The Secret Eleanor

by Cecelia Holland

  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.

  “You should get back out of the wind,” he said. He was not looking at her. She wondered again why he avoided looking at her.

  “No,” she said. “But bring my cloak, if you would, please.”

  He went back past the horses. She stood watching the river ahead for the first sign of the city, of the bridge. Once the boat bumped, and shuddered a little, and she guessed they had run up against something below. A voice behind her called out, the barge gave a sudden sharp unfluid jog, something scraped past, and then they were floating smoothly on again. De Rançun came back again, settling the cloak around her.

  He said, “I just talked to the boatmen. I think they are going to be trouble—they are used to going only as far as Blois, and then coming back with horses towing the barges along the bank, and they want to stop in Blois, on this bank.”

  She gave a start. “Well, that’s no good. We have to cross to the other side of the river, at the least.” She remembered the long well-traveled stretch of road below Blois, where her pursuers could have laid any number of traps. “We should get as far west as we can, don’t you think? See how far west they will take us. Find out what they must have to do it—there will be some price, and I will pay it.” She made a face in the dark. “Do we have any money?”

  “I got the purse from Matthieu before we left.”

  “That was clever,” she said, relieved. “Go buy them.”

  He went back up the length of the boat, and she turned her eyes into the darkness ahead. The barge hardly seemed to move, creeping along the moon-drenched river. The sound of the water gurgling along the front edge was like laughter; then it changed slightly, faster, like arguing or warning, and the barge moved leftward, and in the silvery haze of the moonlight she saw before them and toward the bank a gaunt black shape rising from the water like a claw. Swags of weed flapped from its rigid process. A huge branch, she thought, brought down in the flood and lodged somehow on the bottom. They ghosted by it; the barge touched something, again, on the side toward the snag.

  They were rounding a shallow curve; the water curled white ahead of them along the inside edge, and ahead, on the black strip of the bank, a dim red light showed. Some torch or lantern. As she watched, another appeared, and then more lights, behind the first, higher up. They were approaching Blois.

  She glanced back toward the rear of the barge, wondering if the boatmen would quit here, push into the near bank and refuse to go farther, leaving her in the middle of her enemies. If that happened, she would have to force them off the barges, make her knights do the work, which she knew they would not do, not well enough, men of swords and hawks and horses, not rivermen. The Loire was flooded; there might be treacherous currents, submerged rocks and trees like the one she had just passed. Snakes, she thought. Underwater monsters. Dragons. She tried to think of some alternative, if they were forced ashore here. The barge drifted steadily on, and ahead, like a wall, the narrow black band of the bridge stretched across the gleaming river.

  Her back prickled up. They were not stopping. The barges glided past the outthrust quays along the right bank, the thick dark clots of buildings standing inland of that, some here and there pecked with faint lights. On its hill the black column of the castle stood, the torches at its peak fluttering like pennants against the night sky. She heard voices behind her on the barge, sharp, giving orders.

  De Rançun’s voice, somebody else’s, a boatman. Too fast, heavy, unstoppable, the wooden float swept on toward the wall of the bridge, now rising sheer up before them like a cliff. She thought of the Barb and twisted around; de Rançun himself was there at the horse’s head. Swinging forward again, she began to make out that the span of the bridge opened, underneath, into the loops of archways. They seemed impossibly low, too narrow to fit through, bottomless, endless, caves down into the abyss. The barge was heading straight into one arch, sliding as if down a slope into it, and there was a
sudden darkness, a roar in her ears, dank stone passing overhead; the barge shook under her, and they rushed out again into the silvery light. She gasped as if she were coming to the surface. The barge gave a sudden sharp buck and she caught her balance. Behind her was a drumming of hooves on the barge and de Rançun swearing. Off to her right the last lumpy dark shapes of the city passed by, studded with faint lights. The barge floated calmly along. The river muttered under her, benign.

  De Rançun came back from dealing with the boatmen. “I gave them some wine,” he said. “And promised them money. One of them has a cousin down the river at a place called Amboise and says we should get off there.”

  “Good,” she said. She was glad to have him there; she thought without him she would be helpless. “We should stay away from the main road, though, going to Poitiers.”

  At that, she thought about what lay ahead in Poitiers, and she blurted out, “I hope Eleanor is well.”

  He crossed himself. “I pray God so, my lady.” But again he turned his face away from her, as if he hid something.

  “God keep her,” she said. “She must have had the baby by now.” She hesitated a moment, unsure whether to talk of this, but she had to talk of it. “I love her still, but what lies between us is as if she cut out my heart. I did everything she asked of me; I have done what had to be done, for her and my sake, both. And she doesn’t care. You know she said such things to me that I can’t even bear to remember.”

  He said, “Well, yes, I heard.” His voice went a little ragged. “But she—you have to take her for what she is—Eleanor. She is who she is; she won’t change. Her will is all that matters to her.”

  She sank down into the warmth of the cloak, looking down the river. She realized that he still, always, forever loved Eleanor. He did all of this for Eleanor, not for her.

  This hurt. She wondered why she had let herself care so much for him and his opinions, and thought, I need him. Yet it seemed she could not reach him; he saw only Eleanor.

  She thought, suddenly, I love him. And he hardly sees me. She stood staring off down the river, thinking she had always been in love with Joffre de Rançun.

  He stood there silent in the dark beside her, an impossible space between them. She said, “I have changed.”

  At that he gave a start and turned toward her. She saw the gleam of his eyes in the dark. Then abruptly he turned and walked away from her, as far from her as he could get. She wondered what she had said to have driven him off. She felt the thrill of warning. But he was faithful, Joffre, and honorable. She realized she had always admired him. And she had always stood aside for Eleanor, who took him all for granted. It made no difference, she thought, to admit it. A long road lay before them, and all they did was for Eleanor’s sake, and she had to trust him.

  Whatever he thought, he kept to himself. That chilled her. She was tired down to the bone, and she wished he would comfort her, but he stayed off on his corner of the barge and stared out at the river. She could think of nothing to say to him, to cross whatever cold barrier suddenly lay between them, and he said nothing to her.

  In the corner of her eye, she saw something move, and turned and saw him draw his arm back. He had thrown something into the river. There was a splash, far off. She jerked her head around, looking the other way.

  The night flowed on, until ahead the deep sky was fading to a paler purple. The wind rose, light on her face, blowing westward. The purple turned slowly pink, and pinkish orange, reflecting sleek on the water ahead of her like a path of gold. Behind her the edge of the sun blazed over the horizon, flinging out ahead of it a pure, fiery light that climbed across the sky and out over the river and the land until the very air glowed with a bloody radiance, and the river was a lapping gilded tide. Was this a promise, or an omen? She took in a deep breath, gathering herself, ready, and let the coming day engulf her.

  Thirty-three

  The rumors flew as fast as horses galloped, along all the roads and paths of France, and so in Aquitaine and farther, within a few days of the announcement in Beaugency, they knew what lay ahead for Eleanor.

  They read the proclamation in every church in France, and in all the churches of the French King’s vassals, too. All across the whole of Christendom they knew that Eleanor was unmarried. In Normandy, in Rouen, the Duke heard it, standing impassively beside his mother in the church. In Mirebeau, in the south of Anjou, in the last castle his brother allowed to him, Geoffrey of Anjou heard it in his chapel. They heard it in Paris, too, in Troyes, in Toulouse. And they heard it in Poitiers, but in a different color.

  Hard behind this came the second flood of rumor. It was spoken in the street, and all over the markets, and in the halls of the court, that certain traps had been laid for her. Men seeking to capture her, to abduct her, to use the old law on everybody’s lips: raptus, bride theft. Take her for a night and make himself rich for a lifetime as Duke of Aquitaine.

  In the Green Tower, Eleanor herself, who to everybody else was Petronilla, lay in her bed and heard the excited stories, and prayed that nobody caught her sister.

  De Rançun would know well not to let Petronilla be taken—that it would all come apart if she was taken. But the other thing—she had commanded that of him, and he had always obeyed her. No matter what Eleanor had done, he had obeyed her order. There was no way to stop that. He would use the dagger.

  She told herself she had not meant it the way it seemed. Just keep her away. But she had given the knife into his hand.

  She considered also the sainted Bernard, who had foreseen how, once freed of the royal marriage, she was prey to any bold and well-armed and conscienceless man. Bernard had not thought himself of the wiles of women. He had thought too contemptuously of the sins and weaknesses of women to understand how a woman could outdo a man. He had not seen, either, how a woman’s own wiles could cut her to the bone. For Henry’s sake, she would slay her own sister. Everyone had betrayed her; finally, ruinously, she had betrayed herself. The price was unbearable. Maybe she would die out of grief and guilt. More likely just live in grief and guilt for all her years. She lay in the bed, her hand in Marie-Jeanne’s. The old woman gave her sops of bread soaked in wine. Sometimes, far away, she heard a baby’s lusty cry.

  A son. Well grown and lusty, her son, whom she had never seen. Would never see. If she saw him, touched him, even once, smelled his lovely baby skin, noticed any resemblance at all to anybody else, she might never let him go. She was too weak to speak. Almost too weak to decide this. She would have more children. She had already given up two, and now this one, but ever after she would keep her children by her, and love them, love them with all the heart she could not give this child. Love them, with a heart schooled from loving her sister. She swore this. She slept.

  On the river, nothing happened for a while. All that day and the following night the two barges floated down the Loire. Petronilla finally slept, curled up on the back deck. They had nothing to eat but bread and cheese and some bad wine, most of which was going to the boatmen anyway. They stopped twice on grassy banks to try to gather food for the horses, but the little hay they cut was gone almost at once. The horses stamped their feet and neighed all through the second night, so that the barge rocked under her. In the early morning, the barges drifted into the swampy left bank of the river, grating and scraping through stands of stalky reeds, and they staggered off the heaving decks onto the land again.

  They had come to ground on a swampy meadowland, where the horses sank into the black muck to their fetlocks and a swarm of ducks went up squawking into the air. The smoke and haze of a little village showed just down the river. The three young knights took the horses to find grass and de Rançun went to look for the village, leaving the boatmen to manage the barges. They poled off at once into the river, struggling to find an eddy going upstream again.

  Petronilla walked down the river a little, found a stand of old trees out of sight of the men where she could do the usual morning things, and afterward went down to
the river and washed her face and hands.

  Hunkered down by the river, her hands red and stinging from the cold water, she thought of Poitiers and it seemed as distant as golden Cathay. Her coif had come almost off, and she pulled it down, gathering the pins as she did, and smoothed the white cloth over her knees. She had no idea how to put it on again. Since she was a little girl, someone had always been there to dress her. Before she left the convent, Alys had thrust a bag into her hands, with a comb, some ribbons and cloths, and a pomander, and she used the comb on her hair for a while. Her hair felt matted together like some rude fleece. Finally she gathered it at her nape, wrapped the coif around it once or twice and knotted it, and let the ends trail down her back.

  She had to get to Poitiers. But in Poitiers, there was Eleanor. And Eleanor hated her now. She had no home, really, and once she had shed the disguise of being Eleanor, not even much of a name anymore.

  She sat staring blindly out across the river, thinking of the ancient city, the palace and the garden, and of herself and Eleanor in the garden when they were little girls, making dolls out of the flowers. Eleanor had always used the red flowers for her dresses, and Petronilla the pink ones, or white, the pale ones. Eleanor had made crowns for her dolls out of daisies, but never Petronilla.

  She saw that all her life she had known she would be overlooked. She had accepted this, all her life. Grimly she got up and went back toward the men.

  Just before noon de Rançun came back from the village with a local man, leaning on a walking stick, who knew a way south through the forest. The knights brought in the horses again, and they all sat around and divided up the last of their bread and wine. Mounting the horses, they rode off after this new guide. She picked off the red rosettes on the Barb’s mane and stuffed them in the saddle pouch.

  They soon left the lowland behind, the path rising in steps and benches through oak woods, trees as stooped and gnarled as gnomes, half buckling under the weight of their vast heavy heads of branches. The sunlight reached down in long shafts to the ground. Everything was fresh and green with the first tiny perfect leaves. Mushrooms like broad round hats sprouted around the knobbed roots of the trees, and flocks of birds clamored incessantly in the branches, lifting up wild trills intermingled with screeches. It was Holy Week, she remembered, here even in the wild country; the whole world brought to life by the love of God. She said morning prayers to herself, fretting again over Eleanor, and how she did, and how the baby did, and how she, Petronilla, fit into it all, and still, she saw no place for herself anywhere.