The Secret Eleanor (17 page)

The other knight led his horse up. The innkeeper himself came bustling out, a fat man in a filthy apron, with cups and a jug. Behind him came a girl with wheat-colored hair, younger than Henry, her arms cradling a basket of bread. Henry said, “We have to make sure everybody gets fed. Put the horses on pasture.” He reached out for a loaf.

The girl’s eyes were lowered, but then suddenly she glanced up at him, and then down again.

His interest leaped. He knew that look, what girls meant by that look. He thought of Eleanor, who was far away. The girl’s bodice curved over pretty little breasts. She was a kitchen wench, young and clean. But later.

He turned to Reynard. “Come along, let’s do this. Robert, see to things here. Find me a place to sleep. Fresh horses.” Without another look at the girl, he mounted his horse and rode out of town to stop the rest of his army before they reached the village and get them bedded down along the road, their horses staked out, their sentries posted. Reynard followed doggedly after him.

When he was done, the little camps of his army stretched back on both sides of the road for nearly a mile. Their fires bloomed in the dusk. Besides the bread and wine Robert managed to find for them, they had been foraging as they rode and the smells rose of cooking meat, among the sounds of men laughing and gossiping. When Henry went back to the innyard, trailing squires, his horse stumbling with fatigue, the moon was rising.

The yard was almost empty. His squires trudged off with the horses. The hall was shut, quiet, and he would sleep in there, eventually, but first he went toward the kitchen, behind the hall. Just as he reached the door, it opened. The thin glow of a rushlight spread out over the threshold and shone on him. Behind it, holding the lamp high, was the girl with the wheat-colored hair. Her eyes burned. The thought of Eleanor touched his mind again, and he pushed it out of the way. Aquitaine was all over the hill. This one was here before him. He reached his hands out and drew her toward him.

In the morning he was chasing Geoffrey south through the hills. Having lost Chinon, his brother was predictably making toward Loudon, the second of his castles. His dwindling army left a trail any fool could follow, through trees and meadows and fields where sullen men stood in the middle of their trampled crops and glared at Henry as he rode by.

Almost to the high ground, in the crease between two rolling hills, Geoffrey ambushed Henry’s vanguard. Henry sent Robert and a few men up to fight off the attack and keep his brother busy, and with the rest of his army galloped around the back of the hill to Loudon itself, stormed the gate, and overran the little town. At this, cut off from his base, Geoffrey fled, and more of his men submitted to Henry, so many of them that he took their vows all at once.

He did this in the street inside the gate, just before sundown, and afterward a villager in a broad hat came up and bowed and begged him to keep Loudon, to protect the houses and farms. The villager was an old man, his face the color of dirt. He swept off his hat and rolled the brim unceasingly in his hands. “My lord, give us peace. We have the harvest. I pray God, my lord—the lord Geoffrey took everything, but now, we have the harvest to bring in, I pray you—”

“Harvest your crops,” Henry said. “I am lord here. I will keep the peace. Let any man with a grievance come to me.” The long slanting light of the late sun flooded the place with pink. The guards at the gate called out, and Robert rode up with a half dozen other men of the vanguard and a stranger.

He wore the colors of the Empress, so Henry knew he was a messenger from his mother in Rouen, head city of Normandy. Henry held him aside. Robert swung down from his horse.

“I lost some men. There are a lot of wounded.”

“Bring them in and lay them in the church,” Henry said. “Get Reynard to help you. Camp the rest outside the wall. No looting, no rape.” He would have to arrange to bury the dead. Robert went briskly off. The villager in the broad hat was trying to talk to him. Henry shut him up with a glare and turned to the messenger.

“My lord—” The messenger was filthy. “Her Imperial Majesty bids you God’s greeting—” Henry plucked the note out of his hands and turned aside to read it.

The villager followed him. “My lord, thank God for you, I swear, we are loyal, we will—”

Henry looked over his shoulder. “Is there a surgeon here? A midwife? I have wounded men.”

“There’s an herbswoman, my lord. And the priest, of course.”

“Naturally. Go get them.” He read quickly through his mother’s uncluttered Latin. There was nothing new, only the old woman getting nervous, as she always did, throwing off a spray of advice and orders. Half of the Norman barons had thrown out his chatelains and were proclaiming themselves free, and she expected him back in Rouen at once.

He had to get the south under control first. With Anjou solid, he would deal with the Norman lords. They hated each other more than they hated him, and he could take each one down separately. He walked back and forth a few moments, thinking about that, trying to see everything whole.

Robert reappeared, and so did the villager, who had a priest with him. Henry sent Robert off with the priest to settle the wounded but held the villager back by the arm.

“You say Geoffrey was here for a while?”

“Yes, my lord.” The villager clutched his hat in his fists. “He took everything. They drove us out of our own houses. No woman could go anywhere.” He drew in a deep breath. “There were Bretons here.”

“Ah,” Henry said.

This was interesting to know. Wild Brittany, to the west, was his enemy; the reigning Duchess’s husband was a stirrup friend of King Stephen of England, whom Henry was trying to dislodge. Who then would have an interest in dislodging Henry. “How many? Soldiers, merchants?”

“A high one, my lord, with knights, and a banner.”

Henry grunted. All the more reason, he thought, to uproot Geoffrey. He had been right to come here first. Leave this here to fester and he would never get to England. He said, “Anybody else?”

The villager blinked at him. Henry said, “The French, for instance?” The palms of his hands prickled up. If his brother brought together the French, the English, and the Bretons, they would have him almost encircled.

The old man licked his lips. He said, “The French King and Queen are on a progress, just up the river. Very like, from here, he could have sent to the King.”

“A progress. Both of them?” Henry said.

“Yes, my lord.”

He struggled a moment to remember exactly what Eleanor looked like. Magnificent eyes. All that coppery hair. Yet he could not visualize her face. He thought,
She’s probably forgotten me, too
, and his gut ached.

The villager said in a whisper, as if the softer he spoke the more it was worth, “It’s said they’re quarreling. The King and the Queen, wild thing that she is. They say they’re traveling days apart sometimes. He is to come tomorrow to Saint Jean to hold court, but she is far behind him, way up above the river.”

Henry made a sound in his chest. Suddenly he wanted to see her, more than anything else, hold her, make her remember him.

He hardened himself against this. The Breton lord, the nearness of the French King—he had to keep after his brother. If he slackened now, even for a moment, Geoffrey might get a foothold, some backing, some money to turn and defy him.

She was so close, so close.

He walked over to the church, where they were laying wounded men out on the floor, and went among them, but he thought of her. She could be within a day’s ride. Even nearer. He began to think how to reach her. He thought suddenly of the note from his mother and pulled it out of his purse. Now all he needed was something to write with. He went looking for ink.

By now Eleanor was traveling a good two days behind the King, and avoiding the places he had stayed even after he had left them. During the day they wandered along the road, and in every tiny village the streets were full of wretched-looking, road-worn people. The knights worked to keep the common folk from her, but she saw women with children huddled on the porch of a church, and seeing an old woman begging on the side of the road, she stopped and made de Rançun bring her up beside the Queen’s horse.

The old woman smelled, and the hand she held up was filthy. Eleanor sent hastily for some bread and a purse to give her. “Where have you come from, mother?”

“Anjou—they are fighting—burning everything—”

She gave the bread and purse into the old woman’s hands, then sent for the village’s head man.

He was old like the beggarwoman, but cleaner, and he bowed properly to her. She said, “What is going on now?”

“The Count is harrying his brother south,” the old man said. “These people have fled—unwisely, I think; things will settle down quickly.” But when she gave him another purse to care for the people, he babbled with thanks and bobbed up and down and kissed the hem of her gown.

“Thank you, lady—you are the most gracious of queens—”

At that the crowd pushed around her again, all of them bubbling with thanks, surrounding her horse. She leaned out of the saddle, reaching out her hand to them, as she often did, letting them touch her; some girls held out flowers to her, and one thrust a wad of paper into her grasp.

She closed her hand on it. Her skin tingled in a sudden racing excitement. De Rançun and the other knights were shooing the crowd off. She let the Barb carry her on ahead of everybody else, then swiftly opened the bit of paper in her hand and read it.

Petronilla jogged her mare up beside her. “What is it? What is that?”

“Nothing,” she said. “One of them gave me a flower.” She opened her hand to show the crumpled petals. The paper lay buried underneath, and she would burn it later. She could not keep from smiling, and she looked up the road, eager.

In the afternoon she called de Rançun to her, and said, “Isn’t there a little monastery up ahead somewhere? We could spend the night there.”

He gave her a sharp look. “I don’t know. I’ll find out.” And he came back a little while later, saying, “There is Saint Pierre, but it’s considerably off the road. We could go on to—”

“Saint Pierre will do,” she said. “Go bid them know we are coming.” Petronilla was watching her intently. It was hard to keep anything from her sister. But part of the thrill of this was its secrecy. She gigged the Barb into a trot down the road.

The monastery of Saint Pierre was old and small, its abbot overjoyed to have a royal visitor; he led Eleanor to the best room in the cloister, with the best bed, a mattress stuffed with straw, and the linens patched. It was too small for all of the women, and the three waiting women went into another room. De Rançun took the men and the baggage and attendants down into the village.

The monks brought Eleanor and her little court their finest fare: a ripe cheese and decent bread, a rough fruit wine. Eleanor’s hawk had killed that day, and so they dined well enough. They heard Vespers in the monastery chapel, and then, going back along the cloister, Eleanor said, “I think I shall go for a walk. The rest of you all go in and get ready for bed; don’t wait for me.”