by Mary Lide
They say the queen laughed and began to braid her long hair to hide it beneath her cap, with fingers that are longer and more white than any other woman’s. “God’s mercy, boy,” she is supposed to have said, her eyes sparkling at the thought of adventure after so many years of inactivity. “Have you never seen a woman without her skirts? How shall we gallop along if I am supposed to trot sidesaddle on a palfrey? When I went with Louis to the Holy Land, I rode astride, my ladies and I, dressed like Amazons, one breast bare, bows slung across our backs, our legs naked, stuck into boots. Christ’s bones,” as Hue continued to stare, “so rode your mother once, and not only rode. She lived as man in a camp of men.”
Hue did not say another word, went about his business grimly, curtly ordered the march to begin, although he had secretly hoped to be allowed to lift the queen upon her horse and himself adjust her bridle and reins. Perhaps, too, for the first time the thought occurred that if his mother had so ridden when she was young, that must have been a score of years ago, and the queen must be much older than the Lady Ann!
Afterward, in grief and pain, Hue used to admit as much. “The queen rode like a man,” he explained, “but she was still a woman and a queen. Every so often we had to stop on some pretext. Either the weather was too hot, or the way was hard, or there was some friend she must greet. Or she was hungry, thirsty, tired. We might have made better time with her carried behind one of us, or in a litter as I had planned. I had intended to have her ride with a group of ladies, surrounded by a phalanx of men, so that we would seem innocent, yet so strongly armed as to make any skirmishers give us a wide berth. She chose instead a way that might not have worked for a girl half her age.”
So it was that although Raoul de Faye’s men left a trail a mile long, Henry’s troops, already out in force, ignored them and were perhaps already scouting for the queen. It was not surprising that they caught her almost without trying. For Henry’s men had already come storming into Aquitaine. Even Raoul de Faye’s own castle had been seized, and other fortresses of equal note, so that often places where Hue might have found support were occupied before he got there. Twice he was able to change course in time, once warned by a pall of smoke from a ruined tower, once by a band of fleeing peasantry. The third time he could not escape. He described it thus:
“Forced by circumstance to bivouac, we were resting too long at midday at the queen’s insistence. Suddenly a group of Henry’s men appeared. I had posted guards, without whose warning we would have been overrun. As it was, the few knights we had with us, I myself, were already mounted. The men I had were good, well trained and disciplined; they knew what to do and were prepared to ride out, two abreast, to cut our attackers off before they attacked us. We easily could have sliced a way clear had we been alone.
“But the queen would not mount, nor ride. ‘I am queen,’ she cried in her imperious way, ‘I am Duchess of Aquitaine. They will not dare detain me. Tell them who I am.’ And not even waiting, she did so herself. Well, they surrounded us, a small enough group to have captured such a prize, their captain a friendly soul whom success that day made almost tipsy with surprise. To the queen he showed all respect, but let her go he would not. To me he said in private, ‘Lad, I’ve been a soldier these thirty years, not ever taken any lord of note. At my first skirmish of the season, to have a queen fall into my hands like a ripe plum! And what a queen, whose husband is already scouring the country for her. Now, God be praised, I’ll give up soldiering, marry me a Gascon wench I’ve my eye on, go back where I belong. Praise God and the king, say I; they grant me luck. But how comes it lad,’ for in private, as I have said, he was in jovial mood, ‘how come you are in such a state, so poorly guarded; where are the queen’s men? How come you roam the borderlands like wandering vagabonds?’
“To the queen he was brisk, professional, although still polite and, in his rough way, courteous. Quarrels between kings and their wives are not uncommon, nay more common than not, but seldom last long. A man could lose his head for misspeaking on poor advice. And Queen Eleanor still was queen, even though her husband had ordered her brought forth under guard.
“So it was we rode on north as prisoners, toward the Norman stronghold, the castle of the Norman dukes that they call their home, at Falaise. The queen’s Potivin soldiers were angry at their capture, not wanting to be held by Henry in his own ducal lands, angry enough to whisper suspicion of betrayal. Certainly one of her former friends, William Maingot, might have arranged as much. As we passed by his fort, out he rode to cheer us on, a maggot, indeed, slimy scum. Full of leers and courtesies before the queen, full of regrets he could not rescue her; I could have kicked his teeth in, full of smiles and winks behind our backs.
“So we came to Falaise in due time. Oh, it was not so bad at first, as prisons go. We had the run of the place, like to kill us of boredom; the queen kept to her chambers above, we in the gatehouse, nothing to do but drink and dice.” Hue’s eyes had darkened for a moment in their habitual, angry look. “If that was prison fare,” he cried, “or its foretaste, better death.”
But death did not come for Hue then, although it waited for him. Yet death came for many men that spring, as Henry struck now here, now there, making those rapid moves, those forced marches, those lightning sweeps for which he is famed, holding his enemies back on one side, driving them forward on the other, until at last he had time to spare for his queen. Henry and Eleanor had not met in years, and their last meetings had been stormy affairs. He was in no rush to deal with her. Having her under lock and key in the strongest, oldest of his castles, he was content to let her bide and cool her heels. It was not until full summer, when a lull in the fighting gave him respite, that he bethought what to do with her. And since at the same time worrying reports reached him of a fresh Breton advance cutting across Normandy toward Falaise, he came north himself, on a fine day, to this greatest of all his fortresses, a vast, massive, square block of stone, impregnable, a fitting prison for a queen.
What he meant to do with her is not certain. That she had urged her sons on, that she had planned their rebellion and herself had tried to join them, was unquestionable. Equally without question was that she should pay a queenly price. But what or how taxed Henry’s ingenuity. He was in no hurry to go to Falaise, even reluctant to face this woman he once had adored, less anxious than she for an interview. So it came as a great surprise to him to learn that among her entourage was Hue of Sieux. As now his queen let him know.
Queen Eleanor was no fool. To the contrary, she was clever, quick, more shrewd in the early days than her husband had been, used more than he to courts and kings. Better than anyone she knew this episode could not be ignored. This time, indeed, she had gone too far. She had tried his mettle once before, when, as it was claimed, she had supported his brother, Geoffrey Plantagenet. But she had done so in secret, never openly. A reconciliation at that time had been made between her husband and herself, possible only because they both needed sons. Sons she had given him; now she was beyond childbearing age, as he was quick to point out. And those sons were not much to gamble with, already in themselves suspect. Instances of sons who rebel are commonplace, not so open rebellion by a queen. Desperately Eleanor looked for a way to wriggle free from her predicament. What said the laws, she asked of Henry’s seneschal, a portly man who held Falaise until the king’s return, what was the position regarding rebellion of a queen? Did Henry’s lawyers, who blanketed all of England with their laws, have a statement to cover her case? If so, what arguments would be suggested in defense? Back and forth she sent her demands within the fortress of Falaise, as if in a papal court, causing the worthy seneschal to break out in a sweat, trying to find some means of avoiding the consequences of her rashness. For the queen had begun to be seriously alarmed. Henry’s ancestors had not been nice in their dealings with recalcitrant wives; one had actually had his wife burned as a witch. Although those days of barbarism were long past, the queen did not altogether trust her royal partner. His ang
er was legendary, and as her imprisoner, he might do anything at all to her if the mood took him. She was on the point of despair when she bethought of a chance, a victim to offer in her place. Hue provided her with the logical offering.
Perhaps I do the queen injustice; perhaps she was not so clever as I give her credit for; perhaps, in panic, she merely used an excuse that came easily to mind. But certain it is that she herself sent word to Henry, as soon as he had entered in at Falaise, to let him know that among his prisoners was Hue of Sieux.
King Henry was resting after a long, hard ride, boots on table, chatting genially with his men. He had been amused to hear of the queen’s scurryings and, well satisfied at these signs of proper fear, is supposed to have grunted, “An old woman, bestride a horse, has other problems than legal ones,’’ a thought to make him laugh. The queen as little liked to be laughed at as he did. Late at night, to stir him into an uneasy fret, a game-fly to torment him awake, she sent her message. They say Henry’s boots crashed to the floor, the plates were spilled, the chair up-tipped. “Jesu, Mary, Mother of God, Christ’s wounds,” he swore all at once, “that young whelp who mocked at me!” In the middle of the night he sent his guard, himself came storming into the gatehouse, where Hue had bedded down as he had done these past months, sleeping off a head of wine. That night Hue was dragged out of bed unceremoniously for Henry to get a good look at his prisoner.
Of course Hue fought. Asleep in bed, half drunk, when the guards kicked him in the ribs, he thought at first it was a trick, a spiteful game of his former companions to make him wild, a joke to catch him unawares. Furious in his turn, he attacked, dragging two of them with him, almost crashing into the king himself, wrestling like a wildcat on the floor, until it suddenly dawned on him that the swords were real and the man who wanted him was not playing games. Still bemused with wine and sleep, half dazed from the battering, his red curls grimed with dirt, his face bruised and cut, Hue did not much look like anyone. But when the soldiers dragged him to his feet and held the taper close enough to make him wince, his gray eyes, still unfocused with wine, stared back into gray eyes like his own. Henry the King stood looking at him, nursing the blow Hue inadvertently had given him. Gray eyes to gray, red hair to red, white skin that bruises at the slightest touch, Henry looked at Hue and saw his younger self. I do not know which was worse: a young boy, half asleep, who had mocked a king at Chinon; or a Plantagenet, who was none, who looked like the king’s own son. The king was startled himself out of thought; his rage flared. Before the startled gaze of his own courtiers, some of whom he had also routed out of bed, some certainly as drunk as Hue was, all weary from the long day’s ride, Henry made the example the queen had sought.
With his own fist he knocked Hue down again. “Traitor,” he howled. “Treacherous dog. I’ll have you strung up for this, I’ll have you hanged and quartered, I’ll have your guts.” He had his guards clap Hue in irons, haul him below out of sight, throw him into one of those foul cells in Falaise, dug so deep no man knows the way in or out. “Escape from that, Hue of Sieux. Laugh your way out from there,” the king is supposed to have cried. “Or get your father to help you, if he can.” And there, in truth, Hue would have languished, lost to sight, to memory, until Henry bethought to drag him up for sentencing, had not Gervaise of Walran been there.
And so it was that Gervaise sent a second message, this one to Sieux, in all haste, warning us and bidding us entreat the king for mercy. Gervaise of Walran’s story to this point is soon told. He had joined the king as he had planned, had fought with him at the capture of Rouen, with valor, I may add, as became a Norman lord, so that the king had noticed him. But the king’s war had not been all that he had hoped. Come north now with Henry to Normandy, Gervaise had expected to be involved with the campaign against the Breton rebels, not with the saving of an old friend. His dismay that first day at finding Hue in Falaise, a Hue who lounged negligently against the gatehouse door and drank and laughed at Gervaise’s warning to beware, was matched only by the shock of seeing Hue so treated by the king. Whatever Gervaise might have felt, he knew an earl’s son deserves better care, should not be handled like a common criminal. Word he sent, in that respect behaving like a true friend, to Earl Raoul to save his son. One of his men, for you remember Gervaise still had men with him, rode out before the dawn, posthaste to Sieux. What did the message say? A simple one this time, dictated in a rush, without flourishes: “Henry holds your son, Hue, at Falaise. As your future son-in-law I will act for you until you come. As that son-in-law in fact, I will do the best that I can. But come yourself in any case.”
Chapter 12
Woes come in threes, beating like ravens before a storm. How did that first grief fall on us here at Sieux, in our little island of calm? Let me pose the question another way—how was it that that evening, almost at dusk, when Gervaise’s messenger came laboring up the cliff, lathered, dust-coated, how was it that the Lady Ann was already waiting for him by the gates? Hooded, in her cloak, as I had seen her standing on the battlements at Cambray, why did she wait, her hair unbound, in mourning, her dark eyes steadfast, her face pale as milk, as if she had heard of Hue’s death, as if, in her own flesh, she felt the rending of his? Come yourself. She already knew before Gervaise’s message was read out.
Into our courtyard came the messenger, where the earl but a scant half-hour earlier had returned and was still on horseback himself, much of his time spent out and about in the hope that riding through his lands would keep down thought. I saw how his hands shook as he took that crumpled parchment and smoothed it flat. He did not exchange looks with his lady wife, nor yet his daughter, nor with anyone, merely read the message aloud in a calm voice, from which all emotion had been removed, the bare facts clear: Hue is Henry’s prisoner, condemned to a traitor’s death unless I intercede for him. And Olwen’s marriage to Lord Gervaise the bargain offered for help.
My lord read the parchment, folded it, returned it. Why did his lady look at him with an expression in which pity struggled with dread? Why did his daughter bend her head as if bowed beneath the weight of acceptance? Why did the earl himself sit forward on his horse, his hands crossed in front of him, as he had sat that day his older son had left? When he spoke, it was not even to us but rather to himself, far off, reaching back into those shadows that lay unsleeping, unforgetting, from Cambray. “In Paris,” he said, “I looked for my son. All through the spring I waited for Hue; had he come then, I would have brought him back here. Before the rebellion was formed, I would have rescued him. But to Henry long ago I swore that I should neither be for nor against. And long ago I also swore that never should I ask aught of him, nor take, unless he begged. I cannot be forsworn, not even for my son’s life. And my daughter is not to bargain with.”
His bleak reply, its tone, could not be argued down. He did not even try to argue with himself, and his men, who had heard the first part of the message with mounting anger, they, too, were silent, no help in them. Well, such are oaths, I repeat, sworn in their innocence by honest men, who live to be trapped by them. Not one of the lord’s friends who knew his mind would challenge him; in all other things was he reasonable save only this, his personal pride, his own honor. That was our second grief.
Now came the third. The earl turned his horse abruptly. He did not say anything to his wife, he did not ask for understanding, forgiveness, but spurred out of the gates, between those towers that Henry long ago had razed and where he had hanged Raoul’s men from their shattered walls. Down the cliff the earl went at a gallop, a man who had never turned his back on anything and who feared no one, caught in a trap of his own making. I cannot say what would have happened in the end or what Earl Raoul would have done. Flesh of our flesh are children, remembrance of our youth, our second selves. So do fathers accept their sons who grow to destroy the men who fathered them. But for Hue to meet a traitor’s death, such as Henry had planned once for Raoul, who, then, if not Raoul to save his son? I cannot say that the earl woul
d have let Hue suffer such a terrible fate without having made his stand against a king whose hate now revealed itself again. Instead the third grief fell upon us like a thunderbolt, rendering such speculation superfluous.
Some claimed it was deliberate, that a worker overhead in the semi-dark let slip the stone. God knows the earl had enemies enough: two kings, a queen, many barons who would welcome such an opportunity. The master mason, the earl’s old friend, swore in the chapel, which he had built, that not one mason was unknown to him, all loyal as was he; and, in truth, I myself think it was an accident. But I see the hand of God in it, to keep the earl from being forsworn but to ensure that Hue should have his chance. The earl, riding furiously, heard the sound of the stone’s falling and tried to rein back his horse to warn his men. He had never made a false move on a horse before, he who had been taught to ride by the best horsemen of the time, who, in his youth, they say, rode a stallion more like a human soul than beast. In trying to avoid the stone, in trying to divert the men who followed him, the earl reined back too hard and threw his horse. The stone did not crush him, but the horse did. They fell together in a slide of pebbles, gravel, dirt, broken branches—a small avalanche. On level ground the horse lumbered to its feet. The earl lay on his back, did not move when they ran to him, did not open his eyes.
Only then did the Lady Ann give a cry, one keening note that our women make upon the moors when they sense death. I think perhaps she saw again her brother’s murder, when, as a child, she had watched men bear him back, his body wrapped in his cloak, his arms dangling by his sides as now Raoul was brought. Sensing death, she thought it must be Raoul’s; I believe she thought his life forfeit to the gods for Hue’s.
But Raoul was not dead. Losing consciousness, bleeding from a score of wounds, his right arm (which once had been torn in battle for her sake) ripped apart, he still breathed, although grievous hurt. We carried him into the hall, which his determination and courage had rebuilt. God’s will be done.