Feast of St Joseph of Arimathea, March 1314
The stink of it swamped from the ?le des Juifs, pervasive and acrid, wrapping round them like snake coils so that the Queen of England had to raise a scented hand to her nose. It was an irony that the fire which had burned Isabella’s hands and arms so badly the year before should now be of a help; the wounds had festered and she wore scented gloves to hide the glassy weals.
Out on the Seine, the daring were collecting the ashes of her godfather, Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Temple, burned the day before alongside Geoffroi de Charney, Master of Normandy. They had recanted their confessions publicly and her father had ordered the pyre built and the two Templars roasted slowly on it. Too slowly, as it turned out, for de Molay had uttered a long and pungent curse prophesying that his tormentors would be in Hell within the year.
Isabella thought her godfather’s name would live a long time in memory, as a martyr to the Order and not least because of the Curse he had brought down on the Pope and her father. She said it aloud, which made Beaumont, Badlesmere and the young Earl of Gloucester shift a little at the daring in it. They were well used to this slip of a queen having the cunning of a fox and more backbone than her husband, but they kept those thoughts to themselves.
As they did their views on the Templars – but publicly at least, the Order had been condemned at Vienne two years since and England’s king had followed the Pope’s instructions on it. Now the Knights of St John were taking over the Templar holdings and, for all he might gnaw his nails, Edward could do nothing about it without annoying the Holy Father, whom he needed.
‘Will my father see us?’ Isabella asked and the envoy, bland face setting itself like a moulded pudding into regret and sadness, began to expound on why King Philip of France would not. The curt wave of the scented glove cut him off in mid-flow and no one marvelled at the 18-year-old girl’s poise and command.
Well, there it was. Her father, it seemed, was in mourning for what he had had to do and she wondered if it was genuine contrition, or because he had been cursed. If she knew her father at all, he would be gnawing his knuckles with concern, as much about the macula on his glory as on his soul. Both agonies, she thought, will last long after the smell and the ashes have blown away.
This was the Philip the Fair she remembered, the handsome, cunning, treacherous, vain father and king she had known. The one who could commit the vilest acts, yet agonize over the stain on his relationship with God – but even that man seemed strangely diminished by what had happened, as if this last act of spite had sucked all the juice from him. That and the six-year search for the Templar treasure which Isabella knew had spawned this plot in the first place, a search which had uncovered … nothing.
She had no doubt that the news of the latest outrage on the last Grand Master of the Order of Poor Knights would be speeding to all the hidden ears; she wondered what they would do with their hidden treasure, these last angered Templars of the Order.
Not hand it over to her desperate husband for his wars, certes, so he would have to rely on Isabella, who had to persuade her ailing father to permit King Edward of England to mortgage the ducal dues of Gascony to the Pope, since Philip of France was Edward’s liege lord for those lands. In return, the Pope would loan Edward the money to help finance his latest enterprise, a war against the Scotch.
It was a complex dance that Isabella knew well, the intricate gilded steps that took in the wool-eager mercantile houses of Pessagno in Genoa, the Bardi and Peruzzi of Naples. None of them bothered in the slightest that their biggest rival, the Florentine Frescobaldi, had ruined themselves with similar speculative loans to Edward I.
It was simply the work of mercantiling, where a mistake would plunge you to the depths and a success make you richer than God. It was, as Isabella had long realized, the true sinew of war: gold into a muscle to fight with.
So it would be no fault of hers if the entire intricate cat’s cradle of it failed and her husband never got the money for his new invasion. So sad. A great pity that he would then have to suffer the bit and bridle on his powers by his own barons. Not her fault …
Yet, even as she flirted with the indecent treachery of it, she knew that her husband’s curbing and the fall of his latest detested favourite would need to be better planned. In the end, she would get him what he needed – God send her a sign – but let him fret a little first, as he fretted her with so many small humiliations …
‘Isabella.’