The Secret Eleanor (34 page)

“What do I hear about you and that wicked Frenchwoman? It’s noised about she’s got an interest in you. You should have nothing to do with a woman like that; she’ll ruin you.”

“She isn’t French,” he said. He glanced around to see who might be hearing—there were dozens of people around. The two girls behind his mother’s chair were watching him through the corners of their eyes. In earlier visits he had bedded one of them and tried for the other. He decided this Christmas he would get the other, too.

His mother said, “Avoid that harpy. She would only do to you what she’s done to poor Louis. You would never know your children were your own.”

He took his gaze slowly from the girls. He wanted his mother off this track. He thought of telling her about the letters, the schemings between Louis and Stephen to cut down the English barons, who would never now let any scion of Stephen’s hold the throne. Henry thought he was now King of England in all but the crowning because of that harpy. Behind him, he heard the first low tones of the lute, and he glanced over his shoulder; the trouvère had sat down on the side of the yard not far away and was bent over his lute, his wife behind him, her hand on his shoulder.

Henry turned back to his mother. “I want to call a council in the spring, to plan out another attack on England.” He would not tell her about the letter. No reason to tell her any more than she had to know.

The old woman lifted her chin. She thrived on the fight for England. She put out one hand, and the girl on her left, the one he had already had, brought forward a ewer. The other, the quest, came with a cup.

Matilda lifted her cup to her lips, drank, and set it down. The girls retreated to their places behind the chair. “Another council,” the Empress said. “Nobody came to the one last fall. Drink.”

Henry took the cup. “They’ll come to this one. I have to build another fleet.” He thought he might have as many as three thousand men, which would be enough. The problem was getting them over to England.

“There is no money.” His mother put her fingertips together. “Tell me why you think you will succeed this time, when you’ve already failed twice.”

Her head turned as she spoke, her eyes going toward the trouvère.

Henry snorted at her. She had been scheming for this since he was a baby; she was only dallying with him, which annoyed him. He drank the rest of the wine in the cup. “The first time I was nine years old.” He tossed the cup down onto the ground. The intercepted letter would convince her, but he was now certainly going to tell her nothing. “I need money.”

His mother shrugged and made a face. Her fingers moved fitfully over the rug on her knees. Her eyes went toward the trouvère again, who was playing something soft and complex, involving many of the songs they had heard in passing from the yule-loggers. The woman began to sing.

“Get me the money,” Henry said. She had friends among the Jews. Friends also among the English.

She said, “They will give me not a silver penny until you prove you can get something done.”

“What have I been doing since my father died? I hold all of Anjou now except Mirebeau, which I let Geoffrey keep out of love of you.” He nodded to her; he wanted some acknowledgment of that. “I’ve got Normandy subdued. I have an agreement with Louis. He will keep out of an English war and even help me defend the east. If I build a fleet this spring, I could sail this summer.” The westward crossing of the narrow water was always hard to figure, the wind contrary and the sea rough. If Louis kept the agreement, he would have all year to wait for the right moment. He did not want to wait a year, not even a month. “Fifty ships.” He could be King by next Christmas, he thought.

“We should be thinking of brides for you,” she said. “A Danish princess, maybe.”

“I’ll deal with that, Mother,” he said.

“It
is
her, then, isn’t it? That Occitan harlot. She is much older than you,” his mother said. She fluffed the rug on her lap, her gaze on her knobby fingers. “Of course I was older than your father. But I had some sense of a woman’s place. I hated him for twenty years, but I never tried to annul the marriage.” Her voice trailed off, her eyes turned toward the music. “Nearly killed him once.”

Henry laughed. That he believed; his earliest memories of his parents were of their clawing, kicking fights. “I’m not getting married.”

“Oh,” the Empress said, her gaze swinging toward him, her voice suddenly lighter. “Good.”

“Yet.” He laughed again and winked at his new girl.

But now he was thinking about Eleanor. It came to him he did not want to be grateful to Eleanor for his throne. He drew in a deep breath; he wanted to be on top of Eleanor, driving her down, that long red hair wrapped around his wrists.

His mother gave him a sharp, angry look. Maybe she had seen something in his face. But she said only, “Send these musicians closer, that I might hear them better.”

“You like them,” he said. He himself knew little about music, but he thought they sounded very well.

“I can’t know,” his mother said, “until I can actually hear them.” Her voice was edged with affront, as if he presumed. He had never heard any praise from her, not for him, not for any thing or creature. But her face softened as she turned toward the music, and a wistful look came over her. He turned and beckoned to the trouvère and his wife.

The Duke left, and the Empress ordered Claire and Thomas inside the hall. This was like a barn, drafty and bare except for a few hangings on the walls; Claire thought it had been newly made, or made over, and they had not gotten the chance to fill it up yet. With servants bustling around, Thomas and she sat on a little bench near the end where the Empress’s chair was and played. He played a few notes while he was sitting on the bench, then got off and sat on the floor at her feet, cross-legged, the lute in his lap.

First they played the Queen’s song, from his long story of the sorrowing knight, and then the song of Tristan. Thomas was having some trouble with his strings, stopping often to tune them; while he fussed over the fret board and pegs, Claire studied the old woman on her chair.

The Empress wore a long, elegant gown, as fine as anything Eleanor had, and far more jewels than Eleanor. Around her neck hung a massive collar of gold and rosy quartz, and in her hair, on her wrists and fingers, at her ears she wore more bobs and bejeweled bits. But her face was lean as a knife, her skin crinkled like dry leaves, her eyes pitiless; Claire saw the small, narrow-lipped mouth, curled always downward at the ends, and thought she would not be the servant of such a one.

She thought, with some astonishment,
I am no servant now, at all, not even Eleanor’s
, and a wonderful surge of satisfaction warmed her.

Thomas turned to her. “Let’s try something new. You sing the Queen’s song.”

Obediently she sat up straighter, lifted her head, and began the first notes; dreamy and slow, they could be happy or sad. She loved trying to make them happy and sad at once. The lute played under her for a handful of notes, and then Thomas began.

But he was singing Tristan’s song, now, twining over and around hers. Two different songs, they still fit together, drifted apart, and came back with an aching sweetness. She startled and looked down at him, and found his gaze on her; she sang to him, and he sang to her, and the song was all different, somehow, rich and deep and tender and foreboding. He smiled at her. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“Where did you get these people?” the Empress asked.

“I’m glad you like them,” Henry said.

“Actually,” she said, “I was thinking they need a drum. But they are above the usual run of the country.” One long finger picked at her nose. “Where did they come from?” Henry was listening to the singers, who were in fact very good. The woman was pretty, too, and young, with a fine manner.

He said, “I think the lute player is from Wales, actually, the little I have seen of him. His wife is French, but . . .” This was curling back where he did not want to go, and he said, “I have no idea where.”

His mother would not let it pass. “How did you come by them?”

He shrugged. “Someone sent them to me. I have much to do, Mother. I shall see you for dinner. Tomorrow. Take care of my singers, since you like them so much.”

“I didn’t say—”

He was already backing away; he gave her a deep bow, to make up for this, and went quickly out the door.

Claire and Thomas lived in the Duke’s hall and played for the Empress two or three times a day, during which Duke Henry did not appear. The Empress gave them a purse, and then another purse. Claire took charge of these. She found the steward and began talking to him about giving them a place to themselves. Christmas came, with Masses and parades and the great yule log burning in the center of the hall. Still there was no sign of the young Duke, but his mother one day abruptly called Claire into her bower, behind the hall.

She could not deny a command from the Empress, servant or no, and she went into the bower. It was musty, warm from a clutch of braziers, stuffed with an old woman’s gatherings: fluffy bedclothes, shawls and furniture, a faint smell of dog. The Empress sat in the middle, and Claire bowed down to her.

“Your name is Claire, I’m told?”

“Yes, Madame.” And at the sharp look, hastily: “Your Majesty.”

“Tell me.” One bony hand rose to the old woman’s lips. “It was the Queen of the French who sent you to my son, was it not?”

She stiffened, but she should have known.
Honest,
she thought, in an instant. A lie got her in all sorts of trouble. She said, “Yes, your Majesty. But it was not me she sent. I only came with my husband.”

“This outlandish lute player is your husband? But you are gently born. It shows in your manner, in your speech.”

“Thomas is my husband, Your Majesty. I have no other family.” Which was certainly true now. Even if her father knew or cared where she was, he would not take her back after this.

The Empress’s eyes were like beads. “But you came from Poitiers.”

“We were in Poitiers, your Majesty, before Advent.” Claire held herself straight, as she did when she sang; she knew something was coming. The third test, she thought.

“Did you see the French Queen there?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. And the King. My husband played for them there.”

“Yes. Not a good word for him that they let him go. They say, for all her sins, she has a fine ear for a musician. Tell me—” The Empress leaned toward her, fingertips to her chin. “They say she is very brazen and unwomanly, a harlot, and a hussy, who will spread her legs for any man. What did you think of her?”

Claire blinked, and her eyes slid away from the Empress’s. It came to her that she had what the old woman dearly wanted to know, the perfect reason why her son should not marry Eleanor.

She had carried this secret all this while, unthinking, until now, when it rose in her mind like a dragon from a dark cave: treasure in its wake.