by Anne O'Brien
Louis strode forward to tower over me. ‘I’ll not have that man here, expressing such sentiments to my wife.’
Better and better … ‘Why ever not?’
‘You refused to obey me on the day of our marriage. That was in Bordeaux, your own city. This is Paris. I’ll not have that man in your chamber.’
My troubadour still knelt, head bent, fingers stilled on the strings. Marcabru, another favourite of my father, a songsmith full of wit, of scurrilous verses or the sweetest love songs to turn a woman’s knees to water, renowned throughout Aquitaine and Poitou. I had brought him to Paris with me from our recent visit to Poitiers. A handsome man with great charm and a heart-melting smile. A smile that was now wickedly in evidence at the exchange of words.
Louis waved him away. Marcabru looked at me for confirmation. I hesitated, just for a second, then nodded, smiling at him and watching as he bowed and retreated across the room. My women withdrew too, leaving the pair of us in a little space of hostility.
I turned to Louis. ‘Did you wish to speak with me, Louis?’ I asked sweetly. ‘Did you want my advice at last? Or will you continue to shut me out of your deliberations?’ He slammed the little coffer down, to the detriment of its hinges. ‘Did Abbot Suger allow you to come to me?’ I pursued.
Louis snarled, not diverted. ‘You were flirting with him, Eleanor.’
I made my face grave, hurt. ‘I do not flirt with my servants.’
‘I’ll not have it.’
I lifted my chin a little. ‘By what right do you take me to task, my lord?’
His reply was becoming tedious with repetition. ‘I am your husband.’
‘My husband? I think I’ve not seen you in my bed any time this week—this month, in fact. Even longer than that …’
‘Such comments don’t become you, madam. As for your paid songster. How typical of the louche south,’ he accused viciously, ‘to encourage such wantonness.’
We had been here before, of course. ‘Do you dare accuse me of lascivious behaviour, Louis? The woman who carries your child?’
‘How should I not? Look at your hair, your dress …’
‘I am at leisure here in my own rooms to dress as I please.’ Deliberately I drew my hand down the length of my hair, wrapped about in silk ribbons, the ends clasped in gold finials. Louis’s eyes followed the gesture. ‘I recall a time when you wound my hair around your wrist, my lord …’
‘I’ll not discuss that!’ His face was suffused with colour. ‘I’ll not have you looking like …’
He sought for a word. I supplied it. And not quietly. ‘A harlot?’ I suggested.
It silenced Louis. It drew all eyes in the chamber to us. With a furious look, Louis leaned to whisper, the syllables harsh in the quiet room. ‘You will dismiss your troubadour, Eleanor.’
‘I will not. I am his patron.’
Louis stalked out. The jewels—his peace offering but left behind with bad grace—were atrocious, solid enough to decorate a horse’s harness. I remained obdurate. I knew what I was about. Hardly had the week expired than Louis marched in with another box, small and carved out of wood. Without apology or explanation he thrust it into my hands.
‘A gift, Eleanor. To remind you of your home. I know you love the perfumes of the south so I’ve had this made for you.’
I opened the little box to release a sweet scent of orange blossom with a deeper note that tickled my nose. It was pleasant enough and I was touched that he should think of me with so personal a gift. Feeling magnanimous, I put aside my embroidery. Now was the time to welcome him back into my affections. I kissed his cheek.
‘I had the ingredients from a merchant here in the city,’ Louis explained, as he took the box from me, strode across the room to the open fire and.
‘Take care, Louis—only a little. The merest pinch. That’s too much!’
Louis cast a hearty handful of the contents onto the fire. His enthusiasm was a fine thing.
Smoke rose. There was the sweetness of the orange blossom, perhaps a little jasmine scenting the air, and beneath that. I sniffed. Sandalwood I expected, or even frankincense, as the base notes. That is what I would have ordered. We in the south had much experience of the skills of ancient Rome, now practised and polished by our alchemists. But that was not it. I sniffed again. One of my women sneezed. Louis coughed discreetly. Then not so discreetly as the smoke billowed and the pungency caught at the back of the throat.
There was no escape. The perfume burned, the smoke filled the room and we coughed, sneezed, eyes watering as we were all overwhelmed with the cloying, animal heaviness of it.
‘Open the windows,’ I ordered when I could breathe. ‘Douse the flames.’
To no avail. The perfume continued to give off its secrets and the mingled scents hung like a miasma in the air. By this time any sweetness was entirely obliterated, the draughts from the open windows merely stirring the fire into fresh life.
We fled to the antechamber where we continued to wheeze.
‘It was very expensive,’ gasped Louis, beating at his tunic, dragging his hands down over his face.
‘I can imagine.’ And I began to laugh.
Musk, of course. The most valuable, the most sought-after of base elements. To be used circumspectly, and totally overwhelming when applied with too liberal a hand. Laughter took hold and I could not stop. Everything was permeated with the scent of musk. The tapestries, the very stones of the walls. And ourselves.
‘It was too much, Louis,’ I managed. But Louis was already beating a retreat, still spluttering, as I mopped my eyes. ‘They say its perfume remains detectable for a hundred years …’ I gasped.
‘One week on the skin would be too much,’ Agnes muttered. ‘Your hair, lady! It reeks of the stuff. Who concocted it for His Majesty? They ought to be suffocated in their own product.’
‘Probably the Master of Horse, used to making liniment! They say it’s an aphrodisiac …’ I burst into laughter again.
‘And will you inform His Majesty of that?’
We laughed until we could laugh no more, before Agnes ordered up hot water to scrub and scour our skin and hair. The remains of Louis’s gift we consigned to the garderobe.
Poor Louis! Even his kindest efforts went awry, but at least we were reconciled.
I was still not readmitted to Louis’s councils.
I lost our child. For no reason that I could understand. Although my belly was hardly rounded, the birth far distant, I gave up hunting. I danced only moderately. I ate and drank circumspectly. Nothing must harm this precious child. But then a sharp pain struck in the night, a pain that became agony where there should have been no pain. The child was stillborn, almost too ill formed to be recognisable as a child, certainly too small to take a breath on its own and too incomplete for me to know its sex. Only a mess of blood and disappointment. Of the pain in the bearing of that child as it tore its way from my body I gave no thought, only the loss that lodged its despair in my heart. I had failed. I had failed France and Aquitaine. My grief surprised me.
Did Louis blame me?
No, he never did. He thought our loss was brought about by some nameless, undisclosed sin of his own that he had not confessed, thus driving him to endless hours on his knees to seek God’s forgiveness.
Perhaps it was. Or was the sin mine?
It was Agnes who held my hand when I wept, when the pain was almost too great to bear—not Louis, who was banned as were all men from the birth chamber.
‘What do they say, Agnes?’ I asked when grief ebbed, to be replaced by empty reality.
She pursed her lips.
‘Who do they blame?’ I pressed her.
She gave an eloquent shrug. ‘The child was born before its time. It is always the fault of the woman. It is the burden we have to bear.’
A caustic reply but not without sympathy. I knew she was right.
As for Louis, his despair may have driven him to his knees, but he still found time to banish Marc
abru from my court. I did not know my troubadour had gone until I emerged from my chamber to be told that Louis had sent him back to Poitiers on the understanding that he would never return to Paris. I missed him, that bright flavour of the south in his words and music that might have helped me to heal. I was heart-sore, but kept it close within me. I never talked of it to Louis. It had been deliberate retribution on his part. I had not thought him capable of it.
I think in those days my heart began to harden against the King of France.
CHAPTER SIX
LOUIS acted. The extent of his enthusiasm astonished me as much as it horrified his mother and drove his royal counsellor into a fury. I had not thought he would take my advice so much to heart, or quite so precipitately. I had thought it would take more than one night in my bed to stir him to open hostility against Toulouse, but Louis leapt on the excuse for invasion as a hungry cat leapt on a bird that threatened to escape. The voices raised against such a project were loud and vociferous but Louis was deaf to them all.
‘Why in the blessed name of God make an enemy of the Count of Toulouse?’ Abbot Suger, excruciatingly civil but furious that Louis had made his decision without once consulting him, questioned both the cost and the ultimate value to France.
‘Because he has no claim to it,’ Louis stated. ‘Toulouse is Eleanor’s.’
‘You have been ill-advised.’ Suger’s flat stare encompassed me before returning to Louis. ‘Are you not aware that your vassals will not support you, sire? They’ll refuse to supply you with knights. Not one of them wants an angry neighbour on his doorstep. We have no argument with Toulouse.’
‘I will defeat Count Alfonso, my lord Abbot. He will no longer be a neighbour and his anger will be a thing of no importance.’
Suger lifted his hands helplessly. ‘I pray God thinks you worthy of victory, sire.’
‘I will ask Him. He’ll not refuse me.’
And Adelaide? Her civility was negligible. ‘You will not go, my son.’
A mistake. I saw Louis’s nostrils narrow.
‘I will, madam.’
‘Louis! You will listen to me, even if you refuse to heed Abbot Suger.’
Ha! Adelaide still had not learned. Louis listened to me, and we set out for Poitiers together, where I prepared to stay as Louis gathered his troops. I wished with all my heart to travel farther south with him, into the centre of my own lands, and the temptation to do so stirred my blood from its northern languor—but a miracle had happened. That one night when I had painted for Louis the glory of his victory over Toulouse, his ownership of me, however brief and perfunctory, had been effective. My courses had stopped and nausea struck in the morning hours.
Praise the Virgin! I would carry an heir for France and for Aquitaine.
My delight superseded my wretched mornings when my belly heaved and the thought of food made me retch. Louis proved to be mildly sympathetic but more taken up with the magnificence of his own achievement. I tried not to fall prey to cynicism. The heir would enhance my importance and win over those of Louis’s court who still saw me as an undesirable southern influence in France. No one would dare to slight me when I bore the King a son.
Even Abbot Bernard would be forced to temper his denunciations.
But for now Louis was intent on conquest in my name. Emerging from my chamber, a linen cloth pressed to my lips, I listened to his enthusiastic explanation that they would take Toulouse by surprise and starve the city into submission. Even through my misery I noted that for a siege Louis employed few siege engines. Neither was Louis’s army particularly impressive in size. Was the whole operation too small, too ill-prepared? Yet Louis was so confident that I too saw no impediment to his success. If Count Alfonso did not expect the descent of an armed force, he would be unprepared and the campaign brought to a swift end. Louis would return to me, full of courage and male pride. Perhaps his rejoicing would take him from the long hours on his knees.
‘I will return and lay Toulouse at your feet,’ he promised. ‘I’ll drag Alfonso to his knees to ask your forgiveness.’
I kissed Louis farewell and retired to vomit into a basin.
How many days before Louis returned. Two weeks? Three? We saw the cloud of dust from Poitiers and knew there had been no effective siege. We knew the outcome anyway, long before I saw Louis’s crestfallen face. Rumour travelled faster than the Capetian troops. Count Alfonso had been warned and waiting for him. Formidable defences, banks and ditches and wooden palisades, sufficient to repel Louis’s meagre army, had been hastily thrown up.
And my noble, all-powerful, ambitious King of France, drunk on pride and certain victory? Louis did not even stay to make a token attack but turned on his heel and retraced every inch back to Poitiers without one blow being struck, whilst in Toulouse Alfonso thumbed his nose from the castle walls, catcalls screeching the derision of the Toulousians, the soldiers’ gestures obscene and graphic.
Alfonso could not believe his luck.
I despaired.
Louis begged God’s forgiveness for the unspecified sin that kept him from victory.
A humiliating disaster all round.
I did not use such words to Louis, although it was in my mind to blame him. Where else to lay the faults of lack of preparation, even of abject cowardice, in making no show of force?
‘I failed to take Toulouse,’ was all he said. The misery of failure sat on his shoulders as surly a thunder cloud. The chapel at Poitiers saw more of him than I did.
After a gloomy progress through my domains, we returned to Paris where the reaction of Abbot Suger and the Dowager Queen would await us. With one look at Louis’s doleful expression, Suger desisted, doing nothing more than frown sternly at both of us, as if we were errant children, then unbending enough to take Louis’s arm in a fatherly manner with a sigh. No point, I suppose, in ringing a peal over his head so long after the event.
Adelaide would have something to say about it, she would not hold back. Nothing would keep her silent when she had been proved right. I steeled myself. But her apartments were empty and a message had arrived for Louis during our absence. Adelaide had gone to her dower lands in Compiègne where her eye had fallen—with astonishing speed—on an obscure lord of the de Montmorency family who was unwed. Adelaide expressed the intention of marrying the lord and not returning to court. Poor man. Louis appeared to have little interest in it. It astonished me that the Dowager Queen could accept a return to comparative insignificance but perhaps it was in her nature to keep house in a distant keep where she could concentrate on God and her stitching. Obscurity would suit her very well.
It would not suit me.
So we were returned to Paris, Louis’s reputation smeared, the weight of Abbot Suger’s disapproval heavy, and perversely I missed Adelaide, her acerbic wit and the sharp cut and thrust that had become the essence of all our dealings. Conversation with Louis was as dull as boiled mutton pudding.
At least the child grew and thrived in my belly. It was my only consolation.
Adelaide’s departure had its consequence. Returned to my rooms, I set my women to unpacking my travelling chests since Aelith, who would normally have supervised such a mundane matter, had expressed a desire to remain behind in Poitou. There was the faintest scratch at the doorpost. I turned to find the dark-clad figure of a woman, a servant from her garments, watching me.
‘Yes?’
‘You do not recognise me, lady.’
‘Should I?’ I was out of sorts and missed Aelith’s easy company. My nausea had settled but I had found the long journey in the lurch and sway of the litter more than exhausting. Louis had been no company.
‘I am Agnes,’ she replied with a quiet assurance surprising in one of her status. ‘I was tirewoman to Queen Adelaide.’
I recalled her, Adelaide’s shadow, silent and unobtrusive as she fetched and carried for her royal mistress. She was short and slight, fine boned, her hair covered by a wimple, her figure concealed in dark wool, a woman, I
decided, who would pass unseen through life. I could not understand why she had come to me.
‘Why did you not accompany Queen Adelaide to Compiègne and her new life?’
‘I do not wish to retire, lady. I have no desire to disappear into the depths of the country.’
‘Did she allow you to stay?’ My interest was piqued.
‘I did not give her the choice, lady. It was not my wish to go and so I refused.’
I looked at her sharply, reconsidering. Behind the unassuming exterior of this woman of indeterminate age was a remarkable composure.
‘And so?’ I let my cloak slip from my shoulders. Agnes stepped neatly forward to retrieve it before it reached the floor. Impressive! ‘What is your wish?’
‘I wish to offer my services to you, lady.’
‘I have enough women to wait on me.’ I indicated the women from noble families who made up my household, their sole existence to meet my desires.
‘To wait on you, yes. But you need me, lady.’ She placed the fur on the bed, brushing down the soft pelt with her hand.
‘I don’t think I do.’ I yawned. Oh, I was tired.
‘You need me to help you survive at this court.’
What a strange thing to say. I did not think I had any such need. What could a servant offer me? I raised my brows in enquiry.
‘How many friends do you have, lady?’ the tirewoman asked.
‘Friends?’
‘I think you have none. Which of these women would tell you the truth?’
I considered. She had a point. They would tell me what I wished to know.
‘My sister would …’
‘Your sister is in Poitou, lady. I would be your friend,’ Agnes stated. ‘I would be your eyes and ears. And I would tell you the truth. To know the truth is strength.’
‘Why would you do this?’
She gave no reply. Her eyes were dark and direct as she allowed me to make my own judgement. Truth? Truth was a valuable commodity, not to be sneezed at. I walked across the room, singling out Florine, whose ear for gossip was keen.