The Young Lion (34 page)

He didn’t bother to initial it. He and Rachel rode to the palace gates where Henry reined his horse back to hand Eleanor’s messenger the note. The man already carried a cage of pigeons from the Rouen croft. Looking at the huddled, restive birds Henry thought, she’s going to nag me, but he had no time to dwell on the problem of the wedding date because guards rushed forward shouting, ‘Lord Duke! The English are here in great numbers. They wait for you in the audience hall. Lord Guillaume is with them. The regiment has taken charge of their horses and servants.’

Henry said to Rachel, ‘There may be spies among them. They should know as little as possible of my personal life. Ride to the eastern entrance. You know the curtain in the hall? Try to get behind it. There’s a churchman called Thomas Something. I’d like your opinion of him.’ He waited in the gateway until she had ridden around the side of the palace. When she was out of sight he spurred his horse and, for a second time that day, rode it up the stairs into the hall.

Henry surveyed his visitors from horseback, a frown changing to laughter as he recognised each of them – more than twenty companions from King David’s war. All were battle-hardened and now embittered by the dwindling of their fortunes. Some were haggard from the sea voyage.

The Dowager had ordered a young ox to be slaughtered – it was already roasting in a pit outside – while in the hall the weary men drank eagerly from pots of cider and wine, and ate bread, cheese and pears from platters the servants offered them.

Henry spotted Earl Ranulf and leaped to the floor with a yell of delight. ‘We were ready for you to invade last year, my dear friend,’ Ranulf said. ‘Of course we understand the circumstances: with the sudden death of your father, you had to delay for mourning. But we implore you to come before it’s too late. Every day Eustace draws to his camp more barons and knights. Those who refuse …’

Henry held up his hand. ‘My sword sleeps till Pentecost.’

His visitors groaned.

‘It is God’s Truce,’ Ranulf agreed. ‘But surely, Henry, in the case of our Archbishop seized and imprisoned?’

‘Ranulf, my sword sleeps. I didn’t say I was asleep.’ He beckoned the Archdeacon. ‘You know this man?’ he asked the gathered knights.

They all nodded. They dislike him, he thought. Yet he has shown as much courage as they. Twenty-five pairs of eyes stared at the smooth, unarmed clerk. None of the barons had yet had time to wash or change their travel clothes, whereas the Archdeacon, having arrived hours earlier, had bathed, been barbered, and was dressed in a lavender-coloured robe. They slid glances to each other. Henry drew the man towards a long table at the far end of the hall, close to the curtain behind which, he hoped, Rachel was now seated. On the table Matilda had laid out the original drawings for the Tower. It had not been modified since her grandfather built it almost seventy years ago.

‘How did you escape the White Tower?’ Henry asked.

The Archdeacon pursed his lips in a smile. ‘I dressed as a washerwoman …’ Laughter drowned the rest of his explanation.

When the mirth subsided Henry said, ‘That’s how Theobold will escape. You, Archdeacon, will return and remain in the Tower in the robes of the Archbishop. Theobold will dress as the washerwoman –’

Ranulf interrupted, ‘But Henry, when Stephen – or worse, Eustace – discovers Theobold has escaped, they may murder this fellow.’ He was too polite to say, they’ll torture him to discover where Theobold is hiding and who assisted his escape.

Henry became pensive. On impulse he asked, ‘Will they murder you?’

‘Neither the King nor the Prince, lord Duke.’ The chamber grew as still as if all had died. Thomas glanced around at the hostile, contemptuous faces. Henry felt a bolt of fury fly from the Archdeacon. Filled with resentment of their rank, and ambition for himself, he thought.

He said quietly, ‘Perhaps you’ll explain why the Prince, in particular, will show you clemency? He’s not famous for it.’

Thomas hesitated. ‘I’m thirty-four years old and it’s a decade since I was in finance, but …’

The glances that now slid from face to face were sardonic. Eustace’s extravagant court had been a puzzle to many in the baronage who were finding it impossible to maintain their houses and stables in little more than squalor.

Henry grinned. ‘This man once gave my mother a monkey,’ he said. ‘I do believe you sired the creature yourself.’

The butt of their hilarity had a sense of humour and laughed with them.

They quickly agreed with Henry’s plan that the Archdeacon return to the White Tower, entering it the same way as he had left. From there Theobold the washerwoman would be conducted by ship to Flanders where the Count, Henry knew, was much less friendly with Louis Capet since the annulment of his marriage to Eleanor.

That evening the men dined together on roast ox and bathed in a huge oak tub into which servants poured cauldrons of hot water. Many had not had sufficient wood to bathe in warm water for more than a year, they said. Henry took Ranulf aside. ‘I’d like you to meet my wife and child,’ he said.

‘Your wife!’

‘Not a Church wife,’ he conceded.

The Earl was the first stranger to whom Henry had introduced Rachel and he felt himself in a tide of shyness and apprehension, his feelings like seawater slipping back and forth across a reef. Ranulf traced his ancestry to a Roman governor under the Emperor Hadrian; he might condescend to Rachel for being a member of the trading class. But Henry had not reckoned on the fact that the Earl had never before seen a woman from Outremer. Being at home, Rachel’s head was uncovered.

‘What hair! What eyes! What perfect teeth,’ Ranulf whispered in Latin. ‘And the dark gold of her skin … The Madonna herself could not be more glorious.’

Henry whispered back, ‘Rachel speaks and writes Latin. And Greek. And other languages.’ He realised he could have told Ranulf that his wife was a princess of Byzantium and his friend would have believed him.

She held their baby on her hip, smiling. ‘But I don’t yet know English,’ she said in her slow, lilting French.

Tears of embarrassment welled in Ranulf’s eyes. ‘If I’d seen you before, dear lady, I’d have carried the cross to Outremer myself! How blessed you are, Henry. Blessed. And your son! What a knight we’ll make of him. When you cross the Channel, lady, please do me the honour of staying with my family. We have a modest …’ Ranulf still owned a manor house and at least two castles, both the size of palaces. Each stabled a hundred horses.

Rachel smiled. As silly as a sheep, she thought. But of good heart. Henry had told her that in battle Ranulf’s courage was peerless.

As to the other man she had observed that day: a small, well-placed hole in the curtain had given her a view of the audience chamber. She had put her eye to it and fixed her gaze on the churchman, but a wave of nausea had overcome her. Perhaps I’m with child again, she’d thought. As she continued to spy on the tall, handsome man that all the others in the room, bar Henry, obviously despised, she felt as if she were being pulled back and forth by an invisible hand. Her limbs weakened. She became aware that a being from another world was present; that it surrounded the churchman and spread its power over Henry. Not all such beings were benevolent, she knew.

‘You must be careful of him,’ she said when Henry re-joined her that night.

‘Does he wish me harm?’

‘Possibly.’

‘But he and his patron have supported our cause for more than a decade. That’s deep loyalty.’

‘If his patron had supported Stephen, would the Archdeacon still have supported you?’ she asked. ‘My father used to say that flattery resembles friendship so closely only Solomon can tell them apart. That man puzzled me. I felt a powerful being. Not good, but not bad either. I think it allows him to be seductive to princes …’

‘Eustace?’

‘And you.’

‘Me? Seduced?’

‘He’s subtle. You know why you were born, Henry: ultimately, for the good of other men. But that man?’

He lay flank to flank with her in the darkness, looking at the ceiling, his hand stroking the silk of her thigh. The Archdeacon had disturbed him, but in what way he could not quite grasp. ‘Is he a sodomite?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t hide it. Even from behind the curtain I could smell the perfume he wears.’

Henry caught his breath. ‘The perfume! The same scent as on a note …’ He remembered the mortification of his morning in Winchester when he had begged Stephen for gold, and how he’d believed the note was from a girl whose heart he’d won. Now he wondered if it could have been a poetic warning about Eustace’s jealousy. ‘Do you think he’d risk sneaking me a letter?’ he asked.

She gazed at him with her calm, inner fire of love. He doesn’t realise he’s as beautiful as a god, she thought. Especially to a sodomite.

‘Yes. I think he would.’

Five of the gaolers in the White Tower were discovered in the slack embrace of whores, all dead drunk. Both the Archdeacon and the Archbishop had escaped and sailed by night to Dunkerque.

‘Where did they get the money for women and drink?’ Eustace demanded.

His father could neither reply, nor look his son in the face.

‘I’ll have the answer flogged out of them.’

The King crossed himself. ‘Son,’ he said quietly, ‘I believe we committed a sin in imprisoning Theobold. I believe God …’ He began to weep. ‘It was on the day we arrested the Archbishop that your mother’s illness became grave.’ This great lady, also called Matilda, had been a brave, resourceful queen. ‘She rescued me when the Lion’s daughter captured me eleven years ago. The royal physicians now whisper that she won’t live to see the day of Pentecost.’

Ranulf, who had returned with the others to England, wrote to Henry,
The Queen dies. Stephen despairs. Eustace becomes more dangerous.

The letter was sent to the nearest point on the Normandy coast, Barfleur, but Henry was nowhere nearby. Some days earlier he had called a secret meeting in Lisieux with his most powerful barons. There he informed them of his intention to marry Eleanor and asked their counsel. They listened in astonished silence. ‘Do I have your approval?’ he asked. Richard de Cholet was the first to assent. One by one the others nodded agreement and vowed to defend the union by force of arms. None doubted that Louis, humiliated by his own naivety in failing to block a marriage between his two strongest vassals, would ravage Normandy. If he succeeded there, he would ravage Aquitaine.

‘Will the Queen’s – I mean, the Duchess’s – men support us against His Majesty?’ Richard asked.

Henry had stared at his feet. ‘With the men of Aquitaine, one can never be sure,’ he answered. ‘They’ll defend Aquitaine, but …’

It was not the answer they had hoped for. However, they were grateful for the truth. Meanwhile, Henry refused to send any
notes-in-reply by pigeon to the Duchess, despite her demands for an earlier wedding day.

By the time Ranulf’s letter about events in England reached Barfleur, Henry, Guillaume and a dozen barons were riding for Poitiers.

On the Friday before Pentecost, they rode through the city gates, Henry bearing a hooded peregrine on his fist. News of the strange, wonderful and very expensive creature flew through the streets and lanes, and arrived at the palace before he did. Eleanor, waiting to greet him, seemed to Henry more excited by the bird than by her bridegroom. She unhooded it as he held its jesses in his gauntlet. The falcon blinked once at the light and fixed its stare on Eleanor’s face.

Sisters, Henry thought.

Two mornings later, on Whit Sunday, the eighteenth of May, every church bell in Christendom competed to ring most wildly with the joy of that amazing day when heaven came to earth in tongues of fire. The altar flamed with massed candles and scarlet cloth; red and orange flowers decked every wall and window. The clergy wore fire-coloured robes. People were giddy from the undulating flames, the music and their own shouts of ‘Hallelujah!’ In the cathedral of Saint-Pierre the priests twirled in a sacred dance as the Bible scene was read aloud to the congregation, few of whom understood a word of Latin. But they understood the dance and how the Almighty that day had shattered the old world with an intervention of divine inspiration; how He had poured from His mighty triune being His Holy Spirit into the disciples who preached in the marketplace of Jerusalem, making them reel with the intoxication of His love, giving them the speech of every nation on earth. Everything changed that morning – although at the time scoffers said they were drunks, talking nonsense.

After the congregation had left, Henry and his few barons and Eleanor and hers entered the light-filled cathedral. The bride wore the violet gown that complemented her beauty exquisitely. As Orianne had been dressing her earlier, Eleanor had thought, I hope he remembers and it makes him jealous. She had chosen it in memory of the last time she saw Geoffrey, in Paris, when Louis had accepted Henry as Duke. Standing before the altar, looking up at her boy-husband, his hair as fiery as the flames reflected on the golden chalice from which they drank the communion wine, she wondered if he would stand by their agreement and not lie with her until Christmas.

Guillaume handed them their rings. They were married in less time than it took to skin a coney.

‘May I kiss you, wife?’ Henry asked.

Eleanor looked down shyly. ‘Of course.’ She thought, I’ll have you in my bed tonight, Henry Plantagenet.

She was so delighted with the peregrine that she insisted a falconer carry it before them through the streets. The wedding party had ridden from the palace to the cathedral, which lay outside the city walls, and they returned mounted, but now surrounded by a crowd of townsmen and women who gawped at the nobles and their fluttering standards: Henry’s gold lion on a red ground and the three gold leopards of Anjou. Eleanor’s people had been puffed with pride that their Duchess was the Queen of France, but since the annulment they had become sullen and unpredictable. They had once showered gifts on the Princesses and now those children and their gifts had been snatched away by a king they had always regarded as a weakling.

‘Get a son on her!’ a man shouted in langue d’oc. Catalan was close enough for Henry to catch the meaning. He drew his sword and shook it aloft, laughing and smiling at people, looking them in the eye. The citizens took fits of excitement. ‘Louis was a capon,’
they told each other. ‘Our Duchess has found herself a proper rooster now.’ Because it was the first time any of them had seen their new Duke, Henry suggested he and Eleanor make a tour of Poitiers on horseback as soon as the wedding breakfast was over. His wife was taken aback. She was so used to Louis’s unwillingness to go out among the populace it had not occurred to her that Henry would behave differently. She was also accustomed to being the monarch of her lands; a cold thought crept upon her that Henry intended to win the love and admiration of the citizens of Poitou – and no doubt, Aquitaine.

‘Do you think that’s necessary?’ she asked.

‘Absolutely,’ he answered in a tone that brooked no argument.