Princess Of France

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Princess Of France - book excerpt

Prologue

Henry

            Henry’s lips were warm on mine. He tasted as he always had, of cloves, of almost forgotten spices, of danger and of longing, of all the things I wanted but could not have.

            “Still sweet,” he said as he pulled away.

            We were naked under the covers of the great bed of state. We had never slept together in his room at Windsor in all the months that I had been his mistress. I knew that this was a dream.

I lay beneath him, the canopy high above my head. The curtains blocked out all sound and light, save one candle that burned beside the bed.

Yet I could still see him, not as he was now, old and feeble, sick from a long winter of coughing. I saw Henry as he had been when I loved him, still vital, his strength and warmth cocooning me, making me long to forget the world that lay beyond his bed. But even in the dream, I could not forget.

            “You are still beautiful, Alais, and taste as sweet as the day I first had you. Tell me why that is.”

            I caressed his face. I pushed his long hair back from his cheek, fingering the gray where it shone amidst the red in the light of our one candle.

            “Henry,” I said. “I am as beautiful as you want me to be. This is only a dream.”

            He kissed me again, his tongue stroking mine until a fire began to burn in me, the old fire that I had never forgotten, though it had been almost twenty years since he had touched me. Henry's hand moved beneath our coverlet, lightly skimming over my body, all his hard-won skill as a lover brought to bear on me.

            Henry made love to me in that dream, and it came back to me all at once, how I had hungered for him in the end as much as he had ever hungered for me. Our bodies joined, we spoke words of love, as we never had in the waking world. We lay together afterwards, spent but blessed, safe still from the world beyond the light of that one candle.

            “I have always loved you, Alais,” Henry said. “From the moment I saw you holding that dog in my horse stable.” He kissed me so that I did not have to answer. “Richard is a fool,” he said. “I would have had you, no matter what came before or after, had I been free. The rest of them be damned.”

Henry’s mouth came down on mine once more, and I knew it was for the last time. The waking world began to draw me back. The light of our candle could not hold it at bay any longer.

            “I love you, Henry,” I said.

I do not know if he heard me. I woke on my slender cot, beneath the narrow window of my cell. Mother Bernard’s hand was on my arm.

            “My lady, I bring sad news. You must prepare yourself.”

            She watched as I woke, drawing my mind back from my dream. But I felt as if Henry stood beside me, his hand on mine. I could still taste him on my tongue.

            “The king is dead.”

            Henry’s touch dissolved. I lay alone, looking into the brown eyes of Mother Bernard, the kind woman I had known almost all my life. I did not weep but swallowed my tears. I was a woman grown, with more than thirty years behind me. I would mourn Henry in private.

            “Thank you for telling me.”

            Matins that day would include a mass sung for the king’s soul. The first of many such masses that I would pay for with the gold he had given me when I went away.

For I did love him. And never more so than in the moment when I first heard of his death, the taste of his lips still on mine.

            I was not surprised. Henry had brought the news himself, before his soul flew away.

Chapter 1

Eleanor

The Abbey of St. Agnes, 1189

“The queen is here.” Mother Bernard’s hand was gentle on mine, her voice soft in my ear.

I sat in the sunshine of the simples garden, painting the lavender which grew there onto the page of the psalter I was illuminating. I lay my brush down, the clean linen beneath it catching the purple paint as it fell.

They had come for me. It had been two months since Henry’s death and I had known that someone would. I felt Mother Bernard’s lips on my hair, warm where the sun hit my curls. I had grown older and used to my own ways, and I no longer wore a veil.

“So, little princess. You have not lost the common touch, I see.”

            Eleanor stood in the sunlight of our garden, as if she had appeared there by magic. Her face was shadowed by her veil, but I saw her beauty, still radiant, undimmed by time and pain. Her beauty was in her bones and the magnificence of her soul shone through them. Though the skin of her face was crumpled, like a piece of vellum that could no longer be smoothed out, her eyes burned like beacons of green light. Like all men, I stood in her sight and felt her power. I knelt without thinking and Mother Bernard knelt beside me.

            “Rise, little princess. You do me too much honor.”

            “My lady queen, that is not possible.”

            She stared down at me, her face unreadable, as it always was. I rose, and Mother Bernard left us silently after I touched her once, then let her go.

            Without my having to ask, lay sisters came into the garden, bringing the nunnery’s best chair, a small table, and wine. They set these things on the grass in the full light of the sun. Though it was spring, a wind still came from the north to chill us.

            Eleanor did not sit in that fine carved chair with its cushions worked in cloth of gold. She stood instead in the full light of the afternoon sun and took in the sight of my face.

            “I have missed you, daughter. Though I did not know it until now.”

            I crossed our garden to stand before her and took her hand in mine. Eleanor still wore the great ruby that Henry had given her when they wed on the middle finger of her right hand. I bent down and kissed that ring.

            We stood together, my lips on her hand, birdsong the only sound. Before long, Eleanor pulled away from me, and sat in the abbey’s best chair.

            I sat across from her, for the lay sisters had brought my chair forward into the center of the garden. Neither of us spoke. As I watched, Eleanor cast her mind back over the years we had been apart, all the years of her imprisonment, when Henry had locked her away from the living and the dead, as if she were one of the dead herself.

            Eleanor took in the sun under the open sky. She leaned back and breathed in the perfume of the lavender. She had been released immediately after Henry’s death two months before. It was the first thing Richard had done. Even before burying the king and holding his funeral rights, Richard had sent word to set his mother free.

            Eleanor looked at me past the folds of her veil and smiled. The wind caressed my hair and moved Eleanor’s veil against her cheek.

I turned my face to the light so that she could see me clearly. I still bathed my face in goats’ milk every day. I had a few lines around my eyes, but little else marred my skin. The passage of time had been kind to me. My skin was as soft and fair as it had always been. No silver marred the dark chestnut of my hair. The auburn highlights perhaps were clearer, for I often sat in the sun when it was warm enough. The sun brought out the light in my dark curls.

“You are as beautiful as when last we met. How can this be so?”

            I did not smile or look away but met her gaze so that she could see I was not afraid of her. I had not grown timid during my years locked away in this nunnery.

            “I thank you, your grace. Perhaps my mother had good looks and passed them on to me.”

            “No doubt.”

            I watched Eleanor as she gathered her forces. I did not speak again but poured her a glass of wine. It was the light sweet wine that I had brought up from Anjou, my one indulgence. I had loved that wine since Richard first gave it to me, and I drank it still. Every year at Christ’s Mass, a large cask would arrive from Richard’s vineyards. His steward never sent a note, but I knew it came from him.

            I did not speak of this to Eleanor as she took the bronze goblet from my hand. She sipped the wine and sighed. I saw that her back pained her, for she shifted against the cushions. She was nearly seventy now. Her journey had been long, and she was tired, though she would never admit it.

            “I am going to meet Richard in Poitiers,” she said.

            The name of my old love was a sharp pain. I listened to it and remembered the time when I had thought he would be mine, when I was certain that our union had been blessed by God.

Sitting with Eleanor in our cloister garden, I remembered a different garden on a different summer day, when Richard knelt before me and swore that he would love me all his life. I wondered if he remembered that moment, as I did. I wondered if he loved me still.

            Eleanor drew a letter from her sleeve, its vellum crisp and new, its seal untouched.

            “He sends word to you by me, if you will take it from my hand.”

            I felt the first taste of hope since I had laid my daughter in the ground twenty years before. I had lived so long without it, subsisting only on pain and loss, that I almost did not recognize the taste of it. Hope burst on my tongue like a ripe fruit. I savored it – Richard’s letter in my hand.

We had been betrothed before his father touched me. We were betrothed still, though I had not seen his face in years. He had never married. Perhaps this letter was the first sign of him relenting, Richard calling me to his side at last.

            I wanted to rise, to turn my back on the queen, so that I might read the words my love had written. He had been unrelenting in his youth. I had thought never to hear from him again.

            I did not turn away, and I felt her eyes on me like hands. I broke the seal, and read his words, and knew that she had read those words already.

            “Alais, Countess of the Vexin, Countess of Berry, Princess of France. Greetings. We send you word by way of the Queen, our mother, that you will no longer be kept in the Abbey of St. Agnes under our care. You will take ship to France, where your brother, King Phillipe, waits for you. Go with God and live in peace. Richard, by God’s Will, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine.”

            I wondered if he had even seen the letter. I wondered if he had simply ordered it written, one more task in a list of many, bits of old business to be discarded upon the death of his father, drawn up by a clerk and sealed by his chamberlain.

Then I looked down to the end of the page and saw his name, scrawled in his familiar hand. Richard had never written to me before, but I had seen his writing often when I was a girl at his mother’s court. He composed many songs for the minstrels and wrote them out, that the bards might learn them by heart. Always, under each song and poem, he had scrawled the same word, “Richard,” as if no other man bore that name on earth. And for me, no other man ever would.

            Tears rose in my throat to burn my eyes. A sob began in my stomach and made its way to my chest where it lodged and stuck, old pain, a bird that would not take flight. I covered my mouth, his letter clutched in my hand. I gripped it hard as if it were his hand in mine, as if it might give me comfort, as if I might look up and once more see his face.

            “Alais. I am sorry.”

            Eleanor’s pity was the hardest thing to bear in that long moment of pain. Her pity was like acid on my skin. She had prompted him to write to me, so that I would know there was no hope of going back.

Richard would not forgive me, even now, for all that I had done. For all that Henry had done. He would not forgive, but would send me from his realm, without honoring our betrothal, without seeing me.

            I wanted to comfort myself, to believe that he did this out of policy, that he sent me away because he had no choice. That he had to stand strong before his lords, both in England and in France. Though nothing had ever been proved of my relationship with Henry, the whole of Christendom knew me to have been his father’s whore. Though my child lay dead in the cold ground at Winchester, Richard still would send me from him. His pride would allow nothing else. His pride had always been stronger than his love.

            “Alais. Forgive me.”

            I met Eleanor’s eyes, two tears coursing down my cheeks. Only two, for I had remembered myself. I had remembered that I had sworn never to weep in front of her again. I breathed once, drawing my sorrow back into my heart, where I locked it away.

            I met her eyes. I watched as her pity changed to admiration.

“You love him still,” she said.

            “Yes.”

            “Even death will not change it.”

            “No,” I said. “Nor whatever comes after.”

            Eleanor did not speak again but took my hand in hers. Her rings were cold against my skin. The north wind came to chill us, moving through my uncovered hair.

Her message delivered, Eleanor still did not leave me, so Mother Bernard gave up her rooms to the queen. Though I offered mine, I knew it was not grand enough. Even the Abbess’ rooms were not suited to the queen of England, but Eleanor accepted them graciously, as if they were very fine. I suppose anything was better than the prison she was coming from. The door to Mother Bernard’s room locked, but only from the inside.

            We took a late supper in my room for I knew that Eleanor would not be able to bear the silence of the convent table. I had no musicians to play for her, no troubadours to sing of her beauty. So, as we finished our wine, I sang a song for her, one Richard had written long ago about beauty that never fades and love that lasts forever.

            I was no troubadour, but my voice was clear and sweet. Eleanor wept when I was done.

            She wiped her eyes with a linen kerchief. We sat in silence then, and I thought perhaps we would part, she to her bed, and I to mine, that we might not hurt each other anymore that day. But then she spoke.

            “I put flowers on her grave, before I came away.”

            I sat very still, my goblet in my hand. I knew that if I moved, I would drop it and spill Richard’s precious wine down the front of my homespun gown. I had only two bottles left.

            I set my goblet down carefully, as if it were made of glass. I set my hands on the arms of my chair. They lay like wounded birds, my rings catching the light from the candles.

            “There is a mass sung for her soul each morning and each night. I left enough money with the bishop to see to it that this practice will continue, long after I am dead.”

            I found my voice, and it sounded to my ears as if it rose from the depths of a tomb. The pain of my daughter’s death never left me. I knew that it never would. “And the priest is sworn to this? He will sing for her soul, every day?”

            “He is sworn. I made him swear.”

            I lost my battle with my own pain then and knelt at her feet, my arms wrapped around her knees, a suppliant for all that could not be given back to me. Eleanor caught me as I fell against her, and she held me, though her back was paining her.

            I wept for my daughter as if she had died just that night, and not twenty years before. I wept for the loss of her, for the loss of her father. And for the loss of Richard, who should have been her father, and now would never father a child of mine.

            I wept until I had no tears left in me. Eleanor raised me up and drew my kerchief from my sleeve. It was the kerchief that bore her crest, one that she had given me years before. It was never far from me. She wiped my tears away and kissed me.

            “There is more for you to hear, before there is less. Can you bear it?”

            “I can bear anything.”

            I saw the light of pride in her face, as I folded my kerchief and tucked it away.

“You will leave for Paris within the month.”

As distant as its memory was from me, I still dreamt of Paris. The soft spring rains in the garden of my father’s palace. The flavor of fine watered wine. The taste of pastry that melted as it touched my tongue. I had longed for all these things the whole of my exile. I had thought never to have them again.

            Eleanor smiled in the firelight, lifting her bronze goblet to her lips. “I would like to tell you that your brother calls you to him because he wishes you near him.”

            “But that is not why,” I said.

            “No.”

I thought of Richard’s letter, still tucked away in my sleeve. After I had read it, Eleanor did not ask for it back. I drew it out. It lay in my palm like an accusation, like a knife I could not wield.

I rose from my chair, my face blank, as I had been trained to school my expression as a child. My old lessons came back to me as I stood alone in that room with Eleanor. I would need to remember them all, before I returned to my brother and his court.

I held Richard’s letter in my hand, my last link to him in the waking world. The vellum was smooth against my skin. He had used a new piece, a fresh bit of calfskin. I did not know if this was to honor me, or simply that, as king, he used nothing less.

I cast his letter into the fire and watched the expensive vellum burn. Smoke rose to choke me, but I did not move away. I watched the flames consume that letter until it was nothing but ash.

I met Eleanor’s eyes.

“You have changed, Alais.”

“And not for the better.”

Eleanor raised one elegant brow and extended her hand, reaching up to touch my cheek. “That I could not say. But you are not my little princess anymore.”

            “Phillipe brings me home to marry a man of his choosing,” I said, finishing the tale she had begun. “He calls on me to strengthen his position as king. To keep the peace in his realm. To shore up the throne of France.”

Eleanor smiled, the old wry smile I loved, free of bitterness and pain. “Your brother the king does not confide in me, and my spies are not as good as they once were.”

            “I am not to marry Richard,” I said.

            “No,” she answered. “I have seen to that.”

            I felt the pain of my loss for the last time. My heart burned with it, flaring once more with that inner fire, before the flame guttered out.

            I sat down in my cushioned chair, taking. Eleanor’s jeweled hand in mine as I kissed her cheek. “Once I am gone, we will not meet again.”

            “Very likely, we will not.”

            I spoke the words aloud then, as for the last time. “I love you, Eleanor.”

            “You always will, my dear.” She smiled her wicked smile.

I remembered my childhood and how I had feared her like a demon in the night. I thought of how powerful she was, and of how much harm she had done to me, more harm than I ever could have conceived of as I lay in my childhood bed. And still the power of my love bound me to her, even now, after all those years, after all the pain she had caused me. I knew that I would love her for the rest of my life.

            I did not ask if she loved me. Though she tried to hide it, Eleanor’s love shone in the green of her eyes. Her love for me was a beacon of light that would never go out.

            She would leave on the morrow to go to Richard in Poitiers. Our paths were parting once more, perhaps forever.

So, we stayed together that night and neither of us slept. We sat at my table, Richard’s wine between us, holding each other’s hands.