Devil's Consort (16 page)

‘It seems that we do. And probably will.’ My heart was as coldly heavy as the stone floor beneath my feet.

‘I wish we were back at Ombrières!’

So did I.

Perhaps my own accommodations, prepared and decorated with the new bride in mind, as surely they must have been, would be more comfortable. Momentarily I closed my eyes as the shadowy form of a rat sped along the base of the wall, claws tapping against the stone, to disappear behind a poor excuse for a wall hanging that did nothing to enhance the chamber. A woodland scene, I surmised, catching the odd shape of wings and the gleam of stitched eyes, except that the layer of soot was so thick it could have been the black depths of Hell. The rat retraced its scurrying steps, and I wished the livestock to be confined to the stitchery.

When the rat—or perhaps there were many—reappeared to gallop once more in its original direction, I requested that Louis show me to my private chambers immediately, but he had other ideas. Taking my arm in a gentle hold, he detached me from my women and guided me through a doorway, down a long, dark corridor and knocked on the door at the end.

‘What is this?’ I whispered since he did not explain. I felt a need to whisper as the stone pressed down on us. It was like being in a coffin.

‘Dear Eleanor.’ Louis enclosed my hand within his. ‘My mother has asked to meet with you.’

It was the only warning I received. I had not known
that the Dowager Queen even resided in this palace. The door was opened by an unobtrusive servant into an audience chamber, the walls bare and shining with damp, the furnishings few and unremarkable. Except for one attendant woman, Louis’s mother sat alone, waiting. Hands clasped loosely on her lap, she gave no sign of acknowledging our entrance. The emotion in that small room was chilling: my flesh crept with it.

‘Madam.’ Louis left my side to approach her.

The Dowager Queen of France raised her head and looked not at her son but at me. It was an unambiguous stare, and I swallowed at what I read there, my throat suddenly dry. I had not expected this. I was instantly on guard.

Louis bowed, the respectful son, took his mother’s hand and saluted her fingers. ‘I regret your loss, madam.’

The Dowager Queen bowed her head in cold acknowledgement. I thought her loss was not as great as her son might fear. There was an air of fierce composure about her. Her features were small and pinched but from a lifetime of dissatisfaction rather than from present grief. The lines between nose and mouth had not been engraved in a matter of weeks.

Adelaide de Maurienne. Queen of France. Whose position I had just usurped.

She was a pious woman from the presence of a
prie-dieu,
numerous crucifixes and books of religious content and a rosary to hand on the coffer at her side. Clad
in black from her veils to her feet, she all but merged with the shadows. I sensed she had been invisible for most of her life as the neglected wife of Fat Louis.

‘My son. At last.’ She did not immediately rise to her feet, even though her King and Queen had entered the room.

‘Madam,’ Louis urged with a not-so-subtle tug on her hand. ‘I would present my wife. Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine. Now Queen of France.’

Without haste—an insult in itself to my mind—Dowager Queen Adelaide stood, her hand clamped on her son’s wrist, and managed a curt inclination of her head rather than the curtsey she should have afforded my rank. The welcome from Louis’s mother was as grim as the stench of mould from the wetly gleaming walls. Did she think to intimidate me, a daughter of Aquitaine? I knew my worth. And I knew my power as Louis’s wife. With a genuflection as conspicuous as her lack, I sank into a deep curtsey. My face, I made sure, was full of remorse.

‘Madam, I trust your faith gives you consolation. If I can do anything to alleviate your grief during your visit to the Cité palace, you have only to ask. Do you stay long?’ A neat little challenge to her presence, deliberately spoken in my own language.

Adelaide looked to Louis for clarification. When he could not, I repeated my greeting in Latin. Adelaide flushed at the implication that the days of her occupation
of these rooms might be numbered. Her spine became rigid.

‘You do not have a facility with the
langue d’oeil?’
she asked in that language.

‘I do,’ I replied smoothly. I understood her perfectly well. I had made some progress on my journey to Paris. ‘But I prefer the
langue d’oc.’

‘Here we speak the
langue d’oeil.’

Sensing the imminent clash of wills, Louis eyed his mother cautiously. ‘We will, madam, converse together in Latin.’

Adelaide inhaled. ‘As you wish, my son.’ And then to me, sliding into rapid Latin. ‘My advice is to learn our language. As a mark of courtesy to your husband and your new country.’

‘If I deem it necessary, I will, madam,’ I responded promptly, switching to perfect Latin. Satisfied with the temporary outcome, my answering smile was bright and my Latin excellent. ‘I have great skill with languages.’

The Dowager Queen allowed her pale eyes to travel over my figure, taking in every aspect of my clothes and appearance. For a brief moment I wished I was not so travel-stained but I raised my chin. I was not answerable to this woman for what I wore. And I deliberately caught her eye.

There! I had not been mistaken. Loathing. A rampant hatred. The depth of it startled me. I had never experienced such abhorrence—one did not exhibit such flagrant emotion towards the Duchess of Aquitaine—but
it was impossible to mistake it. Adelaide’s nostrils flared, her lips narrowed into a curl of disdain. The glitter in her eye was an acceptance of my challenge, a return of my gauntlet to signal the onset of warfare between us.

And the prize for the victor?

Louis, of course.

Abbot Suger’s warning had arisen from political necessity, as he saw it. He would control Louis’s ruling of France and thwart me if I demanded a voice. Here before me was quite a different level of opposition: vindictive jealousy, entirely personal, and perhaps all the more dangerous for it. Adelaide would control the heart and soul of her son.

And the object of so much desire to control and manage? I glanced at him. Did Louis see this potential battle of wills between the two women in his life? Would he stand up for me against Queen Adelaide if it ever became necessary? Was he even aware of the tone of our exchange?

Of course he was not. Louis was irritatingly occupied elsewhere, astonishingly oblivious, leafing through the pages of one of his mother’s devotional missals. So be it. I must rely on myself in a conflict that Adelaide must not win. I was not raised to bow before an inferior force.

Adelaide deliberately turned her shoulder to me and addressed Louis. ‘We shall meet again at supper, my son—a banquet has been prepared to mark your return and your marriage.’ She fixed him with the same formidable stare as she must have done at any time over
the seventeen years of Louis’s life. ‘You will be there, of course. There must be no excuses.’

A strange comment, one that caught my attention but then slid away as Louis bowed and ushered me rapidly from the room, striding away purposefully.

‘Will you show me my own rooms?’ I asked, trying to keep up and my skirts from contact with the walls, watching my footsteps in the gloom.

Suddenly Louis was in a hurry. ‘Yes.’ He did not slow his pace. There was an urgency about him.

‘Where are your own chambers?’ I asked.

‘Through there.’ He waved vaguely towards a distant door before ushering me into my suite of rooms. ‘There!’ A light kiss on my cheek, his words delivered in a rush. ‘If anything is not to your taste, you must tell me. This is now your home. I want you to be as comfortable here as you were in your own lands in the south.’

Looking around the stark rooms, their air of abandonment, I doubted it.

But before I could reply, Louis had gone and closed the door behind him. I sat on the bed, sneezing as the mildew from the hangings released its unpleasant odour. Whatever was pulling at him was far more important than his staying with me. But at least now that we were here, in Paris at last, even in the face of the Dowager Queen’s disapproval—which I intended to ignore—we could start to make some sort of life together.

* * *

By the end of that day I was more exhausted than if I had—in my imagination since I had no experience of it—been on a military campaign. Moreover, it proved to be an education, a squint into what was to be my future. How little of my life I had lived so far—a mere fifteen years—and how much still stretched before me with all its promise and excitement. The promise was smothered by my experience of that day, the excitement all but snuffed out. What I had seen so far in the palace, the lack of any refinement or luxury, was merely replicated in the royal apartments. The vast bed with its moth-eaten hangings and damp linens made me shudder. My women for once were smitten into silence.

‘By the Virgin!’ Except for Aelith.

And then the ceremonial feast to acknowledge the new King and Queen.

Louis presided. Why had his mother found the need to insist? He led me to the dais and presented me to my new subjects. I felt their interested gaze, heard the whispered comment, particularly of the women of the court who were so far behind the fashions of the day as to appear ridiculously
outré.
Louis attracted no such attention. He looked no better than a well-to-do merchant in a plain tunic and hose. His chamberlain was better garbed. How could he demand their respect as King when dressed little better than a servant? I determined to take him in hand. But for tonight I settled myself to be celebrated and entertained.

I did not expect to be astonished: to be so rudely
awakened into the reality of the Frankish court. But I was.

Where was the procession of courses at the royal feast? The peppered peacocks, the candied fruits, the rice cooked with milk of almond and powdered cinnamon? The lobsters fried with egg? There was no shortage of food, for sure. Meat upon meat upon meat—venison and wild boar, game birds aplenty—but so coarse and unflavoured. Fish appeared—and languished on its platter. It was not popular. No delicacies of tarts or junkets or fritters. No leaves or salads. Vegetables abounded—particularly onions and garlic—a matter for much regret—stewed or pounded without finesse into an unrecognisable mush.

Louis ate sparingly. I did what I could. And made a point of ignoring the fastidious grimaces of my women. But even I could not pretend indifference for ever to the presentation of the food.

‘What is it?’ Louis raised his cup to sip the thin wine.

I found my attention fixed on a congealing pool of strangely green sauce on the scrubbed table surface, where a clumsy page had spilt it and failed to mop it up. Nor was the wooden planking that made up the table-top particularly clean despite the scrubbing. It looked no better than the butchery block from the kitchens, and the scars might suggest a pig had been dismembered on it. Did no one care?

‘Do you have no table linen?’ I asked bluntly.

‘No.’ Louis was surprised.

‘Not even for the High Table?’

‘No.’

I focused on the charred-edged flatbread before me, a trencher to serve in way of a plate, beside it a drinking vessel and a knife to hack off portions of meat.

‘Are there no spoons?’ I eyed a dish of stewed elvers that would be impossible to deal with if a knife was all I had to hand.

‘Do you want one?’ Louis asked solicitously, already raising a hand. ‘I’ll send for one from the kitchens if you wish …’

I shook my head, repressing a sigh. Glancing along the table, I watched one of Louis’s barons scoop up the elvers with the flat of his knife, from dish to lips with a noisy slurp. I would forgo the elvers.

The Dowager Queen, clad entirely in black in markedly unfestive manner as before, interjected sharply, ‘I have always found the provisions of our High Table satisfactory.’

‘Have you?’ I gave a long look at a thick, glutinous dish that defied recognition. Louis had already given his attention to his Seneschal Raoul de Vermandois on his right so I felt at liberty to allow my dissatisfaction to show.

‘You will find life very different here, Eleanor,’ Adelaide reprimanded with a humourless smile. ‘My advice is to learn the ways of the Frankish court and accept them. It is what I did as a bride.’

‘It is certainly different from my experience.’

The feast continued, memorable for its crudity. No songs. No entertainments. Our eating was accompanied by nothing more than the slurp and chewing and belching of Louis’s barons and an increasing volume of coarse comment and laughter as the wine flowed. At the end, a finger bowl was presented to me. It was more than I expected. But I flinched from the layer of grease and traces of food floating on the top. I dipped in the very ends of my fingers and looked up at the page. He stared back at me with an uncertain fear in his youthful eyes. Clearly he did not know what I waited for.

‘Fetch me a napkin,’ I whispered.

He looked askance towards Louis and back to me. Did he expect me to wipe my fingers on my skirts? I found my attention straying from the rank water in the tarnished silver dish to the black-edged nails of its holder. Perhaps he had scoured the fire grate before serving me.

‘I don’t think we have a napkin, Majesty,’ he admitted in a hoarse whisper that echoed along the board, his face glowing with embarrassment. ‘I could try …’

The lack was not his fault. But when the flatbreads were collected, some given to the servants, some thrown to the scavenging dogs that fell on them with enthusiastic snarls, I had had enough. I signalled to my women to leave, gathering my dignity around me to curtsey to Louis. I found it impossible to smile.

‘I will retire, my lord.’

‘It’s been a long day for you, Eleanor.’ Leaping to his feet, with gentle respect he handed me from the dais. ‘I trust you will sleep well.’

I gripped his fingers for a moment. ‘I hope you find the time to visit me, my lord, before you retire.’

‘Yes.’ I thought Louis gulped but perhaps it was a trick of the guttering and inadequate rushlights. His eyes shone with warmth and, I decided, were full of admiration. ‘I hope you are happy with your new home.’