Devil's Consort (56 page)

I will not! I will not! I am not at fault!

The words screamed in my head as I took refuge with my women, my belly churning in turmoil. Was I guilty? I refuted it, I would always refute it. Yes, I gave my consent but acted on the military experience of de Rancon and Maurienne. How would I know the terrible repercussions? All I knew was that I was chosen for the scapegoat, in disgrace, my reputation trampled in the mud of the mountain pass where our knights and soldiers and pilgrims lay dead.

Unfair! Unfair!

Yet I would hold my head high. Not to do so would be to accept guilt.

I spent a difficult night. Even my women treated me
with a strange sort of silent reticence. The rumours of Louis’s bellowed accusations had resounded around the camp and lost nothing in the telling, and Agnes provided me with any detail of my misdemeanours that had passed me by. She was not reticent. I had weighed down the baggage train with the inordinate, selfish load of my possessions. I had left the main army stranded and vulnerable by ordering my vanguard to cross the pass. I had placed my own safety and comfort before that of the knights and troops and pilgrims who followed me. I had caused the death of the women who had chosen to travel with me but had elected to journey at the rear.

So now I knew why my own women would not meet my eye.

Eleanor was guilty. Eleanor must bear the weight of the dead. Did not her own husband so accuse her? My skin crawled at the injustice of it.

‘I can’t believe Louis would put me in so invidious a position,’ I stormed at last when I could vent my fury without an audience.

‘No, but I can believe it of that Templar snake!’ Agnes brushed my hair with long, angry movements. ‘That’s where the blame lies.’

‘You can’t exonerate Louis. He would listen to Galeran before me!’

‘Galeran fears you. He wants power.’ The stroke of the brush became heavier. ‘He fears Louis’s love for you. He’ll destroy it if he can.’

I was not mollified. ‘What sort of love is it that accuses and shames without evidence?’

I rose next morning determined to plead my cause before Louis and his war council. I would be heard. I would not be ignored. Was I not Queen of France? Louis and his knights must give me a hearing. For my sake and de Rancon’s I must put the record straight. Surely Louis, after a night’s sleep and more reasoned thought, would listen to me.

Did I expect to be included in Louis’s councils? I should have known better by now: weighty decisions of state were not the preserve of women. Thierry Galeran, of course, stiff-legged and snarling, barred my way into the pavilion and Louis refused to see me. Short of an undignified scuffle at the entrance, I had no choice but to retreat. Such anger burned within me beneath the humiliation. I could taste it, as bitter as bile. I had been cast to the dogs by my own husband, my reputation stripped bare to be squabbled over and torn apart by the gutter riff-raff of Europe. If Louis refused to see me, who would listen to my vindication? There would be no vindication. How could he humble me in this way, his wife; how could he put me to shame before those of lesser rank?

Galeran’s smug complacency disgusted me. His influence was surely in the ascendant.

Never had I been brought so low.

If I had to choose the moment when I knew that I
could not tolerate this sham of a marriage, perhaps this was it. That my husband would denigrate me without foundation, listening to the slanders of those who bore me ill will, treating me like a woman rather than as a ruler in her own right with as much authority as he. I knew I would never forgive him as I walked away from that pavilion, knowing that I had been rendered powerless.

I recall I accused Thierry Galeran of being no better than an emasculated cur, snapping to protect its master. The Templar would never forgive me for that. Unfortunate, as it turned out.

That was not the end of it. Our shattered army limped out of the mountains to the nearest port, the town of Attalia, where we found no relief but instead weeks of unspeakable horror. Already half-starved, with the loss of our baggage train lack of food threatened our very lives quite as severely as the Turkish attacks. Even now my belly revolts at the memory of being reduced to eating the rotting flesh of dead horses and mules. Some knights bled their horses to drink the sustenance from their blood. We lacked clothes, shoes even. My hands and feet blistered, my lips cracked, my clothes fell into rags around me.

‘We will regroup in Attalia,’ Louis predicted.

He was wrong, of course. Storms battered us. Food continued in short supply and was expensive as the local Greeks determined to make their fortunes from us. Yet
only three days away, so short a journey by sea, was the golden city of Antioch. All we needed were the ships to take us there. The local fishermen rubbed their fingers at the prospect of crusader gold falling into their pockets.

‘I’ll not pay the price!’ Louis fumed. ‘Four silver marks for each passenger—on top of the cost of each vessel! I’ll not pay it.’

‘Do we have a choice?’ I asked wearily.

‘Of course we have a choice! Galeran says we can’t afford it. With God’s help I’ll beat them down.’

God was beyond persuasion. Five weeks of haggling, with Antioch nearly within our sights. Five weeks of indescribable torment. Dysentery broke out amongst the troops. The stench of death and bodily waste enclosed us—and then the first outbreak of plague. Death stalked us, whilst Louis refused to pay and we sat there in Attalia. Filthy, starving, dying.

Enough! In God’s name, enough! I sought out Louis, as usual praying with Odo de Deuil, Count Maurienne looking jaundiced, Galeran standing guard at the door. Without a word I pushed past him, daring him to draw the sword in his scabbard.

‘We can’t stay here, Louis.’ I didn’t wait until he struggled to his feet. ‘It’s intolerable. Our army is dying on its feet.’

And, taking me aback, Louis smiled. ‘I know. We leave tomorrow.’

‘Thank God! We’ve enough ships to move most of them—’

‘No. We march.’ What? March? ‘I’m determined on this, Eleanor.’ The fervour was back in his eyes. ‘We’ll march in the footsteps of the first crusaders. Their valour is remembered today—and so will mine be. We shall achieve glory in heaven.’

‘A hazardous journey of two months on foot—when we could be there in three days by sea? You must be insane.’

‘I’m assured of God’s blessing. If we die it will be as martyrs for a righteous cause.’

God’s bones! I was beyond valour and martyrs. I felt the strongest impulse to strike Louis’s self-satisfied, self-righteous face. Did he not understand? What mad dream of martyrdom did he hold to? My mind was made up.

‘No!’

‘I don’t understand.’ At least I had wiped the smile from his face.

‘Then let me explain, Louis! I’ll not march with you,’ I stated. ‘If you persist with this madness I will leave you and go by sea. What’s more, I’ll take my own vassals with me,’

‘But the cost …’ Galeran gasped. ‘No, sire.’

‘Cost? What are four silver marks compared with a man’s life?’ My voice rang clear, fired by a sense of rightness. ‘Our troops who can pay will do so. The rest remain here until we can make other arrangements.’

‘You would not …’ Louis looked aghast as I threatened to rob him of the major portion of the army that was left to him.

‘Try me!’ I showed my teeth in a smile that was not a smile. ‘If you march, you go without the men of Aquitaine and Poitou.’

Louis fell into an agony of indecision. His fingers writhed, his teeth bit into his lower lip. Such weakness! Such unforgivable weakness. Such lack of either compassion or common sense. As he rubbed his hands over his face I knew with real certainty that all feeling I had for him was as dead as the troops on Mount Cadmos.

‘You are forcing my hand,’ he muttered

‘Yes. I am. Tomorrow I sail for Antioch. We should have been there days ago!’

Maurienne smirked. Galeran scowled. Odo de Deuil raised his eyes to heaven for guidance. And in the face of my obstinacy Louis’s resistance collapsed. We were barely on speaking terms when we took to the little fleet of round ships.

A nightmare of a journey.

Storms descended, bringing with them all the fear of shipwreck and grim, unrelenting seasickness. Three weeks it took us of winds that drove us off course. Three weeks in which Louis lamented the loss of his dream to follow in the footsteps of those who had captured Jerusalem. He offered me no comfort, only a continued fretting that my decision had lost him an army on the slopes of Mount Cadmos. By the time we reached Saint
Simeon I could no longer bear the sight of his strained features, his bent shoulders, the unending drone of his prayers. He did not even show concern for the thousands of unfortunates who could not pay the passage and had been left behind in Attalia to starve or die of plague.

‘I forbid you to approach your uncle over this,’ Louis lectured me. ‘I’ll see to the rescue of my army. Do you hear me, Eleanor?’

‘Yes. I hear you, Louis. Do it soon, before they all die.’

If we were barely on speaking term when we left Attilia, we were not at all three weeks later when we finally arrived in Antioch. I fell into Raymond’s open, welcoming, compassionate arms.

March 1147: nine months later.

The port of Saint Simeon outside Antioch in the Holy Land.

P
HYSICALLY
shattered, nauseously ill, I stepped from the squalid horror of the little round ship that had housed me for the past three weeks onto the solid quay of Saint Simeon, the port of Antioch. With me there was no baggage, no horses and no hope. Louis, of course, was there, and Odo de Deuil and Thierry Galeran—there had been more times than I could count when I had wished myself rid of all three of them. But there was no crusading army, victorious or otherwise.

What a sight I must have presented. Three weeks of storms and adverse winds and appalling sickness had left me almost as gaunt as Louis. My legs were shockingly weak. Unwashed and filthy, my gown and linen ragged
and soiled after weeks of constant wear in the most loathsome of conditions with none to replace them, I imagined my face pale, lined with fear and exhaustion. My hair was matted with salt and itched, probably—by the Virgin!—with lice. I had, at my lowest ebb, even considered taking a knife to the length of it. I had no looking glass to tell me the truth, neither could have borne to use it if I had. I would not have wished to see the wretchedness in my soul. I was desperately unhappy, my reputation in as many rags as my gown. It was an effort to hold my head high.

Nine months ago I had set out with such hope. The events I had lived through had been the stuff of tragedy. Never in all my life had I felt so utterly wretched as I did as I stepped from that ship.

Louis offered me his hand as I staggered on the unmoving dry land. I took it, because appearances must be preserved in public, and there were plenty to mark our arrival, but I neither looked at him nor exchanged words of relief. I was beyond speaking to him. On that final day in France when he had rejected me by his sacred oath to keep his body pure, I had condemned him for a fool. Now I was beyond tolerating him to any degree. As soon as I was sure of my balance, I snatched my hand away. His treatment of me I considered deplorable, despicably unjust, far worse than mere physical rejection.

And it had all been done, appallingly, in full public gaze.

I strode ahead of him, pushing him from my mind. I’d had a bellyful of Louis Capet, enough to last me a lifetime. And of de Deuil and Templar Galeran. There was only one face I sought in the crowds that had come to welcome us.

Even so, I was vain enough to consider: what would these cheering citizens of Antioch see in me? Not the proud figure that had left Paris in a blaze of publicity, an Amazon on a white horse. Not the elegantly fashionable Queen who had feasted and hunted and enjoyed the fabled luxury of Constantinople. Would they believe now that I was the Queen of France? Duchess of Aquitaine? I doubted it. I did not have more than one pair of sodden shoes to my name, and my gown hung on my bones like skin on the carcass of a scrawny chicken. My hair was a rat’s nest of tangles, hidden, I hoped, by my less then pristine veil. I think I looked like a whore from the lowest stews of Paris.

The voices raised in welcome redoubled and I forced a smile to my lips. Perhaps my sore heart was soothed a little by the familiar chanting of the Te Deum by the choir, led by the Patriarch himself in festive robes. And as I felt my tense muscles begin to relax, I began to be aware of the warmth of early spring on my face. The storm clouds had retreated, leaving the sky the deepest of azure and the hillsides covered with flowers, their spicy scent drifting on the light wind. Just like Aquitaine. Like home in Poitiers and Bordeaux.

It brought me close to tears.

And there in the midst of the crowd, walking towards me, was Raymond, my father’s brother. Raymond of Poitiers, now Prince Raymond of Antioch, as magnificently striking, head and shoulders above the crowd, as my memory of him. Indeed, his new authority burnished him in gold.

‘Eleanor!’

He had no eyes for Louis. None for Louis’s damned advisers. He looked at me. He walked straight to me, such balm to my soul after weeks—months, even—of being excluded from Louis’s endless, pointless negotiations with those close to him. Closeted hour after hour with Odo de Deuil and Thierry Galeran, not once had my miserable husband asked my opinion, yet he was quick to castigate me for the collapse of his plans. Now I was greeted as if I mattered.

Louis and his minions might not have been there.

‘Eleanor. My dear girl. We feared for your safety. How you must have suffered.’ Raymond’s welcome rolled over me, wrapping me in comfort in the soft accents of the
langue d’oc.

‘Ah, Raymond. I am so pleased to be here.’ I almost wept.

He opened his arms and I fell into them. Unable to fight against it, I wept on his shoulder. All my hopes when I had left France—for adventure, for victory, for sheer pleasure in the day-to-day travel—all had been destroyed under the weight of Louis’s stupidity as much as the military skill of our enemies. And I was being
held accountable. But now my ordeal was over. This was home. Raymond’s kiss of welcome on my wet cheeks healed my immediate wounds.