Paul Doherty: The Poison Maiden

Nonetheless, the tourney was about to begin. The lists were ready, the knights emerging from the shadows, the cut and thrust of secret, bloody battle almost imminent. So it was that on the Eve of the Annunciation in the Year of Our Lord 1308, deep in the royal enclosure at Westminster Palace, murderous mayhem emerged on to the field of life. (I will not hurry, but describe it as it was.) On that bleak, cold day, Isabella and I were cloistered with the Queen Dowager Margaret, Isabella’s aunt, sister of Philip IV, widow of Edward I of England. Margaret had been married to that great warlord for eight or nine years and borne him four children. The eldest of these would die most violently at Isabella’s hands outside the gates of Winchester, squatting, chained like a dog, until a condemned felon, in return for a pardon, struck off his head. Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, the most handsome man in England, half-brother to a king, uncle to another, a prince of the blood, son of the great Edward and saintly Margaret, slaughtered like a pig! Who says the Furies do not pursue or that the sins of the father, or the mother, are not visited upon the next generation? Yet that was the path I was about to follow, blood-soaked and violent. Others walked with me: great lords, princes of the royal house, bishops and ladies, knights and generals, all brought down, lower than hell. But that was for the future.

On that Annunciation Eve, Isabella and I had to while away the hours as well as flatter the queen dowager. We sat on faldstools round the great-mantled hearth of the queen dowager’s solar near the Painted Chamber in the Old Palace of Westminster. A harsh, cold day even though spring was three days old. A fire roared in the dark, vaulted hearth. The logs crackled red in the heat. The herbal pouches split to give off puffs of summer smells and drive away the iron-cold feel of winter. We shared a jug of hippocras, heating it with a fiery iron and mixing in nutmeg, whilst we plucked at crushed honey-coated sweetmeats from a mazer fashioned out of vine root which, the queen dowager had solemnly assured us, came from the Holy Land. I remember that mazer well: gilded with silver and displaying the Five Wounds of Christ against the IHS insignia. I sat staring at it whilst the flames roared, the charcoal braziers crackled and the torches, candles and lantern horns sent the shadows dancing, a fitting prologue to the horrid murders about to slip like a horde of ghosts into our lives.

At the time my mistress and I were utterly bored, though Isabella schooled her lovely features like a novice. She crouched, head slightly down, the folds of her gauze veil hiding her lustrous hair, her fur cloak, still clasped about her, slightly opened in the front to reveal a woollen dress of dark blue, its lace fringes resting on the fur-lined buskins protecting her feet. Next to her, Margaret, the queen dowager, was garbed like a nun in dark robes, her face and head framed by a pure white wimple. Around her gloved fingers were a pair of ave beads with gorget of silver and a gold cross. A serene face, cold as clay; those heavy-lidded eyes, square chin and bloodless lips recalled the stony features of Margaret’s redoubtable brother. I always considered her face to be chiselled out of marble, and even then I wondered if her soul reflected her features. Margaret, the devout, the holy one! Even her drinking cup depicted scenes from the passion of Thomas a Becket. Around the rim, as Margaret had tediously told me on at least three occasions, were the pious words: Of God’s Blessed hand be He that taketh this cup and drinketh to me . On the wall behind her was painted: God who died upon the Rood. He bought us with His Blessed Blood upon that hardy tree .

Oh yes, Margaret, the saint, the bore, the empty head. Ah well, I should have been more prudent and reflected on the adage: Cacullus non facit monachum : ‘the cowl doesn’t make the monk’. Or in her case, the wimple the nun! On a stool at the far side of Margaret sat the queen dowager’s constant companion and kindred spirit, Margaret de Clare, sister of Gilbert, Earl of Gloucester, and wife to Peter Gaveston. An ill-matched pair surely, or, perhaps, one fashioned in heaven, for de Clare did not interfere in Gaveston’s affairs. She was whey-faced, redeemed only by expressive eyes and an ever-petulant mouth. De Clare adored the queen dowager, and imitated her in every way, particularly her piety and her public passion for relics and pilgrimages. I deemed both of them pious simpletons, but then I was green in matters of the heart, whilst experience is the harshest teacher. Isabella secretly dubbed them ‘the great Margaret and the lesser’ or ‘the Holy Margaret and the even holier’. She could mimic both to perfection: their sanctimonious expressions, dull looks and monotonous gabbling about the sanctity of a shard of shin bone.

On that particular day, despite her innocent looks and questioning blue eyes, Isabella had been teasing them both about the so-called glories of Glastonbury Abbey, where the bodies of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere had allegedly been found during the late king’s reign, together with the magical sword Excalibur and the mystical Grail Cup of Christ. The two saintly Margarets (and I write as I saw at that moment of time) warbled like songbirds about visiting Glastonbury later in the spring and wondered if her grace would like to join them. My mistress, as she later informed me, bit back her screamed reply. Due to the Lords, she could scarcely leave Westminster whilst her household exchequer was empty; she simply lacked the silver to travel. Of course, as always, she behaved herself, winked at me and innocently asked if the revenues of the good abbey had greatly increased due to their miraculous discoveries. The queen dowager was on the verge of a new homily about the mystical rose bush at the abbey, a sprig she claimed sprouted from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, when Guido the Psalter intervened. He and Agnes d’Albret were also of the queen dowager’s entourage and were usually present whenever we met her. From the start I was wary of Agnes, a young woman just past her twentieth summer, tall and slim, a mop of fiery red hair framing a peaked white face with slanted green eyes and a pert, mischievous mouth. She was dressed in a high-collared tight-fitting kirtle of tawny sarcanet, and sat throughout the dowager’s sermon studying me carefully, as well she might. She was a kinswoman of both the Abbot of St Germain and Marigny, who had just arrived in England and were lodged elsewhere in the abbey precincts. She seemed friendly enough, though she must have known about the deep rancour between myself and the French court.

Guido the Psalter acted differently. An apothecary, a leech, his real name was Pierre Bernard, a Parisian who’d allegedly left France due to an unfortunate incident at the Sorbonne when a magister was stabbed during a tavern brawl. Guido had fled for sanctuary to England, where he successfully petitioned the queen dowager for protection against her brother’s law officers and won a place in her household. A most resourceful man, he was both minstrel and jongleur; Guido was also skilled in leechcraft, an apothecary learned in matters of physic. I had met him quite frequently since his arrival in England after the coronation of Isabella. He seemed a lively, merry soul, with his sensitive, smooth features and close-cropped black hair. I was fascinated by his long fingers, white as lily stalks. Guido claimed he could feel pain from a patient merely by pressing his fingertips against the flesh. I did not believe him. Yet he was no jackanapes or counterfeit man. He openly mocked superstitions such as the power of the emerald being such a protection against poison that if a toad looked at it, its eyes would crack. He also quietly confessed that the queen dowager’s interest in relics and elaborate pilgrimages were tedious in the extreme. Oh yes he did, clever man! Ah well, the scriptures rightly say, ‘Judge not and ye shall not be judged.’ I say, judge and he shall be truly surprised! On that day Guido caught my eye, winked, and when his mistress paused in her description of the mystical rose of Glastonbury, swiftly intervened.