Standard of Honor

by Jack Whyte

  Moments later, the first of the two leading knights came into view, resplendent in black and yellow trappings, and Henry’s back straightened in astonishment before his face broke into a smile. He had not seen this man in years, but he had trained him as a youth and had promoted him to be his own adjutant, fifteen years earlier.

  “Sir Francis!” he called out at the top of his voice. “What would you do now were I a squad of archers instead of but one watching old man?”

  The effect of his shout was salutary, for the marching men behind the two knights crashed to a halt instantly and then, at a snapped command from their mounted officer, the first four ranks spread out across the roadway. Twelve of the men knelt as they aimed their swiftly loaded crossbows towards the sound of Henry’s voice, and twelve more behind them aimed over their heads. The leading knight, whose name Henry had shouted, must have been half asleep, for he pulled sharply on the reins and brought his horse rearing up on its hind legs, then spun it completely around, and by the time the animal’s front hooves returned to earth he had his bared blade in his hand. His companion had spun away, too, and now sat his horse with his spear couched, its butt firmly gripped beneath his armpit.

  “Who goes there? Show yourself!”

  “Happily, Francis, if you will tell your men not to slaughter me on sight.”

  The knight called Francis frowned, but he raised his sword and waved down his men, bidding them hold, then called again to Henry to come out. Henry nudged his horse forward slowly and enjoyed the amazement that dawned in Francis de Neuville’s face as he recognized the man approaching him.

  “Sir Henry? Sir Henry St. Clair? Is that you?”

  “Of course it is. Did you think you me a specter, in broad daylight?”

  Both men slipped down from their saddles and embraced in the middle of the road. “By all the saints in Heaven, well met, Sir Henry. How long has it been, ten years? What are you doing here, so far from anywhere?”

  “Twelve years, Francis, and I am riding my boundaries. This is my home. My castle is close by, over the hill there.” He waved towards it, then indicated the motionless procession stretching back up the hill. “What are you doing nowadays, escorting churchmen?”

  “Churchmen?” Sir Francis looked perplexed again. “Why would you think that? There are no churchmen here.” He glanced at the other knight who had been riding with him. “William, you’ve heard me talk about Sir Henry St. Clair who was Master-at-Arms to Aquitaine when I was a boy? Well, this is the man.” As Henry and Sir William exchanged nods, Sir Francis continued, “So you live nearby? I thought somehow you were in the north, towards Burgundy.”

  They were interrupted by a clatter of hooves as a trio of men came spurring down the hill to find out the cause of the delay. One of them, a black-browed giant of a man mounted on an enormous horse, scowled ferociously at Henry before turning his displeasure on Francis de Neuville, demanding in a surly, ungracious voice to know why the entire column had been brought to a standstill.

  De Neuville looked at his questioner and managed to give Henry the impression that he had responded with a very Gallic shrug, although he was fully armored. “I stopped to speak to an old friend,” he said. “And I have not yet finished greeting him. Move them on, if you wish. We will draw aside and I will catch up with you when I am ready.”

  “You should have done that without waiting to be told.”

  De Neuville’s right eyebrow quirked as he raised his eyes to look at the mounted questioner. “And how would you know that, Mandeville? I doubt if you have ever had a friend to stop for in your entire life.” He stepped to his horse and took its reins in his hand, then beckoned with his head to Henry. “Come, Henry, we can talk over there as they pass by.”

  Neither man spoke until the column had begun to move again, the scowling knight riding ahead in de Neuville’s place while his companions returned to their positions. The marching column of soldiers trudged on, ignoring the two knights by the roadside, their eyes fixed in accustomed misery on the ground stretching endlessly ahead of them.

  “Who was that fellow?” Henry spoke first, his eyes on the retreating form of the big knight.

  “Mandeville. Sir Humphrey Mandeville. A jackass. He’s Norman English and a lout, like most of his ilk. Ignorant and lacking in the basics of civility. Born over there, of course. He hasn’t been here three months, but believes himself superior to all of us.”

  “Is he your superior?”

  Sir Francis barked a laugh. “Not in any respect, although I’m sure he dreams of it. But what of you, buried here in obscurity? How long have you been here? You look fine.”

  “I am now. Thriving, Francis. Who’s in the carriages?”

  Sir Francis smiled, deprived of any need to answer, for the lead carriage had been drawing level with them as they spoke and now the leather curtains were pulled aside and an imperious voice called out over the noises of hooves and iron-tired wheels.

  “Henry? Henry St. Clair, is that you?”

  “Great God in Heaven!” The words were out before he could check them, but they went unnoticed, since the apparition in the carriage was already leaning from the window, shouting to the driver to stop, so that once again the cavalcade came to a halt.

  “Well, sir? Have you no greeting for me? Have you gone mute?”

  “My lady … Forgive me, my lady. I was distraught. The sight of you blinded me … I had no idea … I thought you were in England.”

  “Hah! In jail, you mean. Well, I was, for years. But now I am here, at home. Come now, salute me properly and ride with me. You and you, out. Find places in the other carriages. De Neuville, take Henry’s horse. You, sir, come and pay me your respects, as true knight to his liege, then tell me what you have been doing all these years since last we met.” As her two obedient women spilled hastily from the open door, clutching helplessly at their disarrayed clothes, Sir Henry St. Clair walked forward open mouthed, still grappling with the suddenness of coming face to face again with the woman who had once been the most powerful force in Christendom, Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, former Queen of France and later of England. He climbed into the carriage obediently and sat silent, gazing at the woman across from him and caught up, as he had always been, in admiration of her forthrightness and the uncompromising, direct force she brought to every conversation.

  “There now,” she said when he was seated. “That is much better, and you may close your mouth and collect yourself, Henry, for we have much to talk about and I require you to be alert and as intelligent as I recall you used to be … speaking of which, you look remarkably fine for an old man. You were much like my Henry in those days. And you look much the same today. Clean living, I dare say, for I doubt your leopard could have changed his spots. As a young man, I remember, you were remarkably toothsome, if stiff and unyielding and greatly old-fashioned in your notions of fidelity. How is Amanda, by the way?”

  St. Clair finally found his tongue. “She died, my lady, nigh on two years ago.”

  “Ah, I can see it in your face. You miss her yet.”

  “I do, my lady. Intolerably at times, but less now than before.”

  “I know. Henry is barely in his grave and yet I find that I am mourning him too, and painfully, despite having hated him so long. The old boar kept me locked up in a tower for sixteen years, can you believe that?” She snorted, something approaching a laugh. “Oh, they call it a castle, and it’s rich enough to be called luxurious, but a prison is a prison.” She hesitated, then grinned. “But then, to tell the truth, I gave him little option. I am really going to miss him. Without him, I shall have little to rail about in future.”

  “So he is truly dead then, my lady? We have heard rumors, all of them conflicting, so we did not know what to believe.”

  “Oh, he’s dead. You may take my word on that. He died in Chinon, on the sixth day of July, and some say he was tortured to death by Richard. That is absolutely untrue, and you may trust me on that, too. Richard is no angel,
and he was ever at odds with Henry, but my son as regicide and patricide? That is simply impossible. Believe me, as his mother.”

  “I do, my lady.”

  “I did not doubt you would. God’s throat, Henry, it’s good to see your honest face. You’re frowning. Why? Speak out. You always did before, uncaring what I might think.”

  Emboldened, St. Clair shook his head. “Thinking about my people, my lady, no more. I have been out riding since before dawn, so they will be concerned when I do not return. It came to me that I should send word to them, tell them where I am. May I ask how far we are going?”

  “Not far, but you have the right of things, as usual. Use the window. Call for de Neuville.”

  St. Clair wasted no time, pulling back the leather curtains and leaning out. De Neuville was riding behind the carriage and trotted forward when Henry caught his eye. Eleanor, who had been watching, leaned forward.

  “Francis, how much farther will we ride?”

  “Less than ten miles, my lady. The advance party should be there by now, setting up your tents.”

  “Send back word to Henry’s people, telling them he is detained but will return soon. You may use my name.” When Sir Francis had saluted and wheeled away, Eleanor settled herself on her seat. “There, are you at peace now?”

  “I am, my lady … and grateful. But had I known you were coming this way, you could have stayed on my lands.”

  She smiled, slowly. “And bankrupted your estate? Be thankful you knew nothing, my old friend. I have more than two hundred in my train. It would have caused you nothing but grief … although frankly, had I remembered where you live, I would have used you shamelessly. Queens and royal people do that all the time.” She paused, gazing at him with eyes that were no less spectacular than he remembered them from almost three decades earlier. “Well, I have told you how fine you look, so now it is your turn. How do I seem to you, approaching my dotage? Be careful.”

  Henry found it surprisingly easy to smile at this woman who, at her glittering court in Aquitaine decades earlier, had fostered the troubadours who now swarmed everywhere throughout the land, singing their songs of courtly love and spreading her personal beliefs in the duties of noble men and the supremacy of women in teaching them those duties. “Before I set eyes upon you this day, my lady, I would not have thought it possible that you could be more lovely than you were when first I met you … But you are.”

  She stared at him hard, then sniffed. “You disappoint me, Henry. I am an old woman and that is grossest flattery. The Henry St. Clair I knew before would never stoop to flattery.”

  “Nor would he now, my lady. I speak the simple truth.”

  “Then you never did before. I never had an inkling that you thought me lovely.”

  His smile broadened. “Well, your husband, Henry, if you but recall, was notably jealous. Had he suspected that I saw in you anything other than my lady liege, he would have served me my own stones, sewed in their sack.”

  “Hah!” Eleanor’s laugh was startling, full bodied and rich with earthy delight. “He would have had to vie with your Amanda. One ball apiece, they would have had.”

  “Aye, they would …” His own laugh subsided. “But that was long ago, when the world was young …”

  “How old are you now, Henry?”

  “I will be fifty within the year, my lady.”

  “Why, man, you’re but a child. I am sixty and seven, and my Henry was fifty-six when he died.” She paused. “Richard is to be King of England. Did you know that?”

  “Aye, my lady, I know. I saw him recently. He stopped at my door on his way to Paris, bare two months ago.”

  “Did he, by God’s holy blood?” Eleanor’s face had hardened. “And why would he do that?”

  Henry half shrugged, his face void of expression. “He had need of me, he said. I am to sail with him to Outremer, as Master-at-Arms.”

  “Master-at—” She checked herself. “Well, he is clearly not witless, for all his other faults. Misguided, certainly, but not witless.” Her eyes transfixed him, no whit less hypnotic than they had been decades earlier, when she could beguile even a pope. “And like a fool, you intend to go. I can see it in your face. You are going with him. Why, in the name of everything that’s sane? The Holy Land is a place fit only for young men, Henry—virile, muscular idiots full of the wildness and passion of their youth and their endless lust for guts and glory … idiots and lost souls. There is no life there for women, and even less for elders without crown or miter. Believe me, I was there and saw it for myself. Why, a’ God’s name, would you even think of such folly at your age?”

  He raised one hand, then let it fall to his lap. “I have no choice, my lady. It is my duty, called upon by your son.”

  “Balls, Henry. God’s entrails, man, you have spent a lifetime giving naught but the finest service to our house—to me and to Henry and to Richard himself. Enough, man. You have earned your right to die at home, in your bed. You could have declined with honor. Not even Richard would be so—” She stopped suddenly, her great eyes narrowing to slits. “No, there’s more to it than that. My son manipulated you somehow. Coerced you. That is his way … But what was his lever? What hold did he find over you, to bring you to this? Tell me.”

  It was a command, peremptory and not to be evaded. Henry sighed and looked away from her to where the slowly passing countryside was visible between the curtain halves, seeing the dust lie thick and heavy on the cow parsley that lined the road. “I have a son, my lady.”

  “I know. I remember him as a child. His name is … André, is it not?”

  He looked back into her eyes, impressed again by her seemingly limitless capacity to remember such details. “Aye, my lady, André.”

  “A man now … and a weapon against you. Is that not so? Tell me.”

  He told her the entire tale, up to and including Richard’s intervention and solution, and throughout the hour that took she sat silent, her eyes never leaving his as she absorbed every nuance and inflection of his voice. When he finally fell silent, she nodded and pursed her lips, thinner than he remembered them, and the gesture drew attention to the hollowed cheeks beneath the high cheekbones that had always defined her startling and still-present beauty. He waited, and watched her eyes grow softer.

  “And that, of course, explains why you look so rudely healthy. You have been driving yourself these past two months to recapture your lost youth. Well, you have not suffered ill from it, old friend. So, what happened to these damnable priests? Did Richard hang them?”

  “The priests were tried before the Archbishop of Tours and their guilt clearly established beyond doubt, although, lacking the authority and single-mindedness of your son in prosecuting them, that might not have come to pass so easily. They were then disowned by the Holy Church and bound over to the secular law of the Duchy of Aquitaine for execution.”

  “And in the meantime you and your son were bound to Richard by unbreakable ties of gratitude and fealty …”

  Henry St. Clair noticed the irony in her tone, but he paid it no attention. “Aye, my lady. By gratitude more than even fealty, if such a thing be possible.”

  “Hmm …” Eleanor shifted in her seat and then reached out and pulled aside the curtain on her left, and spoke as she gazed out at the long, slanting shadows thrown by the trees on the sloping hillside above them. “It is growing late, my friend. We should be stopping soon, but it may be too late by then for you to ride back home alone. You must dine with us and return in the morning. In the meantime, come what may, I have a thought for you to dwell upon, Henry, and it is this: there has never been a tie, of any kind, that is unbreakable, given sufficient will, and power.”

  She turned her eyes back on him again. “Absolve yourself of any guilt you feel, even be it born of gratitude. I will talk to Richard about this. I will not tolerate this idea of forcing you to sail to Outremer. It is a nonsense. Besides, you know my son almost as well as I do. He was yours to mold for years. He is a
creature of great passions and enthusiasms, ungovernable and unpredictable to all save me, it seems.”

  Sir Henry spread his hands apologetically. “My gratitude for your concern, my lady, but if it please you, I have no wish to be excused from this duty. I would far rather travel with my son to Outremer than bide alone here and fret for him. He is all I have left of family in this world, and life without him holds little attraction for me now that I am growing old. I might be a fool, as you suggest, but I would rather be an old fool near my son than be a lonely old hermit awaiting death here without him.”

  Eleanor gazed at him for long moments, then nodded her head slowly. “So be it, my lord St. Clair. I will say no more on it. We are both of us too old and gray to quarrel over the manner of our deaths. The Reaper will find us wherever we may be …” She nibbled her upper lip between her teeth in a mannerism he had long forgotten, and then she added, “You know why Richard was so intent upon enrolling you, don’t you?”

  When St. Clair shook his head in honest ignorance, she sniffed. “Well then you should. And take note, if it please you, that I said he was intent on it—knowing my son as I do, it would not astonish me at all to learn that he has either forgotten all about involving you or has changed his mind since then. A move’s afoot in England to have him take the Marshal of England, William Marshall, into his train as Master-at-Arms, but Richard will have none of it, and I would be surprised were it otherwise. Marshall was Henry’s man, dyed in the wool, as fierce and lifelong-loyal as a hunting hound. In Richard’s eyes, Marshall will always represent Henry himself. And, truth be said, I cannot find it in my heart to fault my son for that.”

  She paused. “Besides, Marshall is all for England, first, foremost, and above all else. Richard, on the other hand, has more to govern. England is but a by-blow of his empire, and a backward one at that. God’s throat, he can barely speak the language that they growl over there.”

  She stopped again, mulling her next words. “I suppose you know about Alaïs?” She read the answer in his face and grunted. “Aye, of course you do. You would need to be both blind and deaf not to know of it. It was inevitable, given what was involved, but yet I find myself feeling sympathy for the poor creature, goose though she be, for none of what happened to her lay in her control. She has been used and abused her whole life long and she never had sufficient backbone to brace herself for any of it. Myself, I would have killed someone, years ago, had any man tried to do the half to me of what was done to her. But Alaïs is not me, and now she is home in France again, disgraced, and unlikely to find another husband soon … What is it?”