When Christ and His Saints Slept

by Sharon Kay Penman

  The chamber was dimmed, for the candles had begun to hurt her eyes. Stephen was clutching her hand, lacing her limp fingers through his, his grip so tight that her wedding ring was pinching her flesh. Constance was weeping again, crumpled in the window seat. Matilda ached for her, the daughter by marriage who’d become as dear as her daughters by birth. Will was swiping at his face with his sleeve, her fledgling, her secret favorite. And Eustace…half hidden in the shadows, ashamed to let anyone—even his stricken family—see his tears.

  At sound of a woman’s step, her lashes fluttered, but it was Cecily again. Stephen kept insisting that Mary was on her way, likely to arrive at any moment, and she’d clung to his assurances with all the forgiveness and faith of the love she’d so long ago pledged to him. But this was to be one promise he could not keep. Mary would be too late.

  “Stephen…” Not even a whisper in her own ears, but he somehow heard her and leaned over, vivid blue eyes of their lost youth, awash now in tears. “Look after Constance…” But who would look after him? Surely the Almighty would, for even his worst mistakes were well intentioned. Did this too-clever son of Maude’s have such a good heart? No…God would judge what mattered most.

  Stephen was kissing her hand, pressing it against his wet cheek. His beard was grizzled with silver, like an early frost. How old he seemed of a sudden. She wanted to tell him one last time that she loved him, to promise that she’d be waiting for him at Heaven’s Gate. But she could not catch her breath. She closed her eyes and when she opened them again, the room was filling with light. She could hear sobbing, but it seemed to be coming from a great distance. It grew more and more faint, until at last she could not hear it at all.

  MATILDA died on Saturday, May 3rd, 1152, in her forty-seventh year. Her body was taken with royal ceremony to Faversham, Kent, and buried before the High Altar in the church of St Saviour’s, the Cluniac abbey she and Stephen had founded four brief years before.

  THE church was very quiet. Cupping his candle, the young monk slipped around the roodscreen, into the choir. The white marble of the queen’s sepulchre glimmered in the shadows. As he drew near, he saw that someone had laid a yellow primrose upon the tomb. He was not surprised by the floral offering, for all at St Saviour’s were in mourning for their queen. She’d spent as much time as she could spare at the abbey, finding within its cloistered walls the peace that was so elusive in the rest of her husband’s realm. She’d been extremely generous with the monks, and they in turn had given her their wholehearted devotion. Brother Leonard knew that he was not the only one of his brethren who’d loved the queen.

  The funeral had been over for hours, but there had been too much pain in this church for it to have faded away so soon. It seemed to echo in the stillness, the way the smell of smoke lingered even after a fire had been doused. Brother Leonard knew he was being fanciful, but he could not help himself. The faces of the queen’s loved ones still haunted him, for never had he seen a family so desolated, so overwhelmed by their loss.

  The king had done all that was expected of him, accepting condolences, keeping watch over his daughter-in-law and stunned daughter, but his eyes were glazed, his shoulders bowed. He’d buried his heart with his wife, and all who looked upon him knew it. The queen’s younger son had wept openly throughout the service, as had his Warenne child-wife and most of the mourners. The Lady Constance had almost fainted as they first entered the church, and although she’d insisted upon remaining, there were times when Stephen’s encircling arm seemed all that was keeping her on her feet.

  Brother Leonard gently fingered the stem of the primrose, wishing he’d thought to bring flowers, too. He’d remedy that on the morrow. The primrose was freshly plucked, for it had not yet begun to wilt. Despite his best intentions, he found himself thinking of another flower, the Lady Mary. Never had he seen a prioress who looked remotely like Mary. She was just shy of sixteen, and under other circumstances, the dramatic Benedictine black of her habit would have set off her fairness to perfection. But on the day of her mother’s funeral, she was a lost waif, berating herself to anyone who’d listen for not getting to Hedingham Castle in time to bid her mother farewell. It shamed Brother Leonard that he’d been most affected by Mary’s grieving, for he feared that his sympathy was suspect, unduly influenced by her youth and beauty.

  The queen had often teased him that his conscience was too tender. Remembering that now, his eyes blurred with sudden tears. What would she say if she’d known he’d cast admiring glances at her nun daughter? Most likely she’d have understood, for he’d never known anyone as forgiving…as good. How could she and the king have ever bred a son like the Count of Boulogne?

  And yet…and yet he’d found himself pitying Eustace, too, at the funeral. Standing apart from the others, keeping his face averted so none could notice his swollen, red-rimmed eyes, he’d looked so reclusive in his grief, so utterly alone that Brother Leonard could not help hurting for him. He was all too familiar with the queen’s temperamental son, for twice Eustace had come to Faversham at his mother’s behest, but never before had he noticed how solitary Eustace seemed. He could recognize loneliness easier than most. For much of his life, he’d been an outsider, never having a sense of belonging until fate and the queen had brought him to Faversham. At first it seemed foolish, indeed, to compare himself—an outcast orphan of low birth—with the King of England’s son and heir, and Eustace had soon forfeited his sympathy by turning upon his weeping wife, rebuking her for making a spectacle of her grief. But when he thought about the funeral later, it was Eustace’s isolation that the monk would remember, his inability to end his self-imposed exile even on the day of his mother’s funeral.

  Letting the flower drop back onto the tomb, Brother Leonard said softly, “Ah, my lady, how will we ever learn to abide your loss?” Crossing to the High Altar, he knelt and began to pray for Matilda’s soul, although he was confident that if ever there was one judged worthy of passing straight through Purgatory into Heaven, it would be the queen. He was still on his knees when he heard the voices in the nave.

  “Do you wish me to go with you, my lord?”

  “No, I’d have you await me out here.”

  Brother Leonard scrambled to his feet, for he’d recognized the second voice, a low guttural growl that still evoked distinctive echoes of his native Flanders. He heard the tapping now of a cane against the tiles, and was tempted to duck out before William de Ypres became aware of his presence. But he hesitated too long. The cane halted its sweep, and the Fleming said challengingly, “Who is there?”

  “It is me, my lord…one of the monks.” Although Ypres had always treated him with a gruff, offhand courtesy, Brother Leonard was never fully at ease in his company. The Fleming had been the queen’s closest ally; between them, they’d managed to keep Stephen and the Archbishop of Canterbury from a final and irrevocable split, patching up one peace after another as the need arose. But Brother Leonard was not ignorant of Ypres’s lurid past. Monks liked to gossip, too, and he’d heard all the stories, knew that until Ypres had begun to lose his sight, he’d been one of the king’s most brilliant and brutal mercenary captains. Reason told him that the man was no longer dangerous, for he was in his sixties, an age as vast as Methuselah’s to the twenty-year-old monk, and he was utterly blind in one eye, going blind in the other. But whenever he gazed into those oddly opaque eyes, Brother Leonard felt as if he were looking at an aged wolf, fangs worn down, but by no means harmless.

  “Brother…Leonard, is it not?”

  “Yes, my lord, it is.” Surprised and rather flattered that the Fleming remembered him so readily, he gestured toward the queen’s tomb. “I was saying a prayer for my lady. I…I owed her so much. I was hired to help out in the infirmary, and when the queen learned of my desire to serve God, she persuaded Abbot Clarembald to accept me as a novice, even though I was of humble birth and without two coins to rub together. And when it was time for me to take my vows, she came down from London to bear wi
tness. She did all that for me,” he said wonderingly, “and got nothing in return. But as long as I have breath, she’ll have my prayers.”

  “You’re wrong, lad. It gave her great pleasure that she’d been able to guide you ‘onto the road to Heaven,’ as she liked to say.” Ypres’s smile was both wry and weary. “She talked of you often, you and all her other lost lambs.”

  Without warning, tears flooded the young monk’s eyes. “I know it is not for a poor wretch like me to question the Ways of Almighty God, but…but why did He have to take her now, when we still needed her so much?”

  The Fleming reached out, resting the palm of his hand against the cold, unyielding marble of Matilda’s tomb. “If you truly loved her, lad,” he said, “be grateful that He did take her now.”

  51

  Poitiers, Poitou

  May 1152

  PETRONILLA found Eleanor up on the battlements of the palace keep. The sky was streaking and the Rivers Clain and Boivre curved around the city like flowing ribbons of gold, but the light had yet to fade. Following Eleanor’s gaze toward the north, Petronilla saw what had drawn her eyes: a small band of fast-riding horsemen, leaving a trail of dust in their wake as they approached the Pont de Rochereuil. “Eleanor…you think that is Harry?”

  Eleanor nodded. “He said he’d be arriving on Whitsunday Eve, late in the day, between Vespers and Compline.”

  “Yes, but surely he’d have a more impressive escort than that?”

  “Jesú forfend,” Eleanor said emphatically. “The last thing we want is to attract attention ere we’re safely wed. He said he’d bring just enough men to fend off robbers, traveling as inconspicuously as possible.” She kept her eyes intently upon those distant riders, who were now passing the abbey of St Jean de Montierneuf. “Although I doubt that he’d have brought a large retinue in any event. He does not seem to care much for pomp and ceremony.”

  “A son of the Empress Maude? If that is so, he must be a changeling!” When Eleanor failed even to acknowledge the jest, Petronilla subjected her sister to a closer scrutiny. “Eleanor…are you having misgivings?”

  “Not about the man, Petra. But the marriage…yes, a few misgivings.”

  Petronilla was not taken totally by surprise, for she’d noticed that Eleanor had become more and more preoccupied and pensive as her wedding day drew near. “Why?”

  Eleanor was quiet for a few moments. “I suppose,” she said, “because of the past two months, two months in which I was accountable to no man for what I did or what I wanted. I’ve never had freedom like that before, and I found it a sweet taste, indeed…”

  “But what good is freedom without security, Eleanor? You need a man to protect Aquitaine from the French Crown and to protect you from those hordes of would-be husbands, eager to share your domains with you, whether you willed it or not.”

  “You need not fret, Petra. I am not about to leave Harry at the altar. You are right—I do need a man for the very practical reasons you’ve just argued. And for reasons you did not mention. I want more children. I want a man in my bed again, one who has more in mind than prayer. And I want a crown, I’ll not deny it. All of which I’ve a good chance of getting from Harry.”

  Sure now that it was indeed her future husband who was entering her city, Eleanor moved away from the battlements, for she wanted to be below in the great hall to greet him upon his arrival. “I just wish,” she said, with a skepticism that held an oddly wistful note, too, “that the balance of power in a marriage was not tilted so much in the man’s favor.”

  HENRY could not seem to get comfortable in the bed. For the tenth time, he repositioned his pillow. When he flung the sheets back, he soon felt chilled, but when he drew the covers up, he was too hot. By his increasingly exasperated reckoning, it was well past midnight. This sleepless night before his wedding was shaping up to be the longest one of his entire life.

  In less than twelve hours, he and Eleanor were to be wed in the cathedral of St Pierre. She’d made all the arrangements, leaving him nothing to do but show up. He could see the sense in it, for Poitiers was her capital city. He just wasn’t accustomed to being a bystander, marching to a drumbeat not his own.

  Their wedding was to be a simple affair, not at all the sort of lavish royal spectacle that would normally have attended the marriage of a Duke of Normandy and a Duchess of Aquitaine, a onetime queen and a would-be king. Henry remembered hearing that when Eleanor and the French king wed, the revelries had lasted for three full days. But for them, there would be nothing so extravagant or elaborate, just a wedding supper after the church ceremony, for had they invited all their vassals to celebrate their wedding, as would be customary, they’d have risked having their nuptials interrupted by an invading French army.

  Henry hoped that Eleanor did not feel cheated. Mayhap one royal wedding in a woman’s lifetime was enough for her. For himself, he did not care. He’d always been more interested in where he was going than in how he got there. And even if he’d been one to enjoy such prolonged and high-flown festivities, not here, not now, not in this company for certes.

  Eleanor had summoned a few of her most eminent vassals to bear witness to her wedding, those men too devoted or too proud to learn of her marriage after-the-fact. Geoffrey de Rancon, Lord of Taillebourg. Saldebreuil de Sanzay, formerly Eleanor’s constable, newly named as her seneschal. The lords of Lusignan and Thourars. The Count of Angoulême. They’d not liked Eleanor’s first marriage to the French king, and it soon became obvious to Henry that they were not enthusiastic about her second match, either. Their courtesy was cold enough to threaten frostbite, and they watched him as warily as sheepdogs protecting their flocks from a marauding Angevin wolf.

  Henry was surprised neither by their suspicions nor by their audacity, for these southern barons were known for their recalcitrance and prickly independence. While they were celebrated for their generosity and humor and joyful zest for life, their conviction that Aquitaine was Eden and they God’s Chosen People had given them a sense of moral superiority that their neighbors often found intolerable.

  It had been Geoffrey’s acerbic opinion that the Aquitanians were an ungovernable lot, ready to rebel at any pretext, not in the least awed by authority, as quick to quarrel as they were to laugh. How much of his father’s caustic appraisal was true, Henry had yet to judge. He did not doubt, though, that Eleanor’s vassals would gladly give him as much grief as they’d given Louis—if he let them.

  But if he’d anticipated some initial resistance from Eleanor’s barons, he’d not expected trouble from her family. In addition to her sister, she’d invited her maternal uncles, Hugh de Châtellerault and Raoul de Faye, and her illegitimate half-brothers, William and Joscelin, and from them he’d gotten something he’d never encountered before and was utterly unprepared for—condescension.

  Shoving his pillow back against the headboard, Henry found himself remembering a story Ranulf had once told, of a man supposedly shot by his own arrow when it ricocheted off a tree. He hadn’t believed it then—or now—but he did feel as if his surprise for Eleanor had somehow rebounded upon him, too. Thinking that his bride would surely be pleased to discover on her wedding night that he could speak her native tongue, he’d made an effort to learn the dialect of the South known as langue d’oc, or Provençal. As he’d always had a good ear for languages, he’d soon picked up enough to impress Eleanor—and also to understand the smug conversational currents flowing around him.

  Unlike her barons, Eleanor’s kin had welcomed him with expansive goodwill—to his face. But behind his back, they laughed and jested in their own tongue, always at his expense. They joked about his inferior bloodlines, debating which was worse, having an Angevin sire or a Norman-Scots dam. They boasted to Henry that Eleanor was descended from Charlemagne, and then snickered to one another about the Demon Countess of Anjou, the Devil’s daughter. They lavished compliments upon Henry and then mocked his short hair, calling him a shorn sheep, for all men of fashion wore th
eirs shoulder-length.

  Henry was able to shrug off their supercilious comments about his heritage, reasoning that if they’d not thought the King of France good enough for Eleanor, it was only to be expected that he’d fall short, too. And as he cared nothing for fashion, he could not be wounded by disapproval of that sort. But it stung his pride to be treated like a raw, green lad. It had never occurred to him that Eleanor’s family might see their clandestine courtship as a hunt, their wedding as the kill, and Eleanor as the hunter, he the quarry. Did these dolts truly think that nineteen was so young, that their age difference gave Eleanor such an advantage? Did Eleanor?

  And that was the real reason why he lay awake and restless hours after going to bed. Eleanor. Not her unruly barons, not even her vexing relatives. Eleanor.

  She’d welcomed him as if he were the most honoured of guests, gracious and obliging, concerned for his comfort. He’d caught her in no indiscretions, no lapses in langue d’oc. She’d been the ideal hostess, poised and polished, as regal in bearing as if that lovely dark head were still adorned with a crown. But as much as he admired her social graces, he looked in vain for the woman he would wed. The teasing temptress in that rain-drenched Paris garden was gone, eclipsed by the Duchess of Aquitaine, worldly and desirable and distant.