“Antagonize him?” Eleanor said sweetly. “He had me imprisoned at Chinon, Bishop. Nor did I hear your voice amongst those raised against it.”
She signaled to the men behind Rowley, and they began dragging him out.
As they reached the doorway, she said clearly, “You are Henry Plantagenet’s man, Saint Albans. Always were, always will be.”
“And yours, lady,” he shouted back. “And God’s.” They heard him swearing at his captors bumping him down the stairs. The sound became fainter. There was a silence like the dust-settling quiet that comes after a building has crashed to the ground.
Schwyz had stayed behind. “The schweinhund is right that we should leave, lady.”
The queen ignored him; she was circling, agitated, muttering to herself. Shrugging resignation, Schwyz went away.
“He’d never hurt you, lady,” Adelia said. “Don’t hurt him.”
“Don’t love him,” the queen snapped back.
I don’t, I won’t. Just don’t hurt him.
“Let me take out his eyes, my queen.”
Montignard was breathing hard. “He would assassinate you with that demon.”
“Of course he wouldn’t,” Eleanor said—and Adelia let out a breath of relief. “Rowley told the truth. That woman, Dampers ... I had inquiries made, and it is well known she was mad for her mistress, ugh. Even now, she would kill me ten times over.”
“Really?” Montignard was intrigued. “They were Sapphos?”
The queen continued to circle. “Am I a killer of whores, Monty? What can they accuse me of next?”
The courtier bent and picked up the hem of her cloak to kiss it. “You are the blessed Angel of Peace come to Bethlehem again.”
It made her smile. “Well, well, we can do nothing more until the Young King and the abbot arrive.” From downstairs came the sound of furniture being overturned and the slamming of shutters. “What is Schwyz doing down there?”
“He puts archers at each window ready to defend. He is afraid the king will come.”
The queen shook her head indulgently, as if at overenthusiastic children. “Even Henry can’t travel fast in this weather. God kept the snow off for me, now he sends it to impede the king. Well then, I shall stay here in this chamber until my son comes.” She looked toward Adelia. “You too, yes?”
“Madam, with your permission I shall join the—”
“No, no. God has sent you to me as a talisman.”
Eleanor smiled quite beautifully. “You will stay here with me and”—she walked over to the body and snatched off its covering cloak—“together we shall watch Fair Rosamund rot.”
So they did.
What Adelia remembered of that night afterward were the hour-long silences when she and the queen were alone—apart from Montignard, who fell asleep—and during which Eleanor of Aquitaine sat, untiring, her back straight as a plumb line, eyes directed at the body of the woman her husband had loved.
She also remembered, though with disbelief, that at one point a young courtier with a lute came in and strolled about the chamber, singing winsomely in the langue d’oc, and that, after receiving no response from his queen and even less from the corpse, he wandered out again.
And the heat. Adelia remembered the heat of the braziers and a hundred candle flames. At one point, she begged for relief. “May we not open a window for a minute, madam?” It was like being in a pottery kiln.
“No.”
So Adelia, the lucky charm, privileged by her status as God-sent savior to royalty, sat in its presence, crouching on the floor with her cloak under her while the queen, still in her furs, sat and watched a corpse.
Eleanor’s eyes left it only when they brought the brandy, and Adelia, instead of drinking the spirit, tipped it over the cut in her hand and took a needle and silk thread from the traveling pack of instruments in her pocket.
“Who taught you to cleanse with brandy?” Eleanor wanted to know. “I use twice-distilled Bordeaux myself ... Oh, here, I shall do it.” Tutting at Adelia’s attempt to stitch the wound together with her left hand, she took the needle and thread and did it instead, putting in seven ligatures where Adelia herself would have used only five, thus making a neater, if more painful, job of it. “We who went on Crusade had to learn to treat the wounded, there were so many,” she said briskly.
Most of them caused by the ineptitude of the King of France, its leader, according to Rowley, after his own, much later, time in the Holy Land.
Not that the Church had condemned Louis for it, preferring instead to dwell on the scandal Eleanor, then his queen, had caused by insisting on going with him and taking with her a train of similarly adventurous females.
“Born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards, that lady,” Rowley had said of her, not without admiration. “Her and her Amazons. And an affair with Uncle Raymond of Toulouse when she arrived in Antioch. What a woman.”
Something of that daring remained; her very presence here showed as much, but time, thought Adelia, had twisted it into desperation.
“Is that ... urgh.” Adelia wished to be brave, but the queen was plying the needle with more skill than gentleness. “Was that where you learned . . . how to thread a maze? In the ... oofff ... East?” For there was no sign that Eleanor had spent as much time blundering around Wormhold’s hedges as she and the others had.
“My lady,” insisted the queen.
“My lady.”
“It was, yes. The Saracen is skilled in such devices, as in so much else. I have no doubt your bishop also learned the trick of it from the East. Rowley went there on my orders ... a long time ago.” Her voice had softened. “He took the sword of my dead little son to Jerusalem and laid it on Christ’s own altar.”
Adelia was comforted; the bond between Eleanor and Rowley made by that vicarious crusade went deep. It might be stretched to its limit in present circumstances, but it still held. The queen had taken him prisoner; she wouldn’t allow him to be killed.
She’s a mother, Adelia thought. She’ll let me go back to my baby. There would be an opportunity to ask for that when she and the queen were better acquainted. In the meantime, she still had to learn all she could about Rosamund’s murder. Eleanor hadn’t ordered it. Who had?
Taper light had been kinder to the queen than the blazing illumination around them now. Elegance was there and always would be, so was the lovely, pale skin that went with auburn hair, now hidden, but wrinkles were puckering at her mouth and the tight, gauze wimple around her face did not quite hide the beginning of sagging flesh under the chin. Slender, yes, fine bones, yes. Yet there was another sag above the point where a jeweled belt encircled her hips.
No wonder, either. Two daughters by her first husband, Louis of France, and, since their divorce, eight more children from her marriage to Henry Plantagenet, five of them sons.
Ten babies. Adelia thought of what carrying Allie had done to her own waistline. She’s a marvel to look as she does.
There wouldn’t be any more, though; even if king and queen had not been estranged, Eleanor must now be, what, fifty years old?
And Henry probably not yet forty.
“There,” the queen said, and bit through the needle end of the silk now holding Adelia’s palm together. Producing an effusion of lace that served her as a handkerchief, she bound it efficiently round Adelia’s hand and tied it with a last, painful tug.
“I am grateful, my lady,” Adelia said in earnest. But Eleanor had returned to her watch, her eyes on the corpse.
Why? Adelia wondered. Why this profane vigil? It’s beneath you.
The woman had escaped from a castle in the Loire Valley, had traveled through her husband’s hostile territory gathering followers and soldiers as she went, had crossed the Channel and slipped into southern England. All this to get to an isolated tower in Oxfordshire. And in winter. True, most of the journey had obviously been made before the roads became as impassable as they now were—to arrive at the tower, she must have been ca
mped not far away. Nevertheless, it was a titanic journey that had tired out everybody but Eleanor herself. For what? To gloat over her rival?
But, Adelia thought, the enemy is vanquished, petrified into a winter version of Sodom and Gomorrah’s block of salt.
An assassination has been thwarted by me and an Eleanorpreserving God. Rosamund turns out to have been fat. All this is sufficient, surely, to satisfy any lust for revenge.
But not the queen’s, obviously; she must sit here and enjoy the vanquished one’s decomposition. Why?
It wasn’t because she’d envied the younger mistress the ability to still bear children. Rosamund hadn’t had any.
Nor was it as if Rosamund had been the only royal paramour. Henry swived more women than most men had hot dinners. “Literally, a father to his people,” Rowley had said of him once, with pride.
It was what kings did, almost an obligation, a duty—in Henry’s case, a pleasure—to his realm’s fertility.
To make the damn crops grow, Adelia thought sourly. Yet Eleanor’s own ducal ancestors themselves had encouraged the growth of acres of Aquitanian crops in their time; she’d been brought up not to expect marital fidelity. Indeed, when she’d had it, wedded to the praying, monkish King Louis, she’d been so bored she’d petitioned for divorce.
And hadn’t she obliged Henry by taking one of his bastards into her household and rearing him? Young Geoffrey, born of a London prostitute, was proving devoted and useful to his father; Rowley had a greater regard for him than for any of the king’s four remaining legitimate sons.
Rosamund, only Rosamund, had inspired a hatred that raised the heat of this awful room, as if Eleanor’s body was pumping it across the chamber so that the flesh of the woman opposite would putrefy quicker.
Was it that Rosamund had lasted longer than the others, that the king had shown her more favor, a deeper love?
No, Adelia said to herself. It was the letters. Menopausal as Eleanor was, she’d believed their message: Another woman was being groomed to take her place; in both love and status, she was being overthrown.
If it had been Eleanor who’d poisoned Rosa-mund, it was tit for tat. In her own way, Rosamund had poisoned Eleanor.
Yet Rowley had been right: This queen hadn’t murdered anybody.
There was no proof of it, of course. Nothing that would absolve her. The killing had been plotted at long range; people would say she had ordered it while she was still in France. There was nothing to scotch the rumor—apart from Eleanor’s own word.
But it wasn’t her style. Rowley had said so, and Adelia now agreed with him. If Eleanor had engineered it, she would have wanted to be present when it happened. This curiously naïve, horrible overseeing of her rival’s disintegration was to compensate her for not having been there to enjoy the last throes.
But damn it, I don’t have to witness it with you. All at once, Adelia was overwhelmed by the obscenity of the situation. She was tired, and her hand stung like fire; she wanted her child. Allie would be missing her.
She stood up. “Lady, it is not healthy for you to be here. Let us go downstairs.”
The queen looked past her.
“Then I will,” Adelia said.
She walked to the door, skirting Montignard, who was snoring on the floor. Two spears clashed as they crossed, blocking the doorway in front of her; the first man-at-arms had been reinforced by another.
“Let me by,” she said.
“You want to piss, use a pot,” one of the men said, grinning.
Adelia returned to Eleanor. “I am not your subject, lady. My king is William of Sicily.”
The queen’s eyes remained on Rosamund.
Adelia gritted her teeth, fighting desperation.
This is not the way. If I’m to see Allie again, I must be calm, make this woman trust me.
After a while, followed by her dog, Adelia began circling the chamber, not looking for a way out— there was none—but using this trapped time to find out where Dakers had hidden herself.
It couldn’t have been under the bed or Ward would have sniffed her out; he didn’t have the finest nose in the world, it being somewhat overwhelmed by his own scent, but he wouldn’t have missed that.
Apart from the bed, the room contained a prie-dieu, smaller than the one in the bishop’s room at Saint Albans but as richly carved. Three enormous chests were stuffed with clothes.
A small table held a tray that had been brought in for the queen’s supper: a chicken, veal pie, a cheese, a loaf—somewhat mildewed—dried figs, a jug of ale, and a stoppered bottle of wine. Eleanor hadn’t touched it. Adelia, who’d last eaten at the nunnery, sliced heavily into the chicken and gave some to Ward. She drank the ale to satisfy her thirst and took a glass of wine with her to sip as she explored.
An aumbry contained pretty bottles and phials with labels: Rose oyl. Swete violet. Rasberrie vinigar for to whiten teeth. Oyle of walnut to smooth the hands. Nearly all were similarly cosmetic, though Adelia noted that Rosamund had suffered from breathing problems—I’m not surprised, with your weight—and had taken elecampane for it.
The bed took up more of the center of the room than was necessary by standing a foot or so out from the wall. Behind it was a tapestry depicting the Garden of Eden—obviously a favorite subject, because there was another, a better one, on the same theme on the easterly wall between two of the windows.
Going closer, so that she stood between the bed and the hanging, Adelia felt a blessed coolness.
The tapestry was old and heavy; the considerable draft emerging from underneath it did not cause it to shift. Where in the one on the other wall Adam and Eve sported in joyful movement, here cruder needlework stood them opposite each other amid unlikely trees, as frozen as poor Rosamund herself. The only depiction of liveliness was in the coiling green toils of the serpent—and even that was moth-eaten.
Adelia went closer; the chill increased.
There was a small gap in the canvas where the snake’s eye should have been—and it wasn’t the moth that had caused it. It had been deliberately made; there was buttonhole stitching round its edges.
A spy hole.
She had to exert some strength to push the hanging aside. Icy air came rushing out at her, and a stale smell. What she saw was a tiny room, corbeled into the tower’s wall. Rosamund hadn’t had to use chamber pots; hers was the luxury of a garderobe. Set into a curved bench of polished wood was a bottom-shaped, velvet-lined hole over a drop to the ground some hundred feet below. Soap in the shape of a rose lay in a holder next to a little golden ewer. A bowl within hand’s reach contained substantial wipes of lamb’s wool.
Good for Rosamund. Adelia approved of garderobes, as long as the pit beneath them was dug out regularly; they saved maidservants having to go up and down stairs carrying, and often slopping, noisome containers.
She was not so enamored of the mural painted on the plastered walls; its eroticism being more suited to a bordello than to a privy, but perhaps Rosamund had enjoyed looking at it while she sat there, and undoubtedly Henry Plantagenet would have. Although, come to think of it, had even he been aware of the existence of the garderobe and its spy hole?
Adelia moved behind the tapestry so that she could apply her eye to the hole—and found that she could see right down the bed to the writing desk and the window beyond.
Here, then, was where Dakers had concealed herself and—unpleasant thought—had watched her, Adelia, at her investigations. What patience and what stamina to endure the cold; only fury inspired at seeing Eleanor snatch the crown off her mistress’s head had impelled her out of it.
But the careful stitching around the peephole indicated that tonight wasn’t the only time somebody had employed their time looking through it.
It would have been invited guests who’d ventured up to this floor—it was an English custom for the higher classes to entertain in their bedrooms. If Dakers had spied on them, she would have to have taken up position in the garderobe— with Rosam
und’s permission and knowledge.
To watch the guests? The king? The bed and its activities?
Speculation opened an avenue that Adelia did not want to explore, still less the relationship between mistress and housekeeper.
To hell with the queen’s permission; she needed to breathe clean air. She slid herself out from under the hanging. Eleanor appeared not to have noticed. Adelia went to the nearest window, lifted the lattices’ catch, pulled it inward, and pushed the shutters open. Kicking a footstool into position, she stood on it and leaned out.
The bitter night sky crackled with stars. Peering downward to the ground, she saw scattered watch fires with armed men moving around them.
Oh, God, if they’re putting brushwood around the tower’s base ... if a breeze comes up and blows a spark from one of the fires ...
She and Eleanor were at the top of a chimney.
That was enough fresh air. Shivering, not merely from the cold, Adelia closed the shutters. In doing so, she put too much weight on one side of the footstool and returned to the floor in a noisy scramble.
Glancing at the queen, expecting a rebuke, she wondered if Eleanor was in a trance; the queen’s eyes had not shifted from Rosamund. From his position on the floor, Montignard kicked out, muttered, and then continued to snore.
Adelia bent down to replace the footstool and saw that its marquetry top had come adrift, revealing that it was, in fact, the lid of a box on legs. There were documents inside. She scooped them out and returned to her former place on the floor at the other side of the bed to read them.
Letters again, half a dozen or more, all of them addressed to Eleanor, all purporting to have been written by Rosamund, yet in the same hand as the one Adelia had put into her boot.
Each had the same jeering superscription and, in this light, she was able to read what followed; it was not always the same in every letter, but the inherent message was repeated over and over.
“Today did my lord king sport with me and tell me of his adoration ...” “My lord king has this moment left my bed ...” “He speaks of his divorce from you with longing ...” “... the Pope will look kindly on divorce on the grounds of your treachery to my lord king in that you do inflame his sons against him.” “... the arrangements for my coronation at Winchester and Rouen.” “... my lord king will announce to the English who is their true queen.”