Free Isabeau, A Novel of Queen Isabella and Sir Roger Mortimer by N. Gemini Sasson Page A

conquest of the rebels, and sing honeyed phrases to the glory of King Edward while they drank themselves beneath the tables.
    We never saw the inside of Shrewsbury Castle, never stepped within its warmth or were offered a meal to silence our rumbling bellies. Our hands were tied with rope that smelled of damp hay and manure. Like livestock loaded up for market, we were shoved onto the bed of a wagon and taken away.
    A single falsehood had robbed us of our freedom. Meanwhile, Edward was free to do as he pleased. Not a lord was left in England who would dare defy him.

 
    6
     
    Roger Mortimer:
    Tower of London – February, 1322

    THE ROPE THAT BOUND my hands together burned raw into my flesh. My wrists had been chafed bloody on the first day, the cords drawn so tight that my fingers went numb. I dared not turn or stretch my hands even slightly to try to relieve the discomfort. If I developed an infection, they would gladly let me rot to death.
    The slumbering countryside rolled by in a blur; the dull gray of a winter sky blending with the mud-brown of earth. A dense mantle of smoke lay still and suffocating above the rooftops of the towns. Deep, bone-biting cold enveloped the land, sinking its teeth into exposed flesh. Every tree limb and grass stem was covered in a pearly frost. Small rivers had frozen into ribbons of ice. Had I been a free man, instead of a prisoner mired in gloom, I might have seen some beauty in it.
    I wedged my fingers between my knees to warm them. The wagon that my uncle, Edmund and I were being transported in rattled incessantly. I drifted between half-sleep and hazy wakefulness. In my more lucid hours, I searched the faces of passing strangers. I hoped beyond hope that some old ally would come to our rescue. But no one afforded us more than a glance of mockery. Most dared not look at all with the king’s livery surrounding us.
    I hungered. Hurt. Slept hardly at all. Lost count of the number of days we were on the road, even though it must have been no more than a week. Always, day slipped into night without distinction.
    Suddenly, the right front wheel plummeted into a hole. My head banged against the back plank of the driver’s seat and my teeth came down sharply on my tongue. Before I could recover from the jolt, the wagon bounced upward. My chin snapped forward onto my chest. A blow of pain hammered through the back of my head and down my neck. I thought the axel might break and we would be tumbled into the roadway to be crushed by the hooves of the guards’ horses, but the wagon wobbled unstoppably on.
    I looked around only to discover it was night again. Somehow, I had slept. To my left, still as a dog lazing by the hearth, my son Edmund lay flat on his back. Blankly, he gazed up at the stars through a rare break in the clouds. Since leaving Shrewsbury he had not spoken at all. Rather than flee to Picardy, where his younger brother Geoffrey served in the household of Joan’s relatives, the de Fiennes, Edmund had chosen to stay and fight beside me. But it had not been much of a fight for him thus far. At Bridgnorth I would not even allow him to take part in the assault across the bridge. I had wanted to keep him safe. At Shrewsbury, I had delivered him straight into Edward’s hands. Now this. A bleak end to a life barely begun.
     Except for Edmund and Geoffrey, the rest of my children were at Wigmore with Joan. King Edward would have sent a small army there by now. I might never know what had become of them, or the child Joan was expecting. I would not be there to give it a name.
    “There are things,” I whispered to Edmund, “that I never had a chance to tell you, to teach you.”
    He turned his face toward me, his lips drawn tight with dread, only long enough so I could glimpse the quenched hope behind his eyes.
    “Fight only when forced to,” I went on, “and when you do, let others take the advance. Never lower your shield until the one you are fighting has spent himself. A knight