Authors: Blanche d'Alpuget
‘I pray for a child,’ Eleanor said.
His melancholy eyes rested on her. ‘We’ll have a pure and holy child,’ he said.
By the time the mourning period ended the Queen knew she was pregnant. Some days later when news reached Normandy, the Duke rode out with Henry and Guillaume for the best day’s hunting anyone could remember for this time of year. ‘Where’s
your courage?’ Geoffrey shouted at his sons as he rushed on foot at a bear flushed from its winter den.
Baron Estienne de Selors said to Augustin, ‘If the royal babe, my friend, has one strand of yellow hair, I vow to strangle it before its second dawn.’
In Paris, by the end of February every sign of winter snow had vanished and delicate new leaves uncurled throughout the forests that surrounded the city. Spring was further advanced in Burgundy, where the Seneschal stayed on one of his estates. A robin sang outside his window. He could look out on his greening fields where speckled cows, released from their winter pens, were enjoying the soft sunshine. But the Baron felt something was wrong. He knew the King’s moods as intimately as he knew his own, and understood them better. He knew that Louis had lost his appetite for the campaign against Normandy.
The King had been hungry for attack before the Christmas Court. By now garrisons near the Vexin were mobilised, ships were sailing up the Seine and infantrymen were on the march from the Île de France. A handsome troop of knights was prepared to leave on the morrow. But something was wrong with the King.
It’s the sorceress, Estienne thought. She tells him she’s with child just days before he’s to ride to war. She’s put him in a soft mood.
To the Baroness he said, ‘Going to battle, a man must think of nothing but killing his enemy.’
‘I know, dear.’
‘He can’t be thinking of babies.’
The Seneschal stamped up and down. It was not just the pregnancy. It was that Louis had lost his nerve. In his heart, the Baron believed, Louis knew the Anjevin scum had cuckolded him.
‘Those Anjevins have Lucifer as their advisor,’ he said to his wife.
‘I met Geoffrey Foulques at court several years ago and I thought he was charming. He complimented me on my eyes.’
Her husband was astonished. ‘What did he say about them?’
‘That they sparkle like emeralds.’
The Seneschal was too shocked to respond. He had been married to the Baroness for thirty years. She was cheerful and competent, and during his absence for most of the year, she and his reeves ran their estates as well as any in Europe. She had brought him a lavish dowry, given him six healthy children (three of each), and did not ask about his concubines. But she was fifty, and fat, and her face was permanently flushed, and he had no idea what colour her eyes were, although he supposed a long time ago he had known.
‘He invited me to visit him in Normandy.’
The gnashing of her husband’s teeth was audible to the two young pages waiting by a door.
‘I went there as a child on the Feast of St John,’ she added. ‘We stayed in a white castle by the sea, Caen I think, and went swimming, day after day. The Lion came swimming with us. He dived under the waves and grabbed our legs. He and our Old Louis were friends in those days.’
‘So why haven’t you accepted the Duke’s invitation to visit again?’ her husband shouted.
‘Estienne, don’t be silly. I know you’ve wanted to kill him ever since he took Normandy from England and the Vexin from us. Next week you’ll tell some mercenary to chop off his head. You’ll say it happened in the heat of battle and you didn’t realise who was being beheaded.’
Her answer mollified him. At length he confided, ‘The son is much more dangerous to France. He has vast ambitions. The father is satisfied with whoring and hawking. It’s the son’s head I want.’
She raised an eyebrow. It alarmed the Baroness that, without Suger’s restraining hand, Estienne was becoming reckless.
Louis, she knew, would insist no physical harm be done if either of the Dukes were captured. The King would demand ransom, land, castles, the return of the Vexin and all Normandy if his victory were great enough. But when Louis had that, he would release them. They were, after all, his vassals, part of the tapestry of tightly woven rights and duties that animated their world, gave it meaning, beauty, purpose and value.
‘My dear,’ she said, ‘we’re not Turks. We’re honourable Christian people.’
‘I’m going to see the cows,’ the Baron announced.
The beasts ambled to the rail, their wet, grey, oblong noses pushed towards him in greeting. A cow was an amiable, soothing creature who enjoyed being spoken to affectionately. He crooned, ‘
Bonjour, ma belle, bonjour ma jolie
,’ and made kissing noises. His temper cooled under their gentle influence and he was able mentally to rehearse the plan of attack. It was scheduled for two in the morning on the fifth of March, initially with a siege of the castle of Rouen. Once the siege was established, they would confiscate gold from Rouen’s thousands of Jews, then burn the city. The Rouen Jews had proved themselves infuriatingly loyal to the Anjevins. France had only one man on its payroll among them. He had reported that, despite good harvests and an easy winter, the Young Duke still visited a moneylender’s house: that meant he was still in debt, or still in need of money. ‘He’s short of gold to hire mercenaries,
ma cherie
,’ the Seneschal told a cow. He gave her a good scratching between the horns and allowed a rough lick of his cheek from her charcoal-coloured tongue.
But the nagging feeling that something was wrong would not depart.
When he returned to the chateau he summoned a military rider and handed him a note. ‘I need a reply by the morning of the fourth of March, at the latest,’ he said.
Henry told Xena she would be staying with Guillaume’s mother, Isabella, and her daughters. Isabella’s house was on the outskirts of Rouen, made of stone, and the largest in the city. Fields for the family’s horses, sheep and cows surrounded it, as well as an orchard, vegetable and flower gardens, and an apiary. It had a well for drinking water and was only a few minutes’ walk to a small tributary of the Seine, where the animals drank. Inside, the house had a dining hall, five sleeping chambers, an apartment for Guillaume where he stored his musical instruments and a larger, more luxurious one for his mother, equipped with its own bathing tub. It was in this apartment that Isabella received her ‘husband’, Geoffrey. There was a bath house next to the kitchen, both in separate buildings. At the back of the residence were servants’ quarters and, at an appropriate distance from them, the latrines.
From her front door Isabella could see the castle of Rouen, the ducal palace, built on top of a hill to overlook the town, the river, the orchards and forests.
When Henry and Guillaume had arrived at her door with a dark-skinned stranger, Isabella had taken her son aside and asked him in Catalan, ‘Who is she?’
Geoffrey’s concubine was handsome rather than beautiful: tall, slender, grey-eyed and worldly, a woman whose bearing commanded respect.
‘Henry stole her,’ Guillaume said. ‘We’re to keep her hidden.’
‘Is she with child to him?’
‘He hasn’t lain with her.’
‘This is ridiculous! From whom did he steal her?’
‘A vicious and powerful Frenchman. Mother, please don’t ask questions.’
She raised a long wing-shaped eyebrow. ‘If she’s not with child to Henry why did he steal her?’
Her son looked guilty and miserable. He shook his head.
There’s much more to this, Isabella thought. ‘She’s a Greek, you said? She is charming and has beautiful manners, as if she’s accustomed to refined living.’
Guillaume nodded vigorously. ‘Born in Outremer. A knight brought her back from the second crusade.’
‘Henry stole her from the knight?’
Guillaume nodded.
A lie, his mother thought.
Xena saw little of Henry, Guillaume or Geoffrey in the weeks after her arrival at Rouen. The men appeared fleetingly, Guillaume and his father staying to eat and enjoy a few hours of family life; Henry only to greet Xena and drop off some gift: a length of cloth, a jar of olive oil, a sack of pulses. If she wanted to go riding to the forest she had to be accompanied by two male servants from the estate, and two of Guillaume’s sisters. She had to wear a hooded cloak, Henry said. It was easier to stay at home and exercise the horses in the paddock.
‘Most of the time the men are not even at the castle, or in Rouen,’ Isabella told her.
‘There’s going to be a war, isn’t there?’ Xena said.
Isabella nodded.
At first, Isabella’s strong, serious demeanour had intimidated the girl. She possessed the same grave courtesy as Guillaume. But the longer Xena stayed under her roof, the more she appreciated Isabella’s temperament. At random moments a fire of creativity – music, singing – could burst from her. Her son had the same quality. And he did sing like an angel. When he and his father stayed for supper, Guillaume sang, Geoffrey played the citern and sometimes the tambourine. Isabella and her daughters danced, clicking their fingers, twirling and stamping to the beat. At these times Xena missed her own family so painfully she could have wept. In Antioch they hadn’t played a lute, or danced, but they sang together before and after meals. The bread laughed when we broke it, she remembered. The wine sang to us. One evening, during supper, Guillaume kissed her on the forehead. ‘Your heart aches so much I can barely breathe,’ he murmured.
After Xena had settled in properly, Isabella demanded Guillaume tell her the truth.
‘Mother, she’s in great danger. She’ll be tortured and murdered if the Frenchman gets hold of her again.’
His expression told Isabella that more questions were futile.
On the morning of the second day of March, when the weather made a lurch into spring, Henry arrived riding the Arab mare. He was wearing a plain iron-hilted sword, buckskin leggings and had his wrists strapped. A film of perspiration shone on his forehead. ‘We’ve been playing,’ he said, jerking his chin in the direction of the palace. A pair of tall loose-limbed hounds had followed his horse and the pages who accompanied him. The hounds leaped around each other and chased every creature they saw: a squirrel, a rooster, three of Isabella’s goats. Hearing his voice, Isabella’s daughters came running outdoors to greet Henry, who swung the youngest in a circle, threw her in the air and caught her just above
the ground. They were in torments of curiosity about Xena but obeyed their mother’s instruction not to ask questions.
‘Will you ride out with me?’ Henry asked.
‘Will the pages stay with us?’ Xena responded.
‘If you wish. I’ve sent two on ahead, already.’
She was wearing a new blue robe and a white headdress with a barrette, a style the women of Paris had adopted, copying the Queen. She looked beautiful but Henry felt too shy to say so.
The trees were still bare except for small pale leaves reaching out to the sun. As Henry and Xena passed a pond, they saw grey geese returning from the winter migration. They broke its tarnished surface, bird after bird in a rhythm, as if an invisible hand signalled each its turn to create another ripple. A doe drank at the pond’s edge, her delicate forelegs spread as she bent to the water. Seeing the hounds, she fled. Henry’s whistle brought them loping back to him with reproachful glances; moments later they were capering around the mossed trunks of the trees.
The pages set down a mattress of straw in a clearing in the forest. Over it they laid rugs of brown bearskin. They placed platters of food on a cloth spread beside the furs, and basins of water.
Spring sunshine made it warm enough to remove their riding cloaks. ‘Will you eat chicken?’ Henry asked.
‘It depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On what else there is.’
The answer seemed to please him, although Xena knew it verged on rudeness to reject chicken. It was a luxury. While she was in Byzantium and with the Queen she had learned what, for the Franks, was noble food and what was not. At Isabella’s house they ate plainly.
On the cloth there was bread, cooked and pickled vegetables, a roasted chicken, white cheese, wine, cider and some preserved
fruit. There were whittled sticks and sweet herbs for cleaning their teeth. ‘And your fish,’ Henry said, pointing to portions of roast fish.
She thanked him with a shy smile.
While she ate, the hounds pestered her for tidbits then crept forward on their bellies to lie on the rug beside her.
Henry signalled to the pages to withdraw from the clearing. ‘And take these damned puppies,’ he said.
He turned on his back and closed his eyelids against the sunlight. It was so warm now they would both have been more comfortable with one less layer of clothing. Xena hesitated then lay on her back beside him. The thickness of the fur and the straw beneath it insulated them from the coldness of the earth.
She began to feel anxious. Her mind crowded with possibilities: he was about to tell her that with war approaching, she was too much of a liability and she would have to move on. But the money she had hoarded was with the Queen, in Paris, and she could not afford to travel to Antwerp. Forbidden to go into the city to find work for fear of the French, she could not earn more. I’ve been your prisoner from the moment you leaped through the trapdoor, she wanted to say. If you’d have given me money I could have escaped to Antwerp by now.
He was silent a long time, before reaching out to stroke her hand.
‘You have to tell me,’ he said quietly, ‘where you want to go.’
‘Antwerp. I have an uncle there. I want to start a new life.’
‘A new life in a cold, miserable place where nobody knows you.’ His look was sceptical. ‘There aren’t many Greeks in Antwerp, Xena. In fact, I think your uncle is the only one. But I suppose you will look for a husband there?’
She nodded. ‘I’m a widow.’
‘The horse-trader, was it?’
He watched her hesitate, then shake her head. ‘Xena,’ he said quietly, ‘for almost two months you’ve lied to me and my family about who you really are. Now you have to tell me.’ His dark blue eyes rested on her, unsmiling.
Her tongue clung to the roof of her mouth.
‘You have to tell me,’ he said, ‘because in a couple of days I’ll be at war, and I may be killed. I can’t go into death without hearing your real name.’ He turned on his side, resting his head in his hand. ‘You know I’m in love with you.’
All she could force herself to say was, ‘I’m frightened.’
He sat up suddenly. ‘Why? I’ll never harm you. I saved your life.’
She was trembling as she also sat up. ‘You’re going to send me away – and I have no money …’
‘My lady,’ he interrupted, ‘I know you’re not Greek.’