The Passionate Brood (2 page)

Between them, Henry of Anjou and Eleanor of Aquitaine must have owned half the castles in Western Europe. But because they had begun their married life by being so ardently in love they needed to have one in particular which they called home. So after Louis of France had been persuaded to divorce Eleanor, and Henry by inheriting the throne of England had healed the scars of civil war inflicted by his mother and dead Stephen, they decided to live their private lives at Oxford. Their children were born there and filled the grim castle walls with quarrelling and laughter.

They were a passionate brood—four strong sons and three fair daughters—all inheriting their father’s ruddy energy and their mother’s beauty. Henry adored them, but neither they nor Eleanor could hold him after the first ten years or so of marriage. The prodigality of happiness she radiated satiated him. To a man of his restless energy new, hardly-won success must always be sweetest. So he rode abroad in search of fresh romance and met Rosamund de Clifford.

To give the man his due, it was business as often as pleasure that accounted for his frequent absences. He worked indefatigably for England. And when he did ride wearily into Oxford he noted with a jealous eye Eleanor’s influence on his growing sons, and began to resent the careless spells she cast upon all who came beneath her charm. “Statesmen and scullions, she bewitches them all!” he grumbled, trying to curb the frank indiscretion of her witty tongue. But Eleanor of Aquitaine was of too high a metal to be silenced by any man. When her elder sons made trouble for their father on the continent she was caught trying to join them disguised as a man. So the epic of the Angevin love story ended by the King sending her to live in a separate household at Salisbury.

During the dead days after her departure it was Hodierna who noticed the quenched look in her children’s eyes, and who tried by simple coaxings and scoldings to counteract the frequent rages of the conscience-stricken King. High up in the tower, where she had minded them when they were small, her care out-lived their childhood. She herself had been widowed just before Robin’s birth, and Eleanor had had her brought to the Castle, where a son had been born to each of them on the same day. So the Tower room was her mute gift of gratitude to Eleanor. Nothing in it was changed. And when at last the Queen came home from Salisbury, although her eldest son Henry was nearly twenty and Richard and Robin were over six feet tall, their feet still came hurrying up the familiar turret stair. Back from Normandy or Aquitaine, home from hunting or merely bored by the company in the hall, some of the Plantagenets were sure to be in the Tower room.

It was a place where they could discuss their betters and pursue their individual hobbies in private. Not only was privacy rare in a royal castle, but, as young John Plantagenet always pointed out, the higher one went the more light one got. Down in the dungeons there was no light at all, the guardroom on the ground floor had arrow slits, and the bedrooms on the second floor had only narrow, deeply embrasured windows. But the Tower room was high enough to be safe from snipers, and if you were young enough not to mind climbing up past the garde-robe passage and the gallery, you had the best of it.

The walls were not blazoned with banners like the hall, nor warm with glowing tapestries like the Queen’s bower, but the living sunlight streaming through a double-arched, unglazed window could turn the rushes on the floor to ripe corn gold. And never, all their lives long, did the Plantagenets quite lose that lovely, light sense of floating straight out to the blue sky through its blunt-headed Norman stonework as they came breathless to the top turn of the dark stair.

When Hodierna and Johanna came up with their dress length they found Henry, the King’s heir, using this excellent light to study some fortification plans. Instead of studying his Latin young John lay sprawled on the floor, shying chessmen at a wounded dove; and Ann—who was not yet a Plantagenet—was at her everlasting embroidery. “It amazes me how you can waste so much time talking to the servants, Johanna!” she remarked, virtuously finishing off the centre of a yellow fleur-de-lis.

“The poor page was homesick,” said Johanna. “Don’t you remember how you cried when you first came?”

Henry picked up a notched stick and began making some measurements on the parchment he held before him. “And our pages are scarcely servants,” he pointed out. “Their fathers are usually gentlemen who have done us some service.” Ann’s superiority always amazed him because it impinged on his own prerogative.

Johanna draped a long train of white lamé from her boyish hips and began peacocking up and down with her head screwed round backwards to see the effect. Unfortunately for her dignity she tripped over one of John’s neglected books and rounded on him with sudden annoyance. “Can’t you let that miserable dove alone?”

But John—that “after-thought” of their parents’ cooling passion—took a deformed delight in cruelty. “’Tis mine,” he said, shying white bishop and red knight in quick succession. “Richard’s falcon caught it yesterday. He threw it aside to be killed.”

“Richard kills, but he doesn’t torture,” retorted Johanna.

John grabbed the poor creature by a fluttering wing and rolled over on to his stomach so that the back of his head made a splash of warm copper colour against the grey stone flags. “Look how neatly the falcon picked out one of its eyes!” he invited, still spattering his Norman with the blunt stab of occasional Saxon words, as they all did in childhood. “It would be amusing to put out the other and see if he walks round in circles.”

“How would you like to be blinded?” reproved Hodierna absently, her mouth full of pins.

“My tutor says the Huns used to blind all their boy prisoners. I could do it with this,” went on John, coolly drawing his new jewelled dagger from his belt.

“Drop it, you disgusting little beast!” ordered Henry, kicking at him tolerantly with his soft leather boot. He understood how the least important member of a family must want to shock people into paying him some attention from time to time; but Johanna, unable to bear the bird’s squawking terror, swooped down on its tormentor like a fury. Ann watched the undignified scuffle with quiet disdain, her needle suspended until the dagger went ringing across the floor.

“The King had it specially made for my birthday!” raged the boy, groping for his newest treasure among the rushes.

“It’s a pity he never made you obey!” cried Johanna, seizing the strategic moment to release the dove. Leaning from the window, she watched its triumphant flight into the blue. How fine, she thought, to be absolutely free like that! Free to go out into the world and make one’s own life like a man. Freedom, she supposed, was one of the few things worth fighting for. Why, only yesterday Robin had been saying that even the peasants wanted it. Being a woodman’s son, he should know. But, being Richard’s foster brother, he should also realise that princesses hadn’t half as much liberty as peasant girls’. If only they had she would willingly have risen early and ridden to Banbury fair with him as he had wanted…Well, he would soon be back, and perhaps he and Richard would take her hawking. She came stepping down from the window seat stretching her arms with vast contentment. “How peaceful it is when the King is away!” she yawned.

Hodierna glanced forebodingly at her happiness. “Peaceful?” she sniffed, biting off a thread. “Why, when a pack of wolves used to howl round my old cottage it was peaceful compared with a family party of Plantagenets!”

“Don’t pretend you don’t like us!” teased Johanna. “And you know very well that your precious Richard is the most quarrelsome of us all.”

“It’s lucky for him, now his hellish temper has provoked rebellion in Aquitaine, that our amorous father still philanders at Woodstock!” remarked Henry. “Particularly lucky as rumour has it that the King is tiring of the lady.”

“Who cares?” shrugged Johanna, submitting to the fitting of a sleeve.

“The Queen, probably,” suggested Ann.

“Do you suppose she is jealous of this woman they call ‘fair Rosamund’?” asked John, who had recovered both his dagger and his good temper. “Have you ever seen her, Henry?”

“Once—at a tournament. She is certainly fair.”

“So is mother,” said Johanna, defensively.

“But no longer young,” observed Ann, her red mouth mocking primly in her pale, heart-shaped face.

“You might have grown up less objectionable, Ann, if he hadn’t sent her away to Salisbury as soon as he was reasonably sure she wouldn’t bear him any more contentious, red-headed sons,” said Henry.

“Stop talking like that in front of your sister!” Hodierna told him sharply, much as she used to when he was small. But Ann, whose window looked down on to the herb garden, began giggling. “My dear Hodierna,” she said, “it is high time King Henry married your precious innocent to some possessive foreign princeling! She has the warm kind of colouring that enslaves handsome commoners.”

Hodierna muttered something in Saxon, a language which Ann felt it would be vulgar to understand. “After all, I’m not much older than Johanna, and I’ve been engaged to Richard for years,” she pointed out.

“And look like being engaged to him until you’re buried!” retorted his sister. She was ashamed of her rudeness as soon as John sniggered; but Ann goaded her deliberately and always made her feel a hoyden. It was the sickening way she boasted about French culture and ate with a fork and—most of all—her infuriating habit of referring to England as “this island.” Like Henry, she could say disagreeable things pleasantly, which left forthright Johanna at a disadvantage. Fiddling with some scraps of silk to keep her angry hands from slapping Ann’s sallow face, she added, “Anyway, I’d rather marry a handsome commoner than a king’s son who didn’t want me!”

Henry joined in their feminine dispute with lazy amusement. “My dear Johanna, has it never occurred to you that Ann’s wedding may be delayed less because Richard doesn’t want her than because the King does?”

Ann’s needle jabbed at a harmless
fleur-de-lis
with venom. “How clever some of your stupidest remarks sound!” she mocked.

“Perhaps he will build her a secret bower like Rosamund’s?” suggested John hopefully.

“Now, by all the saints!” laughed his eldest brother. “Who talks to a brat like you about secret bowers?”

“I think it’s so clever of him!” went on John, unabashed.

“No wonder you and he dote on each other, but I think ‘cunning’ is the word you mean,” corrected Henry, tilting back his chair and treating his long, elegant limbs to a good stretch.

John sprang to his feet, his handsome face aflame. “And don’t I need cunning?” he demanded. “With not a duchy left by the time I get born so that I have to be brought up by a lot of mouldy priests? All our parents’ possessions divided between you and Richard and Geoffrey? Normandy, England, Aquitaine, Guienne, Anjou, Maine—” In a worthy gust of Angevin rage, he rapped out each name on the table with his over-worked dagger.

His family remained unmoved. “Poor little Lackland!” laughed Johanna, regarding the effect of her fashionably low belt with approval. “Perhaps if you go on being charming to the King he will give Ann to you instead of to Richard, and then you will get a good slice of France.”

“Ssh! The Queen is coming up the stairs,” warned Hodierna. “For Our Lady’s sake, talk about something else.”

Henry was quick to take up her cue. “If you care so much about a bit of land, why not go on a Crusade and make yourself King of Jerusalem?” he suggested, with loud casualness.

“Because fighting isn’t much in John’s line,” jeered Johanna.

John thrust out his tongue at her. “We can’t all be Richards!” he shouted back from his favourite corner of the window seat.

At the top of the turret stair the tall, white-haired Queen stood for a moment to regain her breath, her scarlet underdress still lifted a little with both hands. She surveyed her family with a humorous quirk of finely marked brows. “Still quarrelling? What a brood!” she sighed.

They rose to greet her and Henry, with his easy grace, pushed forward the well-worn chair he had been using. “It must be because you yourself went crusading, Madam, before we were born,” he suggested.

“His father’s ability and my beauty—what a king he will make!” thought Eleanor, with an impersonal sort of satisfaction. Aloud she said, “That was before your father and I got our divorce, dear Ann. When I was young and
ravissante
.” She always tried to be particularly nice to Ann to make up for Richard’s indifference.

Johanna thought that her mother looked like some exquisitely painted picture with the arched window behind her and the slender gold circlet holding her flowing wimple in place. She leaned over the back of the chair and said, with a provocative grimace at Ann, “Richard still thinks you’re the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen!”

“If he does it must be because he looks only at crossbows and catapults,” laughed the Queen.

Crossbows and catapults were an obsession with Henry too. “If he hasn’t much time for women, I must say he has some pretty sound ideas about fortifications,” he said, hunting out one of Richard’s plans. “Just look at this curtain wall with which he proposes to strengthen the Tower of London!”

Eleanor of Aquitaine regarded it with a reminiscent shiver. “I suppose the Londoners think we ought to live there like your grandmother, Queen Matilda. But I always found the bedrooms so gloomy.”

Henry passed the drawing on to Ann. He resented the way in which she emphasised her fiancé’s gaucheries and ignored his touch of genius. “Your brother Philip always says Richard might have made a fortune as an architect if we hadn’t been born into the kind of family that is expected to butcher Saracens for nothing,” he told her.

“Tell us about the Crusade
you
went on, Mother,” urged Johanna, heading him off from technicalities. It was bad enough having to listen to endless discussions about curtain walls when he and Richard were together.

“You were all brought up on it till you know it by heart,” objected Hodierna, who alone guessed that the Queen had found the steep, winding stairs a strain. “Far better help me with this seam.”

But Johanna had no use for needlework. “Don’t you remember—in this very room?” she coaxed. “The brazier would burn low, throwing long shadows like tall horsemen on the walls. Your voice was like a harp, with memory plucking at the strings. You made everything sound exciting—the heroic things and the ludicrous things, the important people and the pathetic ones—so that it all became part of us and somehow made us different from other families. And after you’d gone downstairs we always got out of bed and acted the part about the siege. The table was Jerusalem, and Henry used to make the rest of us take it in turns to be Saracens. Except John, of course—he was always asleep in his cot and had to be the baggage waggons.”

Eleanor had only to close her eyes to repeople the room again with her absent sons and daughters; she was soon back at her spells again. The spell of adventure she had laid upon them all. All except John. He had been quite small when she went to Salisbury. Too small, as Johanna had just said, to be even a Saracen. And so the King had kept him. And he was growing up full of common sense, and quite English.

“Well, St. Bernard came preaching. Isn’t that how it always began, Hodierna?” She settled herself comfortably in her chair and smiled affectionately at the woman who had shared so much of her family life. “He told us how a handful of knights were still holding out in Syria. How the Saracens had driven them out from Jerusalem and taken the Holy Cross. It made all our tournaments and dancing seem so trivial that we all wanted to go.”

“You had only just come to Paris then as a bride, hadn’t you, Madam?” encouraged Hodierna, beginning to baste her seam.

“And my first husband Louis was a monkish sort of man who felt he ought to do something about the infidels being in all the sacred places. So we set sail with all his troops and horses and supplies, and my ladies and the dower chests—”

“And the poor devils of French archers had to swelter through the sand with your baggage when they might have been shooting Saracens!”

“But, Henry, it was my first honeymoon!”

John, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her, gave a hoot of disrespectful laughter. “Catch Henry taking women on a Crusade when he and Richard go!”

“Catch you going on one at all!” retorted Johanna, who had always entertained secret hopes that they might invite
her.

Eleanor regarded her youngest son with puzzled disapproval. To have given birth to someone beyond her comprehension was disconcerting. And then there was Robin, spending half his time studying astrology and wanting to experiment with a lot of new-fangled notions for improving the conditions of the poor. In her young days things had been much simpler. A man either wanted to go to war or was a craven, just as a woman wanted babies or was wanton. “We women used to send our distaffs to the young men who didn’t want to fight,” she recalled.

It was Ann who gathered up the fraying threads of the spell and handed them back to her with French politeness. “And you really saw Jerusalem, Madam?”

“Yes, Ann,” replied the Queen, grateful for her pretty deference. “Perhaps you will, too, when you and Richard are married. And I hope you will not be as disappointed as I was. It isn’t a golden city at all, you know. Only dreadfully hot and dusty, with all the holiest places built over and quarrelled over until the spirit of them seems to have been trampled into the inhospitable sand.” She lifted one of her beautiful hands to the light, turning it about absently, so that prisms of colour flashed from her costly rings. “Like a great love all marred and twisted out of recognition by jealousy,” she added sadly.

“The way so many human loves are spoiled,” said Ann.

The Queen looked up at her sharply. Ann was so much more mature in some ways than her own children that one could not afford to indulge in significant similes. “That was how I came to part from your poor, pious father, my dear,” she went on lightly, although it was of her second husband she had been thinking. “If I smiled at another man, he mistrusted me. He thought that to be gay was to be immoral. Besides, I wanted children.”

“When he married again he managed to have Philip and me,” Ann reminded her, knowing very well that it had been the contrast of Henry of Anjou’s hot ardour that the Queen had really wanted.

Eleanor could not gainsay it. “Your mother must have been a marvel!” she said politely, and looked with pained surprise at Henry when he burst out laughing. “Well, perhaps it had something to do with it that Louis and I were first cousins,” she allowed. “Anyway, that is why the Pope let me marry again.” And she had married the fierce, ugly, red-headed man half the women in Europe wanted. The man with a name like a poem—Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. She sat there, with her lovely jewelled hands in her lap, smiling back at the scandalous conflagration there had been. Then added briskly, as if to shield their young eyes from the blaze, “When the usurper Stephen died I came over here, of course, and helped your father make a united nation out of all the Saxons and Normans who were turning England into a slaughter house.”

“And in return he sent you away from us,” added his heir cynically. It was true that he and Richard had been abroad in their duchies most of the time, but whenever they came back they had missed her badly. If the hard-working King had hoped to bring them to heel with the spell-maker safely shut up, he had succeeded only in widening the rift he was so pathetically anxious to bridge. Save in warmth of colouring and temper, they were never his.

“It was partly my own fault,” admitted Eleanor. “I probably meddled too much in his affairs, and he was furious because I refused to take Aquitaine from Richard and give it to John.”

“In which you were legally right,” contested Henry.

But Eleanor shrugged those lonely years of stagnation into the past without rancour. She had her children, strong and splendid as the passion from which they had sprung, and she was too proud to let the world guess that her love for her husband had out-lived neglect, or that she cared so much about his lovely mistress Rosamund. “At least your father knows that men are muddlers when it comes to arranging marriages,” she said lightly. “So now I am here to talk to Johanna.”

Henry could be depended upon to handle a delicate situation with tact. He put away Richard’s plans and picked up some samples of a new type of arrow his fletcher had just sent. “Come on, John. Let’s try these out before Richard and Robin get their hands on them,” he invited, leading the way up another turn or two of the stairs to where a little iron door gave access to the gatehouse roof. Ann pushed aside her embroidery frame and followed them, whispering to Johanna as she passed, “I told you so!” Hodierna, too, laid down her scissors but the Queen motioned to her to stay.

Johanna stood alone by the window trying to assimilate the full significance of her mother’s words. “It is
I
this time!” she thought, remembering how one after the other her elder sisters and Geoffrey had gone. She heard the iron door clang behind her brothers and Ann, and by leaning out she could see the three of them spacing themselves out like a happy frieze of Youth along the battlements. The flight of their arrows and the strong wind in their hair gave them an ethereal, transient quality. Already their voices as they shouted to each other were light, unreal, far off. A sudden desolation gripped her. She felt that she must follow them—mingle carelessly with them again—or some part of her would die.

Even when Hodierna reminded her that the Queen was waiting, Johanna withdrew her shoulders from the window embrasure with a reluctance that caught at her mother’s heart. More than all her daughters this youngest—vivid, headstrong, generous—was the replica of her own girlhood. “You have such a wild, carefree life with your brothers,” she sighed. “Nothing important seems ever to have happened to you before!”

“Important?” Johanna swung round on the two women, her hazel-green eyes wide with fear. Suddenly she was down on her knees, her hands urgent upon the Queen’s. “Madam, what are you trying to tell me?”

“That the King has arranged your marriage.” Eleanor had had to say those words to her two elder daughters, Matilda and Margaret, who were always languishing to the minstrels’ love songs and speculating about every young gallant who came to court. It had not been so difficult then because she had known that both of them would be helped over the moment of parting by thoughts of their new importance and the dresses in their dower chests. Whereas Johanna sprang from her fondling hand as unprepared as any boy, and quite disinterested in the wedding finery her old nurse was preparing.

“No—no! I can’t! Not yet,” she stammered. “I haven’t finished—playing.” She knew it was a silly, immature sort of thing to say, and her hands made a pathetic groping gesture that included all the everyday things of her life, as if she tried to draw the familiar walls about her like a cloak.

“I know, my little love,” said the Queen gently. “I remember the morning when they told me the same thing. The scent of the almond trees—the white doves fluttering against a blue sky in sunny Provence—and I had to leave it all for the cold, grey North and a man I had never seen.”

“But I am so young!” breathed Johanna.

Eleanor smiled a little, comparing her with Ann. “’Tilda and Margaret were both mothers at your age!” she scoffed kindly. “Remember, my dear, the King has been very patient because we all hate parting with you.”

The girl stood almost listlessly for a moment or two. “Who—who is it?” she asked presently. Although she asked it as if the matter were of quite secondary importance, the words fell poignantly into the pleasant stillness of the room.

“The King of Sicily.”

“
That
sickly old horror!” Johanna’s voice croaked into sudden harshness like John’s, which was beginning to break. But no gentle woman, according to Eleanor’s code, could indulge in a scene. “Quiet, Johanna!” she remonstrated firmly. “You must always have known that we royal women are just political pawns. You don’t suppose I wasn’t terrified when I heard I was to be Queen of France, do you? And after all, Sicily is a pleasant place to live in, your new relations are half Norman, and probably William is too weakly to be unkind.”

But far from being soothed, the girl was swept by sudden outraged anger. Frustration beyond her understanding shook her body. At seventeen all her blood was beating passionately to the beckoning rhythm of life. “Kind! Unkind! What does that matter?” she cried incoherently. “I wouldn’t care if he struck me—if he took me by force—but I wanted a man—”

“We all do,” murmured the astonished Queen, thinking perhaps of the monkish Louis.

But Johanna’s young, self-betraying protest swept on. “A tall fierce-hearted, adventurous man like Richard. Someone strong enough to compel my desire, to—to lift me down from the saddle the way Robin does…” Frightened by the emotional momentum of what had hitherto been romantic fancies, shocked into realisation that they had all centred in Robin, she ran to his mother and flung herself sobbing into Hodierna’s arms.

Her old nurse held her close, comforting her as no one else could, petting her with foolish, homely endearments. “It is like the way you used to cry out for something in the night, my pretty. Just another impossible dream. But you always forgot about them in the morning, didn’t you, my poppet?” And across the bright, stricken head she held so tenderly to her bosom Hodierna met the Queen’s surprised, questioning look, and nodded.

“It certainly was time Henry found her a husband!” thought Eleanor. “But I wish he had forgotten his foreign diplomacy for once and found her a young one!”