by Lisa Hilton
‘There is no man in England now who does not obey the nod of the king,’ Pierre told me.
‘I wonder why God does not strike him down.’
Pierre raised one beautiful eyebrow. ‘God, Sister? But did you know that God has left England to John’s mercy?’
‘What?’
I had wondered, idly, that I could never hear the carillon from the church tower at Corfe, for all that the church lay so close to the castle. John’s feuding with the Pope over the appointment of an archbishop to Canterbury had caused the realm to be placed under interdict. The churches were locked up, the only rites that might be served were the unction of the dying and the baptism of children.
‘You thought yourself cruelly served, Sister, but you had the privilege of hearing Mass, did you not?’ The hurried, mumbling manner of the priest, the shabby altar table, my churching in the doorway – all this now had a reason.
‘And the country has changed, Sister,’ Pierre continued. ‘With the bell towers silent and the priests and their tales of sin silenced with them, the people are returning to the old faith. There are scarce marriages made, now. Men and women lie together in the fields with no false blessing to unite them.’
I wondered. Could it be that the feeling I had had when I returned to Rouen, that the Lusignan way was the right way, was coming to pass? That what the Church decreed was truly no more than a ledger book, a set of accounts of indulgences and penance for the gain of a crowd of fat priests. God had not heard my prayers from that squalid room, nor yet Lady Maude’s. He had not heard the laments of the poor Jews, or the cries of the barons’ babies as they were cut from their nurses’ arms. Could it be that God was not there, had never been there at all? The thought was so shocking that I gasped aloud.
‘Do not take fright, Sister. Your husband is a great king, now. The greatest of his line, the chronicles will say of him. And now he turns his attention to France.’
‘I want no part of it,’ I said at last.
‘I am to take you to Portsmouth, where the king is mustering his fleet. You will sail with him. Does it not please you, Sister? You are going home. John will give your people back their Countess.’
‘I may refuse.’
‘And return to Corfe? You would prefer to share a chamber with good Terric? Or to receive the king’s hospitality the way the Braose woman did? I think not. You will go home, Sister. And if your husband should not return …’
‘Then?’
He reached for the collar of my gown and slowly drew it back. His fingers snaked along my skin, seeking the mark on my shoulder.
‘And then Henry will be king. A Lusignan king. Our king. Who would be more fit to govern while he is still a boy than his mother and his dear uncle?’
I could not dislike the thought, however much I might have wished to. He watched my face, that was his, and I watched his, that was mine. ‘You see, Sister? I have always told you. We are not so very different, you and I.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE COMING MONTHS REMINDED ME OF THE TIME when I had first come to England as John’s bride, as though time were a fairing ribbon unspooling backwards. My journey with Pierre became a progress as we travelled towards the coast with the purveyors ahead and my baggage train behind. I saw, as if for the first time, now, the great contrast between my royal state and the squalid lives of the country people: Corfe had taught me compassion, at least. Pierre had given me a purse of gold as he helped me into my litter when we departed Wareham, by nightfall it was empty, and the next day as we rode out there were people lining the pathways, clamouring for alms and calling blessings on their good queen, as though she had not been locked up for three years and word given out that she was a witch. I marvelled again at the power of money to smooth over memory, not only among the poor men of the fields, whose bodies were misshapen by labour and hardship into squatting gargoyles, their filthy palms emerging crookedly from flapping rags, but between my husband’s barons, who had mustered loyally at Portsmouth to campaign on my husband’s taxes as though they had never loathed and planned to usurp him.
My thoughts, though, were all with Henry. Each tread of the horses’ hooves on the road brought me closer to him, I hoped. Each long swaying hour in the litter was given up to dreams of seeing my boy again. He would be quite grown now. His hair would have been shorn. Would he remember me? Or had my place been taken by that Angouleme whore? I longed for him so fiercely that when John came out of his tent to greet me, as smiling and civil as though I had been absent for a day, it was easy to make my face light and happy, despite the contempt I felt for him in my heart. We greeted one another as the company looked on, but when I asked after Henry, John’s face, which was paler and more hollow than I remembered the last time I had seen it at Corfe, twisted into a familiar snarl, which he suppressed with an equally familiar smile.
‘The prince is at Eltham, my lady, with his brother and sisters. They wish you joy of your … recovery, and send for your blessing.’
‘They are not to join us, before we sail?’ I managed to ask, squashing the tears that crammed my throat.
‘I thought it unwise. I should not wish to distress them.’
‘Of course, my lord. You are always so considerate.’
‘You must wish to rest after your journey.’
‘Indeed. I will withdraw, with your permission.’
It was so long since I had walked between bareheaded men on their knees that it might have lifted my heart, to see the barons humbling themselves to me, but I had no mind to consider even their hypocrisy. Henry was not there. But I should see him again, when the campaign was over, some little time further could not hurt him, after so long. And perhaps John was right: it would be unkind to reunite us only to have me take ship for France. And then, as I tried to comfort myself with these thoughts as I lay on the Turkey cushions of the tent that had been prepared for me, I knew that I was wrong.
If I wanted to see Henry, if I wanted to teach him, to assist him, I would never be allowed to do so in England. I had to prepare myself once more to fight, and even to kill. I saw, as I had seen once at Rouen, what it was that I might do. I had to escape, I had to be free of John, to steal myself away from him, and the only way to do that would be to get rid of Pierre for good. So for now, I had to play again, to be as smooth and emollient as an olive oil salve, to dissemble to buy time, so I might lay my plans for flight. At last, I acknowledged to myself what my mother had been trying to do. It was the old faith that would save me. She had known that I would never make Henry part of it, as I had never accepted it myself. But in sending Aliene, with her awl and her dreams of queenship, she had made Henry my brother’s ally, one with him in the shadow of the horned man’s antlers. Need. Once again, I would do what was necessary. As the tented fabric above me shifted in the breeze from the sea, I knew that it was time.
*
We sailed two days later, in a great flotilla of ships and barges, paid for with the blood of the English soil. I stood with my ladies in the stern of the ship and watched the coast of that country recede. I thought that I should hate the sight of those chalk cliffs, so familiar were they from my captivity at Corfe, yet as they fell away in a mist of salt spray, I was surprised to find that I regretted them. England had been my home, after a fashion, the only home I had known since I was taken to Lusignan. I waited until the green brow of the hills blurred into the deep blue of the horizon, and then I crossed to the prow of the ship, where the wind whipped my hair back from my face, and stood there a long while, watching for France.
*
That winter, we kept court at Poitiers, the high-towered city where it was said that old Queen Eleanor had challenged her troubadours to make courts of love that she presided over with her ladies in their old-fashioned wide-sleeved gowns. The brutal strength John had shown in England in the last years had drawn his French liegemen back to him; each day more contingents of lords, knights and squires arrived to pay their respects and promise their swords,
and John bade me to entertain them magnificently. There was no mention of Aliene, of her we did not speak; in fact, we barely spoke at all, and John made not even the pretence of coming to my chamber, for which I was thankful. Beyond the courtesies of dinner, supper and Mass we behaved as well-born strangers might, who found themselves obliged to share a tavern room for a night on the road. And since John did not come to my bed, neither could Pierre, and I was thankful for that, also.
I imagined that Pierre, who had never served any interest but his own, was in correspondence with King Philip, but of his plan for a Lusignan kingdom in England he said nothing. He would wait, I supposed, to see which way the first encounters between England and France came out, which way the pieces on the chessboard tumbled, and then, when it suited him, he would move against John or hold his peace. My own unspoken assent to his plan was all that he required of me, and like John, he maintained a civil distance, handing me down at supper when John was too drenched in his cups to do so, sending small gifts and delicacies to my chamber, and dancing with my ladies, who preened and gossiped and wondered which of them the queen’s much favoured brother would take as a wife.
I passed my time making the appearance of a dutiful and proud wife who rejoiced in displaying her husband’s anticipated glory. I had stonemasons from Germany, to flatter John’s alliance with the princes there, at work on a new façade for the cathedral, I had musicians from every part of France to play in the hall each night, I gave the seneschal the liberty of the kitchens, and roast swan and peacock jostled on the trestles, their chargrilled feathers rustling between the great sides of blackened beef that the Englishmen preferred. I sent to Paris for cloth and lace and leather, to Castile for jasmine soaps and bottled peaches, and to Venice for Arab gum and fine woods to be brought across those treacherous winter mountains whose peaks, they said, soared vanishing into Heaven itself, and had John’s campaign tent fitted new with stools and chests that smelled sweetly of cedar and sandal. I had the clerks write letters to my children, asking how they did at their lessons and telling of the great warrior their father should soon prove himself to be. I drank apple cider with the monks of the abbey and spiced wine with the nuns of the convent and granted lands under my new seal to both, in the name of Queen Isabelle and King John, that God might favour his cause when he rode out in the spring. And like a woman, I waited. I waited for one particular thing to emerge among the heaps of goods that the packmen unloaded each day in the courtyards, which made a tumbled market of all the goods of Christendom and proved to the world how rich and mighty my husband was become.
Among the newly loyal vassals who arrived to pay their respects to John were several of whom I had slight recollections. Grizzled now, they had fought beside my Taillefer father years ago, and though it was their sons now who would ride out against Philip, they still held their lands and presided in their halls in appanage. They thanked me for sending Pierre and the mercenary troops from Rouen. They had been hard pressed by the French, and I made great use of my seal, granting the revenues of mills and manors, so they should be bound to their countess when the time came to fight once more. They spoke courteously to me of my mother, and of the beauty of the countryside around my city, complimenting me on the news of my children and the fineness of my entertainments, the sort of light, pleasant remarks that were suitable for ladies. Some of them had brought their wives, stolid women in unfashionable dresses, whose wide hips and square, stub-fingered hands spoke of an attachment to the soil which a couple of generations of rank had not yet bred out. As we sewed and walked and prayed together, I wondered about them, these country ladies who seemed so placid. Where did they fly in their dreams? Were their husbands among the naked creatures who disported with my mother in the moonlight? Or were they themselves members of the old faith, brewing witch’s grease in their kitchens alongside soap and candles? As another year turned and I looked out on the loveliness of the reawakening countryside, I thought that all which seemed so certain in the business of the great, the elaborate courtesies, the scented wine, the delicate gowns of my ladies and the sweetness of the minstrels’ songs was only so much coloured ink on a flimsy scrap of parchment, an overlaying of brightness and order beneath which the land itself moved immutably in a very different rhythm, one of blood and death, the feral screams of wild things in the night, the frenzied writhing of storm-whipped trees and the slow tug of river tides, so that all the trappings of my restored state seemed to me as empty and foolish as a child’s playthings, a collection of spangled baubles heaped like fool’s treasure beneath the mocking gaze of the horned man, who was the only true king of this quiet country.
It came as it had come once before, on another spring day, so long ago. I was walking with my ladies in the garden above the river, which gushed and frothed with meltwater between the banks, a clear day in March with a huge empty sky bright above the Poitevin plains. The road beneath the town was busy with market carts and couriers, I could hear their harness jangling above the duller tread of the horses on the still-soft winter mud, when among them I saw a mule, fat as a cardinal with baggage slings, plodding with bowed head among the smart rapping trot of the liveried messengers. I was no longer a child. I did not shriek and point and dance with anticipation, but inside my blood was leaping, for he had come – the silk man had finally come.
I had a page summoned to my side and spoke to him quietly. I turned the fur trim of my cloak along the walk, and continued conversing with my ladies, though all the while my eyes sought that fly-patch of beast and man, humming and buzzing at the edge of my vision. And later, when he had refreshed himself and washed, and spread out his marvels in my chamber for my ladies to finger and goggle over, I took up a length of silk in my hands, a green so dark it was almost black, as a fir tree against a snowy sky, and drew him into my closet.
To me, he looked just the same. Those same pale eyes, dancing with the light of my once-imagined city. The same coppery, weatherworn skin. I wondered how he saw the changes in me, and how he liked them. I bade him sit and he did so with a calm and modest familiarity that spoke achingly to me of our long acquaintance, and of how different it might have been.
‘I have not seen you since the French king’s feast at Paris,’ I began. ‘I hope you continue well.’
‘God has been kind to me, Majesty.’
‘Which one? Yours, or mine?’
He smiled, ‘I am afraid I do not follow your words, Majesty. I am only a merchant. Will it please you to choose among my poor things today? I have a piece meant for the queen of Sicily, but does Majesty choose to see it first? It is stitched—’
‘With the hands of elves in the caverns beneath the glaciers of Persia,’ I broke in. ‘I know. And your wares are as beautiful as ever. I shall be glad to take something. But there is one thing, you may recall, that you gave me last time we met. I am afraid it was … mislaid. I would have another.’
‘Majesty?’
‘Red, I remember. A very particular piece.’
He continued to regard me quietly, only a tautening beneath his sharp cheekbones indicated his curiosity. ‘And this piece? Another gift from your lady mother, perhaps?’
‘Perhaps. I find myself in urgent need of it. I have received a request from my mother, of the gravest kind. It concerns her business, that is, my family’s business, with the Holy Land. I take it that you understand me now?’
‘I had known of some such thing,’ he answered carefully, ‘when Majesty’s brother was with you that time at Paris. When you received the first gift.’
‘To which I have been true ever since,’ I replied. I stepped to the door of my closet and asked the maid to close it. ‘I am choosing surprises!’ I laughed gaily, news that as the wood swung shut against my back I heard being relayed to the ladies in the chamber, who clapped and giggled approvingly. ‘Give them whatever they ask,’ I said carelessly. ‘Tell them each I chose their silk specially. You will not have to journey so far as Angouleme this winter.’
�
�Your lady mother will be disappointed.’
‘I doubt it,’ I whispered, allowing my gown to fall loose on my shoulder and fishing in my bosom for the strings of my chemise. ‘She has more important matters than gowns in mind.’
I turned so that he could see my bare flesh, smooth and sleek again after a winter of hot baths and rich food. I reached over my shoulder and traced the thin line of the scar with my fingertips, slowly, that he might mark it with his eyes. When I was sure he had seen, I adjusted my gown and turned to him. His eyes remained fixed to what he had seen, like a cat enthralled and dizzied with a sunbeam.
‘And now,’ I said, ‘let me explain to you what it is that I need.’
He smiled, not his wheedling pedlar’s grin, but a true smile. His hand was already scrabbling beneath his cloak, but I stayed him.
‘I have no need to see it. I know that it is there, and why.’
‘Then please, Majesty. Let me know your command.’
And so, some few nights later, I found myself doing what I had sworn I should never do, fastening on the red garter which glowed like a brand against the pale skin of my thigh. My hair was simply braided under my hood. I wore a loose gown and a chemise that laced at the front. I picked up the looking glass that had been my gift to myself from the silk man’s cargo. How I had longed for such a thing when I was a girl! I smoothed my skin in its silvery sheen, pinched my lips and cheeks to bring the blood beneath.