The Secret Eleanor (11 page)

His brother watched him narrowly. Geoffrey was tousled, his long hair matted from the windy ride. He was drinking too much and his face was flushed. He said, “Oh, my lord of Normandy, is it now.” He lifted his cup to his lips.

Henry grunted at him, contemptuous. With his knife he stabbed at the stringy meat in front of him. He ignored his brother, but he kept a careful eye on his father, slumped on the bench. The Count was eating the grilled eels. He shot a look at Henry.

“What did that damned Bernard mean, anyway?”

The eel tasted bad. Henry spat it out. He reached for the loaf of bread; a squire came to fill his cup again. “Where’s Robert?” He knew the sun was falling into the west and he longed to get back on the road.

“You’d better not dally with that slut from—”

Henry wheeled off the bench and grabbed his father’s shirtfront, dragging him up onto his feet. The bench crashed down. Anjou staggered back, his eyes white. Henry let him go at once. His hands were shaking. He flicked his fingertips at his father’s chest, as if getting rid of the last of his touch.

Sweat spangled his father’s forehead. Anjou shuffled backward out of reach. Breathless, he said, “I’ve had her myself. There’s something in the Bible about going in where your father’s been.”

Henry clenched his fists. “There’s something else in there about the devil’s crooked tongue.” He felt as if he were about to explode. “I am going.” Anjou lied all the time about women. If he’d had all the women he claimed, he would have no time to get in Henry’s way. A squire had come up with his hat and Henry took it. “I have things to do in Rouen and I don’t need to listen to you two drivel. I’ll meet you in Lisieux on Saint John’s Day to talk about how we’re going to attack England. Or I’ll do it without you.” He should have seized Eleanor at once, back on the road, when he was thinking of it, and to hell with everybody else. He glared at them both and went out, shouting for Robert to get his men to horse.

They rode north toward Rouen, the land baking in the summer heat. Henry said, “What did you think of Paris? It’s much bigger than London.”

“I don’t think it’s bigger,” Robert said. He was middle-aged, of English birth, exiled under King Stephen from his lands there; Henry had met him on his own first disastrous campaign to England, and Robert had not left him since. “But there’s more—” Robert made a cupping gesture with his hand. “Money. Things to buy with it.”

“Certainly bigger than Rouen.” Henry steered his horse around a herd of pigs tippling along the muddy road. If it had been sheep or cows he would have ridden right through them, but pigs could do damage to a horse. “I wish I had some place near Rouen like that Studium.” There was the Yeshiva, where he heard they argued meanings, but it was all in some other language.

Robert said, “The Studium is full of heresies, they say.”

“Heresies. All the better. Salt for the meat, if you ask me. How can you ask questions when you already know what the answers are?”

He was trying to forget what his father had said about Eleanor. They followed the road where it forked to the north. He remembered her in his arms, sinuous and sweet, the arch of her body, her legs coiling around his. Thought of her in his father’s arms, the same. He wanted to pound his father to mush. He was lying, he always lied. But she was loose; she’d proved that with him.

She was Duchess of Aquitaine, too. And long a wife. He’d already lost the virgin part. When they were married he’d keep her constant, if he had to chain her to the bed.

If they ever married. A daydream, surely, bed talk, gone when the scum dried. Yet he despaired now that he might lose Aquitaine, which he had never had.

They rode on. Toward the end of the day’s ride, with no village in sight, they were thinking of pulling to under a tree, but then a man appeared on the highway behind them, galloping after them. This turned out to be a messenger from his father.

“You’ve got to come.” The messenger was hollow-eyed. His horse was sagging, froth crusted on its nostrils. His horse would die within the hour. “The Count is sick, and likely he will not live.”

“What?” The other men crowded up around Henry.

“What?” Henry said, breathless.

“We stopped at the river. The Count went swimming, and he came out shaking, and they took him to a house nearby and laid him down, and an evil fever took him, hot and dry, and he’s gushing at both ends, my lord; no man can endure such very long.”

Henry turned back to his horse and looked across the saddle at Robert, whose wide blank face was wrinkling, starting to take this in. Henry said, “Go to Rouen. Guard the treasure there, and my mother. This will not be good.”

“Yes, my lord,” Robert said, and turned at once to his horse.

The messenger from Anjou had sat down abruptly on the ground, and someone handed him a wine flask. Henry bent over him; Robert was riding off.

“Where is my father now?”

“At the castle of the Loire, that old tower, there by the river.”

Henry turned, looking among the few men left to him for Reynard, the shorter of his two most trusted seconds. He found him with his eyes. “Go to Caen and get the rest of my guards, and hire some more, if you can. Get me forty men, two horses and a squire each. Men-at-arms if you can. Meet me at Lisieux on Saint John’s Day.” He thrust out of his mind the memory of the fiery blue eyes of Bernard of Clairvaux, predicting this. He took his reins, bounded into his saddle, and started back down the road.

He rode that horse until it dropped and found another and rode that one staggering into the gateyard of the tower where his father lay. Long before they led him into the room with the Count of Anjou, he could smell him. The messenger was right. No man lived long with his insides coming out of him like that.

In spite of the stench, a dozen men, including his brother, Geoffrey, stood around the room. The Count lay on the bed, a blackened stick with wild eyes, candles all around him, a cross above him, as if he barricaded himself against devils. The light was bright around him but turned yellow and smoky above, on the ceiling, billowing in the draft.

“The will.” The old Count’s head rolled on the mattress. His hand moved, and Henry saw there on the bed a crumple of paper. “Agree to the will.”

Henry looked around him at the other men and saw among them the same men who would challenge him as Count of Anjou anyway: the Bishop of Lisieux, his uncle Elias. His brother, smirking at him, triumphant over the horrible bed. Henry said, “Let me read it.”

“No! Agree!”

“How can I agree to something I have not read?” He lifted his gaze to the witnesses ringing the deathbed. Their eyes shone back at him, a wall of stones.

He shouted, “It’s all to Geoffrey, isn’t it? All to Geoffrey.” He stormed out and walked around the courtyard, beating his hands together.

Lisieux came padding after him, a bluff little man with gold in his robe enough to buy bread for a hundred poor men. Puffing as he ran, trailing his clerks, he caught up with Henry on the down ramp. “Wait now, my son.”

Henry wheeled toward him. “
My son.
My father is up there trying to give my inheritance away.”

“Now, son, listen.” Lisieux faced him, smiling. He had bright little eyes like a bird’s above his rosy cheeks. He put his hand on Henry’s shoulder and patted him. “Not all. He wants only to give to Geoffrey a few castles, along the eastern border—so he has land. You are the eldest son. You receive almost all.”

Henry gritted his teeth together. He wanted all. He looked stonily over the bishop’s shoulder. The churchman patted his arm again. “You must see how this is. He is going to die. He has made us all swear not to see him buried before the will is opened and obeyed.”

Henry saw this like an abyss yawning before him. The burial threat was serious. If his father lay unburied, he could not properly be Count of Anjou no matter what the will said.

Most of it was his, at least. Count of Anjou. “Has he been shriven and anointed?”

“Yes. He is ready for God.”

“I doubt that,” Henry said. They stood in the dark on the sloping pavement of the tower; off over the wall he could see down onto the river valley, the water gleaming in the moonlight, and the faint fire of a hall in the distance beyond. Out there, somewhere, the edge of Aquitaine. He thought again of Bernard’s curse. The saint had brought this on, or somehow at least foreseen it. He shook that off. The old man had caught some luck. It was just fate. Chance. It didn’t seem to matter much. If Bernard was right, then they were all doomed. They were all doomed in the end anyway. He wondered, briefly, if his brother had done something.

“My lord.” A page came trotting down the slope. “My lord, the Count wants you there again.”

“Jesus,” Henry said. He walked up the uneven pavement, and the Bishop went along beside him.

“My lord, he must be buried when he dies. It’s an affront to God to leave him above the ground. We’ll take him to Le Mans, it’s closest.”

“Le Mans,” he said. He was not ready for this: his father young and strong, who had always been there, who would be there forever. He had hated his father, but he had relied on him. This was traditional in his family. His father had hated him, also traditionally. Out of spite he could have given half the domain to his brother. Even if the will did name Henry the Count, on the news many of his vassals would rebel; he would have to call up whoever stayed faithful, go from stronghold to stronghold, forcing them open, demand that each baron in his turn submit. And in Normandy, too, they would turn on him. The whole of his realm could go up like a pile of tinder. He had enemies all around, and in spite of the peace, the French would meddle and England might attack him.

First he had to find out what was in the will, and the only way to do that was to agree to it. Grimly he marched up to the door and into the room with the rotting, dying Count, and biting his sleeve in his rage he accepted the will as it was.

PARIS
AUGUST 1151

 

 

 

“David played the lute,” Eleanor said. “The beloved of God. The ancestor of Jesus.”

Louis hardly looked at her; he laid his hands on his knees and pressed his gaze down on them. He said, “If they played but psalms, I would welcome them.” His hands moved, pushing together palm against palm. “I must do right, Eleanor. For this I am King.” He glanced toward her, his eyes bright, almost wistful. “You should not come to court, as Thierry says. This is man’s work here, and you only disturb matters. It is unfit for your delicacy. Yet I am glad of it, just to see you. Is this not suffering? Why have you no care for me?”

She turned away from him and looked out over the noisy, busy hall. The quiver in his voice repulsed her; she thought,
You have too much care for yourself, sir, to need any from me,
but she did not say it. Instead she fed her senses on the color and bustle of the court. If she could not have a lute player here, and jongleurs, and merriment, she could at least enjoy the raw steamy rush of real life.

Beneath the cobwebs and old banners festooning the high ceiling, the cave of the hall thronged with people, all talking in little knots and swirls around the room, some moving here and there from group to group. She thought she could detect the news traveling among them, the currents of gossip, jokes, threats, and offers. Thierry Galeran sat on the King’s left hand and said nothing, but people came up to him and spoke into his ear and went to other people in the hall and spoke to them, in widening ripples of influence and interest. Eleanor wanted to bring Louis to talk of their marriage but could find no subtle entrance to it. She sat idly twining her fingers together, considering how to get her way.

In through the crowd came a flock of blackbirds: four men in long black gowns like Benedictines, hooded and capped, carrying rolls of paper in their wide capacious sleeves. She recognized them at once for teaching masters from the Studium on the river’s Left Bank. They lectured on Aristotle there, Alhazen, the wonderful thinking of ancient men. Petronilla loved to tease her wits with theirs, and Eleanor herself had recently made good use of that. These blackbirds came up before the King and immediately one began to declaim their case, without even waiting for Thierry.