@ofanjous continued from x
Grief had hardened Isabella’s appearance: that heavily jeweled, sharply chiseled countenance, proudly poised on her long neck, now worlds apart from the Queen who once governed England, languishing under the protection of a weak, unstable King. Yet, time had failed to shave away the vestiges of striking allure – beneath the pall of grief and enmity held the bones of an exquisite women, once professed to be the most beautiful of all European brides. But the rank fog that hung over the battlefield, smothering the blood-soaked soil from which Henry had snatched his crown, and the unearthly wails of husbands, sons, thickening up the ground with their gorged bodies, had devoured Isabella’s patience for him; a moth-eaten thread. Henry saw it clearly: the revulsion burrowed in the amber of her eyes, molten.
To her, Henry Plantagenet would die an Earl of March – worse still, a usurper.
Her words were slippery, a gore-slicked dagger’s shaft. The King maneuvered about them with a soldier’s vigilance, careful not to permit his own ire to ignite, to lick into a full-fledged flame. In truth, the boy’s loss clung to him, like the smell of that acrid, demonic fog rolling over Towton, engulfing those it blanketed in smoke. But then, had God and St Gabriel not gazed smilingly upon him, that scarred, mud-soaked face, the sour haze dissolving under the weak heat of an April sun? Blazed his blood-soaked tunic with Kingly glory? ‘We all have our crosses to bear, Isabella,’ Henry uttered. ‘Not one among us is without taint of sin. And, if my memory serves me, there be some among us who question if the blood spilled that day truly ran blue. The Almighty himself has proclaimed me King – His chosen vessel. Whose mortal tongue am I to refuse the decree of Divine Providence?’
Fixed on the crucifix surmounted above them, Henry returned his gaze to hers, the clash like steel blades, and continued: ‘we both suffered that year.’ Grim memories of his own father – stripped, tortured, mocked by Edmund’s legions – flickered in his eyes. A paper crown, so whispered witnesses of that macabre day, placed onto his brow before that heavy head struck a pike. ‘Whether the son of a king, or that of a butcher, Fate has been cruel. It is a sad day in England when so many lives – boys with implacable promise – are lost.’ Henry made to lay his hand across Isabella’s but, as his fingers hovered over hers, the coolness of her flesh – like that of an immortal corpse – compelled him to stop. ‘Is it not high time we drain the rivers of blood, and come together in concord of our shared isle?’