Mathilde 01 - The Cup of Ghosts (31 page)

Old Sandewic continued to watch me carefully. The cold weather and onerous duties weakened his health. I renewed the phials of vervain and other potions to relieve his symptoms, advising caution that he did not take too much. I should have been more prudent about what he actually drank. The constable seemed deeply touched by my care and attention, responding with little gifts. He boasted openly of what he called my prowess in physic. Much to Isabella’s amusement, the garrison, its soldiers, servants, wives and families, started to present themselves on a daily basis in the inner ward for help and assistance. Sandewic, God assoil him, opened the stores and provided powders and dried herbs, even dispatching messengers to buy more from the city apothecaries. The ailments were, in the main, mild. I never forgot Uncle Reginald’s aphorism, that his patients usually healed themselves despite the best efforts of their physician.

The onset of winter ailments allowed me to observe, treat and learn. I dispensed ver juice for sores in the mouth, ivy juice for inflammation of the nose, pimpernel boiled in wine for the rheums and sweet almonds for earache. There were the usual cuts and scars to clean and treat; fractures to be fixed and contained, poultices applied. I advised on the need to be clean, and when complaints of sickness and looseness of the bowels increased, I examined the meat stores, salted and pickled for the winter, to discover some so soft and putrid they were alive with maggots. Sandewic was furious and the flesher responsible sat in the Tower stocks for a day with the filthy mess he’d sold tied around his neck, the rest being offered to passers-by to throw at him.

More importantly for me, Demontaigu entered Isabella’s household, slipping in easily without provoking any suspicions. Petitions had flooded in from many scribes and petty officials, clerks from the halls of Oxford and Cambridge, all seeking placements. Demontaigu was one of these. Armed with false papers, as indeed many applicants must have been, he presented himself before Casales, Sandewic and Rossaleti. He proved himself fluent in English, French, Castilian and Latin. He described himself as a soldier, a scholar who’d studied at Bologna and Ravenna, a Gascon by birth, who had wandered Europe and become proficient in the courtly hand, very skilled in the preparation and sealing of documents, who now wished to seek advancement in the royal service. Since going into hiding Demontaigu had given up using his father’s name, hiding behind his mother’s so he could mix truth and fable. When he was questioned, he acted respectful and courteous so the recommendation to Isabella to hire him was unreserved, Demontaigu was appointed as a Principal Clerk of the Red Wax in the Office of the Queen’s Wardrobe. I felt deeply comforted by his presence. Nevertheless, I acted on Isabella’s warning to walk prudently and allow the day-to-day workings of her household to draw him deeper in.

Demontaigu acted the part, being friends to all and allies to none in the petty factions and squabbling for precedence which constantly dominate any great household. When we did meet in some store room to make a tally or supervise the release of goods, we would talk and gossip in whispers. Demontaigu had changed; no longer concerned about his own situation, he seemed more fascinated about what happened to me.
Oh Domine Jesu -
it was he who prompted me to begin my own journals, written in cipher. I still have these today.

‘List,’ Demontaigu urged, ‘list what happens; they are the symptoms, Mathilde, look for the cause. In the end, all things drain to their logical conclusion; there must be, there will be, a solution to all this.’

I often reflected on that in the days before the coronation. I divided my time between assisting the princess, dispensing medicine and recalling the past. Demontaigu spoke the truth and spurred me into action. The shock and pain of the last few weeks were diminishing. Why should I stand like some pious novice and be attacked, threatened, cowed and bullied by the great ones? I could fight back. Uncle Reginald had been a hard taskmaster; he’d always insisted I keep a book of symptoms.

‘Write down,’ he’d order, ‘everything you observe about an ailment or a herb. Study what you record, reflect, look for a common pattern, and for changes which are not logical. Two things, Mathilde, rule your life: passion and logic. They are not contradictory, they complement each other.’ He would stroke my brow. ‘I love you, Mathilde, like a daughter, therefore I also want you close. So the first part of my statement is what?’

‘Passion, Uncle.’

‘Good, and the second?’

‘Logic,’ I’d smile.

Sweet Mother Mary, even now, years later, the tears still brim. In that sombre February the ghost of Reginald de Deyncourt came to dominate my soul more and more. Perhaps it was the arrival of Demontaigu, what Isabella called the change in the sea, or perhaps like a swordsman I wanted to step out of the shadows to confront my foes. I returned to my journals, writing down in my cramped cipher everything I could remember: that morning outside the death house, the struggle on the steps in Canterbury and, most importantly, pushing open Monsieur de Vitry’s door. I added the petty details of those particular days – what I ate, what I saw – to serve as pricks to my memory. I followed the art of physic, concentrating precisely on what I witnessed, experienced and reflected upon. Time and again I returned to the massacre at de Vitry’s mansion. On that day I had killed a man. I was shocked, I had fled, so my soul was agitated. I recalled entering the merchant’s house. I fastened on one fact: the main door had been open, off the latch, not bolted. Why? The assassin could have killed and left but, surely, he’d have barred the front door and fled through some window to keep the murders secret as long as possible? Was that it? Did the killer overlook that? Or, and I was growing certain about this, had I forestalled him? Had I entered that house before he could turn the key and draw bolts? Surely a killer would seal the door lest someone come in behind him as I did? In my mind’s eye I was standing in the hallway, looking round at the shadowy recesses, the small chambers leading off. Had the assassin been lurking there as I entered? But if so, why had he not attacked me? I asked the same questions of Demontaigu; he too was puzzled.

‘Yes, yes,’ he’d whisper when we met in some corner of the Castle on the Hoop. ‘De Vitry’s death lies at the heart of all this mystery. What happened on that day may be the key. So,’ he added, ‘what would I have done if I’d been the assassin?’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘I would have locked that door behind me. Yes, Mathilde, that’s what I would have done. Why didn’t he?’

As it was, I could not meet Demontaigu often. The Tower was a narrow, close place and I did not know whom I could trust. Nevertheless, I was pleased he was a fully indentured clerk of Isabella’s household, receiving robes and wages every quarter beginning Easter next. He’d sealed agreements with that plump and vivacious controller, a high-ranking English clerk from the Court of King’s Bench, William de Boudon, a man who later played his own important role in the affairs of Isabella, but that is not for now.

De Boudon liked Demontaigu and often used him, so in the Tower I tried to keep my distance. On one thing both Isabella and I had been resolute. Demontaigu was not to strike at Marigny or any of the French party, which would only endanger her and me. Hand on the Gospels, he vowed to obey. Marigny would be left unscathed, though Demontaigu added the ominous phrase ‘for as long as he remained in England’.

By the third week of February 1308, the Tower had become the centre of the English court by both day and night, holy days and weekdays, all taken up with the preparations for the coronation. Baquelle scurried backwards and forwards full of his own importance, openly delighted that the king had decided that he and Casales would be Knights of the Sanctuary for the coronation. Both men, clad in full plate armour covered with the royal livery, would stand in especially erected open pavilions at the side of the sanctuary steps during the ceremony. The carpenters, Baquelle assured us excitedly, were already constructing the heavy-beamed pavilions in the transepts of the abbey; these would later be moved and decorated with greenery and winter roses. Baquelle and Casales also acted as Isabella’s military escort when Marigny and his coven visited the Tower for formal presentation to the princess. On such occasions, at Isabella’s order, I absented myself, as did Demontaigu, though one morning, standing with me on the parapet walk, he pointed out a black-haired, sharp-featured knight in Marigny’s retinue.

‘Alexander of Lisbon,’ he murmured; he turned his back to stare out over the crenellated walls and I gazed down at the Portuguese knight who had become, and would remain, the bane of my beloved’s life. Even then, just the way he walked reminded me of a Tower raven, with his jerky, sinister stride, head slightly bent as if searching the ground for something.

Isabella, as usual, received her father’s ministers only to quarrel again over the appointment of a physician to her household as well as other sensitive matters.

‘He forgets himself,’ she declared once Marigny had left. ‘This is not the Ile de France. Monsieur de Marigny is beginning to realise the full truth of the phrase “as the father, so the daughter”. I heard a curious story,’ she continued, ‘I’ve already asked Demontaigu but he cannot help. That Portuguese knight, Alexander of Lisbon? He has licence from my husband to hunt down subjects of the King of France, Templars, hiding in this kingdom. Apparently he has been busy along the south-west coast.’

‘And?’ I asked.

‘Demontaigu said there was a close link between the Templars and the great abbey at Glastonbury, but that none of his brothers would hide there. A Frenchman in those lonely parts, he alleges, would place himself in great danger. So why should Alexander be travelling through such a desolate region in the depth of winter?’

Such remarks had to be ignored with the busy routine of our days. Casales and Baquelle, our constant visitors, brought in cloth of gold and silver, velvets and satins for Isabella to choose from, together with livery, hangings and banners for others in the Tower who would take part in the festivities and ceremonies. At the same time more soldiers arrived, including the Kernia, Irish Kerns, mercenaries loyal to Gaveston whom they worshipped as a great seigneur; these swarmed through the outer wards of the Tower despite Sandewic’s strictures. The old constable openly grumbled at their wild ways as well as why the king and his favourite needed such mercenaries. Sandewic’s health was certainly failing. I dared not give him further medicines but hoped that once the coronation was past and spring arrived, his health would improve. Sandewic, however, was more concerned about the old bear Woden, who was sickening and refusing his food. Isabella petitioned her husband to have Sandewic released from some of his duties, so a younger man, John de Cromwell, was appointed as lieutenant. The old constable simply became more determined, even spending time supervising the wall paintings in his beloved Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula; he wanted these to be finished before the king left the Tower.

The coronation day approached. Extra seating was erected in Westminster Abbey, triumphal arches in the streets were hung with tapestries and banners whilst the thoroughfares along which the king and queen would pass were cleaned and gravelled. On 23 February, the merchant princes of the city, their barges decked and trimmed with the banners of their mysteries, came up the Thames and joined the king and queen for their coronation rituals in the Chapel of St John the Evangelist. On the morning of the 24
^th
, Edward and Isabella left the fortress for Westminster; a mist-strewn, icicle-hung dawn with lowering leaden clouds and drifting snowflakes. In such bleak weather Isabella glowed like a tongue of flame, dressed in gorgeous robes of gold and silver made from twenty-three yards of precious cloth, all edged and decorated with ermine and overlaid with mother-of-pearl lace. She and I sat in a litter lined with white satin and trimmed with gold damask, drawn by two handsome mules decorated with gleaming harnesses. Above us billowed an exquisitely embroidered canopy of state; alongside marched men-at-arms in livery of scarlet damask.

We left by the Lion Gate and made our ceremonial progress to Westminster. Pageants and displays were staged along the main streets. A tableau of roses and lilies at Gracechurch; near Cornhill a pageant of the virtuous queen; in Cheapside choirs gathered around the beautiful Eleanor Cross to sing Isabella’s praises, whilst the city clerk presented her with a purse of a thousand gold marks. Scholars from St Paul’s made pretty speeches comparing Isabella to the strong and virtuous women from the Bible. Everywhere the brilliantly coloured crowd gaped and cheered from balconies, windows and doorways, all festooned with cloths, mantles and standards displaying every device and colour.

At Temple Bar the city council formally bade us farewell. We proceeded along the Royal Way into the precincts of Westminster, a small city in itself with its mansions, stone houses and thatched cottages. Here lived legions of carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, whitesmiths, jewellers, armourers, bakers and fleshers, as well as those who served in the various departments of the royal household: pantry, buttery, spices, chandlery, wardrobe and kitchen. As in the city, the streets and houses were hung with crimson and scarlet cloth. Along its winding lanes and streets were more staged pageants, allegories and mysteries about fair maidens and giants, angels and devils. Trestle tables groaned with food whilst the conduits splashed out red and white wine. We journeyed into the inner bailey of the palace with its beautiful gabled houses of carved timber, plastered fronts and painted windows, all gleaming with frost and overshadowed by the Great Hall and the soaring glory of St Stephen’s Chapel which, at the time, had not yet been finished.

Isabella and I were allocated quarters near the Painted Chamber with its gorgeous fresco telling the story of the Maccabees. Nevertheless, on our arrival that morning, amidst all that swirl of spectacle, trumpets blaring, horns blowing, standards and pennants clustered into a vivid cloud of colour, one memory, almost like a vision, caught my mind. It was as if the dead, the murdered, those souls cast out before their time, congregated about me, whispering at my soul to alert my heart. I was standing in the doorway of the small hall; across its tiled floor, built against the wall, was a set of stairs, polished to gleaming, stretching up into the darkness. An old porter carrying a coffer on his right shoulder was laboriously climbing up, his left hand holding the wall to keep his balance. Standing in that doorway I felt a shiver of fear, as if the cup of ghosts had spilled out its contents. The scene recalled my entering Monsieur de Vitry’s house, its door closing behind me and that servant lying half out of a chamber to my right. The old porter continued up the stairs even as a servant girl hurried down. I glanced around at the alcoves, recesses and corners. I felt as if I was seeing what the assassin had seen in de Vitry’s house during those first few heartbeats before he struck, yet I was overlooking something. I became engrossed. Demontaigu pushed by me, hurrying up the stairs with a hanaper of documents. I watched him go.