Floundering for words, she said hesitantly, “What does Will think of this, Adeliza? You would have to get his permission ere the Church could accept you, would you not?”
“Yes.” Adeliza kept her eyes upon her work, a cushion adorned with delicately drawn roses. “He thinks it is a foolish female whim, one that will pass. But it will not.”
“Are you truly sure this is what you want, Adeliza? You seemed so contented with Will.” Maude paused, but Adeliza ignored the hint. Maude watched her in bafflement, then tried again. “And what of your children? They are so young, little more than babies…”
“I am a queen, not a cotter’s wife. There are more than enough hands to tend to their needs, to see that they want for nothing. Do not make it sound as if I am forsaking my family, Maude. I have been as good a wife and mother as I know how. I did no less for your father, as his consort and his queen. And I was a dutiful daughter, marrying as my father bade me. I have always done what was expected of me. Now-in the time remaining to me-I would follow my own heart.”
“I was right, then. You are ill.”
“Yes,” Adeliza said calmly. “But you must not grieve for me, Maude. Death is just the door to Life Everlasting.”
Maude frowned, struggling with her pain and her rebellious instincts; she knew nothing of surrender. “You are very dear to me,” she said at last, “and you must let me help you.” Her mind was racing, although not fast enough to outrun her grief. A doctor-she would find Adeliza the best doctor in all of Christendom. But almost at once she remembered Master Serlo, Adeliza’s personal physician; if he could not help her, no mortal healer could. “Do you want me to talk with Will? Mayhap I could persuade him to let you take the veil…”
Adeliza concealed a smile, for Maude had hardly endeared herself to Will, would probably be the last one he’d be likely to heed. “It helps,” she said, “to know that you understand,” and then raised her head inquiringly, for a servant was hovering in the doorway.
“There is a visitor,” he said deferentially, “for the empress,” and Maude’s lacerated heart took a sudden, joyful jump. Ranulf! But the man eventually ushered into the chamber was Brien Fitz Count.
IT was the first time that they’d been alone in a long while. Maude wished that she’d had some warning, wished that she’d had time to prepare herself, wished that she were not wearing this drab dark gown. “You got my letter, then?” she asked, and at once felt foolish, for why else would he have come to Arundel?
“Yes, I did,” he said, just as needlessly. “Did Ranulf come back?”
“No, and we had no luck in finding him. Rainald and Maud have promised to let me know if they hear from him. I’d be grateful if you would, too.”
“Of course I will.” He looked tired and sounded dispirited. “I do not understand about this falling-out with Ranulf. It does not seem like him at all.”
“Ranulf gave up a great deal to support my claims to the English crown. And now…now he fears it was all for nothing.”
“No,” he said, “it was not for nothing.” Removing his mantle, he moved toward her. “You saw Maud,” he said, “and Rainald, and you’ve come to Arundel to bid Adeliza farewell. But you were going to leave without seeing me.”
Maude swallowed. She could feel her face getting hot, but she owed him the truth-this once. “I could not, Brien. It would have been too painful.”
“Are you sorry, then, that I came?”
“No,” she said softly, “no…”
“I have something for you.” Reaching into his tunic, he drew out a soft pouch. It was finely stitched in her favorite shade of green, with silken drawstrings. Nestled within was a small coin, threaded upon a delicate gold chain. Maude’s eyes misted as she gazed down at the keepsake, a silver penny minted at Bristol in her image, with her name and title engraved in Latin around the rim. Lady of the English, the queen who might have been.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you, Brien.”
He hesitated and then gave her one last gift-his jealousy. “Are you going back to Geoffrey?”
She did not pretend to misunderstand. “Not if I can help it.” Her fingers clenched around the silver coin. “I have no choice, Brien, but to go. When Robert died, it all started to crumble. It was only a matter of time until I’d have fallen into Stephen’s hands, and what good could I do Henry from an English prison? I was even in danger of losing Devizes. We’d seized it from Stephen, but he’d taken it from the Bishop of Salisbury, and the new bishop is now demanding its return to the Church. Ranulf accused me of losing heart, but I did not, I swear I did not. I am not giving up.”
“I know that. So does Ranulf. You are doing what you must-for your son’s sake. There is nothing you’d not sacrifice for Henry.” The corner of his mouth curved in a melancholy smile. “Who would understand that better than me?”
Maude shook her head. “Do not make me sound heroic, Brien. There is nothing heroic in defeat, nothing admirable in failure.”
“You did not fail, Maude.”
“No? Then why am I fleeing this accursed country like a thief in the night? More than eight years and God alone knows how many deaths, and what have I to show for it all?”
“Normandy,” he said succinctly. “And do not tell me that was Geoffrey’s doing, for you made it possible. You kept Stephen so busy defending himself that you gave Geoffrey the time he needed to win Normandy. That was as much your triumph as it was Geoffrey’s. Do not let him tell you otherwise.”
She summoned up an unconvincing smile. “I was never one for listening to Geoffrey,” she said. “Thank you…for your abiding friendship and your faith in me, your faith in Henry. He is not old enough, not yet. But he will come back. He’ll lay claim to our crown. And he will prevail.”
“I never doubted that,” he said, “for what son of yours could ever lack courage or fortitude? He’ll be back for certes. But you will not…will you?”
“No,” she admitted, “I will not. England may not have broken my spirit, Brien, but it did break my heart.” It was a feeble attempt at a joke, holding too much truth for humor, and to her dismay, she found she could no longer blink back her tears. When he reached for her, she did not pull away, and they stood for a long time in a wordless embrace, while the fire burned down and the shadows advanced, for night was coming on.
Sleet was pelting the beach, and the ship rocked from side to side as Adeliza’s men pushed it out of the shallows, then splashed hastily back to shore. Maude clung to the gunwale, with a white-faced Minna standing resolutely at her side. Alexander de Bohun, William Marshal, and the others were already heading for the canvas tent, and Maude now insisted that Minna seek shelter, too. “Go on,” she urged. “It looks like a rough crossing.”
Waves were starting to break over the bow. Back on the beach, the wind was blowing sand about and buffeting the onlookers, most of them servants from the castle and curious villagers. They soon were in retreat, until only three hardy souls remained: Brien and Adeliza and Hugh de Plucknet, who’d wed an English heiress but insisted upon seeing Maude safely to Arundel. She would miss Hugh. So many she would miss. So many she mourned.
The sky was as grey as the sea, splattered with clouds. The sleet stung her face and her eyes blurred as the shore started to recede. Adeliza and Hugh were trudging toward their horses, but Brien still stood at the water’s edge, staring after the ship. Maude was trembling with the cold, but she stayed there on the pitching deck until the blue of Brien’s mantle was no longer visible and England began to fade into the distance.
38
Canterbury, England
March 1148
Matilda knelt before the High Altar in the cathedral church of the Holy Trinity and prayed for peace. The choir was chilled and damp, but she stayed on her knees until her back began to ache. She should have been happy, for fortune seemed to be favoring Stephen at last. There were rumors, as yet unconfirmed, that Maude was preparing to leave England. Matilda herself was fulfilling a
long-cherished desire; she’d acquired thirteen acres of land from the canons of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, so that she could establish a hospital to treat London’s poor and pray for the souls of her dead children. And she and Stephen had finally been able to go ahead with their plans to found a Cluniac abbey at Faversham. But her satisfaction was shadowed by Stephen’s continuing quarrel with the Archbishop of Canterbury, a clash of will made all the more ominous by the new Pope’s obvious sympathy for the Angevin cause.
Archbishop Theobald’s intransigence was all the more infuriating to Stephen because he saw it as rank ingratitude; he and Matilda had done their utmost to secure the See of Canterbury for him, at Stephen’s brother Henry’s expense. Stephen had long insisted that Theobald was much too quick to acknowledge Maude after the Battle of Lincoln, and he’d soon convinced himself that Theobald was a secret Angevin partisan. Theobald was, after all, once the Abbot of Bec, the monastery that Maude favored above all others, and when Theobald had hastened over to Paris last May to meet with the Pope, Geoffrey of Anjou had just happened to be there, too. Coincidence or conspiracy? Stephen was sure he knew the answer.
Matilda had been less suspicious, loath to think ill of so pious and godly a churchman. But she was no longer so willing to give the archbishop the benefit of every doubt, not since the furor over the York See. The Pope had deposed the current Archbishop of York, Stephen’s nephew, and then chose his own candidate, who thus became the first English archbishop ever to be consecrated without the consent of the king. To Stephen, it was a slap in the face-and Theobald had delivered it, for he’d supported the Pope wholeheartedly, exercising his considerable influence on behalf of the Pope’s man.
Stephen had been provoked into taking drastic action of his own, urged on by his brother, who blamed Theobald for thwarting his reappointment as papal legate. When the Pope summoned England’s bishops and abbots to a Church Council at Rheims in March, Stephen forbade the clerics to attend. Warned that Theobald meant to defy the ban, Stephen had then taken his court to Canterbury and put his ports under guard. But Theobald managed to slip through the royal net. Accompanied only by one of his young clerks, Thomas Becket, he’d arranged to board a small fishing boat in a secluded cove, and survived a perilous Channel crossing to be accorded a hero’s welcome by the Pope and his fellow clerics.
Matilda sympathized with Stephen’s indignation, but she was troubled by this widening breach with the Church; no good could come of it. Making the sign of the cross, she rose wearily to her feet; she tired more easily these days than she was willing to admit, even to Cecily, who awaited her now in the nave.
She should have said a prayer for Cecily, too, for all her attempts to find the other woman a worthy husband had come to naught. Most men were leery of Cecily’s falling sickness; her fits scared them more than her marriage portion tempted them. The only ones who seemed willing to take advantage of Matilda’s generosity were not the sort of men likely to make Cecily content. And Matilda’s disappointment was tainted by guilt, for in a small, selfish corner of her soul, she was glad that Cecily remained unwed, so deeply had she come to rely upon the younger woman’s loyalty and devotion.
As they left the church, it began to rain, and they quickened their steps. A sheltered passage led from the cloisters to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s great hall, sparing them the worst of the weather. Shaking moisture from their mantles, they hastened into the hall, and then stopped in surprise, for a raucous celebration seemed to be in progress.
Trailed by a puzzled Cecily, Matilda made her way toward the dais. Just hours earlier, the atmosphere in the hall had been as cheerless as the rain, for they’d learned only that morning of the archbishop’s daring escape. What, Matilda wondered, could have happened to dispel all the gloom?
As she tried to catch Stephen’s eye, she was grabbed from behind, and found herself enveloped in a breath-stealing bear hug. Her son was grinning down at her; at eighteen, he was already as tall as his father and towered over the diminutive Matilda. “She is gone, Mama,” he laughed. “The bitch is gone!”
“Are you sure, Eustace?”
He nodded and steered her protectively toward the dais. “She sailed for Normandy a fortnight ago. We ought to have heard ere this; too often, Papa is poorly served. But all that matters now is that Maude is no longer a threat. My only regret is that she never had to answer for her sins.”
“I doubt that she came away unscathed from this war, Eustace. No one did,” Matilda said, and held out her hand to her husband. Reaching down, he swung her up onto the dais, as jubilant as their son, for the passing years had tempered neither his capacity for exuberant rejoicing nor his faith in happy endings.
“It took us more than eight years, Tilda, to drive Maude from our shores, but she has finally gone back where she belongs-to Geoffrey-and I am not sure which of them I pity the more!”
“I am so glad,” she avowed, “so very glad that it is finally over.” But honesty compelled her to add a realistic qualifier: “…at least until Maude’s son is old enough to renew the war.”
Her men regarded her indulgently. She would always remain earthbound as they soared up toward the heavens, and whilst they pitied her lack of wings, they could not teach her to fly. “I may have to borrow money occasionally,” Stephen joked, “but I flat-out refuse to borrow trouble. Maude’s son is but a raw lad, not worth losing sleep over.”
“You worry too much, Mama. How much danger can Maude’s meagre whelp be?” Eustace scoffed. “With men as with horses, breeding always tells.”
“Indeed it does,” Stephen agreed, smiling fondly at his prideful heir. He’d long wanted to follow the Continental practice, have Eustace crowned in his lifetime. What better way to please his son and secure the succession? And what better time than now, with Maude in exile and her supporters in disarray?
Matilda smiled at them both. “It would be so wonderful,” she said wistfully, “to have peace at last…”
Henry I’s royal manor at Quevilly, a suburb of Rouen, was adjacent to Notre-Dame-du-Pre, a priory of the great Benedictine abbey of Bec. Upon her arrival in Normandy, Maude chose to lodge in guest quarters at the priory rather than at her father’s palace or in Rouen’s formidable castle. And it was here that she was reunited with her husband, after a separation of more then eight years.
They were alone. Minna had reluctantly withdrawn, giving Geoffrey a baleful glance that catapulted him back in time, a time he did not want to remember, much less relive. Reaching for a wine flagon, he offered Maude wine and a sardonic smile. “I see the English climate has not mellowed your Minna any.”
Maude accepted the wine, ignored the sarcasm. Outwardly composed, inwardly she felt hollow, so tense it actually hurt to breathe. Much of it was nervous anticipation at seeing her sons again. But it was Geoffrey, too. Just the sight of him brought back too many ugly memories, churned up old emotions that had been stagnant, becalmed during her years in England. Why could this man disquiet her so? Why did she let him?
There was no longer a need for pretense, for the polite conversation they’d exchanged in front of the prior and Minna: queries about health, condolences over Robert’s death, those little courtesies that society expected of a man and woman nigh on twenty years wed. Geoffrey sat down in a high-backed chair, stretching long legs toward the hearth. It surprised her that he still looked so young. But why not? He was only thirty-four. She felt so much older, decades older.
Geoffrey was regarding her over the rim of his wine cup, an old trick of his, one that invariably made her shift self-consciously. “Since you chose to stay with the monks at the priory rather than with me at the castle,” he said dryly, “I suppose that is your subtle way of hinting that you are not overeager to sleep in our marriage bed.”
Maude sipped her wine. “I can assure you, Geoffrey, that I want to be in your bed just as much as you want to have me there.”
An eyebrow shot up, another familiar mannerism. “A jest…from you? You have changed, de
ar heart!”
“Jesu, I hope so!” she said, with such intensity that he stopped in the act of pouring more wine and stared at her. “I do not want to go back to the battlefield that was our marriage, and I cannot believe that you do, either, Geoffrey. I do not want to be held hostage to memories anymore, or to keep paying for past mistakes. I want…” She faltered then, for what did she want of this man? Her husband, her intimate enemy, poisoner of her peace. But how long ago it all seemed. What had happened to that wronged young wife, so choked with helpless hatred? England had happened.
“Can it be,” he said, “that you are offering to make peace, Maude?”
She swallowed a sharp retort. “And if I am?”
“You ask too much.” But he was smiling faintly. “Suppose we start with a truce…see how many days that lasts.”
His humor still held its buried barbs; they did not sting as much, though, as she remembered. “I’ll try if you will, Geoffrey.” Setting her wine cup down, she leaned forward. “Tell me of our sons.”
“They are good lads, for the most part. Geoff has a temper and Will is somewhat lazy, has to be prodded. As for Harry’s flaws…well, I need only remind you of last year, when he decided that invading England would be a marvelous way to get through the boredom of Lent. But why not judge for yourself?”
Maude stiffened. “They are here? You brought them?”
“The younger lads. Harry had gone off into town, but I left him word that you’d arrived.”
Rising, he looked down at her, and she realized that some things would never change; she still had no idea what he was thinking. But when he smiled, it caught unexpectedly at her heart, for it was so like Henry’s smile. What of her younger sons? Would their smiles be familiar, too? Would they know her? For so long, she’d yearned for this reunion, so why did she feel so nervous? He was holding out his hand. “I am ready,” she lied, and let him help her to her feet.
What shocked Maude the most was that she would not have recognized her own son. When she’d last seen Will, he was a chubby-cheeked child of three, and that was the image she’d kept in her mind for the past eight and a half years. But that little boy was forever lost to her, replaced by a russet-haired stripling in his twelfth year, as skittish as a young colt.
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