The Autumn Throne (3 page)

Several maids arrived bearing a tub and pails of steamy water.

‘Perhaps not, but I want to help you.’

Alienor concealed a grimace. Isabel had a penchant for doing good deeds to better the lives of the afflicted. She suspected she was one of them in her eyes. ‘Do not dare pity me,’ she warned.

Isabel’s hazel-brown eyes widened with hurt. ‘I would never do that! You malign me.’ She produced a vial of rose attar and, going to the tub, tipped some precious drops into the
steaming water, causing a wonderful fragrance to billow into the room.

‘You cannot help yourself.’ Alienor softened the comment with a smile, although Isabel continued to look reproachful.

Once disrobed by Amiria, Alienor stepped into the tub and sank down into the blood-hot rose-scented water, uttering a soft gasp halfway between pain and pleasure.

Isabel refreshed Alienor’s cup. ‘John and Joanna were so excited to know you were coming,’ she said.

Alienor’s throat tightened. When Henry had shut her away from the world for rebelling against him, he had shut her away from her children too. Isabel, who was wed to Henry’s half-brother Hamelin, had temporarily taken them into her household to raise with her own children, which had been one small grace amid the devastation. ‘How are they faring?’

‘Well indeed – as you will see,’ Isabel said fondly. ‘Joanna is a fine young lady and John and my William have become close friends as well as cousins.’

‘It has been a great comfort to me knowing they are safe in your hands.’

Isabel waved away the acknowledgement but looked pleased. ‘It has been my privilege. They are both so clever. I have never seen anyone so adept at working an exchequer board as John, and Joanna reads aloud with never a stumble.’

Alienor glowed with pride at Isabel’s acclaim, but felt a guilty frisson of resentment. She should be the one praising such intelligence instead of hearing about it from the lips of another woman, even if Isabel was her sister by marriage and a good friend. Nevertheless, a new mood was clearing her path, like sun burning through fog. She had been shaken back to life and there was no turning back.

‘Do you know why Henry has brought me to Winchester?’ she asked as Amiria helped her to don a clean chemise, and a gown of scarlet wool. ‘Harry says he wants to make peace, but I fear his motives will not be to my advantage.’

Isabel shook her head. ‘Hamelin has said nothing.’

Alienor
sent her a sharp look. ‘He does not know, or he will not tell you?’

Isabel dropped her gaze. ‘I do not know that either.’

And she would not venture to ask: Alienor knew Isabel’s propensity for refusing to see life’s harsher realities in their true light.

‘I hope you can make peace,’ Isabel said anxiously. ‘It is no life for you at Sarum.’

Alienor curled her lip. ‘I expect Henry will use life at Sarum as one of his levers. He imprisons me there for nigh on two years, denies me all contact with the world and my children and takes from me all things of grace and luxury. Now he brings me to Winchester and showers me with everything that I lack. But I tell you this: I will never yield him Aquitaine, if that is his price. I would rather return to Sarum. Indeed I would rather be dead.’

‘Alienor …’ Isabel extended an imploring hand.

‘Do not look at me like that!’ Alienor snapped, and then drew a long breath up through her body, filling herself with life and banking down her irritation. ‘I bless you for waking me up,’ she said in a gentler voice, and kissed Isabel’s cheek. ‘I may not be ready to speak to Henry, but I am desperate to see my children.’

Alienor had just finished breaking her fast on bread and honey when John and Joanna arrived with their nurses and Isabel’s four offspring, their cousins. Alienor’s heart turned over, for she barely recognised the son and daughter whom she had bidden farewell at Sarum’s gates two years ago. Aged nine and ten they were still children, but standing on the final stepping stone before the perilous leap into adulthood.

John was first to come forward, smoothly bending one knee. ‘My lady mother,’ he said. Joanna curtseyed and murmured the same. Her hair was plaited in a gleaming braid, the light brown shot with distinct glints of her father’s auburn.

The
constraints binding the situation were like taut ropes at full strain. In a sudden flurry, Alienor slashed through the formality and gathered her youngest children to her heart. ‘How you have grown!’ She fought tears. ‘Ah it has been too long but I have thought about you every day and prayed to see you again!’

‘We prayed too, Mama,’ John said, his expression innocent and open.

‘Yes, they did,’ Isabel confirmed. ‘I never had to remind them.’

Wiping her eyes on her cuff, Alienor took John and Joanna to sit in the embrasure with her, while she recovered. Eventually she was able to greet Isabel’s son and three daughters with composure and was astonished at how they too were no longer tender little infants but thriving youngsters on the swift path to maturity. Isabel’s son William was the same age as John and the pair had formed the sort of young male bond that involved continually testing the boundaries and each other in cub-play while being united against the world. Isabel’s eldest daughter, Belle, was a similar age to Joanna and possessed the alabaster skin and striking green-blue eyes of her grandsire Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, who had been famed for his beauty. ‘I can tell this one is going to strew the road with broken hearts.’ Alienor smiled. ‘Have you betrothed her yet?’

Belle preened at the compliment, but kept her lids modestly lowered.

‘No, we want her to be older, and to have a say in her choice.’

Alienor raised her brows. ‘What if she sets her heart on a kitchen boy or a minstrel with pretty words in his mouth and nothing in his purse?’

Isabel waved her hand. ‘Obviously there are limits, but within them she shall have a choice – as shall all my girls.’

‘What does Hamelin say?’

‘He agrees with me. There is plenty of time, and no one has yet made an offer we are unable to refuse.’

Alienor
said nothing. For a conventional woman, Isabel could be stubborn and wayward in matters of the heart and home. Some might call her brave and truthful, others indulgent and foolish. She could see why Hamelin would agree with her. Henry’s half-brother ruled his domestic household with benign but absolute authority and would be reluctant to change that state of affairs by giving his daughters in marriage at a young age and exposing them to the influences of other men. Alienor’s own daughters had made matches before puberty in order to secure binding political alliances, but there were fewer onuses on Isabel and Hamelin.

She heard the sound of approaching male voices raised in jovial banter and an instant later her older sons surged into the chamber with their father, bringing with them the fresh scent of outdoors and stirring the atmosphere with vibrant energy. All four were laughing uproariously because Henry’s favourite terrier had absconded with the Bishop of Ely’s jewelled fur hat and had proceeded to murder it round the back of the stables.

Alienor’s gaze went straight to Richard, the heir to her duchy. Her heart was open for all of her sons but Richard was its light. Count of Poitou, future Duke of Aquitaine. His red-gold hair gleamed with vitality, his eyes were the rich summer blue of cornflowers, and he was the tallest among them.

Abandoning the joke, he came to kneel at her feet in formal greeting and receive the kiss of peace. Alienor used the ritual to maintain her dignity, although her emotions were spiralling like a whirlwind. Their eyes met, filled with a multitude of things they dared not say in front of Henry and the others.

Richard rose and yielded his place to his brother Geoffrey, a year younger, brown-haired and slighter of build. He was being groomed to rule Brittany and was betrothed to Constance, its heiress duchess. Still waters in Geoffrey ran deep and the open expression on his face was not necessarily indicative of the complex thoughts flowing beneath. ‘My lady mother.’ Taking
her hand, he pressed it to his brow. His manner was pleasant but his eyes were guarded and inscrutable.

Harry kissed her warmly and squeezed her hand in reassurance. ‘Are you feeling better now, Mama?’

‘I have donned my armour,’ she answered with bleak humour. Was she feeling better? Different perhaps; ready to do battle.

‘These are for you.’ He poured half a dozen gaudy jewels into her palm, including a large amethyst drilled with two holes, from one of which dangled a thread with scraps of squirrel fur attached. ‘Spoils from the kill; don’t tell the Bishop of Ely.’ His eyes gleamed with laughter.

Alienor clasped the stones in her fist for a moment, knowing their value and how they might be put to good use. Henry would not confiscate them when there were so many witnesses and it was all part of the jest. Having locked the gems in her jewel casket, she turned, her body taut with resistance, to face her husband who had deliberately let his sons go first so that he could observe her interaction with them. She did not curtsey and he did not bow.

‘Madam, I trust your sojourn in peace and solitude has been of benefit?’ His eyes were as hard as chips of flint.

‘Indeed, sire. I have had time to think on many matters and to see them more clearly than I did before.’

‘I am pleased to hear it. As you see I have come to an understanding with our sons and there is no reason why we cannot all dwell in peace together.’

There were many reasons for the opposite but Alienor bit her tongue.

He held out his arm. ‘The court awaits us in the hall, if it please you.’

‘Would it matter if it did not?’

‘I think we both know the answer to that,’ he said pleasantly, although his gaze remained cold.

She did not want to touch him, but she made herself place her hand on his sleeve and walk with him, knowing he had
no desire for this contact either, except as a means of exerting his power. She had perforce to play this game until she found out what he was up to, and then they would see.

Alienor sat in a window embrasure with Isabel, embroidering the sleeve on Joanna’s new gown. It was intricate work but her stitches were swift because her reprieve might end at any moment. At Sarum her sewing consisted of plain linen shirts and chemises for the poor and the sick – deemed part of her penance for encouraging her sons to rebel against their father – and it was a joy to work with silk and beauty again.

Yesterday had been one of family gathering and reunion, as bright on the surface as sunlit water concealing turbid undercurrents. Everyone had smiled, and at times the laughter had been genuine, but darker emotions lurked beneath the surface and no one had spoken of the matters that had caused the rifts. Instead there had been jesting and tales of the hunt. The demise of the Bishop of Ely’s fur hat had been reprised several times, and the Bishop himself had taken the incident in good part, graciously conceding the gems to Alienor’s custody. No mention was made of the strife that had turned son against father and resulted in Alienor’s imprisoned isolation at Sarum, yet it was an episode of such enormity that there was no room in the chamber for anything else, and every breath and word was tainted with its presence.

This morning Henry had gone hunting with their sons, at pains to show her the hearty masculine rapport that existed between them.
See, they are mine. You tried to take them from me and you did not succeed.
That was the version he was vigorously
promoting, but while it hurt like a ripped fingernail, she did not believe him.

Joanna and her de Warenne cousins were occupied with small embroidery projects of their own, as were Harry’s young wife Marguerite and her mousy-haired sister Alais who was betrothed to Richard. Constance of Brittany, Geoffrey’s future wife, was reading to the women from a bestiary, and had just informed them, grimacing, that camels would rather drink dirty water than clean, stirring it up with their feet to create slime.

‘Did you see camels when you went to the Holy Land, Mama?’ Joanna asked. ‘Did they do that?’

‘Not that I noticed,’ Alienor replied. ‘You must remember that not everything learned men write is the truth. I rode a camel once in Jerusalem. Louis was horrified at the impropriety, but that did not stop me.’

Joanna’s eyes widened. ‘What was it like?’

‘Sore.’ Alienor made a face. ‘And I felt sea-sick. They are taller than horses so you can see further, but they are not as sure-footed, nor do they respond as swiftly to commands. A fast Arabian courser though – ah, now that is different.’ Her eyes lit up at the memory. ‘Louis disapproved of that too. He hated to see his wife racing about the desert on a horse as fast as the wind. I suspect he thought I might run away from him – hah, and he was probably right! I wish I had an Arabian horse now, or even a camel; but then if wishes were horses, I would have been in Poitiers, in my own hall, long ago.’

Isabel gently touched Alienor’s hand and gave her a sympathetic look that nevertheless held a warning.