Devil's Consort (25 page)

I kept her. Agnes came into my employ. A friend? How could a tirewoman be a friend to the Duchess of Aquitaine? But I kept her because she was right—truth was strength.

There were repercussions from Toulouse. Abbot Suger had his revenge for my interference where I’d had no authority to interfere, with the result that I found myself
shut out of Louis’s meetings with his council. It was not right! The wife of the King of France had always been given access to decision-making, had always been consulted. Even Adelaide had scrawled her signature on any number of Fat Louis’s charters. I had made it my business to know that.

But after Toulouse there was a wily conspiracy, a change to the custom, quietly done. I was not to be allowed to sit in Louis’s consultations with his advisers. My role as Queen was to be ceremonial. I was to be a cipher, a lovely face and elegant body to stand silently at Louis’s side in royal robes and bear the royal children. All I had feared. Neither my consent nor advice would be sought or acted upon. I was barred. My presence at royal discussions was de trop.

Abbot Suger’s little victory.

I allowed it. Would I embarrass myself by being turned from the door of the Council Chamber? But in my heart I refused to accept defeat. I would say what I wished in the privacy of my bedchamber where the worthy Abbot had no power. But first Louis must make amends for cringing so weakly before his minister. I was carrying the heir to France, was I not? I had every right to punish him.

I withdrew from Louis. I distanced myself from him, made no attempt to seek him out, absenting myself from the formal meals with the excuse that I was unwell. When he came to my apartments, I had a dozen excuses to deny him entry. Indeed, one word of my possible ill
health put him to flight like a rat into a sewer in the streets of Paris. I would bring my husband to his knees for his slighting of me. And I did, of course. It was a cunning woman’s ploy, to pretend disinterest. After no more than a se’ennight of the fictitious headache, the troublesome cough, the inexplicable rash, I brought him to me where I had closeted myself in my solar. Abjectly apologetic, Louis had a little coffer clasped to his chest like an offering.

‘My lord.’ My voice held the bitter cold of January, while I continued to give my attention to the troubadour who knelt at my feet, pouring out an impassioned love song. I would not be ignored and Louis would be left in no doubt of it.

My troubadour sang with pain and adoration, all plaintive emotion in his voice.

‘My lady …’ Louis approached.

I waved him to silence as the singer fixed his eyes on my face and completed the sentiment.

‘Lover? Reward?’ Louis’s words were bitten off.

‘Certainly.’ I graced him with barely a glance. ‘My troubadour demands my love in return for his.’ How convenient that he should be singing those sentiments at such a moment—if one believed in such coincidences. ‘This is
cortez amors,
Louis. Courtly love.’ I yawned behind my fingers. ‘The love of a troubadour for his lady. His worship of the unattainable woman of his heart.’

Louis strode forward to tower over me. ‘I’ll not have that man here, expressing such sentiments to my wife.’

Better and better … ‘Why ever not?’

‘You refused to obey me on the day of our marriage. That was in Bordeaux, your own city. This is Paris. I’ll not have that man in your chamber.’

My troubadour still knelt, head bent, fingers stilled on the strings. Marcabru, another favourite of my father, a songsmith full of wit, of scurrilous verses or the sweetest love songs to turn a woman’s knees to water, renowned throughout Aquitaine and Poitou. I had brought him to Paris with me from our recent visit to Poitiers. A handsome man with great charm and a heart-melting smile. A smile that was now wickedly in evidence at the exchange of words.

Louis waved him away. Marcabru looked at me for confirmation. I hesitated, just for a second, then nodded, smiling at him and watching as he bowed and
retreated across the room. My women withdrew too, leaving the pair of us in a little space of hostility.

I turned to Louis. ‘Did you wish to speak with me, Louis?’ I asked sweetly. ‘Did you want my advice at last? Or will you continue to shut me out of your deliberations?’ He slammed the little coffer down, to the detriment of its hinges. ‘Did Abbot Suger allow you to come to me?’ I pursued.

Louis snarled, not diverted. ‘You were flirting with him, Eleanor.’

I made my face grave, hurt. ‘I do not flirt with my servants.’

‘I’ll not have it.’

I lifted my chin a little. ‘By what right do you take me to task, my lord?’

His reply was becoming tedious with repetition. ‘I am your husband.’

‘My husband? I think I’ve not seen you in my bed any time this week—this month, in fact. Even longer than that …’

‘Such comments don’t become you, madam. As for your paid songster. How typical of the louche south,’ he accused viciously, ‘to encourage such wantonness.’

We had been here before, of course. ‘Do you dare accuse me of lascivious behaviour, Louis? The woman who carries your child?’

‘How should I not? Look at your hair, your dress …’

‘I am at leisure here in my own rooms to dress as I please.’ Deliberately I drew my hand down the length
of my hair, wrapped about in silk ribbons, the ends clasped in gold finials. Louis’s eyes followed the gesture. ‘I recall a time when you wound my hair around your wrist, my lord …’

‘I’ll not discuss that!’ His face was suffused with colour. ‘I’ll not have you looking like …’

He sought for a word. I supplied it. And not quietly. ‘A harlot?’ I suggested.

It silenced Louis. It drew all eyes in the chamber to us. With a furious look, Louis leaned to whisper, the syllables harsh in the quiet room. ‘You will dismiss your troubadour, Eleanor.’

‘I will not. I am his patron.’

Louis stalked out. The jewels—his peace offering but left behind with bad grace—were atrocious, solid enough to decorate a horse’s harness. I remained obdurate. I knew what I was about. Hardly had the week expired than Louis marched in with another box, small and carved out of wood. Without apology or explanation he thrust it into my hands.

‘A gift, Eleanor. To remind you of your home. I know you love the perfumes of the south so I’ve had this made for you.’

I opened the little box to release a sweet scent of orange blossom with a deeper note that tickled my nose. It was pleasant enough and I was touched that he should think of me with so personal a gift. Feeling magnanimous, I put aside my embroidery. Now was
the time to welcome him back into my affections. I kissed his cheek.

‘I had the ingredients from a merchant here in the city,’ Louis explained, as he took the box from me, strode across the room to the open fire and.

‘Take care, Louis—only a little. The merest pinch. That’s too much!’

Louis cast a hearty handful of the contents onto the fire. His enthusiasm was a fine thing.

Smoke rose. There was the sweetness of the orange blossom, perhaps a little jasmine scenting the air, and beneath that. I sniffed. Sandalwood I expected, or even frankincense, as the base notes. That is what I would have ordered. We in the south had much experience of the skills of ancient Rome, now practised and polished by our alchemists. But that was not it. I sniffed again. One of my women sneezed. Louis coughed discreetly. Then not so discreetly as the smoke billowed and the pungency caught at the back of the throat.

There was no escape. The perfume burned, the smoke filled the room and we coughed, sneezed, eyes watering as we were all overwhelmed with the cloying, animal heaviness of it.

‘Open the windows,’ I ordered when I could breathe. ‘Douse the flames.’

To no avail. The perfume continued to give off its secrets and the mingled scents hung like a miasma in the air. By this time any sweetness was entirely obliterated,
the draughts from the open windows merely stirring the fire into fresh life.

We fled to the antechamber where we continued to wheeze.

‘It was very expensive,’ gasped Louis, beating at his tunic, dragging his hands down over his face.

‘I can imagine.’ And I began to laugh.

Musk, of course. The most valuable, the most sought-after of base elements. To be used circumspectly, and totally overwhelming when applied with too liberal a hand. Laughter took hold and I could not stop. Everything was permeated with the scent of musk. The tapestries, the very stones of the walls. And ourselves.

‘It was too much, Louis,’ I managed. But Louis was already beating a retreat, still spluttering, as I mopped my eyes. ‘They say its perfume remains detectable for a hundred years …’ I gasped.

‘One week on the skin would be too much,’ Agnes muttered. ‘Your hair, lady! It reeks of the stuff. Who concocted it for His Majesty? They ought to be suffocated in their own product.’

‘Probably the Master of Horse, used to making liniment! They say it’s an aphrodisiac …’ I burst into laughter again.

‘And will you inform His Majesty of that?’

We laughed until we could laugh no more, before Agnes ordered up hot water to scrub and scour our skin and hair. The remains of Louis’s gift we consigned to the garderobe.

Poor Louis! Even his kindest efforts went awry, but at least we were reconciled.

I was still not readmitted to Louis’s councils.

I lost our child. For no reason that I could understand. Although my belly was hardly rounded, the birth far distant, I gave up hunting. I danced only moderately. I ate and drank circumspectly. Nothing must harm this precious child. But then a sharp pain struck in the night, a pain that became agony where there should have been no pain. The child was stillborn, almost too ill formed to be recognisable as a child, certainly too small to take a breath on its own and too incomplete for me to know its sex. Only a mess of blood and disappointment. Of the pain in the bearing of that child as it tore its way from my body I gave no thought, only the loss that lodged its despair in my heart. I had failed. I had failed France and Aquitaine. My grief surprised me.

Did Louis blame me?

No, he never did. He thought our loss was brought about by some nameless, undisclosed sin of his own that he had not confessed, thus driving him to endless hours on his knees to seek God’s forgiveness.

Perhaps it was. Or was the sin mine?

It was Agnes who held my hand when I wept, when the pain was almost too great to bear—not Louis, who was banned as were all men from the birth chamber.

‘What do they say, Agnes?’ I asked when grief ebbed, to be replaced by empty reality.

She pursed her lips.

‘Who do they blame?’ I pressed her.

She gave an eloquent shrug. ‘The child was born before its time. It is always the fault of the woman. It is the burden we have to bear.’

A caustic reply but not without sympathy. I knew she was right.

As for Louis, his despair may have driven him to his knees, but he still found time to banish Marcabru from my court. I did not know my troubadour had gone until I emerged from my chamber to be told that Louis had sent him back to Poitiers on the understanding that he would never return to Paris. I missed him, that bright flavour of the south in his words and music that might have helped me to heal. I was heart-sore, but kept it close within me. I never talked of it to Louis. It had been deliberate retribution on his part. I had not thought him capable of it.

I think in those days my heart began to harden against the King of France.

L
OUIS
acted. The extent of his enthusiasm astonished me as much as it horrified his mother and drove his royal counsellor into a fury. I had not thought he would take my advice so much to heart, or quite so precipitately. I had thought it would take more than one night in my bed to stir him to open hostility against Toulouse, but Louis leapt on the excuse for invasion as a hungry cat leapt on a bird that threatened to escape. The voices raised against such a project were loud and vociferous but Louis was deaf to them all.

‘Why in the blessed name of God make an enemy of the Count of Toulouse?’ Abbot Suger, excruciatingly civil but furious that Louis had made his decision without once consulting him, questioned both the cost and the ultimate value to France.

‘Because he has no claim to it,’ Louis stated. ‘Toulouse is Eleanor’s.’

‘You have been ill-advised.’ Suger’s flat stare encompassed me before returning to Louis. ‘Are you not aware that your vassals will not support you, sire? They’ll refuse to supply you with knights. Not one of them wants an angry neighbour on his doorstep. We have no argument with Toulouse.’

‘I will defeat Count Alfonso, my lord Abbot. He will no longer be a neighbour and his anger will be a thing of no importance.’

Suger lifted his hands helplessly. ‘I pray God thinks you worthy of victory, sire.’

‘I will ask Him. He’ll not refuse me.’

And Adelaide? Her civility was negligible. ‘You will not go, my son.’

A mistake. I saw Louis’s nostrils narrow.

‘I will, madam.’

‘Louis! You will listen to me, even if you refuse to heed Abbot Suger.’

Ha! Adelaide still had not learned. Louis listened to me, and we set out for Poitiers together, where I prepared to stay as Louis gathered his troops. I wished with all my heart to travel farther south with him, into the centre of my own lands, and the temptation to do so stirred my blood from its northern languor—but a miracle had happened. That one night when I had painted for Louis the glory of his victory over Toulouse, his ownership of me, however brief and perfunctory, had been effective. My courses had stopped and nausea struck in the morning hours.

Praise the Virgin! I would carry an heir for France and for Aquitaine.

My delight superseded my wretched mornings when my belly heaved and the thought of food made me retch. Louis proved to be mildly sympathetic but more taken up with the magnificence of his own achievement. I tried not to fall prey to cynicism. The heir would enhance my importance and win over those of Louis’s court who still saw me as an undesirable southern influence in France. No one would dare to slight me when I bore the King a son.