One autumn morning when sunshine had burned the sea mist away and the outside air grew heavy with the scent of apples, the Duchess of Aquitaine looked from a window and saw the crew of a fishing smack arrive at the gatehouse of Rouen Palace. Guards with halberds demanded to know their business. When allowed access, the men trudged up a path towards the entrance reserved for villeins. Eleanor understood immediately – across the Channel King Stephen was dead. Her young husband would be the next ruler of England. At each weary scrape of the men’s clogs against the stones of the path, her heart leapt. Wild southern music rang in her soul. At last, revenge! she thought. One’s mind moves with images as swiftly as angels’ wings.
She snatched her infant son from his nurse to carry him to the arrow-slit window. ‘Mama will be a queen again, chou-chou. You, Willi, will be the English Crown Prince.’
It was more than a year ago and ten days’ ride away, but it seemed like an instant; the shouts of joy from her midwives when they lifted from the birthing tub a mass of raw, red flesh. ‘A boy!’ they’d cried. ‘Duchess, you have a son!’ She’d grabbed him, slippery as a fish and herself as wet as one, the cord connecting them still throbbing. Finally the triumph of an heir!
In thirteen years of marriage to her first husband she’d given birth to two girls. Courtiers and ambassadors had derided her as ‘France’s useless Queen’, ‘Old Shoe’, ‘The Heirless Lady’, ‘Sterile Duchess from Aquitaine’.
‘You will drink bitterness, but the fruit of your body will populate the noble houses of Europe. Your name will be remembered for a thousand years,’ her grandmother had prophesied. For more than a decade the prophesy had tormented her.
‘Willi, you are the beginning of my fortune foretold,’ she’d whispered. ‘The day dawns for us to repay the King of France and the Parisian court.’
Back on that blessed summer morning in her own palace in Poitiers, bathed and dressed in a bedchamber gown, Eleanor had taken from the arms of a nurse her first male child.
They gazed into each other’s eyes with adoration, an infant conceived in his mother’s trance of ecstasy.
A light knock had announced the arrival of the physician. He observed the Duchess beholding her infant as if he were a god. When she glanced up her expression changed.
In the doorway a sun-bronzed, middle-aged, mid-sized
man vacillated, waiting for an invitation to enter. Abruptly he turned away and she heard him call to a midwife in his foreign-accented French, ‘Woman, where’s the placenta and the cord? I need to examine both.’ Some minutes later he returned holding a wooden box and again waited in the doorway.
‘Your punctiliousness irritates me,’ Eleanor said. She knew he worshipped her but her curiosity about men’s feelings was blunted from years of fawning and lies. She remained undismayed that her second husband, Henry, Duke of Normandy, seemed as indifferent to her as she was to him. They had married for power. Unfortunately he was aware of her relationship with his late father. On their wedding night her new young husband had indulged in a frenzy of rut, as if ravishing her would dissolve the ghost of his dead sire. Towards morning she’d thought, ‘This boy’s too young for me.’ At the time, Henry was nineteen. She was thirty. He wanted to get her with child on their wedding night, but her courses were due and within a week he was gone, back to his concubine then off to war against the King of France.
‘Master Erasmus, you may approach. Everyone else may leave.’ Three midwives, a nurse, two ladies in waiting and her personal maid, Orianne, filed from her chamber as Erasmus, clutching the wooden box, approached her bed.
Erasmus, to whom everyone, noble and commoner, accorded the title ‘Master’, was both physician and philosopher, born in a distant province of Greece. He spoke many languages and he astonished the aristocracy of northern Europe with learning he brought from the courts of Byzantium and Baghdad. At the small guild of masters and students in Paris, young monks listened to him with mouths open, looking as stupid as fish. Senior prelates’ lips drew thin. Everything Erasmus said was new, strange and logically irrefutable. When he had first arrived at the French capital his hair was long and greasy. He was now well barbered, his neat beard flecked with grey. He had attended Eleanor as Queen of France and was a favourite with King Louis, who would summon him to the palace to argue philosophy with bishops. After her divorce she wrote to Erasmus asking him to attend her in Aquitaine. The Master had found it politic to say he needed to travel to Rumalia on family business.
On the morning she had given birth his bronzed cheeks were grey from fatigue. All night he had paced outside her bedchamber while midwives and ladies ran back and forth with cloths and buckets of heated water.
‘You’re as dark as a Turk,’ she said as she looked up again from the child at her breast. Eleanor treated him like any other household servant. It would have astounded Erasmus to know that in her heart she held him to be a man of perfect humanity, ennobled by kindness and wisdom, as pure in soul as a true monk. He was worthy of her love.
Soon after her marriage to Henry, the young Duke had remarked in his casual, amiable manner, ‘Everyone’s heart needs the nourishment of love, Cousin. I can’t give it to you. I have too little time.’ And scant inclination, she’d reflected. ‘As long as you’re discreet and put no cuckoo in the Plantagenet nest …’
‘All I am is a womb for making heirs.’
‘You’re unjust to yourself, and to me, lady. You’re beautiful, you’re accomplished, you’re an adornment to our House.’
What you mean, Henry, is that I’m very rich.
When she was Queen of France, Master Erasmus had played chess to divert her fears of giving birth to another daughter. In Poitiers he spent hours reading the verses of a poet, a Greek like himself. His fluent tongue translated without hesitation the story of a great war in which gods fought beside mortals in a conflict over a stolen queen. In the long, warm, southern evenings Eleanor had fallen into an enchantment with the heroes Erasmus brought to life, their magical armour, their cunning, the king whose city walls towered, impregnable to the Greek besiegers camped on the beach below. Sometimes he told her stories of his homeland; how as a youth he swam in the jewel-bright Aegean. At those moments she gazed at him in a way that made his heart thunder.
Approaching the bed he asked, ‘May I?’
Eleanor pulled her robe aside. Erasmus held a square of white cloth over her other breast then pulsed the nipple rhythmically, as if with his lips, until milk sopped the cloth. She handed the baby to him. He carried him to a chair beneath a large, unshuttered window and laid the baby across his lap, pushing a corner of milky fabric between the twitching lips.
His fingers were haptic. He could tell if a leg were bruised or a muscle torn merely by touch. He murmured to the newborn as his hands and eyes examined first its head, then its limbs, the tiny curled petals of its fingers and toes, its crinkled pod of genitals, the length of purplish cord hanging from its navel. Deftly he tied a knot and severed the inch left over. He lifted the baby to his ear to listen to its chest. When he returned it to her, water glazed his eyes. ‘He’s perfect in every respect.’
She took the bundle in silence. They stared at each other. With the rising August sun the bedchamber was heating as if in time with the beating of a drum. The room grew so still that, two floors below, the hum of bees working the lavender and roses in the garden drifted up to them.
‘Appearances can be deceptive, especially at this tender age.’ He swallowed.
They had been speaking quietly, but switched from French to Latin, a language that the servants, sure to be listening outside, did not understand. The infant fastened himself back to Eleanor’s breast and the exquisite sensation of his suckling pumped heat into her vagina. She thought back to the night that, to her, would always be the Angel’s first visit.
An ethereal being had been listening to the magic of the stories Master Erasmus told the Duchess in the glow of autumnal twilight. Like them, it had revelled in the scent of pine rising from the garden. At length it drifted in on the beams of a full moon that shone through the uncovered windows. Her bed turned to silver and there the Angel rolled languorously on its back, like a cat on a strip of warm grass. One night, when the moon was waxing again, the Duchess felt the Angel reappear, sliding down the moonbeams towards her open window. She ordered her maid out of the bedchamber and told Erasmus to undress her. ‘Remove your clothes,’ she said. ‘All of them.’ She invited him to stretch his flank against her silky flesh. ‘You may stroke me,’ she said.
His hands felt a body as strong as a woman from the washing shed. The Duchess rode daily, in gowns tailored to give her freedom of movement. Out hunting she often chose a stallion. The physician’s hands caressed the long muscles of her thighs but she forbade him to penetrate her. She forbade his fingers and tongue to enter her secret crevices. She permitted him to suck her nipples, she allowed him to lick her. He could stroke and lick her anywhere, so long as her body remained closed to him. While he did everything she permitted he murmured words of adoration.
As the moon burgeoned, the Angel returned a third time. It confided to the Duchess in its strange, light voice, ‘A spirit son awaits in the unseen world. He craves to enter your womb.’ She was lying skin-to-skin with Erasmus on the silver bed. Slowly, as if in a trance, she turned and pushed him onto his back. Her hands pinned his shoulders to the mattress. In a swift movement she mounted him, riding so hard he gasped ‘No! I can’t …!’ He’d wept with remorse. ‘My heart was bursting,’ he had said.
She held the shaft of his shrinking penis in her small, strong hand. ‘This heart?’ She drifted her palm across the glisten of its still-swollen knob.
‘And the one inside my chest.’
Immediately afterwards they had resumed caution when, each night and sometimes in the afternoon, they again lay skin-to-skin in her bedchamber. When she panted to Erasmus that his work was done he spilled his seed into squares of silk that her maid, Orianne, would wash.
But now, on this hot morning, they beheld with joy the result of that night nine months earlier when a being from another world – as Eleanor insisted – had driven her to madness. ‘An angel brought an angel,’ she said. ‘A son perfect in every respect.’
Inwardly Erasmus groaned. He had no belief in angels.
‘You’re to say the child is a month premature.’
His dark eyes rested on her. ‘The midwives are experienced. I’ll tell them he’s premature, but I doubt—’
‘You must convince them.’
‘It’s difficult to convince people who’ve seen the truth – and they have, in the placenta.’ He touched the small wooden box.
She frowned. Henry’s permission to take a lover had been given before his concubine was murdered. Unhinged with grief, beset with melancholy and rage, the Duke suddenly turned to his wife for comfort. ‘Please find it in your heart to love me, Eleanor,’ he’d pleaded. ‘As your husband I’m filled with pride in your beauty, your wit, your courage. Your noble lineage. You were born to be a queen. I’ll make you a queen again.’
Thanks to the Angel, she was already five months pregnant when this conversation took place. The leonine head in her lap shook with the sobbing of a little boy. ‘And you’re making a baby for me.’
‘I’ll make many babies for you, Henry,’ she’d whispered.
‘The midwives don’t know when Henry was with me,’ she told Erasmus.
‘That’s a blessing.’ In a quieter voice he added, ‘A temporary one.’
Eleanor speared him with a glance. ‘If my husband discovers my first son came through you, you fear he’ll kill you?’ Her smile was sardonic. ‘I have no fear. If he tries to kill my darling, I’ll insist he kills me too.’ As she gazed at the tiny sleeping face her breath caught in her throat. ‘I’ve prayed since I was first married, when I was fourteen years old, for God to give me a son. He’s made me wait more than half my life.’ A tear rolled down her cheek onto the silky black hair.
Erasmus quivered as he watched the woman who had driven the King of France almost insane with jealousy, confusion and disrespect. To witness his goddess weep over the head of the infant he’d sired pierced his heart. You have experienced the taste of divinity, a voice whispered to him. Your philosophy cannot undo it. But in two beats his faculty of reason surged back with a jolt. A few years from now nobody will believe this boy is the son of the Duke of Normandy.
‘Henry’s aware that grandchildren frequently resemble their grandparents. I’ll convince him the baby is his, my servants will confirm it.’ She laughed, intoxicated with the joy that follows birth. ‘William, William,’ she crooned. ‘We’ll call you William after my father and grandfather. Grandfather was the greatest troubadour in Aquitaine. He was a warrior, too.’ She sighed, her expression changed again and she looked up at Erasmus. ‘Of course, Henry has one son already, out of his concubine. My mother-in-law is urging him to have the Church declare the child legitimate.’ She watched the Master to see if he grasped the implication of her last remark.
He had not. He was gazing at the baby. I gave her a son. I, child of a goatherd. ‘Let me save him!’ he blurted. ‘You keep him with you today, but send for me urgently this afternoon. I’ll have time to find a wet nurse. I’ll take him …’
An angry flush darkened her cheeks. Suddenly he understood her reference to the concubine’s bastard – the Duke could choose to make his older, illegitimate son his heir and Eleanor’s status could drop again to the low water-mark it had reached when the King of France divorced her and courtiers called her ‘scandalous harlot’, ‘southern adultress’.
A knock on the door disturbed them. Breakfast had arrived. ‘Will you join me for breakfast, Erasmus? Orianne, fetch the Master a table and more curds and poached berries. Would you like eggs? I need extra venison.’
He could feel his heart pound so hard it seemed audible. For a second time that hot morning tears glazed his eyes. That the woman he worshipped was so cunning and so stupid at the same time drove him almost mad. Perhaps not stupid but reckless, wilful – the wildness of her class, the arrogance of wealth and great beauty, her conviction that she could do as she pleased, without consequences. Her father had raised her as if she were a son. She was to rule the turbulent barons of Aquitaine and Poitou. Instead, she became ruler of the King of France, of half its clergy and, finally, the Pope. She’d badgered and intrigued to make a condition of divorce that Louis return her dowry in its entirety. She let him keep their daughters, but insisted the Church declare they were legitimate, although the marriage was not. Erasmus wanted to shake her. He wanted to shout, ‘I don’t care what your husband does to me; he may cut out my eyes and my tongue, he may have me drawn and quartered, but let me save our boy! He can become a scholar. He can travel the world.’
Sun slanted through the windows. The palace in Poitiers had proper window openings that, at night, were closed with wooden shutters. It was not a fortress, like her husband’s palace in Rouen. The Master’s body sweated from lack of sleep, anxiety, frustration and heat. Even the Duchess perspired a little. Her maid patted a puff of swan’s down on her mistress’s forehead, nose and chin before kneeling at the bedside to kiss a hand languidly dropped for her lips.
‘If there’s anything else, my Lady?’
‘You’ve been awake all night with me. Go and sleep, Golden Buttercup. I’ll rest as soon as I’ve finished breakfast. The Master will stay a week longer to make sure the baby is feeding well. Then we’ll give William to a wet nurse.’ She looked down, her face glowing with such beauty Erasmus wanted to rush to the bedside and like the maid, kiss her hand. To smother her in caresses, as he had, night after night, right up until a few days ago. ‘And fetch the priest,’ she added. ‘I want William baptised immediately. We’ll do it again in the cathedral when his father returns from the war.’
After Orianne left, Erasmus said, ‘I beg you, let me take the child tonight.’
Eleanor shook her head. ‘Henry never met my papa. The servants will swear William is his living image.’ Suddenly she giggled. ‘When Louis hears I have a son from Henry he’ll die of shame. He’ll scourge himself. He’ll fast and spend all night on his knees in prayer. The Paris court will roil in its viper pit. There’ll be no stomach among them for another war against Henry.’ She smiled up at Erasmus. ‘The prince who wins in the bedroom wins on the battlefield.’ As an afterthought she said, ‘If I can have one son, I can have more. With me as his wife, Henry can raise the House of Plantagenet above the House of Capet.’
Erasmus blinked. ‘So the Angel brought you not only a son but revenge on France’s courtiers for the insults you suffered. You’ve given power to the arm of your husband, Duchess, so he may aspire to become the greatest king in Europe?’
‘At last, dear Master, I’ve taught you something. You begin to comprehend politics.’ Her eyes gleamed with naughtiness. She looked a child – a beautiful, rebellious young girl.
He walked to the bed and without being invited, sat and stared into her face. His demeanour was no longer that of an undervalued lover. He spoke as a professor upbraiding a lazy-minded student. ‘Has it slipped your memory, Eleanor, that your brother-in-law, Guillaume Plantagenet, saw with his own eyes the intimacy of our relationship?’
‘How dare you try to lecture me.’ She turned to stare out a window.
‘Have you also forgotten that the one person your husband trusts – you told me this yourself – is this same half-brother, Guillaume? That he and Henry share all secrets?’
Her head swung round and she glared at him. Unconsciously she pulled the baby closer to her body. At length she replied, ‘The most important thing for a man who will be a king is an heir. An angel performed a sacred ritual to give my husband an heir. It put Henry inside your body, so the baby could be conceived.’
He was dumbstruck. When he recovered, he whispered, ‘So it was really your husband whom you plundered for seed? It was not my cock you squeezed inside yourself until I could hold back no longer? It was not for the sublime sensation of my pumping into you that you screamed and bit my mouth and wept with joy? I wasn’t even there. You rode the Duke of Normandy!’
Her expression was mischievous. ‘How intelligent you’ve become, Erasmus, since attending my court in Poitiers.’
‘Your husband – I’ve met him, remember? – is also highly intelligent and of logical mind, Duchess. In a year or so he’ll look at this boy and he’ll ask Guillaume, “Brother, could it be possible …?”’
Eleanor gave a pant of irritation. ‘You’ve made your point, Master. I don’t accept it.’
‘Well then, I’ll leave.’ He stood, gave a slight nod of farewell and turned towards the door.
‘You’re to stay until William’s ready for the wet nurse.’
He stopped, a crooked smile on his lips. ‘You’ve forgotten something else, Eleanor. I’m not your vassal. You do as you please. And so shall I.’ He closed the bedchamber door. May my horse stumble. May I break my neck and die this very morning.
A priest accompanied by a novice was already panting up the stairs.
Eleanor recalled all these events in moments, watching through a narrow window as guards escorted the salt-bleared fishermen to the villeins’ door. She turned to her toddler. ‘Chou-chou,’ she said. ‘Mama will soon be a queen. And you’ll no longer be Count of Poitou. You’ll be an English prince. One day, God willing, you’ll be King!’