The Young Lion (10 page)

He kept his eye sharp for Hamelin and their six mounts. As a precaution against the French spy network they never risked hiring horses at staging posts but used their own for the ride from Paris to Rouen.

There was no sign of his man.

Once he was off the island Geoffrey whispered to the horse, ‘You’re good. You’re strong. We have a long night ahead.’ He clicked it into a fast trot, then a canter. Dawn was breaking on a cold December 25.

As he rode through Christmas Day, into the night and through the next morning, he saw nobody except villagers in their best clothes traipsing into and out of churches. The only constant sound was the chime of bells and the light hammering of his horse’s hooves. God’s peace rested over the winter landscape in a great, gentle hush. Indoors, families feasted together; now and then he caught singing in the distance. He was not concerned about French guards: during the holy days even they would be celebrating indoors with their families and regiments. He crossed the border into Normandy without a single challenge.

But at the back of his mind the question niggled incessantly: Why was Hamelin not waiting for me?

Late on the night of the Feast of Saint Stephen he reached the palace of Rouen.

A few months from now Henry was to take over as Duke of Normandy: Geoffrey wanted to retire from the relentless, mundane obligations of his rank – disputes his vassals demanded he settle; complaints from bishops and priests about brethren in other dioceses; the grudging observance of payment of his farms; the thieving, the fighting, the needs of the sick, of widows and orphans; the guarding of his domestic and game animals, of his castles and forests. He yearned to retire to a life of hawking, hunting and love. But he well understood the view in Paris. ‘In Henry’s hands, Suger and Selors know Normandy will be the base for an attack on England,’ he’d said to Matilda who, since the birth of her first son had drummed into the boy’s head; ‘England is mine by right. It shall be yours, Henry, through force of arms.’ Suger, Selors and even Louis recognised that in Normandy brooded a clutch of vengeance eggs – and no man could stop them hatching.

Henry came running to the courtyard. He was so furious he spoke in Latin so the grooms could not understand him.

‘How could you, Father!’ he hissed. ‘Mother’s been in tears because you weren’t here for Christmas Day. The little girls are crying. I’ve had to tell everybody lies.’

Geoffrey dismounted. He drew himself erect. ‘You rant like a priest,’ he replied. ‘I’ve not eaten for more than twenty-four hours. This is not a greeting I welcome.’

Henry paused, looking from his father to the horse. ‘What animal is this? You’ve ridden it almost to death.’ He snapped his fingers at a groom. ‘Quickly, take this horse. Give it a physic. Feed it. Rub it well. Put it in thick straw, away from the others.’ He sensed a shadow over his father’s mood.

‘Where’s Hamelin?’

‘Hamelin’s coming tomorrow with our horses. Two of them had colic.’

‘Which two?’

‘The bay and a black.’

He’s lying. They didn’t take a black. They took our plainest animals, to avoid attention.

‘You’ve found a new woman, haven’t you? I know your look when you’re in rut, Papa.’

Geoffrey turned and walked away but Henry dashed after him and grabbed his arm. The Duke was taller, but even if he were not exhausted, he was already weaker than his son.

‘Where have you been that you bring so much grief upon us?’ Henry demanded.

Geoffrey tried to shake him off. ‘How dare you manhandle me, boy! Do you forget you’re still my vassal?’ As is Hamelin, and his father. Maybe even his grandfather, if he’s still alive. For generations they’ve served our family.

Henry’s eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. He dragged his father towards the light from a torch. Once under it, he squinted into his face. ‘Papa, tell me. For God’s sake, tell me!’

‘I can’t.’ The Duke stared at the cobblestones of the courtyard. Suddenly he began to chortle, then laugh. He wrapped his arms around Henry and covered his cheeks with kisses. ‘I love you. I love you,’ he said. ‘I’ve done something for which you’ll be forever grateful.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve discovered that France prepares to make war on us. On my next visit to Paris I’ll discover the exact date.’

Henry whistled. ‘So you did find a highly placed spy. Who is he?’

‘Oh, that I can’t say.’ Geoffrey giggled.

He only giggles when he’s playing with his daughters. He’s as mad as a cock robin in spring. Is everything he says a lie? I know he’s been with a woman. Maybe there is no spy. Or maybe …

The hairs on Henry’s arms stood up, because suddenly he recalled with what care his father had plotted how he would greet the French army as it returned from the disaster of the second crusade; how he had wondered aloud about the feelings of the Queen – if she felt guilty for persuading her husband to undertake the whole, doomed, fantastical adventure. Everyone knew it was she, swept away by Father Bernard’s oratory, who had cajoled and hammered Louis until he gave in and agreed France would carry the Cross to Jerusalem. ‘She’s Louis’s weakest point,’ Geoffrey had said. ‘She neither loves nor respects him. She wants a divorce. Even the kitchen hands say so.’

There were only another few steps before they would be inside the ducal palace where all walls had ears. Henry whispered, ‘If what I suspect is true, Papa, it’s not only you whom they’ll murder. The House of Capet will strike down our entire family.’

‘You’ve been indoors too much and in your mother’s company,’ Geoffrey replied haughtily. ‘We’ll go boar hunting tomorrow. Do us both good.’

Henry pulled a scarf from his neck. ‘Put this around you, Papa. You’re covered in love bites.’

The Seneschal strode lopsidedly up and down the King’s audience hall as he mentally figured what the army would require.

Life had been dull while Louis was in Outremer, and the Seneschal gnashed his teeth with pleasure at the thought of war. He recalled that unspeakable day five years earlier when the Count of Anjou had seized the castle of Rouen, and he, Selors, in his rage had rushed into a sty on one of his estates in Burgundy and stabbed to death a large sow. Her screaming almost drowned his own yells of fury. Before she died the beast turned and bit him on the leg, leaving a slight but permanent limp as her memorial.

‘Boar hunt,’ the Seneschal would say if his wife were not around.

He had studied the reports of young Henry’s fighting in England and the type of training he had undertaken in Normandy and had persuaded Louis and Abbot Suger to attack as soon as Christmas was out of the way and the weather was improving. The beginning of March, he thought, would be right. It was before the start of the campaign season, and would hold the advantage of surprise. And Prince Eustace had promised knights and infantry from England.

‘I’ll get Matilda’s whelp!’ he snarled as he stamped about. ‘I got her father. Got the Lion of fucking England!’ He smacked his thigh in satisfaction. ‘King of the English dies from eating a dish of lampreys! Ha-ha!’

A small, neat man from Lombardy, whose art stretched back many generations, had acted as poisoner for the Baron.

Seated in the audience hall, with maps of the Vexin and Normandy spread across a table, Suger tried to smile. If one believed every word of the Seneschal, he was the Great Alexander, Julius Caesar and Charlemagne all in one.

In the palace chapel early that morning, during lauds, Suger had received news so awful he had spent an hour in his private chapel before attending mass. ‘Lord of creation,’ he prayed, ‘by Your decree our dear Louis is King. He desired never to shed blood, never to touch a woman, only to perfect his soul in Your service. Lord, Your ways are mysterious. Guide me in what I am to do about the serpent You have made Queen of France.’

Suger fell silent, waiting for an answer. It was difficult for him to surrender his heart to God, for he was in a tumult of memories: the fight he’d had with the old King about the proposed bride for his son. He’d warned Old Louis that southern women were ungovernable Visigoths – and this one worse than others, granddaughter of the sorceress, a harlot with so many lovers and husbands she was both grandmother and stepmother to the girl.

Old Louis refused to listen.

‘Richest heiress in the world!’ was all he’d say. ‘And now her father’s dead, I’m her guardian! My son must have her.’

He summoned the boy to his sickbed. ‘They’ll all be after her! Get to her first, boy.’

The royal party had left at one day’s notice. Young Louis, Suger, the Seneschal and five hundred knights rode down to Bordeaux to claim Eleanor of Aquitaine’s money and womb for France.

The Abbot had never forgotten the shock of first seeing her: fourteen years old, clad head to foot in scarlet, seated, waiting for Young Louis to approach her ducal throne. Then standing slowly, she had announced, ‘I am Eleanor, Lord of Aquitaine and Poitou.’

‘God save me!’ the Seneschal had muttered. ‘She is a Visigoth!’

It had been Baron Estienne de Selors’s task to instruct the bridegroom in his marital duties. He’d ordered a kitchen maid to lie on the floor of a bedchamber and open her legs. ‘Thought the boy would faint when he saw it,’ he told the Abbot cheerfully. ‘I said to her, “Shove your finger in the hole, girl. And show him the other thing, the little nob you all like us to play with first.” But he shut his eyes. Wouldn’t even look at her tits. And they were beauties.’

Now on his knees in the chapel, Suger tried to calm himself. He prayed to the Guardian of France: ‘Saint Denis, help me.’

He waited for the saint to arrive in the way he always did, appearing exactly as on the day of his martyrdom, when he strode up a hill carrying his severed head under his arm.

Outside a bell rang the half-hour but the Guardian remained hidden.

The Abbot’s knees ached.

The hour bell rang.

From the courtyard below a sound of flutes, tambours, drums and a citern lit the air with music. A minstrel began a song of welcome to Christmas.

That’s His answer, Suger said to himself. I must wait until the Christmas Court is over. Until we’ve celebrated the Feast of Epiphany.

Inside the pocket of his gown, the King fingered a ruby, the shape of a heart and the size of a pigeon’s egg. On reflection, he now believed Eleanor was ashamed that she had persuaded him to bear the cross to Outremer and that her shame had caused their personal miseries. She was of such an impassioned, volatile temperament –
all fire and music – so easily influenced by romantic ideals. Old Bernard, with his oratory, had inflamed her mind. But back home she was as happy as … Louis could not think what it was his wife was as happy as. She was just very happy. Before the prayers of terce began he exchanged a few words with Suger. ‘Women are nervous creatures,’ he remarked.

‘My mother wasn’t nervous,’ the Abbot replied. His tone was weary and Louis was too polite to point out, ‘Your mother sold fish.’

‘My eyes are dim,’ the Abbot said. ‘Everything looks grey. When I was barbered this morning I looked in the glass and couldn’t see a face.’

‘I’ll send the royal physician as soon as we leave the chapel.’

‘My dear Louis, don’t bother. The Saviour is my physician now.’

The Day of Epiphany had arrived and the responsibility of what he must convey about the Queen, first to the Seneschal, then to the King, weighed heavily on Suger. Since the initial scandalous rumour, his men had captured an Anjevin who gave his name as Hamelin, but refused to name his master. ‘In the octave of Christmas!’ Suger had despaired. ‘The festival of divine love! We cannot pollute it with violence.’ He had the Anjevin taken by night and put in a cell at the abbey until he could decide how to break the news to the King. He dreaded the explosion of Estienne’s temper. He knew in advance everything the Baron would say: ‘Why was I not told immediately?’ ‘Why in a cell, not the dungeon?’ ‘Why do you still keep men who report only to you?’ His most ferocious rebuke would be, ‘You have not fully relinquished power to the King! That is treason!’

Louis presented the ruby to Eleanor at the end of terce, before breakfast. She clapped her small, shapely hands in delight and held it against her heart. The palace was teeming with troubadours and minstrels, and as the royal couple progressed towards breakfast, one was singing.

Musicians and minstrels had followed Eleanor up from Aquitaine twelve years earlier, and had stayed. Suger got rid of scores of them while she was out of France, but now they were swarming back. Louis considered them licentious riff-raff, but they did add an air of gaiety to feasts and Eleanor was adamant that Paris was dull – ‘all philosophers and theological arguments’ – without them.

‘I should not care if it were the hour of death itself, For no one has been born into the world, So lovely and so full of grace …’, went the minstrel’s song.

‘He sings about you,’ Louis said. He was hopeful that again tonight she would come to his bed. ‘I’ll admire the ruby between your breasts this evening.’ It had gratified him to overhear courtiers telling each other how much the Queen loved her husband since their return from the Holy Land.

As they arrived at the dining hall the inflammation of love Louis felt made him gaze down at her with longing. She appeared dismayed.

‘Sweet husband,’ she sighed. ‘You’re too much of a stallion. I think, tonight …’

‘Tomorrow, then?’

She lowered her dark lashes in assent and at the table fed him honey from her spoon. When a drop strayed to the edge of his lip, she hid her mouth behind her hand and with a flick of her pink cat’s tongue licked it off.

That evening after the banquet Eleanor dismissed the guards from her bedchamber as soon as they had shown her in. She barred the door and undressed carefully. Xena had the fire burning strongly and had set a ewer of warm water in front of it, and on a stool a pile of cloths and some soap.

The Queen took her time washing. She found it exciting to know her lover was hidden inside the bed curtains, listening to
her as she washed herself. In memory of their night together in the monastery, it was now a game not to speak until after they had made love for the first time.

For a moment she wondered where Xena was, for she wanted help in taking down her hair.

At length she climbed onto the bed and closed the curtains.

A question flashed through her mind: why has he not chewed lemon verbena tonight? But the thought was so fleeting it was gone as she began moving her fingers through the fur of the bedcover.

As fast as lightning a hand clapped over her mouth.

The point of a dagger pressed sharply under her ear.

Henry’s eyesight had adjusted to the dim light while he lay in wait. He had seen her slender body clearly as she climbed into bed. ‘Don’t make a sound,’ he growled in Latin. ‘My dagger’s name is Drink Blood. And I have a message for you.’

Betrayed! Xena! Could Xena have done this to me? What’s happened to Geoffrey? Her terror became a sob. The stranger moved his dagger a fraction.

‘Tears won’t fix any of this,’ he said. ‘You have information you planned to give the Duke of Normandy.’

His Latin was excellent. Whoever he was, she realised, he was not one of the Seneschal’s ruffians.

‘What is the date France will attack Normandy?’ he asked.

‘I have no idea,’ she said. She struggled to control her breathing.

‘You have no idea! I’ll help you remember.’ Suddenly he took the knife from her throat and pushed it against the delicate skin at the corner of her left eye. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘or your eye comes out.’

Eleanor shook uncontrollably. ‘The night of the birthday of the Young Duke,’ she whispered.

From the central courtyard below came sounds of tumult, of horses neighing and the light of extra torches flickering against the
walls. Henry said, ‘Don’t move from this bed or I’ll catch you and kill you.’ He leaped up and ran to look out a window.

‘Something’s up,’ he said. ‘The King and the court are riding like madmen.’ He returned to the bed. ‘One kiss before I leave,’ he added. She quickly turned her head so his lips could not touch hers so he pushed his face between her thighs, holding her legs apart as if she were a frog to be eaten. ‘You took so much trouble washing,’ he said. And laughed.

Suddenly there was thunderous banging on the bedchamber door, and the voice of the Seneschal roaring to the Queen to get dressed.

‘If he summons the guards they’ll break down the door and we’ll both be dead!’ Her voice came in gasps.

In the church of St Denis, Abbot Suger celebrated compline. The early dark of January hid from view the glorious coloured glass he had installed in the church windows. These windows were the wonder of Europe, causing the faithful who flocked to see them to collapse on their knees in awe. They cried aloud to God and crossed themselves as they gazed on the Bible, come to life in coloured pictures. ‘A miracle! A miracle!’ they exclaimed.

The Abbot looked up from the altar, imagining the great window behind the choir as it was in bright daylight, its blue and red, gold and green glowing with the intensity of jewels. Beside the Saviour stood the Guardian of France, his head under his arm. But as Suger looked an extraordinary event occurred. Light began shining through the dark window at him. It grew brighter and brighter. Then Saint Denis stepped forward. As he did so he took his severed head and placed it on the bloody stump of his neck. ‘So at last you see me as I am, Suger,’ he said. The Saviour stood beside
the Saint, His arms held wide in blessing. ‘All is restored,’ He said. ‘All is perfect.’

Young monks rushed to gather up the Abbot where he fell. He was still breathing. The pulse in his wrist gave a weak, uneven beat. They carried him to his chamber and sent for a bishop to hear his confession, and for the King and Queen to be informed.

Louis rushed from the great hall, shouting to the Seneschal to fetch the Queen from her chamber.

Estienne took the stairs four at a time and belted on the oak door with his fist.

‘I am undressed,’ she called. To herself she sounded terrified.

‘Well, get dressed!’ he roared. ‘We’re riding to St Denis. The Abbot is dying.’

‘My maid is not here.’

‘Oh, fu–!’ The Seneschal took a sharp breath. ‘I beg your pardon, Highness.’

Henry whispered, ‘I have your maid.’ He jumped from the bed again and on silent feet dashed to open the closet door. Xena came out, a gag around her mouth, her hands tied behind her back. With a flick of his dagger he freed her hands but not her mouth.

‘Get her dressed,’ he said.

Eleanor called to the Seneschal, ‘My maid has awoken. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’ Her voice sounded steadier, she thought to herself.

‘I await you at the foot of the stairs,’ the Seneschal shouted. ‘Your horse will be ready.’

They heard his heavy boots fading, step by uneven step.

‘He’s got a limp,’ Henry remarked. ‘You can hear it.’ He had seated himself on a stool to observe Xena as she rushed Eleanor into her clothes.

When the Queen was finally dressed he motioned towards the closet, shoving first the maid, then her mistress inside and closing its door. Dressed now, Eleanor felt she had possession of herself, although she was still trembling. There were large candles in the closet and its fire was alight. For the first time she could see at least part of his face. He kept his hair, forehead and eyes covered by the hood of his gown. He was tall and wore the black garb of a student, which perhaps explained his excellent Latin. But his hands were not soft student hands. Beneath the gown’s sleeves his wrists were strapped with leather. He may be a mercenary.

‘Who are you?’ she demanded.

‘There’s no time for explanations,’ he said. ‘The Regent captured a servant of the Duke of Normandy eleven days ago. Presumably they’ve questioned him. You are in great danger.’