The Young Lion (9 page)

The man in the shadows began to stroll towards him. When Aelbad saw what he held in his hand he glanced desperately to his right and left as if someone would be there to save him.

‘Not my tongue! Not my tongue!’ he screamed. ‘I’ll be your man, King David! I know ten languages. I can break any code.’

The King looked at Douglas, who slowly shook his head. His tone was weary and he did not make eye contact with the torturer. ‘He’s yours,’ he said.

The thread of lips stretched to a smile that bared uneven yellowish teeth. He laid a black-gloved hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘This way,’ he said as he pushed Aelbad through the concealed door that would take him down to the special chamber deep beneath their feet.

It was almost dawn on Monday and their attack was due to begin on Wednesday. The war is lost, Henry thought. The child has betrayed our war plans to Eustace.

The war was lost. And Aelbad disappeared.

Henry, Guillaume and Douglas fought by day and made their way through enemy lines by night. After five months they reached
the south coast. ‘I vow to return,’ Henry said as he embraced his companions. He and Douglas wept as they said farewell. Each had learned a little of the other’s language. ‘Your name is in my heart,’ Douglas murmured in French. ‘We’ll meet at midnight,’ Henry answered in Gaelic.

Mounted on his finest warhorse, Geoffrey waited at the wharf of Barfleur. On either side he had two black destriers, one for each son, caparisoned in blue and gold, their tails and manes plaited, the visible parts of their bodies as bright as silk. His gold leopards flew from every building along the quay and food and drink were laid out on trestle tables. Music and singing came from the taverns. Inside, women, girls and half-drunk sailors welcomed the young heroes who had fought the length of England, won many battles and escaped Stephen’s agents to sail home unharmed. It marked with God’s pleasure their duke-to-be.

Towards evening Geoffrey and his sons left Barfleur to continue its celebration without them.

‘Eustace is insane with fury that you escaped,’ Geoffrey said as they cantered off towards a hunting lodge, where they’d stay a few days. ‘He’s gone to Paris to badger the Regent about you. He sailed all the way to Antwerp in case his ship crossed yours.’

Henry tossed his head in laughter.

His father thought, how like a king he now appears. ‘We have a new troubadour whom I commissioned to write a song for you,’ he said. ‘The chap understands the political power of a song. I hope you approve.’

‘Let’s hear it,’ Henry said.

Geoffrey beckoned the troubadour over and Henry and Guillaume began to laugh as he sang. The song told the story of
Henry’s battle victories and cunning escape from Prince Eustace. It had a catchy tune with a dramatic flourish for its chorus line. From that night it spread like fire in a wheat field, through Normandy, Anjou and Maine. It jumped the Channel, leaped back again and tore up into the Île de France. The chorus rang:

‘A Young Lion steps forth from his den.’

Christmas of 1149 was a glum affair in the palace of Rouen. ‘It’s unheard of that Geoffrey should not be here with his family, to celebrate,’ Matilda raged.

‘Papa is engaged on difficult business for our cause,’ Henry insisted to his mother. ‘I had a message from him by pigeon yesterday.’

‘Show it to me.’

‘It was in code. When I’d read it, I threw it in the fire.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘Mother, I’m not lying. Papa puts his own life in danger …’

His mother stormed from the hall.

Henry knew his face was aflame with shame and anger. There had been no message from the Duke, and for all Henry knew, his father was dead. He had left six weeks earlier with the intention of personally engaging a spy in Louis’s palace to be the eyes and ears of Normandy. They already had kitchen hands and stable boys who reported to them. But theirs were mere snippets of gossip. Now that the King and his army had returned from Outremer they needed to know if there would be an attack on Normandy. All the signs were that Suger and the Seneschal of France were inclined to listen to the Usurper and his Crown Prince. From England a stream of warnings came to the Anjevins, from those
still loyal to the vows they had sworn to the Lion, that, as Henry approached manhood, Stephen and Eustace grew desperate. The civil war dragged on and, although Matilda had given up hope of the crown for herself, Stephen knew it could slip from his grasp to Henry’s, for many in the baronage hated Eustace. What’s more, the grandson of the Lion was in alliance with King David. He had already fended off an attack from David of Scots; it had been bloody and costly. But an attack from Normandy allied to Scotland could be disastrous. So daily he hammered at France.

‘Leave it to me,’ Geoffrey had said before he set off to meet the defeated army returning from crusade. His smile, Henry recalled, was vulpine. Already his father had made a second trip. After the first he had returned with a look of radiance. ‘I’m getting somewhere,’ he’d said. ‘I expect success on my next foray.’

Henry had regarded his father up and down. ‘Is our source male or female?’

‘A man,’ Geoffrey snapped.

As Christmas Eve darkened into night and there was still no word from the Duke of Normandy, Henry went to the stables. A while with the horses would lift his melancholy. A groom saddled up for him and he rode down the hill from the palace to a house on the outskirts of town where Guillaume lived with his mama, Isabella, and five sisters. He could hear Guillaume singing before he saw the lamps inside the house. There was a drizzly wind, but no snow.

After embracings and laughter he asked Guillaume, ‘Brother, would you come outside and take a look at my horse.’

‘What’s happened?’ In the torchlight Henry could see a frown above his dark eyes.

‘Papa has disappeared.’

They stared at their boots for a moment before Henry stepped forward and fell weeping into Guillaume’s arms.

In Paris, town criers announced that the welcome parade would be on Christmas Eve, and soon after daybreak people lined the streets of the capital. The weather had been cold and wet, but on this day the sun shone, the mud in the streets dried up and it felt like spring. Suger had arranged for barrels of wine on street corners and drinking bowls to be given out free to the crowd. The populace responded with singing old songs as if they were celebrating a victory. Eleanor was dressed in scarlet velvet. Her mare wore a green caparison with a gold cross. Xena had suggested the horse’s colours to complement the Queen’s robe.

The mare delighted the spectators with her long black hooves, unimaginably fine head and small, pricked ears. An Arabian was a novelty. A grey Arabian had never been seen in Paris before.

‘Where did you get the horse?’ they yelled.

She stood in the stirrups and shouted back, ‘The Emperor of Byzantium gave her to me.’

Women swooned to see Eleanor so close. Her face! Her lovely headdress with its scarlet barbette beneath her chin! How its colour brought out the violet of her eyes and the red of her lips. Her rubies. Her clothes …

The Queen held her arms outstretched, as if to embrace them all, every man, woman, drunk, whore, leper and grubby child. They roared and surged forward. She lowered ungloved hands on either side of her mount for eager lips to caress.

‘Stop it!’ Louis said. ‘You’ll get leprosy.’

‘You kiss lepers!’ she objected. ‘It’s my obligation as monarch,’ he retorted.

‘It’s centuries since a monarch’s touch cured a leper. You should have stayed a monk.’

But Geoffrey, he could be a king.

‘Eleanor! Eleanor! Our blessed Queen. May God and Saint Denis bless Eleanor!’

‘And give her a son!’ someone yelled.

She turned, radiant, to Louis and raised his hand to her lips. ‘Bless us both!’ she cried.

‘You know I don’t enjoy these displays,’ he muttered, but he raised a warrior’s clenched fist, shook it triumphantly and laughed for them.

She had received him four nights in a week since they arrived home. It was unprecedented: not since their wedding night had she been so eager for him.

Following the parade, there was a feast in the great hall at which more than a thousand guests sat at table. Most of the baronage and knights of France were there, plus ambassadors, spies and countless hangers-on. Servants, pages and squires rushed back and forth as they tried to keep up the supply of wine, mead, cider, ale, whey and meat. Eleanor and Louis, side by side, ate from the same gold dish, sometimes putting their heads together and laughing. As day faded into night and more torches were lighted, the Queen asked Louis’s permission to be excused. ‘I’m exhausted,’ she said.

‘Shall I escort you?’ he asked.

‘No, no. The guards will take me up. The company wants you to stay.’

‘Where’s your Phoenician maidservant?’

‘I let her sleep for the afternoon. She was up at three this morning, preparing my gown.’

The hall rose and bowed to the Queen.

The Queen’s bedchamber was reached by a flight of stone stairs that led from the great hall. The stairway divided a few steps from the top, the left side leading to the Queen’s quarters, the right to the King’s. The main door to her chamber was in a double
wing, made of oak and carved with
fleurs de lis
. But another door, of single width, undecorated, opened into her closet, a room the same width as the bedchamber, only shorter. Here she could read and write letters. It was where Xena slept. Like the bedchamber, the closet had its own deep fireplace and chimney. In its wall, opposite the bedchamber, a very small door led to the Queen’s privy. Outside the palace this was nothing more than a hole in the wall. Inside, it was a hole over which to squat. Eleanor had installed a broad seat with a velvet cover around the hole over which she could spread her skirt to keep it off the floor. The privy had a large ewer of water, soap and a supply of soft cloths. Because it was bitingly cold in winter and filled with flies in summer, its small door was kept closed at all times.

Xena had been aghast when she first saw it. In Antioch running water was piped into houses. Compared to the luxury of Byzantium, this palace seemed little more than a large military fort. ‘My poor Queen!’ she exclaimed. There was no steam room or bathing pool. Eleanor had to bathe in her bedchamber in a tub the servants filled with buckets hauled from the courtyard through one of the windows. ‘Disgraceful, is it not?’ the Queen responded. ‘I never had to live like this in Aquitaine.’

The simply furnished closet was an intriguing chamber, for underneath its writing table was a tapestry, and beneath the tapestry, a trapdoor. Merovingian kings had built the original palace as a fort, and for centuries it had been the duty of the Seneschal of France, personally and without witnesses, to show the newly crowned King – and his wife if she were his crowned Queen and not merely his consort – how to use the trapdoor. When the table and tapestry were moved aside the trapdoor could be lifted with an iron ring. But it needed strength. For a weaker hand there was the aid of a hook that hung from a chain against the closet wall, its other end weighted. Each queen instructed her maids to use the chain for
hanging items of clothing that were too delicate to fold. The hook, the chain and the weight were never visible beneath the rainbow of silks, velvets and furs.

On its reverse side, the trapdoor was elaborately carved, and so well made anyone standing in the stable beneath could not discern it, even in bright daylight.

Once the trapdoor was open it required only slight agility, no more than for mounting a horse, to slide one’s feet forward onto one of the oak trunks that, in hundreds, were the pillars in the royal stables. The pillars beneath the monarchs’ apartments were also elaborately carved. They had notches in their decoration, each large enough to hold the toe of a boot. There were also handholds disguised among the wooden fruit and flowers. If the situation were too dire to leap on a horse and ride from the palace, there was a second trapdoor, concealed in the floor of the stables. This led down a second pole into a dank tunnel. Neither Eleanor nor Louis had ever crept through the tunnel, although the Seneschal had shown them its entrance and, one sunny day had taken them to its exit, inside a well, on the other side of the island. It was said that centuries earlier a murderer had found his way down the well, through the tunnel, into the stables and from there to the King’s bedchamber. Everyone knew he could not have acted alone, for the trapdoor could only be opened from above.

A fire blazed inside the Queen’s bedchamber. She had installed a marble fireplace hollowed along its top for water. In this shallow pool, heated by the flames below, she warmed her fingers. The palace guards entered the apartment before she did, gave a perfunctory look around, bowed and retreated. Eleanor dropped the iron bar across the double doors, pushed off her shoes and threw herself onto the bed. She drew its curtains and lay fully clothed looking up to the shadows cast by the fire and candlelight flickering on the ceiling. She never used a canopy over the bed
because she liked fresh air. No matter how cold the night, she insisted a window be left slightly uncovered.

Outside, the guards’ footsteps faded down the stairs.

Eleanor gave a long pant of relief and reached out, creeping her fingers across the darkness of the bed. She knew he was there; she could smell the sweet herb he chewed and the musky scent of his naked flesh. Her fingers were burning. When they touched his arm he seized her.

They heard the guests’ horses, hundreds upon hundreds, clattering off after the banquet ended. The huge building was heavy with sleep when Geoffrey retrieved his dagger from where he had concealed it under the goose-down mattress, with a hand so swift she did not notice. He dressed with his back to her, hiding the weapon inside his tunic. As he slipped through the door into the closet where Xena was waiting, Eleanor lay with the bed curtains open, naked, her clothes strewn over the floor where they had thrown them. ‘If I get with child …’ she said.

‘Louis’s,’ Geoffrey replied.

Xena entered the bedchamber, gathered up the Queen’s ripped clothes and in the dim light checked the room as best she could for incriminating objects.

Every house, every inn, every room in the palace was full for the Christmas Court. The King had decreed that the royal farms donate a chicken or a duck to each Paris household of six people or more, so all could celebrate. Feathers swirled about in the cold air and the Seine stank of poultry guts. But it was a good Christmas, a joyous Christmas and a prosperous Christmas, for Suger’s brilliance as an administrator had filled the coffers of France. No one was hungry.

Geoffrey waited again inside Eleanor’s curtained bed. She came to him after the midnight Mass.

The fragrant beeswax candles burned down to nothing. ‘It will soon be light,’ he said. She watched him pull on his tunic and soft boots. He threw a hooded cloak over his shoulders.

‘I want you every second of every minute of the day,’ she said. ‘I think of you constantly. I didn’t expect to feel like this. I want to escape the cage in which they keep me.’

He came to the bed in a stride and kissed her mouth. ‘Lady, I’d give my life to hold you, just once, in my arms all night. But you’ve escaped the cage already. Sing inside yourself, as I do when I think of you. Every second of every minute of every day.’ She saw his beautiful, vulpine face as clearly as on the day he’d offered her his cloak. ‘I’m mad with love,’ he said.

He kissed her again, so tenderly she began to cry. ‘I’ll return on the night of Epiphany.’

At the door to the closet he paused and ran back to her bed. ‘I fell in love with you the day we first spoke. I haven’t had a moment’s peace since then. No peace. Only ecstasy.’

When Xena opened the trapdoor for him, he slid down into the stable then murmured, ‘Hamelin. I’m here.’

Geoffrey’s servant Hamelin had got to know the Queen’s horse well. Once the Duke rejoined him they would stroll to another part of the stables and mount their own horses. There were such crowds coming and going during Christmastide there had been no trouble with the guards. Geoffrey had already been able to spend five nights with Eleanor in the palace. Her trick had been to invite Louis to bed in the afternoon, then excuse herself soon after dark, which at this time of year arrived early, and lasted long. She would gaze meaningfully at the King and say, ‘My Lord, I’m so exhausted.’ The bedchamber servants gossiped among themselves that since the King and Queen had returned from Outremer, they
were intent upon creating an heir for France. The foreign maid was involved, said some. She had secrets from Byzantium to help Her Highness get with child.

‘Hamelin,’ Geoffrey whispered again. He guessed his man had fallen asleep. The grey Arabian mare woke up and nuzzled at his hand. He pushed her away, in case Hamelin was asleep on the other side of her. But he had vanished.

Geoffrey walked casually to the left-hand stables, where there were numerous destriers. He took the first stallion he came across that had its riding kit within easy reach. He petted it for a few moments, blew softly into its nostrils, then mounted and trotted past the guard house, across a bridge and through the silent lanes of Paris.