The Autumn Throne (28 page)

Alienor lifted her chin. ‘Indeed, as you see fit – sire.’ Argument was pointless and might lead to difficulties for William. At least he had returned from the dangers of Outremer to tell his tale, and Henry had given him a reward of sorts. It would have to suffice.

The court
spent the long, hot days of summer at the Royal Palace of Woodstock. Henry had allowed Alienor to remain with the domestic household and had not mentioned a return to Sarum. Every letter she sent, every charter she witnessed was vetted either by him or one of his representatives, but she had some leeway in domestic areas. She had grandchildren to instruct, clergy to entertain, and visiting baronial wives for company. Henry had loosened her fetters, but she was well aware that the slightest move in a political direction would immediately curtail her liberties.

One afternoon she went to take her leisure in the garden with her women and enjoy the blooms. Her daughter Joanna had sent roses from Sicily, bearing flowers of rich, deep red striated with cream and gold – bounteous, sensuous blooms that reminded Alienor of the southern courts of her youth but set amid moist English greenery. A clear stream rippled through the garden from its natural spring source, and the children played in it, splashing each other and squealing.

Sitting at Alienor’s side, Isabel de Warenne watched one particular small boy, a haunted look in her eyes. Alienor followed the direction of her gaze to young Richard FitzJohn who was deeply absorbed in sailing a toy ship on the water while telling himself a long, involved story about the people voyaging on her.

‘Our grandson is a fine little boy,’ Alienor remarked.

‘Indeed he is,’ Isabel replied stiffly.

Alienor had not seen Isabel for a while and there was constraint between them. The child had united them in blood,
but driven them apart in other ways. Isabel would always hold John culpable for what had happened to Belle, and Alienor thought Belle less of an innocent led astray than her parents wanted to believe. There was guilt and there was blame, coupled with a deep sadness that they could never go back to how it was before.

Richard was joined by Will, Henry’s bastard son. He too had a small boat to sail down the stream, and soon the boys were engrossed in their play.

‘How is Belle?’ Alienor asked. ‘Has she settled into marriage?’

‘Her husband is good to her and she is a dutiful wife,’ Isabel replied neutrally.

‘And Hamelin?’

Isabel gave a small shrug. ‘It is hard to tell. He speaks to Belle now, but he has lost his trust in her, and that, as you say about the past, can never be restored. He has lost his trust in me too …’ She bit her lip and turned her head.

Alienor watched Hamelin pick his way across the garden towards their seat. As he and Henry had aged, they had come to resemble each other more closely, and for an instant she had thought the stocky man with dusty gold hair and green tunic was her husband. Certainly his dour expression was reminiscent of Henry.

‘Madam, the King seeks you,’ he said without preamble. ‘There is news from Paris.’

Alienor’s heart plummeted. For Hamelin to fetch her it was important, and not good to judge from his expression. Feeling cold despite the intense heat of the day, she set her sewing aside and stood up, beckoning Isabel to accompany her.

The women followed Hamelin back through the garden, the scent of roses cloying now in the hot air and the chatter of the courtiers no more than the meaningless twitter of sparrows.

Henry was in his chamber, sitting in the chair from which he conducted business, but he was hunched over, as if someone had knocked half the life from his body. One hand covered his brow and eyes, the other gripped his midriff. A dark-robed
priest stood at the side of his chair, and beyond him stood a messenger holding a chestnut and white spaniel on a short leash – Moysi.

‘What has happened?’ Alienor demanded.

Henry slowly lowered his hand and fixed her with a dull, red-rimmed stare. ‘Geoffrey is dead.’ The words fell like stones. ‘Trampled to death at a tourney in Paris.’

Alienor stared. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’ Her gaze flicked to the others in the room and she saw the grim faces, the looks that dared not convey pity. ‘How?’

‘A blow to the head, madam, from a rearing horse,’ said the priest. ‘He was only wearing his coif at the time. The King of France was distraught – such a tragedy. I am deeply sorry.’

The words entered her brain like echoes in a cavern. ‘He can’t be dead, it is impossible. What was he doing in Paris? Why would he go there?’

‘What my sons usually do when left to their own devices,’ Henry said in a rusty voice. ‘Plotting. Why would he go there for any other reason?’

‘Madam, he has been buried with all honour in the new cathedral in Notre Dame,’ the priest added. ‘Before the high altar, and honoured by King Philippe who has granted four chaplains to the cathedral for the sake of the Count of Brittany’s soul.’

Henry jerked to his feet and strode into the shaft of light streaming through the window, but with no more purpose than movement itself. ‘And since the souls of those who tourney are damned, is it likely that he was there in Paris to joust at all? Why is he buried before the high altar if that was how he met his end? There is more to this than a simple tale of sport gone awry. I have no doubt he was in Paris for reasons far more nefarious than a tourney. Perhaps I should rejoice – do you think?’ He swung round, and now his eyes were no longer dull but piercingly bright and raw with pain.

The hollow feeling inside Alienor became a cavern. The
ground rushed up to meet her, and as her knees buckled she heard Isabel’s cry of consternation and felt Hamelin grab her and take her weight. Together they helped her to a bench and Isabel put her arms around her.

‘Oh, my dear, I am so, so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘So very sorry.’

Alienor shuddered. ‘Is there nothing I can do?’ she whispered. ‘One by one I have borne them, and one by one they die. How am I to bear this?’

‘Lean on God,’ Isabel attempted, to comfort her. ‘Pray to Him and He will succour you.’

‘After He has wrought this on me?’

Alienor tried to shrug herself free, but Isabel held her tightly.

‘God is not to blame. There are moments when I have grieved to the limit of my endurance, but always there has been an answer, or a branch to grasp. Truly. Come, I will pray with you in vigil.’

The next hours passed in dark limbo for Alienor. She went with Isabel to pray because it was the path of least resistance, and in a way the chapel was a sanctuary, a comforting blanket around her. She could bow her head, say prayers for Geoffrey’s soul, and not have to interact with anyone.

Isabel knelt at her side, praying quietly without intruding, and whatever the differences that had crept up between them in the last few years, Alienor was glad of her presence now. She had once snapped at Isabel that she would never understand the role of a queen, and that still held true, but Isabel did understand the riptide of grief for beloved family members taken untimely and would genuinely share her grief. Henry would not come near, she knew, because to him death was a devouring monster he could not defeat, and thus to be ignored, as if by doing so he could negate its power. Yet to ignore it was to acknowledge its existence, and one day it would come for him.

*  *  *

Hamelin left
Henry in the first light of a summer dawn and stumbled through the palace towards his own chamber. The light was muted grey in the moment before sunrise and the birdsong was a hymn to the new day and all the glorious business of living in the moment. The night had been one of black and bitter rage as Henry paced his room in a fury like the demon from whom he was reputed to be descended, or else sat on a stool with his head in his hands, the silence so thick that it could be cut with a knife. That had been his vigil for Geoffrey while all the sordid details had been dragged out in the open like entrails from a corpse.

Geoffrey and Philippe of France had been secretly planning an uprising against Henry. Geoffrey wanted his share of the family patrimony and felt he had been dismissed in favour of Richard and John. The astute young French king had carefully nurtured Geoffrey’s grudges until the sore spot had become a swollen abscess, which would have erupted full blown had not Geoffrey died on an airless Paris night – either of tourney wounds or sickness it mattered not now because the truth was out.

Henry had still been awake when Hamelin left, lying on his back staring at the rafters as the room filled with the dawn. He had dismissed his brother, telling him to get some rest, but first he wanted him to send a messenger to recall John from the coast where he was awaiting a fair wind to return to Ireland.

‘Bring him back,’ he said. ‘I have few sons left to me, and I would not see my last hope drown.’

Having roused and instructed the scribes, Hamelin had turned towards his own chamber and suddenly checked as he encountered a small, spindle-legged wraith wearing a linen shirt and braies and trailing a well-worn square of blanket behind him. Hamelin stared at his grandson, Richard, a child he had tried to ignore, but it was difficult when the boy was constantly under his nose at Woodstock. He was aware of Isabel’s silent, wounded reproach, but she did not appreciate how difficult it was for him to accept this child whose existence
had ruined his notion of a perfect family. He looked round but there was no sign of a nursemaid.

‘What are you doing out here, child?’ he demanded brusquely. ‘Where’s your nurse?’

‘Sleeping, sire.’ Richard looked up at him out of wide blue eyes. ‘The door was open and I was hungry.’ He hitched his blanket scrap under his arm and tickled his nose with the end of it.

Hamelin gripped his belt and looked stern. ‘So you thought you’d find your way to the kitchens unaided, hmm?’

‘I know where they are.’

Hamelin thought of Henry, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, unable to process the grief that another son was dead but with the knowledge lying on him like a crushing weight. Meeting the fearless stare of this small boy, their joint grandson, something tore in his heart.

‘Perhaps you do, but you should not be walking the corridors on your own when everyone else is asleep.’ He extended his hand. ‘Come, there is food in my chamber. I will send a squire to tell the women where you are.’ Later he would have words with whoever had been lax enough to leave the nursery door open.

As the little hand folded around his, the tender pain in Hamelin’s heart became almost unbearable. He remembered Belle’s hand similarly clasped and how he had sworn to protect her from everything. He had failed, and this child was the result. Until now he had seen him as evidence of shame, but suddenly, with a different slant on the world, what he had seen as a blight on his family’s life was actually a blessing.

He opened his chamber door and quietly entered. His chamberlain looked at him askance. Isabel emerged from the curtained-off sleeping area, robed in her chemise with a cloak draped over. Her hair hung to her waist in a dark and silver waterfall ready for plaiting. He saw the surprised, almost shocked expression on her face.

‘Do we
have anything for this little one to eat?’ he asked. ‘He says he’s hungry.’

Isabel gestured distractedly to a white linen cloth mounded over a trestle. ‘There is bread, cheese and meat. I had it brought not long ago.’

Hamelin lifted the cloth to reveal thick slices of cold bacon with a satisfying rim of fat, a goats’ cheese the size of his clenched fist, two small loaves of bread and a jug of wine.

‘I have honey water.’ Isabel fetched a jug from the bedside. She poured a cup for the child, who bowed with very proper manners and thanked her.

‘I found him wandering in search of food,’ Hamelin told her. ‘Someone had left the nursery door open. I suppose with the recent news matters are bound not to run to order.’ He turned to his grandson. ‘Come, what would you like?’

Richard decided on a portion of everything, and Hamelin sat down with him before the hearth, bare in the height of summer but still a focal point. He watched the little boy eat with gusto but with schooled manners, and realised how long it was since he had taken any notice of the everyday things that underpinned the great matters, and in truth made those great matters very small in comparison. He glanced at Isabel. In a moment she would realise her state of dishabille and retire to don all the trappings of a countess.

He gestured her to join them. ‘Stay – if you will.’

She hesitated, and then inclined her head and sat down. With his new eyes he saw her lowered gaze and set lips. The silences between them were no longer companionable.

‘I have already eaten,’ she said, but poured herself a cup of honey water. ‘You have not roused me, but caught me on my way to bed. I have just come from vigil with the Queen.’

‘Ah, I had assumed …’ He waved his hand. He had been so taken with his own concern that he had forgotten she would be with Alienor. ‘How is she?’

‘Grieving deeply.’ Isabel’s expression filled with pity. ‘I do not know how she endures without going mad. I know I would. Even to
think …’ She broke off and gently smoothed their grandson’s dark golden hair. ‘Every life is precious.’ Her eyes met Hamelin’s across Richard’s head. ‘What about Henry?’