I wept then and clutched him, and he held me close until my sobs were spent. He kissed me gently and dried my eyes with his own tunic before he drew it off and cast it aside.
“I am yours,” he said, “If you will have me.”
I knew he was a young man, and I knew that men were not faithful. Henry and Richard had taught me that. But whatever this man would give me, I would take. I still could not answer him, for I could not find my voice. Instead I drew his shirt up over his head and cast it onto the rushes on the floor.
He reached down and unfastened the laces of my gown. He was clumsy and almost made a knot of them.
I caught his hand in mine. He looked at me, and I cleared my face of hope, so that he would know that he could believe me when I spoke. “William, you do not have to do this. I love you, and I will always love you, just as you love me. We can go on as we have been and be content.”
“I do not want to go on as we have been. I am in love with you. You are the first woman I have taken, but you will be my last. This I swear before your God. May he bind me to it.”
I thought this another dramatic oath born of grief and loss, but when he looked on me, I saw that he meant it. What surprised me more was the light of desire in his eyes. That light did not go out, even as he drew my gown off me, even as he touched me lightly, his hand riding smoothly over the linen of my shift.
We did not speak again, and I taught him the act of love as women do it, as Henry had once taught it to me. When he came to the finish of it, he looked at me with such wonder that I laughed in spite of myself.
“So, it is different,” I said, trying to contain my laughter and failing.
His eyes lit with laughter, and with joy as he bent down to kiss me. “You are different.” His lips silenced my laughter, their contours lingering over mine so sweetly that it might have been a dream that dawn would wake me from.
But when dawn came, we still had not slept, but lay together, a look of joy on his face that mirrored my own as if – in spite of our grief and our loss – we had been given a great gift. Our grief still waited for us. The enchantment we lay under would not last in the face of it, or so we thought that day. Still, we clutched each other as dawn lit the open windows with its first gray, pearly light, reveling in the love we felt and the aftermath of its expression.
As I looked at him, in the light of that dawn, I thought of all the loves of my life, those dead and those lost to me. I thought of Henry and of Richard, and I thought of Jean Pierre. I thought of those loves of my past, and then my eyes rested once more on William’s face. In his eyes, I saw my future, the path of all my days to come.
Our love is with us still, in spite of our grief for Jean, in spite of all the years that have passed since that day.
He has taken other men to his bed, and now that I am older, we rarely share mine. But in all the years we have been together, our love has not faded. No other, man or woman, has dimmed my love for my husband, nor his for me. I have come to see it as a stream that will never run dry That is the enchantment in the end, one I hope I never to wake from: the love of my husband, running over my heart like a vast river in flood, buoying me even as it carries me to the great sea that lies beyond the shadows of this world.
24
The Roses of Summer
I leaned back into the fitted chair that William had ordered made for me, watching Marie run down by the river, roses in her hair. It was summer again, the first blush of summer that came in from the sea, and my roses were in bloom as they always were this time of year, both in my garden and across the river, where the seeds had long since blown and taken root on their own.
Marie was older now, almost ten years old, and I knew that we would have to think of a marriage for her before much longer. I prayed to the Holy Mother every day that we might make her a good match to a man who would love her. William promised me that he would look carefully, and that I would have final approval over the man he chose, no matter the candidate’s wealth or title.
It seemed that, despite my scandalous past, there were many who wanted to be aligned with our family. No doubt they wanted control someday of Ponthieu for their son. Though a small county, it was close to Normandy, and important to the king. Perhaps they thought that such a marriage would bring them in closer contact with my brother, and to his son after him. We no longer maintained our ties with the court and had not been to Paris since our youngest daughter had been born.
Isabelle came to me then, led by Marie Helene who held her gently by the hand. She smiled at me, her three teeth gleaming in the front of her mouth, and I stood and scooped her up. I planted kisses along her cheeks until she squealed, and I set her down again. Marie Helene hugged me close, without formality, for it was three years now since she had remarried, and gone to live on her husband’s land, on a demesne not five miles distant from us.
Marie saw her namesake in that moment and shrieked, all pretensions of being a lady forgotten. She ran to Marie Helene and cast her arms around her as if she was saving her from drowning. I felt a pang then, in spite of all our newfound closeness. For it was I, when she was small, who had turned from her.
Marie Helene whispered to her and kissed her, keeping her arms around her even as they sat on a blanket on the grass. Isabelle toddled to me then on her own and I lifted her up, grateful that God had given me a second chance with this, my youngest child. Isabelle knew who her mother was. I had made certain of it.
Her soft curly hair caressed my cheek as the wind blew it. I watched as Marie and Marie Helene began a chain of daisies and of roses. We sat there in the sunshine until William came up with Marie Helene’s husband Jean Michel, who bowed to me and kissed my hand, as if I were a princess in Paris and still beautiful. I laughed and shooed him away, and he went to sit by his wife.
Marie came to me then with her garland in her hands. I complimented her on her fine work and asked if it was for Marie Helene to wear against the soft golden strands of her hair.
“No, Maman,” she said to me, for she had begun to adopt that name for me when Marie Helene went away. “I made this wreath for you.”
I bent down so that she would not see the tears in my eyes, and she placed the crown on roses on my hair. I could have felt no more joy if I had been the Holy Mother Herself, crowned by Our Lord in Heaven on Her Celestial throne. I kissed Marie, and she went to sit beside Marie Helene again, taking Isabelle with her when she went.
I leaned against my husband where he stood beside me, though my chair easily would have supported my weight. The love in his eyes warmed me. I sighed, looking out over the river, for once blessedly content with where I was and what my life had brought me.
When it was time to return to the great hall for the evening meal, the sun began to slant over my husband’s land from the west. We stood to walk the mile back to the house, and the servants cleared our chairs and blankets and picnic things, bringing them behind us as we walked.
Jean Michel carried Isabelle on his shoulders, a daisy chain threaded through her curls, and Marie walked close beside Marie Helene, whispering secrets. I walked with my husband, his hand in mine. We were silent, for no words could touch the contentment I felt. Or so I thought.
“There is word from the court, Alais.”
I tried to read the look on William’s face. As close as we had become, he could still hide his thoughts from me when he chose. “That does not bode well, husband. There is never good news from court.”
“No,” he agreed. “There is not.” He handed me a letter then, and the servants passed us on their way back to the keep.
I opened the vellum, which was yellowed and old, much used and often scraped, so that the words it bore were hard to read.
It was Eleanor’s script, drawn lightly and beautifully as always despite her age. Her letter sent word of Richard. He had taken an arrow at Chalus, fighting my brother’s people. The wound had festered. He was dead.
I took this news in slowly, as if it were being told to
another, and then I read the last lines of her letter above her elegant name.
“I have buried Richard in Fontevrault with his father, where I, too, will be laid to rest in my own time. His spleen I buried at Chalus, for it was his anger in the end that killed him. As for his heart, it lies buried beneath the stones of the new cathedral in Rouen, for reasons best left unsaid.”
I felt tears rise in my eyes when I read this. For a moment, I stood again in that church by the riverside, in that old city that lay between Paris and my husband’s lands. In that moment, I saw Richard’s face as he had been that day, the last time I had ever seen him, tired and full of sorrow, loving me even then, but ready to go to the Levant, full of plans to free Jerusalem from the infidel. I thought of his face when I first met him, and of the way the sunlight from the leaded window outside his mother’s solar had caught the deep red of his hair, setting it on fire.
I stood in silence a long time, until I heard the sound of Isabelle’s high laughter, and the sweet tones of Marie’s voice, asking me to come to her, calling me back to the living and to leave the dead behind.
I folded Eleanor’s letter carefully and placed it beneath my shift, next to my heart. I took my husband’s hand and led him toward our home, and our children, the light of the setting sun in my eyes.
William said nothing but stood by me as he always had. He said nothing even when he handed me a kerchief so that I might wipe away my tears before we went inside.
Afterword
In honor of the tenth anniversary of the release of my first novel, The Queen’s Pawn, I have chosen to publish this sequel as an alternate history. Though Princess Alais of France, first Countess of Berry and later Countess of the Vexin and Ponthieu, is an historical figure, like most women of the twelfth century, vast stretches of the details of her life are unknown. In history, as in this novel, Princess Alais was eventually sent from the protection of King Richard to her brother, Philippe-Auguste of France.
For the purposes of this novel, Alais was released to her brother’s care after being held in England until the death of Henry II. In history, she was not released until Richard and Philippe Auguste both returned from the Levant and the war they waged as “brother kings” during the Third Crusade. History tells us that she was held not in England, but in Rouen.
The only other two facts that we know for certain about Alais, Princess of France, is that she married William, Count of Ponthieu, at her brother’s bidding and that she bore at least one surviving child, Marie, who later inherited the County of Ponthieu, which went by the old ways and was not confined to the male line by Salic law. She may or may not have given birth to a son named Jean, but if she did, he died as many children did at that time, before he came of age.
By necessity, everything else in this book is a fantasy of mine. I have tried to give Alais, a woman I adore, a full and interesting life. Please forgive any inaccuracies and any oversights on my part. Alais has always held a place in my heart, and I hope you come to love her half as much as I do.
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Princess Of France (The Queen's Pawn Book 2) Page 23