The Autumn Throne (20 page)

A little over a week later, she was sewing in her chamber when the Bishop of Salisbury asked to see her. She had been expecting a request for he was a stalwart supporter of Henry’s and although elderly and growing frail he still exuded authority and power when he chose to exert his will.

Leaving her needlework, and accompanied by Amiria, Alienor followed the escorting knights of the Bishop’s household from the palace to his lodging in the cathedral enclave. The clouds were high in the sky with wide expanses of glorious blue between them. A fine day to go riding, she thought with longing, although that was no longer permitted.

Bishop Joscelin sat in an ornate carved chair with the light spilling onto him from the window embrasure. Even in today’s heat he wore a woollen cloak edged with gold braid, and a cap crusted with embroidery. His ivory crosier rested in a socket at the side of the chair and a leather-bound book with jewelled clasps lay on the table at his right-hand side. His features, cadaverous with age, wore an expression of grim sorrow. Beside him sat another man, recently arrived to judge from the dust powdering the hem of his habit. Alienor recognised Thomas Agnell, Archdeacon of Wells.

Alienor approached the men and knelt to kiss the amethyst ring on the Bishop’s right hand. His skin was shiny, almost translucent, with purple and brown mottles like an autumn leaf. ‘Father,’ she said, before turning to acknowledge the Archdeacon.

‘Daughter.’ The Bishop’s voice trembled. ‘Will you be seated?’ He indicated the stool at his left-hand side.

Alienor would rather have remained standing, but did as courtesy required. She settled her skirts and folded her hands, making a conscious effort not to clench them.

The
Bishop’s own hands shook with palsy. ‘Daughter, the Archdeacon comes to us with grave news.’

Alienor turned to Agnell. He was younger than the Bishop by twenty years, still robust and of the world, although just now he too looked deeply burdened.

‘Madam, it has fallen to me to bring you these tidings and I am sorry to be the one to bear them.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘It grieves me to tell you that your son Henry, the Young King, has gone to be with God in heaven.’

The words sat on the surface of her mind like raindrops on waxed leather. Her lips formed the words, but they were meaningless.

‘I am sorry to say he contracted the bloody flux after robbing the holy shrine of Our Lady of Rocamadour. Some say that God’s wrath has been visited on him for this deed of sacrilege and that the gates of heaven have been barred to him, but I am not one of them. He made full confession and repented his sins before death took him from the world, and I know he is with God and His angels.’

It was as if he had snapped shut a book under her nose, and the dust from it had come up in a cloud. She could feel the hardness of the stool beneath her, the tightening pressure of her fingers against each other until she touched bone. It wasn’t true. It was a story concocted to torment her. How could he be dead and beyond her help? And yet evidently something had happened. ‘I must go to him.’ She tried to stand up, but there was no strength in her legs. She had heard the words clearly with one part of her mind, but her emotions had not caught up, and all she could think of was her son hurting and in desperate need of his mother. ‘It is not true,’ she said. Clutching at straws. ‘Where is your proof?’

Agnell held out a piece of parchment. ‘Madam, I have a letter sent under the King’s own seal. I have no reason to doubt what is written. The Young King died at Martel in the Limousin on the eve of the tenth of June, God have mercy
on his soul. Truly, madam, I wish I did not have to bring you these terrible tidings.’

Alienor’s breath caught as if he had struck her. She thought of the vivid vision she had experienced of Harry seated upon a throne and wearing both a royal crown and a diadem above his head, blazing with light. Not an earthly throne, but a heavenly one. Dear God. The nausea and pain returned too and she put her hand to her belly and gasped.

‘Madam, you are distraught,’ said the Bishop. ‘Will it help you to pray for him now and take time for contemplation?’

Alienor gave the concerned prelate a blank stare. ‘Why should I pray?’ she said bitterly. ‘God is not listening.’

The Bishop made a sound of protest, and raised one of his palsied hands. Agnell leaned forward. ‘God always hears our prayers,’ he replied gently. ‘It is not our place to question Him, but only to yield ourselves to His mercy.’

‘Mercy?’ Alienor shuddered. ‘If this is God’s mercy, then I am finished with God.’

Once more she tried to rise and this time succeeded. The soldiers who had escorted her to this terrible meeting stood ready to catch her, but she warned them off with a hard look.

‘Oh, madam,’ Amiria said, her eyes liquid, ‘I am so sorry.’

‘What good is that to anyone?’ Alienor snapped and swept from the room. At first she walked with her head up, but as she traversed the cloister, her pace quickened until she was running and stumbling, half blinded by tears.

Once in her chamber she began plucking clothes off the poles and hurling them into a coffer. ‘I cannot stay here, I must go to him. It is my duty above all duties as a mother to be with him.’ She tipped her jewel casket into the coffer and watched the rings and brooches tumble over the wool and linen like glistening entrails.

The guards exchanged glances and left the chamber, closing the door firmly behind them. Belbel gazed at Alienor with shock and consternation.

‘It
is the Young King,’ Amiria told her, tears rolling down her face. ‘He is dead and the news has overset my lady.’

‘Dead?’ Belbel covered her mouth with her hand.

‘Of the bloody flux in the Limousin … the Bishop has just told her.’

‘Don’t just stand there,’ Alienor commanded. ‘Help me pack.’

‘Madam, they will not let you leave,’ Amiria said gently. ‘Even for this. And the Young King … as the Archdeacon says, surely he is with God in heaven. Let Him care for him now.’

Alienor ignored her and continued to toss her belongings into the baggage chest. ‘He needs me,’ she repeated.

‘Madam, he is beyond earthly cares.’ Amiria moved to stand in Alienor’s way. Her quiet steadiness and inner core of spiritual strength made her better able to deal with Alienor now than the more forthright Belbel. ‘They will not let you leave; you must pray for his soul where you are. I will come with you and light candles and keep vigil.’ She gently tugged at the cloak Alienor was clutching.

Alienor resisted her for a moment, and then let go and slumped to the floor, putting her face in her hands. ‘He hated to be alone,’ she wept. ‘He needed people around him and he shone for them. What will he do alone in the dark?’

‘He is not alone, madam, he is with God and His angels.’

‘Are you so sure of that? After what the Bishop said about robbing the shrine at Rocamadour?’

‘The Bishop said he had done penance and been confessed, madam.’

‘But that some still reckoned him damned.’

‘No, madam, never that.’

Alienor thought of Harry as she had seen him seated in glory with his twin crowns. Surely that meant salvation, but she had to be certain he was safe and as always she felt so impotent, trapped here in this stultifying small corridor between Sarum and Winchester. She had not been there, not been able
to sustain him and provide the help he needed as he destroyed himself. Those she had trusted in her stead had let her down.

Amiria sat down with her on the floor, enfolding and rocking her. Alienor wanted to crawl into darkness, to hide her wounds and never emerge, but Harry needed her prayers.

Wiping her eyes on the soft cloth Belbel handed to her, she stood up and smoothed her gown. The guards outside the door allowed her and Amiria to pass through to the small private chapel of St Nicholas beyond the hall, and here she prostrated herself before the altar and prayed for the soul of her eldest son. She desperately desired to see that vision of him again, but all that came was darkness welling from a bottomless pit of grief.

In the following weeks, Alienor slowly came to terms with the fact that Harry had died of the bloody flux in squalid circumstances less than a fortnight after robbing the holy shrine of St Amadour to pay his expenses. She learned that he had expired on the floor of a fortified lodging house in Martel, repenting in his last hours on a bed of ashes with a rope tied around his neck. His coffers had been empty; there had been no money for alms to distribute as the funeral cortège wound its way north.

The procession to Rouen had been met along the road with wailing and outpourings of grief, but had turned into a debacle when the people of Le Mans had seized Harry’s body and insisted on burying him in their city, where his father had been born and his grandfather lay entombed. A deputation from Rouen had arrived to reclaim him, since he had requested on his deathbed to be buried in their city. After much heated negotiation and discussion, Harry had been disinterred and taken on to Rouen.

When Alienor first heard the news, she had been sickened that men should use her son’s corpse for their own pecuniary interests. Perhaps it would have amused Harry – he had always possessed an irreverent sense of humour – but it only served
to make her grief more raw. Beyond those details, other considerations were slowly coming home to roost. With Harry gone she had lost another champion to her cause – one less person to stand up to Henry. Her son had constantly campaigned for her release and now that intercession was lost. Harry’s death had drastically changed the path of the future because eventually he would have ruled England and Normandy, and she could have retired to Aquitaine with Richard and lived out her days in Poitiers. All that was swept away, tumbled and torn like shipwrecked timbers.

On a sultry morning in July Alienor returned from mass in the cathedral and saw horses in the courtyard, including a fine dark bay stallion that she instantly recognised. The dull grey feeling at her core lifted and kindled, not with joy but with a fire of grief and anticipation that sparked with rage. William the Marshal was here and she would have the truth from him, every last drop, even if she had to cut him open to get it, and she did not care if she did. She sent a servant ahead with orders to bring William to her private chamber, not the public space of the hall. Her heart was hammering in her chest and her breath was so short that she had to pause in the vestibule at the top of the stairs and compose herself before she continued through the hall and into the chamber beyond.

He stood in the middle of the room, dressed in serviceable travelling clothes that had seen hard wear but were brushed and cared for, and he had wiped the dust of the road from his boots. His sword was propped near the door, his cloak and satchel beside it. The sun’s strength had browned his face and burnished his dark brown hair with strands of deep gold and amber. Fine lines fanned from his eye corners, laughter lines, but there was no laughter in him now, only apprehension, misery, and the look of a man on a battlefield facing his downfall but prepared to stand until the final blow cut him down.

‘William, dear God, William!’ Alienor’s voice broke. She flew at him and hugged him as if by feeling his living
masculine strength she could feel Harry too. The sight of him was a vent for emotions she had been holding back for far too long. ‘How could you!’ she wept. ‘How could you let this happen! Why could you not keep him safe!’ She struck his chest with her clenched fist. ‘That is all I ever asked of you. I trusted you and you failed!’ She struck him again and again, pounding against his solid bulk, and he took each blow gladly, welcoming the punishment.

‘Madam, I would have given my life if it would have saved his.’ William’s voice was raw with pain. ‘I know I failed. It is my fault. I should have protected him better. I did all I could to dissuade him from the courses that led to his demise, but it was not enough; he would not listen. Strike me to the heart and kill me for failing you and him.’

‘I should do.’ She raised her fist again, but then opened her hand to grip a fistful of his tunic and clench around that. ‘But it will not bring him back. Nothing will ever do that.’

‘I am so sorry.’ William’s voice fell to a hoarse whisper and she felt the catch in his chest. ‘He … he desired me to go to Jerusalem, to the Holy Sepulchre, and fulfil his vow to lay his cloak upon the tomb of Christ. I promised him I would, and it is my sworn intention. If I can no longer serve his earthly body, then may I serve by advancing the state of his soul.’

Alienor swallowed and slowly released his tunic. Others had written to her, expressing their condolences, absolving themselves of blame. And here was William taking that blame, offering himself to keep on walking down that path. It did not exonerate him; but it softened something within her that he was prepared to stand at the gates of hell as a shield and boost Harry’s soul towards heaven.

‘Sit.’ She gestured with a trembling hand to the benches set either side of the hearth, bereft of fire in the summer heat.

William sat down heavily while Alienor poured wine for both of them. For a while they sat staring into the blackened cavity as if watching imaginary flames. And then William shuddered and brought his palm down over his face.

‘Tell
me,’ Alienor said. ‘Tell me everything.’

Haltingly, but without sparing himself, William related the details of his young lord’s demise. ‘He was never more true or brave than in the courage with which he faced his death,’ William said. ‘When he knew the end was close, he asked for my hand. He said he wanted to do right, but could no longer fulfil his obligations or make amends because he knew he was dying. He said …’ William paused to swallow emotion. ‘He said he wanted to build a great cathedral to the honour and glory of God but could no longer accomplish that deed. And then he asked me to do one thing for him beyond all others. He begged me to intercede at God’s throne, because he did not want to burn in hell for his sins; he asked me to go to Jerusalem on his behalf and ask God’s forgiveness.’

Tears pouring down her face, Alienor took his hands between hers and gripped them, remembering her dream, of Harry upon his throne, twice-crowned.