To Be Queen (30 page)

I woke in the dead of night to men banging on the door of my room. Amaria had locked it, as a matter of course. She was on her feet in an instant, her dagger in her hand, her long braid trailing down her back. I rose to my feet more slowly. By the time I had wrapped a shawl of silk around my shoulders, Amaria had opened the door, for it was Louis who called for me.

“Eleanor, we leave for Jerusalem.”

“Louis, you can't be serious. It is the middle of the night.”

“It is three hours before dawn. Your women must pack your things and follow behind us if they cannot be ready in time. We ride out in half an hour.”

“Louis, I will not leave my uncle and his Poitevins without a word. You go on, and I will follow with my women in a few days' time.”

“No!”

Louis shouted that one word, his voice filling my rooms, spilling out into the marbled corridor. No doubt Raymond's people heard it all, but they stayed away.

Never before had Louis screamed at me like any furious husband. Never before had I felt the helplessness of being a wife, tied completely to the dangerous whims of a man. I took a breath to speak, but Louis shouted once more.

“You will come with me now, Eleanor. You will not delay even one minute more. You will leave at my side, this very hour, or by God, I will call up my men who stand outside this keep and they will tear it down, brick by brick, and burn it all, until there is nothing left but ash.”

I saw in the blaze of his blue eyes that he would do it. His jealous passion gave him a forcefulness he never had shown me in our marriage before, neither in bed nor anywhere else. My husband had taken on the look of a zealot. I wondered in that moment if he had worn that look always. Only now, in the midst of one of the worst pains of my life, could I finally see it.

I did not see or speak to Raymond before we fled. Louis' army was three leagues away from Antioch by sunrise. Though I turned back toward the city from the litter where Louis had imprisoned me, I could not see it. By the time the light had risen, we were too far gone already. All I saw were white distant hills, and the blue sky, arching above them.

 

 

THE NEXT YEAR WAS INTERMINABLE. LOUIS TRAVELED FROM Jerusalem, to Damascus, to Acre, and back again. After our flight from Antioch, Louis had abandoned his usual passivity. Dragging me from my uncle's keep in the dead of night had charged him with a fire I had never seen in him before. He was suddenly determined to make good on his promises to the pope for a great Christian victory. To have more to show from this campaign than a series of defeats. He fought one battle outside Damascus, and declared it a victory for God, though to my jaundiced eye, it looked more like a truce.

And though Louis visited shrine upon shrine in the months both before and after this one battle, I was not privy to what he prayed for. Once I would have sworn that Louis was petitioning God to cleanse him of sin and to give him a son. But now, looking on him as he knelt, I often wondered if he prayed for victory, both in war and over me.

Louis won nothing as far as I could tell, but he seemed to enjoy himself. He and the Parisians were full of fire after leaving Antioch, and seemed once more to be assured of their God, and of their place in His world. Namely, at the head of it.

As for me, I knelt when expected and feigned a piety I did not feel, all the while waiting for Raymond to come to me, knowing that he could not. This was the other side of the sickness I had once thought an enchantment, a yearning for a joy that could never be. I waited for Raymond with bated breath, like a young girl for her lover, or like a nun for the touch of Christ. But he did not come.

I still had a rational, sensible portion of my mind left to me, a piece of me untouched by this enchantment. That piece waited, almost bored, until I might be freed from the hand of fate. It was odd indeed, to be divided against oneself. I wondered if this was how Louis felt, whenever he looked on me.

The Parisians all thought me a whore by this time, the castoff of my uncle, a woman who had to be dragged out of her lover's house in the dark of night. No matter what my people said to discount this, no matter how many oaths Amaria swore to the contrary, in this Louis' courtiers were intractable. After a while, I left off denying anything. Let the Parisians think what they would. I would be their queen no longer.

My man in Rome was still working. Stefan had secured my sister's annulment; Raoul of Vermandois was married in the eyes of God to Petra, now and for all eternity. I laughed in triumph when I got that news, savoring the victory that had been so hard-won. I sent word to Petra at once, wishing only that I could deliver the news to her myself.

This victory was double-edged, for it encouraged me to continue to seek my own annulment. I had secured Raoul's freedom; I strove now to secure my own. So Stefan turned from the matter of my sister's marriage to mine. He had to be discreet, for Louis was a crowned king, and I, his queen. In the past, annulments came not because the woman asked for it but because the man did. Stefan had to use his charm, but he also had to be cautious.

For now, he sat in Rome, pouring wine down the throats of bishops and cardinals, making friends wherever he went, but without too much bombast. He made certain that all the money he handed out looked discreet as well, as if that gold were donations to build new monasteries, or contributions to pet projects that each cardinal held dear. Stefan knew the inner workings of the Church, and how to use them. I bided my time, and left him to it.

Finally, Louis and his French tired of the Levant. I wondered for a few despairing moments if he would be caught in the web of the Holy Land as Raymond was. But unlike him, Louis had no kingdom to stay for. We turned at last to the port city of Acre, that we might take ship for Sicily.

I was to travel on a separate ship from Louis. He had been blessed in Jerusalem, but had still not come to my bed. I continued to pretend to pray, and to don the facade of a pious woman. I never brought up the idea of our annulment again. I did not think Louis would come to my bed on board ship, but I needed to be sure. After my time with Raymond, and the interminable months since I had seen him, I had taken my fill of Louis. I could not spend a month or more at sea with him beside me.

Louis indulged me in this as he did in all things that did not matter. So we sat in the palace at Acre, locked away in our separate rooms, Louis at prayer, me with my women. In the end, I sent all my women away.

I would not go to the great hall that last night in the Levant, but my women wanted to go to the feast. Each of them could feel the ties that bound them rising to circle them once more. What a woman might do under my protection in the East, far from home, was one thing. What a woman could do at court under the watchful eye of her husband or her father was quite another. I let my women leave me, to make merry while they might.

I sat alone with Amaria beside me in the garden attached to my borrowed rooms. Here, I had a view of the sea. The waves crashed below the palace walls, and I could hear the call of the gulls.

There were roses in that garden, too, Persian roses that climbed their arbors in brilliant colors of red, yellow, and white. I sat beneath them and took in their scent. The perfume of those flowers and the sound of the sea cocooned me. Amaria left me, so that I might sit alone.

He came out of nowhere, as he always did. I thought at first he was an apparition, that my mind had truly broken with the world. Then I saw his cloak thrown over his gold and russet hair, and Amaria standing behind him. She had let him in.

I did not ask how he had slipped past my husband's people. So many men fought under so many different banners in that place. Acre was one of the ports used by all Christian armies, and all men went through there at one time or another, many under false names, many of whom did not want to be known. As long as they paid in gold, no one asked questions. It was one of the things coin bought easily in that place: discretion.

Still, I knew that to come here was folly. He had risked his life and his kingdom to be alone with me.

Amaria left us. I knew that she would guard the door. No one watched me that night, for no one thought that I could get up to mischief one step from the quayside.

Raymond did not speak but came to me, his cloak falling onto the crushed seashells of the path behind him. He took me up in his arms without a word. There had never been a need for words between us. I pressed myself against him, thinking that he might feel for a brief moment like Louis, or that his muscled arms would remind me of the Baron Rancon. But they did not. When Raymond touched me, there was only him.

We had scarcely touched before. That one kiss in the garden on our first night was all that had passed between us. Occasionally, he had touched my hand, or our fingers brushed in the midst of a chess game, but that was all. That night, our restraint fell away. We had only those few hours to fill our lives to come. We took them, and gladly.

His lips were sweet, sweeter than I had thought they would be, soft, like the rose petals I bathed in. He tasted of mead, and warm honey. I pressed myself against him and he drew back long enough to laugh a little. There had never been laughter in Louis' bed. I had not known that I missed it.

I laughed, too, and tasted him again, but I did not lead for long. He savored me, as if I were the finest wine, and I drank him in, as if I could never get enough.

His body was firm and lean beneath my hands, but well muscled, from his time on the tiltyard and at war. He held the country of Antioch by the strength of his sword arm, while Louis held his lands through the strength of his barons, and through his marriage to me. I had never thought that such a difference mattered. But I had never before had a man touch me like Raymond of Antioch.

So the Parisians were right. Raymond and I would be lovers at last. It was something else to make me laugh, before he carried me into the bedroom beyond the garden we stood in.

Amaria had been there before us. Candles were lit on every surface, giving out soft pools of light, softer than any oil lamps or braziers filled with charcoal. Those candles made me think of the wedding night I never had, one a woman always longs for, even a woman born to a life of power. Even me.

Raymond drew my blue gown off me, and then the soft linen of my scented shift. I melted beneath his touch, and burned with the hottest, brightest flame of my life.

He took his own clothes off, and stood before me, tall and proud, his scars drawn white against the tanned muscles of his arms. All his scars were on the front of his body. He led every charge he rode in.

Before Raymond lay down beside me, he caught my hand in his. We were not swept away by our madness. We did not rule it, but neither did it rule us.

The heat rose between us, like a flame that would never go out. But still, he waited. Though his deep blue eyes burned with it, he did not touch me.

“Say my name,” he said, as if asking one last time for permission. I did not hesitate.

“Raymond of Poitou. Raymond of Antioch. Come here to me.”

He rose on one knee and I drew him down beside me on that bed of silk. He kissed me again, and it was as if I were being kissed for the first time. The years of cold and loss in Louis' court, the courtiers who despised me, the child I had buried, the daughter I barely knew. All lay far distant the night he was with me. There was only he and I, alone together.

“I will love you, and no other, until my days pass from this earth,” he said as he lay on the bed beside me.

I answered him, though before that day I never would have sworn such an oath. It was the madness that took me. That night, there was only Raymond, his skin soft on my lips as I kissed his chest, his heart beating over mine as he listened for my voice.

“And I will love you,” I said, “until my life is done.”

Our passion spent, he lay beside me until the hour before dawn when the deep indigo of the sky began to turn to gray. Neither of us had slept. We talked, trying to make up for all the years we had been apart, for all the years that would soon divide us.

I think he had some vain hope that I would leave Acre with him. That like some princess in a German fable, I would desert my husband and my lands, and fly with him to an unknown fate. He did not ask it of me, so I did not have to refuse.

He is with me still. That is what fated love means in the end. The hand of fate lies heavy on us, to show us the ones who will never leave us, the ones we will carry for the rest of our lives. And beyond, if the priests are right.

Though I do not believe in words like
forever
, I did when I looked into the blue of his eyes. I was grateful for that one night, carved out of the rest of my life. Those hours were worth the pain I paid for them, both before and after.