The queen's man : a medieval mystery (3 page)

Never had Justin felt so helpless. He attempted to staunch the bleeding with that costly wool mantle, but soon saw it was futile. Cradling the man's head in the crook of his arm, he unhooked the wineskin from his belt, murmuring words of comfort and

Sharon Kay Penman

hope that he knew to be lies. A life was ebbing away before his eyes, and he could do nothing.

The man's lashes quivered. His pupils were dilated, glassy, and unseeing. When Justin tilted the wineskin to his lips, the liquid dribbled down his chin. By now the other man had stumbled over, sinking down in the snow beside them. From him, Justin learned that the dying man was an affluent Winchester goldsmith, Gervase Fitz Randolph, on his way to London on a secret matter that he'd confided to no one, when they'd been set upon by bandits who'd somehow spooked their horses. "I was thrown," the youth said, stifling a sob. "I am sorry, Master Gervase, so sorry ..."

The sound of his name seemed to rouse Gervase from his stupor. His gaze wandered at first, then slowly focused upon Justin. His chest heaved as he sought to draw air into his laboring lungs, but he had a need no less pressing than his pain, and he ignored Justin's plea to lie still.

"They . . . did not . . . not get it . . ." His words were slurred, soft as a sigh, yet oddly triumphant, too.

Justin was puzzled, for he'd seen the outlaw steal Gervase's money pouch. "What did they not get?"

"Her letter ..." Gervase gulped for air, and then said with surprising clarity, "I cannot fail her. You must promise me, promise . . ."

"Promise you what?" Justin asked warily, for a deathbed promise was a spiritual spider's web, sure to ensnare.

Blood had begun to trickle from the corner of Gervase's mouth. When he spoke again, Justin had to bend down to hear, so close that he could feel Gervase's faltering breath on his face. Unable to believe what he'd just heard, he stared incredulously at the mortally wounded goldsmith. "What did you say?"

"Promise me," Gervase repeated, and if his voice was weak, his eyes burned into Justin's with mesmerizing fervor. "You must deliver this letter to her ... to the queen."

Sharon Kay Penman

toward Southwark, "Eastward ho!" for those wanting to cross over to the London bankside. Some peddlers hawked "Hot pies!" along the Cheapside; others sought to entice customers with bellowing boasts about the fine quality of their needles and pins, their miraculous salves and healing balms, their ribbons and wooden combs and wrought-iron candlesticks. Justin did not doubt that if he asked one of them for the Holy Grail, the man would promise to produce it straightaway.

Weaving his way along the Cheapside, Justin had to check his stallion frequently, for the street was thronged with pedestrians, darting between lumbering carts and swearing horsemen with the aplomb of the true city dweller. They seemed equally indifferent to the dogs and geese and stray pigs wandering about, and were not fazed even when a woman opened an upper-story window and flung the contents of a chamber pot down into the street's central gutter. The Londoners scattered in the nick of time, a few pausing to curse upward, most continuing on their way without losing a stride. Marveling at this urban insouciance, Justin rode on.

Theirs was a world constantly echoing with the chiming of church bells, for they were rung for festivals, for funerals, for marriages, for royal coronations and city elections, for processions and births and to elicit prayers for dying parishioners, to call Christ's faithful to Mass and to mark the canonical hour. Like most people, Justin had learned to be selectively deaf, so that the incessant pealing faded into the background noises of daily life. But never before had he been in a city with more than a hundred churches, and he found himself engulfed in waves of shimmering sound. The sun had slid below the horizon, and he hastily stopped a passerby, asking about lodgings. Directed to a small, shabby inn off the Cheapside, he engaged a bed for himself and a stall for Copper in the stables. The inn offered no meals; Justin was told brusquely that if he was hungry, there was a cookshop down by the river.

Justin was indeed hungry, but even more exhausted. He'd gotten little sleep since the Epiphany ambush on the Alresford Road. He and Gervase Fitz Randolph's groom, Edwin, had taken

THE QUEEN'S MAN

the goldsmith's body to Alresford, where the village priest had promised to alert the sheriff of Hampshire and to break the sad news to the Fitz Randolph family. Justin had then continued on toward London, but he was trailed by memories of the killing, and the letter he'd hidden within his tunic was heavier than any millstone.

According to the innkeeper, Justin would be sharing a chamber with two Breton sailors, but they were out. The room was scantily furnished, containing only three pallets covered with moth-eaten woolen blankets and a few stools, not even a chamber pot. Sitting down on the closest bed, Justin set his candle upon one of the stools and then drew out the letter.

Gervase had secreted it in a leather pouch around his neck, a pouch so soaked with his blood that Justin had discarded it at the murder site. The parchment was folded, threaded through with a thin, braided cord, the ends sealed with wax. The signet was still intact, although it meant nothing to Justin. No matter how many times he examined it, the letter offered no clues. As evidence of a man's violent death, it was compelling. But was it truly meant for England's queen?

A dozen times he'd been about to break the seal; a dozen times he'd checked the impulse. Was it the dried blood mottling the parchment that gave him such a sense of foreboding? What in God's Name had he gotten himself into? How was he supposed to deliver a dead man's letter to Eleanor of Aquitaine?

He knew of Eleanor's remarkable history, of course, as who in Christendom did not? In her youth, she'd been a great beauty, an even greater heiress, Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right. At age fifteen, she'd become Queen of France. But the marriage had not prospered, for wine and milk were not meant to mix. The pious, painfully earnest Louis was as baffled as he was bewitched by his high-spirited young wife, while his advisers whispered that she was too clever by half, more strong-willed and outspoken than any woman ought to be. There had been rumors and hints of scandal as the years went by, a disastrous crusade to the Holy Land, a public estrangement and reconciliation, at the Pope's urging. Few were surprised when the French

Sharon Kay Penman

king and his controversial queen were eventually divorced, for however much Louis still loved her—and he did—she'd failed to give him a son, and that was the one sin no queen could be forgiven.

Eleanor had then returned to her own domains in Aquitaine, and it was expected that after a decorous interval, Louis and his council would choose another husband for her, a man deemed acceptable to the French Crown. What Eleanor might want, no one even considered. And so the shock was all the greater when word got out of her sudden, secret wedding two months after the divorce to Henry Fitz Empress, Duke of Normandy.

If Eleanor and Louis had been grievously mismatched, she and Henry were almost too well matched, two high-flying hawks soaring toward the sun. Eleanor was nigh on thirty, Henry just nineteen, but they were soulmates in all the ways that mattered, lusting after empires and each other, indifferent to scandalized public opinion and the wounded outrage of the French king. Henry soon showed the rest of Christendom what Eleanor had seen in him. When Louis was goaded into a punitive expedition against the newlyweds, Henry sent the French army reeling back across the border in six short weeks. He then turned his attention to England. His mother had fought a long and bloody civil war with her cousin over the English throne. Henry avenged her loss, claiming the crown she'd been denied. Barely two years after their marriage, Eleanor was once more a queen, this time Queen of England.

Her marriage to Henry had proved to be a passionate and tumultuous and, ultimately, doomed union. The "barren queen" bore him eight children, five sons and three daughters. They loved and quarreled and reconciled and ruled over a vast realm that stretched from Scotland to the Pyrenees. But then Henry committed an unforgivable sin of his own, giving his heart to a younger woman. In their world, a wife was expected to overlook a husband's infidelities, no matter how flagrant. Eleanor was not like other women, though, and Henry was to pay a high price for his roving eye: a rebellion instigated by his queen, joined by his own sons.

THE QUEEN'S MAN

But Eleanor paid a high price, too. Captured by Henry's soldiers, she was held prisoner for sixteen years, freed only by Henry's death. Such a lengthy confinement would have broken most people. It had not broken Eleanor. The passionate young queen and the embittered, betrayed wife were ghosts long since laid to rest. Now in her seventy-first year, she was acclaimed and admired for her sagacity and shrewd counsel, reigning over England in her son's absence, fiercely protective of his interests, proud matriarch of a great dynasty. A living legend. And this was the woman expecting a letter from a murdered goldsmith? Justin thought it highly unlikely.

Sounds in the stairwell roused Justin from his uneasy reverie, reminding him that his privacy was fleeting; the Breton sailors might return at any moment. It was time. Jerking the cords, he broke the seal and unfolded the parchment. There were two letters. Justin picked one up, catching his breath when he saw the salutation: Walter de Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, to Her Grace, Eleanor, Queen of England, Duchess of Aquitaine, and Countess of Poitou, greetings. So the goldsmith had spoken true! Scanning the page, he read enough to make him reach hastily for the second letter.

Henry, by the grace of God, Emperor of the Romans and ever august, to his beloved and special friend, Philip, the illustrious King of the French, health and sincere love and affection. Justin brought the parchment closer to his candle's shivering light, his eyes riveted upon the page. When he was done, he sat very still, stunned and chilled by what he'd just learned. God help him, what secret could be more dangerous than the one he now possessed? For he had the answer to the question being asked throughout Christendom. He knew what had befallen the missing English king.

Queen Eleanor had held her Christmas court at Westminster, but she was currently in residence at the Tower, occupying the spacious second-floor quarters of its great keep. The first-floor chambers had been crowded all day with petitioners, vying with one another to persuade Peter of Blois, the queen's secretary-chancellor, that they deserved a brief audience. Peter was not

Sharon Kay Penman

easily impressed by tales of woe, and most petitioners would be turned away. One who steadfastly refused to go eventually attracted the attention of Claudine de Loudun, a young widow who was a distant kinswoman and attendant of the queen. She was curious enough to investigate and by the time she went back above-stairs, she had determined to thwart the imperious Peter's will.

The men in Eleanor's great hall were gathered in a circle near the hearth. Claudine was not surprised to find Sir Durand de Curzon holding court again, for he seemed to crave an audience as much as he did wine and women and good living. His current joke involved a highwayman, a nun, and a befuddled innkeeper, and reaped a harvest of hearty laughter. Lingering just long enough to hear the predictable punch line, Claudine crossed the hall and entered the queen's great chamber.

It was quieter than the hall, but even there the queen was rarely alone. Another of Eleanor's ladies was sorting through a coffer overflowing with bolts of silk and linen, a servant was tending to the hearth, and the queen's pampered greyhound was gnawing contentedly on a purloined cushion. Claudine didn't have the heart to deprive the dog of his booty and pretended not to see, hers the complicity that one rebel owed another.

Nearby, the queen's chaplain was discussing falconry with William Longsword, a bastard-born son of Eleanor's late husband. Claudine would usually have joined the conversation, for she loved hawking and both men were favorites of hers. She enjoyed teasing the courtly, debonair chaplain that he was far too handsome to be a priest, and Will, an affable, stocky redhead in his mid-thirties, was that rarity: a man of influence without enemies, so good hearted that even the most cynical could not doubt his sincerity. She flashed them a playful smile as she passed, but did not pause, for she was intent upon finding the queen.

The door at the south end of the chamber led to the Chapel of St John the Evangelist, but Claudine had no qualms about entering, for she knew Eleanor well enough to be sure that the queen

THE QUEEN'S MAN

was seeking solitude, not spiritual comfort. Pale January sun spilled into the chapel from so many windows that the stone walls and soaring pillars seemed to have been sculpted from ivory. To Claudine, the stark simplicity of this small Norman chapel was more beautiful than the grandest of God's cathedrals. Claudine's piety had strong aesthetic underpinnings; in that, she was very like her royal mistress.

As she expected, she did not find Eleanor in prayer. The queen was standing by one of the stained glass windows, gazing up at the cloud-dappled sky. Few people ever reached their biblical threescore years and ten, but Eleanor carried hers lightly. She was still willow-slim, her step sure and quick, her will as indomitable as ever. She was aging as she'd lived, in defiance of all the rules. The one foe she could not defeat, though, was death. She was no stranger to a mother's grieving; she'd buried four of her children so far. But none were so loved as Richard.

Eleanor turned from the window as the door opened. The white winter light robbed her face of color, deepening the sleepless shadows that lurked like bruises under her eyes. But she smiled at the sight of Claudine, a smile that belied her age and defied her cares. "I was wondering where you'd gotten to, Claudine. You have that cat-in-the-cream look again. What mischief have you in mind this time?"

"No mischief, madame, a good deed." Claudine added a "truly" in mock earnest. "I have a favor to ask of you, my lady. Peter told me he means to tell the remaining petitioners that they must come back on the morrow. Ere he does, can you spare a few moments for one of them? He has been here since first light, and I do believe he is willing to wait till Judgment Day if he must."