Mathilde 02 - The Poison Maiden Read Online Free PDF

willing to purge themselves by military service in Scotland, the grant of offices and benefices, safe conducts for alien merchants to travel safely from Dover. I managed the spicery accounts as well as those of both the buttery and pantry. Above all I dealt with a myriad of ailments, including those of my mistress, whose monthly courses always brought her pain and discomfort. I treated these with great burnet, marjoram and camomile. She also suffered from rashes, a legacy of upset humours when she was a child. I soothed these with soap water and special potions distilled from herbs. I also dealt with the ailments of others: catarrh, stomach cramps, cuts, bruises and injuries. In the most serious cases, or when in doubt, I would recommend a visit to the physicians at St Bartholomew’s or St Mary’s Bethlehem. I acted as Isabella’s clerk in the queen’s secret chancery, my quill pen cut to my liking; or, escorted by Demontaigu, as her confidential messenger to various parts of the city. I loved such occasions, sitting cowled and hooded in some London tavern, be it the Swan in Splendour, the Honeycorn, or the Bell of Jerusalem. I would chatter to Demontaigu like a child. He would listen carefully. Sometimes he would touch me lightly. I would respond. He rarely talked of his priesthood. Occasionally he mentioned his hunger for silence, for a normal, restful life away from the hurly-burly of court life. People took him to be what he was, a clerk in priestly orders. He would discreetly celebrate his Jesus or morrow mass just after daybreak, when the bells of the palace and the abbey were clanging. I would kneel at a prie-dieu and stare at those hands grasping the singing bread or the sacred goblet. I’d bow my head and blush at my waking dreams of the night before. Deus meus! Tears sting my eyes. My heart grieves at the sheer loss, the thought of such bittersweet memories.
    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,