‘Admirable indeed.’
‘My wife loves scholars,’ Henry added with a smile.
Did I imagine that remark was sardonic, Eleanor asked herself. Her heart raced. I must appear to believe my husband flattered me. She nodded graciously to Henry, but his expression was serious, his mind had moved on.
‘We endow churches and shrines and abbeys everywhere. Don’t you think, brother, we should spend something on secular scholarship?’
‘I do,’ Prince William replied.
‘I do too. And when it pleases God to gather your father to heaven, if I’m fortunate enough to become King, I intend to ensure that we have an English academy that studies the Greeks and the new works on mathematics and geometry and Hippocrates and Galen. As well as canon law.’
‘You make me feel as if it’s my birthday, not yours.’ William turned and signalled to a servant.
Into the courtyard trotted an enormous black and white bull.
‘I love it!’ Henry yelled. ‘We need better bulls.’
The bull lowered its head and looked at him, breathing heavily, working itself towards snorting, and beginning to paw at the cobblestones. Eleanor clasped a hand against her heart. ‘This is ridiculous!’ she said. ‘It can escape from that groom in an instant.’
Henry lowered his own head and looked at the bull. He drew a circle in the air with his finger; a second larger circle; then a third. The beast began following the circles with its gaze. A few moments later Henry could scratch it between its horns.
‘Come, brother,’ he said to the Prince. ‘The bull has turned my wife the colour of parchment.’
It was a few days later that Henry invited Eleanor to join him in a flowering meadow not far from Caen. Since early morning they had been hawking together and had enough game for a dozen guests. ‘Let’s just you and I eat some roast pigeons here,’ he said.
He had lain with her rarely since his return from England, and sometimes she overheard him talking to Rachel. She knew he had the daily embraces of various young women, some of whom were former concubines. There was one called Celine, a mercenary’s daughter, who could fight with a short sword; sometimes Eleanor had glimpsed Henry and Celine at the back of Rouen Castle, fighting each other with baffled weapons.
This day she hoped from the tenderness in his voice he intended, after their dinner, that they should enjoy each other. Once they stretched out on the grass he felt for her hand. ‘You’ve been a triumph with the people,’ he remarked. ‘And with my new brother, William. He has never seen such a noble woman. None in England compares to you.’ But his tone contrasted with the pleasantness of his words.
She felt a stab of anxiety: out-of-doors, away from the ears that were everywhere inside buildings, was where he would choose, if that were his real intention, to confront her over baby William.
He took her in a rough embrace. ‘It’s been too long since you’ve been in my bed,’ he muttered. ‘My English relations and that infant have taken you away from me.’
A tremor of fear ran through her. Will he say more? ‘He’s not robust yet,’ she answered coolly. ‘He came early. But he’ll get stronger. I’ve devoted myself to that.’
Henry pulled away from her. ‘Yes, he came early. Unlike your children with Louis.’ His voice matched hers in coldness.
‘But they were daughters,’ she replied evenly. ‘Young dukes are much more headstrong. You cannot tell them when they should enter the world.’
He grunted. ‘I learn something new from you every day.’ Suddenly he stood. ‘It’s chilly, cousin. Let’s return indoors.’
Eleanor rode beside her husband in silence as they returned to the castle. I’m a vessel adrift in unknown seas with no one to turn to, she thought. In the depths lurks a reef that can shipwreck me.
Inside the palace Eleanor excused herself while Henry joined his new brother for a discussion of English politics that lengthened into the night.
It was another three months, and the height of summer, before Henry invited her to lie with him outdoors again. I must disarm him, she thought. It’s the only way I have to protect my son.
‘Cousin, your caresses are sweeter than honey,’ Henry murmured. ‘Why have you never loved me so tenderly before?’
‘You never gave me the chance.’
‘Now I demand it.’
Afterwards, she invented an excuse for returning to the south. There, in the midst of her noble female companions, servants, reeves, treasurers, vassals, banquets, visits from bishops, abbots and abbesses, her world seemed far removed from her companions and their mundane concerns. She lived in the world of Love. She wrote to her sister, ‘I feel no need for my husband, now I have my chou-chou. Of course, I do need Henry and I’ll have to return to normal life, but for these few weeks – perhaps months if I’m lucky – I live in a kind of heaven.’ She considered adding, ‘My husband is dangerously unpredictable. His temperament causes me to fear he may take a dislike to my son,’ but decided to omit this confession. Even in Aquitaine, she knew, Henry had already developed a network of spies.
From the summer afternoon spent with him in a meadow in Normandy, she was pregnant again. Each day her spirits veered between anxiety and excitement. ‘I have another child for you,’ she wrote to Henry. ‘Come at once!’ he wrote back. She travelled north to Rouen with baby William, an escort of Aquitaine knights, destriers, ladies in waiting, servants, falcons and hounds, arriving in late October at the ducal palace.
Her husband ran to the gatehouse to embrace her. The Empress, however, waited for her to step into the audience hall before offering any welcome. Matilda’s jewelled fingers held the small, plump hand of Henry’s bastard. She rose slowly to greet her daughter-in-law, doing so as formally as if they were at the court of the German Emperor.
Two can play games, Eleanor thought. ‘Darling!’ she cried, holding her arms open to little Geoffrey. He glanced up at his grandmother who released him to run to his stepmother’s embrace.
Standing behind Eleanor, a nurse rocked her chou-chou. Matilda moved forward to peer at the infant, her large, shrewd eyes speculative. ‘Very sweet,’ she murmured. ‘But such black hair.’
‘Like little Geoffrey’s,’ Eleanor replied calmly.
The Empress sighed. ‘Little Geoffrey’s mother was dazzlingly beautiful, although she was dark-skinned. She came from Outremer, you know.’
After this greeting, Matilda was too busy to breakfast, dine or take supper with her daughter-in-law. ‘The old sow,’ Eleanor confided to baby William. Her son squeezed his eyes shut in delight whenever his mother came near him. ‘She’s jealous of you. She wants the bastard to be Henry’s heir. But he won’t be, sweetheart. You will! Mama will defeat her.’
Five days later, less than a year after he had adopted Henry as his son and rightful heir, King Stephen died. Bells tolled in mourning. The cry went out the length and breadth of England: ‘The King is dead! Long live the King!’
In the palace of Rouen, the monarch-to-be closeted himself with his mother, discussing the protocols for assuming the English throne. Later that night, for the first time since Eleanor had arrived, Matilda joined her son and daughter-in-law for supper in the dining hall. She seated Henry’s bastard on her lap and ordered the rest of her children and step-children to where each was to sit. Even Isabella joined the festivity, seated as far as possible from Eleanor.
‘Where’s your baby?’ Matilda asked.
‘Asleep.’
‘I wanted another look at him – to show him to Isabella. Didn’t I, Henry?’
Henry inclined his handsome neck. ‘Indeed. I too have not seen much of him. He is always asleep, or being fed or bathed.’
You’ve avoided him with every imaginable excuse, Eleanor observed to herself. ‘My lord King – if I may address you so – once we’re in England you’ll see him much more.’
‘Good.’
Eyes of iron, she thought, as her husband and his mother exchanged glances.
With five
hundred knights the family sailed from Barfleur in early December for a coronation in Westminster Abbey twelve days later. Matilda, seated in the front row of the abbey, placed the bastard on her lap. She’d had fashioned for him a wooden crown, painted gold, with geometric shapes in the colours of gems.
Above the throng in the abbey, enthroned on a dais surrounded by clergy, Henry and Eleanor sat side by side, waiting for the ceremony to begin. The Duke of Normandy reached for his wife’s hand. ‘I’ve kept my side of our bargain, have I not?’ he asked.
She smiled at the glint in his eyes. ‘It’ll take a few years, but you’ll be the greatest king in Europe, Henry.’
‘Thank you, cousin.’ He gripped her hand. ‘And you’ll give me many sons. The House of Plantagenet will overwhelm the House of Capet with boys from your womb.’
Both looked at her belly of seven months. ‘It’s another prince. I know it,’ she declared.
Below them the Empress glanced along the row of seats reserved for members of the royal family. Next to Guillaume, an Aquitaine nurse rocked Eleanor’s small, dark-haired infant in her arms. Matilda’s glance flicked back up to her son and daughter-in-law on the dais, holding hands like lovers. He’s decided to give the harlot the benefit of doubt, she thought. It’s common sense. He can’t afford a scandal at the beginning of his reign. But I’ll make sure that cuckoo never becomes Crown Prince.
The man who would soon be king smiled at his wife. ‘A new day of hope dawns for England,’ he said. ‘I want my subjects to love you.’
Eleanor lowered her eyes to hide the triumph singing inside her. ‘Amen to that, dear husband,’ she replied.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Among the thrills of my childhood was the majestic boom of a bronze gong – a Chinese tam tam – announcing a J. Arthur Rank movie was about to begin. The gong’s sonorous voice, surging through the darkened cinema, seemed to roll out its doors, into the sky, perhaps to the constellations. Ever since, I’ve had a love of reverberating sounds – of chimes – whether literal or metaphorical. The story of The Young Lion, set more than eight hundred years ago, is for me the echo of a mighty gong whose vibrations resonate through centuries. Its background is the crusades; our lives are lived against the background of jihad. The novel’s personal issue is the powerlessness of women; outside the Western world, and inside much of it, female disempowerment is a cancer on the soul. In the twelfth century the position and behaviour of the Christian Church was a matter of contention; as it is today. Even the right of a woman to inherit the English throne if a younger male sibling than she were available has only this year, 2013, been settled. And twining through all these distant and immediate issues is the difficulty of relations between men and women in an age when we believe in romantic love: an invention – or a discovery – of the poets of twelfth-century France.
Just over a decade ago I heard the boom of an even mightier gong than J. Arthur Rank’s: the king of the Western world declaring in fury, ‘This is a crusade!’ I quaked because I recognised that a fateful drama, uncertain in its outcome, unknown in its consequences, was about to begin. The second crusade and the third crusade are the bookends, as it were, to Henry Plantagenet’s political life.
I’m grateful to many people for helping me change a knotted braid of imagination and research into this novel. First, Margaret Gee, my literary agent, who believed in its potential when the manuscript was still struggling to know its own name, at a time before the wonderful Hilary Mantel had been crowned with her second Man Booker. Back then agents and publishers threw up their hands at the mention of historical fiction. It was chick-lit in bonnets or hauberks, and certainly unsaleable. One senior publisher said my book would never fly because it was ‘not about ladies’ dresses’. Another refused to look at it because historical fiction ‘is just too hard’. Margaret had rejection after rejection. ‘Don’t underestimate my determination,’ she said. But finally she and I decided there was a problem with the book’s structure. She recommended Nadine Davidoff as a manuscript doctor. With some deft shuffling of scenes and two tiny cuts, Nadine restructured the narrative without changing any words. The first publisher who read it, Jeanne Ryckmans of HarperCollins, accepted it immediately. Jeanne saw The Young Lion to the last stages of editing by Mary Rennie, whom I frequently offered to murder before accepting what a meticulous editor she is. When Jeanne left to run a new publishing enterprise she handed the project to Catherine Milne, who, with perfect generosity and sensitivity, oversaw a final polish.
Besides these five women I owe a special debt to John Lonie who read initial drafts with the tact, patience, kindness and erudition for which his friends treasure him. The staff of many libraries, too numerous to mention by name, assisted my research. One librarian in Sydney found in Western Australia the collected works in French and English of troubadour songs written by Eleanor’s father, the Duke of Aquitaine.
When I began research in France I was fascinated by how differently French historians viewed Henry from their Anglophone colleagues. They had personal glimpses of the man one cannot find in English books. I’m much indebted to the help of two women in France, historians Deborah Anthony and Odile Caffin-Carcy, who travelled with me and turned up numerous books unavailable in English. They translated as we tootled through the Norman, Maine and Aquitaine countryside, staying outside cities, in the least modern accommodation we could find, observing the land as it may have looked centuries earlier.
In the twelfth century land and horses were the basis of wealth. I needed to learn about horses. My friends John and Kris Messara had me as a guest at their thoroughbred stud, Arrowfield in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, where I waited, freezing in the dark before dawn, to watch foals born and, at more civilised hours, conceived. Staff at Arrowfield provided a trove of information about the mysteries of horses, especially that they communicate in an unknown, apparently silent, language. Another friend, Frenchwoman Julie Bechu, has a special equine affinity that she uses to help humans with problems. She provided more horse lore and translated for me French historical and geographical articles.
Finally I thank my husband, Bob Hawke, for his enthusiastic encouragement. He accepted without demur that I would not go out on school nights in case sociability interfered with the next day’s writing. He went solo to the many functions in Australia and overseas to which we were both invited. His support and matchless love have been a blessing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Blanche d’Alpuget is an acclaimed novelist, biographer and essayist. She has won numerous literary awards, including the inaugural Australasian Prize for Commonwealth Literature in 1987. Her books include Mediator: A biography of Sir Richard Kirby (1977); Monkeys in the Dark (1980), which won the PEN Jubilee Award; Turtle Beach (1981), which won The Age Novel of the Year Award and the South Australian Premier’s Award; Robert J. Hawke: A biography (1982) which won the New South Wales Premier’s Award in; Winter in Jerusalem (1986); and White Eye (1993). She has twice won the Braille Book of the Year award, and her book Turtle Beach was made into a feature film in 1992 featuring Greta Scacchi and Jack Thompson. All her novels have been translated into other languages.
COPYRIGHT
HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2013
This edition published in 2013
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Blanche d’Alpuget 2013
The right of Blanche d’Alpuget to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
d’Alpuget, Blanche, 1944-
The young lion / Blanche d’Alpuget.
ISBN: 978 0 7322 9669 8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978 1 7430 9874 5 (epub)
A823.3
Cover design by Jane Waterhouse
Cover images: Knight by Diana Hirsch/Getty Images; all other images by shutterstock.com
Author photograph by Kathy Luu
The Young Lion Page 43
