“What is the daughter like?”

“Alice? She’s a mere child. As usual, my lord is resorting to hard bargaining. I doubt we will see them betrothed for many a month.”

“And is John to stay at Fontevrault now that he is not to enter the Church?” Raoul looked at Eleanor searchingly.

“That is for Henry to decide,” she said firmly. “I am more concerned about the Young King.”

She had been worrying about her eldest son for some time now. At seventeen, the younger Henry was ambitious and thirsty for power. He was a king, but he had no real authority beyond the superficial privileges that his father allowed him, and that had made him increasingly resentful.

“Geoffrey has Brittany, and Richard is to have Aquitaine, and both already have the freedom of their domains, yet I, the eldest, am ruled by my father,” he had complained, his eyes blazing, just before Eleanor left Argentan. “My titles are meaningless! I have asked him again and again to let me govern at least one of the lands I am to inherit—England or Normandy, even Anjou or Maine—Mother, I would even settle for Maine!—but he will not relinquish any part of his power, even to his own flesh and blood. I asked him if I could rule England as regent during his absence, but he appointed the justiciar instead.”

“I will talk to him,” Eleanor told him, but of course there had been no way of approaching Henry at that time, not when he was suffering agonies of guilt over Becket’s murder.

“It’s not just that,” the Young King had added. “He keeps me short of money. Even William Marshal thinks so. I have had to exist on what I can purloin from the Treasury or what profit I earn from tournaments. My father forgets I have a reputation for open-handedness to maintain. But what does he do? He bans tournaments in England, because he says that too many young knights have been killed. And he reserves the right to choose the members of my household. Mother, am I a king, or am I not? I cannot see why Father made me one, just to treat me like a child.” The boy was in anguish.

“It is hard for a father to accept that his children are grown up,” Eleanor soothed, “much less that they will one day hold what is his. Your father takes great pride in his domains. No English king before him had such an empire. I counsel you, my son, be patient, and act prudently in all things. You are young yet, and must prove yourself worthy.”

After the Young King had gone away, sullen and unmollified, Eleanor reflected that her wise words had not been what he had wanted to hear. Yet she knew him well, and she knew too why Henry was keeping him on a tight rein. Young Henry was a restless youth, inconstant as wax. He was a spendthrift, and had shown himself to be lacking in wisdom and energy. He had not yet learned to control the violent temper he inherited from his Angevin forebears, and probably never would. If the father couldn’t do that, there was no hope for the son. But Eleanor was confident, with a mother’s instinct, that given the privilege of adult responsibilities, Young Henry would quickly learn to live up to them. It was being treated like an incompetent child that was turning him into a wastrel. But Henry could not see that. He did not realize that he was driving a wedge between his son and himself.

“Henry is a doting parent,” she told Raoul now. “He lavishes more affection on his children than most fathers, and takes it for granted that his love is returned. He cannot see any faults in his offspring, and they know well how to deflect his wrath by bursting into tears. It never fails!”

“You are both indulgent and loving parents,” her uncle pointed out. She accepted the implied criticism, knowing it to be justified.

“Yes, I know. We have spoiled our children, and as a result, they are too headstrong for their own good. And unfortunately they have been witnesses to much discord between us, so they have learned to compete for our attention, and to play off one parent against the other shamelessly!” She threw a mock grimace at Raoul. “I have failed as a mother!”

It was a remark lightly made, but it masked an underlying anxiety. Despite the balmy night, with stars studding the clearest of skies, Eleanor felt a sudden chill. She ripped off a leaf from a creeper and began crushing it in her palm.

“You may recall a curse laid by a holy man on Duke William the Troubadour, my grandfather,” she said. “He swore that William’s descendants would never know happiness in their children. I told Henry about it once, long ago, and it quite upset him, because he could not imagine any of our brood causing us grief. Of course, they were small then, and easy to rule.”

“Does any parent ever know happiness in their children?” Raoul asked. “We nurture them, we love them as our second selves, then they go away and leave us. It is the natural course of things. Every time they are hurt, we suffer. If they forget us, we suffer. Is that happiness?”

“What on earth did you do to your children, Raoul?” Eleanor exclaimed, trying to inject some humor into the gloom. Yet there was an uncomfortable degree of truth in what he had said, and she felt depressed by it. Then she remembered something else.

“There is another ancient prophecy, Raoul, of Merlin’s. It has always puzzled me, and yet I have increasingly come to feel that it has some relevance for me and mine. It says that the ‘Eagle of the Broken Covenant’ shall rejoice in her third nesting. Is that prophecy to be fulfilled in me? Am I the eagle? And the broken alliance? Is that my marriage to Louis?”

“It is too vague to say,” Raoul opined dismissively, and began to walk toward the door that led to the abbey guest house. “I should not concern yourself with it.”

“Yes, but if it is about me, then it portends well for Richard. If you think of my living sons, then Richard is the third nesting, of whom I shall have cause to rejoice. I am almost convinced that he will be the fulfillment of the prophecy. It’s what might be meant by the ‘broken covenant’ that worries me.”

“Eleanor, you are worrying over nothing,” her uncle told her. “Let it alone. I am sure that, prophecy or no prophecy, Richard will fulfill your every hope.”

The Young King had been crowned again, with Queen Marguerite, in Winchester Cathedral. Now, Eleanor hoped, Henry would permit their son to exercise more power. He had written to say that since Marguerite had reached the age of fourteen, he had allowed the young couple to consummate their marriage and live together. That sounded promising; it was a start. But hot on the heels of that messenger came another from Young Henry himself.

He wrote indignantly that his father now insisted on keeping him under his eye at all times. He had dragged him from Normandy to the Auvergne to witness the betrothal of John to Alice of Maurienne, and when Count Humbert had asked what John’s inheritance would be, Henry promised to give him three castles. “But they are mine!” the Young King had dictated. “They were to come to me.” He made his anger clear to his father but had been ignored. Instead, Henry forced him to witness the marriage treaty that dispossessed him.

Henry was acting like a bull-headed fool, Eleanor thought. He loved his children, true, but when it came to inheritances, he was back to his game of pushing them around like pawns on a chessboard, with no thought for their feelings. All was policy, and often there seemed no rhyme or reason to it! But what of the wider implications of his heavy-handedness? Did he not realize that a house divided against itself falls?

The next she heard, King Louis had invited his daughter Marguerite and the Young King to Paris. That in itself was worrying.

“Louis has long been trying to make divisions in Henry’s empire,” she told Raoul one morning as they rode out with their hawks. “It would not surprise me if he has heard of the Young King’s dissatisfaction and is trying to exploit it to his own advantage. He fears that vast concentration of power in Henry’s hands.”