The Spirit and the Flesh

by Boyd, Douglas

  Eleanor was on her knees, praying beside the late king’s chaplain at the foot of the waggon on which lay Richard’s coffin. Her eyes took in William’s arrival without pausing in the litany. With a nod, she bid him refresh himself from the wine and meat laid out on a folding travelling table.

  The sentry outside the queen’s quarters edged closer to the billowing curtain, the better to listen to the murmur of praying within. His hopes of gleaning any news to sell to Mercadier were dashed by the noisy arrival of a hard-riding cavalcade. The outer sentries challenged the new arrivals and were brushed aside. As they rode into the small lit area in the centre of the encampment, the first rider to dismount revealed herself to be a woman in a temper.

  Eleanor’s sentry was prudent enough not to attempt to bar her way; the Princess Joanna was notorious for sharing her mother’s temperament. She strode past him and confronted the kneeling queen inside. Their first words were lost to the sentry’s ears as William the Marshal came out, a chicken carcase in his hand.

  He adjusted the curtain and ordered the man curtly, ‘Be off with you and get some sleep.’

  ‘But I’ve another hour of duty.’

  ‘You’ve been relieved,’ said the knight.

  William watched the man rejoin a group of his comrades trying to get comfortable in their sodden clothes around a smoky fire that refused to give much heat. The rain had eased off and clouds scudded through the night sky. Mercadier, who seemed never to sleep, appeared from nowhere and squatted beside the sentry who had been relieved, plying him with questions and keeping a wary eye on William.

  Behind the canvas, both women’s voices were raised in anger. William listened and thought: What passion! Passion was the first word that came to mind when thinking of Eleanor and her children. They were always either loving each other excessively or fighting each other, on occasion to someone’s death.

  He shifted his position. As an old campaigner, he knew better than to lie or even stand still while soaked to the skin. He stamped his feet and blew into his cupped hands, hoping for fine weather on the morrow; there were streams a-plenty to ford on the route to Fontevraud where Richard’s funeral was to take place. The queen was insisting on travelling at the speed of the wagon which bore the king’s coffin, despite William’s argument in favour of speed. She knew as well as he that in the days after a king’s death, any kingdom was at risk; the sooner they got Richard’s testament back to Fontevraud, or better still, within the walls of Chinon Castle, the safer the realm would be. But would she listen? Not Eleanor. The most she had conceded was to send William ahead to summon reinforcements from Chinon which should arrive before daybreak.

  He sighed with fatigue. When this was all over and Richard’s body laid to rest at Fontevraud, he decided that he would ask Eleanor’s permission to leave her service and return to his wife and family, still living on the other side of the Channel in Salisbury. There life was, if not safe, at least calm by comparison with the perpetual turmoil of the Plantagenet court.

  Inside the caldarium, mother and daughter railed at each other like a pair of fishwives. William shut his ears and stamped up and down to get warm. What was it about the Plantagenets, he wondered, that made them fight all the time and band together only when some outsider offered himself as prey to their violent natures? Henry II had been a grandson of William the Conqueror, with all the arrogant love of power that typified a warlord descended from the Vikings. But he had been a statesman and a law-giver too, talents which Richard had not inherited.

  In the coffin, thought William, lay a man ruined by his mother. Brave, skilled in all the arts of war, but greedy … oh, so insatiably greedy. As king, Richard had only ever visited his domains north of the Channel twice, yet had managed to bleed the once-rich realm of England almost dry of taxable wealth. And now his plunder was all gone, squandered on ill-advised campaigns, a failed Crusade, and lastly his inflated ransom, half of which was still unpaid. Hostages or their substitutes still languished in Austria and would forever, as far as William could see. There was no possibility of all the money being paid, which was their only hope of release. It was, he reflected, a tragedy for the realm that Richard had ever been ransomed.

  But Eleanor …

  Despite his weariness, the sound of her voice brought a smile to William’s face. One minute she was cajoling and persuading Joanna, the next attacking her with a stream of accusations and abuse that would have crushed any other opponent flat.

  Yes, Eleanor was of them all the greatest, the one who commanded by sheer stature the service which the others had to claim by virtue of their rank. This woman who had presided over the Courts of Love, where poetry and music held sway, had infatuated William with her beauty on the first day he set eyes on her. And he had been true to her, in the sense of courtly fidelity, even throughout the years when Henry’s savage sense of irony had made him her captor. The feat of youthful valour which had won young William his spurs had been only the first offering on the altar of his love for Eleanor. He would have laid down his life on a command from the queen without a single regret. That she had tested his loyalty and tarnished his affection over the years he forgave her willingly, for what idol could be worshipped as close as he had been to her without the worshipper seeing from time to time the base metal that lay beneath the gilding?

  There was a smile on William’s face as he listened to the queen’s voice now.

  ‘We are in vigil, daughter mine. I remind you of that.’

  ‘I need no reminding that Richard’s dead.’ Joanna, taller than her aging mother, glared across the farm cart, on which lay the king’s body in a crudely fashioned coffin.

  In the faint, flickering light, the two women faced each other warily like a pair of gladiators each seeking an opening in the other’s defences. Their bodies were hidden in voluminous mud-spattered travelling clothes of dull coloured fustian which merged with the gloom and their faces were framed by wimples so that they appeared to float in mid-air. In the shadows the late king’s chaplain, Milo, was praying at his improvised altar, doing his best to ignore the women. Two huge elk hounds stood guard at Eleanor’s feet, snarling at Joanna when she raised her voice.

  The first of Richard’s siblings to reach Châlus, she had been furious to learn from Mercadier’s rearguard that Pierre Basile had been killed. Her subsequent search of the castle and surrounding lands had confirmed what she was told: that, if treasure there had been, it was gone. Joanna had then departed in furious pursuit of Eleanor’s retinue, reported to be heading northwards with a heavily laden waggon.

  She accused the queen now of stealing and spiriting away the gold which should by rights be hers: ‘For I’m the only woman that Richard ever loved,’ she shouted.

  The arrogant voice echoed off the ancient brickwork and peeling frescoes of the vault: loved, loved, loved …

  ‘He never loved you,’ she screamed at the queen. ‘You nagged him and bribed him and manipulated him from the day he could talk, but Richard never loved you. He told me so.’

  ‘You’re an unnatural creature,’ Eleanor hurled back at her daughter. ‘What the two of you did, when you enticed him to your bed, is forbidden by the Church. D’you know the name for women who lie with their brothers?’

  The priest crossed himself and kept his eyes closed, lips moving in prayer. The two huge dogs slunk away into the shadows, whining.

  ‘And what did he lie with after me?’ sneered Princess Joanna. ‘With pretty, red-lipped, rosy-cheeked boys, that’s what!’ She came close to the kneeling priest and thrust her belly at his startled face in a crude pantomime of fellatio. ‘I recall that when you took Berengaria to Cyprus, mother mine, your ship stopped in Sicily to re-provision and I met that poor bewildered princess you were dragging to my brother’s bed. She was terrified, not for herself, but that he wouldn’t be able to get it up! And he never could, could he, poor Richard? It’s thanks to you that I was the only female with whom he could be a man.’

  ‘I beg you, m
adam,’ the priest remonstrated. ‘This is the house of God, for we are in presence of the Host.’

  ‘Still your tongue, Chaplain!’ snapped Joanna.

  ‘No, you still your harlot’s tongue!’ Eleanor’s eyes flashed in anger. ‘Keep praying,’ she ordered the priest. And to Joanna: ‘I at least am in mourning. I was the late king’s mother, after all.’

  Joanna laughed scathingly. ‘What kind of mother were you? As children we never saw you for years on end, until you wanted something. To marry me to an old man with the pox. To persuade Geoffrey and Richard to take arms against John and their father. Or John and Richard to attack Geoffrey, whichever it was. Mother? You don’t know what the word means.’

  ‘Well, you soon will.’ Eleanor lowered her voice. There was a sly smile on her face. ‘Your belly’s getting bigger by the day. And where will you find a father for this bastard, tell me that?’

  ‘In there.’ Joanna tapped the coffin between them.

  Eleanor was warily silent as her daughter came round the ox-cart chassis on which the coffin lay, and knelt on the beast-fouled earth floor to look up into the queen’s face, clutching her hands in a mockery of supplication.

  She’s clever, thought the queen, this daughter of mine.

  ‘And if I tell the world that it was Richard’s seed,’ Joanna hissed, ‘what would you say to that, O mother mine? For there’s enough that know it could be true. And he, poor sodomite, cannot deny it now. My brother, the king, is dead. Do you hear me, Mother? Your favourite’s dead.’

  She taunted the old woman again: ‘Richard’s dead and I’m alive. If John gets the throne, I want the gold. That’s fair. One way or another, the gold I’ll have.’

  ‘You are an ingrate,’ said Eleanor wearily. ‘If it weren’t for my diplomacy, bullying the Pope himself on your behalf, you would at this moment be rotting in one of your ex-husband’s dungeons on Sicily while he rutted with his new bride above your head. The least you can do is leave me in peace with my son’s body.’

  Joanna’s gaze fell on the coffin. ‘Is it the body you want to be close to?’ she asked quietly. ‘Or is it whatever else is in here?’ She pushed aside the kneeling priest who lost his balance and fell into the mire. He watched scandalised as Joanna grabbed the crucifix in front of which he had been praying. Using it as a lever, she defied his protests and forced the cover off the coffin, to find herself staring not at a pile of gold but at Richard’s bloated, stinking, discoloured corpse.

  Eleanor said nothing. She put out an arm to hold back the priest. ‘Leave the demented bitch alone, Milo,’ she said coldly. ‘If she holds that cross long enough, it’ll burn her sacrilegious hands off.’

  Joanna prowled around the coffin, like a cat after a mouse. As a last gesture, watched by the priest and her silent mother, she lifted the dead king’s arms and legs, one by one, to make sure Eleanor had not hidden anything among the wraps.

  ‘If you must know,’ said Eleanor dispiritedly, ‘the boy Pierre Basile died before he spoke. You can thank Mercadier’s brutes for that. They went too far. And even if the gold were here, it would legally be John’s property now, since he has inherited the crown and all that goes with it.’ Her gaze went to the small iron-bound chest which Milo had been using as an altar. Inside it reposed Richard’s testament, dictated by Eleanor, written by Milo and signed by the dying king: the testament that made John King of England.

  ‘I want to see the will,’ demanded Joanna.

  ‘No doubt, but you won’t.’ Eleanor knew how to inject finality into the simplest phrase. ‘You’ve insulted a queen and your mother, betrayed a king and a brother, and blasphemed against God as well. I nearly forgot that small detail. It’s enough for one night, even for a daughter of mine, I should have thought. So go now and find some rest. Someone has to pray for Richard’s soul. Leave that to me, for I sleep but little at my age.’

  With a typical Plantagenet about-face, Joanna thrust the crucifix into Milo’s hands and ordered him to bless her. He stammered and recoiled, muttering about Confession first.

  ‘I’ll bless you,’ said Eleanor. ‘Come to me.’ She embraced her daughter.

  ‘Forgive me?’ Joanna whispered.

  ‘Of course,’ said the queen. ‘You’re Henry’s daughter. You have his temper, that’s all. I understand.’

  When she was sure Joanna had gone and would not return, she stopped praying and sighed.

  ‘My sons, my daughters,’ she complained to the priest beside her, ‘have bickered and squabbled since they were weaned from the wet-nurse’s breast. Why did God curse me with such a troublesome brood?’

  Milo was reluctant to leave her alone. He pointed to the Roman frescoes, repeating the current belief that the baths had been the work of giants and ghosts, in whose pagan company no Christian queen should be left alone. Eleanor laughed at his pious entreaties. ‘The fear of ghosts may be enough to keep the common people away from these ruins, Clerk Milo, but for me cross and candle are sufficient protection against any spirits. Now leave me, Chaplain. I would weep and pray alone.’

  Alone, her tears were swiftly dried. After a few minutes she came to the curtain and pulled William inside. ‘Help me,’ she ordered him in a low voice, ‘to lift the king’s body. Now is the moment to lighten the wagon’s load by half.’

  William took a careful look around the sleeping encampment before slipping inside the drapes. He crossed himself and stooped to lift the dead weight of the king’s stinking body out of the coffin in one movement.

  Renowned for her ability to cope with not two but several conflicting ideas at the same time, Eleanor ignored the bloated corpse that William was laying on the filthy floor.

  ‘Come,’ she said, pulling at the loose panel on which the corpse had been lying. ‘We must hurry.’

  Chapter 10

  ‘Wake up!’ Merlin shook Leila’s shoulder. She turned over in the bed and shielded her eyes from the light.

  ‘I need a cigarette,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Three a.m. or thereabouts.’

  ‘And you wake me up for a smoke?’

  ‘I had a prowl around downstairs to see if there was a cigarette machine, but there isn’t.’

  ‘Help yourself.’ Leila pulled the sheet up, complaining, ‘I only got to bed an hour ago.’

  Merlin took a deep inhalation. ‘You stayed up that late, talking with those two reps?’

  Leila handed the cigarette back and shook her head.

  ‘The rain’s stopped,’ he said.

  ‘Good of you to wake me,’ she yawned. ‘I’d never have known otherwise.’

  Merlin hesitated. Lying awake in the next room after the dream, everything had seemed clear, the choice of action simple. Now his head was full of a confusion of images: a furious princess, a dead king and the oh-so clever queen. Eleanor … Jay … the veiled woman … and back to Eleanor. The images blurred and reformed.

  Putting his thoughts into words for Leila was like trying to justify a midnight hunch to a sceptical news editor in the middle of a crowded newsroom next day. Now, the strands of tangled coincidences seemed to be no more than a nebulous tissue of gossamer, woven together by the fragile stuff of dreams. He decided to say nothing to Leila about the dream.

  ‘They’re not reps,’ said Leila. ‘Those two guys downstairs. The older one I really fell for. His name’s Salem. He couldn’t take his eyes off me all night.’

  ‘That’s a good French name, Salem.’

  ‘He’s from Beirut. Something to do with the hotel business …’

  Another coincidence? Merlin started. Of all the cities in the world, why should a man from Beirut show up now? ‘What’s his other name?’

  ‘He did tell me. Hang on. It’s something like thank you in Arabic, you know: shoukran.’

  ‘Chakrouty?’ Merlin guessed.

  ‘That’s it.’

  It was more than a coincidence. ‘I used to stay in their hotel years ago,’ Merlin muttered.


  She wanted to know where Salem had come from. Merlin shrugged. ‘What’s Beirut like? It’s a pile of rubble now. The old man was a nice guy. He died a while back. I don’t think I ever met the sons. So what’s a Chakrouty doing in a one-horse town like this in the middle of France?’

  ‘Some complicated business deal. I couldn’t work it out.’

  ‘Has to be drugs or arms.’

  ‘Not Salem. Now Pierre, yes. I can believe that of him.’

  ‘Pierre is the younger guy?’

  ‘Yup. He says he’s French, but I think he’s Lebanese too. I heard them talking Arabic through the ventilation duct in the gents’ washroom.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Well, I’m not at my most lucid when woken in the middle of the night, Merlin old boy, but I was going to tell you in the morning anyway. Pierre – the younger one – went off somewhere on his own quite early. He came back a couple of hours later and looked pretty angry to find that Salem and I were still talking. He grabbed Salem in mid-sentence and hustled him into the men’s toilet. My Arabic’s zilch but from what I could make out, Pierre was giving Salem orders to lay off me. From the tone of voice, he was pretty bossy about it.’

  Despite everything on his mind, Merlin had to smile: Leila’s tangled webs had no ghosts in them, just one lover crowding another. ‘So maybe Pierre fancies you too?’ he suggested.

  Leila shuddered and pulled the sheet up. ‘I’d run a mile. You’ve seen those eyes of his, Merl? That is a man who does not like women, period. He’s a killer,’ she shuddered again. ‘A hood, for sure.’

  Merlin laughed outright. ‘This is surreal. If Shakespeare’s right and all the world’s a stage, we have the dramatis personae of all time.’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘A former war criminal has kidnapped a beautiful girl. Her friends can’t go to the police because the real criminal has been dead for eight hundred years and they wouldn’t believe us. I’m cast as Hercule Poirot and fluffing all my lines so far. You’re the statutory beautiful nymphomaniac.’