Behold the Bird in Flight: A Novel of Isabella d’Angoulême
- N.J. Mastro
- Aug 29
- 7 min read
Oh, how I love novels that transport me to the past! Behold the Bird in Flight: A Novel of An Abducted Queen did just that. In it, author Terri Lewis presents readers with a fictional account of Isabella d’Angoulême, a French noblewoman who rose to unusual rank and power in Europe in the thirteenth century.
The story opens in 1199 when Isabelle is nearing her twelfth birthday, an important time for her. At twelve, society will regard her as marriageable. Today the idea gives us the creeps, but 800 years ago, such was the norm. Daughters of wealthy men were commodities, preyed upon by other wealthy men for their dowry and breeding potential.
Isabelle is no exception; her duty is to marry well. Related to the royal houses of Jerusalem, Hungary, Aragon, and Castile, she’s no small catch. Groomed since childhood for her role in securing a good match, she looks forward to becoming a wife.
In the first few pages, however, we fear for Isabelle, or Isi, as she is often called. We see how naïve and impulsive she is, dangerous traits for women in premedieval times. When she ventures into an apple orchard with her friend, Alain, a kitchen boy on her father’s grand estate, disaster strikes. A bee stings Alain, and the lad dies from anaphylaxis. Villeins (feudal tenants) who witness his death accuse Isabelle of putting a demonic spell on him.
Superstitions ran deep then in the minds of people of all classes. Isabelle’s parents recognize the danger she is in and hastily promise her in marriage to Hugh IX de Lusignan, a young nobleman visiting Angoulême. Days later Isabelle travels with him to the Lusignan family’s estate to await the nuptials.
In Lusignan Isabelle is disappointed with Hugh, whom readers learn though his point of view is in love with a peasant woman. He ignores Isabelle. The dynamics between them change when King John of England visits. In a wily prank, Isabelle flirts with the king to make Hugh jealous so he will pay attention to her. Her trickery backfires when the king becomes smitten with her. Hugh takes note and realizes he loves her as well, igniting a competition between the men and placing Isabelle in a treacherous position.
I don’t want to spoil the novel for you, so I won’t say more other than to assure you the story is no simple love triangle. At the time, England was at war with France, pitting King John and King Philippe II of France against each other. At stake are kingdoms and the life of a woman who gets more than she bargained for.
So Who Was the Real Isabella d’Angoulême?
Isabella d’Angoulême was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed young woman so renowned for her beauty that she has sometimes been called the Helen of the Middle Ages. After reading bios of her, a better nickname might be Hell N. Joy. She seemed to generate drama wherever she went.
I’ll not describe her life here; to do so would ruin your opportunity to read Behold the Bird in Flight without knowing how her story ends. However, it’s worth mentioning that Lewis tells Isabella’s story through a sympathetic lens, revealing her life in spirit, if not in strict, literal terms, through the first person voice of Isabelle, the fictional Isabella.
Isabelle utterly enchants. She is lively and scheming at times, but always well-intentioned, just as I’d like to think the real Isabella was. The novel reminded me how horrible life was for women, even those with wealth and property. Entirely at the mercy of their fathers and husbands, they had to be artful, even deceptive if necessary, to survive. Like the real Isabella, Isi quickly learns to maneuver with diplomacy and skill.
Historically speaking, the actual Hugh IX de Lusignan was a minor noble. But when his story intersected with Isabella’s, his, too, became a memorable one—in real life and in fiction. Not much is known about him, giving Lewis license to invent him. She chooses to give him a more pleasant ending than history awarded. Again, I didn’t mind the departure from fact. It served the story well. Fiction is, after all, fiction.
King John of England, on the other hand, was a major historical figure most remembered for signing the Magna Carta, the charter of 1215 that limited the power of the English monarch and established the principle that everyone, including the king, was subject to the law. The Magna Carta became central to English, and later, American constitutional law, forwarding rights we now take for granted, including due process and habeas corpus. But King John was a ruthless ruler, a bad actor as far as kings go. Kings beheaded people and castrated them all the time, but John took cruelty to another level.
Behind Writing the Story
After reading Behold the Bird in Flight, I wanted to know more about what went into Terri Lewis’s masterful blending of fact and fiction, so I reached out to her. We had an email and in-person exchange. Below is a summary of our conversation.
Brava for how well you integrated Isabelle’s, Hugh’s, and King John’s voices into such a smooth narrative. What was behind this choice as an author? Why did you think all three were essential?
Terri Lewis: I always knew I would lead with Isabelle. Behold the Bird in Flight is her story, and I wanted to bring her to full life. The very first chapters were in her voice with brief appearances by Hugh. When she began to notice him, a school-girl crush, you might say, I invented their relationship. Hugh also needed a say in these early pages. Like Isabelle, he had no choice in whom he would marry. To further round out the story, I needed King John’s viewpoint. Only he would care about the politics that were shaping England, politics that formed a tense background. When I started the chapter of John arriving in Lusignan to collect monies owed, I immediately heard his voice. That was a gift, and I went with it. It helped me gain empathy with him, even though he is the villain in the story. His problems as king were not completely of his own making.
Isabelle was naïve when she was young, but she could also be very forceful, especially when she grew older and wiser. What did you have to do to get inside her head from when she was twelve to when she matured into a woman?
Terri Lewis: An uncomfortable admission—I began by remembering myself at eleven, so naïve, slightly sassy, and wanting to get out into the world, to have more experiences with less oversight from my parents. At eleven, I began to talk with girlfriends about boys, so I made Isabelle curious about love, a romantic at heart. And finally, an anomaly—Isabelle is observant of adults as well as nature, whereas I only cared about nature at her age. Once I had her internal life, I sent her into a series of dire events and watched her maturing responses. However, I think her core stayed the same: romantic, clever, passionate.
I like the authorial choices you made to render Isabelle more relatable to modern readers. The book was also an excellent portrayal of life during the high middle ages. I learned so much! In your research, what surprised you the most about the era, or what did you find terribly unusual when compared to life today?
Terri Lewis: The sleeping situation was a surprise. A noble family slept on a dais in the main hall, separated by a curtain from their servants, who slept on the floor. The family disassembled the bedding every morning because they used the hall for other things. It made sense when you realize it was a stone room heated only by fire in the middle of the space. During Isabelle’s time, fireplaces were just coming into being. Wealthy men were adding a “solar,” a room for the family.
Another surprise was discovering the Church allowed intercourse only for conception, never for pleasure. That simple fact made Isabelle’s story easier to write and gave me a great plot point. Also, hunting birds had class and gender designations, which fascinated me. White gyrfalcons for a king, light-weight peregrines for a woman, and so on.
You brought such a strong sense of “being there” to the story. The descriptions, the imagery, and the sensory details you incorporated into the narrative were all very vivid. Did you visit the places you mentioned in the book? If so, how did that impact your inspiration for the story and how you went about writing it?
Terri Lewis: I had traveled in England and France and visited castles, but many of the castles that are popular, like Chenonceau and Amboise, date from later periods and have been restored. So my husband and I spent a week in Chinon because its castle had become an important place in my novel, and the online maps confused me. A chasm divided the keep. I wanted to use that in the story but needed to be sure. While we were there, we visited many other castles. Luckily my hubby is an enthusiast for them. Angers was old but too massive for Isabelle’s home, but in Loches, I found ruins that gave me the feeling I needed—arrow staircases, stone walls, and the ghost of a fireplace. And in Montresor, I found a view of an old castle where I placed Isabelle’s romance.
*
I hope you’ll pick up a copy Behold the Bird in Flight. Whether painting a picture of the era or unveiling important history, Lewis’s attention to detail permeates the entire novel as she brings Isabella d’Angoulême to life. Sadly, Isabella isn’t kindly remembered in history books, a victim, perhaps, of the men in her orbit who dragged her into their foibles. Though we may never know, it leads me to wonder, how often has this been the case in the lives of women from the past? Far too many, I fear, given women’s lack of autonomy. Thanks to historical fiction authors, their stories can now become known in new ways.
For more reviews of Behold the Bird in Flight, click here.
N.J. Mastro is the author of Solitary Walker: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft.
“A captivating work of historical fiction, intellectually stimulating and dramatically engrossing... The author’s prose authentically captures the dialogue of the time and powerfully evokes the contradictions that make Wollstonecraft’s legacy so richly complex.”
-Kirkus Reviews