The Stolen Queen (23 page)

So in time, I wrote to my mother, declaring that she might return to Angouleme if she wanted, to pass her widowhood peacefully. Perhaps, I dictated, when the present difficulties between my husband and the French king were over, I might even visit her there? I almost wept to imagine us sitting together in the gardens where I had played, with my maman watching proudly as Henry took his first staggering steps, and I wished that Agnes could be there, to dream it with me.

My mother accepted my offer, and returned to Angouleme. The next summer we were at Berkhamsted, deep in the bluebell woods, where John's ancestor the Duke of the Normans had first accepted the English crown, when three mules arrived, loaded with gifts from my city. Tiny clothes stitched by the nuns of Langoiran in linen so fine it caught the light like glass, a pearl-lined cedar chest to store them in, and for me, her daughter the queen, a heavy cloak of yellow velvet lined with white fox fur. My mother sent olive oil soap, of the kind I liked to bathe with, scented with rose and jasmine, and a length of the lightest sky blue silk to be made up as a summer gown. The silk man must still visit in the springtime then, with secrets and wonders in his cart. There was a further gift, a nursemaid named Aliene, a stolid, sensible-looking girl who would be to my boy, my mother wrote, as Agnes had been to me. ‘He will hear our tongue, Daughter,' she wrote. ‘For will he not one day be a king in the south, also?'

I was delighted, foolishly delighted. I prattled to Henry all the time in French, and I was delighted that he should also hear the langue d'oc. The last gift came a year after Henry's birth.
By then my little court was at Ludgershall, far from the capital. Henry was walking properly now, swaying importantly along on his stout legs, bumping down on the lawns every few paces with an outraged expression, then marching on, busily, for he always had a great deal of business to attend to. The package was sealed with my mother's mark, and the bearer came from Angouleme, yet when I broke the wax and opened the grubby oilcloth, soiled with its long journey, I started to see a silk ribbon in the green and white Lusignan colours. I thought foolishly of poppets and dried toads, peasants' mummeries, but then came a memory of Lady Maude, kneeling stolidly beneath a nailed up sheet, and I thought of poison. I had not seen those colours since Lord Hugh and Hal had been bundled so disgracefully at the cart's tail after Mirebeau. I called for a ewer and washed and dried my hands, then told a page to fetch a pair of gloves and put them on before opening the parcel.

First he removed the letter, also sealed with my mother's sign. Then a small wooden box, a crude, cheap-looking thing, but when he opened it, he gasped, then controlled himself and handed it to my usher, who passed it, unfastened, to me. Inside lay Lord Hugh's brooch, the serpent I had seen on his cloak at Lusignan, the serpent whose twin writhed beneath my skin. I sent my attendants away, and taking a corner of my gown to cover my hands, opened the letter.

Lord Hugh was dead. He had died at Lusignan, some months ago, it must have been, for the time it took for the letter to reach me. John would have known earlier perhaps, but I had been here, remote in Wiltshire, and seldom apprised of the precise
whereabouts of my husband's restless court. How had my mother come by the brooch? What did she mean in sending it to me? I held up the parchment to the candlelight, but there was no more script beyond the formal salutation from the Dowager Countess of Angouleme to Her Grace the Queen of England. Gingerly, I took up the jewel. It felt heavy and very cold, even through the cloth that bound my palm. I turned it, examining the fine work, the delicate tracing of the serpent. It was an ancient thing, an emblem that might indeed have dated from the time when Melusina walked by the fountain at Lusignan, when fairy goldsmiths worked their tiny burins to form the shimmer of her scaly tail. I turned to the reverse plate, and there were the Lusignan arms, and beneath them, a scratch in the metal's tarnish, much cruder, as though it had been done with a pin or the tip of a sharp knife: the word ‘
necieros
'. The Occitan word for need. Whose need? Mine? Was this some sort of trap so that the horned man might watch over me even as Lord Hugh descended to the Hell he surely deserved? Or was it a message from my mother, an attempt at an explanation that she had acted out of need? I passed the rest of the day thinking on it, but I could not make it out. I wrapped the brooch back in its gaudy silk and had it locked in one of my jewel caskets. After all that had happened, surely the only thing that mattered was that Lord Hugh was dead, and I was free.

I was sure that my maman had understood, that she had broken now with the old faith and that we should rejoice one day together in seeing Henry a great and a Christian king. Perhaps he would even take the cross, as his uncle Richard had done, and
maybe there might be another Courtenay emperor in the Holy Land after all. I had judged right in what I had done then, had I not? I had protected John and given England an heir, I had wriggled free of Lord Hugh's wickedness and found a means by which even his ambition could be made right and good. One day I would tell everything to Maman, and we would forgive each other, back home, in Angouleme.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A
T LAST, MY HEART WAS EASY. MY CHILD WAS STRONG
; my city was safe. John's troubles with his magnates had not ceased, but I thought that whatever became of him, I should be untouchable, for was I not the mother of the king? I saw John seldom, but with Henry's birth he had ceased to treat me scornfully, and when he came to my bed I no longer felt like a whore. He drank as much as ever, but at least in my company he was jovial, and I could pretend, in the darkness of his chamber, that he came to me as a man. Henry was followed quickly by Richard, then by Joan, and John rejoiced in them.

That they were not my husband's children no longer felt like a sin. I no longer feared that my soul was as damned as Lord Hugh's. I could never forgive him, but once he was gone, I began to see things differently, just as I had with my maman. I even began to think that there had not been such madness in his scheming after all. I was Lusignan, Pierre was Lusignan, Henry was Lusignan. We were descended from Melusina, and perhaps it was the destiny of our line to breed together and finally bring
peace to those lands that had been sown in blood for so long. I had long since finished the draught I had from Susan, but my body, it seemed, was apt for children. And since my husband trusted Pierre, and had given him a place in the household, my brother followed the king, and would come to me, always a night or two after he knew I had been summoned to John's bed. Perhaps I lay with him as many as twenty times. It was never sweet, as he had promised me at Woodstock, as sweet as it had been that night in the valley with Arthur. It was something different.

I could not say that I ever wished it, with Pierre. I never ached for him. But as soon as he touched me, it was as though I became someone else, as though my body opened for him like the tendrils of a sea anemone unfurling beneath a wave, or perhaps like the slow uncoiling of a serpent's tail beneath a heavy weight of water. We moved together like that, slowly, swimming through a red dew, his teeth in my neck, savage, so that I answered him bite for long bite, taking his blood into me. He would strike me, cuffing my face, squeezing my neck, lifting me from my waist and hurling my body onto him, so that I writhed in his arms to escape him even as I crammed my fist into my mouth to stop the screams of the craving he summoned in me. It was cruel, what we did together. And when we were done, he would kiss the tears from my eyes and I would lick the marks on his body, and he would smile that long vicious smile and leave me, soused and sobbing in shame and pleasure. And thus the king's children were made.

*

Since I liked to have my babies about me, I did not establish a household for them, as was customary in England, but had them move with me as the court made its slow perambulations, circling London like a sundial. We seldom stayed more than a month in one place – the houses quickly needed to be cleaned and refreshed, while the demands of the royal purveyors might soon exhaust the provisions of the local country if we remained too long. I felt a child's excitement at the preparations for each departure, as the wagons were loaded and the furnishings and hangings were packed up. My children's necessities were packed in a cart of their own, while we travelled last, in a train of litters, in order that the servants might get a start upon us on the road, and the new place be made ready by nightfall. Henry was toddling about everywhere now, still tumbling over with a surprised expression, and he too loved the bustle of moving, climbing earnestly onto a cart to inspect the canvas covering, or being lifted onto the high shoulders of one of the huge dray horses, so that though I praised him for his bravery, my heart was always in my throat lest he should fall. Holding Aliene's hand, he would often climb down from the litter where his smaller brother and sister were drowsing and stump along the hedgerows, gathering flowers into a battered posy, which he would present to me in his hot little fist, with an expression of love in his eyes that always melted my heart.

Though she was young, I quickly appointed Aliene as the chief mistress of the royal nursery. I wished my children to speak with the clear accent of my own country, and to hear from her of the lands of the south that Henry would one day reclaim. As we
travelled, I often spoke with Aliene, first of my mother and the changes in her household, then of my memories of Angouleme. Was the gingerbread seller still keeping her stall in the market place? Had the niches on the cathedral façade been filled with finished statues of the saints? I had been so long from my home, but as we journeyed laboriously through the thick mud of the English roads, or moved along one of the high ancient roads of the hillsides near the coast, Angouleme lived for me again in Aliene's tales. I grew fond of her, though her manner was always respectful and never over-familiar, so fond that I did not see what she truly was until it was too late.

Though my husband saw little of the children, he was always pleased to visit the nursery when he returned to court. Aliene would solemnly report on their progress, how Henry had learned to count, or Joan to hold a spoon. Sometimes we would even play games with them, John pretending to be a dragon and chasing us round the chamber, or, a great treat, putting out the candles and hiding in the dark. Once, as we were watching the children eat their supper of bread and milk, Aliene began to sing, a Provençal song
Lanquan il jorison long e may
. She had a sweet voice, pure and clear, and I noticed John looking at her in the soft light that fell on her warm brown hair through the casement. Aliene was not beautiful, her features were wide and plain, but her mouth was large, with full red lips, and her skin was the colour of new cream. I watched them as though from a long distance away, as she caught his eye and modestly lowered her own. The silence as her singing died away screamed between them.

‘That was very pretty,' John said softly.

‘Thank you, sire.'

‘I would hear something else in that tongue.'

Aliene threw a questioning glance towards me. ‘Perhaps my lord might be amused by some of the sayings of my country? I'm sure my lady the queen will recognize some of them.'

‘Go on,' John smiled.

‘Well, something the people say is “Ten le gendre lens e le tiu femourie proche”.'

I laughed, and so did John as I translated, ‘Keep your son-in-law at a distance and your manure close at hand.'

‘Or this one?' Aliene continued. ‘Femo morto, capel nou.'

‘Dead wife, new hat,' I capped.

There was a sudden, awkward silence. John rose to his feet and formally bid me good evening, he inclined his head courteously towards Aliene. ‘Thank you for your singing.'

It had been so long since he had used such a gentle tone to me; strangely, I felt an echo of the sadness I had known when I had lied to him at Rouen. But the next day John was gone again, and I thought no more on it, until we returned to London for the Christmas crown-wearing at Westminster. That winter was bitter, there was ice on the river and I worried that the children would catch an ague in that huge draughty place, so I asked John if I might order them some new furs. I rarely consulted him about the ordering of the household, but for something so costly as furs it seemed wifely to do so. He gave permission and I ordered three little ermine capes, with hoods and mittens, of Flanders pelts. When I went to the nursery on Christmas Eve, I found Aliene prinking herself in a long mantle of red squirrel
with a thick black satin collar. At first I thought the cloak must be from my own things, it was much too fine for a nurse to wear, but I did not recognize it, so I asked her why she had it. She blushed.

‘It was a gift from the king, Majesty. It came with the children's things. To warm me when we walk out, his Majesty said.'

I gave her a cold look. ‘The king is very kind to permit you to wear such a thing. I hope you thanked him fittingly.' And then I could have bitten my tongue, for of course that was just what John would wish. After that, I watched them.

John visited the nursery frequently, but I could hardly chide him for that. At dinner and supper, though, I saw his eyes searching her out across the hall, where she sat among the upper household servants, far from the fire, snuggled cozily into her new cloak. He did not call for me to his bed during the twelve days of the feast, and on the last, Twelfth Night, when we broke the bean cake and crowned the Lord of Misrule, he danced with her. Again, this was not so very odd – John's manner towards ladies was always gracious, in public at least, and he had even danced with Agnes at Twelfth Night before, but as they turned to the music, their palms touching, I recognized the expression on his face. How could I not? It had been mine for so long. I danced myself, with William Marshal and my brother Pierre and several of the other barons. I clapped and smiled at the antics of the fools and tumblers, I poured wine for my husband, and as I did so I remembered another proverb, ‘Qui beu amarguent pot pos escupi dous' – who drinks bitter cannot spit sweet. And then
John spun Aliene, lifting her in a high turn so that her gown rose up and in the red glow of the torches I saw another band of red, a flash of scarlet thread bound about her leg. And then it was as though I had swallowed a bitter poison, the room began to turn and the flames of the fires rose higher, casting shadows like cavorting demons on the walls. I spoke to one of my ladies and said I felt unwell; she summoned a maid who accompanied me discreetly to my chamber.