Marie Helene met his eyes, and I saw a gleam of recognition there. At first, I thought she only saw what he meant to me, but in a moment, it was clear that they knew each other.
She curtsied and he bowed, almost in the same breath.
“My lord count,” she said. “I greet you. You are welcome to this place.”
“It is my honor to see you again,” was all Jean Pierre said, before he took my arm once more. So, we walked then in silence to my litter, with Jean Pierre on one side of me and Marie Helene on the other.
Marie Helene climbed in first, with a footman to help her, but Jean Pierre handed me into it himself. He was reluctant to take his hand from my arm. We had grown used to being together on the ship and now neither of us could bear to part.
“I will escort you to your brother’s side,” he said, his voice low, so that no one else might hear him.
Marie Helene heard and turned her face away, as if to offer us privacy.
“We sleep tonight in the Abbey of Saint John,” he said. “Tomorrow, we will take a barge on the river Seine towards Paris.”
We stood together a long moment, until even his men began to look to him, to see when we might leave. That was when I knew that our borrowed time was up.
“I thank you,” I said.
Jean Pierre heard the true meaning of my words, for when he met my eyes, his heart was in them. He did not kiss me, as we both would have wished, but leaned down as if to bow to me. Instead, he kissed my hand where it lay on his arm. Then he drew back and let me go.
I closed the curtains of my litter, so that the prying eyes of his men and my brother’s might not see me. I leaned back against the cushions, feeling suddenly tired and sad.
Marie Helene took my hand and warmed it between her own. She did not speak, for we had only the heavy curtains of the litter to shield us. But I knew that she had seen how things were between Jean Pierre and myself, how I loved him, and how like all the loves of my life, it was doomed to fail.
So, we rode to the abbey in silence, her hand in mine.
Sorrow of her own rode Marie Helene, darkening her blue eyes to indigo. This sorrow weighed her down, despite her strength and the joy of our meeting.
I kept her hand in mine until we were alone in the abbot’s rooms, warm water in the hip bath, and the door shut firmly behind us.
She helped me undress, and I bathed. She washed my long hair. It had never grown as long as it had once been in my youth before I cut it in mourning for the death of my daughter.
I sat by the fire, and Marie Helene dried it slowly, spreading it out on a swatch of linen. Bread and fruit sat on a table beside us. If the tapestries had been new, and if the room had wooden floors, I would have thought myself back at Windsor, before Henry had ever seen me.
I sat in my shift in the firelight, the door to the abbot’s rooms locking out the rest of the world. I almost expected my little white dog Bijou to come running out from beneath the bed, to circle our ankles, begging to be picked up.
Marie Helene smiled as if she could read my thoughts. I had forgotten that there had once been a time when she could.
“Bijou always missed you.”
I buttered a slab of bread, placing a bit of cheese on it before I handed it to her. She blinked to see me serve her, but then she remembered how I had done so from time to time when we were together years before. My years in the abbey had reminded me that we are all servants in the eyes of God.
Marie Helene took the bread I offered her, and I poured us each a cup of wine. The goblets were of blown glass from Germany, finer workmanship than I had seen since I left my father’s court. I raised my wine to my lips and felt the smooth warmth of the watered Burgundy flow down my throat. I knew myself back in France truly in that moment, with the taste of that fine wine on my tongue.
I sighed and settled back in my chair, tension leaving me that I had not even known was there. I had been guarded so long, even in the Abbey of St. Agnes. Always I had known that I was on foreign soil. Now I felt myself truly safe for the first time in years. I knew this safety to be an illusion, but it was an illusion I cherished. I was only a day’s ride away from my brother, and Paris. One day’s ride from home.
“Perhaps I will get another dog, once I have settled with the man my brother has chosen for me.”
“So, you come home to marry?” Her eyes were grave. Her bread lay on the table before her, uneaten.
“Phillipe has not told me so. But I can think of no other reason to ask Richard to let me go.”
“And the Count of Valois? He has come only to fetch you?”
“Yes.”
“And you love him?”
I did not look away from her. Though it had been many years since we were parted, she knew me still. “I do. But I will let him go.”
“For the good of France,” she said.
“For the good of my brother, and his throne. My life is not my own. It has never been.”
Tears rose in her eyes, and I saw that it was not for me that she wept. I took her in my arms, and she stiffened. I could feel her pride and her need to harbor her strength. But some wall gave way within her, and she wept while I held her.
“The Count of Valois was there when my husband died. Gregory was killed in a tournament. No one else moved as quickly to his side. Jean Pierre tried to save him but could not.”
Her voice was soft, but I could hear the bitterness beneath it. Gregory had died, not in war and honorable bloodshed, but in the pointless games that men played to amuse themselves.
“He was struck through the breastplate. I did not know that there was so much blood in a man’s heart. Gregory was dead before I could get to him. His blood covered the tiltyard. They tried to keep me back, so that I wouldn’t see, but I made it past them. As quick as I was, I was still too late.”
She stared past my shoulder into the fire. “I did not think to love him, when Queen Eleanor sent me away.”
There was no help for her but time and its passing. And in the dark watches of the night, even time’s softening distance would bring little comfort.
“I am sorry,” I said. “I am sorry for your loss.”
Marie Helene offered a slight smile to comfort me. The sorrow in her eyes did not fade or change. Her hand was cold in mine. “My son is only nineteen, but he is strong. The king has given him the land, in Gregory’s place.”
Her voice broke again when she said her husband’s name. I pressed her hand, and she did not say anything more. I said a prayer to the Virgin for the soul of her husband. I would have knelt, but I did not want to take my hand from hers.
When I opened my eyes once more, her smile held a touch of its usual light. Marie Helene knew my long silences well; I spent such moments in prayer, both for the dead and for the living. I had many souls within my keeping.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“You will see him again,” I said.
I remembered the touch of my daughter’s hand as it had once come to me when I was working alone in the cloister garden, the warmth of her presence somewhere just behind me, where I could not see. I looked at Marie Helene with the certainty my daughter had given me. She saw in my eyes that I did not tell empty lies to placate her.
“I pray every day that you are right.”
I sat with her in the firelight and watched the candle burn down. We stayed that way all night, with her hand in mine.
5
Phillippe Auguste
The morning found us on the river, setting out to meet my brother. The sky was blue overhead, blue as it is only in France.
Marie Helene was pale but looked better than she had the night before. Though we never spoke of her husband again, it gave her comfort to speak of him that one time. I understood her. I had not said Rose’s name except in prayer in almost twenty years. Some sorrows are treasures, never to be handled by another.
The Count of Valois looked in on us under our velvet awning, but he did not sit beside me, as I wished
he might. The weight of other eyes rode him, for not only his men traveled with us now, but courtiers sent by my brother. For a moment, like the foolish girl I once had been, I feared that he no longer wanted my love, now that he knew he could not keep it. But he brought me wine once, and watered it himself, with his own hand.
When I took the wine he offered, he met my eyes. I saw then that I was not alone in what I felt, though he would never speak of it again. I felt that loss even as I looked at him, but it gave me comfort that he shared it.
River travel was swift, though we went against the current. The rowers knew their business, and as their great paddles lifted into the air and down again, I felt the wind on my face.
The warmth of the day seemed to cheer even Marie Helene. I caught her smiling with almost the same light in her eyes that had shone from her when first we met at Eleanor’s court, before we had gone to Windsor, before Henry had ever seen me.
The standard of my brother flew over the palace on the Ile de la Cité. I breathed in the air of my native city and watched as fishmongers scrambled by the quayside to see the royal barge as it passed.
I raised my hand to them and a cheer went up, a cheer that spread along the riverside up into the city proper. More people gathered to see my ship come in; I smiled at them and stood so that they might see me better.
I moved to the front of the barge, and the Count of Valois rose to join me, offering his hand to steady me against the motion of the ship. I savored his touch, though I made sure that it was hidden by the wool of my cloak.
My brother had not come to greet me at the quayside, having other things more important to attend to, such as the welfare of the kingdom and the movement of the armies of his enemies.
But my brother’s people stood to welcome me, though the men-at-arms let none of them gather too close. They called to me, and one woman tossed flowers from a high window near the river’s edge. The flowers fell into the water below and slid past the barge I stood on. I raised my face and smiled, waving to her with my gloved hand.
She did not seem to see my woolen cloak or my linen gown, nor care that I wore the same gown I had worn for two years in the nunnery. She seemed not to mind that I wore no silk or brocade as a princess of France should. That woman and the rest of the crowd saw only my father in me, and the sacrifices we both had made all our lives for their good, to keep the fragile peace.
For though men of wealth loved war better than wine, the people of the cities and the farms needed peace to keep their families safe and fed during the harsh winter months. They needed the peace my father had done his best to keep in order to be free of fear and death, at least as free as anyone on this earth can ever be.
I saw that knowledge in that woman’s face and in the faces of the people that lined the causeway. I stepped from the barge, heedless of the guards that surrounded me and raised my hand once more to my father’s people.
They seemed to know something of my sacrifice. As I stood on the steps leading to my brother’s palace, my father’s people honored me for it, as those among my own class did not. The people cheered me, calling my name, and I waved to them. We might have gone on standing there, basking in the pleasure of one another’s company, but the Count of Valois took my arm in his and led me away.
I watched as my brother’s courtiers and men-at-arms frowned and muttered when he touched me without my leave. Jean Pierre’s love blinded him to the fact that my position had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the power of my brother.
I was soon glad of his protection, for my brother’s men surrounded us on all sides, cutting me off from the people of the city. I could smell the heavy scent of unwashed bodies, and I turned my face to Jean Pierre’s cloak. He drew me ever closer and kept me under his arm as we were pushed through the press and into the palace gates.
I lost Marie Helene in the shuffle as I was led into the darkness of my brother’s keep. I could still hear the cheering of the people as I went indoors.
I knew that they cheered not just to see me, looking younger than my years, despite my dowdy clothes. They cheered also for the peace my brother kept, for the holy war he would soon wage in the Levant, and for the warmth of spring that had come finally on the heels of a long winter. I was glad that I could be an excuse for them to bask in the sunshine before they went back to their daily work.
Jean Pierre stepped away from me once we had room to breathe. My brother’s men fell back and stayed silent as the count looked at me. I saw that he wished to speak, but we both knew that anything we said would be carried at once as tales to the king.
So, Jean Pierre said nothing, but led me into a chamber at the center of the palace, up a winding staircase, and into a long hall. I did not remember the room at first, until I saw the windows high above my head, and the sunlight that filtered through them like the grace of God.
I stood in that sunlight, and watched the dust dance over my head, as it had done once, long ago. In that same room, I had been named Countess at the age of eight. In that room, I had first learned that I was to be sent away.
My brother stood at the end of the hall by his throne. There was little to distinguish him from the men around him, only the power of his stance and the gold fillet he wore on his brow.
I moved away from Jean Pierre, leaving him and my brother’s men-at-arms behind me. I walked alone up the long hall to the dais, where the king waited for me, with three young men ranged about him.
I did not look at those men, but only at him. All my childhood training came back to me as if I had never been away, as if I had not been in exile almost all my life. I remembered my father standing in that very spot, wearing a brocade gown, ermine dripping from his sleeves, his face shadowed by the crown he wore.
I curtsied, then knelt, making the same obeisance I had been trained to as a child.
Phillipe surprised me. Instead of waving me to my feet, he stepped away from his companions and helped me stand.
“Sister.” He embraced me, kissing me once very formally on each cheek.
I had not expected such warmth. We had not seen each other since he was a very small child. I thought it likely that he had no memory of me at all, except as a pawn he had fought over with Richard and Henry once, long ago.
“You have not aged,” he said. “I have heard of your beauty all my life, but I thought it only a fairy story.”
I felt blood rise in my cheeks and tears come into my eyes. He was tall, as our father had been. As I looked at him, I saw that he had our father’s eyes.
“You are kind,” I managed to say without weeping.
He saw that I was close to losing my composure. He placed himself directly before the men behind him so that they could not see my face.
“I possess many qualities, sister,” he said. “But kindness is not one of them.”
There was great strength in him. As I looked into his eyes, I saw that he was older than he looked, as I was. His face was smooth and unlined in spite of the time he spent in the sun, riding to battle, and on the hunt. His eyes were the same piercing blue our father’s had been, but there the resemblance ended. As I blinked my tears of sentiment away, I saw that his blue eyes held the look of a hawk. I, among others, was his prey.
Phillipe’s voice took on a lacquered formality. “Alais, Princess of France and Countess of Berry and of the Vexin, may I present William of the House of Bellême, Count of Ponthieu.”
I expected to see a middle-aged man step forward, balancing his paunch or a doddering toothless grandad, wiping drool from his chin. My brother had chosen neither kind of man for me. My betrothed was a bright-faced boy with blond hair and smooth skin. He was little older than my daughter would have been, if she had lived.
If he had seen twenty summers, I would have been surprised. William of Ponthieu carried himself with the confidence of a man who has acquitted himself well in battle. But the beard on his chin was so light, it almost had not grown in yet.
Surely Phillipe did not
mean to betroth me to a boy almost half my age, while I was wearing nothing but dark linen from the nunnery?
My horror must have shown on my face, for the boy smiled wryly, bowing over my hand. William kissed my fingertips where they were covered by my linen gloves.
My brother talked on, using a great many words to say nothing, speaking of the realm and the war to come in the Levant. He gave a gracious speech of how he needed strong vassals like the Count of Ponthieu at his back, to keep the peace while he was away. I hoped desperately that I was mistaken. Phillipe had not brought me home to marry this boy. But the count had been briefed as I had not. He did not let go of my fingertips.
My brother raised his hand over us, as if in benediction, as if he were himself a priest. “Once you are married, you will stand beside my sister and hold the realm of France in peace.”
Even I knew this for so much nonsense. Phillipe would never leave me as regent at the side of this untrained boy. I stood in silence, looking at my brother as at a stranger. As indeed he was.
In that moment, the only man in the room that had sympathy for me was the boy himself. Even as my brother spoke, the boy glanced at me sidelong, as if to say, “Well, whatever comes, we are in this together.”
I tried to step away from him, but William held me firm. His strength flowed into me where his hand grasped mine. I wondered, for the first of many times, where this boy found his self-possession.
I was not to know the answer to the riddle of his soul for years, if we ever truly know another. But that day I had a glimpse into his strength of will that gave me pause. I had known kings, and strong men had been in my life since birth. As I looked into the eyes of that boy, I saw that he was one of the strongest.
My brother left us then, and the other men went with him. I turned to look behind me, to see if Jean Pierre was there. But he had been sent away, along with my brother’s men. I stood alone in the king’s hall, forgotten.
Princess Of France (The Queen's Pawn Book 2) Page 5