief. Once she sees him from her window, sink to his knees in the rain, then keel onto his side there in the mud. Grief owns him totally.
    She feels the child kicking in her belly. It will be all right, she tells him. Gaveston is gone. Everything will be all right now. We will just get through these dark days and then all will be well.
     
     
     

Chapter 18
     
     
    “Isabella, by the grace of God, Queen of England, Lady of Ireland and Duchess of Aquitaine, to our well-beloved the Mayor and aldermen and the commonalty of London, greeting. Forasmuch as we believe that you would willingly hear good tidings of us, we do make known to you that our Lord, of His grace, has delivered us of a son, on the 13th day of November, with safety to ourselves, and to the child. May our Lord preserve you. Given at Windsor, on the day above-named.”
     
    ***
     
    She looks so small under the bedcovers, and pale. She manages a smile. They tell him the birthing was difficult, she so small in the hips and this her first, a lusty boy, and carried long.
    “Isabella...”
    “Your grace.”
    “You have given us a son.”
    “I hope it pleases you.”
    He leans over the bed. She has not seen him smile like this since the year before, when Gaveston returned from Brabant. There was a time she thought never to see him smile again. If this was what it took, then it was worth it.
    “They say you lost much blood.”
    “You have your battlefields, I have mine.”
    “And you were valiant on it.”
    “Once it has begun a woman has no choice but to bear it. What shall we call him?”
    “I was thinking...Piers.”
    She looks at her baby, better arranges the blanket around his face. The room has turned cold.
    “Your suggestion?” he asks her, finally.
    “I thought Phillip, after my father.”
    He stands up, crosses his arms. “What about Edward?”
    “Well, he is your son.”
    “So he shall be Edward, then.”
    He smiles and kisses her. She closes her eyes. If he would only tell her he loves her--as she had once heard him say to Gaveston--the moment would be perfect.
     
    ***
     
    The threat of civil war has ended with Gaveston’s death. The manner of his kidnap and execution brings Pembroke, outraged and humiliated, back to the king’s side, Surrey and old Hugh’s son with him. It horrifies even those who despise Gaveston, and many call it murder. Warwick sulks in his castle and Lancaster returns to Kenilworth, snarling with contempt at any who dare question his motives.
    Edward is mean while decamps to Oxford, where he pays for cere cloths to wrap the body and then has it embalmed with balsam and spices. He commissions an elaborate coffin for Gaveston’s body for he will yet be awhile above the ground. He died excommunicate, so he cannot be buried in hallowed ground.
    “You know they left the body there in the open?” he shouts at her, as if she is to blame. “Some shoe-menders took him on a ladder to Warwick