The Secret Eleanor (41 page)

Petronilla said, “I should hope so,” her voice sharp, warning. Claire had known her at once for Petronilla, which did not surprise her. She glanced at the young knight, who did not seem much interested in the girl’s odd words of welcome. “I’m very glad to see you, though. I thought never to see you again. Where have you come from? We all thought you had gone away forever with the lute player.”

Claire straightened. There was a new pride in her bearing. She said, “I did. I am about to marry him. And we were coming down to Aquitaine again, but—you know Thomas, how he is—he wanted to stop in Blois. So we have been in that city for a while, enough to hear the gossip, and I have come here to warn you that there is trouble for you, ahead, in Blois. You must not go there.”

Petronilla put one hand out to the young woman before her. “God’s blessing on you, then. But what, tell me, is there for me to fear in Blois?”

Claire gripped her hand. “The place is suddenly full of men in mail, knights and sergeants, all armed, even in the city. I have seen them myself, and—I overheard folk talking about something that awaits you.” She reddened, but her eyes were direct. “It was some secret, but it was about you, and I think perhaps someone there means to carry you off to marry you by force.”

Petronilla twitched, clutching the heavy cloak around her with her other fist. She thought,
I should have guessed that something would happen. This is not over even now.
“Who?”

“I know little more than that—and what I know is all around corners. But I think the lord there, anyway, it’s his men who are everywhere around there.”

“It would be crowded anyway for Easter,” Petronilla said. “But to bring in all his men-at-arms—are you sure? How do you know they are all his?”

“They all wear his blazoning,” Claire said. “Silver, bands crosswise red, each with three disks.”

“Henry of Champagne,” de Rançun said at once.

Petronilla shook her head. “Not him, the band makes a difference. It’s the younger brother, Theobald. He is Count of Blois.” Her heart was pounding like a mallet in her chest. She faced Claire again, meeting the girl’s direct gaze, their hands still linked. She squeezed the strong, capable white hand.

“Thank you, Claire. You have saved us, as you know—come to Aquitaine, that we can thank you.”

Claire smiled at her, her head to one side, eyes gleaming. “My lady, you have done as much for me, although you know it not. I am loyal to the Lady of Aquitaine.” Her grip tightened briefly and let go, and she was backing away into the dark.

“Wait,” Petronilla said, but the girl was gone. Back to Thomas; back to the life she had somehow made for herself, where she should have been only a lady-in-waiting, attendant on someone else, until she was shoveled into a convenient marriage.

De Rançun came before her, his eyebrows cocked, and she knew he needed orders. She dragged her thoughts again to what Claire had said. Her hands were cold and she slid them under her cloak, her mind going to the trap ahead of her.

If anyone seized her now and took her to his bed, it meant he married her. One of her own aunts had suffered this indignity, before Petronilla was born, when her barons carried her off by force to keep her from marrying someone they didn’t like. The man who raped her became her husband instead. That could happen to her, and that she was not really Eleanor made it all the worse. She turned to the knight.

“At least Claire has given us a chance,” de Rançun said. “We can circle around Blois. Make for Tours.”

“No,” she said. “They would anticipate that. Or catch wind of it, very quickly. Such a train as we are cannot move fast enough to outrun armed men.” Her mind leaped forward, past this first threat, to all that might lie ahead. There could be others lying in wait, between here and Poitiers, following the same course, the same evil design, marriage by capture, as old as the ring. One other, especially; she remembered Geoffrey of Anjou, in Limoges, trying once before to carry her off. “What about—” She was trying to imagine this as a game of tables: getting her counters past a clog of opponents. “What about boats? On the river.”

De Rançun glanced over his shoulder at the young knight behind him, who went swiftly off into the dark. Petronilla turned her head, looking into the chamber behind her; the women were all gathered there, listening. De Rançun faced her again.

“That’s good,” he said. “If we can get across the Loire, we can go straight south, through the wild country, direct to Poitiers.”

Wide-eyed, her hair tangled, Alys had come to the door of the chamber. She said, “Should we pack?”

Petronilla’s mind was hurrying through this, imagining the boats floating across the river, and then picking a way through the cave-riddled hills and forests south; she turned to de Rançun again. “What do you think?”

He nodded. “As you do, my lady. We can take very few people across at a time, and no baggage.”

She turned to the woman behind her. “Wait here. I think you may be going on tomorrow the usual way.” It came to her they could go on as if she were still among them, and disguise her flight.

“But—”

Petronilla gave her a sharp look, and the older woman was silent. Up through the darkness of the arcade the young knight came striding into the torchlight.

“My lord,” he said to de Rançun, “the convent has two barges, both rigged, down on the riverbank.”

“Very good,” Petronilla said. To de Rançun, she said, “I command you, then, go arrange all this. See how many horses we can take on each barge. Find out what’s across the river.”

De Rançun said, “It’s all swamp, I think; it would make for very slow going. We should go down the river farther, maybe even past Blois.”

“Well, then.” She imagined that, sailing straight past the ambush, escaping right under her ambushers’ noses, and her blood heated. “Good. However many horses, that’s how many people shall go.”

“Yes, my lady. I’ll find out where we can make a crossing.” He went off, and she turned back to Alys and the other women in the doorway.

“You and the others—you are safe enough; they will not harm you. You can come to Poitiers by the usual way.”

“No,” Alys said. “I won’t let you go alone.” The other women murmured agreement with her, pushing up into the doorway.

Petronilla laughed, borne up by their stout loyalty to her; she moved into the closed, filled space, into the warmth of their gentle womanly love. “How I love you all for this. But you must do as I say. There will be room for three or four horses at the most.” She did not say that their progress would make it seem she herself kept to the road. “Go on to Poitiers, and I will meet you there.” As long as she had de Rançun with her, she thought, she could do this.

Alys said, “We shall, then, my lady. We shall get to Poitiers, as best we can.” Her hand lay on Petronilla’s arm. “Take care.”

Petronilla laid her hand on Alys’s, grateful for the other woman and her devotion. She thought,
We take all these people’s faith without even thinking of it, but if they fail, we are lost
. She bent and kissed Alys’s hand on her arm, and the woman murmured in surprise. Petronilla said, “Come, now, I have to have better clothes than this. And shoes.” She went into the room, to make ready to escape.

The moon was just past full, a gauzy lopsided egg riding high in a starless sky. The nuns had intended to use the barges to get to Blois for the Holy Week processions there, and so they were ready at the quay, like the kind of boats that children made, two great flat chunks of wood, each with a tall sweep at the back. De Rançun roused the boatmen from their shanty, and when they protested and wanted to go for the Abbess, he drew his sword and forced them onto the boats. The chief of them, whom he brought to Petronilla, was a bent lanky man, groaning and pulling his forelock, ready with answers.

The boats were sound enough, he said. He thought each might carry three horses, but more likely two. Across the river the land was swamp and wilderness and there was no road.

She had long since given up the idea that they would simply ferry the whole of her little court by twos and threes across to the other side, when she had seen the benefits of dividing. But now she realized that across the river, there would be nothing to eat, no comfort, and a hard ride through enemies.

They would have to go downriver, as she and de Rançun had already realized, and she designed her questions of the boatman with that intent. How could they pass by the bridge at Blois? She had ridden across it, and she struggled to remember it in detail. The boatman thought the barges would float beneath through the arches, if the river wasn’t too high and nothing had gotten snagged against the bridge in the flood. He said they would reach Blois if they left soon, in the deep of the night, when she could see nothing at all.

Beyond Blois, he thought there might be places where they could put into the Loire’s left bank, depending on the flood. The boatman shrugged, though, and shook his head a little. That place was very wild, and he himself had never gone there. Who knew what was on the other side? Nobody went there. Petronilla took all this in, trying to make one big idea of all these small things, trying to see her way home.

Eleanor, she knew, would make her mind up right away. And she could trust de Rançun. She thought again of the power of those who served her.

They would be at the mercy of the flood-swollen river, and the plan got more vague as it went on; yet she knew she could not stay here. She looked around her for de Rançun.

He was standing behind the boatman, his young knights gathered at his side. She said, “Put the horses on the barges, the Barb for me and your black horse for you on one, and on the other as many of the knights’ as you can. Get us bread and wine and water and whatever else we need.” She guessed he had already thought of all of this, but she had to command him; this was her decision and she would make it. She reached out her hand to him. “Hurry,” she said.

Giving orders settled her. She began to see it better: If she could pass by Blois during the night and then land on the far bank, she could get well ahead of anybody and reach home in a few days. If they could pass the bridge, if they could find a place to land on the left bank. The uncertainty in all this made her knees quiver, but to be caught, to be captured, would be much worse.

Everything then would come undone. The annulment was sealed and witnessed, but if she was caught and her identity revealed, would that not be thrown aside? And she and Eleanor would both be dashed down. But in the meantime, what humiliations she would suffer, when the truth was found out—and how—froze her like an iron hand. For both their sakes, she had to escape.

The groom was already leading down the Barbary horse, saddled and bridled, his mane still knotted with red rosettes. Getting him onto the first barge took three men and several ropes; once he was on, he half-reared, neighing, his hooves booming on the wooden barge. The men hung on him, trying to calm him. The noise of all this raised the attention of many people. The Abbess came down in the middle of it and accosted Petronilla.

“I must protest this, my lady. This is Holy Week. You are no longer Queen of France.”

Petronilla peeled the woman’s hand from her arm. She was wound tight, her blood racing, and she restrained herself with effort from slapping the Abbess’s face. “Go tell Theobald of Champagne about Holy Week.”

“But you are stealing our barges!”

Out at the end of the quay they had now gotten de Rançun’s stout black horse on beside the gray Barb. Petronilla said, “Are you not brides of Christ? Think of it as giving to the needy.” She went to join de Rançun and the horses, and the boatmen with their poles pushed them off into the current of the river.

The great lumbering slab of wood slid along through the dark water, hardly seeming to move. Yet the torch-lit quay dropped back into the dark and was soon only two flickering spots of light behind them, the intervening water dotted with reflections. In the center of the barge, the Barb stood braced on widespread legs. Petronilla paced up to the front, too edgy to try to sit; there was no place to sit anyway. The water glittered in the moonlight, its expanse fringed on the distant left bank and on the nearer right side by drowned trees and stands of reeds.

De Rançun came up beside her. She moved a little closer to his steady warmth. She needed him. She wanted to lean on him, to rest her worries and her fears on him. The Barb had settled down finally, and his head drooped; he looked mild as milk, dozing. Out behind them on the river, the second barge floated after, a dark blob of horses and men; beyond that, the tiny flecks of light that marked the nuns’ quay were almost too small to see.

She said, “What happens if they catch us?”

“I don’t know,” he said. His voice was harsh. “You should make them know right away that you’re not Eleanor.”

Her gut tightened. It was hard to see what might be worse, if they knew—whoever took her—or not. Thinking her Eleanor, he would force her, and at once, so there would be no doubt that he possessed her, no refusing the marriage. But knowing her to be someone else, he might still rape her, out of revenge, or pique, or mere lust, and then throw her aside.

A sudden new rush of terror filled her, to be thrown aside again, to be made nothing of again. She fought that down. She conquered that fear with a surge of righteous anger.

She said, “I hate him. All of them. Am I a castle, to be seized and occupied?”

He said, “They won’t take you from me, that I promise. Not while I live.”

At that a sudden grateful sweetness toward him enveloped her; she lowered her head a little, cherishing this. She knew he meant what he said because of his own honor, not of her. His love for Eleanor. Yet his honor and his love bound him to her. She could depend on him like the sun rising. She said nothing for a while. They were floating along the right bank of the river, through velvety darkness; the water chuckled along the side of the boat, and the moonlight turned the water’s surface to a sheet of silver.
Beautiful,
she thought, and shivered in the cold.