Within the Hollow Crown (41 page)

   Isabel was seated on a stool before a tall, rain-washed window, and Richard thought she looked like one of the fair-haired angels on the bedhangings at Carter Lane come to life. She was bending over her needlework box, patting down the fruits of her labours. "Do you think the King will like it?" she asked earnestly, unaware that Marianna and Simonette were gone.

   When no answer came she looked round with a funny little air of bewilderment.

   "Isabel!" he called softly, laughingly, from the doorway.

   He saw her start and quiver like a thoroughbred hound. The stool was scraped back—silks flew in all directions. There was a slither of satin slippers as she ran the length of the room towards him. She might have been hurrying to reach the closing gates of Heaven.

   "Richard! Richard,
mon cher mari
!"

   The words were a whisper of joy—poignant as only a child's can be—as she hurled herself into his arms. Her head reached only to his breast, but she was pressing it against the peacock velvet as if listening for his very heartbeats.

   He lifted her gently so that her glowing face was level with his own.
"Doucement! Doucement, ma petite!" he chided tenderly
, half frightened she would harm herself by such ardour, and wholly touched.

   The soft gold of his moustache brushed her cheek. When he set her down he could see the quick rise and fall of her immature breasts beneath the pearled roses on her gown. "My little one, if you are so
very
glad to see me I shall be wretched, concluding that all your other days are unhappy!" he protested.

   "All the other days are dead," she said, her hazel eyes dark with childish tragedy.

   "But, poppet, you have Madame de Courcy."

   "Yes."

   "And those two charming creatures who went out just now. Though I hope you're not always chattering French with them." He knew quite well she had been, and tried to speak sternly. "You're supposed to be learning English, you know."

   "It's so difficult not to," admitted Isabel.

   "I know." Richard took her hand and walked with her towards the window, guiltily aware that he usually forgot and talked French with her himself. "Well, where is this
chef d'œuvre
which it seems important that the King should like?"

   A sunny child again, she pulled him to her governess's highbacked chair. "Sit there, please, and shut your eyes," she ordered.

   Richard grinned, but was too sensible of the seriousness of the moment to peep. "Suppose you show it to me so that I may open my eyes and enjoy looking at you," he suggested. It was the old Richard speaking, whose voice and smile charmed people's hearts out of their bodies.

   Isabel came and leaned against him, taking a last critical survey of her gift and smoothing it out on his knee. "You may look now, Richard," she said. "And if it isn't quite as your mother and your—first wife—used to sew, at least it is with all my love."

   Richard found himself staring down at a little green purse painstakingly embroidered with a white hart. The poor beast had a distressing squint and one of his curiously shaped legs was a bit grubby. Presumably the French king's daughter had been allowed to spend more time playing with her palfrey than at her embroidery frame. But after a moment or two Richard found that he couldn't see the defects very well although his eyes were open, because they were wet with tears.

   "D-don't you like it?" asked Isabel anxiously, because it seemed so long before he said anything.

   Richard detached the leather wallet from the girdle of his tunic and carefully fixed the purse in its place, allowing her to transfer the fascinating contents from one to the other. "It is the loveliest gift I ever had and I shall keep it until I die," he said.

   Isabel gave a little squeal of delighted laughter. "But it will be worn out long before then!" she said. "And I will make you lots more purses—as many as you want. Only as I grow older I will learn to make them better and better."

   Already the woman she was to become showed through the child she was. "What a queer little thing you are!" he said, drawing her onto his knee.

   She sighed prodigiously and leaned back against his shoulder. "I am so lonely when you are at Westminster," she confided.

   It was peaceful in the little queen's room, shut away from regal worries and the rain. Richard was well content to sit physically and mentally relaxed, stroking her hair. "They are kind to you, my poppet?"

   "Oh yes."

   Some lack of warmth in her response left him unassured. "Don't be afraid to tell me. No one shall suffer for it," he urged.

   She sat up and answered him with troubled gravity. "Richard, I don't very much like Madame de Courcy. She isn't unkind—only cold and haughty. I know I am only a child, but sometimes one would think it is she who is the queen. And once she spoke against you, hinting that you had let someone spoil her marriage. I didn't

quite understand, but it made me very angry."

   He laughed indulgently. "Then I will find you someone you
do
like, if I have to scour England. Someone who will fall under your spell, little witch, and stand like a dragon between you and the slightest thing which might hurt you. Someone who will love you as devotedly as my old nurse loved me."

   "That would be lovely. Did your nurse die, Richard?"

   "I don't know, Isabel. She went on a journey and neither her husband nor I have ever been able to trace her."

   "I will light a candle to St. Christopher for her every day."

   He was so moved by her sweet naïveté that he suggested something which he had never offered even to Anne. "Isabel, would you like me to leave Mathe with you sometimes?"

   "Oh, would you?"

   After all these years it would seem like leaving a part of himself, but the feel of the little purse at his belt warmed all his pent up generosity. "For you I would, sweetheart. But I couldn't bring him today. It's too far for him and it's raining. He grows blind, I'm afraid."

   "Oh, Richard! But he still comes and puts his paws on your shoulders, doesn't he?"

   "Mostly by sense of smell, I think. Sometimes, if Tom or Ralph leaves a garment of mine about, he'll go and rest against it instead of sitting with me."

   Even the pathos of a dog's old age was very real to this princess of France. "Then I don't think I will have him, thank you," she decided. "You see, you've had him so much longer than you've had me. And he might pine, mightn't he?"

   "I'm afraid so."

   "Besides," she added, as if the idea had only just occurred to her, "perhaps
you
are lonely sometimes, too."

   "Very lonely," admitted Richard.

   Isabel knitted puzzled brows. She had supposed that wherever the object of her affection was, there the atmosphere must always be bright and rarefied as it was when he came to see her. "But you have all England—everything—"

   The lines of a man who has lived and suffered seemed to deepen at the corners of Richard's mouth and eyes—or perhaps it was only the strong light from the window, for when he was playing with her or teasing her Isabel never noticed them. "That is only an illusion, my child. Inwardly, I have nothing—now…Except you," he added, seeing the stricken look on her face.

   She slipped from his knee, all practical energy at once. "Then, Richard, let me come and live with you at Court. You do want me, don't you? Surely with Mathe and me there—"

   "Cherie, we have been all over that before—"

   "Oh, please, please, Richard!" She was standing between his knees, twisting at the knobbly buttons of his tunic in a frenzy of supplication. To her it all seemed so simple. She understood nothing of the passion she was striving to supplant. She could not see the ugly picture in Richard's mind of Henry Bolingbroke grasping at a child wife because she was an heiress, nor know that Mary Bohun had given him their strapping son Harry before she was thirteen, and then a string of other children, and that now— before the bloom of womanhood—she was dead.

   Richard caught her little hands and held them firmly. "Listen, Isabel. When your father used to tell you you couldn't do something you wanted, you always obeyed him, didn't you?"

   Her excited hands lay still. "Yes, Richard," she agreed in a small voice.

   "Even when, in his wisdom, he decided that you were too young to understand the reasons why?"

   She nodded, her adoring eyes on his.

   Richard sighed, wondering what he should do when she
was ol
d enough. She was tall for her age, and maturing every day. "Very well, then. I'm not always as wise as he, I'm afraid. But you'll have to obey me just the same," he told her, rather inadequately.

   Reminded by mention of her father, he drew from his belt a slender roll of parchment with a vastly important-looking seal.

   "From France!" cried Isabel, recognizing the dangling fleur-de-lis.

   "And full of messages for you," smiled Richard. "Would you like to hear them?"

   While he read out all the bits that were not about state affairs, Isabel stood leaning against his chair, the unbound chestnut of her hair mingling with the copper of his. Being there with her had soothed all the evil out of him, as it always did. "It's a pleasant novelty exchanging letters instead of arrows with France, though it seems to have taken me a lifetime to achieve it," he said.

   "Then help me write a reply in perfect English to please my parents—which will take you only half an hour," coaxed Isabel, perceiving an opportunity of avoiding a dull session with her governess.

   Richard sent for pen and parchment and patiently helped her to concoct a missive which must have amazed them very much. "Though I simply can't go on acting as your clerk if you keep saying such extravagantly nice things about me!" he protested.

   As soon as the letter was signed and sealed they went into the hall to dine. A large cushion was put for Isabel so that she could sit at the King's right hand, while Madame de Courcy sat at his left. It was a merry meal, with minstrels and some acrobats the King had sent for specially to amuse her. And when it was over, Tom Holland brought in the little white puppy he had carried all the way from the royal kennels under his cloak. "Don't think we forgot you altogether because we couldn't bring Mathe!" laughed Richard, watching her surprised delight.

   All the happy afternoon Richard of England and Isabel of Valois, with Ralph and Tom and Marianna and Simonette, romped with the leggy little creature and sang ballads in bilingual abandon. To Ralph and Tom it was like a piece out of the good old days to watch the King fooling. At any moment, they felt, Anne—the real queen—might open the door and stand there laughing at them as she used to do at Sheen. They could almost hear her saying in her inimitable way, "My sweet Richard, do remember you are getting on for thirty-three!"

   Towards evening, seeing that Isabel was flagging through so much happy excitement, Richard had the fire lit, and while the horses were being saddled he sat facing her contentedly across the hearth. "Just as if we were really married!" she remarked, rather pathetically.

   The days when he came to Windsor were never long enough,

and because the shadow of approaching parting was saddening her, he tried to distract her thoughts. "I had a letter from Roger Mortimer, as well as from your father, this morning," he told her, with apparent irrelevance.

   "Why do we never see him?" asked Isabel, a little listlessly.

   "Partly because he is one of those rare, retiring sort of persons, I imagine. And because at the moment he is away keeping the Irish in order for me," answered Richard. "But he has a son about your age. I must arrange for you two to meet."

   "Would he play with me like Charles of Orleans?" asked Isabel.

   "I am sure he would."

   "What is this Roger Mortimer, whom you think so highly of? What is he like?"

   Richard considered. So few people knew the Mortimers because they never pushed themselves at Court nowadays, although it was an ancestor of theirs who had been the ambitious lover of Edward the Second's Queen. "Not unlike Mowbray, perhaps, in his love of outdoor life. But more dependable. Would you like me to tell you a story about him?"

   "Has it a happy ending?"

   "Well, yes—for me. Once, long before you came to England, the late Duke of Gloucester invited Roger to dine at his manor of Pleshy. And after dinner when they were quite alone, as we are now, Gloucester suggested that they two should murder me. Then Roger, being the grandson of my eldest uncle who died, would get the throne, he said, and they could share the power between them. I suppose he thought Roger would be more obliging and docile to manage."

   "And what did Roger do?" asked Isabel, her attention weaned at last from the clatter of horses down below.

   "Oh, he listened quite politely. He was never one to make trouble. Besides, he was probably rather afraid of his great uncle, Gloucester, as I was. He even promised not to repeat anything he had heard. And he never did. But he declined to co-operate, and went back to his affairs in Ireland, leaving our cunning relative feeling very insecure indeed. Roger could have come favour-seeking to me, of course, with all the pother of an unmasked plot, the same as the others were always doing. But he didn't bother me. There was a quiet sort of loyalty about his behaviour which I appreciated."

   "Then how did you ever get to know?" asked Isabel.

   "Some friends of mine persuaded Gloucester to write a kind of confession before he died."

   "And how did the horrid wretch die?"