By dawn, with Geoffrey still well ahead of him, Henry rode into a village and found an open innyard.
“Here. We’ll stop here and rest the horses.” He dismounted. His vanguard spilled out the inn gate and filled the narrow street beyond. The village was only a straggle of huts along the road and the inn was the largest building in it, a rambling shack. The smell of food came deliciously from a back building. Robert came up, gray-faced. He did not bear up well on long rides without sleep.
“Yes, my lord.”
Henry said, “We can’t fit all the men into this village.” Several more of Geoffrey’s men had joined them on the ride down. More than a hundred men followed his banners now, even though he had left behind garrisons at the strong places to hold the ground they had taken. With so many, he could not move as fast as he wanted, and they all needed orders, which made things more complicated. “We’ll get them camped outside the town. Reynard—”
The other knight led his horse up. The innkeeper himself came bustling out, a fat man in a filthy apron, with cups and a jug. Behind him came a girl with wheat-colored hair, younger than Henry, her arms cradling a basket of bread. Henry said, “We have to make sure everybody gets fed. Put the horses on pasture.” He reached out for a loaf.
The girl’s eyes were lowered, but then suddenly she glanced up at him, and then down again.
His interest leaped. He knew that look, what girls meant by that look. He thought of Eleanor, who was far away. The girl’s bodice curved over pretty little breasts. She was a kitchen wench, young and clean. But later.
He turned to Reynard. “Come along, let’s do this. Robert, see to things here. Find me a place to sleep. Fresh horses.” Without another look at the girl, he mounted his horse and rode out of town to stop the rest of his army before they reached the village and get them bedded down along the road, their horses staked out, their sentries posted. Reynard followed doggedly after him.
When he was done, the little camps of his army stretched back on both sides of the road for nearly a mile. Their fires bloomed in the dusk. Besides the bread and wine Robert managed to find for them, they had been foraging as they rode and the smells rose of cooking meat, among the sounds of men laughing and gossiping. When Henry went back to the innyard, trailing squires, his horse stumbling with fatigue, the moon was rising.
The yard was almost empty. His squires trudged off with the horses. The hall was shut, quiet, and he would sleep in there, eventually, but first he went toward the kitchen, behind the hall. Just as he reached the door, it opened. The thin glow of a rushlight spread out over the threshold and shone on him. Behind it, holding the lamp high, was the girl with the wheat-colored hair. Her eyes burned. The thought of Eleanor touched his mind again, and he pushed it out of the way. Aquitaine was all over the hill. This one was here before him. He reached his hands out and drew her toward him.
In the morning he was chasing Geoffrey south through the hills. Having lost Chinon, his brother was predictably making toward Loudon, the second of his castles. His dwindling army left a trail any fool could follow, through trees and meadows and fields where sullen men stood in the middle of their trampled crops and glared at Henry as he rode by.
Almost to the high ground, in the crease between two rolling hills, Geoffrey ambushed Henry’s vanguard. Henry sent Robert and a few men up to fight off the attack and keep his brother busy, and with the rest of his army galloped around the back of the hill to Loudon itself, stormed the gate, and overran the little town. At this, cut off from his base, Geoffrey fled, and more of his men submitted to Henry, so many of them that he took their vows all at once.
He did this in the street inside the gate, just before sundown, and afterward a villager in a broad hat came up and bowed and begged him to keep Loudon, to protect the houses and farms. The villager was an old man, his face the color of dirt. He swept off his hat and rolled the brim unceasingly in his hands. “My lord, give us peace. We have the harvest. I pray God, my lord—the lord Geoffrey took everything, but now, we have the harvest to bring in, I pray you—”
“Harvest your crops,” Henry said. “I am lord here. I will keep the peace. Let any man with a grievance come to me.” The long slanting light of the late sun flooded the place with pink. The guards at the gate called out, and Robert rode up with a half dozen other men of the vanguard and a stranger.
He wore the colors of the Empress, so Henry knew he was a messenger from his mother in Rouen, head city of Normandy. Henry held him aside. Robert swung down from his horse.
“I lost some men. There are a lot of wounded.”
“Bring them in and lay them in the church,” Henry said. “Get Reynard to help you. Camp the rest outside the wall. No looting, no rape.” He would have to arrange to bury the dead. Robert went briskly off. The villager in the broad hat was trying to talk to him. Henry shut him up with a glare and turned to the messenger.
“My lord—” The messenger was filthy. “Her Imperial Majesty bids you God’s greeting—” Henry plucked the note out of his hands and turned aside to read it.
The villager followed him. “My lord, thank God for you, I swear, we are loyal, we will—”
Henry looked over his shoulder. “Is there a surgeon here? A midwife? I have wounded men.”
“There’s an herbswoman, my lord. And the priest, of course.”
“Naturally. Go get them.” He read quickly through his mother’s uncluttered Latin. There was nothing new, only the old woman getting nervous, as she always did, throwing off a spray of advice and orders. Half of the Norman barons had thrown out his chatelains and were proclaiming themselves free, and she expected him back in Rouen at once.
He had to get the south under control first. With Anjou solid, he would deal with the Norman lords. They hated each other more than they hated him, and he could take each one down separately. He walked back and forth a few moments, thinking about that, trying to see everything whole.
Robert reappeared, and so did the villager, who had a priest with him. Henry sent Robert off with the priest to settle the wounded but held the villager back by the arm.
“You say Geoffrey was here for a while?”
“Yes, my lord.” The villager clutched his hat in his fists. “He took everything. They drove us out of our own houses. No woman could go anywhere.” He drew in a deep breath. “There were Bretons here.”
“Ah,” Henry said.
This was interesting to know. Wild Brittany, to the west, was his enemy; the reigning Duchess’s husband was a stirrup friend of King Stephen of England, whom Henry was trying to dislodge. Who then would have an interest in dislodging Henry. “How many? Soldiers, merchants?”
“A high one, my lord, with knights, and a banner.”
Henry grunted. All the more reason, he thought, to uproot Geoffrey. He had been right to come here first. Leave this here to fester and he would never get to England. He said, “Anybody else?”
The villager blinked at him. Henry said, “The French, for instance?” The palms of his hands prickled up. If his brother brought together the French, the English, and the Bretons, they would have him almost encircled.
The old man licked his lips. He said, “The French King and Queen are on a progress, just up the river. Very like, from here, he could have sent to the King.”
“A progress. Both of them?” Henry said.
“Yes, my lord.”
He struggled a moment to remember exactly what Eleanor looked like. Magnificent eyes. All that coppery hair. Yet he could not visualize her face. He thought, She’s probably forgotten me, too, and his gut ached.
The villager said in a whisper, as if the softer he spoke the more it was worth, “It’s said they’re quarreling. The King and the Queen, wild thing that she is. They say they’re traveling days apart sometimes. He is to come tomorrow to Saint Jean to hold court, but she is far behind him, way up above the river.”
Henry made a sound in his chest. Suddenly he wanted to see her, more than anything else,
hold her, make her remember him.
He hardened himself against this. The Breton lord, the nearness of the French King—he had to keep after his brother. If he slackened now, even for a moment, Geoffrey might get a foothold, some backing, some money to turn and defy him.
She was so close, so close.
He walked over to the church, where they were laying wounded men out on the floor, and went among them, but he thought of her. She could be within a day’s ride. Even nearer. He began to think how to reach her. He thought suddenly of the note from his mother and pulled it out of his purse. Now all he needed was something to write with. He went looking for ink.
Fifteen
By now Eleanor was traveling a good two days behind the King, and avoiding the places he had stayed even after he had left them. During the day they wandered along the road, and in every tiny village the streets were full of wretched-looking, road-worn people. The knights worked to keep the common folk from her, but she saw women with children huddled on the porch of a church, and seeing an old woman begging on the side of the road, she stopped and made de Rançun bring her up beside the Queen’s horse.
The old woman smelled, and the hand she held up was filthy. Eleanor sent hastily for some bread and a purse to give her. “Where have you come from, mother?”
“Anjou—they are fighting—burning everything—”
She gave the bread and purse into the old woman’s hands, then sent for the village’s head man.
He was old like the beggarwoman, but cleaner, and he bowed properly to her. She said, “What is going on now?”
“The Count is harrying his brother south,” the old man said. “These people have fled—unwisely, I think; things will settle down quickly.” But when she gave him another purse to care for the people, he babbled with thanks and bobbed up and down and kissed the hem of her gown.
“Thank you, lady—you are the most gracious of queens—”
At that the crowd pushed around her again, all of them bubbling with thanks, surrounding her horse. She leaned out of the saddle, reaching out her hand to them, as she often did, letting them touch her; some girls held out flowers to her, and one thrust a wad of paper into her grasp.
She closed her hand on it. Her skin tingled in a sudden racing excitement. De Rançun and the other knights were shooing the crowd off. She let the Barb carry her on ahead of everybody else, then swiftly opened the bit of paper in her hand and read it.
Petronilla jogged her mare up beside her. “What is it? What is that?”
“Nothing,” she said. “One of them gave me a flower.” She opened her hand to show the crumpled petals. The paper lay buried underneath, and she would burn it later. She could not keep from smiling, and she looked up the road, eager.
In the afternoon she called de Rançun to her, and said, “Isn’t there a little monastery up ahead somewhere? We could spend the night there.”
He gave her a sharp look. “I don’t know. I’ll find out.” And he came back a little while later, saying, “There is Saint Pierre, but it’s considerably off the road. We could go on to—”
“Saint Pierre will do,” she said. “Go bid them know we are coming.” Petronilla was watching her intently. It was hard to keep anything from her sister. But part of the thrill of this was its secrecy. She gigged the Barb into a trot down the road.
The monastery of Saint Pierre was old and small, its abbot overjoyed to have a royal visitor; he led Eleanor to the best room in the cloister, with the best bed, a mattress stuffed with straw, and the linens patched. It was too small for all of the women, and the three waiting women went into another room. De Rançun took the men and the baggage and attendants down into the village.
The monks brought Eleanor and her little court their finest fare: a ripe cheese and decent bread, a rough fruit wine. Eleanor’s hawk had killed that day, and so they dined well enough. They heard Vespers in the monastery chapel, and then, going back along the cloister, Eleanor said, “I think I shall go for a walk. The rest of you all go in and get ready for bed; don’t wait for me.”
Petronilla frowned at her. They were going side by side along the arcade of the cloister toward their rooms. “I’ll go with you.”
“No—I want to be alone—I have to think. I’ll just walk in the cloister. Unless you fear some lecherous monk lies in wait?”
The women behind her laughed. Petronilla gave her a long sideways look, suspicious, but all she said was, “Go on, then, but don’t be long. I’m going straight to bed, you’ll wake me up.”
“I won’t.”
The women all turned to go in; she walked on alone down the arcade. Her heart was thudding in her chest.
Her hand slid down her belly, where the baby lay like a rock in her dreams. She held herself straight, pulling her stomach in. He would not notice. She was hardly showing. He could not know; that could ruin everything. Because she was still married to Louis, it was by law Louis’s baby, and to everybody who knew better it was more proof of her wicked, lascivious female nature. To Henry himself, it could be a reason to call everything off.
She could not have ignored his call; she burned to see him again. He would not notice. She pulled off her coif and shook her hair loose. She did not care who saw her now, but she was alone in the dark.
The square of grass in the middle of the cloister was pale with moonlight, the arcade deep in shadows. She walked along to the corner, where the two walls did not meet. The opening between them led into a little crooked passage through to the outside. Beyond the cloister’s outer wall was a row of gardens, bounded by a thorn hedge, and behind the cabbages she found a little gate and let herself out.
She stood at the top of a long grassy slope running down to the tree-lined river. The moonlight turned the long grass silver. The wind swept up from the west, moist and sweet, like a cool kiss that set the grass rippling. She stood a moment in the swirl of it, the wind’s long fingers in her hair. The road led away down the hillside, toward the village. She looked carefully all around for sentries but saw no one. The grass sang in the windy dark. Then through the susurrus of the wind she heard a long, drawn-out whistle: a falconer calling his hawk.
All her hair stood on end; she went toward him like a hawk swooping through the air, running through the moonlight, until near the foot of the slope he stood up suddenly out of the grass and she ran into his arms.
“I had to see you,” he said. “I had to see you.” She clung to him, her arms around his neck, said his name. They kissed. “Come on.” He led her into the shelter of the trees. In the dark she could hardly make out his face. His hands were urgent on her body, his mouth demanding. She helped him gather up her skirts and leaned against an old tree and they joined, his hands on her hips, his lips against her throat. She wrapped her arms around him. She whispered his name again.
“Come with me,” he said. “Forget about Louis. Come with me now.”
She laughed; it felt as if she could never leave him, as if they were permanently connected. She said, “This must be done well, I have told you. Be patient.” She kissed him. He leaned on her a moment more, gasping, and then they were sliding apart. The cool breeze chilled her thighs.
He backed away, pulling his clothes together. “I’ll curse every day until I see you again.” His arms slid around her again; she was doing up her shoulder brooch. His hand moved over her body. He said, in a different voice, “Are you pregnant?”
Her body went cold down to her heels. But she had thought of this. She was ready for this. She laughed. “No, ’tis only the fat bird I dined on. But soon, my darling. We shall have an army of princes.”
He kissed her, his lips apart. He believed her. “Soon.”
“I need to get back.” She had to get away from him, before the suspicion returned. She nuzzled his cheek, her arm around his waist. “We will be together before summer. I swear it.” She turned and went quickly up the slope toward the monastery.
Henry went down through the trees to the bank of the st
ream, where he had left his horse. His body still thrilled, keen at her touch; he was sweating even in the gentle cool of the night. He led his horse a little way down the stream and swung into the saddle. It was a long ride back to his camp. Yet just thinking of her sent him high again, like a leaf on a storm wind, reeling with excitement.
Up there on the ridge someone shouted. He twisted to look over his shoulder; a horseman was riding into sight past the west end of the monastery wall—a sentry, maybe. The rider shouted again to him to halt, to stand. He touched his spurs to his horse and galloped off down the stream. He was over the next ridge, almost to the old road, before it occurred to him that after all he had never really seen her face.
In the morning, Alys brought her a new gown, plain dark russet, with a subdued gold trim; Eleanor said, “What of that old green thing—it is so comfortable for riding.”
Alys leaned slightly toward her, laying the new gown down for her, and murmured, “My lady, I have let this one out a little at the sides. It will be better, I think. I will work next on the green one.” She smiled and touched Eleanor’s shoulder, and Eleanor understood this was her way of saying that she knew, and would protect her.
But it cooled her excitement a little. She realized that the secret, like the baby, was growing, that more and more people were finding out. That this road might not be leading her home at all, but to the failure of all her hopes, to the dark convent, the penitent’s straw, or worse.
She throttled that away. With a sudden fierce desire, she willed the days ahead of her to go as she wished, and quickly crossed herself and said a prayer for God’s help. But the annoying doubt remained, that maybe the unknowable, unbiddable God intended something else for her, and that which lay ahead for her was an ordeal she, even she, could lose.
The Secret Eleanor Page 12