The Abbot of Basingwerk bowed back. Both men looked as if they were tiptoeing on thin ice as they turned as one to Isabella. She stared back at them resentfully. ‘So? Why did you want to see me, my lord abbot?’
‘As you know, princess, your late husband was a patron of our abbey…’
‘And endowed it handsomely.’ Her voice was waspish. ‘If you come for a donation, my lord abbot, you are out of luck. I have no money until my dower is arranged.’
‘You misunderstand me, princess.’ The abbot bowed again. ‘I have not come to ask for your generosity.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I have come at the command of the king.’
‘Oh?’ She looked at him suspiciously.
‘It appears that his grace has decided that for now -’ he paused and licked his lips nervously – ‘he would like you to go to the sisters at Godstow.’
‘What exactly do you mean?’ Isabella’s hands had gone cold.
Henry had after all allowed Owain to succeed Dafydd, but only after he and his brother, Llywelyn, had acknowledged the King of England as their overlord.
The abbot glanced at de Bret for support. ‘His grace commands that I escort you to Godstow. He feels that as a highborn widow – ’
‘He is not going to turn me into a nun!’ Her voice rose sharply. ‘I hope his grace does not intend to try to make me stay there.’
The abbot shrugged. ‘I have my orders, madam. To deliver you to the Lady Flandrina, Abbess of Godstow. That is the king’s command.’
‘I won’t go! I’ll marry again.’ She looked from one man to the other wildly. ‘It’s because I can’t have children, that’s it, isn’t it? No man will want me if I’m barren. But I can have children! Ask anyone. I was cursed. But the curse can be lifted – ’
‘Princess.’ The old abbot shook his head. ‘Please don’t distress yourself. I am sure the arrangement is only temporary.’
‘Sure? How can you be sure?’ Her hands were shaking. ‘The king doesn’t confide in you, does he? No, of course he doesn’t. Suppose they lock me up and keep me there forever?’
‘Why should they do such a thing?’ Philip de Bret forced himself to speak calmly. He disliked excitable women in general and he was beginning to dislike this one in particular. Since her arrival at Dyserth the smooth running of the royal castle had been relegated to the least of his worries. Instead he had found himself summoned to a series of increasingly stormy interviews with the princess, who had been packed into his care by Henry and her two nephews the moment Dafydd’s death had been announced.
‘When Eleyne was widowed, the king didn’t send her to a nunnery.’ Isabella’s voice had risen to a tight, nervous whine. ‘Why should he send me there? And to Godstow. It’s so far away. No, I won’t go. I shall return to Aber until the matter of my dower is arranged.’
The abbot sighed. ‘Princess, I’m sorry, but that is not possible. The King of England’s command must be obeyed, and it is also the wish of the new Prince of Aberffraw.’ He nodded to himself smugly. Those two boys had not been able to wait, so he had heard, to get rid of her!
‘Not if I refuse.’ She shook her finger under his nose. ‘I’m sorry, my lord abbot. I hate to disappoint you but you must return without me.’
She took his hand and kneeling to give his ring a perfunctory kiss – some inches above the cold amethyst on an equally cold finger – she rose and swept from the room.
De Bret shrugged. ‘I had hoped we could avoid using force.’
‘And I.’ The abbot stared sadly at the door which still reverberated from the force with which Isabella had flung it shut behind her. ‘Poor woman. She is still young for such an incarceration.’
De Bret raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m surprised to hear you of all people call going into a convent incarceration. A strong word, surely.’
The abbot frowned. ‘What else is it, my friend, if the postulant is unwilling and must stay there for the rest of her life?’
XII
The house was on the main street in Roxburgh, not far from the bakehouse where she and Alexander had spent such happy hours. The rich tradesman who owned it was not interested in the identity of the two merchants’ wives who had agreed to rent the ground-floor rooms. They had heavy purses and were well dressed beneath their sober cloaks: that was all that mattered. They had two servants, a nurse for the baby and a great dog. He did not ask their business in Roxburgh.
He was not there when the elder woman took water from the silver Tweed and setting her bowl on the bank beneath the stars drew down the moonlight into the water with her muttered incantations, stirring glittering circles into the black depths of the pot before taking it indoors and making the younger woman drink. The spell was to hide her identity; to make her invisible to all but the king and in his eyes to make her irresistible.
XIII
The great hall of the castle was as always crowded and Alexander was in jovial mood after the midday meal. He had called for his horse and his hawk and was looking forward to an afternoon’s sport after a morning closeted with his nobles. Marie had left the table early to go and fuss over the boy. Even that small respite improved his mood.
He rose from the table with a contented sigh and began to make his way slowly down the hall towards the door. He could already hear the scraping of the horses’ hooves on the cobbles as they waited in the courtyard and the high piping call of the bird waiting on the fist of his falconer.
He wasn’t sure why the woman caught his eye; her stillness in the midst of so much confusion? The angle of her head as she waited unobtrusively in the shadows near the door? Shadows made blacker by the wedge of brilliant sunshine which streamed into the high-roofed great hall attended by a myriad of dancing dust motes. He squinted across the sun and stopped dead. Immediately the crowd around him stopped too, but their chatter did not cease; the stamping of the hooves did not cease. And yet it was the woman’s silence he heard: her silence and her power.
Sweet Christ! She had come back to him at last. At last she had tired of her husband and come back!
He looked about him swiftly. Whom could he trust? No one else had recognised her; no one else had even noticed her in the general melee which accompanied him everywhere.
He moved on without giving any sign that he had seen her, out on to the steps and down to his horse. Only then did he beckon one of the grooms and whisper into his ear. The groom found her, still standing in the shadows, though she was now alone. He peered at her inquisitively and shrugged; if the king wanted to play riddles with a heavily veiled townswoman who hadn’t even the wit to put on her best gown when she came to court it was none of his business. What was his business was the reward he had been promised if he got the message right.
Her smile was like the sunrise after a night of rain. He glimpsed it only for a moment beneath her veil as he whispered the message and then he felt a coin pressed into his palm – a coin hot from her own hand. With a flurry of skirts she was gone and by dusk when the king returned the groom would be richer by far than he had ever dreamed.
