Daughters of Babylon (2 page)

To your pale cheeks, I shall restore

ere sunset over Christendom the bloom

of hearty pleasures and this long-stemméd love.

They’d put this one to music, although she couldn’t be sure who’d composed the larkful iambs. Toward the end, there’d been so many cossantes, sestinas, and triolets flying about, it was hard to keep track… aah, yes, she remembered now. Wiley Forrest had made fun of “long-stemméd love”, drawing out the phrase with bawdy dance steps that dissolved the court to mirthful weeping, but it was Arturo of Padrón who penned the piece and, pressing the jester to the wall, insisted that long stemméd love referred to “spiritual passion that extends across infinity, you buffoon!”

She’d prohibited dueling in the court with anything but words, but oh, how those verbal arrows sang! Eleanor smiled and pressed fingers to the page. Last she’d heard of her Irish jester, he was giving Sufis a run for their wit in Anatolia, but of the Galician, her knight, she knew nothing.

How much of Christendom Arturo was restoring to hearty pleasure, she would rather not know, but without him there’d have been no Court of Love, no heart of Aquitaine to match her mind. Long before the accolades and adoring ladies, he had stood apart, distinguishing himself. Had it not been for Arturo, Eleanor might have become an agreeable melancholic, like her mother: distant smile, vacant eyes, while bluebells drooped mid-summer at her passing, persuading bees to abandon joyful labours, spend their lives rheumatic and abed—

Clickety-click.

“Oh, no.” Her left eye accelerated its frightful winking, like the thump of a hare’s hind foot. She slapped a hand over it. The tips of a million icy needles pricked her chest and left arm, and drollness gave way to panic. Was this to be her dissolution then? Death by tic and sentimentality, the cables of her mind snapping like a bridge that’s weathered too many crossings, too many spring melts. Eleanor gripped the edge of the desk and cried out, “Leland,
s’il vous plait, je crois que je vais avoir un coup de—non, non, non, pas français, englais
! Could you come quickly, please? I seem to be having
un p’ti dilemme
.”

Leland was Northumbrian, duty-bound and loyal to the marrow. He would halve his own gizzard without a second thought to prevent His Majesty’s prisoner and sole charge from leaving the manor grounds or from conversing in private with anyone who wasn’t a dead crushing bore. But he was also a good man. She did not doubt that, roused, Leland would pull helmet over cap and rush to protect her, dispatching orders to the knights and ladies arranged like flower pots down the cold, spiraling stairwell. Only he did not rouse. She called out again, but he carried on snoring, smacking lips, dreaming, perhaps, of Dorcas, his bride who, at this moment, would be elbow deep in sweet dough for the Easter feast.

Her entire body was clattering now. She entertained the possibility that her attendants had been drugged and were being carted away for the purpose of reaching her, unarmed and cornered. But whatever for? Or perhaps Leland and the others didn’t hear her because she’d emitted no voice, only thinking that she spoke. Wasn’t it Wiley who once jested, madness will ever outrun reflection? Reflection being a cold bed mate, keep running!

Running, alas, in a stone tower was not possible. The stairs were a horror and peppered with attendants, embroidering, or counting cracks in the mortar; and so she slid, juddering, onto the chair and gave her consent to the palsy, whatever it was, in hopes it would continue on its way when done with her.

After a few moments, the paroxysms began to lose steam. The maniacal grinning slowed enough that she could inhale fully between tics. She pulled herself to standing. Knees wobbled, heart raced, but bones and sinew held together. Perhaps a round or two of farandole would help: para-
pom
-pom, para-
pom
-pom…

The beat faded when her upraised arms started tingling. She dropped them and gazed through the high slitted window, the same window through which, as Henry’s new bride, besotted and flush with pleasure, she’d thrown sprigs of lavender into the upheld arms of villagers. The Severn River, mindless as it ever was, meandered through pasture, beech and willow groves. Sheep grazed, cows dozed. If this were a plot against her, it bore an extraordinarily light touch. When was the last time Eleanor of Aquitaine flushed with pleasure? Or, more’s the pity, laughed and amused another? Her
joie de vivre
extended no further these days than to the dutiful curtsy-bob of a maid servant laying logs or a dissolute baron trying to chuckle his way to a loan.

She tried her voice again. “Leland…my ladies, can any of you devoted stair-sitters hear me?”

The only reply was
clickety-clickety, clickety-clickety
, and it did not come from embroidery needles.

Tears splashed onto the parchment. Eleanor used the velvet hem of her sleeve to dab at her cheeks, to wipe away the drool. She rotated her neck from left to right, taking in the dimensions of the small, cramped landing. Apart from the chair and writing table, the room contained no other furnishings or comforts. Her only exercise, apart from a weekly ride of thirty minutes, would be the solemn descent from the turret across a small stretch of grass to the manor house for evening repast, devotionals, and bed. But why the sudden self-pity? Until this flibbertigibbet of nerves, she had been occupied with trying to call up the Pyrenees that cradle
Reine du Ciel
, but again, her mind’s eye sketched four people on a road, in a vast stretch of land she’d never seen.

“Fine!” She settled on the chair. “If you are to be my new inner court, then let us begin acquaintance.”

They walked three abreast and one behind, one man, three women. They were too sun-kissed to be English or Norman, though their features resembled neither the Turk nor Moorish races. The man was the front and central figure. He wore loose cotton breeches and a tunic, both white, and though his garb looked tattered from long wear and labour, his presence shone like a pearl midst the dark-jewel setting of shawls and skirts that surrounded him.

Variations in their height and levels of fatigue created an audible shuffle-swish as they walked, a point counter-point that called to mind the cossante when danced upon good hardwood floors. At the thought of Aquitaine, a small sound erupted at the back of her throat, like the single downbeat of a finch’s wing. Her attention shifted to the woman who walked behind the other three. She couldn’t tell if the woman’s position was one of honour or subservience. The laryngeal croak came again, painfully this time.

Leland’s bobbled cap jerked upward, offering a glimpse of the guard’s slack-jawed face before returning with a snore and splutter to his chest. She touched the heavy linen at her throat.

“Have I become a habitation of pixies? Is it true what they say about the little people here?”

“I doubt that pixies would find you habitable at your age.”

She glanced around. “I beg your pardon? Who said that?”

A figure had insinuated himself, without so much as a by-your-leave, between her and the stairwell of attendants. He wore full ecclesiastic robes and the expression of having eaten unripe persimmon.

“What in the name of St. Jacques are you doing here?” she asked. “This is England, not Purgatory.”

Abbot Suger, chief cleric of St. Denis and counsellor to kings, snorted. In actuality, he had been mouldering in resins and fine herbs for decades, and thereby should have been incapable of snorting. But here he was, standing before her with as kempt a look of disapproval as she’d ever seen. “I wouldn’t be too confident you’re in England at the moment.”

“In the absence of freedom and the collapse of one’s senses, geography hardly matters. But if I’ve disturbed your eternal rest, Father, or the gleeful counting of your incorruptible treasures, please accept my apologies and be on your way.”

“You really have forgotten, haven’t you? All those opportunities for true understanding, spread before you like a Pentecostal feast, and you gobbled the sweet bits, tossed the rest behind like scraps of gristle.” Abbot Suger flapped his upper arms and, to her astonishment, clucked.
Pwraawk, prawk, prawk!
Were those pin feathers peeking out from beneath his skull cap? “You’re dimmer than
La Dangereuse
,” he went on. “Now, there’s one we’ll not hear from again—another star that glimmered and winked out in your precious Queen of Heaven.”

Eleanor’s eyes flashed, and her spine straightened. “I will not tolerate the slander of my grandmother even from an apparition whose fowl nature I had, until this moment, only suspected.”

“Scoff all you like. No one listens to your wordplays anymore, no one fawns or presses in for a glimpse of Her Benevolent Majesty. You lead your procession, day after day, from bed chamber to privy to this crumbling tower, a paragon of longsuffering, but your knights and ladies are scattered across Creation and your Court of Love is dead. Do you hear me? Dead, dead, dead! Those flapping tics and grins, they are your flaws of character assembling, your accursed selfishness that seeks to flee before you are called to Final Judgment.”

The vile little man who, while he was alive, had never shown a mustard seed of original thought, twirled on gold-embroidered, silken slippers, his arms outstretched like the centerpiece of a
gateau d’amande
she’d once commissioned. The marzipan dancer had been Wiley’s idea, the centerpiece attached to a dowel rotated by a page hidden under the table. The Sultan’s envoy, who’d been cheated by wool merchants in Blois and Anjou and was on his way home to recommend war, signed a trade agreement for raw wool with the shepherds’ guild of
Reine du Ciel
that night.

“And how do you waste your final days?” Suger clucked on. “You
imagine
movement of an
imagined
pregnant woman, knitting needles clacking as she walks behind an
imagined
threesome, and this is not what CHRIST our LORD would WANT to HEAR.” What DAH-dah-DAH would DAH-dah-DAH. His phrasings had always called to mind the flap of an ill-fitting carriage door, but this was something different. The language of sound, the sound of language.

Eleanor sat back, flummoxed. This wasn’t the dead abbot or even a ghost of the abbot showing her with three successive downstrokes of his knobby index finger:
Imagine. Imagined. Imagined
. Three decapitations, three clean severings of the heretic from the holy, the head of the serpent from the slithering spine.
The Power, the Glory, the Kingdom.

A part of her shuddered. Another part, younger and far more disposing, yearned to throw her arms around his dimpled chicken neck and plant a kiss on his cheek. They had, after all, been friends once, long ago.

“How right you are, Father, how very right you are! I am, as you say, squanderous of opportunity. I can’t thank you enough for reminding me.” And with that, he disappeared, whisked off-stage like a hose puppet, freeing her to peer anew at the tiny movement inside the woman who knitted,
clickety-click
, from a skein of turquoise blue wool while following her companions. Beneath those voluminous, striped skirts, she was pregnant! And within a heartbeat of that confirmation, there arose a corresponding flutter from her own lower belly. With a gasp, she placed a hand there.

The undulation was subtle but no less alive for that. Pleasurable feelings in her womb spread outward in concentric circles like a tide pool, filling the dimensions of the attic space. She, not quite in its center, could follow as it rose and circled elliptically. The orbiting spirals reached her heart, then branched off, unhurried, into chambers of inflow and outflow, halving again to quarters of pulse and resistance; and the quadrants pulled, drawing in, drawing in, as though calling others, more of itself, and strengthened by complicity of bone, muscle, tissue, continued upward to the inside of her crown where echoing refrains and towering exaltations called to mind angelic choirs singing
Alleluias…
and while this was going on, all she’d learned of pain, had accumulated and packed away; all the protestations she’d swallowed, for what else was there to do, time and again, but swallow; and the boredom she had railed so viciously and fruitlessly against—in their entirety, splintered. She watched them fall apart, crumble to powder like mouse-nibbled armour made of
papier mâché
, leaving in its place…

Leland shifted on the top step. She could hear her ladies-in-waiting conversing at the base of the stairs. Life was stirring around her again. Tiny drops of sweat beaded along the edges of her hairline, and she promised herself to ponder deeply, later, on how it all connected. For now, though, she needed to return to the foursome.

They were still plodding, stirring small clouds of yellow dust, yet something had brightened. They were still three in front, one behind, but she had undercalculated. How could she have forgotten movement, sound, the shape of things? Trembling, not with weakness now but with sweet, sharp desire, she dipped her quill into the inkpot and blew on the places where the tears had nearly dried. Bilqees,
femme de chambre
, dancer from the East, elegant and adored member of the court, had set Eleanor in front of a looking glass once and shown her,
de la manière la plus fantastique
.

Isolate the muscle, see the figures in your head. Because there are no starting points, you wait…you wait…you call the movement to you…while it comes, you take its measure…while it comes, you join its pleasure…when it comes—

And oh my, it had come! In a red-haired, lusty form from Normandy.

From the box of quills, Eleanor selected the taut, brown wing feather of a falcon. The linen of her headdress draped and folded so that light from the turret window suffused, pouring warmth into her aching knuckles, sanguinity to ink. To anyone observing—and they
were
observing—this was clearly a penitent in prayer and deep disconsolation.

Her script was swift, the ink flowed smooth, and the queen could scarcely keep from laughing!

La Hacienda Delgado de Obregón
Veracruz, Mexico
LATE SUMMER, 1972