Time and Chance

  There was no time to explain herself. Jordan and Renée would have to take her on trust. As Will’s stallion had outdistanced his pursuers, her brain had been racing, too, weighing her options. Even if they could elude these men, they were too far from Poitiers, would never make it back. Thank the Blessed Lady Mary that these were her lands! She’d grown up here, hunted as a girl in these woods, knew the roads and rivers and trails as well as any poacher. Their only possible refuge was the castle at Lusignan. But a return to the Poitiers Road would be madness, would result in their capture straightaway.

  Jordan’s face was flushed with exertion; he was no longer in the prime of youth. Renée was perching precariously on her sidesaddle and Eleanor spared a moment to damn the fools who’d decreed that women should not ride astride. Renée’s veil and wimple were gone, ripped off by an overhanging branch, and there was a smear of blood on her cheek. Eleanor knew, though, that the girl had courage. She’d need it; they all would. She gestured silently to her left and turned her stallion in that direction. Jordan and Renée exchanged baffled looks, but they followed after her without hesitation.

  It was slow going. Like threading a needle, Eleanor thought, and she’d never been one for ladylike pastimes. A laugh welled up in the back of her throat and she quickly suppressed it, recognizing the symptoms, for this was not the first time she’d faced physical danger. Fear could breed an odd sort of excitement, an emotional rush that had something of the giddiness and caprice usually bottled in wine casks. She ducked under a jutting tree limb, but not in time; it snagged her veil. They were leaving a trail a blind man could follow, but that was the least of her worries at the moment. If her memories were false, they’d be ridden down soon enough, anyway. She resolutely refused to dwell upon that possibility, and soon thereafter her faith was rewarded by the glimpse of a familiar oak tree, splintered and seared by lightning, towering above the spring greenery like a pale, timbered tomb. This time Eleanor did not stifle her laugh. Beckoning to Jordan and Renée, she forged ahead and within moments had emerged onto a woodland path, narrow and winding, but to Eleanor as welcome a sight as the widest of the king’s highways.

  The wind carried to them the distant sounds of male voices, hunters tracking their quarry with too much confidence for stealth. She could understand their cockiness, their certainty that she’d soon be so mired down in the heavy brush that she’d be easily overtaken. They would stumble onto the path, too, but she knew she was less than a mile now from safety. The odds were even, and she’d never asked for more than that.

  The ground was too irregular to let their horses run full out. They urged the animals forward as fast as they dared, and suddenly the woodland canopy blocking the sun was gone and they were emerging into a blaze of light. The Vonne’s placid surface gleamed like a polished looking glass, and shimmering ahead in the heat was the hilltop town of Lusignan. It lay in a horseshoe curve of the river, and Eleanor felt a grudging admiration for her husband’s military skills; the castle looked well nigh invincible and yet Harry had taken it in less than a week.

  “Listen to me,” she told her companions. “I suspect there are men in hiding, watching for our approach. I’d wager my chances of salvation that the de Lusignans are the ones on our trail. If I’m right, they’ll have remembered that this forest track cuts through the woods to the castle. By now they’ll have sent scouts to wait for us. They’ll be out of sight, not wanting to alert the garrison. But as soon as they see us, they’ll have nothing left to lose.”

  Jordan’s beard and hair were incongruously seeded with flecks of torn foliage, but his smile never faltered. “So it’s a race, is it?” he said, and Eleanor nodded. Renée was ashen. She offered a smile, too, though, or at least a game imitation of one, and Eleanor gave her an encouraging look, then assured them there was a shallow ford just ahead.

  Leaving the cover of the woods, they had gone only a short distance before horsemen came bursting out of hiding, closer than Eleanor had expected. Giving Will’s stallion his head, she raced for the river. He slackened speed only slightly as he splashed down the bank, and she blessed the young knight’s foresight; her own mare was skittish around water. She heard a choked scream from Renée, but the girl was on her own now; they all were.

  Risking a glance over her shoulder, she was sorry she had, for their pursuers were only a few yards behind. A spear struck the water to her right. If that was an attempt to intimidate her into giving up, it was a waste of good weaponry. As her stallion scrambled to shore, a flock of arrows flew over her head, but these shafts had been launched from the walls of the castle. She could see faces peering over the battlements and she opened her mouth to demand entry, but there was no need. A postern gate was opening. She asked her stallion for one final burst of speed and he surged forward, galloping through the gate into the bailey.

  Reining him in, she turned in the saddle, just in time to see the gate slamming shut behind Jordan and Renée. Men were crowding around her, shouting questions, asking if she’d been attacked by bandits, if there were others in danger, any deaths. Eleanor waited until she got her breath back, and by then, someone recognized her. An incredulous cry went up: “The queen!”

  Hands reached up to her and she slid from the saddle. The faces surrounding her were so alarmed, so solicitous that she thought she must look like the Wrath of God. Jordan shoved his way toward her, a supportive arm around a stumbling Renée. If she was as disheveled and wet and dirtied as they were, no wonder these men were staring at her as if doubting their own senses. “Where is your castellan?” She was still somewhat breathless but pleased by the level tones of her voice.

  “Madame!” A path was clearing for him. He was one of her husband’s handpicked constables. She could only hope that he was as capable as Harry thought him to be, for there was no time to lose. Stilling his questions with an upraised hand, she told him, as concisely and quickly as possible, what had happened and her belief that the de Lusignans were the ones behind the ambush. He at once put the castle on a war watch in the unlikely event that the de Lusignans should launch an attack upon Lusignan itself. He then led the rescue mission himself and that, too, won him favor with Eleanor. Only then did she let them escort her into the hall.

  Renée gratefully accepted the assistance of the castellan’s wife, but Eleanor declined. She had her share of vanity, as most beautiful women do, but washing her face or tending to scratches and bruises seemed of small matter, as long as the fate of her men remained unknown. It was only when she noticed that her skirt was ripped from waist to hem that she agreed to change into clothes provided by the Lady Emma. As soon as possible, she returned to the great hall, where she interrogated the garrison until she found a man who seemed reliable and dispatched him to Poitiers with a terse letter in her own hand. After that, there was nothing she could do but wait.

  The two hours they were gone seemed interminable to Eleanor. Jordan and a still visibly shaken Renée had joined her vigil by now. Unfortunately, so had the Lady Emma, and in no time at all, she was rubbing Eleanor’s nerves raw with her well-meaning, smothering attentions.

  Eleanor understood her agitation, even her compulsive need to play the lady of the manor, offering every hospitality to England’s queen, Aquitaine’s duchess. But the last thing she wanted was to commiserate with Emma about “the outrage,” as the castellan’s wife kept calling it. Jordan finally took Emma aside and, as politely as possible, explained that the queen had faced down bandits before. She had been in a caravan attacked by the Saracens; she had thwarted several attempts at abduction by would-be suitors; her ship had even been captured by the fleet of the Emperor of Byzantium, rescued in the nick of time by the King of Sicily’s galleys. Emma listened, openmouthed, to this recital. Agreeing meekly that the queen’s earlier experiences were indeed more harrowing than this encounter with the de Lusignans, she promised to say no more of the unfortunate events of the day, at least not in the queen’s hearing. Jordan sighed with relief, grateful that he’d ave
rted bloodshed at least once today.

  The castellan and his men returned at dusk, bearing a body wrapped in a blanket and grim word for Eleanor. They’d arrived too late to be of help, had found only the corpses of the dead and a few men too badly wounded to be worth carrying off. He was bringing the injured back by horse litter, but he held little hope for their recovery. They’d need an ox-cart to retrieve the other bodies, but out of respect, he’d brought back the remains of my lord Salisbury.

  Eleanor watched bleakly as the body was carried into the castle chapel. When the priest gently pulled away the blanket, she gazed down for some moments into the earl’s face, and then made the sign of the cross.

  “My lord Raymond?”

  The castellan turned at once. “Madame?”

  “The earl had a nephew with him, a young knight named William Marshal. Was he amongst the wounded?”

  “No, Madame,” he said quietly. “But it may be that he was amongst those taken prisoner. God grant it so.”

  Eleanor nodded somberly and they walked in silence from the chapel. Outside, the sky had begun to darken. This accursed Wednesday in Easter Week was at last coming to an end. But she did not yet know how many men had bought her freedom with their blood.

  HENRY HAD NEVER BEEN so exhausted in all his life. Upon getting word of the attack upon Eleanor, he had immediately broken off talks with the French king and raced south. By skimping on sleep and changing horses frequently, he and his men had reached Poitiers a full day before anyone expected him. But almost from the moment of his arrival, nothing had gone right.

  With an effort, he fought back a yawn. His head was throbbing, his eyes red-rimmed from the dust of the road, and he doubted that there was a single muscle in his entire body that was not aching. He wanted nothing so much as a few uninterrupted hours of sleep now that he knew Eleanor was indeed unharmed, but instead he found himself presiding over the high table in the palace’s great hall, having had time only for a brief, unsatisfactory reunion with Eleanor and a quick wash-up. Even Henry’s careless disregard for protocol would not permit him to miss this solemn meal of mourners. Just two hours before his arrival, Patrick d’Evereaux, Earl of Salisbury, had been laid to rest in Poitiers’s church of St Hilary, far from the mausoleum in Wiltshire where his kindred were buried.

  The Countess of Salisbury had been given a seat of honor on Eleanor’s left. She looked wan and weary, but she’d always struck Henry as a very competent, no-nonsense kind of woman, and he expected her to cope with her husband’s death as capably as she had life’s other crises. For a moment, his gaze rested upon his own wife, regal in black. Wearing dark colors for mourning was essentially a Spanish custom, but once word spread that Eleanor had worn black for the Earl of Salisbury, Henry felt certain that it would become the fashion at funerals throughout Aquitaine, Normandy, and France.

  Eleanor looked tired, too; the powder she’d applied with a skillful hand could not quite camouflage the shadows hovering under her eyes. But with him, she’d been infuriatingly offhand, almost dismissive of her ordeal, brushing aside his concern for her emotional well-being, acting as if her physical safety was all that mattered. He knew better than most that the mind could be wounded by violence as easily as the body; he’d seen hardened soldiers haunted by battlefield memories, and he assumed that women would be far more susceptible than men to dark thoughts and dreads. Eleanor would have none of it, though, refusing to admit her fears even to him. He’d been irritated by her bravado, reminding her that it was well and good to assume an air of public sangfroid but hardly necessary in the privacy of their bedchamber. But he’d gotten only an unfathomable look from the depths of those greenish hazel eyes, a shrug, and a murmured, “I do not know what you want me to say, Harry . . . truly.”

  Nor had his edgy, irascible mood been improved any by the presence of Eleanor’s uncle, Raoul de Faye. The younger brother of Eleanor’s late mother, Raoul was about ten years older than Eleanor, with a handsome head of silver hair, snapping dark eyes, and a cultivated air of jaded world liness that Henry had encountered all too often in Aquitaine. There was an obvious fondness between uncle and niece, and Eleanor seemed to respect his political judgment. Henry thought that was unfortunate, for he most definitely did not. Raoul was no admirer of his, either, and the tension between the two men sputtered and flared even on so somber an occasion as this. Eleanor’s constable, Saldebreuil de Sanzay, was seated at the high table, too, as well as a number of other familiar faces, all vassals of Eleanor’s, including a few whose loyalties he considered suspect. Eleanor appeared to be doing exactly what he’d asked of her—mending fences with the volatile Poitevin barons, soothing ruffled feathers, healing bruised pride as only a woman could. So why was he not better pleased with her efforts?

  Henry was so caught up in these brooding thoughts that he did not hear the Bishop of Poitiers’s query and had to ask the cleric to repeat the question, one which only reminded him of the many reasons he had to be wroth with the meddling King of France. For all that people talked of Louis’s piety as if he were almost saintly, Henry did not consider shiftiness to be a virtue.

  “Yes, my lord bishop, you heard right,” he said tersely. “The Count of Angoulême has sought refuge in Paris. The French king is getting into the habit of making rebels and malcontents welcome at his court.” And although he was speaking ostensibly of the fugitive count, he was actually thinking of Thomas Becket, Canterbury’s exiled archbishop.

  The rest of the meal passed without incident, aside from an embarrassing mishap by Henry and Eleanor’s son Geoffrey, who tripped and lurched into one of the trestle tables, overturning wine cups into laps and splattering gravy over the fine clothes of several unhappy guests. Geoffrey flushed to his hairline with humiliation, and Henry felt pity stir, remembering a similar accident from his own boyhood, this one involving a dropped soup tureen. Even the offspring of the highborn were taught by doing, and boys were expected to wait upon tables in the great hall as part of their lessons in courtesy and etiquette. Geoffrey had learned little this day but mortification, though, and as Henry’s eyes met Eleanor’s, they shared a brief moment of parental solicitude.

  Leaning closer so her voice would carry to Henry’s ear alone, she murmured, “I know what Scriptures say about pride going before a fall, but must it be out in the full glare of public scrutiny? At least Richard sought to cheer him up; you did notice that? Too much of the time they are squabbling like bad-tempered badgers. It is heartening to see that they can close ranks when need be.”

  Henry wasn’t as sure of what he’d seen as Eleanor. There had been a brief exchange of words between the boys, as she said, and he supposed Richard could have been offering sympathy. But if so, Geoffrey was an utter ingrate, for he’d responded with a look of loathing. He kept his suspicions to himself, for he had nothing to go on except sour memories of his rivalry with his own brother. Remembering, too, his father’s feuding with his uncle Helie, he said softly, “The House of Anjou could give Cain and Abel lessons in brotherly strife. Let’s hope our lads take after your side of the family.”

  Reaching across the tablecloth, he clasped her hand in his. “Are you truly sure you are all right, Eleanor? This I can promise you, that Guy and Geoffrey de Lusignan will come to look upon death as their deliverance.”

  What was most chilling about his statement was that it was said so matter-of-factly. Eleanor did not doubt that he meant to wreak a terrible vengeance upon the de Lusignans, and the thought of their suffering did ease some of her rage and grief over the deaths of her men. She merely nodded, though, for her throat was suddenly too tight for speech. It hurt more than she could endure, this sudden glimpse of what had once been hers and was forever lost. Discussing their children and their mutual mortal enemies, she could not help remembering a time when they’d been in perfect harmony, allies as well as consorts, hungering after empires and dynasties and each other, their aspirations and ambitions as entwined as oak and ivy, impossible to separate one f
rom the other without destroying both.

  WILLIAM MARSHAL’S SLEEP was shallow and fretful, the grim realities of his captivity clawing insistently at his dreams, seeking admittance to his last refuge. When he turned over, pain lanced through his leg, jarring him to full wakefulness. He lay very still, willing the throbbing to stop. The air was musty, and with each breath, he inhaled the familiar, foul odors of straw and sweat and urine and manure. He remembered where he was now, chained in another stable in an unknown castle, with his only certainty that the morrow would bring fresh indignities, more miseries.

  So far he hadn’t been ill treated; the de Lusignans wanted him alive in hopes of making a profit. They were desperate for money, reduced to banditry by their failed rebellion, and had carried off all of the captured knights, save those near death. Guy and Geoffrey de Lusignan had been almost as enraged by the Earl of Salisbury’s death as they were by the queen’s escape. Will was a knight, too, and therefore he might be worth ransoming. Will had done his best to foster that belief, stressing his kinship to Earl Patrick at every opportunity. He did not expect his uncle’s widow to barter for his freedom, though. Why should she deplete her dower on his behalf? She barely knew him. The bulk of Salisbury’s estates would pass with his title to his eldest son and he was even less likely to ransom a needy young cousin. And unlike the other men seized, Will could never have afforded to ransom himself.