Authors: Blanche d'Alpuget
Both knew that Louis’s reaction to a union between his most powerful vassal, Henry, and his richest vassal, Eleanor, would be to forbid it – if they were so naive as to ask his permission, as by law and custom they were required to do.
The brothers grasped each other’s hands, then upper arms. ‘War,’ Guillaume murmured.
‘War on two fronts!’ Henry added through gritted teeth.
Aelbad wandered about Rouen, chatting to men on the wharves. In half a day he had gathered that no preparations for an invasion of England were under way, although he did notice the shipyards were busy. A guard on the waterfront gate said, ‘We’re trading with Denmark. Building big ships to sail there.’
Several days later the boy was back in England. After a long ride from Portsmouth to Castle Hedingham, he reported to Prince Eustace that Normandy and Denmark were in alliance again. The Prince stopped breathing for almost a minute. ‘It’s true, then,’ he said. ‘I thought it a rumour the Anjevin had put about.’ He summoned his cavalry guard and rode to Westminster to speak to the King, taking Aelbad with him.
As he entered his father’s private chamber he saw his uncle, the Bishop, was already there and appeared, as he so often did, highly displeased. Eustace’s hand rested on Aelbad’s shoulder. The Bishop barely greeted the Crown Prince but stared with fury at the boy.
‘Uncle?’ Eustace said.
‘Send him outside,’ Winchester answered.
Aelbad made a doleful face. ‘Lord Bishop,’ he murmured as he withdrew.
‘What’s all this about?’ Stephen asked irritably. News that an attack from Normandy was delayed was welcome, but Stephen had other distractions. The harvest had been poor and hunger this winter was inevitable. Men – all sorts of men – were building castles wherever they pleased. They were younger sons of younger sons with no entitlements, many not even members of the baronage. Sheriffs were snatching land for themselves and refusing even to pretend to exercise the King’s law. Justiciars had virtually abandoned their duties.
‘Sire, the Anjevins are in alliance with the Danes!’ Eustace burst out.
‘How do you know that?’
The Prince shot an angry look at his uncle. ‘Aelbad discovered it, in the shipbuilding yards in Rouen.’
‘Who informed him?’
‘A guard.’
The older men exchanged glances. ‘I don’t believe, nephew, we need accept casual gossip in a building yard as gospel truth. Why would a guard confide such important information to an unknown boy?
Is the wretch his catamite?
’
He had heard from clerical brothers of the abominable events in the lazar house outside Paris, where a boy called Robert, by description identical in appearance to Aelbad, had arrived with a letter from Prince Eustace. This Robert had now vanished. ‘Stolen by demons,’ the Abbot claimed – an abbot who was in charge of a lazar house instead of an abbey because he possessed, in Winchester’s view, the brain of a sheep. A man had been found in the boy’s cell, dead, with four small wounds in his neck. ‘More demons,’ Winchester mocked.
The Prince grew pale. ‘Don’t you see, Uncle? Father? They delay their attack because they’re still formulating plans with the Danes. They’ll strike us not from the south, as we expected, but from the north-east with a huge fleet of ships. The Anjevin will give Scotland to the Danes. He’ll take all of England. And perhaps Wales.’
‘Eustace, calm yourself,’ his father said.
‘It’s risible to suggest the Anjevin would betray his kinsman, David of Scotland,’ Winchester added.
You entertain the idea only because you don’t begin to understand the moral code of kings: they don’t betray their allies. Or even their relations, if they can avoid it.
‘What makes you think he can take England?’ Stephen asked. Eustace retreated from the puzzled stare of his father.
It was his uncle who made the obvious remark: ‘Nephew, if you believe the Anjevin will be victorious he will be victorious.’
The Prince inhaled a long breath and raised his chin in what he considered his most regal aspect. ‘My dear sire, my dear uncle: the Anjevin is now eighteen years old. I’ll ensure he does not live to see his twenty-first birthday.’
Winchester rose and, without a word of excuse or farewell, left the chamber.
Aelbad was lurking in the corridor outside. The Bishop beckoned him. ‘You, boy, if I ever see you again, I’ll have you returned to King David. You won’t escape a second time. I know what you did in the lazar house in Paris.’
Aelbad grinned. ‘I also burned down the one in Rouen. Did you know about that?’
Before the Bishop could grab him, he frisked down the corridor to wait outside until his lord reappeared.
On their return journey Prince Eustace said to Aelbad, ‘Son, you need to disappear for a while. The Lord Bishop holds a prejudice against you, no doubt on account of your parentage.’ His uncle had greatly affronted him, and Eustace wondered if, when he inherited the crown, he might banish the curmudgeon to Rome. ‘Since you’re going to vanish, give me back my ring. I’ll give you something better when you reappear. Meanwhile, you are to report to me in a code you shall devise now, with a copy for each of us. You shall tell me where you are, what you are doing and what you hear people say.’
Aelbad took the ring off his finger and kissed it with reverence before placing it in the smooth palm of the Prince.
‘You’re a good boy,’ Eustace said. He ruffled Aelbad’s curls. ‘Still as lovely as an angel.’ His creature squirmed with delight.
‘Lots of men …’ Aelbad began, but Eustace put a finger over his lips.
In November, with its miserable grey skies, the Queen dined alone in her apartment. Since her discussion with Louis in the meadow, she and the King had had every hour of their days taken up with organising her departure from Paris and his from Aquitaine. She told the courtiers she and the King would hold their Christmas Court in Limoges. She invited them to join the festivities.
Their planned journey to the south and long sojourn there explained why all her Parisian clothes, jewels, tapestries and musical instruments were being sorted and packed. Fourteen years of accumulated treasures filled the palace on the Seine. And there were many other royal chateaux through the Île de France from which she ordered her belongings to be gathered, loaded into wagons and sent to Poitiers. Eleanor spent her spare moments with her daughters, instructing Marie, the elder, in the arts of beauty, playing and singing to little Alix. Court gossip was that Her Highness had not been so purposeful and optimistic since before she carried the cross to Outremer. ‘She’s preparing for a pilgrimage,’ courtiers told each other. Those who happened to be ambassadors wrote this news to kings and princes. ‘Her pilgrimage is to pray for an heir.’ They speculated at whose shrine Eleanor would worship: there were many in the south, many of them to the Madonna and the Magdalene. She could even be planning to travel as far as Compostela, they suggested.
Then one day she rode out to visit Father Bernard at Chartres, setting a new ferment of speculation at court: the Queen would return to Jerusalem!
Bernard had anticipated her visit since September, when Geoffrey Plantagenet died. During his daily and nightly communion with the world of unseen beings he had learned many things he had not understood. Now all began to fall into a pattern. One of the earliest instructions he had taken from his spiritual guide was that he was to love Eleanor. ‘She is an instrument in the
hand of the Saviour,’ Bernard had been told, ‘and you shall cherish her as such.’ The voice that spoke added, ‘She does not know this. Nor may you reveal it to her.’
Bernard, who had once jumped into a freezing river to evade the embrace of a woman, had faith he was equal to the task of guiding his charge in what would seem to be a wrong direction.
The labyrinth he had designed was built in the grounds outside the cathedral and had already grown so tall no man could see over its box-hedge walls. Once inside the visitor had to find his way out or be rescued. That was its purpose. Its complexity boggled the mind until it shook free from the body to a finer realm.
A monk took note of who entered and at what hour. If by nightfall the person had not re-emerged, a search party was sent to the rescue, and the unfortunate was obliged to spend days, sometimes months, in prayer and contemplation to discover the nature of his or her blindness.
The maze was reserved for the religious, but Father Bernard could override this rule. He did so for the Queen.
‘Please precede me, Your Highness,’ he said. ‘I’ll follow you. I’ve given orders that no one else may enter, so we shall be alone.’
The day was cold and windy. The Queen wanted to confide in Father Bernard about her expected divorce, and ask his advice about how to live as a divorced woman. Nobody had ever heard of a divorced queen who did not go on pilgrimage then enter a nunnery or marry another king. Eleanor was determined to live as Lord of Aquitaine. She began to stroll the gravel path between the tall box hedges. It was only wide enough for one person to walk comfortably. She felt herself entering a world of perfect stillness in which silence reigned but for the small scraping noises of gravel
beneath her feet. Although this world was all green, it suggested to her the enclosing comfort of a womb. It felt serene and mysterious. She began to have a sensation of floating down one path, only to find it turned in a direction she had not anticipated. Suddenly a tall green wall confronted her. She stopped. There was no sound of Father Bernard’s footsteps behind her. Eleanor turned around, expecting that he too had stopped at the sight of the wall. But he was not there. I’ll retrace my steps, she thought. But when she did she found herself in a different place from where she thought she had last heard gravel crackling beneath Father Bernard’s feet. She looked closely at the ground to try to see the imprint of her shoe, or his. She could discern neither. In all difficulties she had said to herself, ‘I am Duchess of Aquitaine’ or ‘I am Queen of France’, and with prestige in her mind she had confronted whatever or whomever bothered her. She had maintained her sangfroid in the face of shipwreck, gale and pirates. The exception had been Geoffrey’s dreadful son, when he had threatened to cut out her eye. She said to herself now, ‘I am the Queen of France.’ But terror struck her. She would be Queen of France for only a few months longer – and at that thought she uttered a cry of distress. She was alone, lost, and the sun was already sinking.
Father Bernard was standing less than a yard away from her, on the other side of a hedge. He decided to wait. It was most important to what he had to say to her that the Queen be reduced, as far as it was possible, from her haughty arrogance to her simple essence as a human being. The process would take months, years, decades, he knew. Maybe it would not be achieved in her lifetime. But a start had to be made. Even her humiliation for failure to bring forth an heir was superficial; it had brought no true humility to her soul, he knew. He sometimes found it difficult to think of the Queen as fully human, so roiling with animal spirits was her soul. But he could hear his guide assert, ‘She is! And more
than human, for one of the Saviour’s great angels rides over her. The pressure on her of his power is so great only a woman of her strength can bear it. She lives in ignorance of the Saviour’s angel. It will cause her much anguish.’
He listened carefully to where she walked next. He knew she was clever and, as he expected, she managed to retrace her steps to the spot where she had taken a wrong turning. How long before she calls for help, he wondered. He had to stand as still as the hedge and walk only when she did, so the sound of her footsteps muffled his own. Every so often he took a sip from his medicine flask.
For almost two hours Eleanor walked on in the twilight. Increasingly, she felt separated from normality. Waves of fear arose in her, then subsided, but she felt unaccountably content in the green womb of the labyrinth. She stopped puzzling how to find the way out and simply wandered. I’m as calm as a falcon floating above a field. At this thought she looked up and realised night was fast approaching. A spasm of panic shook her. ‘Father Bernard! Father Bernard!’ she cried. The green walls swallowed her voice.
He stepped around a corner, took her elbow and said, ‘This way, my dear.’ A few minutes later they emerged and walked side by side towards the cathedral where the windows glowed like jewels and a bell tolled for vespers.
‘I need your advice,’ the Queen said.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I need you to listen.’
It was agreed she would stay the night in Chartres, accommodated in quarters furnished for a senior prelate but not nearly so ornate as those Cluny monks provided. She took supper with the clergy. By seven o’clock she was in her bedchamber. Her maid brought a cup of milk; the lamps were extinguished, and the religious slept. Bells woke them for matins at two in the morning,
and again at five, for prime. The Queen slept on, but awoke, bathed and dressed in time for lauds. She had had a strange dream in which she felt tossed by the waves of the sea, but she could not remember much more than that. After breakfast Father Bernard invited her to his apartment. It was sparsely furnished, lined with hundreds of books and manuscripts. A plain wooden cross hung on the wall behind his chair.
‘You’ve come to ask me how you can live as a free woman after your divorce from Louis,’ Bernard said.
Her eyes flew open so wide the whites showed above her irises. ‘Our plan to divorce is secret!’ she whispered.
‘It is to the world,’ he agreed. He took a sip from his bottle and smiled. ‘I think you should drink a drop of this medicine. It sustained the final days of your lover, Geoffrey Plantagenet, and brought him peace. Your heart is in turmoil, I see. Drink a little drop.’ She drank, trying not to grimace. Bernard said, ‘You must abandon your dream of freedom.’
She gasped. ‘I’ll not be allowed a divorce!’
‘Is that what I said?’ he asked sharply. ‘You will be divorced. It’s essential for the future of France that you are. But you cannot live as Lord of Aquitaine.’
‘Father, must I enter a nunnery?’