A King's Ransom (24 page)

“I’ll make no apologies for deposing Isaac Comnenus,” Richard interrupted angrily. “He usurped the Cypriot throne and treated the people so harshly that they were only too willing to assist in his overthrow—”

Now it was Hadmar’s turn to interrupt. “You need not defend your actions in Cyprus to me. I’d not have cared had you sent Isaac to the Cairo slave market instead of turning him over to the Knights Hospitaller. But Leopold felt obligated to object because his mother was a daughter of the Greek Royal House and thus a cousin to Isaac.”

Richard had far greater concerns than Isaac Comnenus and he fell silent as he considered all that Hadmar had revealed. “It makes no sense,” he said at last. “Heinrich told Leopold that he hopes to collect a large ransom. So why, then, put me on trial if his aim is to turn a profit?”

“Leopold asked that, too. Heinrich does indeed mean to demand a vast sum. But he knows that he’ll be subjected to harsh criticism for holding you prisoner. Not only does your captivity violate the Church’s protection, it breaches the rules of war, for no state of war exists between England and the empire. Leopold said that whilst Heinrich does not seem overly troubled by what the Pope might do, he does not want to add fuel to the rebellion or give German clerics an excuse to join the rebels. He thinks that once you are found guilty of betraying Christendom to the infidels—and you
will
be found guilty in his court—it will be more difficult for the Church to defend you and he’ll have a free hand to do with you whatever he wishes, even if that means selling you to the highest bidder.”

“If the highest bidder is the French king, it will be signing my death warrant. Heinrich would lose no sleep over that. Would Leopold?”

Hadmar did not answer at once, finally saying, “I think so. He knows you did not betray your fellow Christians in the Holy Land. Whether he’ll admit it or not remains to be seen, though. He’s a proud man and a stubborn one and he may well conclude that he’s gone too far along this road to turn back now.”

“Even if it means riding over a cliff? Hadmar, there is still time to stop this madness. From what you’ve been telling me, Leopold is not happy with Heinrich’s plans for me. He fears—as well he ought—that his own honor will be stained. And he must fear, too, the wrath of the Church, for even if Celestine dares not excommunicate the Holy Roman Emperor, he’d have no such compunctions about a duke. Leopold will make the perfect scapegoat. Surely he realizes that?”

“I daresay he does,” Hadmar admitted. “But he sees no way out now and so he figures he might as well profit by claiming half of the ransom. My duke is a practical man,” he said with another sad smile. “He is half Greek, after all.”

“If it is the accursed ransom he wants, he can have it. He can have it all. Convince him to forget about Heinrich and strike a deal with me. I told him I was willing to pay his ransom. I still am. I know he believes himself to be a man of honor. This may be his last chance to preserve that honor . . . and his peace of mind.”

Hadmar reached for his wine cup and drank until it was empty. “Christ Jesus, Richard,” he said softly, “do you think I have not already tried that? Leopold never bargained for any of this. He thought himself justified to hold you to account for the way you shamed him—shamed Austria—at Acre. But what Heinrich intends to do with you . . . That will gnaw away at him, poisoning his peace. Yet he sees no way out of this trap. He may not respect Heinrich, but the emperor is still his liege lord. To defy Heinrich and reach a private accord with you is beyond him. He’d see that as an act of rebellion, and he knows that Heinrich would, too. As horrified as he was by the Bishop of Liege’s murder, he is not going to rebel against the man to whom he has sworn fealty and homage.”

Shoving his chair back, Hadmar got unsteadily to his feet. “I thought you deserved to know the truth. I am sorry I cannot do more. I very much fear that what you call ‘this madness’ is not going to end well for any of us.” Without waiting for Richard’s response, he turned away, brushing aside the guard who sought to steady him as he staggered toward the door.

Richard did not move from the table. An eerie stillness seemed to have enveloped the chamber and he thought he could hear the dull thudding of his heart, the constricted rasp of his breath, even the sound of his own thoughts as they ricocheted around in his head. He poured more wine, only to set it down again quickly, for the sweet Rhenish wine tasted as bitter as wormwood and gall.

He was thirty-five and for nigh on twenty years, he’d been a soldier. By now Death was an old and familiar foe. He could not begin to count all the times he’d put his life at risk. Storms at sea, malarial fevers, sword thrusts that he’d parried just in time, lances that shattered against his shield, crossbow bolts and arrows that seared through the air with a lethal humming sound he sometimes heard in his dreams. Men said he was blessed in battle, but his body bore the scars of old wounds like any other man’s. His nephew Henri had once told him, half admiringly and half in reproach, that he was easy to find on the battlefields of the Holy Land, for he was always in the thick of the fighting, usually surrounded by a sea of saffron, the colors of Saladin’s elite Mamluk guard. He’d not denied it, for he believed that a king must lead by example, and he’d been the first to force his way into Messina, first to land upon the beach at Cyprus, and again at Jaffa. He’d long known that he did not feel the crippling fear that other men did in combat, had accepted it without question as God’s gift, proof of divine favor.

But he no longer believed that he was Fortune’s favorite, for he could make no sense of what had happened to him and his men in the past two months. Was God punishing him for his failure to take Jerusalem as he’d vowed? Had he angered the Almighty by breaking the Fifth Commandment and making war upon his father? What had he done to deserve this? How could he atone if he did not know how he’d sinned? He had no answers. He knew only that he’d never felt as desperate, as vulnerable, and as utterly alone as he did on this frigid January night at Dürnstein Castle.

CHAPTER EIGHT

JANUARY 1193

London, England

S
he had been doubly blessed, born a great beauty and a great heiress. She would be the only woman to wear the crowns of both England and France, but history would remember her by the name of her beloved duchy—Eleanor of Aquitaine. She would prove to be as controversial as she was captivating, for she never accepted the constraints that their society and the Church imposed upon women, convinced that she could rule as well as any man. At thirteen, she’d wed the King of France, Louis Capet. While Louis had been bedazzled by his lively young wife, he’d been troubled by her strong will and worldly ways, for he’d been meant for the Church, pulled from the cloisters at age ten by the unexpected death of his elder brother. For her part, Eleanor had been heard to say that she’d thought to marry a king, only to find she’d married a monk. Theirs was a clash of temperaments and cultures. Eleanor was a child of the sun-splashed south, where the pursuit of pleasure was not sinful, troubadours were held in esteem, and women were not always demure, docile, and sweetly submissive, whereas Louis was a son of the more austere, staid, and conservative north.

Their marriage endured for fifteen years, though, even surviving the disastrous Second Crusade and the scandal that trailed in Eleanor’s wake after their fateful visit to her uncle’s court at Antioch, where she had attempted to end their union by making use of the tactic that kings had always employed to rid themselves of unwanted wives—arguing that their marriage was invalid because they were related within the forbidden fourth degree. Louis had her taken from Antioch by force and his counselors tarnished her honor by whispering that it was unholy love for her uncle that had prompted such shocking, unwomanly behavior. It was a bitter lesson for Eleanor in the inequities of male and female power; it would not be her last.

What the marriage could not survive was her failure to provide Louis with a male heir. After the birth of her second daughter, he began to believe that the marriage was accursed in God’s eyes, and ended it in March 1152. Eleanor at once returned to Aquitaine and barely two months later, she shocked Christendom by choosing her own husband instead of waiting dutifully for Louis to pick a man acceptable to the French Crown. Her choice could not have been more abhorrent to Louis, both as monarch and man, for she wed the Duke of Normandy, Henry Fitz Empress, nine years her junior, who already had a reputation for boldness and a good claim to the English throne.

If Eleanor and Louis had been mismatched, she and Henry were perfectly matched, two high-flying hawks who lusted after empires and each other. Within two years of their marriage, Henry had taken England and Eleanor was once again a queen. The Angevin domains far dwarfed those held by her former husband, stretching from the Scots border to the Mediterranean Sea, and to those watching in amazement, admiration, or dismay, Henry seemed to be riding the whirlwind. Eleanor proudly rode it with him. She’d failed to give Louis a son; she gave Henry five, four of whom survived to manhood, and three daughters, two of whom wed kings. For twenty years, they soared from triumph to triumph; not even the murder of an archbishop in Canterbury Cathedral dimmed the luster of the Angevin court. And then it all fell apart.

No one was more stunned than Henry when his three eldest sons rose up in rebellion against him, supported by their mother, his own queen. He prevailed, of course, facing untried youths and the militarily inept French king, but their rebellion had dealt him a heart’s wound, one that never fully healed. His sons, he forgave, time and time again as the years passed. Eleanor, he could not forgive, for by blaming her for his estrangement from the sons he loved, he could avoid blaming himself. He concluded that Eleanor had been a jealous wife, resentful of his young mistress known as Fair Rosamund, and he did not believe her when Eleanor told him she’d rebelled because he’d laid such a heavy hand upon her beloved Aquitaine and refused to establish their sons in their own domains. His greatest weakness was an inability to relinquish any of his royal power and his sons chafed under a tight rein, while Eleanor remained his prisoner, held in English castles far from her homeland as summers turned to winters and then summers again, having to watch helplessly as her family tore itself asunder.

She once told Dame Amaria, the loyal maid who’d shared her long captivity, that she and Henry did not often make mistakes, but when they did, they tended to be spectacular. She had sixteen years to ponder hers, and during those long, difficult years shut away from the world, she developed a skill that neither her husband nor her sons had ever cultivated—the art of introspection. She also learned to live with her regrets, and that gave her the resilience to survive the tragedies she could not prevent.

Their golden boy, Hal, the young king, died in yet another rebellion against his father. Among Henry and Eleanor’s failings as parents, they’d had obvious favorites—for Henry, it was Hal and then his youngest, John, and for Eleanor, it was always Richard. Geoffrey had been the forgotten son, and had been driven to rebellion by his father’s failure to see that he and Richard were very different men from the feckless, charming, and irresponsible Hal. Geoffrey met a meaningless death in a tournament at the court of his new ally, the young French king, Philippe, who would prove to be as unlike Louis as granite and sand. Henry drove Richard away next, refusing to acknowledge him as the heir, thinking that would give him leverage over this strong-willed, fiery son. He succeeded only in convincing Richard that Henry meant to disinherit him in favor of John, and so he, too, traveled the same road as his brothers—to the French court. By then Henry was ailing, aging, and did not want to fight his son. But he was too proud to give Richard what he demanded—official recognition—and a life of brilliant triumphs would end in bitter tragedy. He died at Chinon Castle after making a humiliating surrender to Richard and Philippe, few doubting that the death blow had been the news that his beloved son John, for whom he’d sacrificed so much, had betrayed him.

Richard’s first command as king was to free his mother from her confinement at Salisbury Castle. She was to be obeyed, he directed, in all matters, and so it was. Thus began perhaps the most satisfying time of Eleanor’s life, for she was no longer a bird with clipped wings. She and Richard shared what Henry had so desperately wanted from his sons and never gotten: complete and utter trust. Her son was willing to do what Henry would not—make use of her formidable talents, the political instincts that had been sharply honed after more than fifty years on history’s stage. Immediately upon Richard’s accession to the throne, he prepared to honor his vow to free Jerusalem from the Saracens. It had been three years since he’d seen the white cliffs of Dover receding into the distance, confident that he could rely upon his mother to keep his kingdom at peace until his return.

Now in her sixty-ninth year, Eleanor was resisting aging as fiercely as she’d once fought against convention. After making a winter crossing of the Alps to deliver Richard’s bride to him in Sicily, she’d returned to England to mediate between his volatile half brother Geoff, the reluctant Archbishop of York, and his unpopular chancellor, the clever, crippled, and prideful Bishop of Ely, Guillaume de Longchamp, and to keep a close eye upon his younger brother John, the Count of Mortain and a willing pawn of the French king. Eleanor had few good memories of England and yearned for the warmth and sophisticated splendor of her favorite city, Poitiers. She was determined, though, to remain on this accursed, rain-soaked isle until Richard returned from the Holy Land. As the weeks turned into months, other crusaders arrived home, most of them eager to relate tales of her son’s bravura exploits on the battlefields of Outremer. But of Richard, there was no word, only an ominous, suffocating silence.