ridden to Cardiff to see Isabella, putting her arm around the girl, who had become as thin as a skeleton and was wearing a robe of penitential sackcloth. “Poor darling,” she murmured. “The king has dishonored you most horribly. You should be our queen.”
But Isabella shook her head. “I am happy now. It’s what I always prayed might happen. That or the release of death.” She lowered her eyes, toying with the rosary beads that hung at her girdle. “Be pleased for me. Pity the new wife, whoever she may be.”
She, as it turned out, was another Isabella, Isabella of Angouleme, a lady well able to cope with John and his rages.
When John heard of Matilda’s visit to Cardiff he was irrationally angry. “Your wife, Sir William,” he hissed at the trembling baron, ignoring Matilda, who was standing calmly beside her husband, “takes it into her head to meddle in matters that do not concern her.” His face was white with anger and his eyes glittering slits in the mask of his face. “The lady to whom I was formerly associated does not require her attentions.”
“Isabella was and is my friend, Your Grace,” Matilda interrupted before William could mumble an embarrassed apology. “I like to visit my friends when they are in need of comfort.”
“And you found, I am sure, that she needed no comfort.” John’s voice dropped a fraction lower.
Matilda smiled. “Indeed she didn’t. She was happy at last, Your Grace. Happier than she had been since the day of her betrothal. But I was not to know that. I did not realize you had spared Isabella what you did not spare me!” Incautiously she rushed on: “I have witnessed for myself, after all, the form Your Grace’s attentions can take. I know the suffering they can cause.” Her eyes held his for a moment, blazing with anger, before realizing suddenly the foolishness of betraying her feelings. She turned abruptly away. It was not before, however, she saw John’s pale cheeks suffuse with blood until his face was nearly purple.
On that occasion, however, he had controlled himself with an effort, and William and Matilda were curtly dismissed from the royal presence without another word. It was only as she was leaving the room, curtsying one last time as they reached the doors, as protocol demanded, that Matilda raised her eyes again to the king’s face. The expression that she saw there made her stomach turn over with fear.
Once outside, William had been beside himself with fury. “Do you want to jeopardize my position, you stupid woman!” He raised his hand as if to strike her, and then thought better of it. “Have you no idea how much rests on my friendship with the king? How much he may do for me-how much money I owe him!”
This last he added in an undertone. He was becoming increasingly worried by the vast debts he was building up. Starting with the five thousand marks he owed for the Honor of Limerick, which the king had granted him after his uncle Philip’s death, and followed by other honors and the large feudal reliefs, a thousand pounds each, he would have to pay for the marriages of his two sons. Matilda could do much to maintain him in the king’s favor, of that he was sure, and yet every time she was within earshot of her monarch she seemed determined to anger him.
William had often puzzled over the strange relationship between his wife and John. He knew John was attracted to her. He knew that he had once made an approach to her, out hunting in the New Forest, and he had, in spite of his laughter, been flattered and pleased by the prince’s attentions to his wife. It had seemed harmless enough at the time, and it had occurred to William once or twice over the years to wonder if he owed his favor with King Henry to John’s interest in Matilda. Then the interest seemed abruptly to have cooled, and William was, in spite of everything, relieved at the time; John had a reputation in some quarters for making very free with the wives of his followers. Now he was not so sure. The king’s interest would have been all to the good. Hostility was the last thing William wanted, and now he found himself wondering increasingly if he maintained his friendship with the king in spite of Matilda, not because of her, and he resented her bitterly for it. And was it because of her antagonism John still withheld the most tantalizing prize of all, the gift of an earldom?
He had sent her back to the Brycheiniog estates then, while he himself had stayed hopefully at the king’s side.
When Gwenwynwyn attacked the de Braose Marcher lands yet again, it had been thanks to her warnings that William was ready for him. He repelled the attack with energetic fury and was rewarded the following year with the lordships of Glamorgan, Gwynllwg, and Gower. He had seemed especially close to the king after that, but even so, some whispered that he had had to extract the rich lordship of Gower from John by threatening to leave the king when he was most in need of the baron’s support.
Matilda glanced at him again, her comb lying motionless in her lap. He had followed John to Normandy, but how did he stand with the king now?
She watched him as he raised the goblet to his lips.
“We return to France in the spring,” he commented abruptly, as if reading her thoughts. “But by then it will be too late. Normandy will have fallen to the French king. Only Chateau Gaillard holds out for us now, and the coastal towns. Except that Philip Augustus has lost his best excuse for fighting.”
Matilda glanced up again. “What do you mean, he’s lost his excuse?” She eyed her husband distastefully.
“Arthur. Prince Arthur is dead.” William tipped back the goblet and drained it.
“The king’s young nephew?” She began to work at a tangle in her hair with the ivory comb even as she felt a muscle somewhere in her stomach start to tense.
“Yes, Arthur. We captured him at Mirabeau. The little runt was attempting to besiege his own grandmother! Eleanor sent word to John and we marched from Le Mans in two days-two days, mark you-and had them all in the bag in hours. John had the boy sent to Falaise.” William fell silent for a moment, picking his teeth with the corner of his thumbnail.
“And?” she prompted him.
He shrugged. “Arthur hasn’t been seen since.”
“So you don’t know that he’s dead.”
“It’s fairly certain,” he admitted guardedly.
“But the king must have confided in you. He always does. Surely you can tell me, your own wife.” Matilda concentrated on her hair, carefully casual.
William was watching the rhythmic strokes of the brush, fascinated. He licked his lips, half astonished at himself to feel desire for her still after all these years.
“Oh, yes, the king confided in me.” He could not resist rising to her remark, and he did not notice her secret smile as suddenly he sat forward on the edge of the bed, his voice low. “But I didn’t need his confidence this time, Moll. I was there. I saw it all. He killed Arthur with his own hands and threw the body into the Seine!”
Matilda felt herself grow cold. “With his own hands?” she heard herself repeat the words, incredulous.
William slipped from the bed and came to squat near her, his fingers held out to the blaze. “We were at Rouen for Easter. John had been drinking. We all had! He decided he was going to interrogate the prisoners and he sent for Arthur. The boy stood there arrogantly and refused to recognize his uncle as king. John flew into a rage and went for him. But, God damn it, if the boy had had any spirit at all…He just stood there and allowed John to put his hands around his neck and shake him. We all had to swear on Christ’s sacred bones we would tell no one of his death. The king wanted him alive.” William stood up, rubbing his own neck ruefully. “He had given orders that the boy be blinded and gelded and kept a harmless hostage by Hubert de Burgh at Falaise, and Hubert refused like a whey-faced woman. It was Hubert’s fault. The boy would have been a useful pawn, damn it!” He paused, his back to Matilda.
“I helped them tie the stones to the body and we heaved it over into the river, but as ill luck would have it, a fisherman found the wretched corpse some days later. Luckily by then it was unrecognizable. Nobody could be sure. But some guessed.”
Matilda listened in silence, horrified, picturing John’s sudden drunken rage and his assault on the frightened, lonely boy, remembering the night when he had put those same hands around her throat.
Why had William not lifted one finger to help him? Why had he not tried to restrain the king at least? She looked at her husband and shuddered.
William was incredulous. “The boy was a traitor! He deserved to die! It was only John’s goodness that had kept him alive at all-”
“John has no goodness, William. He did what would have been best for his own cause-until he got drunk and lost his temper. It was Hubert among all of you, from what you say, who had goodness and compassion.”
She climbed up into the bed, keeping her gown wrapped tightly around her. “Call the servants, William. Let them make up the fire and put out the sconces.”
