by Jean Gill
Estela did indeed know Aliénor, guessed at what de Rançon was too proud to say, that he’d been threatened with disgrace himself if he disobeyed. She imagined Aliénor’s rage and de Rançon being the nearest target. Mollified, she contented herself with, ‘Yes, I know Aliénor, and I can understand that you were under orders.’
‘I don’t understand what you mean as to the poppy. It’s a medicine. I thought he might need a calming potion for sleep after such bad news.’
Estela sighed. She herself had been just as innocent in the past, before hearing from a young Arab boy what the results of regular use would be, before witnessing those effects in Dragonetz, before fighting for his life - against Dragonetz himself.
She gave de Rançon a summary of the poppy’s dangers and asked him to give her his supply, so she could lock it away with the other poisons. Of course, he agreed, clearly impressed by her status as physician. The matter concluded to her satisfaction, Estela interrogated him about the news from the north.
‘So Aliénor has married Henri of Anjou.’
‘The King of England,’ corrected de Rançon, twinkling.
‘Do you think he will be? What manner of man is he? How does he compare with her last king?’
‘You’re worse than Barcelone and Etiennette combined!’ laughed de Rançon, fending off the battery of questions. ‘Primo, yes, I think he might get his wish - and live to regret it. Henri is fiery, a fighter with his own men and now all of Aquitaine to back him. Stephen’s star is fading. He cannot fight off Henri forever and the claim is good; he’s Stephen’s nephew, the Empress Mathilde’s son and strong in his own territories. He owns more Frankish land than King Louis does! So yes, I think we shall see Henri King of England and Aliénor Queen.’
He raised a second finger. ‘Secundus. He is as red-headed as she and there are sparks. It is a good political marriage but not a cold one. Becoming king is an obsession. He needs Aquitaine but he’s happy to have Aliénor too.’
He ticked off the third answer. ‘Tertio. Aliénor has more satisfaction of her new husband than her old.’ He glanced at Estela, teasing again. ‘But I can’t give you more details.’ She flushed. That wasn’t what she’d meant. Was it? ‘Whether she births another girl or gives him the boys they need, we’ll see.’
Boys, thought Estela. Plural. A man needs boys. Her insides twisted into a knot. ‘Aliénor has always wanted to be mother to a king,’ she said, ‘to rule through her son.’ A memory stirred, back in Narbonne, the Gyptian studying Aliénor’s cards, prophesying kings, a tower… Well, if de Rançon was right, Aliénor already had her second king lined up! Aliénor, married to Anjou.
Another thought jumped into her mind. ‘England might be more comfortable than Anjou,’ she observed. ‘Is it true that Aliénor was once closer to Henri’s father than is seemly?’
‘Swived him you mean?’ Accompanied by a dazzling smile, that filled his eyes, De Rançon’s crudity was amusing but also disconcerting.
‘Do tell,’ prompted a familiar voice.
‘Dragonetz,’ Estela stammered. ‘I was asking for news of Aliénor.’
‘And getting an interesting response, my love.’ Her lover stood, something of the goshawk in his pose as he loomed over the couple perched on the window-seat.
‘So serious, Dragonetz, and quite right too! Finding us snug in our little corner, looking like a pair courting, anybody would think I’d been kissing your irresistible lady.’ The very words tinged Estela’s cheeks with a memory that flitted into view, slight as a butterfly but brushing against Dragonetz as it flew. As surely as if he’d spoken, Estela saw him make the connection and realise that she had kissed de Rançon. Once, she told him silently. And you were so far away, for so long
‘And did she?’ he asked, patiently, just the slight tightening of his jaw telling someone who knew him well how angry he was.
De Rançon pursed his lips in comic judgement. ‘Possibly,’ he concluded, ‘though I’d wager more on the uncle in Antioch as a certainty. You know Aliénor.’
Dragonetz just nodded. He reached for Estela’s hand, kissed it and asked, ‘My Lady? When you have finished your gossiping, perhaps you would care to ride with me?’
Estela just nodded, the trace of lips burning her treacherous hand. She didn’t take in one further word spoken by de Rançon before she excused herself and donned her riding skirt.
This time, the ride was silent and their love-making fierce. Estela met her lover’s urgency with her own fire but when she lay in his arms afterwards, what she felt was guilt. That was when he asked her the question that was not a question. ‘He kissed you.’
She confessed into the black hairs of his chest, ‘No. I kissed him. Once. On the voyage to the Holy Land. He behaved as your friend should, with courtesy, and escorted me back to my cabin - the only cabin on the ship.’
‘Once is too often.’ His arm remained around her, steadier than his voice.
She said, ‘And you?’ They both knew what he had done in the Holy Land.
‘That’s different.’
Is it? she thought. And would it be different to marry the Lady of Les Baux? How far would ‘difference’ take a man? She rolled out of his arms and straightened her clothes.
‘I will sleep in my chamber tonight, keep Vertat with me,’ he told her. ‘I need to think.’
Instantly, her thoughts flew to a locked cupboard. He read her face. ‘No,’ he told her gently, taking both her hands in his. She could feel the musician’s calluses on his long, tapering fingers, as surely he could on hers. Twin souls. He wiped the tear that escaped her control. ‘No, I will not seek the poppy.’
‘I made de Rançon give me his store and it is locked away where you cannot reach it without robbing Malik’s dead body for the key.’ There had been a time he would not have hesitated to do so.
He smoothed her hair back from her face, putting the strands back under her coif. Then he cupped her chin, tilting her face up so she must meet his eyes. ‘You did well. It is hard for me not to kill him, you know.’ He ran his fingers over her mouth then kissed her. She knew he didn’t mean Malik. She had been right to hide Hugues’ assault from her lover. If he reacted this way to a kiss, what would he do if he knew his host had behaved with such discourtesy? For a moment, Estela weighed the power she held over Les Baux and Provence. But she was no Helen of Troy.
‘It was my fault,’ she repeated. ‘He did nothing wrong.’
‘Let him keep it that way,’ Dragonetz said, with Damascan steel in his tone.
‘Then you’ll come to me tonight?’
‘No.’ Still gentle. Most dangerous when gentle. ‘I do need to think. It has been a difficult couple of days.’ His tone lightened and he squeezed her. The first sign of play. ‘And you are most distracting, my love. When a man needs to plan his tactics for a tourney, a goshawk is a better aid in focusing the mind.’
‘Should I be jealous, my Lord?’
‘Never,’ he told her. ‘But make sure that I am not.’
When Estela found a posy of bright flowers on her bed, she knew all was well between her and Dragonetz, even if he kept his nights to himself. Like the smiling faces of young maids-in-waiting, the multi-coloured pansies gave her their message.
‘Thoughts,’ she mused aloud. ‘Thinking of you, bright colours, happy thoughts, heartsease.’ The hours spent in ladies’ company had not been wasted and she could speak the language of flowers as well as she could identify their medicinal properties.
Von Bingen had no use for pansies but Estela’s mother had made tisanes of the wild tricolour flowers to soothe coughing. A good choice from Dragonetz, she decided, and the flowers did indeed ease her aching heart. She was surprised he hadn’t chosen blue flowers, his colour, but otherwise the gesture was perfect.
She pinned one pansy to her gown, to show appreciation, and pulled the petals off all the others to use medicinally. She tied them into a square of muslin and took them to her dispensary, where she boiled some water and a
dded the muslin bag. She added some of her precious stock of sugar as sweetener.
Since Aliénor had brought sugar back from the Holy Land to Narbonne, Estela had taken to the white substance and often used it instead of honey. In fact, she liked sugar so much that she wondered whether it had qualities like the poppy and she was becoming an addict.
Her train of thought led her back to Dragonetz and his problems. Was he really as strong as he claimed? He’d survived all manner of horror in war and capture but his reputation had always been untarnished. Dragonetz ‘los Pros’, ‘the brave’. Did men now call him oath-breaker behind his back? Surely he must be wondering the same thing.
‘Mother Mary and all the saints!’ she swore as the pot frothed brown on the crucible. She grabbed a gauntlet stuffed with rags, that she kept for the purpose, and moved the pan onto the cold stone in the fireplace, where the mixture sizzled and spat.
Stirring with the wooden spoon and cursing her lack of attention, Estela watched the bubbles die back and the brew settle to a clear liquid. She lifted the spoon out of the goo and let the liquid drip back, drop by drop. Except it didn’t. They drops hung like tears, like dew, like pearls but they stuck to the spoon, dangling. All very interesting.
Estela put a spoonful onto a platter to let it cool quickly. Then she tasted it, briefly wondering what Dragonetz would say if she died during one of her chemical experiments.
‘It’s good! May I be turned into a scorpion for basil-sniffing if this isn’t the best tasting potion ever!’ Wondering how long the miracle would stay syrupy in consistency, and, if it did stay syrupy, how long such a product would keep, Estela started planning further experiments. She couldn’t wait to tell Malik.
This was a sign that she had made the right decision; she was meant to be an apothecary, maybe even an alchemist. The change of base metal to gold must be similar to what she had just seen; bubbles and magic.
Chapter 26
… there are some dirty and corrupt prostitutes who desire to seem to be more than virgins and they do make a constrictive for this purpose, but they are ill-counselled, for they render themselves bloody and they wound the penis of the man. They take powdered natron and place it in the vagina.
The Trotula, On Treatments for Women
Occasional storms had punctuated the summer heat for weeks but the heaviness never quite cleared. It was as if the pressure outside gathered inside her own head, thought Estela as she worked in her dispensary or practised her lute, far too busy for embroidery. She saw Dragonetz in passing, a glance, a fleeting touch. She could see how busy he was too, now that the date for the tourney was fixed, but he was never too busy to send her flowers, speaking in the language all lovers knew. Marguerites, with their delicate suggestion that she was ‘a pearl’ among women, had been followed by roses and more roses, passion and more passion. A promise.
Still a surprising lack of blue in his choices but no lack of fervour. Surely he would send a blue flower for her to wear at the tourney? If not, she could pin whatever it was with a blue ribbon. But would that seem ambivalent to others if she had a red rose and a blue ribbon. On tourney day of all days she wanted to wear her lover’s colours.
Not that she anticipated he would be in any real danger, with Malik and de Rançon to watch his back and do his bidding. He was too fine a commander to come to harm in play-fighting. There would probably be more damage to the men from heat-stroke in all that armour than from the mock-battle itself! But the body of soldiers needed blood-letting as much as did any human corps. Good health for the body politic would follow.
She thought of her own blood-letting and how effective it had been in calming the hot humours of the Lord of Les Baux. If only she could tell Dragonetz who’d inflicted Hugues’ irritating wound, the cause of all these delays in the tourney. She smiled to herself. Hugues was on the mend and if his pride still felt the prick, so much the better. The tourney would take place, Ramon would win Les Baux’s alliance if not allegiance and then Barcelone would return home, where Petronilla was in the last months of pregnancy.
Afterwards, the story would be worth singing and Estela was part of it, but she longed for home, for Musca and Nici. When Barcelone left Les Baux, Dragonetz would be free to leave too, for his mint project in Arle. Estela refused to consider the idea that he might choose to stay in Les Baux as its lord. Hugues was wrong and that was all there was to it. There was no reason why she and Dragonetz should not return home in a couple of weeks, he to his various projects and she to the baths at Ais, where she could make the most of her new chemical expertise.
In the meantime, she had her studies, her experiments and her singing. She had been too busy to see much of de Rançon but, when she had, she’d been mindful of Dragonetz’ feelings, however misguided they might be, and had steered conversation away from the most titillating gossip. He had accepted her lead and proved, as always, to be a paragon of chivalry in her company. It was normal to enjoy the company of an attractive man, she told some silent challenger, with a flare of irritation.
Perhaps in response to that inner voice, she had ducked de Rançon’s suggestion that they sing together and also changed her programme of songs. She’d prepared some of the northern ballads that Dragonetz loved so much, lays of King Arthur’s knights that had reached the court of Aquitaine by way of the Welsh bard, Bledri. She was proud of having acquired some of the original songs, as well as some Frankish versions, and she planned to surprise her lover with the new repertoire.
Gallant knights and beauteous ladies made for stories that touched the heart but somehow she didn’t think Dragonetz was in a humour for Lancelot and Guinevere, the perfect knight and his best friend’s wife. Estela was neither Helen of Troy nor Guinevere but she was a troubairitz with a certain reputation. Growing older and wiser merely seemed to constrain her subject matter beyond bearing! Frowning, she added an extra dose of sugar to the bubbling pot and noted the quantities. At least here, in her scientific domain, there were no people to consider!
She ignored the knock on the door at first but it was persistant, if not loud. The quickest method of making it go away was to answer. She sighed, yelled, ‘Wait a minute!’ at the door in a manner more suited to the apothecary than the lady. The mix of blackberries, water and sugar boiled and clotted to her satisfaction. She removed the pot from the heat and, red-faced from working, went to see if anybody was still standing at the door.
Patiently waiting on the other side, was a girl with long, black plaits, a demeanour that suggested she was a servant but clothes richer than such a station would allow. Estela sniffed. She knew what her mother would have said.
‘Come in,’ she said, ‘and don’t touch anything. I expect you have coughing fits or some such thing.’ Or the pox, she thought, wiping her hands on her sackcloth apron.
The girl flinched at such a brusque reception, eyeing Estela like a rabbit with a rabid fox.
‘I’m sorry. I was busy with my work.’ Estela wiped the sweat from her forehead and remembered that she’d tied another bit of sacking round her head, to protect her coif and hair. No doubt she had traces of soot on her face too. Sackcloth and ashes. She must look like a pilgrim on the last step of a thousand mile atonement for murder. She laughed.
‘What must I look like!’ She moved ‘Antidotarum Nicholai’ onto a clean flagstone and liberated a stool for the girl. ‘Sit yourself down and tell me all about it.’
Hesitant at first, the girl - Maria - opened up with more confidence as Estela prompted gently. She’d heard such stories a thousand times and however often she had to turn down the requests for love potions and abortificants, she felt that it helped girls like this just to unburden themselves. So she listened, waiting for the moment Maria said what she’d come for. Estela schooled her restless spirit to patience, to the observation Malik had taught her.
The patient’s eyes? Bright with clear whites, so healthy. Not over-bright, pupils not dilated so this was not a digitalis-user. Not unlike Estela’s in col
our but more hazel than golden. Black hair shiny and well-oiled. Skin the olive tones of the region, smooth but not always protected from browning, although the patterns of sunlight were faded. This was a girl who had only recently started to take care of her appearance.Her hands gave her away, as was always the case. Just as Estela’s said ‘lute-player’ so did Maria’s hands show manual work. In the past, no doubt. Perhaps even washing clothes. River-water and wringing clothes on stones, in all weathers, coarsened hands.
‘He has asked me to come to him and I have said I will, tomorrow night,’ Maria was saying. ‘I know he is too much above me for me to hope for marriage and yet, I think, if I please him enough, he might keep me by him as his mistress…’
‘So you want help in pleasing him enough?’ Estela helped her, awaiting the inevitable.
‘I know exactly how to please him,’ was the unexpected reply, ‘but it’s physically impossible.’ Estela ran through the many and varied sexual problems detailed by Trota, along with their cures, and waited.
‘I need to become a virgin.’
‘Ah,’ said Estela, not very sympathetically. ‘I take it you have lain with another.’ The situation was common enough as most men expected a maiden in bed on their wedding night and many men preferred virgin whores or the illusion thereof. Many a good marriage had been founded on reconstructed virginity and many a renowned whore had remained a professional virgin.
In her current humour, Estela was critical of all this hypocrisy. At least she could say she’d never tricked her lover, whatever her nagging conscience might say about enjoying dalliance. So she was not in the mood for indulging such a request.
‘It’s not as if you’re hoping for marriage,’ she said bluntly, ‘and if this noble lord expects a virgin to come to him when he snaps his fingers, he doesn’t seem very admirable to me! If he cares about you, then he should accept you as you are.’
