Her courtiers were easily distinguishable from those of her husband, being generally younger and, both men and women, better-looking and better-dressed. What they wore set the fashion. Her male courtiers appalled some of Henry’s die-hard barons by being as perfumed as the female, the die-hards believing the proper scent for a man to be sweat.
‘One shouldn’t really approve of Eleanor,’ thought the abbess, ‘but there’s no doubt she’s got style.’
Her nun, however, approved neither of Eleanor nor her style. Sister Boniface carried into that swirling, multi-coloured, multi-scented Great Hall an odour of sanctity, lye-soap and disapproval. The stories of Eleanor’s various sins during her marriage to Louis of France, her behaviour on crusade when she was supposed to have had an affair with, among others, her own uncle, had lost nothing in the telling in the Fontevrault dorters where they had been recounted with appalled breathiness. Sister Boniface had never actually met the queen, having been absent on the few occasions when Eleanor had visited the convent, but she knew that the woman had broken God’s rules and was therefore nowhere near as beloved in God’s eyes as she was herself.
As she approached the dais to be introduced to the queen, the young nun’s face, had she known it, wore a look of rigid superiority as befitted one who was destined for a higher heaven than erring royalty.
‘She’s Irish,’ shrieked the Abbess of Fontevrault, pushing forward her protegée, ‘An Irish mind trained in the Roman discipline with Angevin logic. Ideal for this holy cause, a treasure.’
Eleanor of Aquitaine looked into the treasure’s sharp blue eyes and sighed. Here was another one who thought of her as a scarlet woman. Eleanor had long ago decided that the worst of having a reputation for naughtiness was that half her social inferiors looked down on her, and the other half treated her with a nudging over-familiarity. She didn’t know which attitude she most disliked. However, she’d had her orders about this nun… she smiled her most brilliant smile at her and said: ‘My dear, this venture is so fascinating and I’m dying to hear all about it. Let’s go where we can talk privately.’
Trailing silk and a scent of jasmine, she took the nun’s hand and began leading her towards a side door. The abbess would have followed them but was deflected by one of Eleanor’s courtiers who, at a glance from Eleanor, went up to her and began talking horseflesh.
Sister Boniface found herself alone with the Queen of England in a walled garden where, Eleanor told her, ‘nobody comes unless they want to talk secrets.’
‘Talk seduction, more like,’ thought Sister Boniface. She disapproved of the garden. In her view the only purpose a garden should have was to provide herbs, culinary or medicinal. It should certainly not be decorative for decoration’s sake, like this one.
The day had turned warm, as the Loire Valley’s weather could in April, and the sun seemed centred on Eleanor’s garden, speckling through the hawthorn trees’ branches which had been interlaced over the walkways, and on the stream channelled to run alongside them into a carved basin where the cool, indistinct shapes of fish swam beneath the water, and on the lawns which were of camomile and mint, grown not for the properties of those excellent plants, but for the scent they released underfoot. The place was full of the twitter of hidden birds, and from an unseen arbour came the inevitable sound of a young tenor voice singing. Inevitably too, it sang of Eleanor: ‘Gently swaying, rose and fell/Her supple form, while her feet/Kept measured time with perfect beat.’
Against one of the walls was a topiaried yew hedge with niches carved into it in which stood statues, not of saints, but of beautiful young men and women, only saved from total nakedness by a negligent stone drapery or figleaf. ‘Aren’t they fine?’ asked Eleanor, ‘Henry of Blois had them brought back from Rome and Fitzempress liberated them from his palace as a gift to me.’
Sister Boniface did not answer. The statues discomfited her, as did the fact that the women walking beside her was revealed to be heavily pregnant.
Eleanor sighed again. This was going to be more difficult than she’d been led to believe. She was unused to people who were proof against her charm for long. She sat the nun down on one end of a stone bench, another involuntary Roman present from Henry of Blois, and eased herself onto the other end to look at her. If the child did but know it, she was beautiful, with that strangely pale, freckled complexion she had, and those amazing eyes. It was a more arresting beauty than Eleanor’s own, which was of the blonde type. ‘The trouble with you,’ thought Eleanor, ‘is that you don’t know what to do with yours, and I do. On the other hand, you don’t have to.’ She wondered what line to take and decided on a sincere piety.
Sincerely she said, ‘I beg that you will not isolate me from this enterprise of yours in Ireland. And God’s,’ she added hastily. ‘You are so brave to be carrying the Church’s banner into the end of the world as you are. I wish I were going with you.’ And in that moment she truly did. Eleanor’s enthusiasms, though short-lived, were genuine. ‘So let me be a part of it by helping you. Tell me what you want for your journey, for instance.’
Sister Boniface was coming round; she was not insusceptible to charm and, anyway, she found herself beginning to feel sorry for this woman who was so much less beloved of God than she was. In the sunlight Eleanor looked like a lovely golden pear but she also looked vulnerable in her pregnancy. The queen was, after all, thirty-two years old – eleven years older than Fitzempress – which seemed to the young nun, who knew little about the reproductive processes, an incredible age at which to be bearing a child, and a dangerous one. She was not to know that Eleanor’s appearance of vulnerability was one of her greatest assets: she actually had the constitution of a horse.
Nevertheless, Sister Boniface could think of nothing she needed that the vast resources of Fontevrault couldn’t supply. ‘I am grateful, my lady, but God has provided for me.’
‘Well, there may be one or two little things He’s overlooked,’ said Eleanor, ‘I have prepared a pannier of articles, a swansdown quilt against the cold, some wine, a cloak, for your journey. And there’s this I should like you to take with my blessing.’ The sun shone on a prettily-carved trinket box with an elaborate ‘E’ intertwined into the device of Aquitaine gilded onto its lid. Eleanor opened it to show that its interior contained six gold coins.
Boniface was overwhelmed. She had owned nothing in her life before; even her rosary, her crucifix, was the property of Fontevrault. She wasn’t sure she should take the box, she had a sense of being bribed, but her puritanism gave way before the beauty of its present and the giver.
‘I’m very grateful.’
‘But perhaps it is when you have arrived at this abbey of…’ Eleanor had forgotten the name, ‘that I can be of the greatest assistance. You may wish to build something – a house for the poor lepers, perhaps – do they have lepers in Ireland? You see how ignorant I am. And that’s another thing,’ she was getting to the point now. ‘I should love to hear about these poor heathens you are going to help. Somebody said they had tails. Do you think they’ve got tails? Will you write to me and tell me everything? Their quaint customs, how the local kings comport themselves, how big their armies are, all that sort of thing?’ What else was it Fitzempress wanted to know? ‘Who’s fighting who? That sort of thing?’
‘I can’t write,’ said Sister Boniface, sharply.
‘Of course you can’t,’ said Eleanor, who could. ‘Which of us women can? But you’ll have scribes and things, won’t you, and you must send me letters, and I’ll send you letters, and it will be lovely.’
Sister Boniface frowned. There was more here than a desire for travellers’ tales.
At that moment there was a convulsion in the hedge against which the two women sat and two hands appeared over Eleanor’s shoulders, slid lasciviously down her chest and clasped themselves round the swell of her belly.
‘Henry,’ said Eleanor contentedly, without turning round.
‘Better not be anyone else,’ said Fitzempr
ess, ‘Hello, Sister Boniface, and hello, young Henry.’ He vaulted over the bench, knelt down and pressed his ear to his wife’s stomach. ‘Young Henry says “Hello” back.’ He got up and plonked himself down on the bench. ‘All the old women predict it’s another boy, a brother for William.’ He smirked. The only child Eleanor had produced during her years with Louis of France had been a girl. ‘Now then. Has the queen told you about the horse?’
‘What horse?’ asked both Sister Boniface and Eleanor.
‘The horse, the horse. The one I’m giving you to take to Ireland with.’ He stretched out his legs so that he nearly upset the bench and the women backwards. ‘She’s a mare, a racer, from the best stud in Brittany. My good aunt says you can tell a fetlock from a farthingale. So, all right; I’m giving you a horse.’
‘Thank you, my lord,’ said Boniface, thinking hard.
‘I’m not doing this for nothing. I want you to breed from her. About the only thing I know about Ireland is that they’ve got some sturdy horseflesh over there and I want a new breed of charger for the army, something stronger and faster. I’m experimenting with heavier armour for my knights and I want something that can carry it.’ He beamed at the nun. ‘Let’s try for that.’
She would have liked to disapprove, have time to think, draw back into her experience as a protection from this young man, but he so eclipsed everything in her experience that all the rules were broken and she could not cope with him. She was being hoisted into his service for God knew what diabolical reason, and while she was infuriated she was exhilarated and helpless. As he sat there with his arm around the golden queen, she felt that he had harnessed everything, all the world’s acuteness and all modernity, into doing what he wanted.
‘It ought to be two horses, my lord,’ she said, ‘in case one dies on the journey.’
Fitzempress peered at her. ‘I wondered why they were sending such a young one,’ he said softly. ‘“Does she know what she’s taking on?” I thought. Now I think: “Does Ireland?” All right, two horses. Enough?’
‘Enough.’
The king hauled Eleanor to her feet. ‘Come on, old woman. You can’t sit here all day; anybody’d think you were pregnant. Sister Boniface, my blessing on you. You’re to stay here and wait for the cardinal. He wants to give you your marching orders. Good luck.’
As they walked away, the king’s red head and the queen’s blonde one turned to each other so that they could converse and in that moment it seemed to Sister Boniface that there was an equality as well as sexuality in their marriage which turned it into a companionship such as she had not dreamed could exist between a man and a woman. She was glad to sit quietly in this scented, song-filled garden and reassure herself by telling her rosary.
But there was a pounce on the grass in front of her and she looked up to see that Fitzempress had come back. ‘Say some Irish,’ he demanded.
She had been dreading this moment, but coming on her so unexpectedly now, she was driven back on an unbidden memory which brought words into her mouth without knowing what they meant.
‘Eochu had two sons, Nuada Declam and Mafebis. From Nuada are all the race of Eber. Of his posterity are all the Eognachta,’ she said in perfect Irish, her tongue and her throat making unfamiliar moves as she spoke with an ease that was almost alarming. She knew she could have gone on at length, but Fitzempress was nodding, satisfied that what he was hearing had no root in any of the classical languages with which he was familiar. ‘Outlandish,’ he said, and disappeared again.
Sister Boniface sat down again to await the cardinal, telling her rosary harder than ever. All this was extremely unsettling for someone such as herself who thrived on the regularity of things; nor was it conducive to one’s own internal order to find that hidden cupboards existed in oneself which contained strange, and possibly suspect, tongues and that these same cupboards could fly open to let them out when one did not know one had the key. ‘Please God,’ she prayed, ‘allow me to be in control when I take over this Irish abbey, if take it over I must. Give me power to make a routine so that I can be in charge and establish your rules. Give me monotony.’
She heard steps progressing along the walkway which ran behind the hedge against which she sat and was opening her mouth to call out to the cardinal that she was on this other side, when a young man’s voice, obviously addressing someone else, asked the question: ‘What do you suppose Ireland’s like?’
Sister Boniface shut her mouth and listened.
‘To hell and gone. North. Cold,’ said a companion voice. ‘Definite lack of dancing girls. No palm trees.’
‘That’s the impression I got,’ said the first voice, ‘How he expects us to blend into the background among a lot of woolly tribesmen in bearskins, especially as we don’t speak the bloody language, beats me.’
‘“Use your sodding initiative,”’ said the companion in an imitation of Fitzempress, ‘Anyway, they’re not all woolly. I met one in Syria once. Perfectly good knight; looked just like you and me. Well, like you – he wasn’t as handsome as me.’
‘I suppose we’ll have to be horse buyers again,’ said the first voice wearily. ‘Here we are, two well set-up young marshals in the service of a great king, and we end up as a couple of horse-copers.’
‘That’s all marshals are…’
The voices faded as the men reached the top of the garden.
Although Fontevrault had remained untouched by the war that the Plantagenets had fought in England and on the Continent to acquire supremacy over both, it had not done so in ignorance of what battles for power entailed. Many of Sister Boniface’s fellow nuns had brothers and fathers involved on one side or another. The nuns had been as up-to-date in who was about to invade whom, and the intelligence which had been gathered preparatory to that invasion, as any military headquarters.
‘Spies,’ thought Sister Boniface with anger, ‘Fitzempress is spying on this Ireland I’m going to.’ And she herself had been enlisted as an intelligence getter. That was what all the girls-together request for letters by Eleanor of Aquitaine had been about. And the gift of the horse.
‘I’ll give him horse,’ thought Sister Boniface. ‘Trying to embroil a daughter of God in his filthy politics.’
The men had turned and were now strolling down the walkway which passed in front of her. She fell on her rosary, moving her lips like a mad thing, but managing to take stock of the two men from under her wimple. They were in their twenties; one tall, handsome and dark, the other shorter with mousey-coloured hair and both dressed like huntsmen, as so many of Fitzempress’ knights were, in imitation of their king, though their leathers were less scuffed and more self-consciously worn than his.
They bowed as they passed her, to honour her cloth, but didn’t bother to lower their voices. Nuns were everywhere and anonymous, acting as chaperones, attendants, comforters, piously treated but otherwise as disregarded as wayside shrines; ‘Pray for us, sister,’ said the tall, dark one, mechanically, and resumed what he had been saying to his friend: ‘…You can understand him, though. Strategically, it’s. And in the wrong hands…’
She watched them out of sight, and when the cardinal eventually came she told him what she had heard.
The papal legate listened with fascination and, to her surprise, some amusement. ‘I knew Fitzempress wasn’t as uninterested in Ireland as he liked to make out,’ he said.
‘But will he invade Ireland, my lord?’
‘Unfortunately, I don’t think so yet.’ He caught her bewilderment. ‘Dear daughter, these are high matters and are not for you, who should concern yourself only with the good of the souls who will soon be in your charge.’
He told her to sit down while he took the place recently vacated by Eleanor. The warmth of the day and his velvet robe were making him perspire. His bulk, his smell and his obvious intelligence reminded Sister Boniface of the treasuress, but to her he was the most important person she had met that day, carrying the authority of the Pope – the only earthl
y authority she recognised. The aroma that came from him was therefore holy, and to be accepted as such.
‘My child, the situation in Ireland is complex, but for your purposes it is simple. You are being sent to take over the Abbey of Kildare at the invitation of one of Ireland’s many kings, Dermot of Leinster, in whose kingdom it is situated. Why he has asked for a foreign abbess is unclear. I was surprised when I heard of it, for usually these Irish kings give such preferments to their own kin. But I have met Dermot and he is an unusual man; part barbarian, as all Irishmen are, but with many civilised traits. His kingdom is on the eastern side of the country and I think he has a wish to bring it into the twelfth century by allying it to the mainland of Europe and adopting modern customs. Anyway, he has asked the Pope to send him an abbess.’ He picked up Sister Boniface’s hand. ‘We are sending him you, confident that we have found the right little person to fulfil God’s purpose.’
He kneaded her hand all the time that he was telling her what God’s purpose was, which made her uncomfortable and distracted her from concentrating. She gathered that she was to hold the same position at Kildare as the abbess held at Fontevrault, wielding power not only over the nuns of the convent, but over the monks of the attached monastery as well.
‘You are to be our little crucifer, carrying the cross of Rome’s Church and her tradition into this abbey which doubtlessly has strayed so far from it. You will countenance no variation of the discipline which you have been taught, and should Dermot or anyone else prevail upon you to do so, you will oppose him and send word through me to the Pope, and we shall come to your aid. Is that clear?’
Daughter of Lir Page 4