by Iris Anthony
And I should have done so sooner rather than later. His mother was in a state by the time I arrived. The tops of her cheeks and base of her throat had flushed a bright, splotchy red. “Has everything gone topsy-turvy? Does it require a battle now to draw water?”
“No, Your Highness.”
“Then where is it?”
“Where is…?”
“My water!” She pulled her lips into a thin, flat line, sending furrows racing from her mouth down toward her neck.
Charles had set it down when we had gone to dance, and in my haste, I had forgotten to collect it. “Forgive me, Your Majesty, but—”
“Forgive you? Everybody is celebrating my son’s news but me! Even you, I suspect.”
I put a hand to my reddened cheeks and tried to calm my ragged breath. “But is it not wonderful, Your Majesty?”
“Wonderful? What would be wonderful is if I were down there with them! What would be wonderful is if he had the crown on his head right this instant. Or if he actually had a throne to sit on! What would be wonderful is if my maidservant stopped acting as if she were my equal instead!”
“I’m sorry, Your Majesty!”
“Stupid girl! Sorry is a state of being, and right you are in thinking it applies to you.”
Tears stung my eyes. I dipped into a curtsy. “I will go and—”
“Yes, go. Be gone with you! When I took you up, I had hoped you would turn into a fine servant. Now I can see I am destined to disappointment.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Then take your sorry self away. Do something useful. Fetch me my water!”
***
I tore down the steps, tears blinding my eyes. I tried—how desperately I had always tried to please her. One would think on this day, at least, she could not be out of sorts. She had worked, ever since I could remember, to get the throne back for her son. Why could she not just be happy?
I stumbled on a step, and my foot slipped, sending me down the next two steps on my buttocks. That seemed about right and as rude as the position I now found myself in. My sole friend was bound to leave me behind, and my mistress was not likely to improve. And so I indulged in a luxury: I gave myself over, for just a few moments, to my tears.
That’s where Charles found me.
“Juliana?” He bent and offered me a hand.
I wiped at my tears with the sleeve of my tunic.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. It is nothing.”
“It cannot be my mother, can it? I’m sorry. Did she scold you?”
I did not wish to dampen his high spirits, but I could not lie, and so I said nothing.
“Juliana?” He put a gentle hand to my face and tipped my chin so I had to look at him.
I tried to turn my head, but he would not let me. “She did.”
He sat on the step beside me.
I felt a surge of furious, perverse anger. “You had to know she would.”
“I’m sorry.”
A pair of tears slipped down my cheeks as I gathered up the skirts of my tunic, preparing to stand. “You’re not forgiven.”
“I am not—?”
“She was…horrible.” My lips wobbled. “You know how she is. You knew, and still you kept me. I told you I could not stay and—”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I did not think—”
“It’s fine.” I turned away so he couldn’t see the tears descending in streams down my face.
But he would not let me leave. He stayed me with a hand to my shoulder. “I said I’m sorry.”
“You’re always sorry, and still you always seem to get me into trouble.”
“It’s just that—don’t—don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”
I swiped at my tears. “I’m not crying.”
“Please don’t.” He pulled a handkerchief from his belt, took me by the jaw, and tipped my head up toward the torch’s light so he could see. And then he dabbed at my tears. “I just—I wanted you there. You’re the only one who truly understands. The only one who knows how it was to wait and hope those many long years.”
Perhaps. But now there were many to share his good fortune. The palace was filled to bursting with them. “It seems to me as if you have friends aplenty now.”
“Don’t cry. Please.” He’d stopped dabbing and was staring into my eyes. “You’re so…beautiful.”
A flush rose up and swept across my face. “Beautiful?” I meant to scoff, but the word came out in a whisper.
“Just—just let me—” He bent forward, putting a hand to my neck, and gave me the softest of kisses. That was when I lost my heart to him. It must have been. For when he found me later that week, I followed him out to a dark, deserted corner of the palace, and there we kissed again.
***
It soon became difficult to find a place to be alone, for every day, more were being added to the numbers at the palace. But our childhood wanderings through that place did not fail us, and most of the time we were able to steal a kiss or two between my tasks.
It was so new and magical, the spell that had come over us. It had to have been an enchantment. I have nothing else to attribute it to. For why else should I have yearned for a boy I had known all my life? How else could what happened be explained?
I had been bewitched, and so had he.
His mother must have suspected, for she kept me busy, running between the floors, going from one side of the palace to the other. But still, somehow, Charles always seemed to know where I was. And before long, where one kiss had suited, when one caress had sufficed, I found I needed more. We both did.
“Don’t make me stop,” Charles groaned late one night from his cushions as he reached for me.
I pushed his hands aside. God help me, I did not want to, but I knew I had to. “You must.” What in heaven’s name were we doing? And why did I want so badly to continue with the doing of it?
“I mustn’t do anything I do not wish to now. Didn’t you hear? I’m to be king at last.”
I broke away from his embrace, though I was curiously unsteady in the doing of it, and I could not seem to get enough air in my breathing. “But even kings must care what people say about them.” Or at least their mother’s maidservant must. I made sure to keep plenty of distance between us.
He pushed up on an elbow and came after me. “Don’t go, Juliana. Not yet.”
I could hardly dare to look him in the eyes, this boy, my childhood friend now become a man. Was my hair hopelessly ruined? I put a hand up to feel the length of my plaits. “Your mother must wonder where I am.” My cheeks were flushed, I could feel it. I hoped she would not notice.
“Just tell her you’re attending to your king.”
“Charles.” Shifting, putting a hand to the collar of my tunic, I tried to straighten everything that had been set askew by the goings-on between us.
He crossed his arms behind his head as he lay back on his bed, grinning at me.
I couldn’t help but return it. What a fine expanse of chest he had.
“Don’t I need attending to as well?” I could tell he meant the words to be enticing.
Perhaps then I could be forgiven for not having moved quite far enough away, for not reacting swiftly enough when he rose and took me in his arms once more.
“Juliana.”
I could not help it. I knew, of course I knew, the thing we did was wrong. I had no doubt it was against God’s holy commands. But I could not help myself. Companions we had always been, Charles and I. This was simply another step along life’s path we had decided to take together.
After, when our passion was spent and I was trying to decide why I did not feel shamed or even very guilty, he rolled from me and tucked me into his side, planting drowsy kisses on my neck. “When I claim the throne, then you shall be my queen. Make no
mistake about it.”
I had not. I did not.
Not through the long days of service to his mother, nor through the procession of short, stolen nights spent in his bed that followed. Had I ever even thought to doubt his love, I would have been assured of it when I confided to him my secret hope and greatest fear. I was with child.
He had taken my hands in his. “Are you certain?”
I nodded.
“Oh, my sweet love.” He slipped from the bed, bent on one knee, took up my hand, and kissed it. And then he’d picked me up from the bed and carried me about in a merry jig.
I clung to his neck, laughing.
“A prince! We are to have a prince!”
I kissed him full on the lips. “Or a princess.”
He kissed me back. “And now my mother cannot keep you to herself. We shall marry at once.”
***
If we had married as he said we would, perhaps things would have been different. But then perhaps he would never have been king at all.
Surely, I had been cursed by my memory of those days long past. And surely I was not a true penitent. If I were, would I not refuse to pull those memories out at night, turning them this way and that, like the finest of jewels? If I were, would I not feel shame at the remembered warmth of those stolen kisses? Would I not have stopped waking in the middle of the night with the feel of Charles beneath my fingers?
I brought them, trembling, to my face. My soul was in such desperate need of salvation. This I knew, and yet I could not seem to find it within myself to submit to saving grace. For if I gave up all my memories, then what would I have left?
“You there!”
The abbess’s imperial voice startled me from my thoughts.
She pushed the young man away, letting her skirts fall back into place. “Forget what you have seen.”
I could not do that. And I knew she would not be able to either.
Walking back to the dormitory, I tried to push my thoughts of Charles away. As always, they did not go far. They came flooding back to me as I lay down on my pallet and shut my eyes.
Such heady days of sweet love those had been.
I might have expected to be secretly scorned, discounted as a servant simply keeping the king’s bed warm, but Charles must have made it known how he felt about me. Dressed in robes of silk and clad in embroidered slippers, I was relieved of my duties as a maidservant and installed in his chamber. But…I did not know what to do with myself. Clearly, I was not expected to wait on anyone anymore—at least no one besides Charles—but I could not bring myself to consort with those daughters of the lords I had once served. I contented myself with waiting for Charles’s visits and dreaming about the babe who was to be born.
There was immense competition for position as nobles flooded the court. The order of precedence was constantly changing. And though Charles wanted me always by his side, I had no position at court. No one was sure quite what to do with me. My presence made life much too complicated.
I tried to excuse myself from most of the official occasions, but Charles would not hear of it.
“Why should you not come?”
“I am not wanted, Charles.”
“I want you, and I am the king, so it’s decided.”
In truth, I hated being noticed by anyone for any reason, for I knew what people were thinking. They were wondering why I had been so blessed by Fortune and how long I was going to last. If we had been married, it might have been different, but there was strife on every front. Though Charles had been crowned king by the archbishop of Reims, Odo had no intention of relinquishing the throne. Pagans were threatening every corner of the kingdom. Worst of all, nobles who had pledged Charles their fealty seemed to betray him at every turn.
I had expected we would marry, but with emissaries arriving daily, and meetings that took place at all hours of the day and night, there seemed to be no time, and in the middle of such turmoil, I could see no reason to push for something Charles had already promised.
CHAPTER 10
Since I had seen the new abbess with her lover, she liked me even less than she had at the beginning. At least she let me serve Saint Catherine in peace. But as I went about my duties one day, a new clerk came to take the accounts.
As a pilgrim came forward, he stopped her. “Where’s your gift?”
She presented a length of linen to him.
“Is that all?” He was eyeing her mantle as if he suspected she had something else hidden beneath its folds.
“It is all that I have, all that I brought.”
He took it, turned it over once, twice, and then tossed it into the chest. He looked at me. “She can pray, but she can’t kiss it.”
“She can…what?” I was not certain I understood.
He had already started questioning the next pilgrim. But he spared me a glance. “She can pray. Can’t stop her from doing that. But she can’t kiss the relic.”
“Then how can she expect a miracle from Saint Catherine?”
He shrugged.
The woman clutched my hand and begged me for the chance to kiss the casket, but the clerk blocked her from it. Indeed, half the pilgrims that day were sent on their way without a chance to kiss the relic. And only half of their gifts were placed into the basket meant for the treasury. The other half were bundled into a separate chest.
When I asked where they were going, I was told to mind my own tasks. But as he was sorting the gifts, the clerk grasped at something and pulled it from the pile. It was a candlestick fashioned from silver. “My lord will be pleased with this one.”
“And so might Our Lord as well.”
“Can’t fault the count for getting something in return for his protection.”
“Protection of what, exactly?”
“Of the abbey.”
“From what have we need to be protected?”
He looked up from the candlestick. “From the Saracens. Or Danes. Or the lord’s men themselves.”
“The count’s men?”
“Ah!” He plunged a hand into the pile again and fished around for a moment. “The abbess will like this one.” He held a plump white pearl between his fingers.
Outrage quickened my heart. “It was not meant for her. It was meant for the abbey!”
“And she’s the abbess, is she not?”
When he was done with his recording, he shut up his records. Tucking them under his arm, he strode off toward the church.
“Don’t you wish to pray? Or kiss the relic?”
He hardly paused in his step. “Why?”
“For…for peace of mind? Or healing?”
“Don’t want anything. The count has given me everything I have need of.”
After he left, I walked about, finishing my work, wondering what kind of world ours had become when everything of value could be bestowed by the hand of men. What need was there for God?
***
The next day, after the pilgrims had gone, the same clerk returned. He placed atop the altar a large golden box marked with crosses and set with glittering stones. Then he picked up Saint Catherine’s reliquary casket, lifted the lid, and dumped the contents inside his box.
“You cannot—!”
“The abbess said the reliquary should be bigger. Grander.”
He took the old one and dropped it into his chest. Then he went about collecting fully half of Saint Catherine’s candles, hardly pausing to allow me to extinguish their flames.
I tried to stop him. “They are not yet depleted.” Most of them still had a good many days left to burn.
“Saint Catherine doesn’t need them.”
“They were given her by the pilgrims.”
“They were given to the abbey.” He wound them in a length of cloth and then moved to carry them off.
“But, w
here are you taking them?”
“Somewhere more eyes than yours can use them.” He placed them into his chest and gestured for his lad to take it up.
The glow had gone from the chapel, and it had nothing to do with the decrease in candles. “I must protest.”
“Then talk to the abbess.” He tossed the words over his shoulder as he walked toward the nave.
***
Should I say something? And if I should, then what? Even if I should, who would care what I said, and what difference could it possibly make?
A girl like you has nothing to offer at all. To anyone.
The Queen Mother’s words were as true now as they had been back when she had first said them.
Besides, how could I fight Providence and ever hope to win?
Only the bishop could approve an abbess. And only an archbishop could approve a bishop, and if the count’s daughter was charged with the abbey, then what chance had I of changing it?
What chance had I ever had of changing anything?
Once again, the world had changed around me. I had been swept up in a tide against which I had no purchase. The feeling was familiar, but no less alarming than it had been the last time such things had happened.
***
I had not known Charles’s crown would ruin forever the possibility he could ever be rightfully mine. Foolish girl that I was, I thought heaven had blessed us both. Perhaps I could be forgiven such things. I had been so very young.
It had taken the Queen Mother to make me understand.
I had no mother or father. They were killed in a raid by the Danes when I was yet a babe. The queen had taken pity on me, the daughter of palace retainers. I was brought into her household, and I had been raised according to her wishes, as a handmaid. She treated me as a plaything. A bauble or a trinket. Betimes she petted me. Other times she beat me. Sometimes she ignored me completely. Those things she had taught to me—reading, writing, embroidery, Latin, singing—were for her use rather than mine.
Perhaps it was inevitable Charles would turn his attentions to me. I had grown up with the prince, though during that time, due to the circumstances of his parents’ marriage, a prince he could not be called. And she ought not to have been called Queen Mother either; the pope had refused to crown her. The king’s first wife insisted her own two sons, Charles’s half brothers, were the rightful princes and she the rightful queen. But Charles’s mother had refused to accept it. In her mind and among her people, at least, Charles was the only prince, and she the dead king’s only true wife. The rest of the nobles had laughed at her. They had mocked all of us.