The Secret Eleanor (24 page)

She thought she would call out to him, would raise her hand, but some foreboding kept her frozen in her place. She would be just one of all of these girls, who clung to him, shameless, adoring. His gaze passed over her and he did not notice her; he went on by her, laughing. Claire lowered her eyes, trying to pretend she was not looking at him. The girls around him battled each other to be close to him. So it was, she thought. So it was. But now her anger at Petronilla rose a little hotter.

When the weather cleared, they began on toward Poitiers, some days off, and on the first night of the journey, they stopped at a monastery near the River Creuse. Eleanor’s train arrived much later than the King’s, and before she had dismounted, de Rançun came up to her on foot, his face expressionless.

“I think we’ll see little Anjou back here soon.”

“What?” she said, turning abruptly around, and as she did so the horse moved abruptly and she lost her balance.

She was dismounting, swinging her leg across the cantle of the saddle, and she began to fall. She caught herself, both hands on the saddle, and the horse sidestepped away from her and she did fall. De Rançun caught her almost at once, his hands on her sides. The Barbary horse, snorting, swiveled away from them, his ears pricked up. She hung one arm around the Poitevin knight’s neck, her whole body in his arms. Her eyes went bleared and her head muzzy, as if the world disintegrated around her.

De Rançun set her on her feet again, holding her until she was steady. She turned toward him and looked into his stiff, drawn face, and at once she saw that he knew what was going on with her. He lowered his eyes, as if nothing had happened, his voice unnecessarily loud.

“The plot in Anjou’s done. Duke Henry heard about it and rode down there from Normandy—in a single night—” He gave a little shake of his head, a grudging admiration. “That must have been quite a ride. Picking up his garrisons as he went. Caught the whole batch of schemers all at once, still cooking up their little rebellion, and stewed them together in their own pot.”

“Good,” she said, pleased; she told herself she had foreseen this, knew him well enough to know what he would do, questing toward his crown. She drew in a deep breath. The spell was fading, and in a moment she would be strong again. She glanced at the knight. De Rançun, she knew, would tell no one about what had just happened. She forgot about losing her saddle; that was nothing. And she would shake off the little lingering dizziness. “Give me your arm, I’ll go inside. Where is my sister?”

They reached Poitiers the day after the King arrived, on a bright breezy winter day, when little silver-bellied clouds scudded above the city on its rocky hill like ships across the blue sea of the sky. They rode over the bridge and up the steep narrow street toward the palace through crowds of cheering people who screamed Eleanor’s name and reached their arms out to touch her.

The noise and confusion spooked even Petronilla’s little mare, usually calm as a nun, and Petronilla kept a nervous eye on Eleanor, on the Barbary horse, which tiptoed along with his head bowed almost to his chest, snorting with each step. Eleanor mastered him utterly; they went through the gate into the palace with no trouble, and left the thunderous cheers behind.

The huge rambling palace covered the hilltop, the center of it old Roman work, patched and expanded with new stone halls and towers. Eleanor took one look at it and turned to the double tower on the right, under the two hats of its peaked roofs. “We will house ourselves there,” she said, and so they moved into the Maubergeon.

Her grandfather had built the great double tower for his mistress Dangereuse, and so it had acquired a certain disrepute. Nobody had lived there for years. The rooms were full of dirt and trash, rats and owls and bats, terrible smells and crawling things that hissed. Eleanor got everybody to cleaning it up, carrying out masses of junk and dirt, sweeping, washing down, bringing in what suitable furniture she could find elsewhere in the palace.

She herself decided everything. Except for a brief appearance at dinner on their first day, she ignored the rest of the court; she watched over every task in the Maubergeon. She went into the rooms and found the new-style hearths, set in recesses in the outer wall, which had been plugged up by somebody who did not understand their use. Birds had built nests and clogged the openings above them, which were supposed to let the smoke escape without coming into the room. She set a crew of men to digging them out, and made sure they did it properly, especially the smoke channels. In the meanwhile she sat with Petronilla beside her to choose new hangings for the walls.

She remembered this place from when she and Petronilla had grown up here—the hearths, the curving staircase, the sunny windows—and she meant to bring it back again, and with it, that world of poetry and music, new ideas and new dreams. Sitting with Petronilla, running her fingers over a heap of silky damasks, she said, “Was it this color? Or green? There was a dark green.”

“No,” Petronilla said, “it was blue, in this room, blue and gold, like this, only Grandfather’s initial, not yours. Big gold Gs. Dark green upstairs, and a lighter green, what they call salamander, across the way.”

“Then let it be so,” Eleanor said.

She intended to live here, to make her greatest place here, when she was free. When they were all free. Yet they were no closer to that, even though they were in Poitiers. The King still had not summoned any council, although he was certainly promising. She put off the gnawing twinge of doubt. Maubergeon and the life she wanted lay within her grasp now, and she refused to let this not happen. She haggled with the merchant over the blue and gold damask, as if she could make the future by furnishing it.

Something was going on with Petronilla, she knew not what. Her sister had lost her easy openness, which once Eleanor had seen through and through like glass. Some part of her was closed away. Twice she had almost said something, but held back—as if she did not trust her, Petronilla, who had been by her side all her life. Downcast at this, she struggled to put off her doubts, thinking that being pregnant was always a mild form of madness.

That afternoon, a neatly folded, elegantly written letter appeared, laid on a cushion just inside the door of the middle room, and she did not need de Rançun to tell her that Geoffrey d’Anjou was back.

She tossed that paper into the hearth, but over the next several days there came more such in a steady stream. She sent them all after the first, without reading them. The other women happened on them, as they were tossed in through the windows or tucked into the usual gifts from the court and people in the city, and quickly the servants understood what was going on and gathered in giggling bunches to read them before they brought them to her. She refused to let them tell her what they said. She contented herself listening to de Rançun’s stories of Duke Henry.

“He’s tireless, they say; he rides everywhere, drives everybody, and he is fearless, and certain—you don’t see him down here hanging on Louis’s sleeve.”

She said, “Anything you hear of him, though, bring to me.”
Anything,
she thought,
save whom he takes into his bed. I will make him love me,
she thought.
Once we are married.

“I hear he is ruthless, and cruel,” de Rançun said. “And if he would do such to his own brother, Eleanor, what would he do to a wife?”

She laughed, angry. “Bah. I am not a mere wife, am I?”

He hesitated; she saw he had something he wanted to say. “What is it? There’s more news? Tell me.”

“No, my lady.” He swallowed, his head down, and she guessed it was something else entirely, which she wanted not to hear. He started to speak, and she beckoned him off with her fingers.

“Well, then, go off to court, listen to them over there. If anyone asks of me, tell them I am far too busy here to attend their idle chatter-feasts.”

He turned on his heel and left. The room was quiet, sunny even in the winter, warm from the banked hearth; she curled her arm around her belly and sat down awhile, her back hurting.
You did this to me,
she thought. She summoned up the image of Duke Henry: the gray eyes, the spiky red hair. Surely the baby would have red hair. He must never know. He would doubt her always if he even suspected that she had gulled him—so men thought evil of women, where they themselves were prone to evil. She turned into the warmth of the hearth, easing her back, and tried not to think about anything at all.

POITIERS
NOVEMBER 1151

 

 

 

Claire loved Poitiers, so different from anywhere else she had been; even in winter it seemed warmer and brighter than the rest of the world. The rooftops were not covered with the black slates of Paris and Fontevraud, but with rounded clay tiles, once red but now patterned gray and green with lichens and moss. The streets wound up along the hills past shops full of laughing people, pie men with their trays and hoarse cries and delicious trails of aroma, women selling fruit and fish, the clip-clop of big horses, always the chatter of this different kind of French, which she understood well enough but which still sounded so strange, rounder, sweeter than her own.

Monks paraded through the streets, and preachers stood on the corner, talking about a life nearer to God, a way of pure spirit that left the body behind. It sounded good but, she thought, for her, not yet. Her body loved this place, with its wonderful smells and sounds and sights. She loved to go out on the Queen’s tasks, run to the cathedral to admire the beasts carved in its columns, beg a sweet from a baker woman with a promise to tell the Queen how good it was.

Usually, too, she made her way to the King’s court, which Thomas the lute player still attended; she dared not approach him, but she loved to see him and to hear him play. If he noticed her, he didn’t care. He had forgotten her. But all he played for the King seemed like dirges.

Then one day to her surprise she almost walked into him as she went one way around a corner of the tower and he came the other.

He was pulling his clothes straight; he had just made water. He saw her and began a mindless sort of bow, and started past her. She mumbled and flushed, and then suddenly he recognized her.

He faced her again. He caught her hand and gave her his beautiful, irresistible smile.

“Oh, little Claude, the Queen’s girl.” He pulled her toward him. “Give me a kiss.”

His hand was warm and strong, but she held him off. Petronilla’s words rang in her mind.
His heart’s in his music. He will never love you.
She said, “Claire, it is,” and could not keep the annoyance out of her voice. “But I am happy to see you, Thomas.”

He turned a little to put the wall beside them, giving them a little privacy from the crowded yard; he hitched up his lute in its sack on his shoulder. “Yes. Claire,” he said. “Very well. But what do you want, if I cannot kiss you?”

She said, “I wish I could sing like you. Can you—” She twisted her hands together. “Can you teach me how to sing?”

“To sing.” That startled him into silence, into a shocked look that, she saw, for once reflected his real thoughts. He put one hand on his hip. “You want to sing.”

“I try to sing,” she said, “but when I hear you, I know I am a creaking hinge. Please. Show me how to do better.”

He glanced around them. They were at the far edge of the courtyard, the kitchen around the corner behind him, and the broad paved court behind her crisscrossed with hurrying servants, grooms, a train of horses. He turned his eyes on her, not smiling. “Sing for me, then.”

“What?” She gripped her fists to her chest, afraid. “Here? Now?”

“Here and now,” he said. He unslung the sack and pulled his lute out. Holding it ungainly in his arms, he plucked out a few notes. “Sing that.”

Her heart was slamming against her ribs. She wound her hands together. Suddenly she saw that if she failed now, he would not teach her, would think nothing of her, forever, and his judgment would be true: She would never sing again. She swallowed. She collected herself, and with the notes he had just played in her mind, she sang them out wordlessly, beat for beat.