Paul Doherty: The Poison Maiden

I have read the chronicle accounts for those opening months of Edward’s reign. They all depict it as a time of bloody change. Philip IV ruled France. Pope Clement V sheltered in his palace at Avignon, feasting himself and his court of cardinals on swans, peacocks and boar meat, guzzling like parched men on the rich wines of the south. A time of change also. Death and Destruction, those two gaunt riders on their pale skeletal horses, were already emerging from the boiling mists of time. Death, as one chronicle declared, was a knight on horseback carrying a square shield, in the first quarter of which was depicted a grinning ape, indicating how, after his death, a man’s executors laughed at him and spent his goods. In the second quartering was a lion, symbolising the ferocity of death. In the third, an archer signified its swiftness, and in the fourth was a scribe writing down all the sins to be judged before God’s tribunal. Flood and foul weather blighted lives; Pride and Pestilence prepared their ambush. One monkish chronicle declared: ‘God is angry. He will no longer hear us and, for our guilt, grinds even good men to dust.’ According to another writer, the times were so dreadful, Antichrist himself was already born and had reached his tenth year, a boy of great beauty. Grisly, mysterious incidents were carefully recorded. The earth turned barren due to blood being spilt. Trees creaked after they had been used as gallows. Cliff-faces were scored with the claw-marks of Satan. There were storms and floods. Eclipses, shooting stars and signs in the heavens. Monstrous births and violent visitations. People ate the bread of sorrow and drank the waters of distress. Looking back, all I can say is that the preachers and the prophets of doom had it wrong. Matters were to turn much worse! Evil was burgeoning like a plum ripe to rottenness, and as with all mayhem, once released, it followed its own destructive course.

Edward and his lords were bent on confrontation. The king withdrew into the spacious grounds of the palace at Westminster, where he had built a splendid hall that he nicknamed ‘Burgundy’, laughingly calling himself the King of Burgundy, and recreating there his favourite childhood residence: those chambers above the gatehouse at King’s Langley. Burgundy Hall was a stately, majestic manor house of costly stone and timber with a slate-tiled roof. It was built round a quadrangle and boasted a long hall with chambers above, and alongside, half-timbered, half-stone extensions above a maze of cellars. It was a veritable jewel with its oaken framework, the elaborately carved verge boards of the gables, the vein-like tracery of the windows, the slender pinnacle buttresses. It was as if the king wished to create his own make-believe world and hide from the rage seething around him. He, Gaveston, the queen and a shrunken group of royal supporters, led by the old king’s general Hugh de Spencer of Glamorgan, sheltered there.

Edward and Gaveston played and waited, ignoring the gathering furies. In Scotland, Bruce threatened his northern shires. From Avignon, Clement V fulminated how the English king should harass the Order of the Temple to destruction as Philip of France had. Close by, a mere arrow shot away, the Lords decided to stay and take up residence in the sacred precincts of Westminster Abbey. Philip, scenting victory, the opportunity to turn Edward into his minion, re-entered the melee, dispatching his own envoys to England. They arrived mouthing peace but planning for war. A vicious brood: the Abbot of St Germain, a pompous nonentity, together with the French king’s evil familiars, Guillaume de Nogaret, Guillaume de Plaisans and, prince amongst those serpents, Enguerrand de Marigny. These three demons, at their master’s behest, had destroyed the Templars, browbeaten the papacy and were now determined to bring Edward of England under the ban. In the king’s palace itself, hiding in the shadows, was Isabella la Belle, not yet fourteen, but still possessed with the mind of a veteran intriguer. A true daughter of her father, nevertheless Isabella hated him as the cause of her own mother Jeanne de Navarre’s sudden and mysterious death, as well as for the abuse perpetrated on Isabella by her three brothers, those scions of Satan: Louis, Philippe and Charles. In public, she played of the role of her husband’s enemy, united with her father in his dreams of a Capetian hegemony, of bringing all Europe and its rulers under his iron sceptre. She was publicly aggrieved at her husband, deeply resentful of Gaveston. Ah well, that was how the tongues wagged. In private, Isabella plotted her own path with me in her shadow, like an archer notches his bow as he hides behind the shield of another.

I was close to both queen and king. In truth, I had no choice. Both my mistress and I were of the king’s mesnie, his household, members of his own private chamber. There was one other. The beat of my heart, the light of my life, the passion of my soul, Bertrand Demontaigu, his black hair lined with grey, his sallow face redeemed by the most beautiful eyes and courteous ways. A Templar priest, the son of a French knight and an English mother, Demontaigu, after the sudden, brutal destruction of his order, had also hidden away in the shadow of the queen’s retinue, acting as one of her household clerks. His previous role as a messenger of the Temple had saved him from being marked and hunted down by Alexander of Lisbon and his Noctales. These were ferocious bounty-hunters dispatched through Europe by Philip of France and Clement V to pursue, capture and kill any surviving Templars. Demontaigu! Even now the very thought of him sends my blood fluttering. He made me feel whole and good. Above all he made me laugh, saying our relationship was one of autumn and spring, for he had reached his thirtieth summer whilst I was just past my twentieth. He and Isabella brought purpose to my life. I repaid both with undying loyalty, whatever their sins, whatever their faults. Yet that is what love does, surely? Blinds us only to the good.

The spring of 1308 was a time of acute danger, made even more so when the Poison Maiden emerged to make her sinister presence felt. How did it begin? Let me tell you as I would describe two knights preparing for the joust. They mount, armed and helmeted, their destriers paw the earth and snort, the tourney ground falls silent except for the jingle of mail and the clatter of arms. The trumpets shrill. The red cloth falls. The knights lower their visors, couch their lances and raise their shields. The warhorses move in an ominous rumble. The charge begins, slowly at first, then the heart quickens as the earth shakes and the combatants bear down on each other in a fight to the finish. So it was. I can only recall what is important, what pricks my memory. Think of walking down a dark passageway, stone-walled, hollow-sounding. You pause and look back. You see the darkness but your eye is drawn to the flickering torches, the glow of light they throw — so it was with my life, my time. Danger did not threaten at every heartbeat. I was usually immersed in a tedious list of mundane tasks: supervising the pantry, ensuring the cooks and fleshers bought good meat and fresh fish. I went down to the slaughterhouse to check that the quails, partridges and pheasants were properly prepared and cured. I ensured old rushes were burnt and the freshly cut sprinkled with herbs. The laundry room was also my responsibility: how the linen of both wardrobe and bedchamber was washed to freshness and properly stored in aumbries, coffers and chests. I dealt with petitions, a licence for a man to crenellate the walls of his manor house, protection for a merchant going abroad, pardons to outlaws who had committed crimes and were now willing to purge themselves by military service in Scotland, the grant of offices and benefices, safe conducts for alien merchants to travel safely from Dover. I managed the spicery accounts as well as those of both the buttery and pantry. Above all I dealt with a myriad of ailments, including those of my mistress, whose monthly courses always brought her pain and discomfort. I treated these with great burnet, marjoram and camomile. She also suffered from rashes, a legacy of upset humours when she was a child. I soothed these with soap water and special potions distilled from herbs. I also dealt with the ailments of others: catarrh, stomach cramps, cuts, bruises and injuries. In the most serious cases, or when in doubt, I would recommend a visit to the physicians at St Bartholomew’s or St Mary’s Bethlehem. I acted as Isabella’s clerk in the queen’s secret chancery, my quill pen cut to my liking; or, escorted by Demontaigu, as her confidential messenger to various parts of the city. I loved such occasions, sitting cowled and hooded in some London tavern, be it the Swan in Splendour, the Honeycorn, or the Bell of Jerusalem. I would chatter to Demontaigu like a child. He would listen carefully. Sometimes he would touch me lightly. I would respond. He rarely talked of his priesthood. Occasionally he mentioned his hunger for silence, for a normal, restful life away from the hurly-burly of court life. People took him to be what he was, a clerk in priestly orders. He would discreetly celebrate his Jesus or morrow mass just after daybreak, when the bells of the palace and the abbey were clanging. I would kneel at a prie-dieu and stare at those hands grasping the singing bread or the sacred goblet. I’d bow my head and blush at my waking dreams of the night before. Deus meus! Tears sting my eyes. My heart grieves at the sheer loss, the thought of such bittersweet memories.