“Come closer, child, so I might see you.” The voice was not at all the croaking whisper Joanna had been expecting; it was clear, perfectly pitched, made her long to hear it again.
Joanna rose shyly, took the hand outstretched to her. It was hot and dry, so frail she could think only of the time she’d held a captive bird within her palms; her grandmother’s bones seemed no less fragile, to be broken by a breath. But then the fingers, long and tapering, ablaze with emerald and opal and turquoise, closed around her own, firmly, drawing her forward. For a moment she felt a cheek pressed against her own; it, too, was hot, crinkled like parchment. An exotic, beguiling fragrance perfumed the air; as her grandmother embraced her, she heard the whisper of silk. She lifted her lashes, looked into hazel eyes much like her own.
“So you are Joanna,” Eleanor said, and when she smiled, Joanna, caught like so many others before her by the potent pull of that sudden, capricious charm, gave up her heart with reckless and innocent abandon.
July skies were cloudless, shimmering metallically above vines scorched beyond renewal by the unrelenting sun. Joanna rarely ventured out into the midday heat, having adapted her habits to those of her grandmother. Eleanor was that rarity in an age of dawn-risers, a creature of the night. She flowered in those hours after dusk, not going to her bed until the world was long stilled and hushed, sleeping away the bright, hot afternoons under the soft swishing of her ladies’ fans. That was, she told Joanna, one of the advantages of age, that she could at last follow her own inner clock.
“What other advantages does age offer, Madame?”
“Precious few, child. The sweet satisfaction of outliving all my enemies, of burying my mistakes, of remembering and savoring my triumphs. Memory is merciful, Joanna, more so than man. It fades past pain, yet holds bright the colors in recalled joy.”
Joanna was not long in discovering that Eleanor’s memory was no less remarkably preserved than her small white teeth. It was rare to reach such an age without gaping blank spaces in the mouth and mind; most ancients were reduced to gruel and muddled memories in which time blurred all boundaries. But Eleanor had somehow triumphed over the vagaries of age, just as she’d somehow triumphed over the confines and constraints of womanhood. Her past was very much with her, vivid and precisely drawn, a treasure trove of memories ripe for sharing. And share them she chose to do, in those sultry summer nights when sleep would not come and her yesterdays seemed so very close, just beyond reach.
She told Joanna of her long-ago girlhood, conjured up the ghosts of her marital bed: Louis, so mild, so pious and softspoken, so utterly unlike the Angevin great-grandson of the Conqueror, the youth who’d dared to seek her out at her husband’s court, caressing her boldly with hot grey eyes as he talked of empires. “I was twenty-nine and Henry was eighteen, but more of a man than any I’d ever known, in bed or out,” Eleanor said softly, startling Joanna by the nonchalance with which she confessed to adultery, but then she gave the girl a self-mocking smile not entirely free of bitterness. “I must have loved him, in truth, else I could not have hated him so much after.”
She told Joanna of Henry’s bitter quarrel with Thomas à Becket, how Henry had sealed Becket’s doom by crying out in a fit of rage, “Will none rid me of this turbulent priest?” Told her the legend that the royal House of Plantagenet came from the Devil; told her, too, how her sons had laughed at their Angevin heritage, turning aside criticism with jests about the demon Countess of Black Fulk of Anjou.
Some of her memories were tragic: her daughter Joanna’s death in childbed at thirty-four; Richard’s foolish and fatal bravery before the walls of Châlus. Others were fraught with menace: Eleanor’s perilous journey from French territory into her own lands in Poitou after her divorce from Louis; two separate attempts had been made to ambush and abduct her, for landed women were often forced into marriage against their wills, and Eleanor was the greatest heiress in Christendom.
And some of her stories were tales of horror, none more so than that of the massacre of the Jews the year before Joanna’s birth: “Richard had forbidden all Jews to attend his coronation, but some wealthy merchants brought gifts to the banquet following. Members of his court, the worse for wine and having no liking for Jews even when sober, expelled them from the hall, and the citizens of London took this to mean all Jews in the city were fair game. Rioting broke out, the ghetto burned, and many died. Other cities were soon caught up in the same violence, as it swept like plague across the realm, but nowhere was the outbreak worse than in York. There the Jews had sought refuge in the castle keep, and when it appeared certain they’d be taken by the besieging mob, the men, women, and children trapped within, numbering in the hundreds, did kill themselves.”
Joanna, dutifully crossing herself, felt no real surprise; death seemed to follow her uncle Richard like a lover. The thought was not her own, of course, but had its seeds in a caustic comment once made by John, that Richard’s lust was sated on the battlefield, not in the bedchamber.
But in these weeks at Fontevrault, slowly another image of Richard was taking shape. Richard loomed large in his mother’s memories. From Eleanor, Joanna learned that Richard, having to withdraw from the Holy Land, denied himself even a glimpse of Jerusalem from the heights of Nebi Samwil, saying, “Those not worthy to win the Holy City are not worthy to behold it.” She learned of the celebrated exchange between Richard and Philip, the French King, over Richard’s great fortress, Castle Gaillard, Philip boasting, “If its walls were made of solid iron, yet would I take them,” and Richard’s mocking rejoinder, “If its walls were made of butter, yet would I hold them.” Richard had indeed been a great soldier, Joanna reluctantly acknowledged. But she did not understand why her grandmother should have preferred him above her other children, and wished she could summon up the nerve to ask Eleanor why she spoke so often of Richard and so rarely of John.
She never did, though, sensing that such a question would not be to Eleanor’s liking. As bedazzled as Joanna was by Eleanor, she was very much in awe of her, too, and uneasily aware of the fragile foothold she’d gained in her grandmother’s life. There was indeed iridescent magic in Eleanor’s spell, but no security. Eleanor could be amusing, indulgent, utterly captivating. She was also impatient, unpredictable, easily bored. On any given evening, Joanna might find herself welcomed into Eleanor’s presence with genuine pleasure; Eleanor would share confidences both intimate and adult in nature, tutor Joanna in the intriguing complexities of politics and statecraft, and at such moments Joanna knew happiness in full and abiding measure. But on the morrow she might find her grandmother preoccupied, pensive, with no interest whatsoever in a child’s companionship. Joanna did not resent Eleanor’s mercurial mood swings; her sense of self was too tenuous, too vulnerable, to allow for the indulgence of wounded pride. She only tried all the harder to earn her grandmother’s goodwill, and when she did not, she accepted the failing as her own.
On this particular night in late July, Eleanor was in markedly good spirits, relaxed and responsive to Joanna’s eager queries about times long past and people long dead. But as midnight approached, Joanna’s energy began to ebb; she sought to stifle a yawn, was relieved when Eleanor said, “You’d best get to bed.”
Joanna rose obediently. “May I go and light a candle first for the French Queen, Madame?”
“If you wish.” Joanna’s impassioned partisanship for Philip’s unfortunate Queen was a source of some amusement to Eleanor, but she was touched, too, suspecting that Joanna’s pity for Ingeborg’s plight could be traced to her own years of confinement, that it was the captive Eleanor whom Joanna was mourning as much as it was the hapless Ingeborg, whose luck had yet to change for the better. Philip had held out against the Pope’s Interdict for seven stubborn months, and then agreed to set aside his second wife, to recognize Ingeborg as his Queen. But he’d then confined her in Étampes Castle, and rumor had it she was not being treated kindly.
Joanna’s sympathies went out to the Danish
Princess, Queen of France in name only, being made to suffer for no sin of her own, and she’d been lighting nightly candles on Ingeborg’s behalf. Now she hastened back from St Magdalene’s chapel, stripped, and crawled into the pallet made up for her at the foot of her grandmother’s bed.
Lights still burned, and the constant murmur of conversation sounded around her; Eleanor’s ladies could not retire until she did. But Joanna had learned to block out background noises, and she fell at once into a fitful sleep. Her dreams were troubled, reflecting the tenor of her waking hours. Eleanor had recently had a letter from John, in which he’d told her that he’d broken Philip’s siege of Radepont, just ten miles southeast of Rouen. But that was the only good news the letter held. Isabelle’s father, Aymer, Count of Angoulême, had died suddenly that past month, but John had not dared to risk her attendance at the funeral; Angoulême bordered upon La Marche, and Hugh de Lusignan still nursed a bitter grudge over Isabelle’s loss.
Tossing and turning on the pallet, Joanna attracted the attention of the Abbess Matilda. Matilda was intrigued by her friend’s unexpected rapport with Joanna; she’d never before known Eleanor to show more than the most perfunctory interest in children. It was, she decided, probably because Joanna was such a serious child. The questions she asked were invariably sensible, of the sort Eleanor had always encouraged in her own daughters; she had nothing but scorn for the prevailing viewpoint that women should abjure interest in such masculine concerns as power, policy, and tactics.
Matilda was surprised, too, that Eleanor should suddenly evince a hitherto unexpressed interest in looking back, in dwelling upon yesterday; at last she attributed this to the twin crosses of age and illness, for Eleanor was not well, had not been well for months. Her spirit still blazed so brightly that those around her did not always notice how frail the shell enclosing that spirit had become. Matilda did. For all that Eleanor was fiercely private about her ailments, Matilda saw with sorrowing eyes how easily she tired in this summer of her eighth decade, how she’d begun to lean upon a companion’s arm when walking, to place a hand over her breast as if willing away the heart palpitations she’d not acknowledge. And as Matilda watched on recent evenings as Eleanor pieced together her past with the gossamer strands of memory while Joanna listened, intent and enthralled, she found herself wondering if Eleanor was not reaching out to right a wrong, seeing in this hazel-eyed, dark-haired granddaughter the son she’d never loved.
This was sheer speculation, she knew; Eleanor was the least fanciful of women, little given to regrets. The thought lingered nonetheless, and she laughed soundlessly now, envisioning what Eleanor’s reaction would be should she be so foolish as to confess what she suspected. Joanna sighed, mumbled something unintelligible, and Matilda stooped, touched her hand to the sleeping child’s forehead. “She does not feel feverish, but her sleep is not a restful one.”
Eleanor sat down on the bed. “She fears for her father.”
“As well she might, poor lass. She’s utterly devoted to him.”
Eleanor looked up at that. “Need you sound so surprised?” she said dryly. “Or think you, as do John’s enemies, that he is incapable of loving or being loved?”
“No, Madame, indeed not. I would not presume upon our friendship to speak ill of your son. But I must admit to being troubled by some of his acts, such as how infrequently he does partake of the Holy Sacraments.”
“That is rash of him, I agree, and I daresay he’ll pay a high price for it.”
“I would hope, Madame, that he will repent in time; God forbid that he should go unshriven to his Maker,” the Abbess said with fervor, and Eleanor gave her a thin, ironic smile.
“Indeed. But I was not thinking of his immortal soul, Matilda. I was thinking that history is chronicled by monks.”
Joanna had begun to whimper in her sleep, and Eleanor leaned over, shook the girl’s shoulder. Joanna awoke with a gasp, eyes wide and staring. She had been dreaming of her father, abandoned and alone before Philip and Arthur, but she was reluctant to admit it; it seemed somehow disloyal to John, almost as if she’d be revealing his own fears. She hesitated, and then turned aside Eleanor’s query with the first lie to come to mind. “Yes, a bad dream…of Ingeborg.”
“You must not dwell upon her, Joanna. Hers is a sad fate, yes, but common to women of rank. Would you pity the swan that ends up swimming in gravy upon your father’s table? Well, princesses, too, are bred to be sacrificed, as pawns in the marital game. That is just the way of it. Be grateful, rather, that you were spared such a fate, that you need not fear a foreign marriage in a far-off land. Unless, of course, you do yearn for a crown…” Eleanor smiled, shrewdly certain that Joanna did not.
Joanna had long been thankful that her tainted birth so severely reduced her value on the marriage market; her ambitions rose no higher than a manor and children of her own, a husband of respectable rank, ideally a knight of her father’s household, so that they might be often at court.
“No, I would not want a crown, Madame. I would that Papa had not one, either, would that he were still Count of Mortain. Mayhap then he’d be safe…”
She was hoping for some sort of assurance from her grandmother, an expression of faith that all would go well for John. But Eleanor was turning away, frowning at the woman standing in the antechamber doorway.
“Your Grace, Sir Aubrey is without, requests an urgent word with you.”
Joanna sat up on the pallet, pulling the sheet up to her chin. Aubrey de Mara was the captain of her grandmother’s guards, but Joanna had never known him to seek Eleanor out at such an hour. She watched uneasily as he entered the chamber, knelt before the Queen.
“Madame, forgive me, but a courier has ridden in, sent by your son. The King’s Grace wants you to leave Fontevrault on the morrow, to withdraw with all speed into your own lands in Poitou.”
“Arthur and the de Lusignans?”
“They’ve been encamped at Tours, not forty miles to the north, are now known to be on the road south. The King has left Queen Isabelle in Rouen, is heading for Le Mans. But he fears for you, Madame, as well he should. You’d be a most tempting prize, in truth.”
Eleanor nodded slowly. “My son is right. We depart for Poitiers at first light. See to it, Sir Aubrey.”
Their journey south proved to be a slow, arduous one. The road was rutted and rock-strewn, the soil cracked and seared by weeks of burning sun, and their horses churned up clouds of thick red dust. Jolted from side to side in her swaying horse litter, Eleanor at last called for a halt. As her servants began to set up a tent so that the Queen might shelter a while from the heat of high noon, Joanna slid from her mare, hastened to join Eleanor in the shade of several elms. In addition to his midnight message for her grandmother, her father’s courier had carried two letters for her, a brief dispatch from John instructing her to accompany Eleanor south for safety’s sake, and a longer communication from her brother Richard. Clutching this letter, she settled herself in the grass next to Eleanor.
“Shall I fan you, Madame? I’ve a letter from my brother; may I read it to you? Richard is serving as squire to the eldest son of Lord de Braose, is with his household in South Wales. He says there is trouble between the de Braose sons and a Welsh Prince, Gwenwynwyn of Powys, that Gwenwynwyn—what queer names the Welsh have—is set upon war.”
“I’d say, rather, that the de Braoses are the ones set upon war.” Eleanor leaned back against the tree, closed her eyes. “Your father did grant them the right to any Welsh lands they could gain by conquest. And they know that there has been a shift in our Welsh policy, that John has decided it is more to his advantage to back Gwenwynwyn’s chief rival, Llewelyn, Prince of Gwynedd.”
“Richard makes mention of him, too…Prince Llewelyn. He says Fulk Fitz Warin is still in rebellion against Papa, that he has taken refuge at this Llewelyn’s court. He says, too, that Llewelyn has been pulling strings in Shropshire on behalf of the rebels, that he did prevent a younger brother of one of
Fitz Warin’s vassals from laying claim to his father’s manors. The family—de Hodnet, they’re called—did hold land of the Corbets, and Robert Corbet, as overlord, refused to recognize the younger de Hodnet’s claim. Richard says all do know the Corbets were acting at Llewelyn’s behest, he being kin.”
Joanna frowned. “I met Lord Corbet once, when we were at Worcester two years past. Papa granted him the right to hold a weekly market at Caus. I do not think he should be so quick to do a Welsh Prince’s bidding, not when that Prince is aiding men outlawed, men who are Papa’s sworn enemies.”
Getting no response, she glanced up, saw that Eleanor was no longer listening. Sweat was glistening at her temples; her face was bleached of color, as white as the linen wimple that hid her hair. “Two years ago,” she said, bitterly amused, “I did ride a mule across the Pyrenees, and in the dead of winter, too. But who’d believe that, seeing me now…”
“Madame!” Aubrey was coming toward them at a run. “Madame, our scouts report a large armed force on our trail. I’d wager my life it is the Duke of Brittany and the de Lusignans, that you are the prey.”
Joanna was amazed to see how rapidly her grandmother seemed to shake off her fatigue. She at once held out her hand for Aubrey’s assistance, came quickly to her feet. “If my memory serves,” she said coolly, “we are but a few leagues distant from Mirebeau. It’s not much of a refuge, but beggars, as they say, cannot be choosers.”
Aubrey nodded grimly. “Madame, can you ride astride?”
“I shall have to, shan’t I?” Some of her servants were struggling now to dismantle the tent they’d just erected, and Eleanor said impatiently, “For Jesú’s sake, let it be!” Seeing Joanna still standing immobile, she gave the girl a push. “Go on, child, make haste to mount. Sir Aubrey…which of your men do you most trust?”
Aubrey did not hesitate, beckoned to a slight bandy youth, one who looked to have been born in the saddle. “Edmund, take my stallion. Kill him if you have to, but get to Le Mans, get to the King.”