The Iron King Read Free Page B

France!’
    He was struck by her tone of voice as much as by her words. He realised that there were two Isabellas: on the one hand the young sovereign, conscious of her role and trying to live up to the majesty of her part; and on the other, behind this outward mask, an unhappy woman.
    The French lady-in-waiting returned, bringing a purse of interwoven gold thread, lined with silk and fastened with three precious stones as large as thumbnails.
    ‘Splendid!’ Artois cried. ‘This is exactly what we want. A little heavy for a woman to wear; but exactly what a young man at Court dreams of fastening to his belt in order to show off.’
    ‘You’ll order two similar purses from the merchant Albizzi,’ said Isabella to her lady-in-waiting, ‘and tell him to make them at once.’
    Then, when the Frenchwoman had gone out, she added for Robert’s ear, ‘You’ll be able to take them back to France with you.’
    ‘No one will know that they passed through my hands,’ he said.
    There was a noise outside, shouts and laughter. Robert of Artois went over to the window. In the courtyard a company of masons were hoisting to the summit of an arch an ornamental stone engraved in relief with the lions of England. Some were hauling on pulley-ropes; others, perched on a scaffolding, were making ready to seize hold of the block of stone, and the whole business seemed to be carried out amid extraordinary good humour.
    ‘Well!’ said Robert of Artois. ‘It appears that King Edward still likes masonry.’
    Among the workmen he had just recognised Edward II, Isabella’s husband, a good-looking man of thirty, with curly hair, wide shoulders and strong thighs. His velvet clothes were dusty with plaster. 3
    ‘They’ve been rebuilding Westminster for more than fifteen years!’ said Isabella angrily. (She pronounced it Vestmoustiers, in the French manner.) ‘For the whole six years I’ve been married I’ve lived among trowels and mortar. They’re always pulling down what they built the month before. It’s not masonry he likes, it’s his masons! Do you imagine they even bother to say “Sire” to him? They call him Edward, and laugh at him, and he loves it. Just look at him.’
    In the courtyard, Edward II was giving orders, leaning on a young workman, his arm round the boy’s neck. About him was an air of suspect familiarity. The lions of England had been lowered back to earth, doubtless because it was thought that their proposed site was unsuitable.
    ‘I thought,’ Isabella went on, ‘that I had known the worst with Sir Piers Gaveston. That insolent, boastful Béarnais ruled my husband so successfully that he ruled the country too. Edward gave him all the jewels in my marriage casket. In one way or another it seems to be a family custom for the women’s jewels to end up on men!’
    Having beside her a relation and a friend, Isabella at last allowed herself to express her sorrows and humiliations. The morals of Edward II were known throughout Europe.
    ‘A year or so ago the barons and I succeeded in bringing Gaveston down; his head was cut off, and now his body lies rotting in the ground at Oxford,’ the young Queen said with satisfaction.
    Robert of Artois did not appear surprised to hear these cruel words uttered by a beautiful woman. It must be admitted that such things were the common coin of the period. Kingdoms were often handed over to adolescents, whose absolute power fascinated them as might a game. Hardly grown out of the age in which it is fun to tear the wings from flies, they might now amuse themselves by tearing the heads from men. Too young to fear or even imagine death, they would not hesitate to distribute it around them.
    Isabella had ascended the throne at sixteen; she had come a long way in six years.
    ‘Well! I’ve reached the point, Cousin, when I regret Gaveston,’ she went on. ‘Since then, as if to avenge himself upon me, Edward brings the lowest and most infamous men to the palace. He visits the