by Lisa Hilton
‘See, Majesty, what a charming place,’ remarked Lady Maude brightly. I took no pleasure in the new title, with not one moment’s joy of it. Two guards helped me from the litter and my maids fussed to arrange cushions that I might sit while my tent was set up. Below us in the forest, I could hear the grunts of the men as they hauled the baggage carts into a ring for the night. The deep forests of England were haunted by wolves, and the men lit fires in a circle each night to keep them off.
I was seated next to a little well, no more than a heap of stones with a cracked leather pitcher set into a ledge, and the thought of the cool water made me suddenly thirsty. I motioned to one of the maids to fetch me to drink and saw Agnes and Lady Maude exchange a meaningful look. It was the first time I had expressed any wish since we had been on the road. I swallowed the clean, flinty water, first sipping, then gulping. I could feel it flowing through me, reviving and cooling me from within. I sat straighter, and something in the doorway of the chapel caught my eye. Slowly, with my legs trembling with effort, I pushed myself to my feet. The maids leaped forward to support me, but I saw Agnes hold up a quick hand to still them. A few faltering steps brought me across the thick summer grass to the deep shade of the chapel porch. Set into the stone lintel was a carving, a poor thing, the kind of drawing I might once have made for Othon, not the skilled work of a mason, and newer than the chapel, its planes still raw bright stone among the moss and ivy of the walls. A face with two horns surrounded by a few crudely shaped leaves above, with a line on its forehead and another flickering leaf-shape above that, like a candle’s flame. It did not frighten me – what could frighten me now? The beauty and peace of the glade seemed to cup my puny body in its greenness, sheltering. This was a holy place. I pushed at the rough wooden door. Within, the chapel was dark and surprisingly cold, its only light a round window pushed through the wall where an altar had once been. The floor was littered with the desiccated corpses of songbirds, poor things, who had flown through and died in their dim prison, battering their fragile bodies against the walls. And there was something else. A heap of rags in one corner, curled over a stick. As I looked, I saw it move, very slightly.
‘Lady Maude!’ I had been right, I had lost my old voice. This was a new tone, clear and commanding, with an edge in it like the flint in the water I had swallowed. Lady Maude rushed up, followed by the guards. ‘There is a person here.’
I waited outside, exhausted on my cushions, while the figure was dragged into the light. An old woman, though the thick grey hair on her wrinkled berry of a face made her seem as sexless as the figure carved into the door. One pathetically thin hand clutched a broomstick, and when she moved her layers of skirts they gave off a thick, dirty barnyard scent, high and pungent like a chicken run.
‘Only a beggar, Majesty. I shall pack her off?’ gasped Lady Maude, struggling between fear that I should be angry at being privately disturbed and delight that I had at last spoken.
‘No. Ask her if she is hungry. I am hungry. Bring us some food.’ No one moved. ‘Lady Maude, you heard me. Bring us some food. And the woman may sit.’
I wondered later if the poor old lady knew that she had shared her meal with the queen of England. We were both ravenous. She nibbled swiftly and furtively at her food like an animal, mumbling chunks of bread into her toothless mouth as fast as she could swallow, and I tried to smile at her to show she should not be afraid, while I stuffed down cold fowl and cold baked eggs until my astonished stomach bulged and twitched with pain. I washed my hands and myself handed the creature a napkin to wipe the crumbs from her mouth.
‘Now. Ask her what this place is,’ I instructed Lady Maude.
‘Majesty, I cannot think—’
‘I said, ask her.’
Lady Maude spoke to the woman in the English tongue. I was surprised to find that a few of the words already sounded familiar.
‘It is an old chapel, Majesty. This … person lives in a hut nearby. She sweeps it to keep it tidy. Sometimes a pilgrim will sleep or pray here. That is all.’
‘Ask about that.’ I pointed to the face in the porch.
‘It is nothing, Majesty. The common people call it a “green man”. A sort of …’ Lady Maude trailed, ‘woodland sprite. Just an old superstition.’
‘Ask her. Tell her she has no reason to fear, if she will answer. Ask her politely, Lady Maude.’
The old woman paused then began to roll up her sleeve, exposing a withered arm much weaker looking than her broomstick. It was hard not to recoil in disgust at her stench. She held it out to me and I bent forward eagerly, ignoring Lady Maude’s disapproving glare. The flesh was bluish white where the sun had not reached it. It was easy to see the tiny purpled coil, a raised scar. It could be a repulsive cyst, or it could be a serpent. Such as the one hidden beneath my own heavy linen gown. I looked into the old woman’s darting, birdlike eyes, and placed one finger slowly on the mark. ‘Ask her how she came by this?’
Lady Maude reluctantly translated the question. The woman’s answer was short, as though she thought Lady Maude ought already to know it.
‘The black man, Majesty. She says the black man put it there.’ Lady Maude crossed herself and the ninny maids piously imitated her. I was desperate to ask more, but there was one word I was fearful of hearing.
‘Please thank the woman. You may give her enough food for another meal, and some pennies. Not too many, she might get into trouble for stealing. Take her away, now. I am tired.’
I smiled at the woman, trying to reassure her, but she made no gesture of thanks, as I had been accustomed to see poor folks use. She scrabbled together her rags as decently as she could and stepped away from us with a surprising agility, like an old proud doe. One of the maids gingerly handed her some provisions wrapped in a cloth, and then she was gone, calmly, vanishing along an invisible path through the trees.
‘Now I would bathe. Have the bath set up, Lady Maude. And then I will dine. How many more days until London?’
‘Three, Majesty. Perhaps four.’
‘Very well. I will not use the litter, the air is too close. That is what has made me ill. Tomorrow, you shall have my horse prepared, and I will ride.’ As the maids bustled to fetch out the tub and the screens, the soaps and the sheets, I looked around for Agnes, holding her face in my gaze until she returned it. ‘Dear Agnes, see, I am well. You shall help me bathe.’
I rested as the water was boiled in cauldrons over the fire until it steamed, watching while the maids added cold from the well and Agnes the herbs and soap she carried in her travelling bag. My bath was a gift from my husband, who Lady Maude said liked to bathe every few days in the southern style, a polished cedar tub with thick handles carved with mermaids. I was rather tired of women with tails. The guards formed a ring around the glade, their backs turned, to protect the queen’s modesty, and the maids held the sailcloth screens around the bath. I wrapped myself in the sheet that Agnes held for me and she unlaced my dress and I sank into the water, the wet folds clinging to my skin. My ribs stuck out and my stomach was distended between them with the food I had gobbled, the ankle bones of my floating feet poking out like hinges. Agnes combed and bound up my hair, humming to herself as she had always done when she washed me.
‘It wasn’t a dream, was it?’ I asked as she bent to rub the olive oil soap into my back.
‘No, Lady Isabelle,’ she whispered sadly.
‘And in Bordeaux, the night of the wedding … you knew of that?’
‘I knew that he would come. Nothing more.’
‘Yet you burned the bed linen?’
‘I did as I was told.’
‘I know you did. You would never hurt me.’
‘Never, never!’ Agnes cried.
‘Hush,’ I whispered. One of the maids had looked behind her.
‘I was so sorry. I had no idea. But your mother …’
‘You must tell me now. You have to. If the king should see?’ I felt her fingers trace the mark on my shoulder, as m
y hand had traced the line on the old woman’s flesh.
‘He won’t. Not for a long while, little one. Your mother made him promise.’
‘What do you think of my mother’s care for me, Agnes? What should I feel about my mother’s promises?’
‘You will understand, you will. Please, please be patient.’
‘When? When will you tell me?’
‘When you are crowned, Isabelle. When you are safe.’
I stood up and peeled the sheet from my wet body. Agnes held the towel and I allowed her to lift me from the tub against her hip as I had done since I was tiny, as I had always done. I couldn’t be angry with her, she had not known how to protect me, how could she? There was no statue in that ruined chapel, only the green man, gloating at me. I thought of the Virgin in Mother Helene’s closet, of the nun’s serene face, tranquil in her assurance that the Holy Mother would protect her. But I had come alive again with the cool water of the forest, just like the king in the story of Melusina. There were other things than bits of painted wood to believe in. I would not commend myself to an ornament. My mind shied from the word but I forced myself to think it. Agnes could not protect me because she had been bewitched. And if my mother would not, and Agnes could not, then there would be nobody to protect me now I was in England – except myself.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I WAS A COURTENAY, AND A TAILLEFER, AND THEN, IN THE first week of October in the first year of the new century, and the twelfth of my own life, I became a queen. The king’s heralds announced my ancestry over the blaring of trumpets in the cathedral at Westminster: Isabelle, Countess of Angouleme, great-granddaughter of Louis VI of France, niece to the Emperor of Contantinople, kin to the royal houses of Hungary, Aragon, Castile, Jerusalem and Cyprus, to the counts of Champagne, Hainault, Forez, Namur, Nevers, anointed with the common consent and agreement of the archbishops, bishops, counts, barons and people of the realm of England, by the grace of God, Duchess of Aquitaine and Normandy, Countess of Anjou and Maine. So many titles, so many great names. Names that were recorded on parchments in the monasteries of Europe and howled on battlefields; names that were muttered around peasants’ hearths and cried in the lists of tournaments. And they all belonged to me. I felt too small to carry them.
As John and I processed in clouds of incense and ermine the Laudes, the ancient hymn of the Norman dukes, was sung, proclaiming me party to my husband’s empire. At the banquet beneath the great beams of Westminster Hall the queen’s champion, William Marshal, the finest of the Lionheart’s knights, walked his destrier three times among the trestles, challenging any man who disputed my title to single combat. The Royal Exchequer released thirty pounds for my coronation regalia, and my crown of thick and ancient English gold had been worn by the Danish queens long before England passed to the Normans.
My queenship was recorded by stiff fingered monks in freezing northern abbeys and Arab scribes beyond the Pyrenees; I was one of God’s elect, and would be the mother of kings. The most powerful vassals of my husband’s lands, from my own father to the king of Scots, would kneel before me. My revenues included lands in Saintes and Niort, Saumur, La Flèche, Beaufort-en-Vallée, Baugé and Châteaux de Loir, manors in Devon, Ilchester, Wilton, Malmesbury, Wiltshire, Rutland, Berkhamsted, Falaise and Domfront and Bonneville-sur-Touque, all solemnly granted in the king’s name. I had a household of my own, and the rights of a bridge and a dock in London. I had a chaplain and a mistress of the robes and, for what it mattered, a silver chamber pot.
The men I had known as a child had only travelled in order to make war, at the summons of their king. Mules and carts were for pedlars. But my new husband could not get enough of moving, that strange restless energy which possessed him only being assuaged by constant journeying. As the leaves turned, the king took me on progress across the country to the border of the wild lands of Wales, north to Lincoln and south once more to Guildford, where we kept Christmas and I gave out bright silk shirts with my own hands to his knights. Then north again, as far as the Scots march, across a range of hills where we heard the wolves howling across the snow-streaked moors and back to the holy city of Canterbury where we wore our crowns at the Easter Mass.
I looked on graciously as the burghers of each town we visited came out beyond the walls to make their bumbling and lengthy speeches of welcome, I listened gravely to the reports of my clerk of the revenues, I hawked with the king on the road and knelt at prayer and dined beneath my gold canopy of state and distributed alms and grants, but as I went about in my new guise, as gentle and docile as even Lady Maude could have wished, I thought of little but the stories Agnes told me, when she crept from her pallet at the foot of my bed to whisper to me in the candlelight.
At Angouleme, and then at Lusignan and Langoiran, I had been left a great deal to myself, and I had scarcely noticed, much less minded. Only now that I knew what it was never to be alone did I recall the long hours in the forest with Othon or my games in the garden with disbelief. Queens, it seemed, might never be alone. Agnes had said that my marriage would be like a play, but I had not expected that I should be constantly on the stage. From the moment Lady Maude drew the tester curtains in the morning, to the time my maids undressed me when I retired, I had to act my part. I was rarely private with the king. Since he could not yet share my bed, he would summon me after supper to sit on his lap and chatter in his ear, and I did not much mind his hands stroking my neck or the length of my thigh over my gown, though I did dislike the wet, wine-soaked kisses I had to accept from his mouth. That he doted on me was the only satisfaction of this new life, and even that was for the pleasure of tormenting Lady Maude. At first, I thought of extravagant trifles it would plague her to fetch me, fresh figs in November, a pure white kitten, winter roses to scatter on my sheets, but quickly these things seemed as childish and stupid as my half forgotten dreams of monkeys and silver sherbet bowls, and though the king begged me to think of anything he could procure that would delight me, I ceased to find pleasure in Lady Maude’s disapproval. I did not care for jewels nor for silks any longer, nor even for the discomfiting of my enemy.
The kitten developed disgusting pus in its eyes and I told one of the guards to drown it. I found I no longer liked marmalade, much. I rode Othon each day that we travelled and made Tomas the master of my horse, but even that was not what I had expected. I was no longer ill. I ate and laughed, and found I could delight the king by teasing him, but all my thoughts were on that black night at the riverside in Lusignan, because the mark was on me.
The serpent on my shoulder twisted deep in my flesh, as deep as Lord Hugh had done. I scratched and worried at it, until the scar broke out in a weeping sore, then I raked my nails across it, knowing I could never smooth it out, unable to leave it be. Agnes made a plaster and told me that I should have to sleep in mittens if I did not leave myself alone. But it disgusted me, even as I made my own blood run down my back, the thin red trail a rope that bound me to the Lusignans across the sea. The mark trapped me, and at night I hated everyone who had conspired to put it there. It was a slave’s brand, for all that I was queen, and like a slave, my thoughts were filled with futile schemes against my despised masters. The only thread of hope in that watery, ferrous skein was Agnes, because Agnes knew what I did not, and I believed that if I could only know too, I might understand. Not forgive, yet, but understand.
*
It came out slowly. Just a few snatched moments each night. I could not hear too much, Agnes said, since it made me nervous and unable to sleep, and it would displease the king if he saw me white and hollow eyed. Lady Maude supervised my food carefully, trying to stuff me with white bread and cream, because the king wanted me to grow plump and ready to become his true wife, but after hearing Agnes’s story I pushed my dishes away and ate only a little fruit and meat, since I had no desire to grow at all. My mother had told me of a Saracen princess who saved her own life each night by inventing a new tale to divert her husband the sultan, and as Agnes falte
red out what knowledge she had it seemed that I too was wrapped in a skein of stories except that each night I grew a little closer to my own end.
Agnes’s family had always served the Courtenays. Back in Poitou she had sisters in service to my aunts and her uncles had gone as grooms or men-at-arms to the Holy Land. As a child she had been taken by her own mother to the summoning of the horned man, and watched the Courtenay ladies draw off their gowns and dance with him under the moon. It was the old faith, she said, much older than the Church, and all the men of Poitou, the Taillefers and the Lusignans and even the Aquitaine dukes included, knew that in their veins ran the blood of sky-clad women with unbound hair who knew of a religion deeper and more ancient than that of Christ. King Richard had known of it through his mother old Queen Eleanor, and when he was dying of the arrow wound in his shoulder had said bitterly that his family had come from the Devil and would return to him, but he was wrong, Agnes whispered, close in the dark. He was wrong because the Devil was an invention of the priests in Rome, who wished the people to adhere to the new faith, and tried to frighten them with stories of demons. The horned god was the spirit of all that kept the earth alive, and no more wicked than a tree or a sheep.
It was women’s business, Agnes said. The men, the lords like my father, held themselves apart from it, for the Church and its bishops were what kept the world in balance. So long as the Holy Land was disputed, the Church supporting the system of lordship and vassalage, its wealth could be drawn upon, and in return there was great power to be obtained for the Crusader princes of Outremer. If the Holy Land was fully conquered, Agnes said, and I felt her stout shoulders shrug against me under the bedclothes, then perhaps there would be less need of popes and prelates.
I had never been so enthralled by any of the stories my mother told me, nor so appalled. Was this not wickedness, I asked, great wickedness? Certainly what was done to me could not be good. And what about sin, and minding my missal like a Christian child? All my life, Agnes had heard Mass alongside me each day, it was her voice that had taught me the ‘Ave’ and the ‘Our Father’, her hands which had folded my own small fingers in prayer. Agnes shrugged again and I could sense her struggling to find the words. The Lord was good, she sighed at last. What the Church taught – kindness, compassion, charity – were good things, and it was right to be mindful of them, especially for great people. But the old faith made no distinction between good and evil, it simply, it simply was. And many of the festivals we kept – Christmas and Easter and Lammastide, my marriage night – were the feasts of the old faith, covered up and made new, like, she struggled, again, like a plaster wall painted over, where the old patterns worked their way through the lime.