Paul Doherty - The Cup of Ghosts

I remember it all so vividly: a cold morning with the river mist boiling across the Tower, shrouding walls and turrets, hanging across the ward like a curtain, deadening sound except for the harsh cawing of the ravens. The mist even seeped under the door into the nave of St Peter’s. I wondered if the wispy tendrils were the ghosts of those who wander searching for absolution. Sandewic paced up and down the sanctuary describing his work in the chapel. He paused and gestured.

‘This, Mathilde, is my Cup of Ghosts!’

I asked him what he meant.

‘If only the king would come here!’ he continued, ignoring my question. ‘If he’d only reflect and pray.’ The constable lowered his head, looking at me from under bushy eyebrows. ‘This place holds the Cup of Ghosts, just as in Arthur’s tale the Chapel Perilous possessed the Holy Grail.’ He then swiftly passed on to other matters so I let it rest. ‘Soul does speak to soul — cor loquitur cor — heart speaks to heart.’

Perhaps even then Sandewic was trying to warn me. A soldier of the old school, he was reluctant to say anything direct yet he tried to be honest and blunt. Once outside the chapel he grasped my hand and took me into a small buttery adjoining a kitchen, one of those outhouses which served the garrison. We sat breaking our fast before the fire. Sandewic could have spoken but servants were milling about. Eventually he grasped my wrist as if he’d had reached a decision and took me out down to the great Watergate; its portcullis was raised, pinpricks of torchlight glowed through the mist and the clatter of men unloading the barges echoed dully. Sandewic pushed me into a recess. He pulled my cloak up about me and thrust a pomander into my hand as some protection against the reeking stench from the waterways. Then he gestured at the torchlight.

‘What do you think is happening, Mathilde?’

‘They’re unloading stores.’

‘Weapons,’ Sandewic replied. ‘Bows, arrows, halberds and shields. I visited the Bowyer Tower yesterday. My lord Gaveston was also there supervising the work; our armouries and smithies are kept very busy.’

‘ Mon seigneur the king is preparing for war against his earls?’

‘Yes,’ Sandewic agreed. ‘ Mon seigneur certainly is.’ He turned. We stood as close as lovers. I could smell his ale-rich breath, those watery blue eyes bright with anger. ‘Did you notice, Mathilde, when we journeyed here from Dover, how we visited no castles but rested at monasteries and priories?’ I nodded. ‘Edward was insistent on that,’ Sandewic explained. ‘He did not wish others to see how those places were preparing for war, garrisoned with troops, full of stores and arms. And in France,’ he continued, ‘when I went riding out? King Philip was doing the same, preparing.’

‘War with France?’ I asked.

‘Perhaps,’ Sandewic replied.

‘Is that why the French were told to make their own way here and kept well away from the Tower?’

We left the recess, going back to the gloomy gateway.

‘I’ve seen war, Mathilde, here in England,’ Sandewic declared. ‘Brother against brother, father against son. I fought for Earl Simon at Lewes and Evesham. I’ve seen the dead piled high like blood-soaked sacks, trees rich with corpses, villages burning, their wells crammed with cadavers. I’ve fought in Scotland and Wales and seen cruelty not even the Lord Satan could imagine: men skinned alive, maimed and tortured then slung in cages over castle walls to rot to death.’ He stamped his feet on the cobbles. ‘I don’t want that to happen again. Tell that to your mistress.’

In the days following I often thought of Sandewic’s warnings and discussed them with Isabella. She could do little, being taken up with the coronation, and visited, as she sardonically put it, almost on the hour by Sir John Baquelle. The merchant prince would sweep into her chambers with clothiers, jewellers, goldsmiths, grocers, silversmiths, all eager to offer presents and protestations of loyalty as well as to catch the princess’s eye with samples of their goods. In my arrogance I’d always considered Baquelle a pompous nonentity, but that fat, jolly merchant, Lord Pigeon as Isabella secretly dubbed him, was powerful in the city and instrumental in raising the loans for the crown King Edward desperately needed. Baquelle would often be closeted with both king and favourite, as well as with the exchequer officials in the Treasury Tower. I wondered if he too was party to the king’s warlike preparations.

Other visitors arrived at the fortress, the great earls with their retinues seeking an audience with the king. Their demands were well known. They wanted a parliament to meet at Westminster as soon as possible to discuss ‘certain weighty matters’. Edward fobbed them off with excuses. Marigny and his two familiars, des Plaisans and Nogaret, also arrived to pay their courtesies to both the king and his new bride. Edward met them in the Wakefield Tower. They later shared wine with Isabella, who refused to allow me to attend, claiming Marigny did not wish me well. I was surprised at this, but my mistress was insistent. In the end the meeting did not last long. Isabella announced she felt unwell and returned to her own quarters, where, in the most robust of health, she stormed up and down her chamber cursing Marigny as her father’s ‘prying eyes’.

‘They tried to foist a physician on me!’ she exclaimed. ‘One of my father’s creatures. He became too familiar, he wanted to know. .’ She fought for breath.

‘If you have lain with your husband?’

‘God’s teeth, Mathilde, no! If I might be pregnant with child!’ Isabella threw her head back and laughed. ‘In such a short time?’ she shouted. ‘Is he so monkish to know so little, and even if I was, even if I am, he’d be the last to know.’ Isabella flounced down on to a bench. ‘I informed him I no longer wished to converse.’ Isabella bubbled with laughter. ‘I clutched my stomach and declared I felt quite sick. I’ve never seen Marigny smile so much. He even had the impudence to insist, yet again, that I be tended by a French physician.’ Isabella blew a kiss at me. ‘I told him I was, by you.’

‘Was that wise, your grace?’

‘Was that wise, your grace?’ Isabella mimicked. ‘Marigny’s face! Oh, Mathilde, you should have seen it, so suffused with rage! He asked if you were another gift I’d given my husband.’

The hairs on the back of my neck curled, a shiver of fear as if some dark presence had brushed me with its feathery wings.

‘Mathilde, what is the matter?’

‘Madame,’ I used the address I always did when I was blunt with her, ‘madame, please repeat what you said. Do so slowly.’

Isabella did, then halfway through broke off.

‘Of course,’ she whispered, ‘how could he know?’ She rose slowly to her feet. ‘How would Marigny know that it was I who recommended Edward give my wedding presents to Gaveston? No one else was present that night. I later spoke to mon seigneur , and he swore that the great game was a matter of the utmost secrecy, so who, Mathilde? Sandewic?’ she added quickly. ‘For a while he was outside the door.’

‘Gaveston?’ I replied. ‘Even the king, despite his protestations?’ I thought back to that evening. No one else had been present, and ever since, Isabella had maintained the pretence, even to Casales and Rossaleti, that her wedding gifts had been seized by Edward for Gaveston. I recall the malicious glee of the favourite as he taunted de Clauvelin. Pourte’s death, Wenlok thrashing on the floor, the attacks on me. Was Gaveston’s hand, even the king’s, behind it all? I wanted to sit like a scholar, collect and sift all I knew, but I was unable to. So many matters were pressing in, I was confused. Isabella and I were still pawns in a game we could not even hope to control.