A King's Ransom (26 page)

“You remind me of Richard, my lady, planning one of his campaigns. You are sure that Heinrich will demand a ransom?”

“Had it been Philippe . . .” She shook her head grimly. “But Heinrich . . . Yes, he will seek to ransom Richard. He is in dire need of money, for he is facing a rebellion from his own vassals. The fool actually dared to kill a bishop, or at least made it appear as if he did, which makes me seriously reconsider my estimation of the man’s intelligence. In a just and fair world, he’d be kept so busy fending off excommunication for that bloody act of lunacy that he’d never have dared to lay hands on Richard. But in a just and fair world, we’d not have a Pope so spineless it is a wonder he can walk upright,” she said, so acidly that André saw she expected little help from Celestine in gaining Richard’s freedom.

Eleanor crossed to André then and reached out, taking his hand in hers. “You look exhausted, Cousin. Did you sail from Barfleur to Southampton? So you’ve been on the road for days. My steward will find you lodgings here in the Tower. Try to get some sleep if you can. We will prevail, I promise you that.”

“I believe you, Madame,” he said, and he meant it, greatly heartened by the reemergence of the Eleanor of legend, the woman who’d dared to go on crusade, to choose her own destiny, to do what no other queen had ever done—rebel against the man who was her liege lord and husband. Richard’s courage and boldness had not come entirely from his sire, he thought, but then his hand tightened on hers. “Madame . . . it cannot be allowed to drag out. Richard must be freed soon.” He paused and then said, so softly that his words reached her ears alone, “A caged eagle does not thrive in captivity.”

Eleanor was chilled to hear her own fears given voice so eloquently. But as her eyes and André’s caught and held, she nodded, for this man knew her son as well as anyone on God’s earth, possibly even better than she herself did. “I know,” she said quietly. “But we must never forget this, André. Whilst Richard could not come back to us from the grave, he can come back from Germany. And he will.”

A
T FIRST,
R
ICHARD’S QUEEN
and his sister had been enjoying their stay in the Eternal City. The Pope had made them welcome and they’d soon been installed in the palace of the Frangipani family on the Palatine, the most famous of Rome’s seven hills. Joanna had visited Rome on several occasions during her marriage to the Sicilian king, William II, and Berengaria had been there when she and Eleanor had traveled from Navarre to join Richard in Sicily. But Anna was keen to see all of the ancient sites and so the queens hired guides to take them to the Temple of Apollo, the Palace of Nero, and the underground crypts in the Baths of Diocletian, for indulging the girl called the Damsel of Cyprus had become a habit with them by then.

Anna was an object of considerable curiosity and gossip, for Roman society did not know what to make of her. It was known that she was the daughter of Isaac Comnenus, the self-proclaimed Emperor of Cyprus, who’d been deposed by Richard, and people were puzzled that she was neither a prisoner nor a hostage. It seemed obvious that she was now part of the royal household and Romans did not understand how this had come to pass. They did not know that Isaac Comnenus had been a father no girl could love, a man who’d been so hated by the Cypriots that they’d cooperated in his overthrow. Thirteen-year-old Anna and her stepmother, Sophia, had been happy to leave Cyprus and its bad memories behind, and she’d soon embraced her new life as the English king’s ward.

On this January afternoon, Anna was playing tables with Alicia, the young girl Joanna had taken in after her Templar brother had been drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Sicily. But she was finding it difficult to concentrate upon the game. Each time she glanced around the hall, she could see that the other women were just as distracted, too.

After nigh on two years in their company, Anna knew them all well by now. Her private name for Dame Beatrix was “the dragon,” for the tart-tongued Norman had been with Joanna since childhood and she was not to be crossed. Berengaria’s ladies were of little interest, for they spoke no French, just the Romance tongue of Navarre and the
lenga romana
spoken in Aquitaine, and they seemed boring and dull to the fifteen-year-old Anna. But there was nothing boring or dull about the Lady Mariam, whose family history was as exotic as her appearance. Her sun-kissed skin and slanting golden eyes proclaimed her Saracen blood, and although Anna knew she was a Christian, chosen as a companion for Joanna, King William’s homesick child-bride, her mother had been one of the slave girls in the
harim
of King William’s father. Her scandalous background made her a source of fascination for Anna, as did the fact that she’d been conducting a clandestine love affair with Joanna’s Welsh cousin Morgan.

Anna wondered sometimes if Joanna and Berengaria knew of Mariam’s trysts with Morgan. She was sure Berengaria would not approve, for Richard’s queen adhered to a strict Spanish code of morality that made her seem older to Anna than her twenty-three years. Anna had been a bit bedazzled by Berengaria’s husband, and she’d adopted the Saracen name for him—Malik Ric—because she knew it amused him. She did not think Berengaria was the best mate for such a man. She still liked Berengaria, though, for she had a good heart. Isaac Comnenus’s daughter knew better than most how rare true kindness was in their world.

But it was Joanna whom Anna had come to love: Joanna, who was beautiful and worldly and had a mind and will of her own. She knew how to savor life’s daily pleasures, too, and that was a lesson Anna had been eager to learn, for there had been little laughter at the Cypriot court, where her father had suspected mirth and stifled joy, fearful of losing his tenuous and illegal hold on power. So when her stepmother had chosen to stay in her native Sicily upon their arrival in Messina that past November, Anna had elected to remain with Joanna and Berengaria as they continued their journey on to the domains of the English king.

The game with Alicia forgotten, Anna found herself watching the other women in the hall. Berengaria was working on a delicate embroidery, as were most of the ladies-in-waiting, while Joanna read aloud to them from a book called
The History of the Kings of Britain
; Anna had heard Joanna say it had been written by an Augustinian canon named Geoffrey of Monmouth, but his name meant nothing to her. The book did not seem to be holding Joanna’s attention, for she would occasionally pause, staring off into space before rousing herself to resume reading. Anna could not remember the last time she’d heard anyone laugh. It was almost as if this had become a house of mourning.

Alicia waited patiently for her friend to turn back to the game board. When it did not happen, she said softly, “I pray every day for King Richard’s safe return.” She’d meant to comfort, knowing how worried Anna was, how worried they all were, but Anna took it amiss and scowled.

“Of course Malik Ric is safe! How can you even doubt it?”

Anna’s voice had carried and the adults in the hall glanced her way. None commented upon her passionate outcry, though, for the subject of the king’s safety was a very sensitive one and certainly not to be discussed in the hearing of Richard’s queen and sister. An uncomfortable silence fell, but they were accustomed to such fraught moments by now. The normal rhythms of a royal household had been utterly disrupted by the gradual, reluctant realization that the king was missing and could well be dead.

Berengaria smiled sadly as she watched Anna scold Alicia for her “lack of faith.” Beside her, Joanna had given up any pretense of reading, the book lying open on her lap. She knew the bleak path that her sister-in-law’s thoughts were following, for hers were keeping pace, both of them desperate for word of Richard’s whereabouts. They never spoke of their apprehension, though, for they’d entered into a conspiracy of silence, acting as if there were no cause for concern, as if they could vanquish their dread by refusing to acknowledge it. They had done this once before, when they’d been stranded off the coast of Cyprus after the royal fleet had been scattered in a storm and Isaac Comnenus was threatening to take them ashore by force. Not once during that ordeal had either woman voiced her fear that Richard’s galley might have gone down in that Good Friday storm, and their faith had been rewarded when Richard had arrived just hours before Isaac’s ultimatum was to expire. But that had been only a week, albeit an endless one. Now it was more than two months since there’d been any sightings reported of the English king.

Groping for a safe topic of conversation, one that would not inadvertently lure them into discussing her husband’s disappearance, Berengaria returned to their earlier discussion of the crime that was the talk of Rome—the shameful murder of the Bishop of Liege and the bloody footprints that seemed to lead right to Emperor Heinrich’s throne. “I wish I could say I do not believe Heinrich capable of such a godless act, but I cannot, Joanna. There was something about the man that I found chilling. I feel heartsick for his wife. What will she do when the Holy Father casts Heinrich into eternal darkness? All Christians are duty bound to shun an excommunicate. But how can Constance do that? Do you think the Church will make allowances for her plight?”

Joanna cared deeply for Constance de Hauteville, who’d done so much to comfort her as she struggled to adapt to her new life in Sicily, and she hated to think of the misery that Constance had found in her marriage to Heinrich von Hohenstaufen. “I’ve never thought about how the wife of an excommunicate would cope,” she admitted. “Fortunately, Constance will be spared that, for the Pope is not going to excommunicate Heinrich. My father was not excommunicated when Thomas Becket was slain, and the Church’s outrage was even greater over his killing than the Bishop of Liege’s murder.”

“Yes, but Pope Alexander believed your lord father when he swore he’d never meant for those knights to act upon his heedless, angry words. The Holy Father knew him to be a good man at heart, one who truly mourned the archbishop’s death. Can Pope Celestine say as much about Emperor Heinrich?”

“Mayhap not, but it will not matter. Whatever the Pope’s suspicions about Heinrich’s involvement in the crime, he has no proof.” And he’d likely not act even if he had a confession written by Heinrich in his own blood. Joanna kept that cynical viewpoint to herself, though, for she was touched by her sister-in-law’s innocent trust that justice would always prevail, be it in the papal curia or the king’s court.

Berengaria was prepared to argue further. She knew, of course, that all churchmen were not pure and incorruptible. Some of them were truly loathsome individuals, their holy vows notwithstanding. She frowned then, thinking of her husband’s enemy, the Bishop of Beauvais. But when the Church was confronted with such a shocking crime, the spilling of a bishop’s blood, surely sordid political considerations would not prevent the guilty from being brought to judgment. Before she could continue, there was a stir at the end of the hall.

When she saw the tall, dignified figure being escorted toward them, Joanna jumped to her feet. “My lord bishop! How the sight of you gladdens our eyes!” She hastened forward to welcome Hubert Walter, with Berengaria just a step behind, for they’d both become quite fond of the Bishop of Salisbury during their time in the Holy Land. Joanna appreciated his pragmatism, Berengaria had been grateful for the spiritual support he’d given her when Richard seemed likely to die of the lethal malady called Arnaldia, and they both valued the bishop’s unwavering loyalty to the English king.

Once greetings were exchanged and they were seated by the center hearth with wine and wafers on the way, Joanna was able to ask the question that had been hovering on her tongue from the moment she’d seen him entering the hall. “My lord bishop, when we left Acre, you were planning to sail with Richard. What changed your mind?”

“I did sail with the king, at least as far as Sicily. He insisted then that I disembark, for we’d learned that he was not going to be able to land at Marseille, and he said he wanted me to get to the Pope ere his enemies did, and then to hasten to England to help his lady mother and the justiciars rein in his brother. I arrived in the city last night and went to the papal palace this morning to pay my respects to the Holy Father. It was only then that I was told you were still in Rome, my lady.”

“After listening to my sister-in-law’s stories about their January crossing of the Alps,” Joanna said, with a fond glance at Berengaria, “we decided to wait till the alpine routes were more passable in the spring. She said at one point the women had to be slid down the mountain slope on ox hides!”

Berengaria smiled at the memory, which was easier to do now that it was part of her past. Accepting a wine cup from a servant, she waited until the bishop had been served before saying quietly, “I realize you’ve heard nothing about my lord husband, for you’d have told us at once. But you can ease my mind on one matter. He’d not fully recovered from the quartan fever when we sailed from Acre. Was he well when you parted from him in November?”