The Stolen Queen

To Kate Williams
.

Contents

Part One

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Part Two

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

I
N THE TIME WHEN I WAS STILL A CHILD, IT SEEMED
to me that my father's city of Angouleme was an island, a floating city gathered in the folded waves of the Charente Plain. From harvest until Easter, the fields that stretched below the ramparts were bleak, wind-scoured, pitted here and there with lonely clumps of juniper that I would make-believe were rocks where mermaids might sing, wriggling up from the froth of chalky soil which tipped the winter rains into a silvery net of tiny streams. I had not seen the sea, then, but on bright days when my nurse Agnes would take me to walk in the garden I would scramble up on the wall and claim I could spy it, a tinsel ribbon at the edge of the horizon, and I would make poor stout Agnes puff along after me as I played at being a pirate princess, defending my kingdom against dragons or the wicked hordes of heathen soldiers, pulling up the beach in their black-sailed ships, vicious scimitars glinting deep in their beards, clutched in gold-tipped pointed teeth. Agnes grumbled that it was no game for a young lady, and why couldn't I sit nicely under a rosebush
and attend to my needlework like a Christian child, but I argued rudely that was I not a Courtenay and a great lady besides, and that serpents and infidels were very much my business. Agnes had nothing to say to that.

My mother's people were a crusading family, royalty from Outremer, the kingdom across the sea where the bravest knights of Europe fought in the bloodstained desert to preserve Christendom from the wicked wiles of Saladin. When I was big I was going to take ship at Italy and cross those deserts myself and live in a pink marble palace with a hundred courtyards full of fountains and a troop of monkeys with gold collars to bring me pomegranates and sherbets made with jasmine syrup and mountain ice. Agnes said monkeys were nasty beasts, she was sure, full of fleas and worse, and that she had no intention of getting on a ship and then where would I be in my pink marble palace with no one to mind me? So then I would sit quietly, to please her, and pretend to study my missal, but in a while my eyes would wander up through the wide sky above my father's house to the façade of the cathedral, alive with its tumble of stone flowers and beasts, and my sensible wool cloak would turn to mail across my back so that I could feel its dusty weight, and the sharp wind that whipped up from the river below the city would be full of the scents of saffron and incense and the cupolas at the corners of my grandfather's church would shimmer in a mirage, becoming the towers of the Holy City itself … until the bells rang for the tenth hour and I had to snatch up my book and run to wash my hands as Agnes called me to dinner.

I was playing there, up on the walls, the day the silk merchant came. April, and the waters of that fancied ocean beneath me were turning from grey to the palest golden green.

‘Look, Agnes, he's here, he's here!'

Childhood has a different calendar, I think, not marked by the feasts of the Church or the regular shift of the seasons but by the smaller, more personal rhythms of a world of which we are still the centre. For me, the new year began when the new sunlight softened merciless Poitou wind and I began to watch for the silk merchant on the road from the south. He was Venetian, from that city that really did float on water, where all the wealth of the East was gathered to be floated along canals the colour of the silk man's strange aqua eyes. I loved to hear my mother tell me of Venice, the Crusader's gateway, from where the men of her own family, the Courtenays, had set out to fight the heathen, where mysterious ladies waited in gold-panelled rooms, combing out their hair in pearl looking glasses, with the silk sleeves of their gowns trailing all the way to the ground. My mother had a looking glass, and if I was very careful she might sometimes allow me to peep at myself in it. She said that in Venice the light was conjured into so much glass that the whole city shimmered like a vast mirror, a vision of Heaven at the edge of the world.

Even Agnes was excited to see him, looking carefully round to see that none of my father's grooms were nearby before hoisting her skirts, showing a glimpse of blue cloth stocking, to climb up beside me. She put her arm around me as we watched, and I remember her smell, the lavender in her linen under the darker
odour of her winter gown, mixed with the olive oil of the Castile soap she used to scrub us with in the bathhouse.

I pointed along the road to where the silk man's mule laboured like a fat bluebottle through the swampy hollows left by the winter floods. ‘Look, there he is!'

‘I see him, Isabelle, yes. I see him, little one.'

If I had listened, perhaps I would have caught something different in her tone, but I was too excited to care.

‘But there's someone else, Agnes, look!'

I felt her stiffen beside me, a sudden tension in her gentle arm, and she looked round wildly for a moment until her eyes dropped back to the road, and seeing that the second rider was alone, she let out her breath and hugged me closer.

‘What's the matter, Agnes?'

‘Nothing, my treasure. I wonder who that is?'

The Poitou roads are almost impassable in the wintertime. Our supplies and messages came up the river on barges. It was not until the world dried out that the time came for the men to move out for the campaigning season. It was too early for there to be anything to fear from the road, even I knew that. Agnes was always worrying. I peered as far as I dared over the worn stone, my feet dangling in the air behind me. The horseman was gaining on the mule, I could see the red and gold of his surcoat through the splattering of road mud. He was riding crazily, paying no mind to the treacherous ground, his body hunched high over the straining shoulders of his mount so that I could imagine the poor beast's sides slick with sweat and blood from the cruel spurs. He came up behind the silk man and the mule
skittered clumsily from his path, I heard a shout of protest as the packs were pelted with dirt. I wanted to giggle, but Agnes would not have liked me to laugh at another's misfortune, so I made my face solemn and said that I hoped the poor silk man's wares were not spoiled.

‘Still, he must be important. He will be coming for my father.' I felt proud as I said that, knowing that my father was the most important man in his county of Angouleme and La Marche. Aymer Taillefer, Count of Angouleme, as the heralds called when he entered the cathedral for Mass, one of the greatest vassals of Philip, king of France. My father's people had held our lands since the time of our ancestor, the Emperor Charlemagne. They had fought the Norsemen when they ventured into this part of France, and the meadows beneath their city were full of iron, my father said, from their swords and from their blood. Our name meant ‘iron cutter,' after the Count of Angouleme who had sliced a Norse chieftain in half to his waist, cleaving his helmet and breastplate with a single great blow of his sword. The Taillefers belonged to Angouleme, and Angouleme to us, and one day this high city would be mine, for I was my father's heiress.

‘Come away now, Isabelle.'

‘No! I want to see.'

‘The silk man will be here soon,' she coaxed. ‘We can go to the kitchens and see about some food for him. And then you can choose your gown.'

I struggled out from under her arm. ‘No, I want to stay here. Look, they're opening the gates!'

‘You'll fall, you foolish child! Come back, now.'

Reluctantly, I let her lead me down to the kitchen buildings but not before I had jumped three times from the wall into her waiting arms. And then we were in the kitchens, where I was rarely allowed to go, and all the cooks and scullions bowed through the smoke and steam and said ‘my lady', which I liked very much, and we picked out a cold duck and some soft manchet bread for the silk man, and I grandly ordered some spiced wine for my visitor and was given a piece of pink marchpane to suck, so that altogether I forgot about the messenger so eager was I to see the silk that Agnes would sew into my birthday gown.

*

I waited and waited in my mother's room, where we would always look at the fabrics together, but even after the silk man had unloaded his wares and washed and eaten and prayed, my mother did not come. I fidgeted with the hangings on her big carved bed and poked in the rushes with my toes and made a nuisance of myself until Agnes snapped at me and told me to sit quiet.

‘But
Maman
said she would come! She always comes. Why is she late?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Well, send to find out then,' I said imperiously, so Agnes spoke to one of my mother's maids, who had gaggled in the doorway, as eager as I to see the cloths and slippers and ribbons. In a while she slipped back and whispered in Agnes's ear.

‘Maman says you can start without her, Isabelle. She's very
busy, and you're a big girl now. Old enough to choose your own gown.'

I thought about crying. It wasn't fair. My mother always looked at the silks with me and told me stories about where they came from and it wouldn't be the same without her. Still, the maids were watching, and Agnes's face was tight with something I didn't recognize, and I knew that she minded for me and that I should behave graciously.

‘Very well.' I took a deep breath and motioned my hand to the silk man as I had seen my mother do. ‘You may show us what you have brought. We will see if it pleases us.'

I caught a giggle from one of the maids and glared at her. She bobbed a curtsey and said, ‘Excuse me, my lady.' I felt better. I clapped my hands, trying to feel as happy as I had last year, and the year before.

‘Come along then!'

For a moment the girls hung back, but then they fell upon the opened packs like a flock of pigeons, pecking and exclaiming, running rainbows through their fingers and holding up the jewel-coloured cloths to their faces. I pointed to a heavy red as it slithered to the floor. ‘Where does this come from?'

The silk man's skin was dark like old leather, but I thought I could see that city of sparkling water and glass in his curious eyes. I liked the long lilt in his voice when he spoke, the slim suppleness of his vowels, poking through our language like the slender prow of a boat. ‘From Venice, my lady. My city.'

All the same, the red was too weighty and sombre, like something a priest would wear.

‘Show me another.'

He pulled out a length of golden orange, holding it up to the light so that the colours danced, then spread it across my knees so I could make out the delicate blue embroidery, a shadow pattern of foliage.

‘This is from the meadows of Anatolia, my lady. The women there labour for years on a single piece of cloth. It will be as though your skirts are a field of flowers.'

Agnes looked disapproving. ‘You may set that aside for my mistress. It is too fine for a child.'

I didn't mind. It was beautiful but it was not my birthday gown. The maids had gathered beneath the casement exclaiming over a piece they held between them but when I looked again I was puzzled, for it seemed there was nothing in their hands.

‘That one,' I demanded.

Agnes often reprimanded me for my eagerness, for poking and snatching, breaking things or making them grubby, but when I saw the silk the maids were carrying I held myself back, afraid to touch it. I had never seen anything so beautiful. The tissue was so fine it might have been a lady's skin; the veins on the girls' hands were visible beneath it. It was not quite white and not quite silver, densely woven like damask, but it seemed as light as a cloud. It was definitely something that a mermaid would wear.