The Accursed Kings Series Books 1-3: The Iron King, The Strangled Queen, The Poisoned Crown

‘The King of England’s justice has been enforced this morning,’ said Signor Boccaccio. ‘This is how criminals, or those who are named criminals in order to get rid of them, finish here.’

‘A curious sight to welcome strangers with,’ said Guccio.

‘It is a warning that they are not entering a town of light-hearted gaiety.’

At that time, this was the only bridge across the Thames; it was built as a street over the river and its houses were of wood, one pressed close against another. Within them every sort of business was carried on. Twenty arches, each sixty feet high, supported the extraordinary structure. It had taken nearly a hundred years to build and Londoners were very proud of it. A strong current boiled about the arches; washing was hung to dry from the windows; and women emptied slops into the river.

Beside London Bridge, the Ponte Vecchio at Florence seemed but a mere trifle in Guccio’s memory, and the Arno a brook compared with the Thames. He said so to his companion.

‘All the same we teach them everything,’ the latter replied.

It took them about twenty minutes to cross the bridge because of the crowd and the stubbornness of beggars who seized them by their boots.

Arrived at the farther bank, Guccio saw the Tower on his right hand, its huge, tragic mass standing out against the grey sky. Following Signor Boccaccio, he went on into the city. The noise, the coming and going in the streets, the strange rumbling of the city under a leaden sky, the heavy smell of burning peat lying over the town, the cries from the taverns, the impertinences of the women of the streets, the brutal, brawling soldiery, all seemed to Guccio at once curious and intimidating. Paris, in his memory, seemed suddenly to possess clarity and light, while London at midday appeared darker than night.

Having progressed some three hundred yards, the travellers turned to the left into Lombard Street, where the houses of the Italian banks were marked by painted iron signs. These houses, of one, two or more storeys, had little exterior splendour, but were exquisitely maintained, with their doors polished and their windows barred. Signor Boccaccio left Guccio in front of the Albizzi Bank. The two travellers separated with affectionate farewells, mutually congratulating each other upon the pleasure of their dawning friendship and promising to meet again soon in Paris. These are things often said by travellers but never fulfilled.

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At Westminster (#ulink_430cfc3a-d202-59b7-99a4-03d304d86885)

MASTER ALBIZZI WAS A TALL, dry-looking man with a long brown face, thick eyebrows and tufts of black hair appearing beneath his hat. He received Guccio with serene graciousness and the condescension of a great lord. He talked of his ‘house’ with a casual gesture of the hand, as if he attached no importance to the fortune of which his home was, nevertheless, a fairly remarkable manifestation. Standing behind his desk, his thin body clad in a blue velvet robe, ornamented with silver buttons, Albizzi had the manner of a Tuscan prince.

While the usual greetings were being exchanged, Guccio looked from the high oaken chairs to the Damascus hangings, from the stools of precious woods encrusted with ivory to the rich carpets that covered the whole floor, from the monumental chimney-piece to the massive silver torch-holders. And the young man could not help making a rapid valuation in his mind. ‘The carpets, sixty pounds apiece, certainly; the torch-holders, twice as much. The house, if every room in it is on the same scale as this one, must be worth three times my uncle’s.’ For, though he might dream of himself as a secret ambassador, a knight-errant of the Queen’s, Guccio was none the less a merchant, the son, grandson and great-grandson of merchants.

‘You should have taken passage in one of my ships, for we are ship-owners too, and sailed from Boulogne,’ said Master Albizzi. ‘You would have had a more comfortable crossing, Cousin.’

He had Hypocras served, an aromatic wine that one drank with comfits.

‘You want to have an audience with the Queen, do you?’ said Albizzi, playing with the great ruby that he wore on his right hand. ‘Your uncle Tolomei, whom I hold in great esteem, was wise to send you to me. I will not conceal from you that this particular business, impossible perhaps for others, will be easy for me. One of my principle clients, who owes me much, is called Hugh the Despenser.’

‘The particular friend of Edward?’ asked Guccio.

‘No, Hugh the father. His influence is less evident but all the greater for that. He cleverly uses the favour shown his son, and if things go on as they are, he is likely to rule the kingdom. He is, therefore, not precisely of the King’s party.’

‘In that case,’ asked Guccio, ‘is he the right person from whom I should ask assistance?’

‘Cousin,’ interrupted Albizzi with a smile, ‘you seem still very young. Here, as elsewhere, are people who, while belonging to neither one party nor the other, profit from both by playing one off against the other. You need only measure out your smiles and words, know how to profit by the weaknesses of the great, indeed, get to know them better than they know themselves. I know what I can do.’

He summoned his secretary and rapidly wrote a few lines which he then sealed.

‘You will be at Westminster this very day after dinner, Cousin,’ he said, sending the secretary on his way, ‘and the Queen will give you audience. You will seem to everyone but a merchant of precious stones and goldsmith’s work, come especially from Italy and recommended to her by me. Like all women, Isabella likes pretty things. While showing her jewels, you will be able to give her your message.’

He went to a great coffer, opened it, and took out a casket covered in red velvet and ornamented with a gold lock.

‘Here are your credentials,’ he added.

Guccio raised the cover; there were rings with shining stones, heavy necklaces of pearls; at the bottom of the box lay a mirror framed in emeralds and diamonds.

‘Should the Queen wish to buy one of these jewels, what do I do?’

Albizzi smiled.

‘The Queen will buy nothing from you direct, because she has no money in her own right and her expenditure is supervised. If she should wish to purchase something, she will let me know. Last month, I had made for her three purses for which I have not yet been paid.’

When they had eaten, and Albizzi had made excuses for the poorness of the meal, which, nevertheless, was worthy of the most aristocratic table, Guccio mounted his horse again to go to Westminster. He was accompanied by a servant from the bank, a sort of bodyguard, who wore a short black leather coat and carried the casket fastened to his belt by a chain.

Guccio’s heart beat with pride as he went along, his chin held high with a great air of assurance, looking out upon the town as if he were to become its proprietor the next day.

The Palace, though imposing from immense proportions, was floridly Gothic in decoration and seemed to him in somewhat bad taste as compared with the buildings of Tuscany, and particularly to those built in Sienna in those years. ‘These people already lack sun and it would seem that they do everything they can to prevent the little they have entering their buildings,’ he thought.

He entered by the gate of honour and dismounted under a vault where the soldiers of the bodyguard were warming their hands at a fire of huge logs. An equerry came forward.

‘Signor Baglioni? You are expected. Will you follow me?’ he said in French.

Still escorted by the servant carrying the casket of jewels, Guccio followed the equerry. They crossed a courtyard surrounded by a cloister, then another, then mounted a huge stone staircase and arrived at the private apartments. The ceilings were enormously high and echoed curiously; the light was dim. As they crossed a succession of dark, freezing halls and galleries, Guccio tried vainly to preserve his air of fine assurance, but they made him feel small. In a place like this one could easily die without trace. At the end of a corridor some forty yards long, Guccio saw a group of men dressed in rich clothes, their robes edged with fur; each bore on his left side the bright gleam of a sword-hilt. This was the Queen’s guard.

The equerry told Guccio to wait for him and left him there, amid gentlemen who looked at him with a certain mockery in their expression and exchanged among themselves remarks in English which he could not understand. Suddenly Guccio felt a vague, but overwhelming, foreboding. Supposing something unforeseen occurred? Supposing, at this Court, which he knew to be torn by rival factions, divided by intrigue, he should become a suspect? Supposing, before he ever saw the Queen, he was seized, searched, and the message were discovered? All the fears that a panic-struck imagination can conjure up attacked him, combining with his anxiety not to show his disquiet or let it betray him.

When the equerry, returning to fetch him, touched his sleeve, he started. He took the casket from Albizzi’s servant’s hand but, in his haste, he forgot that it was attached by a chain to the man’s belt, who was suddenly dragged forward. The chain became entangled; the padlock fell. There was laughter, and Guccio felt that he was making a fool of himself. As a result, he entered the Queen’s presence in a state of embarrassment, humiliation and confusion, and found himself face to face with her before he even realised it.

Isabella was sitting very straight on a chair, which looked to Guccio like a throne, in the same room where, a little while before, she had received Robert of Artois. A young woman with a narrow face and rigid deportment sat beside her on a stool. Guccio went down on one knee and searched his mind for the elusive compliment. He had imagined – from what absurd illusion? – that the Queen would be alone. The presence of a third person damped all his splendid expectations. The Queen spoke first.

‘Lady le Despenser,’ she said, ‘let us look at the jewels this young Italian has brought. I am told they are marvellous.’

The name Despenser disquieted Guccio, made him anxious.

What possible role could a Despenser have about the Queen?

Having risen at a sign from Isabella, he opened the casket and showed it to her. Lady le Despenser, glancing at it, said in a dry, curt voice, ‘The jewels are certainly quite beautiful, but they are not for us. We cannot buy them, Madam.’

The Queen looked put out but, containing her anger, replied, ‘I know, Madam, that you, your husband and indeed all your family take such great care of the finances of the kingdom that one might think they were your very own. But here you will permit me to spend my own money as I please. I notice too, Madam, that when some stranger or merchant comes to the Palace, my French ladies are always absent, as if by some accident, so that you or your mother-in-law are in attendance upon me as if you were on guard. I suspect that, if these same jewels were shown to my husband or to yours, they would find a use for them in loading each other with them as women dare not do.’

However much she might try to control herself, Isabella could not help showing her resentment against this abominable family who, while bringing the crown into contempt, pillaged the treasury. For not only did the Despensers, father and mother, profit in an abject way from the love the King bore their son, but even the wife of the latter consented happily to the scandal, even forwarded it. This Lady le Despenser the younger, born Eleanor de Clare, was moreover the sister-in-law of the late Gaveston, that is to say that King Edward II had married the nearest relative of his former lover, who had been beheaded, to his present favourite.

Vexed at the affront, Eleanor le Despenser rose and busied herself in a far corner of the enormous room, though she never took her eyes from the Queen and the young Siennese.

Guccio, recovering some of the self-possession that was ordinarily natural to him, but which today had been so strangely lacking, at last dared look Isabella in the face. Now or never, he must make the young Queen understand that he was on her side, that he pitied her misfortunes and wished for nothing but to serve her. But she was so cold in manner, showed such indifference to his person, that his heart froze. Undoubtedly she was beautiful, but her beauty seemed to Guccio to repel all thought of desire, tenderness or even understanding. She seemed to him more like a religious statue than a living woman. Her beautiful blue eyes had the same cold, fixed stare as those of Philip the Fair. How could one say to such a woman, ‘Madam, we are of similar age, we are both young and I am in love with you’? It seemed that inheritance, royal function and consecration, had created a being who differed from the rest of the human race and for whom time and flesh and blood had other rules.

All Guccio could do was to take Robert of Artois’s iron ring from his finger, taking care to hide the gesture from the Despenser, and say, ‘Madam, you will do me the favour of looking at this ring and examining its design?’

The Queen nodded her head and, her expression unaltered, looked at the ring.

‘It pleases me,’ she said. ‘I imagine you have other things worked by the same hand?’

Guccio pretended to search the casket, played with some pearls and, taking the message from his pocket, said, ‘The prices are all marked.’

‘Let us go to the light that I may better see these pearls,’ replied Isabella.