The Rain Maiden

by Jill M Philips

  “Why are they fighting anyway?” Richard asked. “And why are you siding with Philippe Capet? Flanders has been your friend for years.”

  “Give or take a few miscellaneous difficulties,” Geoffrey injected with a prodding smile, letting his gaze circle the table before coming to rest firmly on his father’s face. He was referring to a forbidden topic of conversation—the Great Rebellion of 1173 when he, Richard, Harry and Eleanor had banded together with Philip d’Alsace and his brother Matthew of Boulogne against Henry. Flanders had been the real instigator of the plot (which had also had the tacit approval of Louis of France). Only the death of his beloved brother had sent Philip home, besotted with grief and quite suddenly uncaring of what happened between the English king and his sons. That was the Flemish way. No matter how excessive ran their lust for power, their blood ties held as chains.

  It was not so within the brooding ranks of the Plantagenet clan, with their fierce Norman pride and Angevin maleficence. Henry felt distrust strong in his blood now as he stared across at Geoffrey, and his voice bore a warning tone. “That matter is a closed subject,” he declared. “I forgave all of you for that. I’ve told you what I expect from the three of you in this business, and by God you will do it!”

  “Philip d’Alsace is a great soldier,” Richard mused, “and though unlike them,” he indicated his brothers, “I have no personal feelings of friendship toward him, I respect his abilities. Let Philippe Capet stand against him if he can, but why should we involve ourselves?”

  Henry’s decision was unalterable. “For the same reason I put a stop to the Champagnois plots against him in the past and then tried to reconcile him with his family. Philippe is the rightful king and I will not be a party to any attempts to harass him.”

  “How very noble of you,” Richard sneered. “But I cannot agree. If he is unable to control his family and his barons, if they feel constrained to band together with his former mentor in a covey of dissent against him, then I say he’s in more trouble than we can allay.” He emptied the rest of his wine into his mouth and set the henap down with a bang of irritation. “Personally, I don’t think we should bother ourselves. Besides, he’s an impudent snot. And I don’t have to remind you, Father, he has no feelings of fondness for you.”

  “Well he does for me,” Harry interrupted, “and I think that Father is right. We should help him. Poor Philippe. He’s still only a boy and no match for feckless dissemblers. God knows I warned him against the treachery of Flanders, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

  Richard’s laugh was goading. “That’s very interesting coming from you, Harry. There was a time when you couldn’t open up your mouth except to say glowing things about Philip d’Alsace. Now you would take an adversary’s position against him? What a queer world we are living in.”

  “My admiration for Flanders has nothing to do with this!” Harry insisted with vehemence. “There are many things about him still to my liking—he is the greatest soldier of our day, the very heart and soul of chivalry.”

  “The good William Marshal would be ill-at-ease to hear you say that,” Geoffrey inserted. “He is your current mentor, is he not?”

  Henry slammed his fist down on the table and beside him Geoffrey started. “I’ve had all the shit from you three I intend to take!” the king shouted. “None of this bantering has anything to do with what I’m talking about! Your opinions of Flanders are of no importance to me. God knows you’ve all taken your turn at adoring him, admiring him, giving him ten times the respect any of you have ever shown me. Well that’s past—and I say he’s pestered the French boy once too often. So many of the French barons have joined the revolt against Philippe, he needs our support in the field.” After a pause he finished: “He is Louis’s boy, and I don’t want to see him lose face because of any unsavory plots against him.”

  Richard was incredulous. “And that’s your reason for involving us? Because he’s Louis’s boy? Since when did Louis Capet mean so much to you?”

  Henry’s grey eyes narrowed as he looked at Richard. “I would never expect you to understand,” he finally said. “You’re not a father, and you’ve never been a son.”

  “So you’ve said, and often enough,” Richard answered under his breath.

  “Spare me the rebuke,” Henry answered sharply, getting to his feet. Brisk steps carried him toward the archway entrance of the hall where he stood for a moment. Then he turned back to them, his gaze steady and accusing. “There was a time when the combined treachery of you three broke my heart. I’ve since learned to live with it. I’m not asking for your love, I’m summoning your obedience. As your king I can still command that.” He paused. “I’ll see all of you in the morning. Goodnight.”

  Isabel’s frenzy had given way to physical collapse and finally pneumonia. For weeks she wavered between this world and the next, as though undecided whether she wished to live or die.

  The finest physicians in Paris attended to her, but seemed powerless to restore her vitality. Sully, fearful for her life, remained in daily attendance. Edythe never left her side, even sleeping on the floor beside her bed. During Isabel’s brief periods of consciousness they forced food into her; more often than not she remained in a stupor that resembled death. Awake or asleep—conscious or insensible—she cried out for Philippe.

  On Christmas day Sully gave her Absolution, fearing that she would be dead by nightfall. But by evening she sat up suddenly as though recovered. The physicians charged her to stay in bed till after Epiphany. Isabel was shocked to learn how much time had come and gone during her illness. She remembered it only in vague and shadowy flickers: Edythe’s tender ministrations, Sully’s kind face above her like a saint beckoning her to heaven.

  Days of inactivity intensified her present misery. All news was being kept from her, perhaps deliberately. She had no idea of what had transpired between Philippe and her uncle. She tried to pray. The words came from her lips in practiced religiosity but they were empty of meaning, emptier of hope.

  Isabel was terrified, panicked by the secret that she had kept from everyone, most of all herself. She had tried to wall it up in her mind, banish it, destroy it. But truth, though it can be imprisoned, can never be killed.

  The evidence of her fear fell in stinging tears to the silken bedcovers. She had endured Philippe’s early indifference and enigmatic moods. She had gloried in his body and gorged on it. She had withstood his physical cruelties and even this most recent mortification. All that she had endured. But this last treason was the worse, because it was of her own making. Isabel had surrendered herself finally—fatally—and now she would never be free again. She knew now that she loved him.

  Thirty-nine of the most powerful barons in France had joined the revolt against Philippe Capet. Their prime incentive had been his indifference toward them; they had also been swayed by the entrance into the controversy of the charming Stephen of Sancerre—his largess to French nobility gave him credence with them. The formidable combination of Philip d’Alsace and Hugh of Burgundy only strengthened the barons’ conviction that Louis Capet’s son had lost all chance of respect among his subjects and his peers. Although Philippe had retained the loyalty of the noble lords of Paris, that was scarce advantage to the peril he faced now in the field. The young king of France was totally untrained as a soldier.

  By the middle of December, d’Alsace and Count Stephen had maneuvered their combined forces some sixty-five miles northwest of Paris at Beauvais on the fringe of the Ile-de-France, while Hugh of Burgundy had moved his troops to Valois, virtually hemming in Philippe’s domains on the northern borders. The situation had sent the young monarch, with Hughes de Puiseaux and five hundred loyal knights, fleeing for Chantilly, thirty-five miles directly to the north of Paris. There, only a few days before Christmas, Philippe received word from William Marshal that Henry and his sons were coming to the aid of the French.

  King Henry himself did not take the field but his three sons did, with a combined fighting f
orce of over three thousand men. That news, quickly circulated, was enough to detach the Duke of Burgundy from the coalition and by the end of the month he had recalled his men to Auxerre.

  Count Theobold of Chartres had also been diverted from his revenge against Philippe. His brother Henri of Champagne had fallen ill at Chalons, and Theobold had abandoned the Flemish-Champagnois coalition to be at his side, leaving only d’Alsace and Stephen to head the rebellion. That combination still represented a considerable threat to the security of the Ile-de-France and would have been enough to give Philippe Capet a sound drubbing in the field.

  But on the third of January, a combined force of Norman, Breton, and Poitevan knights under the generalship of Richard Plantagenet swept the rebels from the field at Beauvais, sending Counts Philip, Stephen, and the major portion of their contingent fleeing east toward Compiegne. There, Henry’s sons and their men had such a decisive victory that Stephen’s forces fled their leader for the safety of the Loire Valley.

  Philip d’Alsace’s men did not flee. They took up sanctuary with him and the Count of Sancerre at Flanders’s fortress at Crepy-en-Valois on the Oise. There they sought to regroup their strength, but before long the Plantagenet forces surrounded the chateau. Within three weeks the Flemish-Champagnois coalition was disbursed, their leaders virtually starved into submission.

  Henry negotiated the truce, calling for a future meeting at Gisors in April when a formal treaty would be signed by all parties. Until that time the counts and their men were bound by oath not to breach the peace or congregate in unlawful action against the King of France.

  Throughout the entire campaign Philippe Capet had remained submissive to the will of Henry and his sons, while marveling in silent envy at the fighting abilities shown by the three Plantagenet brothers. While the danger persisted Philippe had been too uneasy to worry over the tremendous loss of prestige which he’d brought upon himself by allowing a covey of outsiders to conduct his war for him. But once the surrender had been assured and then accomplished, he felt totally unmanned by the experience. The victory (the relief) was his, but he’d had no part in its making. It was a sobering admission of his own weakness and inexperience. Only his pride kept him from displaying those feelings in the view of his benefactors.

  Philip d’Alsace was infuriated by the turn of events. Though he made a public show of great civility, he was furious with Henry for having interfered. He and the English king had been comrades and enemies in turn, but Flanders felt betrayed. He had cause to ponder what bond had been sealed between Henry and Philippe behind his back.

  So it was finished, for now. Stephen of Sancerre packed up his injured pride and shattered expectations, returning to the Loire Valley. Flanders went north to Ghent to brood over his latest setback. Young Philippe Capet was becoming an obsession with him. For the past year and a half Flanders had known nothing but frustration and defeat at his hands, and his desire for revenge was strong. It was no longer a case of fighting for the renewal of his own power in France. Flanders wanted Philippe undone. But for that sweet satisfaction, he knew he would have to wait… .

  IT WAS A COLD evening and the snow was falling outside, but Isabel remained at the window of the palace archives library, watching the flicker of a hundred candle flames tracing a path across the Petit Pont to the Orleans road on the opposite bank. The pilgrims were Benedictine monks of Saint-Barthelemy and Saint-Magloire from the lie de la Cite, in procession on their way up to St. Denis.

  February the Second—Candlemas. As usual Isabel was alone. She had not seen her husband for over nine weeks. No one had even troubled to bring her information concerning the rebellion against him. Hughes de Puiseaux had left Paris with Philippe and, like his king, had not yet returned. Sully had spent the weeks following Epiphany at Montmartre; she had not seen or spoken with him since the end of December. Even William of Rheims, who had spent Christmas in Paris, had left shortly thereafter. All the Champagnois family had convened in Chalons to mourn the death of Henri, the scion of the Champagne-Blois clan and Philippe’s formidable uncle.

  Shivering, Isabel stayed at the undraped window, breathing in the freshness of a solemn winter night. Even noisy Paris was quiet tonight. It was the snow that brought the hush. It buffered every sound, whitened every dark place.

  Isabel pulled the silver fox-fur mantle tighter about her shoulders and retreated to a chair beside the fire. This room, lapped in light from torch and fire glow, provided more than adequate light to read, but her eyes ached from hours of reading, and her distracted mind repelled any further concentration.

  She sat, very small in the enormity of her confusion, feeling pity for herself. It was a weakness which had become all too common for her since the enforced separation from Philippe, and especially considering the way they had separated. Her illness had created an added sting to her situation, and aimless time spent in convalescing had invited bitterness.

  The stewards and serving girls brought her food and drink, banked the fire, lit the torches when it grew dark. Their servile silence unsettled her, but the endless questions from Edythe and the physicians irritated her more. Did she feel better? Was she growing any stronger? Couldn’t they see how unhappy she was, and if so, could they not leave her alone? Isolation was melancholy, but isolation with constant interruptions and questions was near to madness. Quietly contemptuous, she retreated to the silence of her own thoughts. Let them ask their questions. There was still one thing she had managed to keep secret.

  Isabel had carried that secret in her body for sixty-five days, until a midnight seizure of abdominal agony had yanked it from her. That was one week ago this night and still she had told no one. It was improbable that she ever would. Feelings of ambivalence shamed and subdued her. She wanted no living thing growing, tumorlike, inside of her. She was too young. Her future was too murky. Childbearing—specifically, the birth of a male heir—was the only security any queen could ever know. Isabel realized this, yet she recoiled from it in secret dread. She did not know why. And still it haunted her.

  Isabel lingered beside the fire a while longer before wearily ascending three sets of curving stone stairs to the fourth floor. Exile. Tonight the narrow corridors beckoned; ghostly and cheerless, airless and cold. A flickering fragment of a shadow preceded her down the passageway. Isabel halted, tense and waiting. A soft, dead echo. A sob. Then silence. The whispering residue of seven centuries. Gloom. Endless and eternal. She paused in brief futility beside the covered archway to Philippe’s darkened room, then walked on, dispirited.

  It was Baldwin who brought Isabel the news of Philip d’Alsace’s surrender the following morning. Isabel was still in bed, reclining in lassitude, her spirits dark as the visages of the nightmare she could not remember.

  Baldwin’s presence animated her, though the immediate joy at seeing him soon gave way to tears and for a long while she wept in his arms. Finally she raised her head from his shoulder and drew a strand of hair across her face to wipe away the moisture. “I’m sorry, Father,” she explained, “but I’ve been so unhappy, and then to see you, and as the bringer of good news, is a more welcome sight and sound than I have had in many a fortnight.” She thrust aside the covers and leapt from the bed. “Let me put on my clothes, then we can take a meal together, and sit here beside the fire and talk. I feel quite suddenly hungry.” She turned from her dressing mirror to look at him. “It is because you are here, and I am happy.”

  Baldwin appraised her silently. She was small, her limbs curved and delicate, but she was richly and beautifully developed for one so young. The sight of her naked breasts stirred him and he looked away.

  Isabel pulled a black velvet dishabille over her head and went over toward the fire, where she sat combing her hair for a long time. When she looked up, Baldwin was standing before the undraped window. His profile cut sharply against the grey background of baleful clouds. Isabel could sense the malaise, the sudden restlessness. The profile disappeared as he faced her. “I’m deeply tro
ubled by all that has happened. I feel helpless, thwarted at every turn.” He drew a breath as though he meant to say more, but the sound as quickly trailed off to silence.

  She ran to him, her arms outstretched. Baldwin caught her up, holding her close, his cheek resting on the top of her head. “It isn’t your fault,” she said quietly. “Don’t blame yourself.”

  “I do,” he insisted, “I’ve never stood up to Philip—never, in all the years of our association. I should have fought against your marriage. I should have refused to hand you over as a sacrifice to his ambition.”

  She should’ve told him the truth but she couldn’t, so she clung weakly to him with a lie on her lips. “I haven’t been so unhappy, and everything would be better if Uncle Philip would cease this continual fighting with my husband.”

  Baldwin set her down with a dour appraisal. “He’ll never stop.”

  “But if King Henry intervened on Philippe’s side,” Isabel reasoned, “doesn’t it compel Uncle Philip to keep the peace?”

  Baldwin shook his head. “No one can compel Philip d’Alsace against his will. Fighting is his trade, he does it better than anyone. Henry has a country to govern—he can’t stand vigil over my brother-in-law forever, and don’t expect him to come to your husband’s defense at every turn, either. No treaty will hold your uncle back when he wants revenge. He’ll never forgive Philippe.” Baldwin sighed with finality and turned back toward the window. “So far he’s left me out of it, but the time will come, Isabel, when he will expect me to join with him against your husband—and then what course can I follow?”

  Isabel had never seen him so distressed and it sent her into tremors of panic. “What do you mean?” she asked, though she feared his answer.

  He brushed past her and went to stand before the fire, rubbing his palms together to warm them before slumping into a nearby chair. “You know exactly what I mean,” he answered after a long silence. “The time will come when Flanders decides to call my loyalties in, expecting me to ally myself with him against Philippe.” He toyed idly with the rings on his left hand as he spoke.