ELEANOR WATCHED WITH CONCERN as the physician laid his hand on Henry’s forehead.
“A high fever,” he said. “The duke must be bled, then purged.”
Henry groaned. “No … too much to do … not ill.” He struggled to sit up but immediately fell back on the pillow.
“Of course you’re ill,” Eleanor said, trying to hide her alarm. She had never seen Henry so weak. “You must do as he says.”
They were in her mother-in-law’s solar in the ducal palace at Rouen, which had been turned into a sick room for Henry’s benefit. After more than a year in England, he had finally returned to Normandy in late April. A month later she had accompanied Henry on a trip through Aquitaine which had been cut short to handle an uprising in Anjou. This was followed by a skirmish with King Louis’s forces on the Vexin border, from which Henry had just recently returned.
It was now mid-October and for the past three days he had been lying ill of a fever, refusing to allow Eleanor to call in the physician. The Empress Maud was away, visiting the abbey at Fontevrault, so Eleanor had no one to consult. This morning Henry had not been able to get out of bed; his skin was so hot that Eleanor, fearing for his life, had overrode his protestations and called in the physician.
Under her watchful eye, the physician placed leeches over Henry’s body, relieving him of a half-pint of blood, then proceeded to mix the purge. In the fifth month of her second pregnancy, Eleanor gagged when the physician lifted Henry’s head and poured the evil-smelling concoction down his throat. Within an hour it proved effective as a purge, but the fever did not abate.
Despite continued bleedings and purges, Henry grew steadily worse. His wasted body and incoherent gibberish drove Eleanor to the point of distraction, increasing her fear. Hourly she was on the point of sending to Fontevrault for the empress, but stubborn pride made her hesitate. Her imposing mother-in-law was the only woman who had ever made Eleanor feel inadequate. If she could not care for her own husband … what kind of a wife would the empress think her? What kind of a wife would Henry think her?
How she wished she had listened more closely when her mother, aunt, and other relatives in Aquitaine had tried to teach her about brewing herbs and simples. It had all been written down, some in Provençal, some in Latin, she remembered. Surely she must have taken some of that material with her when she left Poitou. In France she had never nursed Louis or anyone else, leaving such care in more skilled hands.
After searching through various unpacked boxes, Eleanor finally unearthed some leaves of parchment bound together that contained various jottings on how to handle fevers, swellings, and other ailments. One remedy seemed appropriate for Henry’s condition. She decided to mix the brew herself.
Since all household duties had remained in her mother-in-law’s capable hands, it took Eleanor a while to locate the kitchen. In the pantry she found a goodly stock of herbs and mixed dried febrifuge, verbena, and root of sassafras in a mortar, then ground them together with a pestle. Next she emptied the mortar into an iron pot, filled it with water, and brought the whole mixture to a boil over the fire.
“Lady, let me add a dried bat’s wing to that potion,” said one of the cooks who was watching. “The empress always says there be nothing like dried bat’s wing for bringing down a fever, so I keeps a supply on hand.”
“Yes, all right. If you think it will help.” The redoubtable Maud seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of useful knowledge, for which Eleanor was duly grateful. But sometimes she felt like closing her ears when someone prefaced a sentence with “The empress says …”
The cook added the bat’s wing and a pinch of salt, then said the Pater Noster seven times while stirring vigorously. After the mixture had boiled, it was cooled and strained into a silver goblet. Eleanor returned to the solar and gave Henry the potion. For a while he continued to toss about uneasily, then gradually became less restless and finally dropped off to sleep. The physician said this was a most favorable sign, so Eleanor, who had sat up with him for several nights, lay her aching body down on a pallet beside the bed and immediately fell asleep.
When she woke to the sound of the Prime bells ringing, the chamber was filled with pale sunlight streaming through the narrow window slits. Shivering, Eleanor rose, rubbed her aching back, and walked to Henry’s bedside. He was still sleeping quietly. Placing her hand on his forehead, she found it cool and damp. Praise the Holy Mother, the fever had broken. She was so relieved she decided she would actually attend the next Mass and light a candle to express her gratitude.
The coals in the brazier had burned down to ash so Eleanor opened the door of the chamber, ordered the servitor who slept across the threshold to bring fresh coals and some warmed wine, then pulled up a cushioned stool. She took Henry’s hand in hers, laid it against her cheek, and tenderly gazed down at his slack face. It was so rare to see him weak and helpless. Always energetic and spirited, Henry was constantly in action, never needing or wanting to be looked after. How often, in the few times they had been together since their marriage, had she longed to nurture and care for him. Far more than she had ever wanted to nurture her two daughters by Louis, or even her infant son. Eleanor knew that her maternal feeling for little William was inextricably bound with the political significance of the birth of an heir.
It wasn’t that she wanted Henry to be ill or unable to care for himself. Of course she didn’t. But still, now that he lay in such a sorry state, she found herself treasuring every moment that he depended upon her. If only he would do so more often. Especially where Aquitaine was concerned. The thought of her duchy reminded Eleanor of the sinister incident that had occurred at Limoges during their progression through Aquitaine the previous June …
She and Henry had traveled into the Limousin as far south as the craggy landscape of Gascony. Everywhere Eleanor journeyed she was followed by her entourage of poets, women, knights, and troubadours. Henry had been very affable and relaxed, not in his usual tearing hurry to be somewhere else. He hunted and flew his falcon, drank sparingly of the hearty Bordeaux wines, joined in the constant merriment, and made no objection to the ever-present songs of courtly love and storytelling. Despite the thinly veiled antagonism of some of Eleanor’s vassals, he kept his temper in check—until they reached Limoges. After a rapturous welcome by the townsfolk, they had pitched their pavilions outside the city walls for the night.
They had been eagerly awaiting their supper when the cook in charge of the ducal kitchen tent approached Eleanor in her pavilion.
“Lady, the town has failed to send us the usual customary provisions.”
“It must be an oversight,” Eleanor said. “I will tell the abbot of St. Martial’s. He deals with such matters.”
“No, let me go.” Before she could protest Henry had bounded out the pavilion door.
When he returned thirty minutes later his face was flushed, his eyes blazing. “You know what that smirking abbot had the gall to tell me?”
Eleanor, along with her women, had been reclining against a pile of cushions listening to a troubadour. Now she held up a hand for silence. “Smirking? That doesn’t sound like the abbot.”
“Indeed? Listen to this: The town is only obligated to victual the duke and duchess when they lodge within the city’s walls. Did you know that?”
“Of course I knew that.” Eleanor shrugged. “Sometimes they victual us anyway, sometimes—they need persuading. Those are the Limousins for you. Unpredictable and self-willed. Since time out of mind.” She smiled. “Let me have a word with the abbot myself.”
“You’re missing the point.” His flush deepened. “Is this the town’s idea of obedience to their duke and duchess?”
“Henry, this means nothing. Just a little show of resistance.” She rose to her feet. “That’s all.”
“That’s all? That’s all? By God’s splendor, they need to be reminded who’s master here.” His face was now gorged with blood.
“They’re more apt to do as we wish if reminded who is mistress.”
There was a moment of tense silence while she and Henry stared at each other.
“Mistress or master, I won’t allow either of us to be insulted.”
“Henry, no insult is intended. I understand these people and they mean no harm. Humor them.”
His face was slowly turning a deeper crimson; one hand clenched his sword hilt. Eleanor could feel his hot gaze upon her as one of the women brought her a cloak to throw over her shoulders.
“I will be back shortly,” she said, and opened the door of the pavilion.
Outside, enveloped in a warm purple dusk, she had started toward the abbey when there was a strangled cry, then the sound of something falling. This was followed by the screams of her women. Eleanor rushed back inside.
For the second time Eleanor witnessed Henry in the grip of a fire-breathing rage. Shrieking, kicking, and cursing, his hands pounded at the floor, his eyes rolled back into his head. The women’s screams increased; the troubadours backed as far away as possible from his thrashing body. Swords upraised, a handful of knights raced into the pavilion. If one added a troupe of jugglers and acrobats one might take the whole business for a mummers entertainment.
Except the scene being played before her eyes was hardly entertaining. It was terrifying.
Though this fit was no less violent than the one in Poitiers, it was over far sooner. With the aid of the knights, Henry was helped to his feet. After swaying back and forth, he recovered sufficiently to down a goblet of wine before staggering out of the pavilion. Eleanor could hear him shout that the walls of Limoges must be destroyed. Aghast, she did not know how to stop him. The refusal to provide food was an affront to her authority, this could not be denied. But, left to herself, she would have handled the matter with tact and diplomacy, charming the abbot and leading citizens into giving her whatever she wanted. Her grandfather had done it his whole life as a matter of course. That was the way the more successful dukes of Aquitaine handled their unruly subjects.
“Now we are no longer outside the town,” Henry said cheerfully, when the walls were razed. “The townsfolk must provide food. This will teach them a lesson they won’t soon forget.”
Indeed it would. If her vassals had been hostile before, what would they be once news of the incident spread? Eleanor wondered. Since their arrival in Aquitaine she had been the center of attention; the adoring southerners making a great to-do over her, and paying little heed to Henry. He had initially appeared to take this in good humor, but after Limoges Eleanor was less certain.
“I will see you are recompensed for the walls,” she told the abbot privately. “The duke is truly a good man but hasty of temper.”
The abbot gave her an incredulous look. “ ‘Hasty of temper’? Is that how you see it, Madam? May God forgive me, but what I see is that you have liberated us from one tyrant only to yoke us to another. He intends to be master here. Take care that this firebrand who so readily kindles others does not torch you as well.”
Was the abbot right? Did Henry basically resent her power in the duchy—as Louis had? Was the show of force against her subjects a foreshadowing of the future? The prospect was so unconfrontable that Eleanor immediately dismissed it. The abbot had spoken in the heat of the moment. She loved Henry beyond reason. Surely, surely, she would, over time, imbue him with the same love, the same understanding of her people that she possessed.
Henry slowly opened his eyes. For a long moment he gazed up at her. “Nell.” His fingers closed weakly round her hand. “I thought mayhap I was dead and a beautiful angel was ministering to me.”
Eleanor, her dark thoughts banished in the instant, blinked back tears of relief and moved his hand to her lips.
From that moment on Henry’s strength began to return, although he was still too weak to leave his bed or even sit up. Eleanor was hard put trying to keep him entertained. He wanted her with him constantly and complained every time she left the chamber. She spent hours telling him stories, massaging his back, feeding him tempting dishes to stimulate his weak appetite. At first he lay quietly, his hands frequently on her stomach so he could feel the baby move.
“That was a lusty kick. I’m sure it’s another boy. Bring William to me,” he said, a few days after the fever had broken.
A wet nurse brought in the baby, now over a year old and still ailing, and laid him beside Henry.
“He looks like me, don’t you think?”
Eleanor smiled. “I’ve always thought he resembled your mother far more than you.”
“Thomas Becket said he was the very image of me.” Henry watched the baby’s dimpled fist close round his finger.
The name sent a tingle of resentment through Eleanor. Henry talked frequently of Thomas Becket since returning from England. Why he was so taken with this cleric, who had all the charm of a cold trout, she could not imagine. Henry had told her that the archbishop of Canterbury suggested Becket would make an excellent chancellor when he became king. To Eleanor’s amazement, Henry had given his agreement. Even the Empress Maud had voiced her doubts about that, but Henry, who usually listened to her advice—if he listened to anyone’s—had ignored her. He seemed determined to elevate this Norman of low birth into a position of power—which, in Eleanor’s view, the archdeacon had neither earned nor deserved. With a shrug she thrust the unwelcome thought of Becket aside. Now she had Henry to herself—sharing him with the empress, of course—although sometimes their relationship reminded her more of two kings joined in a common campaign than a mother and son.
“I think he looks like me.”
“William is well-membered,” Eleanor said in a dry voice. “He certainly resembles you in that respect.”
“Hah!” Henry beamed, and over the protests of both Eleanor and the nurses, unwound all the swaddling bands to examine the evidence with his own eyes.
“What a son this will be, Nell! As heir to the throne he must, of necessity, be educated primarily in England, of course. It won’t hurt to engage his tutors now. One from Normandy and one from Anjou, to start with at any rate. Send to the bishops of Rouen and Angers for suggestions.”
“No tutor from Aquitaine?”
“Really, Nell, he isn’t going to be a poet or a minstrel, heaven forfend.”
“Let us hope they can teach him to be more civilized than the average Norman I’ve seen,” Eleanor said. “All Aquitainians are born civilized.”
“This uncivilized Norman is creating an empire, have you thought of that?” Henry sat the baby on his stomach, dandled him in his arms, and played with his downy patch of russet hair. “This Norman is also bored. Amuse me.”
“What would you like to do?”
“Surely such a civilized creature as yourself can think of something.”
Eleanor was perplexed. In Aquitaine, if a member of the family was ill, he or she immediately called for a troubadour to soothe their spirits. Her grandfather had actually believed that the sound of lute and voice helped exorcise the body’s foul humours. Perhaps this would work for Henry. Eleanor knew she did not dare recall Bernart de Ventadour. In England, Henry had intercepted a letter the troubadour had written to Eleanor, claiming that he hated the northern clime and wished he was a swallow who could fly back to her “across the wild, deep sea.” Bernart was now back in Aquitaine seeking a new patroness to worship.
She missed him. There was no denying that he appealed to the wildly romantic side of her nature that loved to be adored.
Eleanor sent for another, less gifted troubadour she had brought with her from Aquitaine. After he had played and sang all her grandfather’s songs, Henry yawned.
“I’m more scholarly than musical, Nell,” he said in a peevish voice. “Read to me. Something I haven’t heard before.”
At her wit’s end, Eleanor sent for the bishop of Rouen, who suggested she call for a particular reading clerk from the cathedral at Caen. The clerk, a Master Wace, was in the midst of translating into Latin an old Welsh manuscript about the ancient kings of Britain.
When Eleanor finally received the Latin portions of the manuscript, she began reading the book aloud. Henry was entranced by the tale of King Arthur, but all too soon it was finished.
As Henry grew strong enough to sit, his demands increased. “Get into bed with me, Nell.”
“I don’t think you’re well enough.”
“Perhaps not for everything but for some things. Like this.”
He insisted she remove her gown and sit with him in her chemise so that he could pull it down over her shoulders and caress her breasts. He never tired of looking at them, squeezing them together, taking her nipples into his mouth and sucking on them. By this time they were both so aroused that Eleanor forced herself to get up and put on her gown.
“This is the last time I let you start something you can’t finish.”
Henry made a face at her. “All right, bring over the chessboard. I haven’t beaten you at chess in a long time.”
“You’ve never beaten me at chess.”
“Haven’t I?”
“We’ve never played before.”
Eleanor looked around for the chessboard, praying her mother-in-law would not return home in the immediate future. The empress’s well-appointed, immaculate solar now looked as if a storm had swept through it leaving vast amounts of debris in its wake.
In addition to the usual presence of William, his nurses, and various attendants who came and went, extra tables had been brought in and were littered with food, pitchers of wine, and rare books bound in wood and ivory. There were candleholders perched everywhere and the wax had dripped onto the polished tables, over the rushes, even staining the scarlet wool coverlet the empress had had especially woven by Flemish weavers in Arras. As if all this weren’t enough, Henry’s favorite greyhound bitch had chosen to whelp her pups at the foot of his bed.
Every day now, Henry insisted on conducting all the business of Normandy and Anjou, so rolls of parchment, sheets of vellum, wax tablets, and styli were strewn over the bed. Each morning Eleanor read aloud all the documents and relayed the pertinent news. Henry, aided by subtle suggestions she added from time to time, would then make the decisions which two clerks recorded on wax tablets.
In truth, Eleanor enjoyed doing this activity almost more than anything else, and not only because she was actually sharing in Henry’s work; it also gave her a far greater understanding of how Henry’s mind functioned, the scope of Normandy and Anjou’s problems, and how he proposed to deal with them. Eleanor had thought herself a good administrator. But listening to Henry’s incisive decisions on how to increase revenues, conserve expenses, what to look for in appointing bailiffs, measures to take with rebellious nobles, or, particularly impressive, how to dispense justice to lawbreakers, she was awed by the caliber of the man she had married. So vastly different from poor ineffectual Louis.
And also vastly different from how he had behaved in Aquitaine. This Henry and that one, like devil and angel, were virtually impossible to reconcile.
When a servitor placed the empress’s prized chessboard of inlaid wood covered with squares of gilt and silver upon the bed, Eleanor picked up the ivory figures and turned them over in her hands, marveling at their workmanship.
“This was given to my mother by her first husband, the Holy Roman Emperor, who taught her the game when she was only a child,” Henry said. “I think I told you that my father always beat my mother at chess. She let him win to make up for the incident at hawking where he felt so humiliated.”
“I remember. Well, I give no quarter,” said Eleanor. “Skill will triumph.”
“Which is why I’ll win. Prepare yourself for a bloodbath, Nell.”
“You’ll eat those words. I’ve told you, you can’t expect me to pander to male pride.”
“Of course I expect it—if I weren’t naturally superior to you.”
Eleanor stuck out her tongue at him.
For several hours they matched wits until she made a move with her queen that she knew would win her the game. While Henry alternately gazed at the board with suspicious eyes, glowered at her, and tapped his teeth with an angry forefinger, Eleanor sat back on her stool with a complacent smile.
Suddenly Henry threw back the scarlet coverlet and sent chessmen and board tumbling to the floor.
“Henry! Why did you do that?” Eleanor could not keep the note of irritation out of her voice.
He gave her an innocent smile. “Do what? It was an accident.”
“Accident? You know perfectly well you did it because I was about to beat you! Sweet St. Radegonde, you’re such a child.”
Henry put his thumb in his mouth and made a gurgling sound. He looked so comical Eleanor could not help laughing. Suddenly there was an urgent knock on the door and the steward burst into the solar.
“My lord, a herald has just arrived from Canterbury. King Stephen is dead.”
Eleanor leapt up like a startled hare; Henry, open-mouthed, looked at the steward then at her.
As Eleanor watched him, she fell prey to a tumult of feelings—satisfaction, excitement, and others less easily defined. Whether for good or ill Henry had diligently pursued that star which was now within his grasp, and she was happy for him—and for herself. But how vastly their lives would change, she realized with a sudden pang of regret that surprised her. Not that this would make the slightest difference. To reach for that which you sought, to finally attain it, for an instant or through all eternity, whether it brought joy or bitter pain—surely that was all that mattered?
“Jesu, Nell! Sweet Jesu! I am King of England! King of England!” He grabbed his head with both hands. “I cannot believe it.” Suddenly he looked so terribly young, so vulnerable, so astounded that Eleanor’s heart melted within her breast. She sank down on the bed and gathered him into her arms.
“Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou, the father of one son, with another on the way; husband of an adoring wife. Now King of England. You’ve achieved it all, my lord.”
Henry drew back and gave her a tremulous smile. When Eleanor gazed deeply into his pewter eyes she saw, for the first time since she had known him, that they sparkled with tears.