To Be Queen

by Christy English

  My man in Rome was still working. Stefan had secured my sister’s annulment; Raoul of Vermandois was married in the eyes of God to Petra, now and for all eternity. I laughed in triumph when I got that news, savoring the victory that had been so hard-won. I sent word to Petra at once, wishing only that I could deliver the news to her myself.

  This victory was double-edged, for it encouraged me to continue to seek my own annulment. I had secured Raoul’s freedom; I strove now to secure my own. So Stefan turned from the matter of my sister’s marriage to mine. He had to be discreet, for Louis was a crowned king, and I, his queen. In the past, annulments came not because the woman asked for it but because the man did. Stefan had to use his charm, but he also had to be cautious.

  For now, he sat in Rome, pouring wine down the throats of bishops and cardinals, making friends wherever he went, but without too much bombast. He made certain that all the money he handed out looked discreet as well, as if that gold were donations to build new monasteries, or contributions to pet projects that each cardinal held dear. Stefan knew the inner workings of the Church, and how to use them. I bided my time, and left him to it.

  Finally, Louis and his French tired of the Levant. I wondered for a few despairing moments if he would be caught in the web of the Holy Land as Raymond was. But unlike him, Louis had no kingdom to stay for. We turned at last to the port city of Acre, that we might take ship for Sicily.

  I was to travel on a separate ship from Louis. He had been blessed in Jerusalem, but had still not come to my bed. I continued to pretend to pray, and to don the facade of a pious woman. I never brought up the idea of our annulment again. I did not think Louis would come to my bed on board ship, but I needed to be sure. After my time with Raymond, and the interminable months since I had seen him, I had taken my fill of Louis. I could not spend a month or more at sea with him beside me.

  Louis indulged me in this as he did in all things that did not matter. So we sat in the palace at Acre, locked away in our separate rooms, Louis at prayer, me with my women. In the end, I sent all my women away.

  I would not go to the great hall that last night in the Levant, but my women wanted to go to the feast. Each of them could feel the ties that bound them rising to circle them once more. What a woman might do under my protection in the East, far from home, was one thing. What a woman could do at court under the watchful eye of her husband or her father was quite another. I let my women leave me, to make merry while they might.

  I sat alone with Amaria beside me in the garden attached to my borrowed rooms. Here, I had a view of the sea. The waves crashed below the palace walls, and I could hear the call of the gulls.

  There were roses in that garden, too, Persian roses that climbed their arbors in brilliant colors of red, yellow, and white. I sat beneath them and took in their scent. The perfume of those flowers and the sound of the sea cocooned me. Amaria left me, so that I might sit alone.

  He came out of nowhere, as he always did. I thought at first he was an apparition, that my mind had truly broken with the world. Then I saw his cloak thrown over his gold and russet hair, and Amaria standing behind him. She had let him in.

  I did not ask how he had slipped past my husband’s people. So many men fought under so many different banners in that place. Acre was one of the ports used by all Christian armies, and all men went through there at one time or another, many under false names, many of whom did not want to be known. As long as they paid in gold, no one asked questions. It was one of the things coin bought easily in that place: discretion.

  Still, I knew that to come here was folly. He had risked his life and his kingdom to be alone with me.

  Amaria left us. I knew that she would guard the door. No one watched me that night, for no one thought that I could get up to mischief one step from the quayside.

  Raymond did not speak but came to me, his cloak falling onto the crushed seashells of the path behind him. He took me up in his arms without a word. There had never been a need for words between us. I pressed myself against him, thinking that he might feel for a brief moment like Louis, or that his muscled arms would remind me of the Baron Rancon. But they did not. When Raymond touched me, there was only him.

  We had scarcely touched before. That one kiss in the garden on our first night was all that had passed between us. Occasionally, he had touched my hand, or our fingers brushed in the midst of a chess game, but that was all. That night, our restraint fell away. We had only those few hours to fill our lives to come. We took them, and gladly.

  His lips were sweet, sweeter than I had thought they would be, soft, like the rose petals I bathed in. He tasted of mead, and warm honey. I pressed myself against him and he drew back long enough to laugh a little. There had never been laughter in Louis’ bed. I had not known that I missed it.

  I laughed, too, and tasted him again, but I did not lead for long. He savored me, as if I were the finest wine, and I drank him in, as if I could never get enough.

  His body was firm and lean beneath my hands, but well muscled, from his time on the tiltyard and at war. He held the country of Antioch by the strength of his sword arm, while Louis held his lands through the strength of his barons, and through his marriage to me. I had never thought that such a difference mattered. But I had never before had a man touch me like Raymond of Antioch.

  So the Parisians were right. Raymond and I would be lovers at last. It was something else to make me laugh, before he carried me into the bedroom beyond the garden we stood in.

  Amaria had been there before us. Candles were lit on every surface, giving out soft pools of light, softer than any oil lamps or braziers filled with charcoal. Those candles made me think of the wedding night I never had, one a woman always longs for, even a woman born to a life of power. Even me.

  Raymond drew my blue gown off me, and then the soft linen of my scented shift. I melted beneath his touch, and burned with the hottest, brightest flame of my life.

  He took his own clothes off, and stood before me, tall and proud, his scars drawn white against the tanned muscles of his arms. All his scars were on the front of his body. He led every charge he rode in.

  Before Raymond lay down beside me, he caught my hand in his. We were not swept away by our madness. We did not rule it, but neither did it rule us.

  The heat rose between us, like a flame that would never go out. But still, he waited. Though his deep blue eyes burned with it, he did not touch me.

  “Say my name,” he said, as if asking one last time for permission. I did not hesitate.

  “Raymond of Poitou. Raymond of Antioch. Come here to me.”

  He rose on one knee and I drew him down beside me on that bed of silk. He kissed me again, and it was as if I were being kissed for the first time. The years of cold and loss in Louis’ court, the courtiers who despised me, the child I had buried, the daughter I barely knew. All lay far distant the night he was with me. There was only he and I, alone together.

  “I will love you, and no other, until my days pass from this earth,” he said as he lay on the bed beside me.

  I answered him, though before that day I never would have sworn such an oath. It was the madness that took me. That night, there was only Raymond, his skin soft on my lips as I kissed his chest, his heart beating over mine as he listened for my voice.

  “And I will love you,” I said, “until my life is done.”

  Our passion spent, he lay beside me until the hour before dawn when the deep indigo of the sky began to turn to gray. Neither of us had slept. We talked, trying to make up for all the years we had been apart, for all the years that would soon divide us.

  I think he had some vain hope that I would leave Acre with him. That like some princess in a German fable, I would desert my husband and my lands, and fly with him to an unknown fate. He did not ask it of me, so I did not have to refuse.

  He is with me still. That is what fated love means in the end. The hand of fate lies heavy on us, to show us the ones who will never leave u
s, the ones we will carry for the rest of our lives. And beyond, if the priests are right.

  Though I do not believe in words like forever, I did when I looked into the blue of his eyes. I was grateful for that one night, carved out of the rest of my life. Those hours were worth the pain I paid for them, both before and after.

  For nothing in this world comes free.

  PART IV

  To Be Known

  Chapter 23

  City of Palermo

  Kingdom of Sicily

  September 1149

  LOUIS KISSED ME AT THE QUAYSIDE IN THE PORT OF ACRE, and sailed before me. I watched his ship until it was out of sight; then I stepped onto my own. The tide was turning, and we needed to be gone.

  I stood on the deck of that ship, rented at a high price from King Roger of Sicily, as my ladies sat below in their cabin. I was alone but for Amaria, who stood at my side. Raymond was like a dream gone at morning, but I felt his eyes on me as I stood upon the deck of King Roger’s ship.

  I watched until the city of Acre dwindled into nothing. I never saw Raymond, but I knew he was there. I felt his presence, as Louis so often claimed to feel the presence of God. Perhaps, in the end, I was as misguided as Louis was.

  Night rose, and the sea rose with it. I went below for a few hours, but slept little. My ladies woke when I did, a few hours before dawn, but they soon went down into the belly of the ship again. The Middle Sea was a place that turned away the faint of heart. A great wind rose, and blew us off course. I welcomed it, for I did not want to step on land again, and see Louis standing there, waiting for me.

  When we were two weeks at sea, I saw that we were lost in earnest. My women fell silent, their voices quieted by fear. I saw the most pious among them at prayer, and the worldly ones fingered their rosaries, their eyes turned always to the horizon, looking for land. I welcomed the deep waves and the swelling troughs that rose around us. I wanted freedom from the world as I had known it. If I could not stay in the Levant, I wanted to enter a new world altogether.

  Our ship landed not in a new world but in Sicily more than a week later. We had been blown well off course, and came ashore not at Calabria, as Louis had, but at the port of Palermo. But even once we reached the Norman kingdom of Sicily, it was not a simple matter to come to land, for when we reached the waters close by Palermo, the Emperor of Byzantium’s ships came upon us out of nowhere.

  I laughed out loud when I saw Manuel’s standard flying, thinking at first that the Byzantines meant only to greet us as we swept in from the sea. I laughed harder when I saw that they meant to take my ship. I was justified in my mistrust of Emperor Manuel yet again.

  The Sicilians on board our ship were brave. They would have died to a man before letting the emperor’s navy take me. But just as the imperial sinking catapults were turned on us, King Roger of Sicily’s ships sailed up from the city, and fought off Manuel’s navy.

  I watched all this as a spectator only. I could not feel myself involved in the proceedings, though my very life was at stake. For all I knew, Louis’ churchmen had paid the emperor well and in gold to see to it that I never made it back to my husband’s side. It would have been like the Church, with their womanish ways, to pay others to commit their murders for them.

  I was a woman. I should know.

  If Brother Francis and his ilk paid for my death, they lost their money that day, for King Roger’s ships took me under their protective wing as a mother hen shields her chicks from the hawk. The emperor’s men must not have wanted me all that badly, for after a few parting volleys that went wide, they sailed away, heading for the open sea.

  I came off ship at Palermo, knowing that King Roger would not be there to greet me. Of course, he was inland, running his court, as I myself should be. He held his land by the skin of his teeth. Sicily was a Norman conquest, but was full of bandits and rebels, with the Saracens across the Middle Sea in Africa, waiting always for the opportunity to raid the coast. Unlike myself, he could not leave his court to go on Crusade, or to seek his pleasure elsewhere. As my feet touched dry land once more, the hot plains of Sicily made me long for the verdant greens of the Aquitaine and Poitou. I had been gone too long already.

  I fell ill from a sweating sickness, though I had never before been sick in my life. The sweltering plains of Sicily brought this sickness to my ladies as well, but it was worse with me. I was laid low with it for a week before we could move inland. I spent those days in a sort of twilight, in which my fever made me forget the past. I thought that Raymond was still with me, just a step away in the next room. I did not call for him, but I wanted to. That alone showed how weak I was.

  My faithful Amaria guarded me, her dagger in its sheath on her wrist. She would not let any of King Roger’s women attend me. Seeing all my food and water tasted, she fed me from her own hand.

  After a week, I was in my own mind once more, and strong enough to travel, albeit slowly and by litter, inland to Roger’s capital of Potenza. It took three weeks to make a journey that normally could be accomplished in two days. At the end of it, I was on my feet once more, if only barely.

  At King Roger’s keep at Potenza, I rose from my litter, Amaria gripping my hand. Louis and his confessor, Brother Francis, stood in the courtyard of Roger’s palace, waiting for me. Amaria was angry that Louis had not come to me on the coast, to save me a journey in the midst of my illness. She loved me, almost to distraction. She did not understand that the King of France never put himself in danger of infection to travel to the side of another, not even his queen.

  I stepped toward Louis under my own power. When I released her hand, I could feel Amaria’s irritated displeasure as clearly as I felt the hot sun in the sky. She said nothing, but let me go.

  “Eleanor. When your ship did not land at Calabria, I feared you were dead,” Louis said.

  Tears rose in my husband’s watery blue eyes. I reached for him, and took his hand, as I would have taken a child’s. I stood close to him, and let him hold me up. Only as I leaned against him did he see how weak I was.

  “You have been ill,” he said. “I am sorry.”

  I forced a smile. “I am mending now, Louis. But I had better get out of this sun.”

  “Yes.”

  And in the next moment, the King of France swept me up into his arms. I had lost a good deal of weight with the sea voyage and my long illness, but Louis’ strength, so rarely seen, struck me dumb. He carried me into Roger’s keep, and all our people, his and mine, moved quickly out of his way. He strode without speaking to a room deep in the interior of the castle. There was a little sunlight coming in from an open window, but the room was cooled by its thick stone walls.

  Louis laid me gently on a feather bed, a bed far too soft for such a savage court. I missed the Levant already. I had grown used to the ever-running fountains and the rose gardens, the fresh fruit and the cold water. I would have to accustom myself to Europe once more.

  We were alone, for Louis had closed the door of the bedroom behind him. I thought for a moment that he might have me on that bed, for his face was flushed with his exertion and his love for me. Whether he turned from me because of his sin or mine, or because of my long illness, he did not lie down beside me. Instead, Louis knelt at my bedside, lifting one of my hands to the softness of his lips.

  “I love you, Eleanor. I prayed for you every day, while you were away.”

  I could not give Louis the answer he longed for, so I stayed silent. Even now, my men waited outside the door to report on the progress Stefan had made in Rome, to tell me whether or not the pope would set me free.

  “You are a good man, Louis,” I said. “Too good a man to be married to me.”

  “I am a sinner, Eleanor. You are my idol, and if I do not stay in constant prayer and fasting, I will burn for the sin of idolatry, when I am taken from the earth.”

  I considered the idea that Louis had set me up as an idol, and worshipped me without touching me for most of the years of our marriage. I
f that was true, it must have been worse torment for him than our marriage had been for me, because he was a pious man who could not even take the steps necessary to fulfill his own prayers for a son.

  I caressed my husband’s hair. We were not even thirty yet. Once I had left him, God might yet grant Louis a son. I believed in nothing, and in no god, but I hoped for Louis’ sake that it would be so. For myself, I longed only to be gone from the Parisian court, and from him.

  I gathered my strength and smiled. I had a long road to walk before I could go home again.

  “Thank you for your prayers, Louis. If God listens to anyone, He listens to you.”

  Louis did not chastise me for my blasphemy. No doubt he marked it down as a shadow of my fevered brain. He kissed me, and left me then, so that my women could attend me. They brought cool cloths with which to bathe me, and wine sweetened with fruit. I recognized the Cypriot wine that I had first drunk in Emperor Manuel’s palace, the wine I had come to love during my time with Raymond.

  I drank that wine, and ate some honeyed dates, though I had no appetite. I had to gather my strength. More than Louis waited for me outside that door. His Parisians waited, too, and his churchmen. I must face them that night at King Roger’s board. No matter how sick I was, or how tired, I must go on. They could not be allowed to see my weakness.

  Amaria drew a box from among my things, a box I had never before seen. Within it lay cosmetics, vermilion and lapis lazuli, powdered rose petals and kohl. I had never used such things, but I looked at my face, as gray as death, in the bronze mirror Amaria held up for me. Tonight would be the first time. Dressed in cloth of gold, with a bronze and silver belt at my waist, I stood while Amaria fastened my thin gold veil with the diadem of the Aquitaine. No doubt Louis’ people would think less of me for it, and whisper evil tidings behind my back for not wearing the crown of France.