Eleanor was well on the way to convincing herself that Richard and the Young King—and perhaps even Geoffrey—were coming to free her. “The day of my deliverance is here, I know it!” she breathed. “And then I shall come again to dwell in my native land. Please, O God, let it be so!” Amaria looked away, unable to bear much more of this.
The door to the chamber opened. Ranulf Glanville stood there, his attractively craggy, clever face wearing a look of jubilation. For one blissful moment Eleanor thought he was going to tell her that she was free. She even got as far as thinking that she would be bountiful toward him when she was restored to power, for he had been a considerate gaoler … But with his first words her hopes were savagely dashed.
“My lady, I am commanded by the King to inform you that your sons have submitted to his authority, and that King Louis has conceded defeat. The bells you can hear are being rung in celebration of the peace that has been agreed. They are being sounded everywhere, for the whole of England rejoices!”
Eleanor sank down into a chair, feeling as if she had been winded. She could not speak, so great was her disappointment.
Glanville was looking at her, not unsympathetically. No fool, he would have guessed that she might misunderstand the reason for the rejoicings.
“Are you able to give me news of my sons?” she managed to ask.
“I am at liberty to say that the breach between them and the King has been healed; he has excused their treason on account of their youth. In the circumstances, the King has been very generous, although I am not allowed to discuss the terms of the peace settlement with you, my lady. What I can say is that, out of affection and love for the princes, he has proclaimed a general amnesty.”
Eleanor rose to her feet, hope springing again.
“So I am to be freed after all?” she asked eagerly.
“No, my lady, I am afraid not.” Glanville’s face was pained.
Eleanor almost reeled at his words, as did Amaria, who burst into noisy tears. This was altogether too much to bear.
“Then how can it be a general amnesty, if I am excluded?” Eleanor shrilled.
Glanville looked uncomfortable. Clearly, he was debating with himself how much he dared say to her. “I am probably exceeding my orders,” he said, “but the King made known his belief that his sons had been led astray by troublemakers. He named the King of France … and yourself.”
Of course. Someone had to take the blame and be punished. Henry needed his sons: they were his heirs, although she suspected that he had conceded them even less than before as the price of making peace. It was politic, indeed necessary, to restore good relations with them as soon as possible. But for that to happen, there had to be a scapegoat, someone at whom people could point a finger and think: shewas the evil genius behind their rebellion. They were not to blame.
She could never, in her worst nightmares, have envisaged that Henry could be so vengeful.
——
The King had triumphed, and for a time the talk in the marketplace and inns of Sarum was all of that. Good King Henry, the people called him, forgetting their horror at the murder of Becket and how they had vilified him then. All that mattered to them now was that he had been victorious against his enemies, as kings should be. Some could remember the trials of the weak Stephen’s reign, and knew how to appreciate a strong ruler like this one. For weeks the taverns resonated with the sound of ballads bawled tunelessly in honor of the King’s real—and imagined—exploits.
Clearly, Queen Eleanor, the one who was shut up in the castle and had not been freed—heads nodded significantly over that—was much to blame. Shehad caused the war, beyond any doubt, andthat devil, Louis of France. She was an unnatural woman, betraying her lord like that. But no one was really surprised. There had been other rumors over the years, scandalous ones at that, andprobably all true, given what they knew now. The people fell to whispering …
Yet as time passed, in its normal seasonal cycle for the good folk of Sarum, but dismally slowly for Eleanor, incarcerated in her tower, the mood of the people changed. By varied and circuitous routes, other rumors had reached them, rumors that offended their peasant sensibilities and their ingrained sense of right and wrong.
“The King is living openly with his leman!”
“He flaunts his paramour for all to see!”
“They call her the Rose of the World. My eye! Rose of Unchastity would be a better way of putting it!”
Henry was again the object of rank disapproval and derision, and the women were even more censorious than the men. “Since the world copies a bad king, he sets a bad example,” they complained. “Why, our husbands might think to follow it!” And tongues clucked in outrage.
Eleanor did not hear any of this, although Amaria could have told her a thing or two. She refrained, of course, not because she had been specifically instructed to keep quiet about such matters, but because she felt sorry for her mistress, whose emotions were very fragile where the King was concerned. The poor lady had troubles enough, and Amaria was not about to add to them.
But Eleanor was not to be kept in ignorance for long. Unexpectedly, she had a visitor, the ascetic Hugh of Avalon, Henry’s good friend and mentor. Eleanor had always liked and respected Hugh, that saintly man, that good and fearless man, who never shrank from speaking his mind, and whose unbounded charity was famous. Of a noble Burgundian family, and a monk of the Grande Chartreuse, Mother House of the austere Carthusian Order, he had just arrived in England at the King’s urgent request to head Henry’s new monastic foundation at Witham in Somerset.
Kneeling to receive Prior Hugh’s blessing, Eleanor wondered what had brought him here. She did not think it was merely to offer her some spiritual consolation, although she would be glad of that for, try as she might, she could not warm to the chaplain whom Henry had appointed. She feared, though, that Hugh of Avalon might be the bringer of bad tidings—another blow from Henry—and she was right.
“My daughter,” the prior said, in his deep, commanding voice, “I have come on a somewhat delicate but necessary mission.”
Oh no, Eleanor thought, but she observed the courtesies and invited her visitor to sit down.
“This is very sad and regrettable, this estrangement between you and the King, my lady,” Hugh began, regarding her with great warmth and humanity.
“It is no mere estrangement. I am his prisoner. He cannot forgive me for taking my sons’ part against him.”
“Of that, in charity, I will forbear to speak,” Hugh told her, seeing her distress, and knowing that anything he could say would only add to it. “But I must open my mind to you plainly, and tell you that I have always held the union between you and King Henry to be adulterous and invalid.”
“Adulterous?” echoed Eleanor, her mind rejecting the wider implications of what he was saying, and thrusting to one side the memory of Geoffrey in her bed, and the secret, shameful barrier to her marriage with Henry that her trysts with his father had created. What would the holy prior say if he knew about that? But she could never speak of it, and Henry knew it. Nor, she realized, could he, because he had married her knowing of the impediment. To admit that would be to declare their children bastards.
She had feared for a moment that Hugh of Avalon had somehow found out about her affair with Geoffrey. But he could not have, she told herself. Even Henry would not be so rash or vicious as to endanger his sons’ rights. But it had been a nasty moment, and she waited in trepidation to hear what the prior had to say.
“The annulment of your first marriage was, in my opinion, on questionable grounds,” Hugh told her. “You had married King Louis in good faith. A dispensation could without difficulty have been procured, and penances undergone for the lack of it. Yet you chose to leave your husband and take another, to whom you were even more closely related in blood. Because of that, no good could have come from that second union—which time, indeed, has proved. And therefore, the King wishes to end it by entering a plea of consanguinity.”