“You’ve not even heard the worst of it yet.” Richard leaned forward, no longer remembering to keep his voice low. “Hal promised that they’d offer up hostages, and when Maurice de Craon went to fetch them, he and his men were fired upon! Then Hal had the gall to come back and once again avow that this was another of their many ‘mishaps.’”
“Did Harry believe him?”
Geoff shrugged. “Who knows? He’ll not even talk to us about it anymore. But the mere fact that he is still willing to listen to their lies is more than I can comprehend!”
“Geoff is right,” Richard declared, loudly enough to turn heads in their direction. “I tell you, Uncle, it shames me to see him being duped like this. He’s usually quick to suspect the worst, for certes where my mother is concerned. But now he keeps giving those double-dealing hellspawns the benefit of every doubt! It is enough to make me wonder if he is slipping into his dotage.”
“It is not his brain that is leading him astray. It is his heart,” Ranulf said, with such heat that the younger men looked at him in surprise. “Do you truly find it so strange that he’d not want to believe his sons could be conniving at his death? If either of you had sons of your own, you’d not be so quick to pass judgment on him!”
“I do have a son,” Richard protested, earning him curious glances from Geoff and Bleddyn. But Ranulf was not mollified.
“And I’d wager he’s too young to give you any grief yet. Just wait until he’s old enough to balk, until he stops paying heed to a word you say, and then tell me that Harry is in his dotage!”
Bleddyn had begun to look uncomfortable, not sure whether Ranulf was drawing upon painful memories of their own estrangement. Richard and Geoff merely looked baffled. “Are you saying, then, that you’ll not even try to talk some sense into him? For if you cannot convince him, Uncle, I do not know who can.”
“Of course I will talk to him, Richard. I am simply saying that I understand, I understand all too well. But Harry is not my first concern. I am here to get my son Morgan out of this…this blood feud. Will the rebels honor a flag of truce?”
Geoff and Richard exchanged glances and then nodded. Richard could not resist a flash of mordant humor, though, saying sardonically that “I hope, though, that you have better luck with your flag of truce than my father had with his.”
Ranulf stared at his son in dismay. “You cannot stay here, Morgan! God only knows how this will all end, but I can safely say it will not end well. Your brother and I have come to take you back to Wales.”
Morgan glanced toward his brother, his indignation showing clearly on his face. Bleddyn shrugged and gave him a sheepish smile, for unlike Ranulf, he’d been sure Morgan would refuse. He’d still chosen to accompany Ranulf on this perilous trip, if only to keep him safe. But he’d never expected them to succeed.
“Morgan, you are not being given a choice! I am not going to leave you in the midst of a civil war.”
Morgan began to bridle, but the anguished expression on his father’s face stilled his temper before it could fully ignite. “Papa,” he said gently, “I am no longer a child. I was nineteen in February. Need I remind you that in Wales a lad reaches his legal majority at fourteen? I am old enough to make my own choices, and my choice is to remain with Cousin Geoffrey. He has been very good to me, has even promised to knight me himself and has offered me a place in his own household. Moreover, he has a just grievance against his father. How can I abandon him at a time like this?”
“Because he is fighting against his king, because that is treason, Morgan, and if you stay with him, it makes you guilty of treason, too.”
Morgan felt as if they were speaking two different languages, neither one able to understand the other. “Papa…we do not see it like that. We are fighting for our king, fighting for Cousin Hal. He is God’s Anointed just as much as Cousin Harry. So how can that be treason?”
Ranulf looked at his son in despair, seeing that he was not going to prevail. Making one last effort, he said, “I promised your mother that I’d bring you home. How am I supposed to tell her that you refused to come?”
“That was a low blow,” Morgan said, sounding more reproachful than resentful, and Ranulf’s shoulders slumped in defeat.
“I know,” he admitted, and after that, there seemed nothing more to say.
One glance at Ranulf’s face and Henry knew his mission had failed. Beckoning his uncle up onto the dais, he signaled to a passing servant for wine. “You look like a man greatly in need of a drink. It is one of the regrets of my life that I never learned how to drown my troubles in wine, but who knows? It might work for you.”
Ranulf gratefully sank down in an empty chair. “I do not remember ever being so tired,” he confided. “I must be getting old…”
“You are old,” Henry pointed out, with the glimmer of a smile. “Hell and damnation, Uncle, we’re both old, and getting older by the day.”
Ranulf took a deep swallow of wine, then another. “Were we this stubborn and foolhardy when we were young?”
Henry was gazing down into his wine cup, as if it held the answers they sought. “So Morgan is still beguiled by my sons, chose them over you. My sympathies, Uncle. I can say in all honesty that I know exactly what you are feeling right now.”
“Harry…whilst I was at the ville, I heard men talking in the hall. They were saying that Viscount Aimar had summoned all the townspeople to the church of St Pierre, where they were instructed to swear fealty to Hal.” To Ranulf, this was the final nail in the coffin of Hal’s credibility, and he was taken aback when Henry continued calmly to sip his wine. “You do not seem surprised,” he said at last, and Henry regarded him in silence for a moment, then leaned over and clinked their wine cups together, with the saddest smile Ranulf had ever seen.
“Shall we drink,” he said, “to the joys of fatherhood?”
When Ralph Fitz Stephen was admitted to her chamber, Eleanor’s eyes locked upon the letter in his hand. He did not keep her in suspense, hastened toward her and held it out. “This has just arrived for you, Madame, from your son.”
Amaria wondered which son he meant, but Eleanor already knew even before she saw the familiar ducal seal of Aquitaine. It had been broken, of course, for her greater freedom did not include freedom from discreet surveillance. Snatching the letter, she moved toward an oil lamp and began to read.
Ralph Fitz Stephen withdrew, and Amaria wondered if she should leave, too, not sure if Eleanor would want to be alone or not. It depended, she supposed, upon the contents of that letter.
When Eleanor looked up, she eased the other woman’s uncertainty by saying, “This is from my son Richard. I am thankful that he thought to write to me, but all his news is bad, Amaria. He says the French king has sent routiers to aid the rebels and they have done widespread damage, burning the town of St-Leonard-de-Noblat after stripping it bare, killing the men and carrying off the women. Perigord, Angoumois, and the Saintonge have all been overrun by the rebels. He admits that they’d be in dire straits if the rebel lords could control their men and launch concerted attacks. But fortunately their routiers lack discipline and are more interested in plundering and looting than in fighting a real war.”
It sounded to Amaria as if Richard and Henry were already in dire straits, and she suspected that Eleanor thought so, too. The queen had that glazed, faraway look in her eyes again. Deciding to take her cues from her lady, she asked no questions, waiting to see if Eleanor wanted to confide in her, and after a time, the older woman began to speak again, her tones brittle and taut, sounding as if the muscles in her throat had constricted so painfully that the words had to fight their way free.
“Richard says that Hal and Geoffrey have done nothing but lie to Harry, that again and again he has offered them forgiveness, only to have them make a mockery of his trust. He says that Harry was twice shot at as he approached the city. That Hal promised hostages and then ambushed Harry’s men when they came to get them. That he claimed to have taken the cross and threatened to depart for the Holy Land, but let himself be persuaded when Harry entreated him not to go. That when Harry sent two envoys to Geoffrey, his men attacked them, stabbing one and throwing the other off the bridge into the river. Neither Geoffrey nor Hal took any measures to punish their men for these breaches of the truce.”
Eleanor related this litany of her sons’ sins so matter-of-factly that Amaria found herself on the verge of tears, for she knew how much that dispassionate recital had cost the queen. She wanted to say how very sorry she
