The Queen's Pawn

by Christy English

  The women left the heated water standing in its tub, and my dressing women came forward to take my gown. I raised my hand, and stopped them.

  “The princess will bathe first.”

  Her eyes lit with fear. Alais would have run had I not been holding her hand. As it was, she stood caught, like a boar in a net, like a deer that first scents the hunter.

  “I must bathe?” she whispered to me.

  “Every day, little princess. As I do.”

  She turned her eyes on me, the light maple brown that took me in and held me as no other eyes have, before or since. She measured me and my words together.

  “You bathe?” she asked, as if to make certain she had heard me right.

  “I do.”

  “Every day?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And so will you.”

  I do not know what nonsense the child had been taught at Louis’ court about the dangers of getting wet, or the Church’s strictures about mortification of the flesh. I could only imagine what had been wrought in Paris since my time. Even when I was queen in France, only a handful of courtiers had been brave enough to bathe weekly, and those few did so only to please me. I had been the only one to bathe daily, except early in my marriage, when I tempted Louis into the bath with me.

  I turned my mind from such musings. I could not think of my ex-lover as I looked upon his daughter.

  She was braver than many French before her. She stared into the tub as if it were filled with acid and not with water. She stood still and staring as my women stripped her down to her shift.

  They saw that she had no baggage with her. I discovered later that Louis had sent a paltry bag of gowns and shifts, things I would not give a servant, much less dress my daughter in. As soon as I saw that bag, I had them take it away. I would order new gowns made for her myself.

  My dressing women stepped forward and offered their hands to her, which she took, raising first one foot and then the next into the bath. The warm water was an unexpected delight, and her eyes darted to mine. I saw that she had never had the pleasure of submerging herself in warm water before. Once more I cursed Louis and all Parisians for fools.

  Alais stood still and let my women wash her, their hands gentle beneath her shift. They knew that she was far too modest a child to bathe naked, as I did. The largest of my women washed her hair gently, then lifted her from the tub as if she weighed nothing.

  The princess clung to her as a little monkey might, but always, she kept her eyes on me. My women drew her wet shift from her so swiftly that Alais had no time to protest. They dried her in warmed linen sheets, then wrapped her in a fur cape I ordered brought from my trunks.

  Alais would not let me out of her sight, but sat on a little stool beside the tub as my women stripped me to the skin and helped me step into my bath.

  “Very good, Alais. You were very brave.”

  Tears rose in my new daughter’s eyes, and I saw that praise came to her as rarely as bathwater. I reached out from my tub and took her hand, soap from my skin wetting the fur of her borrowed cloak.

  “You must give no man your tears,” I said. “Nor woman, either. Always, their strength belongs to you.”

  She nodded and swallowed hard, her tears receding through sheer force of will. I watched her battle with herself, and knew that I would love this child every day for the rest of my life. And beyond, if the Church was right.

  If I lay in torment after death, my memory of this girl would be one bright, cool spot in hell.

  We sat together, our meat and bread finished, and Alais looked at me. “Is King Henry the devil?” she asked, as calmly as she might have asked me to look out the window for the weather.

  I choked on my wine, and sat gasping.

  Still, she looked at me, as still as death, as calm as a priest.

  “Did your father tell you that?”

  “No, Your Majesty. But everyone else said it at my father’s court.”

  No doubt the child was referring to one of the old Angevin tales that spoke of Henry’s great-grandfather rising from the ground like a demon to torment all his enemies. I laughed again; no one had had the temerity to speak of those old stories in years. And now this child, a little girl from Paris, had the audacity to meet my eye and ask if the man I had loved and the children I had borne him were devil’s spawn.

  “No,” I said. “Henry is not the devil. That is an old and foolish story.”

  I could see that she did not quite believe me, but that she was going to try to take me at my word, for my sake.

  I smiled at her, and smoothed the curls that rose in waves along her brow. “You must never speak of it again,” I said, “At court, the walls have ears.”

  “I know,” she said, fingering a piece of bread that she did not intend to eat. “My papa told me.”

  “You papa was right,” I said. I could not bear to think of Louis, much less speak of him, so I changed the subject. “Shall we play a game?”

  Alais’ face lit like a sunrise, and the simple joy in her eyes pierced my heart. I wanted to clutch her to my breast, to ask if she had never been allowed to play at games in Paris. I suppressed this longing, and held myself very still until it passed.

  I raised one hand, and my women brought forth my chessboard, the board I had not played on in years, since Henry left me for Rosamund. The pieces were finely wrought in gold and silver. I had brought them back in my retinue from the Holy Land. Louis had given them to me.

  I had always meant to teach Richard to play, but while military strategy fired his mind as nothing else, he could rarely sit still long enough to indulge in a game with me. I missed my son, and my sickness for him pierced me. I looked at my new daughter.

  “This is a chessboard,” I told her.

  Alais reached for the silver queen, but when I said the word “chess,” she drew her hand back, as if the board had caught fire.

  “That is an infidel game,” she said. “My papa told me.”

  I almost laughed, but I saw the earnestness in her face, and I held my tongue. I picked up the gold queen from my side of the board, and fingered it lovingly. I thought of all the times my old lover Raymond and I had whiled away the hours, playing at this very board. No wonder Louis cursed the gift he himself had given me.

  “Well,” I said, “your papa is right. Arabs began this tradition. But it was a Christian knight who designed this board, and who cast these pieces for me.”

  “Has it been blessed?” Alais asked.

  Again, I did not laugh at her. I knew of Louis’ superstition, of his devotion to the Church. I could only imagine how much of that blind belief he had passed on to her. I knew, no matter how long it took, that I would cleanse her of religion. I would teach her to think.

  In honor of future teachings, I swallowed a scathing reply. Instead, I lied. “Yes,” I said. “My confessor blessed it yesterday.”

  Alais looked at me suspiciously. Though she saw the gleam of mirth in my eyes, she decided to trust me. She lifted the heavy silver queen, a piece so large it filled her palm. On the board of inlaid ivory and ebony, trimmed in gold and lapis, that queen stood three inches tall.

  “She is beautiful,” Alais said, all thought of infidels forgotten. She knew at once that the piece in her hand was a woman. She knew, without my having to tell her, that in this game it was not the king but the queen who ruled. Alais was the daughter of my soul before she ever knew it, a girl to match my mind as well as my spirit.

  I set my own queen down, and she did the same. I raised my first pawn, and spoke. “Let us begin.”

  “I do not know how to play,” she said.

  I smiled as her clear maple eyes met mine. “I know, little princess. I shall teach you.”

  Chapter 3

  ALAIS: A STOLEN SEASON

  Abbey of St. Agnes, Bath

  May 1169

  I cannot tell you how I loved Eleanor. From the first moment I met her, I knew I would love her all my life.

  Eleanor took
me in and sheltered me when I had nothing and no one. The food I eat, the wine I drink, the way I bathe, even my strategies at chess, were all learned at her hands. She kept me with her for months when I first came to England, though she and the king had planned to send me to a nunnery to be raised by the sisters until the time came for my marriage to their son.

  Eleanor kept me by her far longer than she was meant to. I believe that once I was with her, once we had found such kinship un-looked for, she did not want to let me go. Perhaps she hoped that King Henry would simply forget that I had come, and she could keep me with her indefinitely.

  During our time together, Eleanor taught me a little dancing, how to play a lute, how to smile graciously at fools. She taught me all these lessons and more.

  Her hair was the color of burnished bronze where it peeped out from beneath her wimple. She let me brush it every night, after she sent her women away, when we were left alone. And always, from the first moment I saw her, I knew why my father once had loved her. For she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

  It was her bones that held her beauty, the strong cheekbones and chin that were softened by her hair and the folds of her wimple and gown. Her slanted eyes were a deep green, and they flashed at me from the moment I met her, as if to say she knew me already

  Our stolen season could not last. I knew, even as a child, that it would not. The devil queen of my childhood fancies had long since vanished from my mind, to be replaced by Eleanor in all her power, her musical, wicked laugh, her way of seeing the world, so different from any other I had ever known.

  The letter from the king came one day when she was teaching me a dance by the fire. The king wrote that it was time for me to go to the nunnery they had long since chosen for me; the abbess, Mother Sebastian, waited for me. Eleanor tossed his letter into the fire with a laugh and a contemptuous flick of her wrist, but I knew that she would have to let me go. For Henry was king. Even Eleanor could not stand against that. And I knew that she had stayed away from her lands in the south, for love of me. She would take her children and return there once I was tucked safe away in my abbey.

  So that spring, in late May, Eleanor and I rode together in a litter to the Sisters of St. Agnes outside Bath. Those old Norman stones had stood a hundred years when I first knew them, and would stand a hundred more after I was gone. Eleanor spent that first night with me, her hand on my hair. I hoped that she might stay with me longer, but I knew she could not. Though she was my mother, elsewhere, she was queen.

  So the next day we stood in the stone courtyard of that nunnery, Mother Sebastian waiting patiently while I took my leave. Eleanor was clothed from head to foot in emerald silk, her linen wimple white against the drab gray stone. I was dressed in the black wool of the nunnery. Already I missed the fine silk dresses that Eleanor once had given me, the dresses that now she was taking away with her. I could not wear such things in the house of God.

  The queen drew me close, ignoring all the sisters who stood staring at us, and the men-at-arms who would take her back to her castle at Winchester. She knelt beside me there on those stones, and drew me close to her heart.

  “I will come back for you, as soon as I am able.” She kissed me, and drew a ribbon from the sleeve of her gown. She pressed the silk into my palm. “Take this, so that you have something pretty to remember me by.”

  She watched me, and I stood without weeping. She had taught me well; already I was strong enough to heed her.

  “Good girl,” she said, and kissed me. “Remember, you are a princess of France.”

  I stood in the courtyard and watched her litter disappear down the road that had no turning. I watched until she was too small to see any longer, vanished into the dust of the horizon. The Mother came to me then, and hugged me close, telling me that it was time for prayers.

  I drew out my father’s prayer beads, the only beautiful thing I still had with me. That and the silk ribbon from Eleanor’s gown.

  I slept with that ribbon clutched in my palm for a month, but as I settled into life at the nunnery, I laid it by. I used it during those years to bind the letters that Eleanor sent to me without fail, at Christmas, and on my saint’s day.

  My years at the nunnery were more peaceful than any I have known before or since. We were called to prayer each morning by the bell in the churchyard. The abbey did not ring many bells at once, as I was used to hearing at home in Paris. Instead we answered to the sweet, high sound of one bell echoing, like a woman’s voice, calling us to God.

  Our time was meted out to us by the sound of that one bell: time for mass, time to eat, time to pray. The abbess, Mother Sebastian, looked after me.

  I lived with the nuns of the abbey, but their days were not my days. While the sisters worked, tutors saw me, closely chaperoned by the Mother in my rooms. Language instructors came to teach me Spanish, and a traveling priest came to teach me better Latin. Latin was the only language I had learned to read and write well, and I improved greatly under Father Anthony’s tutelage. After a year he declared that he had no more to teach me, and he went away. So my only instruction in Latin after that came from the Mother herself.

  When I passed twelve summers, the Mother took me into the simples garden and showed me how to tend the herbs and plants that lived there. She had given me all of her Church Latin, so now she taught me the names of plants, what they were good for, how some were aids in healing, and others aids in death.

  There was a fountain in this garden, a small one that never ran dry Sometimes when we were done working, the Mother and I would sit beside it, sipping cool, clear water from a dried gourd.

  My favorite of all my work, what I loved more than the garden, more than prayer, was to sit in the small library and work with Sister Bernard on the illuminations.

  We were a small house, but we had the queen’s favor, so others who sought her favor as well would often send us requests for small books. They would ask for a woman’s prayer book very rarely, or sometimes for a Gospel for a small church that had just received an endowment from the Crown.

  It was considered odd for women to paint illuminations, but Sister Bernard had a gift, and what little she could teach of it, she gave to me.

  The day I first found her painting, I gasped to see the colors take shape under her hands. She was working on a small book, its vellum old, scraped many times. But Sister Bernard worked as if the words she drew would last into eternity. Being the Word of God, I suppose they will, though not the ones drawn by her hand.

  I watched her for hours, not returning to my rooms or even to the simples garden to meet the Mother. Mother Sebastian came to find me, and when she saw the look on my face, I did not have to ask permission to stay. She granted the requests she could, for I asked for very little.

  So time was taken out of my day to work with Sister Bernard. At first, I could do only the calligraphy, for we could not risk the costly colors on my lessons. But even the Mother agreed that no one seeing the book when it was finished would be able to tell that it had not been written by a man.

  After a few months, I was allowed to paint with color. Sister Bernard stood next to me by my high table and stool. We sat in full sunlight when we could and brought lamps when it was raining. We needed light for our work, as the rest of the nunnery did not.

  I dipped my brush in the vermilion paint, and began the first word of the Gospel of Saint John. I felt as if the hand of God guided me, keeping me from any mistake. The first letter was done last, after the rest of the calligraphy had dried. It was a testament to the rest of the work, one that would draw the eye and bring the reader’s mind to God. This was a simple Psalter, with no other illumination than the first letter of the first page. Some country squire had ordered it to further his place at court, and it was deemed a good book for me to begin on.

  The Mother came to see the book after it had dried. Sister Bernard and I had worked on this one Psalter for months. We were sorry now that it was done and would go out into the world,
away from us.

  I stood by the Mother and looked down at my work. It seemed to me that it had been done by another. How could the hand of a princess, born only for marriage, draw even a shadow of the mind of God? The Mother answered this question for me, though I had not asked it out loud.

  “Our gifts come through us from God, and go back to God from whence they came. We are only their keepers for a little while, sometime stewards of God’s inward grace.”

  Sister Bernard nodded, and I found myself comforted. This Psalter, and every illumination I did after it, belonged to God. It was for me to let them go.

  I was at the work of painting illuminations, on a day in my fourteenth spring, when the queen came back for me.

  I sat at my high table, the sunlight warm on my hands. The light brought out the auburn hidden in the brown of my hair.

  “You have grown beautiful, little princess. I would not have known you.”

  Eleanor stood in the doorway of the cloister garden, her eyes on me. Her bronze hair was hidden under her wimple, but I could see her green eyes glinting. She had not aged a day. It was as if she had prayed to the Virgin to stay ever youthful, ever beautiful, the better to hold all men in her sway.

  I sat there, thinking these things, caught, as all men are, by the power of her eyes. Then she smiled at me, and she was the woman I remembered, the woman who had made me welcome when I had nothing, and no one. The child in me wanted to run to her, to feel her arms around me. But I was a woman now, and it had been almost three years since I had last seen her.

  Then, too, as always, she was queen. The court manners I had mastered as soon as I learned to walk called to me from my childhood. Long ago, I had known when to bow and when to kneel, and had done so as thoughtlessly as I drew my next breath.

  I laid my paintbrush down, knowing that I might never take it up again. Eleanor had come for me, and I must follow her. I had not come among my father’s enemies to become a woman of God. I had come to marry, and to hold the English king to our treaty, if I could. I had come to give my life, and the lives of my children, to keep the fragile peace.