When Christ and his Saints Slept eoa-1

by Sharon Kay Penman

  “I assume he already had a wife when he stole the viscount’s?”

  “By then he was working on his second marriage. His first wife was a kinswoman of yours, Harry, Ermengarde, your father’s great-aunt. Fortunately for us, that marriage fell apart ere they had any children. My grandfather took as his next wife the long-suffering Lady Philippa, heiress to Toulouse. She gave him two sons and five daughters, but their marriage was no happier than his first. As he put it, he loved women too much to confine himself to just one.”

  “But Dangereuse was different, not a passing fancy?”

  “More like a grand passion. Philippa had put up with his straying as best she could, but his infatuation with Dangereuse could not be ignored, for after he wooed her away from her husband, he brought her right under his roof, settled her here in the Maubergeon Tower. That was too much for Philippa, and who can blame her? When my grandfather refused to send Dangereuse away, Philippa left him. She retired to Fontevrault Abbey, where-as unlikely as it seems-she became good friends with Grandpa Will’s first wife, Ermengarde, who dwelt at the nunnery whenever the whim took her. Imagine the conversations they must have had on those long winter nights!”

  “I’m still mulling over the fact that your grandfather was having an affair with his son’s mother-in-law!” Henry said with a grin. “It is not as if I come from a line of monks myself. My own grandfather could have populated England with all his by-blows. But I have to admit that this grandfather of yours seems to have had a truly spectacular talent for sinning. What did the Church say about these scandalous goings-on?”

  “Oh, he was often at odds with the Church, but it never bothered him unduly. In truth, Harry, nothing did. He liked to scandalize and shock people, but there was no real malice in him. As you may have guessed, I adored him. Most people did, for he had more charm than the law should allow. He did treat my grandmother rather badly-one of them, anyway! But I was too young to understand that, and by the time I did, he was long dead. What I remember most is his laughter, and I suspect that is what truly vexed his enemies, that he got so much fun out of life. He could find a joke in the most dire circumstances, as his songs attest. That shocked people, too, that a man so highborn would write troubadour poetry, but he enjoyed it and so what else mattered?”

  Henry brushed back her hair. “Tell me more,” he urged, and she shivered with pleasure as he kissed the hollow of her throat.

  “Well…Grandpapa Will painted an image of Dangereuse on his shield, saying he wanted to bear her in battle, just as she’d so often borne him in bed. He liked to joke that one day he’d establish his own nunnery-and fill it with ladies of easy virtue. And when he was rebuked for not praying as often as he ought, he composed a poem: ‘O Lord, let me live long enough to get my hands under her cloak.’”

  Henry gave a sputter of laughter. “Between the two of us, we’ve got a family tree rooted in Hell! Once Abbot Bernard learns of our marriage, he’ll have nary a doubt that our children will have horns and cloven hooves.”

  “The first one born with a tail, we’ll name after the good abbot.” Eleanor reached for a dish of strawberries in sugared syrup, popping one neatly into his mouth. He fed her the next one, and when she licked the sugar from his fingers, as daintily as a cat, his body was suddenly suffused in heat. Dipping his finger in the syrup, he coated one of her nipples. She looked startled, but intrigued, and when he lowered his mouth to her breast, she exhaled her breath in a drawn-out sigh. “Abbot Bernard preaches that sin is all around us,” she said throatily, “but I doubt that even he ever thought to warn against strawberries!”

  “He’d likely have an apoplectic seizure if he only knew what can be done with honey,” Henry predicted, and Eleanor began to laugh.

  “I think,” she said, “that you and I are going to have a very interesting marriage.”

  Henry thought so, too. “I want you, Eleanor.”

  Her eyes reflected the candle flame, but brighter and hotter, making promises that would have provided Abbot Bernard with a full year of new sermons. “My lord duke,” she said, “tonight all of Aquitaine is yours for the taking.”

  They were both exhausted, but neither was ready yet to let the night go. Staving off sleep, they lay in each other’s arms, watching as the hearth flames wavered and danced and sent up white-gold sparks. Henry could not remember ever feeling so content. God truly did reward those willing to gamble. Breathing in the scent of his wife’s perfume, he nuzzled her neck and she nestled closer.

  He was not at all surprised that she could fire his passion as no other woman had. But he’d not expected to feel so intensely protective. She was quite capable of taking care of herself. He’d never thought to meet a woman more self-sufficient than his mother, but here she was, her thigh resting on his, her hair tickling his chest. It was not that she needed him to take care of her; it was that he wanted to, and this was a novel sensation for him. Lust took on a new taste altogether when tenderness was added to the brew.

  How had she gotten to him like this? Mayhap it was just the afterglow. It was only natural that he’d feel close to her after lovemaking like theirs. Any more heat and they’d have set the bed on fire. Or was it that any last lingering doubts about her honour had gone up in smoke? However much he’d insisted to his father that he did not believe the gossip and innuendoes and rumors, there’d been a small, dark corner of uncertainty, one he’d not acknowledged even to himself…until now.

  But no more. No matter what men said of her, he knew now that she was not a wanton. She was passionate and blessedly uninhibited and ardent. But she knew none of a courtesan’s erotic tricks, those special, seductive ways of pleasuring a man that most wives never mastered. He’d lain with enough harlots to recognize practiced passion, and from harlots, that was indeed what he wanted. But not from Eleanor. He’d not wanted her to be too knowing, too artful in her caresses, for she could never have learned such skills from monkish, fettered Louis. If she had ever been unfaithful, he was sure now it had been a brief tryst, no more than that.

  It was passing strange, for he ought not to care what she’d done whilst wed to another man. But he did. If tenderness was an unfamiliar emotion for him, so was this urge, too. He’d never been jealous of a bedmate before, never felt possessive of one, either. Was it because she was his wife? Was that what made it so different, so much more complicated?

  “Harry…what are you thinking about?”

  “Papal politics, the price of corn, whether I ought to get my stallion shoed, the usual…” he joked, while tightening his arm around her shoulders. She had the most luxuriant hair he’d ever encountered in a bedmate; he could not keep his hands away from it, running its silkiness through his fingers, wondering why men found blonde hair so alluring. It reached well past her hips, ebony in the night shadows, a deep rich brown whenever the firelight played upon it. Separating a long, gleaming strand, he entwined it around his fingers, looping it about his wrist.

  Her lashes flickered. “Are you worried that I might run off whilst you sleep?”

  “I just want to keep you close,” he said, and she smiled drowsily.

  “You need not worry, Harry,” she said. “I’ll not stray…”

  Eustace had moved to the open window, watching the river traffic on the Seine. Behind his back, the French king exchanged puzzled looks with his brother Robert and his cousin Raoul. Louis was as surprised as anyone by Eustace’s unexpected arrival in Paris. He must have left England within a few days of his mother’s funeral, which bespoke an unseemly haste to Louis. Moreover, his presence was something of an embarrassment now that Louis had made peace with his rival the Duke of Normandy. The other men in the chamber were regarding Eustace with no favor, for he had few friends at court. But he had to be made welcome. They could hardly turn away the Count of Boulogne, the French king’s brother-in-law.

  Eustace was well aware that these men liked him not. But he harbored no goodwill toward most of them, either. While he’d always been on civil
terms with the French king, he could not respect a man so weak-willed. Louis’s blustery brother the Count of Dreux he disliked heartily, an antagonism Robert returned in full measure. Nor did he think much of Louis’s dissolute kinsman Raoul de Peronne. Raoul’s courtesy too often held a hidden sting, a hinted smugness that Eustace found infuriating, coming as it did from a man who’d made a fool of himself over a slut young enough to be his daughter. He had no reason to think badly of the Templar, Thierry Galeran, and he did not know Hugh de Champfleury, Louis’s new chancellor. As for Waleran Beaumont, the less said of him, the better; Eustace would never forgive him for going over to Maude. And these were the men whose voices Louis most heeded? If so, no wonder his brother-in-law seemed to lurch from one blunder to another, like a ship with no rudder.

  “Did you bring Constance with you?” Louis queried politely as Eustace turned away from the window. Eustace shook his head, started to say that Constance had remained behind to tend to his father, whose grieving was still raw. He caught himself in time, for that would only stir up another flurry of commiserations. He’d already accepted their condolences, wanted no more. If he would rather mourn his mother in private, that was betwixt him and God and no concern of theirs.

  What he really wanted to discuss with Louis was the calamitous mistake he’d made in coming to terms with Maude’s whelp. Henry Fitz Empress could not be trusted; what Angevin could? Not for nothing did men call Anjou the Devil’s birthplace. Sooner or later Louis would realize how badly he’d erred. Eustace hoped to make it sooner. But he preferred to wait for a more opportune moment. He had a better chance of convincing Louis if they were alone.

  Since Eustace seemed to feel no obligation to stoke the conversational fires, it fell to the ever-courteous king to perform that task for him. It was not easy going, for so many subjects held pitfalls. Fortunately, Louis got some help from the affable Raoul, who was a past master at social discourse, the sort of talk that was lively and smooth-flowing and said nothing of any consequence. But Louis was not enjoying himself and it was a relief to be summoned away by Adam Brulart, his secretary, hovering anxiously in the doorway.

  “Well, what shall we talk about now?” Raoul asked Eustace. “I can always tell you the story of my life. I daresay you’ve been awaiting that with bated breath.”

  Eustace stared suspiciously at the older man, sure that Raoul was mocking him, but not sure what to do about it. Humor was the weapon he most mistrusted, for it was one he’d never learned to handle with any skill. But he was spared the need to reply. Glancing about the chamber, Raoul frowned, then rose from his seat. “Cousin? Is something amiss?”

  By now other heads were turning toward Louis, too. He did look sickly, Eustace conceded, for he had no more color than a corpse candle and an odd, glazed stare, as if he were not seeing any of them. Filled with foreboding, Eustace started toward him. Raoul and Robert were already there, asking questions that Louis did not seem to hear.

  It fell to Adam Brulart to tell them. After a troubled look at his king’s ashen face, the clerk said reluctantly, “The King’s Grace has just learned that the Lady Eleanor and the Duke of Normandy were wed in Poitiers on Whitsunday.”

  As the unhappy clerk had known it would, his news created a furor. Voices rose as men struggled to make themselves heard. Eustace finally prevailed, for he’d had much practice in shouting others down. “Is it true?” he demanded of Louis. “Just tell me if it is true!”

  Louis swallowed. “A mistake,” he said. “It must be a mistake. Eleanor would not do that to me. I know she would not…”

  He was a minority of one in that belief. Several of the men had begun to curse. Raoul had paled; clutching his royal cousin’s arm, he said urgently, “I did not know, Louis. I swear by the Holy Cross that I did not know!” Louis said nothing, for he was not listening. Neither was Eustace. Turning away, he rested his palms flat against the wall, standing motionless, arms outstretched, head down. Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and now Aquitaine, too-Blood of Christ! Without warning, he balled his fist, hammered it into the wall repeatedly, leaving a smear of blood behind. In the confusion, no one noticed.

  The French king continued to insist plaintively that it must be a mistake. He was Eleanor’s liege lord. She had no right to wed without his consent. And never would she have wed Henry Fitz Empress. Had she not wanted to annul their marriage because their kinship was an affront to the Almighty? It had gnawed away at her peace. She’d told him so-often. But she was even more closely akin to Henry than she was to him. So such a marriage could never be. She would not mock God’s Law like that. She would not mock him. But his protests carried less and less conviction and at last he slumped down in a chair, too stricken to keep up the pretense any further.

  Gradually the other men quieted and a discomfited silence filled the chamber. Watching Louis bleed was painful for them, too, but none knew how to treat a heart wound. After much shuffling of feet and clearing of throats, they seemed to have reached an unspoken consensus that the greatest kindness they could do their king would be to leave him alone. They began to mumble regrets, to murmur vaguely of duties elsewhere, putting Eustace in mind of the hushed, unnatural voices of the mourners at his mother’s funeral. Crossing the chamber swiftly, he planted himself directly in front of his brother-in-law’s hunched figure, arms folded across his chest, legs spread, impossible to ignore.

  “What mean you to do about this?”

  Louis looked up blankly, a man roused from his own private hell, blinking as if surprised to find the men still here. “What can I do? They are already wed.”

  “But you are not going to let them get away with it, are you? They had no right to wed and well they knew it. If it is too late to prevent the marriage, it is not too late to punish them for it. If you do not, others will think that they, too, can defy you with impunity.” Eustace’s mouth twisted and for a moment, he thought of his father. “You have no choice,” he said, “but to make an example of them, one that others will not soon forget.”

  He’d struck a common chord. For once, he did not lack for allies, and they all agreed that Eleanor and Henry must be held to account for their treachery. There must be a reckoning. If Thierry Galeran was spurred on by his known hatred for Louis’s queen, that could not be said of Louis’s chancellor, and Hugh de Champfleury argued somberly, too, for retribution. When at last eyes turned toward Raoul, he did not hesitate for long. His fondness for Eleanor was genuine, but his position was precarious enough as it was. No, in this case, she was on her own. “A man does what he must,” he said carefully. “You must think of the Crown, my liege.”

  Such unanimity was rare in Louis’s royal councils. He knew they were right. So great a betrayal could not be ignored. It must be avenged. She’d lied to him from the first, with her talk of conscience and God’s Will. Mayhap this had even been planned from the onset, as far back as last summer’s peace conference with the Angevins. Mayhap that was why Count Geoffrey and his spawn had become so reasonable of a sudden? That suspicion twisted the knife almost beyond bearing. How she must be laughing at him, lying in bed with the Angevin stripling, congratulating themselves for having made such an utter fool of the King of France. Well, let her beloved Aquitaine be overrun by French troops, let her watch as Poitiers burned, let her see then if she still felt like laughing.

  “I shall summon them both to my court,” he said abruptly, “to answer a charge of treason.”

  They approved, nodding grimly. Raoul glanced around at their faces, wondering if he was the only one who thought it unlikely that the guilty pair would obey the summons. He knew his sister-in-law better than any of them, and he could not see her submitting meekly to a judgment of the French court. Ah, Eleanor, he thought bleakly, what have you done? For such a clever lass, how had she gotten herself into such a predicament? What had possessed her to put her world at risk like this, with nothing between her and disaster but luck and a cocky nineteen-year-old?

  As satisfied as Eustace was
with this outcome, he still harbored a few qualms. Louis sounded steadfast enough now, but how long would that last? “What happens,” he said, “if they dare to defy the summons?”

  Louis raised his head. His eyes held a blue-ice glitter that Eustace had never seen before, that he found very heartening. “Then,” Louis said, “it will be war.”

  52

  Fontevrault Abbey, Anjou

  June 1152

  The sun was high overhead, filling the cloisters with brilliant white-gold light. Eleanor and the Abbess Mathilde were sauntering along the walkway, in such animated conversation that they did not notice when Yolande lagged behind, tugging at Colette’s sleeve to attract her attention. “Did you hear that? The abbess called our lady’s new husband ‘Harry.’ How does a nun know the duke so well?”

  Colette’s black eyes held an amused glint. “That is a scandalous suggestion,” she chided, and Yolande blushed brightly.

  “I did not mean there was anything improper betwixt them!”

  Colette sighed. “I was but teasing you, child. The abbess is Lord Henry’s aunt, his father’s elder sister, so it is hardly surprising that she calls him ‘Harry.’ You do not know of her history, then? If not for a drunken helmsman and a hidden reef in Barfleur Harbor, she would have been Queen of England, for she’d been wed as a child to the English king’s only lawfully begotten son, the one who drowned in the wreck of the White Ship.”

  Although it had been more than thirty years since the sinking of the White Ship, its tragic fate continued to haunt the imagination, its story to find new audiences. Yolande might be ignorant of English politics, but she knew every one of the legends that had sprung up around the White Ship, and she stared after the abbess with avid curiosity. “Truly? How unlucky she was!”

  “Oh, I’d say she was very lucky, indeed, for she could have been on the White Ship, too. But fortunately for her, she’d sailed with the old king. Far better to be widowed than drowned, Yolande, even if it does mean forfeiting a crown!”