The Young Lion (15 page)

Louis kissed the Baron’s lips. ‘I’m ready to die for France, but also for you, Estienne,’ he said and kissed him again.

As the Seneschal stood to take his leave the King added, ‘Should I meet misadventure, vow to protect the Queen.’

The Queen had alarmed her husband by vomiting each morning for two weeks. On the day she told him she was with child he sent for the Master from Rumalia, Erasmus, a Greek renowned as both a physician and a philosopher. Louis had met him in Constantinople, where he was a favourite in the court, especially skilled in caring for noble ladies in Eleanor’s condition, although that was only a fraction of his knowledge. Louis, who was eager for the small Guild of Masters and Students in Paris to grow into an academy, had offered the Rumlar a post there teaching medicine and philosophy. He would be protected, the King assured him, from interference by the Church.

When she heard of it Eleanor had mocked her husband. ‘You see yourself as a new Charlemagne, do you, Louis? Patron of learning?’ She met the Rumlar and disliked him. She disliked him even more for insisting the milking maids were necessary to keep her husband’s humours in proper balance.

Over the Christmas period Erasmus had returned to Rumalia to be with his family, a wife and ten children. Summoned back to Paris in February, he arrived exhausted from fast travel. The army had already left. By then the Queen was feeling less nauseous. Augustin, captain of the palace guards, informed Master Erasmus he was permitted to examine Her Grace in her bedchamber in
the presence of five palace ladies. ‘You may feel the pulses in her wrists, ankles and neck, and look at her tongue and hands.’ Beyond this, he was not to touch her.

At their first meeting she told him, ‘The child I carry must be a male.’

‘Of course, Your Highness.’

‘Well, is it? Can you confirm I bear an heir for France?’

His hesitation made her turn away. She felt exactly as she had on the previous confinement, when it was a princess.

The master spent an hour each day with the Queen. After the examination they played chess. He was a better player than any of her earlier partners and far better than she, but the Queen was more competitive and, at any rate, he thought it wise to allow her to win at least two out of every three games. Sometimes their battles stretched beyond the allotted time, even up to three hours. ‘Go away! You’re distracting me,’ Eleanor ordered Augustin when he came to the apartment to discover why she had not come out for her daily exercise.

Erasmus’s other task was to instruct the kitchen staff about dishes to prepare. ‘We assume a prince,’ he said. ‘For the prince we need …’ He had an exotic menu of ingredients difficult to acquire in Paris.

‘My son will be christened before all these herbs arrive,’ Eleanor complained. She still did not much like Erasmus, although for a scholar he was elegant enough. He was about forty years old and looked like a Turk: his eyes slanted above high cheekbones and he scented his hair and short beard with a sweet-smelling oil that in other circumstances she may have found attractive, but at the moment nauseated her when he moved over the chess board to take one of her pieces. But her deep misery was that day and night, twitching at her as if she were a puppet, were thoughts of Geoffrey. She had calculated and recalculated, but was still uncertain who
the father was. The rigours of two years of travelling had upset her cycle, and it was hard to tell if she had fallen pregnant during the Christmas Court, in which case the father could be Louis or Geoffrey; or on the day after the Feast of Epiphany, in which case the child was the King’s. She wished it would be Geoffrey’s, so even if he died in battle, even if they could never meet again, she would have a part of him to hold and love. I’ll dismiss the wetnurse and nurse myself, she decided. I don’t care if it ruins my breasts. She yearned for Geoffrey to send her just one word, or to hear from someone else a word about him. But nobody spoke his name. Inside the palace he was a bodiless apparition. She recalled for the hundredth time the night she had first lain with him, in the monastery, invisible to each other, only his beautiful smell and their hair falling into each other’s open mouths. When she remembered the force with which he had taken her she felt faint.

And she missed Xena – perhaps murdered by now by the terrible son – her lovely Xena, for whom the Queen’s power and prestige were of no concern. Xena had treated her as an elder sister, or a friend. ‘The Queen of France does not have friends,’ Estienne said once. ‘But you’re friends with Louis,’ she’d objected. ‘No, Highness. I’m the King’s vassal. I cannot be his friend.’

She called Master Erasmus. ‘Let’s play dice today,’ she said.

He thought she looked feverish. He had studied Galen, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; none, he thought ruefully, had equipped him to deal with this divinely beautiful, horrendously wilful woman. He murmured, ‘Every man who looked upon her found himself her captive.’

‘What’s that?’ she demanded.

‘A fragment of poetry.’

She raised an eyebrow.

‘It refers to a queen whose name was a synonym of yours.’

‘What was she called?’

‘Helen.’

‘I don’t enjoy word games,’ Eleanor replied. She had two sets of ivory dice in an ebony case, their numbers made from jewels. ‘I bet double six,’ she said, and rolled the dice.

‘Very good, Your Highness.’

She handed the master his set. ‘I bet four: two twos, or a one and a three.’ He rolled but got five.

‘I bet another twelve!’ Two sixes came to rest on the table between them.

‘Remarkable,’ he said.

‘For what do we wager?’ the Queen asked. She suddenly looked intently into the master’s face. It was refined, filled with intelligence, and despite the unnerving slant of his eyes, it was kind. He dropped his gaze to his lap. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her every movement was fluid, elegant, sensuous and feline. Indeed, her pets were two sleek black cats – she said an abbot had bequeathed them to her in his will. ‘He was a horrible little man. He did it to spite me,’ she said. ‘He hoped they’d scratch me and I’d die.’ She laughed. ‘But they love me, don’t you, darlings?’ The cats prowled the royal apartment, bejewelled, wilful and untouchable, like their mistress. Erasmus wondered if they were happy, because the Queen was among the unhappiest women he had ever met. He looked up and watched a tiny trapped bird flutter beneath the white skin of her throat.

‘I think we’re wagering for your happiness,’ he answered quietly.

A flash of irritation crossed her features. ‘Good. I’ll bet twelve again. If I win it means I’ll be very happy. I’m definitely carrying a prince.’

The master smiled. Eleanor rolled and when the dice fell she clapped her hands. ‘Twelve!’

He wondered if he could risk touching her without a guard striding across the room and striking his face. His soft fingers quivered briefly on her arm. ‘Highness,’ he said, ‘you cannot win happiness with loaded dice.’

She was silent a long time.

‘The trouble is the dice are loaded against me. My only value in this country is my womb. But what’s a queen without a son?’

‘Highness, remember our game of chess: a king loses all his strength without a queen.’

‘That’s why they hate women,’ she hissed. ‘Men – kings – hate us for the power in our wombs.’

‘What you say may be true of some kings. But remember, the queen is still the strongest piece on the board.’

Eleanor stared at him for some time. ‘True,’ she said. ‘But this is not a game, and I’m a prisoner of France until I produce an heir. Or until they decide I’m useless.’ And because she was feeling spiteful, she added, ‘I may as well be the court physician. Dismissed when they don’t need me. As you will be.’

He opened his palms in a gesture of helpless agreement. ‘What are we to do?’ he asked. His question was intended to soothe her. But the Queen leaned forward and in a vehement whisper replied, ‘Run away! You can say I need to travel to Aquitaine for the health of my son …’

‘I think, Highness, you need to rest,’ he answered softly, but firmly. ‘You are mentally strained because you wonder about the prince you carry, and you worry for your husband, who is at war. Is that not so?’

Her marvellous eyes, the colour of violets, lost their feverish sparkle and the flush left her cheeks. ‘You have perfectly diagnosed my state,’ she replied tonelessly.

She beckoned the guards. ‘Master Erasmus is leaving for Rumalia. Prepare his baggage and a carriage.’

In the courtyard Augustin said, ‘Master, the King will be angry with both you and the Queen if he discovers you’ve left France.’

‘Thank you,’ the master replied. ‘I’ll return to my post at the Guild of Masters and Students, just over there, across the river.’ He smiled at the relief in Augustin’s face.

The people of Normandy and the Vexin arrived wearing their best clothes at the places appointed to celebrate the birthday of the Young Duke. Their rent payments – food stuff, fleeces, furs, wood, in some cases, money – they brought in ox-carts or loaded on horses. Marshals at the gates of the castles ushered them inside but ordered most of the carts to be dragged out again, well away from the outer protective walls; and unless the draught animals were of the finest quality, they too, had to be moved outside. There were large pens inside the walls for the best sheep, cows and horses. Jugglers, musicians and men who walked backwards on their hands performed for the guests’ entertainment. A man inside a bearskin chased the children. Another had a stag’s antlers on his head. There were puppet shows. A fellow whom a crier announced had hatched from a dragon’s egg blew gouts of fire from his mouth. A goat walked on its hind legs and danced to a citern. In a wicker cage grey monkeys leaped constantly back and forth, like the damned in the fires of hell, and tried to bite people who poked them with sticks.

At Rouen castle by three in the afternoon vassals without rank were eager for the feast to begin. They were ushered into the great hall where trestles of food and drink were ready: bread, much of it the coarse, sustaining bread that was hard to chew, but also dainty loaves, pies with small pieces of pigeon inside them and others with winter vegetables. There was pottage. There were hams,
smoked lamb and fish, barrels of wine and cider, cakes of fine flour and pitchers of honey. A montage in the centre of the longest trestle made people gasp: two whole roast sheep, surrounded with winter lettuce, knelt as if they were alive and resting in a field. Some guests had already smelled the ox, or oxen, reserved for the baronage, roasting in a pit outside. They pulled eating knives from their belts and fumbled their wooden bowls upright. Household servants stood behind the trestles with large knives and ladles to serve the food and drink. Guests took their bowl of food and bowl of drink and sat on the rushes on the floor. Old friends greeted each other effusively, old enemies nodded.

Within an hour it was growing dark and more servants arrived with flaming torches they jammed into iron rings set in the walls. ‘When will he come?’ people asked each other.

Many knew the Young Duke. Since he was a boy of twelve he had visited their villages and fields with his father, and later on his own, with a reeve. He had stopped to talk to them, asked about their crops and animals, if there were sickness in the village, if a physician or a midwife were needed, how many babies had been born. Sometimes he took dinner with them. In cold weather he wore a sheepskin, just like them.

By six o’clock everyone had eaten. The food and – to the dismay of many men and women who had planned on getting drunk – the wine also, was removed. Servants took the trestles down. A group of musicians and dancers entered almost immediately, and the guests’ spirits rose. By ones and twos people got up to dance. A minstrel sang a song that needed the whole company to join its choruses, to clap and stamp their clogs on the floor. The noise was so deafening they were all giddy with excitement. The next song everybody knew and they shouted the words with joy: ‘A Young Lion steps forth from his den …’

Suddenly the musicians stopped playing.

A group of pages in bright clothes had appeared at the main door of the hall, all pointing to something outside it. Silence fell on the company.

There was a blast of trumpeters.

Noble women in gorgeous gowns and jewels entered first. Then fifty men in armour, visors hiding their faces, tramped into the room with their swords held upright. People cowered against the walls.

Two standard-bearers entered, the Young Duke’s golden lion braced against their chests. Then side by side, unhelmeted, mounted on stately black warhorses, the Dukes rode into the hall. Behind them came the Empress, her younger sons and her daughters, all mounted, the boys in light armour, their mother and sisters in ravishing jewels. An uneasy silence fell on the hall.

The Duke held up his iron-gloved hand. ‘People of Normandy,’ he said, ‘I present to you your new Duke. Each of you will now take the oath of allegiance. I’ll say the words and you’ll repeat them.’

The visored knights in unison dropped their swords from above their heads to their chests and the hall, almost as one, dropped to its knees.

The Old Duke, as Geoffrey had instantly become, instructed: ‘Repeat: Henry of Normandy, Anjou and Maine, I vow I am your vassal. I ask for your protection and vow to obey you.’ The vow rumbled through the hall and all the knights and their ladies, the Empress and her children, added, ‘My life is yours.’

Geoffrey turned to Henry who surveyed the room in silence. He allowed the silence to drag out, until people felt their nerves would break. They jumped at the
shing!
as he drew the Lion’s sword from its scabbard. He rested it across his knees and laid his bare hands on its blade. ‘You are my people,’ he said, ‘I vow by this sword to protect you with all my might and power. So help me God.’

They roared their approval. A priest stepped forward to flick holy water over him and the Old Duke, but Henry hefted the gold-hilted sword from his knees and held it aloft. Silence fell once more. People began crossing themselves. Some women whimpered, sensing bad news.

‘People of Normandy!’ Henry shouted. ‘A few hours from now we’ll be at war with France. Your bodies, your tools and your best animals are safe inside this castle and in other forts and castles across our territories. Pray we’ll be victorious. Now lie down and sleep.’