The Summer Queen

49

Poitiers, August 1153

A burning August sun bleached the blue from the sky and gripped Poitiers in the fierce talons of a heatwave. High in the Maubergeonne Tower, the confinement chamber was insulated by thick stone walls. Linen curtains hung across the shutters, letting in air, but maintaining shade. A baby’s wail filled the room where moments ago there had only been Alienor’s voice, raised in a final cry of effort.

Hair drenched with sweat, chemise bunched around her hips, she raised herself on her elbows to watch the child being lifted from between her blood-dabbled thighs. The little body was streaked with blood and mucus, and the pulsating cord obstructed its genitals so Alienor could not tell the gender. And then the midwife pushed the cord to one side and beamed.

‘A son, my lady. You have a fine boy, praise God, praise God!’

The wails became lusty roars as the midwife wiped out the baby’s mouth and laid him upon Alienor’s belly. He screwed up his face and thrashed his limbs, but as he felt the warmth of Alienor’s flesh, he grew quieter. She reached down to touch and feel him. Alive, squirming, perfect.

The midwife gently lifted him off Alienor, snicked the cord with a small, sharp knife while intoning a prayer, and then removed him to a table where a bowl of scented warm water had been prepared for his first bath.

‘Do not swaddle him,’ Alienor commanded. ‘I would see him first.’

The woman gently washed the baby’s tender limbs and then returned him to his mother, wrapped in a soft towel. Alienor held him close and checked his fingers and toes, his little ears, his puckered face. His hair gleamed like new gold, so did the tips of his eyelashes. He was going to be red like his father. And between his legs, the very obvious proof of his gender. Alienor swallowed. Her throat was tight and she knew she was going to weep a flood of tears, some of joy, some of grief, but all of healing. She held the baby to her breast and kissed his face again and again. ‘He is to be named William,’ she said. ‘For the Dukes of Aquitaine and Normandy and the Conqueror King of England.’

The bells of Saint-Pierre pealed out the news that an heir to Aquitaine was born and every church in Poitiers took up the joyous clamour and from there rang the tidings to all the towns and villages beyond. Scribes frantically copied out the news and messengers galloped from the city, heading far and wide with the announcement.

Sitting up in bed sipping wine, Alienor watched the baby snuffle in his sleep and smiled with triumph. Now let Louis eat his words that she was a useless bearer of girls. How right this marriage must be that God had shown his approval and she had borne Henry a son on the first try. She only wished he were here to share this moment with her, but he would know soon enough, and even without him, the savouring was sweet indeed.

Henry eyed the white stallion recently purchased by his groom. The horse was intended for parade and ceremony rather than everyday riding. Being so full of energy, Henry was always hard on his mounts and wore them out swiftly, but this one was to be coddled for occasional use.

‘Lame,’ he said, his nostrils flaring with temper. ‘I have paid five pounds of silver for a lame horse that has only been a waste of stable space thus far. How is that a good purchase?’

The groom flushed. ‘It was not lame when I bought it, sire.’

‘Hah, it wouldn’t be, but you were duped all the same.’ Henry walked around the horse again, looking at its trembling flank and the white of its eye. ‘No good for breeding either. Nothing but dogsmeat. Get it out of my sight.’ He dismissed both horse and groom with angry impatience. He expected good service in all parts of his life as a matter of course, and when it did not live up to expectations, it made him angry.

He had been in England since the winter and during that time had undertaken two serious campaigns, both of which had ended in stalemate because the barons on either side would not commit to a pitched battle. Everyone was weary of war; everyone wanted peace and, even through the skirmishing and posturing, negotiations were going forth. It all took time and effort, and Henry was having to school himself to a patience he was far from feeling, and it exacerbated his irritation when he could not trust his groom to do a small thing such as selecting a sound palfrey.

Henry retired inside the keep at Wallingford to read the day’s messages and give further orders. A scout had arrived to report that Stephen was in Norfolk, striving to bring the troublemaker and renegade baron Hugh Bigod to heel. Henry had no intention of pursuing him there. Indeed, in some ways it was all to the good that he was chasing Bigod. Henry found the baron useful as an ally, but it did not mean he trusted or liked him. The man had proven himself a cunning, self-serving bastard.

He paused to ruminate and his gaze crossed the chamber to rest casually on Aelburgh and little Geoffrey. He watched her play with the child who was just beginning to walk and he smiled a little at the infant’s determination. It was good to have a domestic presence even at the heart of a battle camp – something to offer comfort but not important enough to require attention until he chose to give it.

As he reached to take a cup of wine from an attendant, another messenger was ushered into his presence in haste by Hamelin, his expression bright with suppressed excitement. ‘Tell the Duke what you have just told me,’ he commanded.

‘Sire.’ The man knelt to Henry. ‘Eustace, Count of Boulogne, is dead.’

Henry put his cup down and stared at the man and then at Hamelin. ‘What?’

‘Sire, he choked on his food while claiming hospitality at the abbey of Bury St Edmunds. Men are saying it was the wrath of the saint coming down on him because he had raided the monastery lands. He is being borne to Faversham for burial.’

Henry leaned back in his chair and absorbed the news. This must be God’s intention – His way of making everything right by clearing a way that had been blocked. Eustace had been the boulder in the path to peace and now he was suddenly gone. In Stephen’s camp, and with Stephen himself, everything would be unravelling thread by thread. Even those who had stayed with him would be looking for a new allegiance and now there could only be one. He possessed all the youth and vigour Stephen lacked. All he had to do was continue undermining the older man’s plinth until he toppled him. And now Stephen’s eldest son was dead, that plinth was precarious indeed. Suddenly the matter of the lame white horse became a trivial thing. ‘God rest his soul, and God bless Saint Edmund,’ Henry said with a serious face and levity in his eyes.

‘Stephen has other sons,’ Hamelin said. ‘There’s still William.’

‘But he will not stand in the way as Eustace has done,’ Henry replied. ‘He is malleable, for which everyone will be thanking Christ. I doubt he will stand in our way. Even if he does …’ He let a shrug speak for the rest.

A week later another messenger arrived in Henry’s camp on a lathered horse, this time from Aquitaine with the news that Alienor had been safely delivered of a fine, healthy baby boy, christened William, the name they had agreed before Henry left for England.

If Henry’s cup had been full before, now it ran over. He had known she would bear a boy, but the proof in the letter confirmed that God was smiling upon him, especially when he realised his son had been born on the same day, perhaps taking his first breath at the very moment that Eustace was choking to death. If that was not God’s will in the matter, he did not know what was.

Louis broke the seal on the letter that had arrived from Henry, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou. He did it slowly, glancing round at the courtiers in the chamber as a matter of course to see who was watching him. He was feeling sour and unwell today. His physician said there was too much melancholy within him and had bled him to balance his humours, but that had only given him a sore arm and a headache. The news of Eustace of Boulogne’s death had done nothing to improve his dark mood. It meant that another obstacle had been removed from Henry FitzEmpress’s path to the English throne. It also meant his sister Constance was now a widow and he would have to go about extracting her dower from Stephen and finding her another husband.

Slowly he unfurled the scroll and, with a feeling of mild dyspepsia, read the customary flourishes of salutation. Then he came to the place where Henry was pleased to inform his overlord that God had seen fit to bestow the joy and blessing of a strong, healthy son on him and the Duchess of Aquitaine. The words burned themselves into Louis’s brain while he sat and stared at them. How could such a thing be? Why had God not favoured him instead of that Angevin upstart? What had he done to make God turn His face against him in such a way?

‘Bad news?’ asked his brother Robert, raising his brows and holding out his hand for the letter.

Louis drew back and, rolling it up, tucked it inside his sleeve. Everyone would know soon enough, but it was a wound he wanted to keep to himself for as long as possible. ‘I shall tell you later,’ he said. ‘It little concerns you.’

Robert gave him a look askance.

‘It is between me and God,’ Louis said, and left the room. He wished the messenger had foundered on his way to Paris and fallen into a bog so that he did not have to carry this letter, this knowledge against his breast.

Arriving at his chamber, he dismissed everyone and lay down on his bed. He was filled with grief for the son he did not have – for the son that Alienor had miscarried long ago when she was his young, fresh bride. For the fact she had borne the heir that should have been his to Henry of Anjou, while giving him only daughters. Feeling desolate, abandoned, and full of self-pity, he covered his head with a pillow and wept, wishing he had never been drawn from the cloister to become a king.