The Young Lion (28 page)

‘No! No!’ she said.

Louis said, ‘It’s well known you’re very fond of your animals. It was courteous of Normandy to return the heart of your favourite
horse, the grey mare from Byzantium that somehow strayed into Norman territory. And died. Everyone will understand your grief over the death of a fine horse.’ He paused. ‘Will they not?’

She gave a listless nod.

Had she looked at him, she would have seen his face was black with rage. But his voice remained under control. ‘I’ll have this offal burned,’ he said.

‘I’ll never forgive you,’ she replied.

The abrupt and simultaneous deaths of four lepers at the lazar house outside Paris was at first a wonder of God’s mercy, but after a few days relations of the deceased began to ask the holy fathers questions. Among them was a physician who had heard of the behaviour of the unfortunates whom God had so tumultuously gathered to Himself, and insisted on inspecting their just-buried corpses. He questioned the monks, the gardeners and the kitchen staff, all of them in holy orders. At length he requested an audience with the Abbot.

‘Father, did you have a rabid dog, cat or any other rabid animal in the house?’

The Abbot was bemused. ‘There was a rabid dog, but outside our walls.’

‘It did not enter the grounds?’

‘Never. A brave kitchen boy stood on top of the wall there, and shot it with an arrow. To ensure it was dead he ran down and cut its head from its body. Why do you ask?’

‘The four who died: is it true they were screaming, violent, dashing their heads against walls, foaming at the mouth, staggering when they walked? Were they, as your monks have told me, behaving as if possessed of demons?’

‘Precisely. We all observed demons tormenting them. I feel ashamed to admit this: we feared for our own lives. We believed
the demons could abandon the bodies of our lazars, and enter our own.’

‘So you locked the lazars in a lower chamber … and there they destroyed each other, did they not? They howled incessantly. They bit off noses and ears. Those with whole hands ripped the limbs of those without?’

The Abbot leaned forward to whisper to the physician. ‘We saw, with our very eyes, a cavern of hell.’ He began to tremble.

The lazar house had been the Abbot’s life’s work, and in moments of self-doubt he wondered if his spiritual pride in it had brought this disaster upon them. ‘There was a grating through which we could observe the torments of the demons on our lazars. We knelt before it and prayed day and night. Then the demons departed. None of us felt the cold or the fiery air of their presence after that. The souls of our lazars were left in a pure state. All had driven away the demons by their courage.’

‘All were dead?’

The Abbot nodded.

‘Where’s the dog’s head?’

To the Abbot, this question was such a non sequitur it seemed almost blasphemous in its disregard for the lazars’ victory over hell. He frowned. ‘I have no idea.’

‘Perhaps a demon took it.’

‘Perhaps.’

The physician, whose elder brother was a knight in the second crusade and was one of those who spent his last hours in the cavern of hell, said, ‘I cannot think, Father, of another explanation for why four lepers died of rabies. All of them were polluted by a rabid animal. It is one of the worst poisons known to man. Or demon.’

The Abbot, affronted at first, crossed himself. What the physician had just said seeped slowly through his mind. ‘But every monk, every novice here, is committed to the succour of our lazars.’

‘Therefore my conclusion, Father, is that a demon somehow entered this house with a rabid animal concealed inside it.’ As the physician stood to leave he had a final thought. ‘The kitchen boy who cut off the dog’s head – is he in the house?’

‘I’ll take you to him.’

Aelbad’s cell was next to the kitchen. He was on his knees in private prayer when they entered. The Abbot explained to his sweet, uplifted face the reason for the physician’s visit. The pink and milk-white skin grew pinker and the boy’s eyes turned round with surprise.

‘I have many questions to ask him,’ the physician said. ‘I’ll detain you no longer, Father.’

A bell began pealing one of the hours of prayer.

‘Indeed. I must hasten for nones. Your attendance is excused, Robert.’

‘Thank you, Father,’ Aelbad murmured. To his visitor he said, ‘Please, master, sit here on my sleeping platform.’

The door closed. The physician sniffed the air in Aelbad’s cell. The question in his mind was unmannerly, but he believed he had to ask it. ‘There’s an unusual smell. Do you keep food in here, young man?’

‘I keep ingredients for the cure I’m trying to develop for our beloved lazars,’ Aelbad said.

‘May I see them? I’m interested in all types of cures.’

Aelbad went to the cupboard and with his back to the physician pulled on his gauntlets. He carried to the seated man a variety of herbs and fungi laid out on parchment and spread the display across his lap. As the physician looked at the peculiar treasures – he recognised angel death mushroom immediately – Aelbad bent and gave two rapid taps on the floor. The viper rushed from the bag to his gloved hand. He seized it close behind its jaw bone and drove its open mouth at the physician’s neck. Its fangs struck close to the
man’s ear where, Aelbad knew, a large artery ran to the brain. He wrenched it back and drove its face hard at the man a second time. The physician fell back, his skull cracking against the wall of the cell.

Putting the viper back in its bag, Aelbad repacked his treasures and placed them all inside a larger bag that contained his clothes and other possessions. He had prepared to leave as soon as he heard that someone was asking questions. The service of nones would last another thirty minutes. Then monks, novices and lazars would amble back to their final hour of work before vespers. After vespers, supper. Then bed.

He removed the novice’s habit that he wore over the street clothes in which he was already dressed. Swiftly, writing with his left hand, he penned a note in Latin:

During the soothing chant of the nones prayer, Aelbad quietly removed himself from the house of lepers. It was not a long walk to the docks in Paris. By compline he had found a smack that on the tide would sail to Rouen.

It took Louis two days before he could bring himself to confront his wife about Geoffrey Plantagenet’s heart. Wanting to speak to her in private he invited her to go falconing. September was an excellent month for it.

They rode out soon after dawn and in a meadow east of the city cast their birds. The falconers and hounds went galloping away. Louis gave a flick of his hand to the royal guards, indicating they were to leave him alone with the Queen.

‘Will you dismount, lady?’ he asked. He laid on the meadow grass the scarlet riding cloak he was wearing and beckoned her to join him. ‘Out of sight!’ he shouted at his men.

Seeing the monarchs seated on a riding cloak, they guessed His Majesty intended to lie with the Queen. They galloped over a hill.

‘So, Eleanor?’ Louis said. For both it was a moment ripe with terror and relief. Both had decided to speak frankly, something neither had done in their fourteen years of marriage. ‘You lay with Normandy?’

‘I did. Many times … But I never realised how much he loved me.’

‘You never realised how much I loved you,’ her husband replied bitterly. ‘Or if you did, you placed no value on my love.’ He knew that within a year of their marriage she called him ‘the royal puppy’, ‘my faithful hound’, ‘the monk in a crown’ and other disrespectful names. ‘You’re a hard-hearted woman, Eleanor.’

She turned her wonderful face towards him. ‘You mistake me. I’m hard-hearted to you, Louis, but that’s because I hate to be married. I hate it that I’m not my own master. I prayed to be a good wife to you, but my prayers went unanswered.’

He sighed. He understood now that he had known all this about her from the first moment he had laid eyes on the Duchess of Aquitaine, fourteen years old and as proud as Lucifer. ‘Ungovernable,’ Suger had warned him. The boy had thought he meant ‘ungovernable by another’; the grown man realised she could not govern her own passions.

‘I cannot bear to live with you as my wife,’ he said. How wonderfully simple, he thought. I’ve wanted to say those words for a decade, but cowardice silenced me. He felt as if he had stepped forth, alive, from a tomb.

Eleanor watched him carefully. She was thinking: will he agree to a divorce? Or have me charged with adultery? Surely he won’t have me beheaded, or forced into a nunnery and stripped of my lands?

‘So you will petition for divorce on the grounds of consanguinity?’ She made her voice almost casual.

He nodded. ‘Neither of us wants the taint of adultery.’

She wept tears of relief that Louis misinterpreted as remorse. ‘We had some good times together, did we not?’ he asked. ‘There are sweet memories, as well as bitter.’ She patted the tears from her cheeks and smiled at him. Now it was done they relaxed and lay side by side on the riding cloak. It was lined with soft grey coney fur. Eleanor was thinking, I need to keep Louis as a friend. I’ll need powerful friends. She calculated quickly: her cycle of blood would begin in two days. She stroked his hand. ‘Louis, would you like … one last time?’

The King felt a confluence of emotions as if rivers in flood had surged together inside his chest. He felt sorrow, fury, nostalgia and relief. She was the woman to whom he had sacrificed his virginity as a sacred act of worship, ordained and demanded of him by God.

‘No,’ he said.

For Eleanor, the moment became exciting. She was now bent on seducing the King; since they were already psychologically divorced, if he’d lie with her, it would be like adultery. She slid her small, warm hand beneath his tunic. Louis, downcast and unwilling, found that despite himself she aroused him.

On a warm September morning in a meadow, they lay together for the last time. ‘I loved you so much I believe I’ll always love you a little,’ he told her afterwards. ‘If ever you need a friend …’

‘I wish I could be as pure a person as you are,’ she whispered.

She seemed so genuinely contrite that to cheer her he said, ‘Father Bernard loves you.’

The only churchman who does, she thought.

For Louis the hardest part was yet to come, but he felt more courage now he had lain with her. ‘The Princesses will stay with me,’ he added.

‘My daughters!’

‘No. My Princesses. That’s my one condition, Eleanor. You’ll have your lands. I’ll keep our daughters. By Christmas my garrisons will be withdrawn from Aquitaine. We should be able to arrange a divorce before next Easter.’

‘As soon as your garrisons leave Aquitaine everyone will suspect we’re to divorce.’

‘We’ll create a pretext. You’ll be as free as that gyrfalcon.’

They both looked up at the bird, floating, soaring, watching for prey, floating again.

‘Geoffrey gave her to me,’ Eleanor remarked.

‘I know,’ Louis answered. ‘I was going to order it poisoned. But then I thought, what harm has it done? It’s God’s creature. It values its life. Who am I to take that away, out of jealousy?’

Eleanor’s eyes flooded. ‘I didn’t deserve you, Louis,’ she said. ‘And you didn’t deserve me. Fate should be kinder to both of us now.’

Henry and Guillaume had reached the forest of Gisors and the ancient elm where, for centuries, the dukes of Normandy and the kings of France had met. They had spoken little on the ride home, both wrapped in thoughts of the consequences of what they had done in the wood outside Paris.

Henry spoke first. ‘He’ll divorce her.’

Guillaume gave a sad smile. ‘Brother, that’s why we obeyed Papa, isn’t it? To weaken Louis financially?’ He watched Henry closely.
He knew his father had sent his heart to Eleanor from love; he guessed his brother was after her fortune. ‘Let’s pray Louis doesn’t petition for divorce on grounds of adultery, because then …’

‘I’ve thought of that,’ Henry interjected. ‘Remember that almost immediately, on seeing Papa’s heart, Louis announced that it came from a horse? He won’t risk the shame of a divorce for adultery.’

‘So despite your dislike for the Queen …?’

‘War eats money, brother.’ They rode on in silence. ‘She doesn’t want me as a husband any more than I want her as a wife. But, Guillaume, her income!’

‘What will you say to Rachel?’

Henry groaned. ‘She’s four months with child. I don’t dare upset her over something that may never happen.’

They dawdled through the forest to their garrison where they spent three days, discussing at leisure with the commanders of infantry and cavalry the attack on England that was delayed now until the following spring. They had worked so hard for an invasion in autumn–winter that they could now afford to relax and spend time in mourning. And in building bigger ships and forging greater quantities of arms.

Before they left the garrison, a carrier pigeon arrived from Paris. Their kitchen boy in the palace regularly had pigeons smuggled to him from Gisors and had some place in the city where he hid them. From Gisors other pigeons, whose crofts were in Rouen and Le Mans, would relay the messages on. The boy wrote badly, and only in kitchen French. His message, when Henry puzzled over it, seemed to say King Louis would remove his garrisons from Aquitaine before the end of the year because the south was so peaceful.

‘Aquitaine peaceful!’ Henry said, and laughed. ‘They’re as ungovernable as the Bretons.’

Guillaume said, ‘You must open negotiations with Eleanor soon. Every scoundrel west of the Rhine will try to snatch her.’

Henry had never told his brother exactly how loutishly he had behaved on the night he first met her. ‘I threatened to cut her eye out. I threatened to kill her. She was naked, so I licked her pussy and her arse,’ he said. ‘If there’d been time …’

Guillaume held his forehead in his hands, groaning at each detail. ‘You violated the Queen of France!’

‘I was sixteen,’ Henry muttered. ‘I hated her because I’d just murdered Hamelin, and I was meant to murder Rachel next. All to save Eleanor’s delicate neck.’

‘We’ll send Richard de Cholet to her,’ Guillaume said after a while.

‘Then you,’ Henry said. ‘You’re to propose marriage on my behalf.’

‘I refuse,’ Guillaume said.

Henry was about to say, ‘As my vassal you must do as I say.’ He realised that was both unchivalrous and absurd. Only I will be able to invent arguments to persuade her. ‘We must keep this secret,’ he said. ‘Louis, especially, must get no whiff of the possibility of a match between us.’ They decided they could not even tell Isabella, let alone Rachel.