Devil's Consort

by Anne O'Brien

  ‘I have news. From Outremer. And a letter has been brought by courier for you.’ A serious, stolid man, King Roger regarded me with sombre eyes. ‘I think you should sit. It is not good news, lady.’

  So the news first. I sat, sliding the letter into the slashed sleeve of my gown. King Roger wasted no time. What point in attempting to soften news that cannot be softened?

  ‘The Prince of Antioch is dead, lady.’

  I gasped. Struggled to draw another breath. ‘What?’

  ‘The Prince is dead. I thought you would wish to be alone when you heard.’

  For a moment, before the truth of his words hit home, I wondered how much King Roger knew of my liaison that he should make this opportunity tell me alone. But, of course, that was not his reason. Raymond was the brother of my own father and I saw compassion in the Norman’s face. It was right that I should be told first, and in private.

  And then the words made sense.

  It was a mailed fist to my belly.

  Raymond was dead. My magnificent golden hero, my lover, no longer breathed the same air as I. How could it be? How could his love of life, his vibrancy have been extinguished with no more of a ripple than when the flame of a candle is snuffed out? I had not known. How could I not have known it?

  ‘Tell me,’ I commanded calmly, when I was in a mind to shriek my grief and loss.

  So King Roger sat himself beside me and told me, in the baldest and most critical of terms, because that would be the least painful. Raymond was killed in a foolish, ill-considered skirmish against the Saracen leader Nureddin. An ill-advised campaign it had to be said, refusing a truce with the Turks when it was offered and attacking a massive force with only a few hundred knights and a thousand foot soldiers. Brave, King Roger admitted, but not feasible. Such sheer bravado in the attack, so typical of Raymond, who believed himself invincible, but beyond common sense. My beloved Raymond was surrounded, slain by the stroke of a Turkish sword as exhaustion laid him low. And then.

  ‘Tell me!’ I insisted when Roger’s flat description faltered.

  ‘They struck off the Prince’s head and right arm.’

  Ah! I could not speak.

  The Sicilian king was not finished. How brutal it was. ‘The Prince was decapitated. His head was set in a silver case and sent to the Caliph of Baghdad,’ he finished in a rush. ‘I’m told it’s displayed there over the city gate. There is huge rejoicing. Allah’s most formidable enemy dead. They held him in high regard, even though they killed him.’

  Thus I knew the worst.

  ‘Thank you,’ I managed to say. I drew my veil over my head. Over my face so that the King would not see the effect of his news. ‘Blessed Virgin! Why did he have to die?’

  ‘It is in the nature of heroes to die at the height of their powers, lady. We must celebrate his greatness as we mourn his passing.’

  ‘But I cannot celebrate.’

  Sensitive to my loss, King Roger withdrew.

  So I mourned him. I did not weep for so brave and foolish a warrior because that is not what he would have wanted from me. If tears were shed for him, perhaps Constance would do the weeping. It was her right. Instead of useless tears I put the blame for Raymond’s death where I thought it lay: Louis’s callous refusal to help him had cost Raymond his life. Louis’s abduction of me had prevented me from giving my Aquitanians to Raymond’s use.

  And perhaps if I had insisted on returning to Antioch from Jerusalem—perhaps I too could have made a difference.

  And now Raymond was dead.

  It made the loss of his daughter even more unimaginably tragic. I had nothing left of Raymond but a bright memory of ten magical days spent in that golden oasis he had created in Antioch.

  ‘I hope you have a conscience!’ I had no tolerance for Louis, and so accused him.

  Louis refused to reply. We never spoke of it again.

  I was crushed with sorrow.

  Where was the proud, confident Duchess of Aquitaine? Not here in Potenza, that was certain. The woman who sat in her borrowed rooms was buried under a weight of guilt and loss and unhappiness. Nothing but emptiness. Eating, sleeping, even thinking, seemed beyond me. Until Agnes crouched beside me, her hands closed around mine where they lay unoccupied in my lap, and squeezed hard.

  ‘Lady. Look at me. Listen to me.’

  I looked into her concerned face, surprised by the command in her tone but not particularly stirred to obey. And Agnes, dear Agnes, enfolded me in her arms and rocked me like the mother I had never known.

  ‘It might be good to weep,’ she said softly.

  ‘I cannot.’

  So we sat silently, until I struggled for release and Agnes turned me to face her.

  ‘This is no good, lady. You have to be strong. If you do not … do you live under Louis’s subjection for ever? Do you let Galeran win?’

  ‘Louis will not release me.’

  ‘No, he won’t.’ I blinked at her honesty. ‘He’s weak and stubborn, both in equal measure, and Galeran has his hands on the reins. When you are returned to Paris there’ll be no respite—it will be Abbot Suger who resumes control. No, the King won’t release you or your lands.’ Her hands gripped even tighter. ‘Not unless you do something about it.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  Agnes released me and stepped away with a fine sneer inappropriate in a tirewoman. ‘You’re as weak as a mouse! Where’s the woman who came to Paris and took us all by storm? Where’s the woman who cajoled and wheedled and bullied until she accompanied her husband on Crusade? Who demanded an annulment in the middle of a war council? Is she dead for ever?’

  ‘I think she is,’ I remarked dolefully.

  ‘So they talk, gossip, rip apart your reputation. Will you let them do it? Will you sink into a trough of misery? I had thought better of you, lady. Even Queen Adelaide had more spirit than that! What’s more, if you continue to maunder in this fashion, you’ll lose your looks.’

  Well, that got through to me, the banality of it. I tilted my head. ‘Well?’

  Agnes fell to her knees beside my chair. ‘Listen, lady. Galeran has Louis’s ear again.’

  ‘When does he not?’

  ‘He tells the King to discipline you, to take you to task. To force you to travel on. He says your illness is a trick and that His Majesty should order you to resume your journey home.’

  ‘Does he?’ I felt my mind stir with mild resentment, the first time it had stirred in any direction for days.

  ‘We are in Sicily, lady.’

  ‘And so?’ I found I was looking down at my gown, my shoes, really seeing them with some surprise. Had I chosen to wear this gown? Its weight and dark mourning hue displeased me. How could I have allowed the ends of my hair to become so dull through the exigencies of travel and neglect? I rubbed them between my fingers, unable to suppress a grimace. How dull the glowing colour had become. My hands were less than soft, my nails ill-tended.

  ‘We are in Sicily! Do we go on to Italy, to Rome?’ Agnes demanded. ‘What would Prince Raymond tell you to do?’

  Ah. My mind snapped back from the deficiencies of my wardrobe and person. How difficult it seemed to stir my thoughts to life. But no longer. As if a window-shutter had been opened to let in the first blush of dawn, I was beginning to think again.

  ‘Rome? I’m not sure.’

  ‘Ask his Majesty. No—tell him! Tell him you must go to Rome. For the good of your soul. He’ll not refuse you.’

  Like the mist clearing in the heat of the sun, my abandoned planning began to reorder itself. I looked at Agnes and smiled for the first time for longer than I could recall, the muscles of my face stiff with disuse. ‘I should beg an audience with the Pope, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Most definitely!’

  I had forgotten. How had that been possible? It had been my intent when I had schemed and plotted through that long incarceration in Jerusalem. The Holy Father would support me against Louis, and Louis would be forced to listen. Pope Eugenius would
outrank and out-argue Abbot Suger any day. How could I have let my plans slip through my fingers for so long? It was time—well beyond time—for me to take control, to order my life again, to drag my mind back from the brink of what had seemed to be inconsolable despair.

  ‘And, lady—’ Agnes was holding a document ‘—this fell from your sleeve. I put it aside for you. It is still unopened. I think you should read it.’

  The letter. King Roger had given me a letter. Who would send a letter to find me here? Nothing that would not keep. There were more urgent matters to arrange. Louis would discipline me, would he? Take me to task, would he?

  ‘It has the lions of Anjou on it, lady.’

  ‘Anjou …’ Now, here was an unexpected communication. ‘Give it to me.’ I snatched it up.

  To Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, Countess of Poitou.

  Well, that was clear enough. I opened it with sudden urgency, eyes racing down the single page. Considering the time and effort to get this to me, it was very short.

  I send this in the certain hope of it finding you. Roger of Sicily is a family friend who can be trusted.

  News of your desire to end your marriage has reached Anjou. You’ll not need me to tell you that this will make you vulnerable. If you should find a need for the protection of a strong arm from a man who has always admired you, I am he. I can be your eyes and ears, as alert as your magnificent gerfalcons.

  My admiration for you has not lapsed over the years.

  As I studied the writing, the scrawled signature, I laughed aloud at the outrageousness of the offer, my voice rusty with the effort. A strong arm. Eyes and ears. Just what was the meat in this offer? Then I concentrated on the author. Not Geoffrey, as was my first instinct for so personal a letter. Or in the neat, educated hand of a clerk. Instead, in a hurried style and quite idiosyncratic with strong uprights and lacking any embellishment, the well-formed words galloped across the page. And there the final flamboyant signature.

  ‘Henry Plantagenet.’

  And then a scribbled footnote, even more hurried, as if he had abandoned the earlier formality to write what was in his mind.

  More to the point, every ravenous power-seeker will be sniffing at your heels when you are unwed. You need me to stand for you. If you consent, I promise that you will not regret it.

  Despite my misery, I laughed, and remembered. Another life, another place. How many years ago now since I had first seen him in Poitiers? Four years? The boy with russet hair and grey eyes, precociously aware, already bidding to be a warrior. A youth with blood on his wrists where my hawk’s talons had dug in because he’d refused to wear a gauntlet. And then later when he had sat at the council in Paris to discuss the possibility of a royal wife for him, watching, weighing, assessing. A young man now, capable of a cool appraisal. I recalled my acknowledgement that here was a rare intelligence. And all that uncontrolled energy as he’d investigated a pierced incense burner, burning his fingers as he’d done so.

  So Henry Plantagenet had written this, offering to be my hawk. He would stand for me. An enigmatic statement that left much to the imagination. Was that all he was offering? Who would be the hawk, blinded and controlled by hood and jesses. Who would be the master? This was not an offer to take without due thought.

  Should I be considering it to any degree?

  I reread the extraordinary request, absorbing the truth in it.

  Every ravenous power-seeker will be sniffing at your heels when you are unwed.

  I had been protected all my life, and so busy snatching at my freedom that I had not truly reflected on what I would do when—if—I was at liberty to return to my own lands.

  I would be the perfect target for a well-planned abduction and a hasty marriage to any ambitious knight who saw me as his road to greatness. Was not that the reason I had been so precipitately wed to Louis in the first instance, remaining incarcerated in Bordeaux until he came to fetch me with all the power of a French escort, for fear that I might be ambushed before I could reach Paris? The man who took the Duchess of Aquitaine to his bed, willingly or by force, would be fortunate indeed.

  So if I could escape from Louis, if … I scowled at the opulent surroundings … I could escape from this damned marriage—what then? Who would protect me from the jackals that would circle to pounce and take possession? I would have a pack of them on my heels before the ink on the annulment was dry.

  The golden lions of Anjou grinned at me from the seal. Was this nothing but the puffed-up confidence of youth, entirely implausible—unless Count Geoffrey was behind the offer. Now, there was a thought that did not please me. But if so, why hide behind his son? And I did not think it had the essence of Geoffrey. Far too direct. Geoffrey would wait, bide his time, then swoop when I was at my weakest. This was a very direct proposal.

  From a mere boy!

  How old would Henry Plantagenet be now? He described himself as a man, not a boy. Determination sprang up from the page from the bold, black script. How intriguing. To go to the trouble of sending a message across Europe, to put himself at my side. And what a turn of phrase he had.

  I folded the parchment, hooding my eyes from Agnes. ‘Put this in my jewel coffer.’ And felt the desire to determine my future resurface, thundering through my blood enough to make me catch my breath. I rose to my feet, issuing orders. A tub. Hot water. Perfumes and lotions. My clothes shaken out, my jewels laid out for my inspection.

  Within the hour I think I was restored.

  A servant led me to the chamber occupied by my husband.

  ‘Eleanor …’

  He struggled from his knees before the prie-dieu, a guarded expression on his face. Thank God, neither de Deuil nor Galeran was hovering in the shadows. I curtsied. I hid a smile at the startled winging of his brows. There had been little respect between us of late.

  ‘I have a request, my lord.’

  Louis looked as if he would rather I hadn’t.

  ‘I want to go home. And I want to go to Rome first.’ Louis’s brow wrinkled. ‘I want an audience with His Holiness the Pope. I wish to stop in Rome.’

  Louis steepled his fingers to his lips. ‘Abbot Suger wants us to get to Paris as fast as possible. There are rumours of discontent at home …’

  Which I very well knew. I had spent the last hour in taking more than control of my life. If my own reputation had been damaged, Louis was whole-heartedly blamed for the failure of the whole crusading enterprise. His vassals were murmuring loudly about dishonour and waste of money, rattling their swords and threatening rebellion. I widened my eyes with a magnificent pretence at anxiety.

  ‘It’s been well over two years since we left, my lord. Will two more weeks make any difference? Abbot Suger is a capable man.’

  ‘I don’t see the need to linger in Rome now.’

  So I lied. I perjured my soul. Why not? I would never forgive Louis for his cruel role in Raymond’s death. ‘I wish to make repentance. I have sins on my conscience.’

  Magic words. Immediately Louis’s features softened. Oh, how soft, how gullible he was.

  ‘Eleanor. My dear wife. Of course. His Holiness will give us both his blessing. He will grant us oblivion for our sins. And then when we return to Paris we can look forward—to our future together.’

  ‘Thank you, my lord. I knew you would understand.’

  He walked forward, placing his hands tentatively to cup my shoulders. When I steeled myself not to pull away, Louis kissed me tenderly on my brow.

  ‘Of course I understand. You have been unhappy.’ I tried not to tense, not to pull away. I prayed he would not conjure Raymond’s name between us. ‘You are so high-spirited, it draws you into dangerous currents. It has always been so. But God will know what is in your heart and give you his comfort. As I will give you mine. The past will be wiped clean and we will walk forward together in God’s holy light. Both of us restored to his salvation.’

  He kissed me again on the lips.

  I escaped before I might vo
mit over his sandaled feet.

  We left for Rome with an escort from King Roger. His teeth glinted in a smile that was almost a grin as he handed me into the swagged and cushioned palanquin.

  ‘I trust the letter from the Angevin brat was of interest to you.’

  My brows rose. Angevin brat? Was he being deliberately provocative? And what did the King of Sicily know of it anyway?

  ‘Family connections, you know.’ Roger kept hold of my fingers and raised them to his lips, a charming formality, then added with utmost seriousness, ‘If he offers help, don’t reject it out of hand.’

  ‘And how do you know he offers me help? What help could I possibly need?’

  ‘Only you know that, lady.’ He signalled for the escort to move off with a distinct gleam in his eye. ‘Henry Plantagenet will go far, I predict. If not always comfortably. He’ll be worth watching.’

  ‘He’s very young.’

  ‘Angevins mature quickly, lady! Watch yourself!’

  ‘I have no intention of doing anything foolhardy!’ I replied, inexplicably ruffled.

  King Roger smiled.

  Before I left Potenza—how I hated Potenza!—I gave money for perpetual masses to be said for Raymond’s soul and prayed that God would not judge him too harshly. He was a man of much charm and not a little talent. How could I not have loved him? I tried not to think of his naked skull encased within rigid silver, adorning the Gates of Baghdad. I tried not to think of the carrion eaters swooping to peck at the rotting flesh.

  Some days I was still sick to my stomach.

  But now I looked forward. The image of Henry Plantagenet slipped through my guard—until I banished it. I would be under the control of no man. I had almost fallen foul of his father, who had wooed me for his own ambitions. I would not do the same with the son.

  And then found myself smiling again within the sumptuous enclosing curtains as a long-distant memory burst into my mind with great clarity, when the young Angevin had taken my popinjay to teach it to repeat ‘Eleanor’. He had done no such thing. When the troublesome bird had been returned to me it had enunciated with great clarity ‘Henry’, followed by a squawk that might just have been Plantagenet. And continued to do so until I banished it from my solar.