The Miracle Thief (30 page)

Dear God in heaven! This was not going to work. I was not going to be brave enough. I was not strong enough. “Better yet, perhaps, not to remember me at all.”

“Do not sacrifice yourself this way.”

“You mistake me for some virtuous maiden. I am being most selfish. If you stay with me, if you go with me when I wed, do you not see that I would only diminish myself in your eyes?”

“You could never diminish yourself—”

He must not talk. To hear his voice, to gaze into his eyes, would only sway me from what I knew I must do.

“My lady, you ask the impossible.”

“But you have done the impossible. You have given me faith when I had none. You have returned to me my honor.” How I wanted to stroke that fine, strong jaw, to kiss that beloved cheek. But I would not do it. Not now, not at the last. I could not ask him for more than was mine to demand.

Nostrils flaring, he gazed into the distance above my head, past the door into the morning's sun. Though not so bright as the sun of summer, still it had the ability to dazzle. Perhaps that's why there were tears in his eyes when he returned his gaze to me. “If you wish it, my lady.”

My chin trembled as my throat bobbed with tears unshed. I did not wish it. I did not want it. “I cannot see any other way.” No other plan would allow him to keep his honor and me to keep my virtue. If he stayed with me, he would give up the chance to ask my father for his estates. He would forfeit everything that mattered to him, and in the end, he would not even gain me for his efforts. He would sacrifice everything, and I would sacrifice nothing, and we would both be debased by the result.

Bowing swiftly, with a nod of his head and a swirl of his mantle, he took himself away.

Saint Catherine may have saved my life, but I had lost my heart in the end.

The queen came into the stables as I was standing there, mourning the vision of a bleak future, where Andulf would most probably often be present but could never again be mine.

She gave me a keen look. “Do you miss Rouen already? Is that why you cry? We can return. You should not distress yourself so.”

“What other reason would I have to weep?”

“Your father spoke of you before he left. He thought perhaps you might journey to the abbey at Rochemont this summer, since you did not get to go this autumn past. Would that please you?”

“Yes.” Tears began to stream from my eyes once more. “That would please me very much.” I would write a letter to my mother and enclose it with a note to the abbess. Perhaps she would not mind passing it on for me. I wanted to tell her…everything. But most of all, I wanted to thank her. She had been right. In spite of everything that had happened and anything that might come to pass, I knew I must not despise the life I had been given.

“I do not know what the appeal is. It's very remote, and the way, I have been told, is treacherous. I offered that it would be better for you to stay in Lorraine with us, but your father thought it might profit you to visit.”

“He was right. I think it will.”

She eyed me with a dubious frown. “I cannot see how.”

The beginnings of a smile stirred within in my heart. “It will. I know it will. I have great faith.”

THE WOMEN

Juliana's character is fictitious, but if the old stories are correct, King Charles had a natural (illegitimate) daughter quite early in his reign. If the child's mother was not Juliana, then it was someone very much like her. But by 907, King Charles was apparently free enough from romantic attachments to marry the Lotharingian, Frederuna.

Anna's character is also fictitious, but obvious deformities were considered a punishment from God during the period. Pilgrims like Anna trod the roads during the Dark Ages, visiting shrines in search of a miracle that would heal them. Records from those shrines record hundreds of miracles, some perhaps easily explained by coincidence or modern science, but others are of such an astonishing nature that “miracle” seems the only term to apply.

The queen mother, Adelaide of Paris, had many reasons to be bitter. Her husband, Louis the Stammerer, was forced to repudiate the woman whom he had secretly married at age sixteen (Ansgarde of Burgundy, who was
twenty
years his senior and by which he had four children) in order to marry her. When Louis was crowned king, the pope refused to crown her queen. And when Louis died, a battle for the throne ensued. Ansgarde called Adelaide an adulteress, while Adelaide called Ansgarde a whore. Soap opera is a modern term, but the concept stretches back to the dawn of history. Combine the fact that Adelaide was not her husband's first choice, with the possibility that she saw her son follow in her father's footsteps, and it is little wonder the queen mother hated Juliana, who was both chosen and loved. And how ironic these patterns would assert themselves once more in the possibility of Gisele's marriage to a man who already had a wife (in the most practical sense of the word). I could not have plotted these relationships better if I had made them up!

French records don't record Gisele ever marrying Rollo, while the Norman histories do. One theory holds that Norman chroniclers confused an earlier Gisele with Rollo's Gisele. This “real” Gisele, they claim, was a daughter to an earlier king and was also married to a Dane. For centuries, the chief argument denying the existence of King Charles's Gisele has always been the age of the king. He was born in 879. At the time of his meeting with Rollo, he would only have been thirty-two. For Gisele to have been of an age to marry at that point, she would have had to have been born early in her father's teenage years. Earlier centuries, apparently, found this inconceivable, but I had no problem imagining the possibility. In any case, no one knows what happened to her after Rollo's baptism, and she figures in no genealogy from the period. If she did indeed exist, she would have been a natural daughter conceived from a relationship Charles had as a youth.

THE MEN

It might surprise you, as it surprised me, that Frankish kings weren't French at all. They were German. If there was any capital during those troubled times, it was not in Paris. It was to Charlemagne's old palace in Aachen that King Charles the Simple aspired. In the interest of not confusing the narrative of the story by recounting the tumultuous politics of the time, I simplified the tale of Charles's ascension to the throne. Suffice to say that Charles had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It's unfortunate King Charles III has come down through history to us with the moniker “The Simple.” He was straightforward, honest, and sincere, but he was not stupid. With a fractured empire and numerous enemies—Magyar invaders approaching from the east, Danes from the north, and the threat of Saracens ever constant in the south—it was impossible to fight on all sides at once. And Charles did not just want to preserve the kingdom he had been left; he wanted to restore it to the glorious empire created by Charlemagne. He let his nobles defend the edges of the empire, and then he did what many men in similar situations have done: he made a bargain with the devil. And he followed a pattern well established in the ancient world by seeking to seal the agreement through the irrevocable bonds of marriage.

Charles achieved what previous kings had not: he reunited Charlemagne's beloved kingdom of Lotharingia with his own kingdom of West Francia. He must have considered that year of 912 a good omen of things to come. After having been crowned King of Lorraine, he moved his court and his entire attention to its affairs. But as he rode away from Rollo's baptism in Rouen, he had unknowingly given away his destiny. The future of Europe lay not with him but with Rollo, the father of the future dukes of Normandy, and young Hugh, father of the future Capetian kings. The bargains Charles made and had been forced into allowed his nobles to build empires of their own, which would not be surrendered until a painstaking reconsolidation undertaken by a later dynasty of kings.

In 922, nobles who were tired of King Charles's obvious affection for the Lotharingians gave his crown to Robert, the Count of Paris. In 923, with the support of the Normans, King Charles was captured in battle as he fought to retake his throne. He was literally left to rot in a prison and died there in 929. His only truly loyal retainer of that period turned out to be Rollo, who fought faithfully against every advance by the Count of Paris against King Charles's kingdom.

Originally Viking denoted an excursion, not a people. From their homeland in current Scandinavia, sometimes men would go on a viking, sailing off to foreign lands, seeking gold and treasure as they sowed fear in the hearts of people everywhere. For centuries, they were known as Danes. But this designation was not technical. Danes during that period might have come from Denmark or Sweden or Norway. In fact, the actual nationality of Rollo (as well as his lineage and his very name) is still debated. Rollo's descendants became the dukes of Normandy, and his great-great-great-grandson William became known as the Conqueror in 1066. Perhaps most ironic of all, Rollo became a relic collector himself. He was not, however, a convincing convert to Christianity. Legend has it he ordered the beheading of one hundred Christian men upon his death bed.

Robert had many titles: Count of Poitiers, Marquess of Neustria and Orléans, and Count of Paris. Later, he took the crown from Charles the Simple and gave himself the title Robert I. For the sake of simplicity and consistency, I chose to refer to him as the Count of Paris. His brother, Odo, also Count of Paris and Marquess of Neustria, had been appointed King of France during Charles's minority but refused to relinquish the throne without a fight. The agreement between the two rival kings left Robert with Odo's lands, but bereft of the royal crown.

The boy, Hugh, may very well have been in love with Princess Gisele, as he fancied himself to be. His father, Robert, Count of Paris, took the crown from King Charles in 922. When Robert died, just a short year later, the throne was offered to Hugh, his son. He refused it, and it was given to his brother-in-law (his sister's husband, the Duke of Burgundy) instead. And when that king died in 936, Hugh was instrumental in bringing Gisele's half brother, Louis d'Outremer, to France to claim the throne. Though he and Louis subsequently had a falling out, after the king's death, Hugh was the first noble to support Louis's son, Lothair. What better reward, then, for a faithful subject to become the founder of a royal dynasty himself. Hugh's son was Hugh Capet, from whom sprang the Capetian kings that shaped the destiny of modern France.

As so, we come to Andulf. What can I say about this knight who was so noble and true, but that he, more than any other character in the novel, was a product of my imagination? During that time of tumult and turmoil, there were no knights in shining armor. There were no castles as we think of them today, and there was no code of chivalry. There was only survival. If you imagine the world existing within the decaying moldering ruins of ancient Rome, you are closer to a picture of the times than if you read a fairy tale. The story of woe he recounted to the princess, however, was true. If you read
Handbook
for
William
by Dhuoda, you will hear, in his mother's own words, the tragic tale of his family, and you will discover just how closely faith was woven into daily life. Though it was written a generation before the events in this book, and though more than a thousand years have passed since the words were first penned, you can hear the longing and the fear and the pride of a woman who sought to give her two sons all of the wisdom she could think of. She probably never saw her youngest son after he was wrenched from her arms shortly after his birth.

Chroniclers of this age were few, and there are no contemporary histories that remain from the late ninth and early tenth centuries. Those who later recorded the events sometimes relied on unproven oral histories or bent the facts to fit their biases. Some historians of this period claim relationships between historical figures, which other historians take great pains to disprove. And while some ancient records are quite clear on the existence of certain people, other records claim the same person never existed at all. This period is rife with kings named Louis and Charles and usurpers named Robert, all of whom played a part in the dismantling of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire. Any given name from the period might be referenced in modern histories by three or four different spellings (Latin, Frankish, Germanic, and old English) according to the author's preference. Place names sometimes suffer a similar fate.

I went cross-eyed tracing family trees, trying to figure out who was related to whom and to what sort of degree. Like nearly everything about the Dark Ages, family lines are rather obscure, with genealogies sometimes skipping entire generations and mixing up those of the same name but of different eras, for who knows what reason, which quite vexingly leads to claims of relationships that are ridiculous upon further investigation.

One thing is clear: the great Charlemagne left many descendants, both legitimate and illegitimate. It was not unheard of for second or third cousins to marry in that tightly knit court, and what might merely raise eyebrows in our time would have been scandalous in an age that would not tolerate marriage within seven degrees of kinship. (Which simply means the bride and groom could not share a great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent.) I hope you will understand—and quite possibly sympathize!—when I admit that when I did not know for certain, I cherry-picked the facts I wanted, or I made things up where they didn't exist. I only hope for those not acquainted with the era that my fiction mixes seamlessly with the historical record.

In one of those strange coincidences that sometimes befall historical writers, after I had decided which saint should be the focus of Anna's pilgrimage and which part of her body I wanted the reliquary to hold, I discovered that Saint Catherine's finger was in fact brought to Rouen in the eleventh century. It was placed in an abbey that sat atop a hill on the east side of the city. Though the abbey was destroyed in the fifteenth century, the hill is still called by Saint Catherine's name. In the fifteenth century, Saint Catherine was one of the saints who urged Joan of Arc to fight the English, and it was in Rouen where Joan was tried and executed for heresy.

Although in the modern age wolves are not generally known to attack people, the Middle Ages recorded many accounts of wolves preying upon people. With all of the famines and diseases and wars that swept the continent, generations of wolves were raised to believe humans were easy prey. And although no bears currently exist in Europe, there were plenty back then.

Poland Syndrome, exhibited by a deformed hand and an underdeveloped breast on the same side of the body, was named for the doctor who documented it in 1841, but it must have existed for centuries before that. Xylophagia is the type of Pica disorder describing those who eat paper or wood. Pica can be exhibited in children who have developmental disorders or who have been neglected. Tourette's Syndrome, while commonly envisioned as a person uttering profanities at inappropriate moments, more often manifests itself in uncontrollable behaviors, like the young lord's. Arm flapping is a classic symptom of autism spectrum disorders. Children with Down's syndrome often repeat or mimic words or sounds. That the abbey at Rochemont found itself the guardian of children exhibiting these sorts of behaviors would not have been uncommon. All of these disorders would have made children unfit for normal life, and therefore unwanted, during the period. Marked malformation of the body was often viewed as a judgment from God or as a punishment for a grievous sin. Still, in contrast to the region's pagan religions, Western Christian culture actively organized care for those who could not care for themselves.