When Christ and his Saints Slept eoa-1

by Sharon Kay Penman

  “But you do not deserve Rhiannon and your babe…is that what you fear? That God means to punish you for daring to be happy?” Rhodri slid over on the bale until he was close enough to grasp the younger man’s arm. “Why is it that the Almighty forgives us more readily than we forgive ourselves? Listen to me, lad. I cannot tell you there is no danger in childbirth. But I can tell you how good you’ve been for my daughter, how much-”

  “Come quick!” Padarn had been keeping vigil at the door. Spinning around, he gestured urgently. “They are shouting for us!”

  Lurching to their feet, Ranulf and Rhodri hastily followed Padarn out into the snow. Linking arms, they ploughed through the drifts, for they now had the wind at their backs. As they stumbled toward the hall, Eleri appeared in the doorway. Her hair was in disarray, her color ashen, her eyes swollen with fatigue, her gown splattered with blood. But her smile was incandescent.

  The entire household had crowded into Rhiannon’s chamber to admire her newborn son, everyone from the timid Bechan to the burly stable grooms. She accepted their congratulations and good wishes with exhausted aplomb, but was grateful when Eleri eventually took charge and insisted that they all withdraw so she could rest. She groped quickly for Ranulf’s hand, letting him know she wanted him to stay, needlessly so, as nothing short of force could have dislodged him from her bedside. A reluctant Rhodri was the last to leave, pushed out by his wife and daughter as he craned to get one more loving look at his grandson. Once they were finally alone, Ranulf leaned over and kissed his wife, then his son.

  Rhiannon smiled tiredly. The baby had begun to whimper, and she drew back the bed covers, guiding his little mouth toward her breast. He needed no further urging, was soon sucking contentedly upon her nipple. She’d refused from the outset to consider a wet nurse, and Ranulf now understood why; nursing was an especially intimate act for a mother unable to see her child.

  “What color is his hair?” she asked, and he reached over to stroke the infant’s head; the silky, scant hair was as soft as the downy plumage of a baby chick.

  “It is hard to say,” he teased, “for he is well-nigh bald. If I had to guess, I’d say a flaxen shade. It’s like to change anyway. Which is fine with me; I’d not mind if it turned green.”

  “I think I’d prefer a more conventional color.” Rhiannon’s smile ended as a yawn. “I want you to name him, Ranulf.”

  “Are you sure, love? It would not be a Welsh name.”

  She squeezed his hand in reply. “You wish to call him Robert, after your brother?”

  Ranulf gently wiped away the milk dribbling down his son’s chin. “No,” he said, “I want to name him Gilbert.”

  49

  Beaugency, France

  March 1152

  In late September, Louis and Eleanor had begun a royal progress through her domains. They were welcomed with enthusiasm, for Eleanor had always been extremely popular with her people, and they were heartened by rumors of an impending split with her “foreign” French husband. These rumors gained credence as the weeks passed, for in the course of the progress, French garrisons and Crown officials were replaced with men of Eleanor’s choosing, men of Aquitaine. The French sovereigns celebrated their Christmas court at Limoges; it was to be their last one as man and wife. In February, they parted, Eleanor returning to Poitiers, Louis to Paris. By now all knew a divorce was both imminent and inevitable.

  On the Friday before Palm Sunday, the Archbishop of Sens convened a Church Council at the royal castle of Beaugency, not far from Orleans. Evidence was presented that the French king and his queen were related within the prohibited degree, for her great-grandmother had been a granddaughter of his great-grandfather. The clerics were not long in delivering their solemn verdict-that the marriage must be annulled on grounds of consanguinity. The young princesses, Marie and Alix, were declared to be legitimate and their custody was granted to the French king. Eleanor relinquished her queenship, and resumed those titles that were hers by birthright: Duchess of Aquitaine and Countess of Poitou. The French king was now free to wed again, to seek a wife able to give him a son and heir. At the prodding of Eleanor’s advocate, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, the Council agreed that she was free to wed, too, but of course not without Louis’s consent, for her former husband was still her king and liege lord.

  The following morning was a mild, sunlit Saturday, a good day for travel. But the Count of Vermandois did not doubt that his sister-in-law would have ridden out in the teeth of a raging gale, so eager did she seem to leave Beaugency and her former life behind. He would be sorry to see her go, and he said so now, telling her that the royal court would be a dull place without her, that her going would break male hearts and quench candles all over Paris.

  Eleanor smiled, for she liked Raoul. His gallantry might be a bit heavy-handed at times, but she’d take that any day over the sort of somber piety she’d been living with for the past fourteen years. Gathering her into his arms, Raoul winked over her shoulder at his wife. “You do not mind if I run off with Eleanor for a few weeks, do you, Petra?”

  “Of course not,” Petronilla said absently, not hearing a word he’d said. She was finding this harder than she’d expected-saying farewell to her sister, knowing how drastically their lives were about to change. “I shall miss you, Eleanor,” she said, summoning up a game but forlorn smile. “Who will I have to quarrel with once you’re gone?”

  “That is what husbands are for.” As the sisters embraced, Eleanor found her eyes misting, too. “You must visit me at Poitiers later in the spring,” she said, adding significantly, “I will tell you when to come.”

  Petronilla nodded, and Raoul cheerfully promised to accompany her. The two women said nothing, for it was understood that Petronilla would find a way to come alone. Raoul was Louis’s cousin and liegeman and seneschal of France; they could not compromise his honour by allowing him to attend Eleanor’s wedding to Henry Fitz Empress. Eleanor had no illusions about what was to come. There was a time when she’d been careless of consequences, but no longer. Louis would see her marriage as a grievous betrayal, both of the man and of the monarch. What would he do? She knew him so well, and yet she was still not sure how he’d react. She felt confident that she and Harry would be a match for him. But she was determined to shield any others from Louis’s wrath, and so Raoul must be kept in ignorance, for his own protection.

  The great hall was thronged with clergy and curious onlookers, eager to watch this historic parting between the French king and his notorious queen. As soon as Eleanor appeared, heads turned and necks craned. The men who’d command her escort were waiting by the door: Saldebreuil de Sanzay, her constable, and Geoffrey de Rancon, Lord of Taillebourg. She smiled at sight of them, for they were more than loyal vassals; they were friends, men who would willingly lay down their lives to keep her safe. Louis was nearby, engaged in conversation with the Archbishops of Rouen and Reims, not yet aware of her presence. She was about to start toward him when she saw the tall, white-haired figure by the hearth, his simple monk’s habit contrasting dramatically with the colorfully clad nobles and the ornately garbed princes of the Church. The holy man of France, the venerated and honoured Abbot of Clairvaux. Her sainted enemy.

  Abbot Bernard greeted her with frigid formality. He so resembled one of the patriarchs of old-pale and haggard, burning dark eyes and flowing long hair-that Eleanor wondered cynically if he’d deliberately cultivated the image. “I understand,” she said, “that you convinced Louis not to bring my daughters to Beaugency to bid me farewell. He told me that he would have done so-if not for you, my lord abbot.”

  He was quite untroubled by the accusation. “That is true,” he said calmly. “I thought it was for the best. Such a meeting was bound to be painful.”

  “Am I to believe, then, that you were acting out of Christian kindness?”

  “I care for all of God’s lost lambs, madame, even the foolish ones who keep straying into the hills where wolves prowl and dangers lurk. The Lord
forgives much, provided that there is true repentance. It is always possible to come back into the fold, back into grace.”

  “With you as my guide? I’d rather take my chances with the wolves.”

  “Take care, madame, lest you imperil your immortal soul. You do but prove I had good reason to keep your daughters away from your baneful influence.” As wrathful as he was, the abbot still remembered to keep his voice down, for this was not a conversation for others to hear. “Your lack of gratitude should not surprise me, though, given your lamentable lack of decorum and discretion-”

  “Gratitude? My apologies, my lord abbot. It seems I’ve been maligning you unfairly, for you do have a sense of humor, after all!”

  “It is foolhardy to court danger, madame, but it is lunacy to court damnation. You do indeed owe me a debt of gratitude. If not for my forbearance, you might have been cast aside for adultery rather than consanguinity.”

  “It is also foolhardy, my lord abbot, to hold your foes too cheaply. Your convictions to the contrary, most women are not idiots. I could not have been accused of adultery, for you have no proof, and well you know it. And even if you’d found men willing to swear falsely that it was so, a verdict of adultery would have prohibited Louis from marrying again…as you well know, too.”

  “I see no point in continuing this conversation. If you would spit upon salvation, so be it, then. I leave your sins to God. Fortunately for the king and for France, he is now free of your unholy spell, free to choose a wife devout and docile and virtuous, a wife who will give him the heir you could not.”

  Eleanor’s eyes shone with a greenish glitter. “What a pity,” she said, “that the Blessed Virgin Mary is not available, for she would have suited his needs admirably.”

  Bernard drew in his breath with a sibilant hiss. “You are an evil woman, wanton and truly wicked, and you will indeed suffer for-”

  “No-no, she is not!” Neither Eleanor nor the abbot had heard Louis’s approach, and they both spun around at the sudden sound of his voice. “You are wrong, Abbot Bernard,” he said, with a firmness Eleanor had seen him show all too rarely. “I know her far better than you, and there is no evil in her soul, only a misguided sense of…of levity.”

  Eleanor was tempted to retort that to a man like the abbot, levity might well be the greatest sin of all, but she did not, for Louis’s sake. The abbot was regarding the king with the pained patience of a tutor for a likable but slow student. “You are sometimes too tolerant, my liege,” he said, “too forgiving for your own good.”

  That, Eleanor couldn’t resist. “Did not Our Lord Christ preach that forgiveness was a virtue?” she murmured, earning herself a toxic look from the abbot, a reproachful one from the king. Seizing her elbow, Louis steered her away from Bernard, toward a recessed window seat. He did not suggest that they sit; the time was past for that.

  “Why is it that turmoil and commotion always follow after you as faithfully as that dog of yours?” Louis asked, pointing to the greyhound that had trailed them into the window alcove. But he sounded more plaintive than protesting, even mustering up a sad smile as their eyes met. His was an easy face to read; it took one glance to reassure Eleanor that he’d not overheard her Blessed Virgin gibe. She was glad, for it was Bernard she’d wanted to wound, not Louis.

  That was not always so. There’d been times when she’d yearned for words sharp enough to draw blood, to leave ugly scars. She’d blamed Louis for much that had gone wrong in their marriage, for not being bolder or able to laugh at life’s perversities, for not being more like the swaggering, spirited, roguish men of her House, for no longer heeding her advice as he’d done in their first years together, for loving God far more than he could ever love her, and for the reluctant desire and sense of shame that he’d brought to their marriage bed.

  But she’d not hated him for these failings-anger and frustration and occasional contempt, but not hatred. That had come only after Antioch, after Louis had accused her of harboring an incestuous passion for her uncle and threatened to have her bound and gagged and dragged away by force if need be. Ever a realist, she’d yielded, far too proud to fight a war she could not hope to win; she was learning that women must pick their battles with care, that strategy mattered more than strength. Eventually Louis had apologized and swore upon the True Cross that he knew her to be innocent. But by then it was too late. By then her uncle had been slain by the Turks, his impaled head rotting above the caliph’s palace in the hot Baghdad sun, and Eleanor could not look upon her husband without Raymond’s doomed and bloodied spectre coming between them.

  But now that she’d regained her freedom, she found herself remembering how it had been at first for them, a fifteen-year-old bride and her sixteen-year-old groom, shyly appealing, awed by her beauty and eager to please her. Before he’d begun to yearn for the peace of the cloister, before those poor souls had died in the flames of a Vitry church, before the miscarriage and daughters instead of sons, before his hair shirt and her disgrace, before the crusade and Antioch and Raymond’s needless death, before Abbot Bernard. For a poignant moment, she could see that long-lost youth reflected in the depths of translucent blue eyes. And then the memory faded and she was looking at a man decent and ineffectual and despairing, a man she could pity but not respect and never love.

  “I promise you,” he said earnestly, “that I will not speak ill of you to our daughters.”

  She knew better. His intentions were good; they always were. But he would never be able to forgive her for Henry Fitz Empress, no more than she’d been able to forgive him for her uncle Raymond.

  “I ought to have brought them,” he said, striving to be fair. “You can see them whenever you come to Paris, that I promise you, too. I would ask, though, that…you not come for a while, Eleanor.”

  “No,” she agreed, “not for a while.” Knowing that she’d never be welcome in Paris. She had to believe she’d see her daughters again, for she would never give up what was hers. But as Louis leaned over and kissed her circumspectly on the cheek, she realized-as he did not-that it was not likely they’d ever meet again. A door was slamming shut, and there’d be no going back.

  There was nothing more to be said. Louis seemed to grasp that, too, for he stepped aside and wished her “Godspeed,” which struck her as an odd epitaph for a marriage. “I wish you well, Louis,” she said, and discovered that she meant it. “I wish you happiness, a wife with no ‘misguided sense of levity,’ and the son you so crave.” And that, too, she meant-almost.

  Raoul and Petronilla followed Eleanor from the hall, out into the bailey, where her armed escort waited. Uncomfortably aware of Abbot Bernard’s disapproving gaze, Louis did not. Instead, he retreated from the hall with what dignity he could. Once he’d reached the privacy of his bedchamber, he unlatched the shutters, leaned out in time to see Eleanor riding across the bailey, out of the castle and out of his life. He watched from the window, mourning what they’d lost and what they’d never had. He kept vigil until she’d disappeared into the distance, until even the dust had settled again onto the grooved, pitted road. But she’d never looked back.

  AN early spring had begun to repair the damage done by winter. The trees were budding and the wild daffodils known as Lent lilies were gilding the river meadows with splashes of gold; the Loire shimmered like liquid silver, reflecting the sky and clouds and the soaring spirits of the Aquitanians. Most of the men in Eleanor’s escort detail were Southerners, never happy in the less hospitable domains of the French king. They were a different breed, these sons and daughters of Aquitaine, for theirs was a warmer, more indolent clime, a land of rich harvests and fertile vineyards and lush emerald valleys. They understood that life was short and unpredictable and therefore it behooved a prudent man to taste as many of its pleasures as he could. If their exuberant joie de vivre conflicted with the Church’s stringent teachings about the mortification of the flesh, that never seemed to trouble them much. They were glad to be escaping the rigors of northern wi
nters, even gladder to be leaving behind the French king’s austere, staid court. The jokes flew by faster than the miles as they galloped south, so delighted were they to be bringing their beautiful duchess home.

  Not all of the members of Eleanor’s household were born and bred in Aquitaine. One of her ladies-in-waiting came from a wilder region, the fog-drifted seacoast of Brittany. Yolande had been with Eleanor only a few months; it had been her misfortune to join the French queen’s retinue just as Eleanor’s queenship was breathing its last. But if she minded trading Paris for Poitiers, she showed no sign of it. Riding alongside the Lady Colette, Eleanor’s longtime attendant, she kept up a running commentary of cheerful observations and ingenuous questions.

  They would be back at Poitiers for Easter, would they not? Was it true that the famed troubadour and poet Bernard de Ventadour would be joining the duchess’s court? Did Colette think the duchess was in true danger from would-be suitors? Would they still be stopping for the night at Blois? Why had the duchess been so loath to accept the invitation they’d gotten from its young count? He’d sounded quite charming, judging from his letter. And very highborn, for was he not the English king’s brother?

  Yolande was almost as much in awe of the black-eyed, elegant Colette as she was of the duchess herself. Colette’s moods were as changeable as the weather; she could go from sun to frost and back to sun fast enough to set Yolande’s head to spinning. Today, though, the forecast seemed favorable. Colette listened to Yolande’s chatter with good-humored indulgence, answering her queries and making wry asides of her own.

  They’d soon be back in Poitiers, she assured the Breton teenager, within four days if all went well. She’d not be at all surprised if Bernard de Ventadour sought the duchess’s patronage; poets and troubadours would be flocking to Aquitaine like migrating swallows in the spring. Indeed, there was a very real danger now that the duchess was free to wed again; why did Yolande think they had so large an escort?