The Stolen Queen (11 page)

My queenship was recorded by stiff fingered monks in freezing northern abbeys and Arab scribes beyond the Pyrenees; I was one of God's elect, and would be the mother of kings. The most powerful vassals of my husband's lands, from my own father to the king of Scots, would kneel before me. My revenues included lands in Saintes and Niort, Saumur, La Flèche, Beaufort-en-Vallée, Baugé and Châteaux de Loir, manors in Devon, Ilchester, Wilton, Malmesbury, Wiltshire, Rutland, Berkhamsted, Falaise and Domfront and Bonneville-sur-Touque, all solemnly granted in the king's name. I had a household of my own, and the rights of a bridge and a dock in London. I had a chaplain and a mistress of the robes and, for what it mattered, a silver chamber pot.

The men I had known as a child had only travelled in order to make war, at the summons of their king. Mules and carts were for pedlars. But my new husband could not get enough of moving, that strange restless energy which possessed him only being assuaged by constant journeying. As the leaves turned, the
king took me on progress across the country to the border of the wild lands of Wales, north to Lincoln and south once more to Guildford, where we kept Christmas and I gave out bright silk shirts with my own hands to his knights. Then north again, as far as the Scots march, across a range of hills where we heard the wolves howling across the snow-streaked moors and back to the holy city of Canterbury where we wore our crowns at the Easter Mass.

I looked on graciously as the burghers of each town we visited came out beyond the walls to make their bumbling and lengthy speeches of welcome, I listened gravely to the reports of my clerk of the revenues, I hawked with the king on the road and knelt at prayer and dined beneath my gold canopy of state and distributed alms and grants, but as I went about in my new guise, as gentle and docile as even Lady Maude could have wished, I thought of little but the stories Agnes told me, when she crept from her pallet at the foot of my bed to whisper to me in the candlelight.

At Angouleme, and then at Lusignan and Langoiran, I had been left a great deal to myself, and I had scarcely noticed, much less minded. Only now that I knew what it was never to be alone did I recall the long hours in the forest with Othon or my games in the garden with disbelief. Queens, it seemed, might never be alone. Agnes had said that my marriage would be like a play, but I had not expected that I should be constantly on the stage. From the moment Lady Maude drew the tester curtains in the morning, to the time my maids undressed me when I retired, I had to act my part. I was rarely private with the king. Since he
could not yet share my bed, he would summon me after supper to sit on his lap and chatter in his ear, and I did not much mind his hands stroking my neck or the length of my thigh over my gown, though I did dislike the wet, wine-soaked kisses I had to accept from his mouth. That he doted on me was the only satisfaction of this new life, and even that was for the pleasure of tormenting Lady Maude. At first, I thought of extravagant trifles it would plague her to fetch me, fresh figs in November, a pure white kitten, winter roses to scatter on my sheets, but quickly these things seemed as childish and stupid as my half forgotten dreams of monkeys and silver sherbet bowls, and though the king begged me to think of anything he could procure that would delight me, I ceased to find pleasure in Lady Maude's disapproval. I did not care for jewels nor for silks any longer, nor even for the discomfiting of my enemy.

The kitten developed disgusting pus in its eyes and I told one of the guards to drown it. I found I no longer liked marmalade, much. I rode Othon each day that we travelled and made Tomas the master of my horse, but even that was not what I had expected. I was no longer ill. I ate and laughed, and found I could delight the king by teasing him, but all my thoughts were on that black night at the riverside in Lusignan, because the mark was on me.

The serpent on my shoulder twisted deep in my flesh, as deep as Lord Hugh had done. I scratched and worried at it, until the scar broke out in a weeping sore, then I raked my nails across it, knowing I could never smooth it out, unable to leave it be. Agnes made a plaster and told me that I should have to sleep in
mittens if I did not leave myself alone. But it disgusted me, even as I made my own blood run down my back, the thin red trail a rope that bound me to the Lusignans across the sea. The mark trapped me, and at night I hated everyone who had conspired to put it there. It was a slave's brand, for all that I was queen, and like a slave, my thoughts were filled with futile schemes against my despised masters. The only thread of hope in that watery, ferrous skein was Agnes, because Agnes knew what I did not, and I believed that if I could only know too, I might understand. Not forgive, yet, but understand.

*

It came out slowly. Just a few snatched moments each night. I could not hear too much, Agnes said, since it made me nervous and unable to sleep, and it would displease the king if he saw me white and hollow eyed. Lady Maude supervised my food carefully, trying to stuff me with white bread and cream, because the king wanted me to grow plump and ready to become his true wife, but after hearing Agnes's story I pushed my dishes away and ate only a little fruit and meat, since I had no desire to grow at all. My mother had told me of a Saracen princess who saved her own life each night by inventing a new tale to divert her husband the sultan, and as Agnes faltered out what knowledge she had it seemed that I too was wrapped in a skein of stories except that each night I grew a little closer to my own end.

Agnes's family had always served the Courtenays. Back in Poitou she had sisters in service to my aunts and her uncles had
gone as grooms or men-at-arms to the Holy Land. As a child she had been taken by her own mother to the summoning of the horned man, and watched the Courtenay ladies draw off their gowns and dance with him under the moon. It was the old faith, she said, much older than the Church, and all the men of Poitou, the Taillefers and the Lusignans and even the Aquitaine dukes included, knew that in their veins ran the blood of sky-clad women with unbound hair who knew of a religion deeper and more ancient than that of Christ. King Richard had known of it through his mother old Queen Eleanor, and when he was dying of the arrow wound in his shoulder had said bitterly that his family had come from the Devil and would return to him, but he was wrong, Agnes whispered, close in the dark. He was wrong because the Devil was an invention of the priests in Rome, who wished the people to adhere to the new faith, and tried to frighten them with stories of demons. The horned god was the spirit of all that kept the earth alive, and no more wicked than a tree or a sheep.

It was women's business, Agnes said. The men, the lords like my father, held themselves apart from it, for the Church and its bishops were what kept the world in balance. So long as the Holy Land was disputed, the Church supporting the system of lordship and vassalage, its wealth could be drawn upon, and in return there was great power to be obtained for the Crusader princes of Outremer. If the Holy Land was fully conquered, Agnes said, and I felt her stout shoulders shrug against me under the bedclothes, then perhaps there would be less need of popes and prelates.

I had never been so enthralled by any of the stories my mother told me, nor so appalled. Was this not wickedness, I asked, great wickedness? Certainly what was done to me could not be good. And what about sin, and minding my missal like a Christian child? All my life, Agnes had heard Mass alongside me each day, it was her voice that had taught me the ‘Ave' and the ‘Our Father', her hands which had folded my own small fingers in prayer. Agnes shrugged again and I could sense her struggling to find the words. The Lord was good, she sighed at last. What the Church taught – kindness, compassion, charity – were good things, and it was right to be mindful of them, especially for great people. But the old faith made no distinction between good and evil, it simply, it simply was. And many of the festivals we kept – Christmas and Easter and Lammastide, my marriage night – were the feasts of the old faith, covered up and made new, like, she struggled, again, like a plaster wall painted over, where the old patterns worked their way through the lime.

I could not believe it. All the people at Lusignan – the half-recognizable village folk, even my mother's maids – they all knew of this? And what about Lord Hugh? If this religion was women's business, then what was Lord Hugh doing wearing a stag's head and dancing about on the riverbank at night? I could not mention the other thing, though it was there between us, solid as a warming pan beneath the sheet. Instead I tried to make it sound foolish, a matter for muttering peasants like the old woman we had seen in the woods.

‘It was not him,' Agnes insisted.

‘Agnes, I
saw
him. I saw the brooch, the Lusignan serpent. The same shape as the mark he put upon me, a serpent, like Melusina. Why?'

Agnes couldn't say. At least, she tried, but she was not learned, and she could not make words to fit what was inside her.

‘It might have looked like Lord Hugh, but it was something else, in Lord Hugh's body. Like the body of Christ, at Mass.'

‘Lord Hugh is not a god, Agnes. Do not speak so sinfully! Whether you believe it or not, the thing I saw on May Eve was Lord Hugh. And I know that as surely as I know he was in my chamber on my wedding eve. You know it too. Don't lie!' I was so angry I thought of having her whipped, of having John's guard pull off her shift and shame her, of weals cut across her poor old back with a burning leather brand. But how could I think such things? I was wicked, the mark was making me as wicked as Lord Hugh. So I tried to be patient, to listen and to believe that she had acted because she thought it right.

All Agnes was able to explain clearly was that she had taken me to the
sabbat
, the meeting of the old faith, on my mother's instructions, just as her own mother had carried her.

‘It was Tomas who took me, wasn't it?'

‘He flew with you, yes.'

‘Flew?'

‘That's what we call it, when we are summoned. Flying.'

I recalled the thick grease Tomas had smeared on Othon's hooves the first time I had galloped him. It had felt as though we were flying.

Agnes explained that those who worshipped the horned man believed that they could take the form of animals, swift and light as foxes, strong as horses, fleet as hares.

‘What else? What else do they believe?' I was insatiable now.

‘That there is no death.'

‘Like Christians, then?'

Agnes puzzled again over her words. ‘Not like that. There is no death, because it is the same as life, just a different … stage. When we eat bread, we are eating the death of the wheat that made it, but it becomes part of us, of our life. And when we die, we become part of the fields.'

‘Like the bread at Mass.'

Agnes smiled, quite the scholar, ‘That is where the Mass comes from, little one, from the old ways.'

‘And my mother? She wanted to make me part of this?'

‘Your mother loves you, little one. You are a queen now. Surely you see that?'

‘Then why—'

‘I cannot say.'

‘Did it happen to you too?'

‘Once. It happens to all of us. We have to become one with the horned man.'

I was bewildered. Agnes was an old maid, a spinster who had never had a husband. Had she … done that? I could not picture it.

‘And now? Why did Lord Hugh want me to marry Hal and then change his mind? Why did he treat me so kindly, and then …' I could not say it. I bit my lip and took a deep
breath. ‘Why did he pretend that the king had tricked him, if he didn't care?'

‘I have only told you what I was bid, little one. But your mother said she would send you a messenger, someone who will explain, when the time is right. I was not to tell you, except for what happened in the woods that day, and you so ill, and I so afraid.'

I reached out and touched Agnes's face. Her cheeks were wet. ‘I will not be without you for anything, Agnes. Don't worry. You did what you were told. Don't cry.'

But somehow that made her cry the harder.

*

I wished then that I had learned to write during those quiet days in the convent. I could read quite well, in both French languages, but like any lady, I had clerks to make out the grants and charters I was expected to witness as queen, and though I could dictate a letter, as Queen Eleanor had done to the Pope himself when her son the Lionheart was a hostage in Austria, I could hardly ask a nervous young priest to take down words about stag's heads and midnight sabbats. And to whom should I send it? Did my mother intend to send me a letter? Or Lord Hugh?

I doubted that, too, because my marriage with the king had brought rebellion to Poitou. My flight with King John had made war, not peace. At first, Lord Hugh had feinted, asking John to offer him some recompense for the loss of his son's bride. Instead, my husband sent his seneschal in Normandy
to seize the castle of the Count of Eu there, who was Lord Hugh's brother, and demanded that the vassals of La Marche, which he had granted to the Lusignans, pay homage direct to the English crown. Lord Hugh's response was to throw off his allegiance to John and declare once more for the French king, sending his men to attack the garrisons held in John's name. Each time my husband held a council, I questioned him, claiming that I wished to know the workings of his government, that I might be a better wife to him, but often he would play with my hair and tell me not to mind, that this was men's business, and that I should not meddle in it as his own mother Eleanor had done. He preferred me to play with toys, or eat cakes with my ladies, or practise my dancing, to think on pretty things, he said, since I was so pretty myself. But sometimes, he would indulge me, and I discovered all I could of the Lusignans' plottings, all the time feeling the throb of the mark on my shoulder and recalling the coldness inside me, which meant I belonged to them.