How had she gotten to him like this? Mayhap it was just the afterglow. It was only natural that he’d feel close to her after lovemaking like theirs. Any more heat and they’d have set the bed on fire. Or was it that any last lingering doubts about her honour had gone up in smoke? However much he’d insisted to his father that he did not believe the gossip and innuendoes and rumors, there’d been a small, dark corner of uncertainty, one he’d not acknowledged even to himself…until now.
But no more. No matter what men said of her, he knew now that she was not a wanton. She was passionate and blessedly uninhibited and ardent. But she knew none of a courtesan’s erotic tricks, those special, seductive ways of pleasuring a man that most wives never mastered. He’d lain with enough harlots to recognize practiced passion, and from harlots, that was indeed what he wanted. But not from Eleanor. He’d not wanted her to be too knowing, too artful in her caresses, for she could never have learned such skills from monkish, fettered Louis. If she had ever been unfaithful, he was sure now it had been a brief tryst, no more than that.
It was passing strange, for he ought not to care what she’d done whilst wed to another man. But he did. If tenderness was an unfamiliar emotion for him, so was this urge, too. He’d never been jealous of a bedmate before, never felt possessive of one, either. Was it because she was his wife? Was that what made it so different, so much more complicated?
“Harry…what are you thinking about?”
“Papal politics, the price of corn, whether I ought to get my stallion shoed, the usual…” he joked, while tightening his arm around her shoulders. She had the most luxuriant hair he’d ever encountered in a bedmate; he could not keep his hands away from it, running its silkiness through his fingers, wondering why men found blonde hair so alluring. It reached well past her hips, ebony in the night shadows, a deep rich brown whenever the firelight played upon it. Separating a long, gleaming strand, he entwined it around his fingers, looping it about his wrist.
Her lashes flickered. “Are you worried that I might run off whilst you sleep?”
“I just want to keep you close,” he said, and she smiled drowsily.
“You need not worry, Harry,” she said. “I’ll not stray…”
Eustace had moved to the open window, watching the river traffic on the Seine. Behind his back, the French king exchanged puzzled looks with his brother Robert and his cousin Raoul. Louis was as surprised as anyone by Eustace’s unexpected arrival in Paris. He must have left England within a few days of his mother’s funeral, which bespoke an unseemly haste to Louis. Moreover, his presence was something of an embarrassment now that Louis had made peace with his rival the Duke of Normandy. The other men in the chamber were regarding Eustace with no favor, for he had few friends at court. But he had to be made welcome. They could hardly turn away the Count of Boulogne, the French king’s brother-in-law.
Eustace was well aware that these men liked him not. But he harbored no goodwill toward most of them, either. While he’d always been on civil terms with the French king, he could not respect a man so weak-willed. Louis’s blustery brother the Count of Dreux he disliked heartily, an antagonism Robert returned in full measure. Nor did he think much of Louis’s dissolute kinsman Raoul de Peronne. Raoul’s courtesy too often held a hidden sting, a hinted smugness that Eustace found infuriating, coming as it did from a man who’d made a fool of himself over a slut young enough to be his daughter. He had no reason to think badly of the Templar, Thierry Galeran, and he did not know Hugh de Champfleury, Louis’s new chancellor. As for Waleran Beaumont, the less said of him, the better; Eustace would never forgive him for going over to Maude. And these were the men whose voices Louis most heeded? If so, no wonder his brother-in-law seemed to lurch from one blunder to another, like a ship with no rudder.
“Did you bring Constance with you?” Louis queried politely as Eustace turned away from the window. Eustace shook his head, started to say that Constance had remained behind to tend to his father, whose grieving was still raw. He caught himself in time, for that would only stir up another flurry of commiserations. He’d already accepted their condolences, wanted no more. If he would rather mourn his mother in private, that was betwixt him and God and no concern of theirs.
What he really wanted to discuss with Louis was the calamitous mistake he’d made in coming to terms with Maude’s whelp. Henry Fitz Empress could not be trusted; what Angevin could? Not for nothing did men call Anjou the Devil’s birthplace. Sooner or later Louis would realize how badly he’d erred. Eustace hoped to make it sooner. But he preferred to wait for a more opportune moment. He had a better chance of convincing Louis if they were alone.
Since Eustace seemed to feel no obligation to stoke the conversational fires, it fell to the ever-courteous king to perform that task for him. It was not easy going, for so many subjects held pitfalls. Fortunately, Louis got some help from the affable Raoul, who was a past master at social discourse, the sort of talk that was lively and smooth- flowing and said nothing of any consequence. But Louis was not enjoying himself and it was a relief to be summoned away by Adam Brulart, his secretary, hovering anxiously in the doorway.
“Well, what shall we talk about now?” Raoul asked Eustace. “I can always tell you the story of my life. I daresay you’ve been awaiting that with bated breath.”
Eustace stared suspiciously at the older man, sure that Raoul was mocking him, but not sure what to do about it. Humor was the weapon he most mistrusted, for it was one he’d never learned to handle with any skill. But he was spared the need to reply. Glancing about the chamber, Raoul frowned, then rose from his seat. “Cousin? Is something amiss?”
By now other heads were turning toward Louis, too. He did look sickly, Eustace conceded, for he had no more color than a corpse candle and an odd, glazed stare, as if he were not seeing any of them. Filled with foreboding, Eustace started toward him. Raoul and Robert were already there, asking questions that Louis did not seem to hear.
It fell to Adam Brulart to tell them. After a troubled look at his king’s ashen face, the clerk said reluctantly, “The King’s Grace has just learned that the Lady Eleanor and the Duke of Normandy were wed in Poitiers on Whitsunday.”
As the unhappy clerk had known it would, his news created a furor. Voices rose as men struggled to make themselves heard. Eustace finally prevailed, for he’d had much practice in shouting others down. “Is it true?” he demanded of Louis. “Just tell me if it is true!”
Louis swallowed. “A mistake,” he said. “It must be a mistake. Eleanor would not do that to me. I know she would not…”
He was a minority of one in that belief. Several of the men had begun to curse. Raoul had paled; clutching his royal cousin’s arm, he said urgently, “I did not know, Louis. I swear by the Holy Cross that I did not know!” Louis said nothing, for he was not listening. Neither was Eustace. Turning away, he rested his palms flat against the wall, standing motionless, arms outstretched, head down. Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and now Aquitaine, too- Blood of Christ! Without warning, he balled his fist, hammered it into the wall repeatedly, leaving a smear of blood behind. In the confusion, no one noticed.
The French king continued to insist plaintively that it must be a mistake. He was Eleanor’s liege lord. She had no right to wed without his consent. And never would she have wed Henry Fitz Empress. Had she not wanted to annul their marriage because their kinship was an affront to the Almighty? It had gnawed away at her peace. She’d told him so-often. But she was even more closely akin to Henry than she was to him. So such a marriage could never be. She would not mock God’s Law like that. She would not mock him. But his protests carried less and less conviction and at last he slumped down in a chair, too stricken to keep up the pretense any further.
Gradually the other men quieted and a discomfited silence filled the chamber. Watching Louis bleed was painful for them, too, but none knew how to treat a heart wound. After much shuffling of feet and clearing of throats, they seemed to have reached an unspoken consensus that the greatest kindness they could do their king would be to leave him alone. They began to mumble regrets, to murmur vaguely of duties elsewhere, putting Eustace in mind of the hushed, unnatural voices of the mourners at his mother’s funeral. Crossing the chamber swiftly, he planted himself directly in front of his brother-in-law’s hunched figure, arms folded across his chest, legs spread, impossible to ignore.
“What mean you to do about this?”
Louis looked up blankly, a man roused from his own private hell, blinking as if surprised to find the men still here. “What can I do? They are already wed.”
“But you are not going to let them get away with it, are you? They had no right to wed and well they knew it. If it is too late to prevent the marriage, it is not too late to punish them for it. If you do not, others will think that
