Gifts of the Queen

by Mary Lide

  'No,' I said, subdued, shocked and, yes, still part disbelieving. 'As long as you keep clear of her.'

  Nor did he ask who she was.

  'It was a nothing, too,' he said. 'To persuade me to their side, she used her wiles, as full of them as a honeypot entraps wasps. I remembered them from long ago; they had no hold on me.'

  Not even if she planned your death? I thought, but still I hesitated. His charms had been considerable, perhaps so had been hers. 'And that attack on us at Saint Purnace—was Geoffrey behind that too? Or is there someone else behind him?'

  He said, 'De Vergay and de Boissert will plot no more. Forget Saint Purnace. Best put aside.'

  ‘And our marriage?' Again I hesitated. 'They said your bethrothal to her, coming first, counted more. And you, you said you regretted the yoke Henry put on you.'

  ‘And you,' he countered, 'knock-kneed, fat-bellied,' I think were the words you used, a misshapen lout compared with that god of manly grace.' He smiled, but I sensed a hint of anger, concealed, yet deep. I was surprised. I had not thought that jealousy might have gnawed on him, yet, had not I hoped at the start to make him feel jealous of me?

  He suddenly smiled once more, his generous smile that lit his face. 'Poor wench,' he said. 'I did not know they tormented you so. I see why you fought them as you did, although it was not wise. Witchcraft is a dangerous thought, better hidden in this land. But, despite everything, you were loyal to me. Was I worth that much to you?’

  ‘Aye.' My answer was simple and direct.

  He gave the mantel shelf another decisive thud, came toward me. 'There,' he said, 'you look at me as if to ask what can I mean, and I see a new expression in your eyes that was not there a year ago. Sometimes I think I have done you wrong to bring you here to mix with such rough company. I should have left you at Cambray. Do not you know that no one can hurt us two save only us, and that in striking you, I strike at my own heart? Come close, that I may prove the truth.'

  He put aside the flowers that I had been holding in my hands. 'Ann,' he said, 'I owe my life to you. How many times has that been said? I have fought with you and bested you and yet not won. I do not know how other men manage their wives, but I cannot either do with, or do without you.' He spread wide his hands as if he had no defense.

  ‘I shall to Poitiers,' he said, 'and having dealt with this king, take my leave of France. Come with me then. I would please you, ma mie,' he whispered. ‘I would please my Celtic witch.'

  And with each word, he kissed my breasts, slid my cloths off my back. 'Open wide,' he said, 'and let me in. Let me love you as I ought.'

  Afterward, when his heartbeat had slowed to normal against my own and he lay tracing with one finger between my breasts, I heard the ripple of laughter in his voice.

  'Not crown you?' he said. ‘I cry you pardon; I already thought you crowned of all I own, my lands, my name, my heart. Have not I given you a tower, nay two towers, fit for a queen? And a castle guard who would die for you? And a husband who will call this his wedding day, better, I swear, than the one we had?' He reached out his hand and took the flowers and idly dropped them one by one, tracing them down across my body, marking out each line and fold.

  'Is not this better than our wedding night?' he asked again, and every flower was a caress. 'And shall I admit what is not good for you to hear, that Henry had already given me the kingdom's prize when he gave me you.'

  'Not good, my lord?' I asked him, drugged myself with sun and love and expecting, I admit, other compliments.

  The slap he gave was as brisk as his tone. 'See,' he said, 'you purr for cream. Suppose I were to lie abed all day and whisper words like those southern lords, who lisp their time away in wantonness? Then would you, lady, lie idly in bed, too, and expect my praise, and Sieux would fall about us in ruins.' He stretched himself, long like a cat, and his eyes grew blue-green like the sea. 'But, by the Mass,' he swore, and the flowers were crushed by his weight, 'such a life might not be so bad. I might become used to it. I am not the man,' he said, each word against my skin, 'to mouth sweetness as you know. But I cherish it when given me. Let Henry dance to another time. We are done with things in France. Let me ride you safely home.'

  But, even as he loved me then and there, why did his words ring out their warning note, things still not said, things not finished with, like a drowned bell echoing out the shiftings of the tide, like a fog horn rolling its alarms along a rocky coast?

  After Boissert Field I thought the many threads of conspiracy were at last unwound, like that skein of wool which once Sir Renier had held. Who knows how the ends start, he had said, or how they ravel out. Why then did night still startle me? For Jean de Vergay and Ralph de Boissert, who had begun that conspiracy, whose hatred of Henry had prompted them, who needed Sieux gold to buy support, death came for them. And one daughter, who for spite would have had her father's men kill me, she was cast aside; and another daughter, who would have made my husband her lover or climbed over his death to win rank and fame, she too now was shut away, both of them discredited to the world. Beware the malice of woman-kind, so had the lady of the moors warned and now so it seemed. (At least I thought that malice done with; not yet, as shall be told.) Those other Norman lords, nameless lords, who had come to Boissert Field to plan the date and place of attack on Henry's lands in northern France, who would have killed Raoul because he would not join in their schemes, they were disarmed, disgraced, and thrown to Henry's mercy, such as that was. And the man in whose name the conspiracy was begun, who had come to spy upon his fellow conspirators and had stayed to see them killed so they could not tell tales on him; he, whose archers had been placed to murder and then been murdered in their turn; he, who, if all else failed, would have killed Raoul to advance his own plan, which, God forgive us, was to marry me and become Count of Sieux in Raoul's stead; what next had he, Geoffrey Plantagenet, in mind, of all men in France the most fair and most treacherous? That thread which bore that Geoffrey's name was truly bitter in its unravelling.

  There remained then one thread left, and it the most difficult of all for me to grasp, the part played by the queen. I should have left it well alone. As Raoul would have said, rather ignorance. Perhaps in this what he and other men felt was right; better their womenfolk bide at home, content themselves with women's work, and leave government to men. Yet now I believe, although then I could not bring myself to do so, that one thing was central to that twisted coil of conspiracy—the wishes of the person who sponsored it. Not Geoffrey Plantagenet, not de Boissert, nor any Norman lord had that power. Then who? For although the conspirators gave many excuses for their actions, yet one reason seemed common to all of them—each was tied to what the queen did. Now other men had told me this, if I had but listened to them; and, on looking back, I think Sir Renier had come, in part, to Sieux to warn of it. But this now I also believe: de Boissert and his daughter may have used the queen's friendship as license for what they did, and even Geoffrey may have felt she owed him recompense for failing to marry him, but none of their reasons affected her. For there was another thing vital to that conspiracy, and it too lay at the heart of it—the desire for land. And in that the queen felt more strongly than anyone.

  She will protect her lands as fiercely as any vixen does her cubs. I should have remembered that. For ownership of land, the keeping of it, the wresting away of it by force, the clinging to it tenaciously, is the thing that motivates this world we live in. For us, land equals power and wealth and fame, all those earthly goods that God permits to humans in their earthly lives. And in the end it is the only thing we keep, that little plot of ground in which death gives us our graves. So then, for her, the desire for her own and, and so also men had warned. I tell you this so that you shall understand what at the time had escaped me, that last strand in that knotted skein. For had I unravelled it I would have never felt the need to go and find the Queen. As I did. This was the way of it.

  When King Henry and his retinue came south to Poitiers, as ha
d been predicted, Raoul joined the king there. But Raoul rode alone. That was something I had not bargained on. For Queen Eleanor also had joined the king with her two children, her son and new daughter, and came south with him. And more than ever I felt compelled to see her again. What prompted me to go in search of the queen, to brave the intrigues of her court and think to settle all this rumor, these hints, these lies (for so I still thought them) concerning her role in the conspiracy? As you know I had not seen her since leaving England and had only that news of her which Sir Renier had brought to Sieux. Yet I felt it only just to her to tell her in person what had happened at Sieux, at Saint Purnace, at Boissert Field, and hear her explanations in return. There were ties so strong between us I believed them capable of overcoming any misunderstanding. And I valued her friendship both for itself and for the help she had given me in the past. I could not accept that a queen who had sent me a ring as pledge of faith could withdraw that pledge and turn from me. I longed to hear her voice once more, retell old stories, share our joys and griefs as friends. I wanted, most of all I suppose, to have her help me put in order my own conflicting thoughts as she had done when I knew her first in England. I felt it only right for us both to meet. I explain all this so you will know with what mixture of fear and expectation I had hoped to see her. Deprived of that chance, I felt distraught; still caught up in all those snarls of plot and counterplot which only she could unwind.

  Poitiers lies to the south of Sieux, a finger span on that map I once had seen, an easy ride, and easily Lord Raoul and his guard went south. Now it happened at this time that the king and queen were lodged apart, he within the city and she without; and learning of that fact in wifely wise (having sent messages after Lord Raoul to make sure he was safe and well), I too made a plan. Of all the things I have done in a long life, this was easily the worst; but I thought, since the queen kept court alone with her womenfolk, separate from the men, what harm should be if I joined her there, not so much in secret, since Lord Raoul had not forbidden it, but on a private visit such as one woman might make to a neighbor, having news to share or wanting company. Of course, one does not make private visits to a head of state without being asked, nor, to tell the truth, am I just to Raoul. He had not forbidden me to see her, it is true; but that was because it had not crossed his mind I would. But even he could not have estimated the harm. Well, taking Walter as my squire, and with three stout French men-at-arms, I rode south to meet the queen. An easy journey it was for us too, no haste, no great cause for alarm, my son bestowed once again in comfort with his village nurses, Sieux at peace. Then I saw for the first and only time the fair and rolling hills of Anjou, the neat roads lined with poplar trees, the many people traveling up and down, for the most part on pilgrimage to the famous sanctuaries in Spain and Italy. Every day we moved south under a pale sky like a robin's egg; and although it was the autumn of the year, the leaves had not yet fallen, the grapes hung in rich clusters in the vineyards. There were many smaller towns along the way, each throbbing like an anthill, each full of builders about their trade until you would have thought there was not one piece of earth that had not already been marked for a new tower or church. We lodged for the most part in quiet hostelries, peaceful too, for the counts of Anjou kept their lands safe, I grant them that, no robber bands, no thieves; and so we came at last to the ranks of the Loire, the greatest river in all of France. We crossed it in a small flat-bottomed boat, propelled between the many islands and sand banks by brown-faced men who leaned on their long poles to steer us through. The poles dipped and glittered in the sun; flights of small white birds wheeled downstream; beyond the further bank, finally we came within the sight of the city of Poitiers, with its many walls and spires, as if suspended between the water and the sky. On clear days, they claim it can be seen like a forest of stone rising out of the plain. They say, too, if you dig beneath its ground but a foot or so, you come across the remains of stones and bricks, buried now a thousand years, left behind by the peoples who once lived there. And so I think it is with memories; dig beneath, you will find whole cities once inhabited, now empty, all who once laughed and played there, all those whom you loved, gone, vanished like dust. In this way then I came most of the way to the city gates but never entered in, turned aside, rode further on to find the queen.

  To tell why Henry and his queen were lodged apart, I must again refer to the consequences of Boissert Field. And since I learned this later, I will tell you it briefly as it was told to me.) What was intended by the king in Poitiers and what was achieved mainly resulted from the crushing of the rebellion, too. It gave him time and opportunity, which he otherwise would not have had, to secure what was claimed he long had planned: his hold upon the turbulant barons of the south. It seems that, when he had married with the queen in this same town of Poitiers, he was young, new come to titles on his father's death, and that far-off island kingdom promised him without importance to these southern lords. He was eighteen; Eleanor, some eleven or twelve years his senior, had already once been a queen. They say he was both overwhelmed and intrigued by her, and in his eagerness to please would do anything she asked. Queen Eleanor had, then as now, one main desire: to keep the lands she had inherited, to hold them in her own right as she had done since childhood, as she had done indeed throughout her first marriage to the King of France. An ardent bridegroom then, Henry let her do as she would, let her receive her southern lords alone, let her have homage from them for their lands. But afterward, he had resented having done so, the more because those lords had ignored him and honored her. For five years their arrogance had rankled him. Now he was come to Poitiers to put an end to it. Then, too, there was the question of what and whom the queen had supported in Normandy, and why. And rumors of what her life had once been, of her many 'friends' both old and new, friends or lovers, who dared say, must have reached him. He may have heard stories of his brother's meeting with her, the promises each claimed the other had made, the support she may have promised him. These and other tales of this sort had made Henry less willing to please than he had been. Moreover, the death of his older son must have been a blow. The queen's next child had been a girl, and she had had only girl children with Louis of France. Henry needed heirs as much as Louis did to secure his inheritance; and, although in due course he was to get more than enough, the lack may have been a cause of alarm at this time. Finally, he was young and, like his father and brother both, amorous, desirous perhaps of 'friends' himself—so many reasons then to cause a rift, if not an open breach, between the king and queen. And because of them he stayed at Poitiers with his men and received the southern lords in his name alone, entertained them without her, had them do allegiance to him for their lands. (For what that was worth. As I soon found out, they rather did him lip service and bided their time.)

  As for the queen, the failure of Boissert Field had had effect on her, too. The Norman barons' defeat meant the failure of her plan, as I found out, to discomfort the king, although at that time I had no proof of what her plans had been. She stayed outside the town, housed in one of those religious buildings I had admired along the way, more like to an English country house, bigger than a house although not as strong as a castle, set about with many gardens, but fortified. They say she later shared King Henry's triumph and journeyed with him to meet each of her formal vassals; but first, seeing how he had triumphed in all things, she kept herself apart. And knowing what he guessed of her intrigues, she may have felt it wiser to stay away. They said she feared the spread of plague, the autumn being unusually hot; they said she preferred the country air, thought of her child's health—all lies. Poitiers was her city, where she had been brought up, where she had fled after leaving King Louis's court, where she had been wed to Henry; it was a city she dearly loved. Nothing would have kept her out of it save anger and pride. And these she nursed secretly, as she did her fear of her husband and her thought of revenge.

  I arrived at Poitiers, full of hope, certain all misunderstandings would
be put to rights, convinced one word from her would suffice; so sure of her, you see, that I thought at first it was merely ill timed that when we arrived at her court she was riding out, her falcon on her wrist, her falconer beside her, ladies swarming around. In the confusion of so many horses and riders I would have been jostled against the wall had not Walter thrust himself in front to take the strain. I caught but a glimpse of her, and she, I suppose, none of me; but I thought, When she hears I am here, she'll burst open the door in her impetuous way, and run in. Why little Ann, she'll say, her face alight with mischief as if she were but ten years old, why Ann, you've stolen a march on those stupid men who thought to keep us apart.

  And so, not unduly alarmed, I left Walter to see our men housed and fed, and followed her stewards up the wide shallow stairs to wait her return. All day I waited; all day I expected her; and at night, after the feasting, after I convinced myself that she had some high ranking guest perhaps whom she had not been able to dismiss who kept her then at night, I was sure, she would come. Kings and queens do not keep faith long. So Raoul had warned me, but I had not believed it then, and now I found it to my cost (although that was but half of it). When old companions are out of sight, there are too many new ones over-eager to fill an empty place, too many enemies waiting to whisper sly reports. By daybreak, confused, sleepless, I determined I would seek her out.

  I knew enough of court etiquette of course to realize I broke the rules. It was not for me to approach her, nor should I address her out of turn. I should presume nothing unless she permitted it. Even to me, by then, it seemed that I had made a grave mistake to have come at all. I could not, perforce, ask Raoul for advice—there was no one else to ask—yet a year ago, she had begged for me, sent for me with many loving messages. I could not accept that she had changed, or, if so, understand what had caused such change. Only that I had refused to come to her? But that was a thing I must explain myself, and then, I thought, she would relent. I believed, you see, that she was as constant as I was, not realizing that constancy too can be judged in many ways and even my own was open to doubt.