“Jesu, it is worse than we feared, Maud.” Henry was grinning. “Damn me if else, but the man has gone and fallen in love with his own wife!”
That got a laugh from all but the thoroughly mystified Minna. Ranulf had the last word, though. “Keep it up,” he warned, “and I’ll name the pair of you as godparents, which would necessitate a long and arduous winter journey into Wales for the christening.”
Maud was slow on the uptake for once, and yielded with a feigned gasp of horror. Henry was quicker. “Are we talking about a theoretical child,” he queried, “one likely to come in God’s own time? Or a flesh-and-blood babe, with a definite due date?”
“November,” Ranulf said nonchalantly, and then gave himself away with a radiant smile. “Rhiannon is vowing to deliver on my birthday and-”
At that point, he found himself fending off his niece, who was scolding him for not telling her while smearing his face with haphazard kisses. Henry offered his congratulations, too, plus a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the baby be named after him. Ranulf agreed gravely that he would, provided it was a girl, and Minna gave up any pretense of understanding male humor. “Why are you here, Lord Harry?” she asked, as soon as she could get a word in. “We thought you and Lord Geoffrey were guarding the border against the French.”
“We have a truce in effect, for the French king has taken to his sickbed. What of you, Ranulf? What brought you and Cousin Maud to Rouen?”
“Bad news, I fear. A friend of your mother’s has died.”
“It has been a sad season for Mama,” Henry said regretfully. “In April, Adeliza died at a nunnery in Flanders; I suppose you heard? What of this latest death? Is it anyone I know?”
“Yes, it is. The lord of Wallingford Castle, Brien Fitz Count.”
Henry was quiet for a moment, thinking of his Christmas reunion with his mother at Wallingford. “She took shelter with Brien,” he said, “after her escape from Oxford. He was a man worth mourning.”
Brien’s shadow seemed to follow them back across the garth to Maude’s chambers. At sight of her son, Maude’s face lit up. Henry could not remember ever having seen his mother cry, but he noticed now that her eyes were suspiciously red-rimmed, the lids swollen and tender. “I know about Brien Fitz Count’s death. I am sorry, Mama. He was a good friend to us, a good man.”
Maude swallowed. “Yes,” she said softly, “he was.”
“It does not seem fair. Uncle Robert and Brien sacrificed so much for us. Of all men, they ought to have lived to see us triumph.”
Maude nodded somberly. Although she was gazing into his face, Henry had the odd feeling that she was not really seeing him. “The greatest regrets,” she said, “are always for what might have been.”
Although the French king had grudgingly recognized Geoffrey as Duke of Normandy, relations between the two men had always been strained, and deteriorated rapidly when they clashed over the fate of Giraud Berlai. Berlai was the seneschal of Poitou, a man who stood high in the French king’s favor. But if he was a loyal vassal to Louis, to Geoffrey he was merely a rebel, one of the ringleaders of an abortive rising of Angevin barons. Geoffrey had quelled the rebellion without difficulty, but Berlai had retreated to his castle at Montreuil-Bellay and begun to harass the countryside. After he’d harried monks from St Aubin’s, Geoffrey lost all patience and vowed to bring the man down, no matter how long it took. When he lay siege to Montreuil, Berlai was defiant, contemptuously confident that the castle could withstand any assault. He’d underestimated Geoffrey’s resolve, though. The siege had lasted three full years, but the fortress was now in ruins and Berlai in an Angers prison.
The French king was enraged by Geoffrey’s harsh treatment of his vassal, and dismayed by Geoffrey’s unforeseen decision to turn Normandy over to Henry. It was in France’s interests to make sure that Normandy and England were not united again, and Louis was not willing, therefore, to see Normandy ruled by a man with such a strong claim to the English crown. He’d refused to recognize Henry’s title, revitalized his alliance with Stephen, and invited Eustace to join his campaign.
The past year had been one of sporadic and inconclusive warfare. Henry had been besieging a rebellious lord at Torigny when he’d learned that the French king and Eustace were advancing upon Arques. He swiftly gathered a mixed force of Normans, Angevins, and Bretons and confronted the French. But Louis chose to withdraw and battle was averted. Geoffrey then seized a castle at La Nue belonging to Louis’s brother, and the French retaliated by burning the town of Seez. There were a few months of relative peace after that, but then, in midsummer, the French began massing troops along the River Seine between Meulan and Mantes, and Geoffrey and Henry hastened to protect their borders from this new threat.
War seemed to be inevitable-until the French king was stricken with a fever, necessitating his return to Paris. It was possible that he would now heed the advice of France’s premier churchman, the venerable Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, who’d long been urging peace. But it was just as likely that he’d resume hostilities once he recovered. Henry and Geoffrey could only wait and see.
Henry dominated the conversation at supper that night, thanking his mother for her continuing efforts to make the French king see reason, giving Ranulf and Maud an insider’s account of the political and military maneuvering that had occupied so much of his time this past year, telling them of the skirmishes and raids and Geoffrey’s prolonged siege of Montreuil-Bellay.
“Berlai bragged that the castle could never be taken, with a keep high enough to scrape the sky and double walls, encircled by a deep, natural chasm called the ‘Judas Valley.’ It kept my father from getting close enough to use his siege engines. So do you know what he did? He moved the yearly fair from Saumur to Montreuil, and paid the fairgoers to assist his soldiers in filling up the ditch!”
Henry laughed and pushed his chair back. Ranulf glanced toward Maude, for it could not be easy for her to hear Henry speak so glowingly of Geoffrey. But she showed no overt displeasure; he supposed she’d had to accept it, that her son and his father would always be close. He’d noticed, though, that she no longer spoke of Geoffrey with such searing bitterness. Mayhap what he’d heard was true, that they’d finally made their peace. A pity they could not have done so twenty years ago. Why was it, he wondered, that whatever came to his sister, always came too late?
“Was that how Geoffrey took the castle?”
Henry shook his head. “No, Cousin Maud. Even though his mangonels were then able to do considerable damage, Berlai still held out. Whenever breaches were made in the walls, they repaired the damage with oaken beams, and Berlai boasted from the battlements that he’d never surrender. But he’d reckoned without Vegetius, a Roman sage who’d written a classic treatise on siege warfare. Papa got an idea from his writings, and he filled an iron vessel with Greek fire, then used a mangonel to hurl it at the castle walls. It ignited on impact and the wooden beams caught fire. Greek fire is very hard to put out and they could not keep the flames from spreading.”
“Greek fire,” Ranulf echoed thoughtfully. “Crusaders brought back tales from the Holy Land of Greek fire. But I’d not heard of it’s being used in the West ere this.”
“Papa was the first,” Henry said proudly. “When his father went off to wed the Queen of Jerusalem, he learned the ingredients and shared the secret in a letter to Papa. I’m not sure what he mixed-naphtha and lime and tar and sulphur-but whatever, it worked. In no time at all, Berlai and his men came-as Papa put it-slithering out like snakes!”
“Is it true that the French king got Abbot Bernard to excommunicate Geoffrey for refusing to set Berlai free?”
Henry looked over at his uncle and nodded. “It seems the Church has a third category of sin; in addition to mortal and venal, there is also political.” His mouth quirked at the corners, in just the suggestion of a smile. “Fortunately,” he said, “Papa appears to be bearing up rather well.”
“I expect he would,” Maude said dryly, f
or the counts of Anjou had always taken excommunication in stride; one of Geoffrey’s more infamous forebears had sinned on such a grand scale that he’d made no less than three pilgrimages of atonement to the Holy Land. “How long do you think this truce will last, Henry?”
As always, he smiled at her use of “Henry.” She’d made a good-faith attempt to switch over to “Harry” in order to please him, but she was so obviously uncomfortable with the informality that he’d soon taken pity and urged her to revert back to his given name. Now she alone called him Henry and she’d come to relish the exclusivity of it. He was still as restless as he’d been as a boy, never able to sit still for long, and he’d begun pacing as he considered her question. She felt a great surge of pride as she watched him, and an empty, hurtful ache, a bittersweet regret that this son she so loved could not have been Brien’s.
“It is hard to say, Mama. It all depends upon who has the French king’s ear. If it is Abbot Bernard and the Bishop of Lisieux, they may well persuade him to talk peace. If he is fool enough to keep listening to Eustace, we’ll all be the losers for it.”
Ranulf was intrigued by his nephew’s candor, for it was his experience that young men invariably proclaimed their eagerness to go to war, and with many, that eagerness was even genuine. But Harry had an uncommonly pragmatic view of warfare for one in only his nineteenth year; he’d proved himself willing to do what must be done to win, but it was clear he took no pleasure in it. To test his theory, Ranulf said, “So you hope your differences with Louis can be settled by negotiation?”
“Of course. I’d choose bargaining over bleeding any day, as would all men of sense. So it goes without saying, then, that Eustace is lusting after a bloodletting. The more I learn about this rival of mine, Uncle Ranulf, the more I realize that Eustace is the most convincing argument possible against hereditary kingship.”
Ranulf and Maud laughed, but Henry’s mother did not, for that sounded like blasphemy to her, even in jest. “How could anyone argue against hereditary kingship?” she protested, and Henry grinned.
“I can assure you, Mama, that I’d be the last one to make such an argument,” he said and was leaning over to give her a hug when one of Maude’s servants entered with an urgent message. Once such a message would have been for Maude; now it was for Henry, for “the lord duke.”
“It is from Papa,” Henry said, gazing down at the familiar seal. Moving toward the nearest lamp, he read rapidly. “That contest over the French king’s ear? Well, it seems that Eustace lost. Louis has agreed to enter into negotiations and Papa wants me to return straightaway, for we are expected in Paris in a week’s time.”
“Thank Heaven,” Maude said fervently. “Now we can concentrate upon the real enemy-Stephen and his wretched son.”
“Easy, Mama,” Henry cautioned. “We’ve not made peace yet. These talks might well come to naught. But we have nothing to lose and possibly much to gain. So…it looks like I’m off to Paris.” He glanced at the letter again and then over at Ranulf. “At the very least,” he laughed, “I’ll finally get to meet Eleanor of Aquitaine!”
They had just passed the abbey of Saint-Denis, so Henry knew Paris was only seven miles away, and he spurred his stallion to catch up with Geoffrey. “Tell me,” he said, “about the French king. What sort of man is he?”
“One of meagre importance if not for a hungry sow.” Seeing his son’s bafflement, Geoffrey grinned. “You never heard that story, then? Louis was the second son, pledged to the Church. But when he was ten, he was snatched from the cloisters and thrust back into the world, courtesy of that aforesaid pig. It was foraging for food along the River Seine just as Louis’s elder brother, Philippe, happened to ride by. When the sow spooked his horse, Philippe was thrown and killed. So little Louis was suddenly the heir apparent, and it is a great pity, for he would have made a far better monk than he has a king.”
“Tell me more, Papa,” Henry urged. “What are his virtues and his vices?”
“His greatest vice is that he has none.” Geoffrey laughed at his own joke, and then gave his son a serious answer. “He is very devout, has good manners and a good heart. Nor does he lack for courage. But he is cursed with the worst sort of stubbornness, the stiff-necked, inflexible obstinacy of the weak. And because he is so troubled by self-doubts, he tends to be too easily influenced-invariably by the wrong people. He is melancholy by nature and suffers periodic pangs of guilt over his disastrous attack upon Vitry-that the town where more than a thousand villagers took refuge in the church and died when it caught fire. And he is burdened with a paralyzing sense of sin, a truly pitiful affliction for a man wed to one of the most desirable women in Christendom!”
“He shuns her bed?” Henry was incredulous. “Jesu, the man must be mad!”
“You’ll get no argument from me, Harry. But monks are not supposed to indulge in carnal lust, and Louis remains a monk at heart, a monk married to Eve. They sound even more mismatched, by Corpus, than your mother and me!”
“They do, indeed,” Henry agreed cheerfully; he had no illusions whatsoever about his parents’ marriage. “Tell me more about Eve. Is she that, in truth?”
“Well…she is indeed willful, much more than any woman has a right to be. She is worldly for certes and high spirited and too clever by half. Is she a wanton, too? Mayhap yes, mayhap no. I never had the opportunity to find out for myself. But then, I never thought wantonness to be a female character flaw, at least not in another man’s wife!”
Off to their right, a village came into view, which Geoffrey identified as Clignancourt. In the distance the wooded hill of Montmartre rose up against the hazy August sky. Geoffrey said there were the ruins of an ancient Roman temple on the summit, which offered an impressive view of Paris. Henry was sorry they did not have time to stop and see. He’d never paid much mind to gossip himself, but his father was a reliable source for humor and scandal. “I’ve heard such unlikely tales about their crusade, Papa. Just what did happen in Antioch?”
“Louis made an ass of himself, refused to go to the rescue of Edessa, and doomed the crusade, the Prince of Antioch, and his marriage-all in one fell swoop.”
That made no sense to Henry. “I thought it was the fall of Edessa that stirred men to take the cross. So why did Louis balk?”
“That is what Prince Raymond wanted to know, too. Ever since Edessa’s capture by the Turks, he’d feared that Antioch would be next, and he was relying upon the French king’s crusaders to stave off disaster. When Louis insisted that he could do nothing until he’d fulfilled his vow to reach Jerusalem, Raymond took it badly. Eleanor agreed with Raymond, but she had no luck in changing Louis’s mind, and by all accounts, the quarreling got very hot, indeed.”
“Raymond was her kinsman, was he not?”
“Her uncle. Like many a younger son, he’d gone off to seek his fortune in the Holy Land, and by luck and guile and a fair measure of charm, he’d won himself a great heiress and the principality of Antioch. But when Eleanor sided openly with Raymond, Louis’s advisors claimed that proved she was not to be trusted.”
“I’d say it proved she had more common sense than Louis. If Antioch fell, Jerusalem’s fall would be a foregone conclusion. Was this when Eleanor declared her intent to end the marriage?”
Geoffrey nodded. “And she was shrewd enough to pick the one argument likely to shake Louis to the depths of his pious soul-that their marriage was a sin. Raymond had revealed to her, she contended, that she and Louis were fourth cousins and thus forbidden to wed without a papal dispensation. She then reminded Louis that after eleven years of this ‘sinful’ marriage, he still lacked a male heir. What greater proof could there be of God’s displeasure? Louis was distraught, for in his innocent, odd way, he truly loved his wife. He could not bear to lose her-and Aquitaine-but neither could he abide the fear that he’d offended the Almighty. As I said, Eleanor knew her man; her thrust had gone right to the heart.”
“What provoked him then, into dragging her away fro
m Antioch by force?”
“He sought counsel and comfort from his chaplain and a Templar named Thierry Galeran, a eunuch who’d long chafed under Eleanor’s barbs. He seized his chance to repay her in kind, and he and Odo, the chaplain, convinced Louis that Eleanor’s real reason for seeking a divorce was arrantly sinful-because she’d taken Raymond as her lover.”
Henry was not easily startled, but now he almost dropped the reins, so hastily did he swing around in the saddle to stare at his father. “They accused her of bedding her own uncle? Jesus wept! Was it true?”
“I seriously doubt it,” Geoffrey conceded, with a trace of regret. “Sins are no more equal than men, and incest is a grievous transgression, indeed, far more damning than mere adultery. It is clear from his subsequent conduct that Louis did not really believe it, either, else he’d never have been able to reconcile with her and share her bed again. Be that as it may, he was hurt and jealous and angry, and he heeded his counselors, compelled Eleanor to accompany him to Jerusalem.
“What happened after that, lad, you doubtless know. Louis made a halfhearted assault upon Damascus, retreated after four days, and the glorious Second Crusade was over.”
“I’d say your decision not to take the cross was a wise one, Papa. And their troubles did not end in the Holy Land, did they? I heard they had a harrowing journey home.”
“That they did. Eleanor’s ship was captured by the Greeks, rescued in the nick of time by the King of Sicily’s fleet, then blown far off course toward the Barbary Coast, finally coming ashore at Palermo, where Eleanor was gravely ill for weeks, and where she got word of her uncle Raymond’s death, slain in a courageous, foolhardy clash with the Turks, his head cut off and sent as a gift to the Caliph of Baghdad.”
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