The Winter Crown (40 page)

‘There is no comparison, madam, they are very different.’

‘That is a courtly reply,’ she said with a smile.

‘But a true one. Aquitaine is steeped in sun, whereas in England it often rains. Aquitaine is a land of good wine, and sweet red grapes. England is one of sheep and ale and blazing fires…’

‘…as the wind whistles under the door,’ Alienor said.

He grinned. ‘I grant you that, but the grazing is good. The English have a reputation for being clods and drunkards, who then want to brawl except when they drink too much and then all they can do is fall in the gutter. But they are tenacious. My mother’s kin were landholders long before William the Bastard came to our shores. It is my homeland, but for the moment I would rather be in Aquitaine in April, and riding among present company.’

‘You will go far,’ Alienor said with a laugh. She tilted her head to one side. ‘Someone told me the other day that all English men have tails. Is that true?’

He glanced at her sidelong with a mischievous sparkle in his eyes. ‘No more than all men do, madam, and not that you would ever notice or be exposed to in polite company.’

‘I am pleased to hear it; you have set my mind at rest.’

He bowed in the saddle, and then gathered the reins. ‘We should pick up the pace, we are falling behind.’

Alienor clicked her tongue to her mare. William excused himself and rode ahead to join his uncle. She studied with appreciation his long, straight spine and the effortless way he controlled his horse. It entertained her to jest with him; they shared a sense of humour and he played the game with skill.

They stopped to water the horses at a wayside stream. Some of the party produced food from their saddle packs and started to eat. Alienor’s seneschal Geoffrey de Rancon helped her dismount and presented her with a cup of wine, which she drank with gratitude, being parched from the dusty road.

Patrick of Salisbury joined them. The bony arch of his nose was sun-reddened and sweat glistened in the creases of his throat. ‘We should keep the troop closer together, madam,’ he said. ‘Strung out on the road we are vulnerable.’

‘I will make sure to take closer order when we move off,’ she promised, adding, ‘Your nephew mentioned it too; he is a fine young man.’

Patrick glanced at William, who was watering his horse in the stream and jesting with the younger knights in the troop: something to do with a mouse in someone’s bed roll. ‘He plays the fool at times as they all do at his age, and he eats enough to feed an entire troop never mind one man, but yes, he shows promise. I…’ Patrick turned at a sudden yell from a squire who had gone into the bushes to empty his bowels. ‘Ambush!’ the youth howled, charging back into their midst, his hose flapping around his thighs. ‘Ware arms!’

Amid a frantic scramble to mount horses and draw weapons, Patrick bundled Alienor back on to her mare. ‘Go with the Queen!’ he roared to Geoffrey de Rancon. ‘Take her to safety!’ He whacked his hand down on the mare’s rump and then turned, snarling orders at his men as soldiers rode out of the trees, armed for battle. Her heart in her mouth, Alienor spurred her mare. If she was caught, God alone knew the price they would exact. They might take her for ransom, but were just as likely to kill her or cause her to have an ‘accident’. Behind her the clash and clamour of violent battle tore the air and she knew that the screams of the dying and wounded were mostly from her escort who were all unarmed – except for the young William Marshal in his repaired hauberk, and what chance did he stand?

‘Holy Mary!’ Her mare stumbled on a rut in the path and she was thrown forward and almost unseated. She loved to gallop; it was pure exhilaration to feel the speed of a strong horse beneath her, but she was terrified that they were hurtling too fast and would take a fatal fall, yet if they slowed they would be caught and slaughtered. When she tried to look back to see if they were being pursued, her wimple flapped in her eyes like a sail and blinded her. Henry’s sister Emma galloped at her side; fortunately she was an accomplished rider.

De Rancon drew level. ‘Slow down!’ he bellowed. ‘Madam, slow down, we will founder the horses, and we have many miles to cover before we are safe!’

Wild-eyed, Alienor drew in the reins and eased the blowing mare to a trot. The horse was trembling, and so was she. De Rancon’s face was anxious and grim. The two other knights who had ridden with her were breathing hard and looking worried. One wore armour; the other was clad in his ordinary tunic but took the opportunity to pull a leather jerkin out of his saddle pack and struggle into it.

‘We must double back to Poitiers, that is safest,’ de Rancon said, fingering the hilt of his sword. ‘But by a different road, not this one.’

Behind them they heard the thunder of hooves and saw a cloud of dust rising from the road. Alienor gripped the reins and swallowed.

‘They’re ours,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Praise God, they’re ours.’

There were four of them, battered and bruised, one man pouring blood and missing the ends of his fingers down to the first knuckle on his right hand, but no one mortally wounded.

‘The Earl!’ one of them gasped, spitting out blood and pieces of broken tooth. ‘They’ve murdered our lord – speared him through the spine like a fish in a pond before he could reach his warhorse and armour. It’s a butchering ground!’

Alienor stifled an exclamation of shocked dismay. If Patrick had been slain, who was the commander of Angevin military strength in Aquitaine, then what did it bode for the rest of them? No attempt to capture, but to kill. Still, she was alive and free, even if in grave danger; the attack had partially failed, and her sons were safe behind defended walls.

‘Who?’ she said. ‘Do you know who?’ She would have their heads. And their dismembered arms and legs. She would grind their bones to dust and cast them into the sea.

‘Guy and Geoffrey de Lusignan,’ the knight with the mutilated hand said as his companion leaned across the saddle and bound the bloody stubs with the cloth in which he had been carrying his bread and cheese.

The de Lusignans were troublemakers, often descending from their fiefs in the north of Poitou to wreak havoc. Six brothers, all as bad as one another and with a wide network of affinities – magnets to whom the disaffected flocked. ‘There will be repercussions for this,’ she said, and her voice was harsh with the effort of controlling her fear and rage. ‘The de Lusignans will pay, I swear it.’

They rode into Poitiers with the hot afternoon sun on their backs, their lathered horses dripping sweat in the dust. Alienor held herself proudly, but she was devastated. No one had spoken for many miles; what was there to say when faced with the sudden severing of life mid-thread, no matter who you were? The utter treachery of spearing a man in the back? Alienor thought of the young knight William Marshal, of the conversation and jests they had been enjoying as they rode, and how she had intended to offer him permanent employment under her banner. An image of him lying dead and bloody in the dust beside his uncle flashed across her mind, making her nauseous.

News of their return had been carried throughout the palace, and it was plain to all that there had been a calamity. Ela, Countess of Salisbury, was one of the first to arrive as Alienor entered with her escort. Ela was too experienced a military wife to ask in front of everyone what had happened, but her spine was rigid with tension. The knight with the severed fingers was taken, staggering and dizzy with blood loss, to be treated by a physician. Alienor went immediately to her chamber, issuing orders for the captain of the garrison and the remaining senior knights to attend her there, and then she turned to Ela and told her what had happened.

‘Dead?’ Ela said blankly. ‘Patrick is dead?’ Her expression registered disbelief. ‘That cannot be.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Alienor. ‘If I could pull back today like unpicking stitches and weave them anew, then I would.’

Ela took a deep breath and pressed her hand to her heart. ‘And Patrick’s nephew, William? Is he lost too?’

‘That I do not know, my lady.’ Alienor braced herself against emotion. Tears could come later; for now she had to cope. There were letters to write, aid to seek, men to rally. ‘I pray not.’

Ela laced her hands together, white-knuckled, and nodded. The news had plainly hit her hard but the blow had yet to connect at a deeper level. ‘I must go and pray,’ she said, ‘and I must send a message to my son in England. You will excuse me.’

Alienor took Ela’s hand and squeezed it. ‘Yes, of course. I will join you when I have dealt with what must be done.’

Ela departed with her maids, walking as if she was in the act of turning to stone. Alienor washed her face and changed her travel-soiled gown. Her hands shook as she drank a cup of wine. Nowhere was safe and Henry for all his energy and prowess could not deliver her that safety. He would come and stay for long enough to rectify the worst of the problem and then leave without proper resolution and it would all begin again.

She was adept at doing battle diplomatically, but the sword and the warhorse were also required to stamp authority on Aquitaine, and no woman could take such a road. Even the inimitable Empress Matilda had had to delegate authority to her half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester, because men would follow his lead and baulk at following hers. When Richard was old enough he could take on the role of warlord, but that time was not yet ripe. She had to endure; she had to deal with these things as best she could.

‘Go and admit the men,’ she said to her chamberlain in a firm voice, revealing none of her doubts. ‘I will speak with them now.’ And they would know her anger and see her grief, but they would never see her fear.

A detail of soldiers rode to the ambush site and returned with the bodies of the slain in a covered cart which they brought to the church of Saint-Hilaire.

Alienor steeled herself to look at the bodies as they were placed side by side on yards of grey burel cloth in a screened-off part of the nave. Lying on his back, the vicious spear wound that had ended Patrick of Salisbury’s life could not be seen, but his shirt was saturated in the blood that had poured from his mouth. Someone had tried to close his eyes, and had wiped his face, but his lids were still half-open and his parted lips showed red-stained teeth.

Ela had insisted on coming to see her husband’s body, saying it was her duty and she owed it to him, as his wife, but the sight was grim. She gazed at him, her face bleached of colour. ‘When he rode out this morning I was angry with him,’ she said. ‘He’d let his gazehound pup into the chamber and it had chewed my embroidered shoes. He told me not to be a foolish woman complaining over trifles and I called him an inconsiderate boor…’ Her throat worked.

Alienor touched her arm.

‘He always gave of his best,’ Ela said. ‘He was an honourable man; he made me proud. I am proud now. He died doing his duty. I wish I had told him…’ She bit her lip. ‘A pair of chewed shoes is indeed nothing but a woman’s folly.’ A shudder ran through her body. ‘Let him be buried in Poitiers,’ she said, composing herself. ‘The road home is too far in this fine weather, and he loved this church.’

‘It shall be done as you wish,’ Alienor said.

‘Thank you.’ Ela wiped her forefinger under her eyes. ‘At least he will receive Christian burial and a tomb where his kin may mourn, which was never granted to my first husband, God rest his soul.’

Alienor admired Ela’s pragmatism. The Countess’s first husband, Isabel’s father, had died in an ambush too, cut to death by the Turks and left to rot on the desolate heights of Mount Cadmos. ‘Indeed, I will make sure he has a fitting memorial.’

Alienor cast her eyes over the other corpses with a deep welling of grief and rage that this should have happened. Reaching the end of the line, however, a fragile spark of hope kindled. ‘The Earl’s nephew is not among the slain,’ she said. ‘Where is William Marshal?’

A knight from the retrieval detail answered her. ‘His horse was there, dead, but there was no sign of him. I would say taken for ransom, madam.’

The spark of hope became a small flame. William was one of the few wearing a hauberk and that would have set him apart immediately as a man of rank. Patrick in his old riding tunic must have been viewed as a no one – just another servant to be cut down.

‘If he has indeed been taken for ransom, then I will pay the price since he was taken in service protecting me,’ she said to Ela.

‘That is kind of you, madam.’ Ela’s voice was thin and preoccupied.

Two women arrived supporting each other, one elderly and toothless, the other in her middle years. Clinging together, they paced the line of corpses, their eyes intent. The younger one uttered a sudden spine-tingling wail and fell on her knees beside one of the bodies. She tried to lift him and clutch him to her, and when she could not because he was stiff in death, she spread herself across his bloodstained body and howled. Her companion gave a low moan as if she too had received a mortal wound. ‘My son,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘My boy, what have they done to you?’ She knelt painfully beside the younger one and began to keen.

Alienor made herself witness the raw and terrible grief of wife and mother. Where there should have been tranquillity and reverent praise to God, there were cries of grief and despair over the bodies of the slaughtered. She had lost children as babies, and she often thought of the lives they might have had, but to lose a son or a husband or a father in the full summer of his life was a bitter curse indeed.

Ela had not fallen on Patrick as the two peasant women had done upon their beloved man, but she gave quiet orders that she desired to wash his body and care for him herself before he was placed on his bier in front of the altar. Control had settled over her like a stone mantle. ‘I shall not wed again,’ she said, dry-eyed. ‘Ever.’

In the wake of the attack, the de Lusignan brothers took to their heels and lived a nomadic existence, travelling from one castle to the next, never spending more than one night in any place so that they could not be pinned down and brought to justice. Henry left in abeyance the truce he had been organising with the French and his continuing difficulties in Brittany and rode south at speed.