The Stolen Queen (10 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

S
O WHEN AT LAST I SAW THE SEA, IT LOOKED TO MY EYES
as dank and sour as a stagnant millpond. I wished I could be blinkered like Othon and the other horses. I wished that I could stuff my nose and ears with wax so as not to smell the salt mist or hear the waves. To Agnes's puzzlement I asked to be taken below deck as soon as we stepped onto the ship and I did not stir from my bed all the time it took to make the crossing. Lady Maude ordered basins, and screens around my face, for it would never do for the queen of England to be seen puking, but I had no need of them, I was dry and hard within, and I lay on my couch as still as my own effigy. Lady Maude tried to rouse me, thinking that I was so overwhelmed by my new station that I was afraid to speak, and Agnes, more sensitive, merely sat by me and stroked my hand, but my throat seemed full of the feathers from the bolster where my face had been pressed. If I tried to speak I knew that my voice would grate my tongue to shreds. A day and a night I lay there, and when we docked at Portsmouth, the first town of my strange new country, I suffered myself to
be sponged and scented and dressed in silence. The king had travelled on an earlier tide, it was bad luck for us to sail together, and I was to join him at his capital at London, where I would make my entry as queen.

We journeyed along high narrow roads, the horses picking their way carefully through the flint-strewn soil. I watched endless green hedgerows through the curtains of the litter, so that England seemed to me a country of green shade and grey stone, a damp mossy hollow where I had been rolled like a pebble. Perhaps if I had moved even slightly I should have seen the leafy pelt of the trees rippling against the sky, the spires of churches or even the faces of the people who Agnes and Lady Maude assured me had travelled for miles to glimpse their new queen, but I did not look up. I turned my head away from the food offered me, which smelt coarse and rancid. I accepted only a few sips of a brown drink called ale. I closed my eyes when I was lifted for the litter at night and carried to my bed in the township of tents erected for the queen's passing and let Lady Maude give out that I was ill, overwrought by the journey. I could see that she and Agnes had formed an unlikely alliance, each praying for her own reasons that I should survive, and they changed roles, Agnes scolding and Lady Maude awkwardly coaxing, but I could not eat even when I heard the pain in the feigned sharpness of Agnes's tone. As the days passed, I grew dizzy, fuddled by the shifting green shadows creeping into the litter, sometimes sobbing silently into my fists, often drifting and dreaming and waking in a moment that had lasted a morning.

To say that I did not care if I lived or died would suggest I had thoughts of either. Rather, I thought nothing, felt nothing. I paid no mind to my wedding, to my arrival in London, or the coronation that would be expected of me. I had no wish, as I grew daily weaker and Agnes and Lady Maude more frantic, beyond the green shadows of the roadside, the calls of the birds and the shuffle of the shifting leaves, that I might eventually slip away painlessly to meld with them and simply be no more. Until we broke our journey one evening in a clearing where there was a half-ruined chapel, its rounded arches recalling to me the lines of the old cathedral at Angouleme, whose bones were built into the newer apse erected in my grandfather's time. Dully, I thought that it must be very old.

‘See, Majesty, what a charming place,' remarked Lady Maude brightly. I took no pleasure in the new title, with not one moment's joy of it. Two guards helped me from the litter and my maids fussed to arrange cushions that I might sit while my tent was set up. Below us in the forest, I could hear the grunts of the men as they hauled the baggage carts into a ring for the night. The deep forests of England were haunted by wolves, and the men lit fires in a circle each night to keep them off.

I was seated next to a little well, no more than a heap of stones with a cracked leather pitcher set into a ledge, and the thought of the cool water made me suddenly thirsty. I motioned to one of the maids to fetch me to drink and saw Agnes and Lady Maude exchange a meaningful look. It was the first time I had expressed any wish since we had been on the road. I swallowed the clean, flinty water, first sipping, then gulping. I could feel
it flowing through me, reviving and cooling me from within. I sat straighter, and something in the doorway of the chapel caught my eye. Slowly, with my legs trembling with effort, I pushed myself to my feet. The maids leaped forward to support me, but I saw Agnes hold up a quick hand to still them. A few faltering steps brought me across the thick summer grass to the deep shade of the chapel porch. Set into the stone lintel was a carving, a poor thing, the kind of drawing I might once have made for Othon, not the skilled work of a mason, and newer than the chapel, its planes still raw bright stone among the moss and ivy of the walls. A face with two horns surrounded by a few crudely shaped leaves above, with a line on its forehead and another flickering leaf-shape above that, like a candle's flame. It did not frighten me – what could frighten me now? The beauty and peace of the glade seemed to cup my puny body in its greenness, sheltering. This was a holy place. I pushed at the rough wooden door. Within, the chapel was dark and surprisingly cold, its only light a round window pushed through the wall where an altar had once been. The floor was littered with the desiccated corpses of songbirds, poor things, who had flown through and died in their dim prison, battering their fragile bodies against the walls. And there was something else. A heap of rags in one corner, curled over a stick. As I looked, I saw it move, very slightly.

‘Lady Maude!' I had been right, I had lost my old voice. This was a new tone, clear and commanding, with an edge in it like the flint in the water I had swallowed. Lady Maude rushed up, followed by the guards. ‘There is a person here.'

I waited outside, exhausted on my cushions, while the figure was dragged into the light. An old woman, though the thick grey hair on her wrinkled berry of a face made her seem as sexless as the figure carved into the door. One pathetically thin hand clutched a broomstick, and when she moved her layers of skirts they gave off a thick, dirty barnyard scent, high and pungent like a chicken run.

‘Only a beggar, Majesty. I shall pack her off?' gasped Lady Maude, struggling between fear that I should be angry at being privately disturbed and delight that I had at last spoken.

‘No. Ask her if she is hungry. I am hungry. Bring us some food.' No one moved. ‘Lady Maude, you heard me. Bring us some food. And the woman may sit.'

I wondered later if the poor old lady knew that she had shared her meal with the queen of England. We were both ravenous. She nibbled swiftly and furtively at her food like an animal, mumbling chunks of bread into her toothless mouth as fast as she could swallow, and I tried to smile at her to show she should not be afraid, while I stuffed down cold fowl and cold baked eggs until my astonished stomach bulged and twitched with pain. I washed my hands and myself handed the creature a napkin to wipe the crumbs from her mouth.

‘Now. Ask her what this place is,' I instructed Lady Maude.

‘Majesty, I cannot think—'

‘I said, ask her.'

Lady Maude spoke to the woman in the English tongue. I was surprised to find that a few of the words already sounded familiar.

‘It is an old chapel, Majesty. This … person lives in a hut nearby. She sweeps it to keep it tidy. Sometimes a pilgrim will sleep or pray here. That is all.'

‘Ask about that.' I pointed to the face in the porch.

‘It is nothing, Majesty. The common people call it a “green man”. A sort of …' Lady Maude trailed, ‘woodland sprite. Just an old superstition.'

‘Ask her. Tell her she has no reason to fear, if she will answer. Ask her politely, Lady Maude.'

The old woman paused then began to roll up her sleeve, exposing a withered arm much weaker looking than her broomstick. It was hard not to recoil in disgust at her stench. She held it out to me and I bent forward eagerly, ignoring Lady Maude's disapproving glare. The flesh was bluish white where the sun had not reached it. It was easy to see the tiny purpled coil, a raised scar. It could be a repulsive cyst, or it could be a serpent. Such as the one hidden beneath my own heavy linen gown. I looked into the old woman's darting, birdlike eyes, and placed one finger slowly on the mark. ‘Ask her how she came by this?'

Lady Maude reluctantly translated the question. The woman's answer was short, as though she thought Lady Maude ought already to know it.

‘The black man, Majesty. She says the black man put it there.' Lady Maude crossed herself and the ninny maids piously imitated her. I was desperate to ask more, but there was one word I was fearful of hearing.

‘Please thank the woman. You may give her enough food for
another meal, and some pennies. Not too many, she might get into trouble for stealing. Take her away, now. I am tired.'

I smiled at the woman, trying to reassure her, but she made no gesture of thanks, as I had been accustomed to see poor folks use. She scrabbled together her rags as decently as she could and stepped away from us with a surprising agility, like an old proud doe. One of the maids gingerly handed her some provisions wrapped in a cloth, and then she was gone, calmly, vanishing along an invisible path through the trees.

‘Now I would bathe. Have the bath set up, Lady Maude. And then I will dine. How many more days until London?'

‘Three, Majesty. Perhaps four.'

‘Very well. I will not use the litter, the air is too close. That is what has made me ill. Tomorrow, you shall have my horse prepared, and I will ride.' As the maids bustled to fetch out the tub and the screens, the soaps and the sheets, I looked around for Agnes, holding her face in my gaze until she returned it. ‘Dear Agnes, see, I am well. You shall help me bathe.'

I rested as the water was boiled in cauldrons over the fire until it steamed, watching while the maids added cold from the well and Agnes the herbs and soap she carried in her travelling bag. My bath was a gift from my husband, who Lady Maude said liked to bathe every few days in the southern style, a polished cedar tub with thick handles carved with mermaids. I was rather tired of women with tails. The guards formed a ring around the glade, their backs turned, to protect the queen's modesty, and the maids held the sailcloth screens around the bath. I wrapped myself in the sheet that Agnes held for me and she unlaced my
dress and I sank into the water, the wet folds clinging to my skin. My ribs stuck out and my stomach was distended between them with the food I had gobbled, the ankle bones of my floating feet poking out like hinges. Agnes combed and bound up my hair, humming to herself as she had always done when she washed me.

‘It wasn't a dream, was it?' I asked as she bent to rub the olive oil soap into my back.

‘No, Lady Isabelle,' she whispered sadly.

‘And in Bordeaux, the night of the wedding … you knew of that?'

‘I knew that he would come. Nothing more.'

‘Yet you burned the bed linen?'

‘I did as I was told.'

‘I know you did. You would never hurt me.'

‘Never, never!' Agnes cried.

‘Hush,' I whispered. One of the maids had looked behind her.

‘I was so sorry. I had no idea. But your mother …'

‘You must tell me now. You have to. If the king should see?' I felt her fingers trace the mark on my shoulder, as my hand had traced the line on the old woman's flesh.

‘He won't. Not for a long while, little one. Your mother made him promise.'

‘What do you think of my mother's care for me, Agnes? What should I feel about my mother's promises?'

‘You will understand, you will. Please, please be patient.'

‘When? When will you tell me?'

‘When you are crowned, Isabelle. When you are safe.'

I stood up and peeled the sheet from my wet body. Agnes held the towel and I allowed her to lift me from the tub against her hip as I had done since I was tiny, as I had always done. I couldn't be angry with her, she had not known how to protect me, how could she? There was no statue in that ruined chapel, only the green man, gloating at me. I thought of the Virgin in Mother Helene's closet, of the nun's serene face, tranquil in her assurance that the Holy Mother would protect her. But I had come alive again with the cool water of the forest, just like the king in the story of Melusina. There were other things than bits of painted wood to believe in. I would not commend myself to an ornament. My mind shied from the word but I forced myself to think it. Agnes could not protect me because she had been bewitched. And if my mother would not, and Agnes could not, then there would be nobody to protect me now I was in England – except myself.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I
WAS A COURTENAY, AND A TAILLEFER, AND THEN, IN THE
first week of October in the first year of the new century, and the twelfth of my own life, I became a queen. The king's heralds announced my ancestry over the blaring of trumpets in the cathedral at Westminster: Isabelle, Countess of Angouleme, great-granddaughter of Louis VI of France, niece to the Emperor of Contantinople, kin to the royal houses of Hungary, Aragon, Castile, Jerusalem and Cyprus, to the counts of Champagne, Hainault, Forez, Namur, Nevers, anointed with the common consent and agreement of the archbishops, bishops, counts, barons and people of the realm of England, by the grace of God, Duchess of Aquitaine and Normandy, Countess of Anjou and Maine. So many titles, so many great names. Names that were recorded on parchments in the monasteries of Europe and howled on battlefields; names that were muttered around peasants' hearths and cried in the lists of tournaments. And they all belonged to me. I felt too small to carry them.

As John and I processed in clouds of incense and ermine the
Laudes
, the ancient hymn of the Norman dukes, was sung, proclaiming me party to my husband's empire. At the banquet beneath the great beams of Westminster Hall the queen's champion, William Marshal, the finest of the Lionheart's knights, walked his destrier three times among the trestles, challenging any man who disputed my title to single combat. The Royal Exchequer released thirty pounds for my coronation regalia, and my crown of thick and ancient English gold had been worn by the Danish queens long before England passed to the Normans.