The Winter Crown (17 page)

‘And I will be king!’ Harry shouted, not to be outdone.

‘Yes, my heart,’ she said. ‘You will indeed.’

The groom led Harry’s brown pony by a halter rope, but Harry held the reins himself. Alienor took charge of Richard, walking his pony at a gentle plod, one arm ready to catch him. Richard sat his mount like a warrior, possessing a natural sense of balance that filled her heart with pride to see it in one so young. She loved Harry dearly, but her affinity with Richard was closer. He was her heir and she recognised her male ancestors in him, men whose legacy lived on in this bright, vibrant child.

A messenger arrived on a blowing horse as the children were being led back into the yard, Richard making a fuss because he wanted to stay out and ride some more. ‘Another time, my fierce little falcon,’ Alienor said, and saw him into the care of Hodierna, who then had to deal with the ensuing tantrum.

Alienor summoned the man to her side. Usually she would have waited for the master of her writing office or her chamberlain to present her with the letters, but this was quicker, and she was impatient. The packet bore Henry’s military seal of a knight on horseback, sword brandished. Queasy with anticipation, she broke open the letter and unfolded it. As she read, her hand went to her mouth.

Isabel was immediately at her side. ‘Is there something wrong, madam?’

Alienor looked at Isabel through a blur of tears. ‘Henry has withdrawn from Toulouse because Louis has gone there to defend it, and he refuses to attack his overlord.’ Her expression contorted with anger and frustration. ‘In other words his great enterprise has failed and he has been outwitted by Louis. The worm has turned into a snake and Henry will not pin him by the neck.’ She raised her head to the sky. ‘All my life I have wanted to add Toulouse to my dominions. All my life I have wanted to prove to my ancestors, my father and my grandmother, that I could do this for them and restore what was stolen. Louis could not take it when I was wed to him. He came prancing back from his campaign claiming victory when all he had was a handful of dust and a promise of homage that meant nothing. Now Henry has done even less, and with Louis resisting him. Dear God, I would laugh if I did not feel so betrayed.’

‘Is it certain Toulouse is lost?’ Isabel asked tentatively.

Alienor crumpled the letter in her fist, feeling the sharp edges of the parchment buckle against her palm. ‘Henry would not have written this unless forced,’ she said, baring her teeth. ‘He knew what it meant to me that he should be victorious; he knows he has let me down. All that is left to him now are petty deeds of burning and pillage while the great prize remains untaken and he is made to look a vainglorious fool.’ She wiped her cuff across her eyes. ‘There is no point waiting here for a victory parade now, is there?’

‘But will not the King return to Poitiers?’

‘No.’ Alienor shook her head. ‘It would be too humiliating. He will want to bury this deep – but it will always lie on the surface for me.’

The weather finally broke and the rain came in sheets, drenching the land until it was waterlogged. Henry had struck camp and was riding north in haste, burning and looting as he went. Louis had remained behind the walls of Toulouse but his messengers had been busy and even as Henry scorched the land around Toulouse, Louis’s brothers had unleashed French troops on Normandy to do their worst. Caught in a cleft stick, Henry had had to abandon Toulouse and ride to deal with the situation. He had left Becket in command of the town of Cahors, but in a display of pique, had deprived him of men and the coin to pay them, blaming him for the failure of the campaign.

On the third evening of their journey, as the army halted to make camp at Montmorillon, Hamelin by chance drew rein beside William de Boulogne. The young man was clinging to his saddle and shivering. Hamelin could not tell if it was sweat or rain on his face, but his teeth were chattering so hard that the motion of his jaw was a blur.

‘You should have a physician attend you,’ Hamelin said. Bloody fluxes and quartan fevers were rife among the men, another reason Henry had chosen to withdraw. If they had stayed longer in the poisoned air of the camp, there would have been an epidemic.

William de Boulogne looked at him with fever-glazed eyes. ‘I intend to,’ he croaked. ‘Jesu, my head feels as if a thousand demons are beating drums inside it.’

Hamelin made sure the young Earl’s men found a decent lodging in the town, and sent him Henry’s own physician to tend him.

In the morning when Hamelin visited him to see how he fared, William’s condition had worsened. His fever still burned like a furnace and he was fighting for breath. His chaplain had confessed him and the physician was dour and purse-lipped. ‘I can do no more for him,’ he said, ‘he is in God’s hands. If his fever breaks he will live.’ He did not state the alternative, but it was there in his eyes, clear and certain.

Hamelin stood at the bedside. William’s dark lashes flickered and he turned his head towards Hamelin, showing him the face of death with waxen flesh and woad-blue shadows in his eye sockets.

‘I shall pray for you,’ Hamelin said, feeling pity and shock in equal measure. How swiftly the affliction had come upon him, and how fragile life was.

‘When I am dead … Make sure … the Countess … receives this…’ William raised a trembling hand and indicated a sapphire ring glowing on his middle finger.

‘I do so swear.’ Hamelin crossed himself. ‘But you may yet live and give it to her yourself.’

William’s face contorted. ‘Yes…’ he said and tears slid from his eye corners. ‘I may.’

Hamelin found Henry about to mount his horse, cloak thrown back, foot in stirrup. Their youngest brother Will was with him, holding the stallion’s bridle.

‘I’ve just come from William de Boulogne,’ Hamelin said.

‘How is he? Well enough to travel?’ Henry asked.

Hamelin shook his head. ‘He is mortally sick; the fever will not relent.’

‘Is that so?’ Will said with interest rather than concern.

‘Unless God sees fit to spare him,’ Hamelin replied a trifle brusquely. He had little time for his youngest half-brother and the feeling was mutual.

‘That is a great pity,’ Henry said, signing his breast, at least paying lip service. ‘I shall pray for him.’

Hamelin knew that for Henry, it would be no tragedy if William de Boulogne did die, because it meant that Stephen’s line in direct male tail would fail, and the demise would open all sorts of interesting possibilities when it came to the inheritance of his lands.

Alienor too was on the road, journeying north from Poitiers, and had stopped for the night at Tours en route to Normandy. She was playing chess with Isabel and drinking a last cup of wine when Bernard her chamberlain announced that a monk had arrived with news from Henry’s army.

‘Admit him.’ Alienor was immediately on edge because monks were often the harbingers of tragic news. Dear God, for all that she was angry with Henry, she could not begin to envision a world without him in it.

The monk that Bernard ushered into her presence was a Benedictine, his habit and cloak mud-splattered and travel-stained. He had bushy silver eyebrows and deep-set dark eyes.

‘You have news?’ Alienor forestalled him as he started to kneel.

He bowed and produced a sealed parchment from a satchel slung across his body. ‘Madam, the King bids me say that he will see you at the Christmas feast in Falaise – this is a letter from him.’ He withdrew a second packet, together with a sapphire ring looped through a coil of blue ribbon. ‘It also grieves me to say that I bring sorrowful news for the Countess de Warenne.’

Alienor turned to Isabel, who had been standing ready to support her, but was now staring at the messenger and the object like a deer that had just been shot by a hunter’s arrow. ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No.’

Alienor turned and swiftly took her arm. ‘You had better sit down,’ she said.

Isabel thrust her off. ‘I do not want to know,’ she said in a voice brittle with panic. ‘Whatever you are going to say it is not true.’

‘Isabel…’

‘No!’ she cried and, pushing away from hands held out in concern, stumbled from the room.

‘What happened? Tell me,’ Alienor said peremptorily.

The priest bowed his head. ‘It grieves me to tell you that Earl William de Warenne died at the pilgrim hospital of Montmorillon of a virulent fever,’ he said. ‘The King had his own physician to tend him but to no avail. The ring is sent as proof.’

Alienor took the item from him, so light to weigh so much. The sapphire cabochon gleamed like an oval of midnight sky. ‘Stay here,’ she said. ‘Warm yourself by the fire and take a cup of wine. I will need to speak to you later, and the Countess may wish to talk to you when she has recovered from the shock.’

Alienor went in search of Isabel and found her prostrate before the altar in the castle chapel. She had torn off her wimple and her beautiful brunette hair was spread around in a thick, disordered fan.

‘Please God, please God, let it not be true, I beg you, let him not be dead!’ she entreated, her body riven with shudders and her breath coming in harsh gasps.

Alienor knelt at her side and tried to embrace her. ‘Isabel,’ she said, ‘come now.’

‘I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to hear!’ She thrashed in Alienor’s grip. ‘It’s not true. I won’t let it be true!’

Alienor tightened her hold. ‘Hush, hush,’ she said. ‘Let it be.’ She remembered the day she had been told that her father had died on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James at Compostela. The utter devastation scooping out a hollow inside her as if dug with a jagged spoon. She had had to stand firm because she was his heir, the new Duchess of Aquitaine, and she had a little sister to protect. In this moment, Isabel reminded her of Petronella, and it caused a piercing pain in her heart. ‘There is no door you can close against it and nowhere to run,’ she said. ‘Isabel, you must face it now, because if you do not, it will fester and bring you down.’

‘He can’t be gone, he can’t be!’ Isabel sobbed.

‘I know you do not want to believe it,’ Alienor said. ‘I do not know your pain, but I remember my own when people who were everything to me left this world.’ Taking Isabel’s hand, she placed the ring in it.

Isabel stared at it, then gasped and doubled over with a howl, clutching her belly, crying out. Alienor rocked and soothed her while Isabel’s grief rose to the vaulted ceiling, ringing out torment in place of praise. A priest came to investigate, and Alienor sent him in haste to fetch her chaplain and her maids.

Together they returned Isabel to the chamber. She was trembling and sobbing so much that she could barely walk, and she was bleeding. The shock had brought on her flux, which was several weeks late. It was far too early to know if this was a miscarriage, but the bleeding was heavy and the knowledge that she might be losing her husband’s child sent Isabel into fresh paroxysms of weeping.

The women cleaned her up and put soft rags between her thighs; Marchisa made her a hot tisane, holding the cup to Isabel’s lips, coaxing her to take a few sips. Isabel refused to lie on the bed, but huddled on a bench before the fire, shivering. ‘I cannot rest,’ she said in a ragged voice. ‘His soul still needs me even if his body does not. I want to know how he died, and then I must hold a vigil of prayers for him. That is my duty as his wife and his widow.’

Alienor did not try to dissuade her from her purpose, but she was worried. Isabel had become a very dear friend. Running alongside her personal concern was the political awareness that Isabel had suddenly become a fine and eligible marriage prize. She was young, wealthy and well connected. She had yet to bear a child; there was a chance she might be barren, but she was still of an age to make it worth the risk. Henry would want to match her with someone that suited his needs, but since Isabel was Alienor’s companion and dear friend, she could bring her own influence to bear and perhaps that was a glint of sunlight bordering a very dark cloud.

Standing on the battlements of the great donjon at Falaise, seat of the Dukes of Normandy and the place where William the Bastard had been conceived and born, Alienor watched his great-grandson arrive.

‘Mama, look, Papa’s here!’ Harry pointed excitedly to the cavalcade making its way through the snowy landscape towards them.

‘Yes,’ Alienor said, ‘he is. The miracle is that either of us recognises him.’ From her vantage point, the men were the size of toy knights. Henry wore a blue cloak lined with ermine and was riding a bright chestnut palfrey. Their paths had not crossed since he had ridden off to fail at Toulouse. He had not seen fit to visit her or the children and had barely written either. She cared that he had not, but it was a caring born out of anger and contempt, not thwarted affection.

She lifted Harry so he could better see the parade arrive, banners waving, the household knights glittering in their armour, the barons colourful in their thick woollen tunics and cloaks, and then she took him down from the battlements to the hall, collecting his siblings on the way.

By the time Alienor arrived, Henry was already in the great hall and had formally greeted his mother who was holding court in her chair by the hearth. The winter cold had attacked her joints and although she refused to use a stick, the fact that she was content to sit by the fire was indicative. Henry’s bastard son Jeoffrey stood at her side, now a sturdy freckle-faced seven-year-old. His tunic of dark moss-green brightened the copper tones in his hair. Alienor was irritated that he had been the first to greet his father when he should have been last, but she let it pass. It was not the child’s fault.

Advancing to Henry, she made her obeisance. Harry knelt, little Matilda curtseyed as she had been taught and Richard gave a proper little bow before losing his balance and falling on his bottom. Geoffrey gurgled in his nurse’s arms.

‘Well,’ said Henry heartily. ‘What fine children. And you look well, madam.’

Alienor inclined her head, playing the diplomatic role with aplomb; there were no chinks in her armour in public. ‘Indeed they are, as am I. And you, sire?’