or troubadour even could make sense of it. But then there is no accounting for the ways of the heart—or the responses of two healthy bodies to each other. She had never forgotten that day in Paris, more than half a century before, when she first set eyes on Henry in his magnificent prime …
Heady memories, but crowded now by sad ones. They were always with her. Not just the tragedy of her marriage, but the pain and unending grief of loss. Eleven children she had borne, and nine she had lost: they came to her often, a sad procession of cherished ghosts: Marie and Alix, whom she never saw again after her divorce from Louis, both gone to their rest these six years now, leaving her full of regrets for having failed them dismally as their mother; little William and baby Philip, sweet, fleeting, poignant memories; Henry the Young King, and Geoffrey, her fine strapping sons, dead before their time, their bitter rivalry vanquished only by death; beloved Matilda, snatched away in childbirth that same summer Henry had died; tragic Joanna, scarred by a violent marriage and the burns that had marred her beauty in a terrible fire and left her too weak to survive a brutal confinement; and her adored Richard, who was to have been the staff of her old age, gone from her too. Having suffered the failure of his great crusade to free Jerusalem from the Turks, and then captivity by the treacherous Emperor—how she had slaved and cajoled to raise that ransom!—he now lay here quiet at Fontevrault, his lion heart stilled, in the choir, at the feet of his father, as Richard in humility and penitence had requested. And soon, if God was merciful, she herself would be laid to her rest near them both.
After Richard’s death the light had gone out of her life. A shell of her former self, she had girded her loins and done her best to secure John’s inheritance for him, but her heart had not been in it; it was broken and could never be mended. Yet even after that, aged as she was, she had been afforded no rest, but traversed the inhospitable Pyrenees to fetch her granddaughter, Young Eleanor’s child, from Castile, to marry the Dauphin Louis, Philip Augustus’s son. Then there had been the rebellion led by her grandson, Arthur of Brittany, who contested John’s crown, and even had the impertinence to besiege his eighty-year-old granddame in her castle at Mirabeau. It had been John, perfidious John, who showed his mettle and came vengefully to her rescue, riding at breakneck speed to raise the siege, her champion on a white charger. She had almost loved John on that occasion. It was the nearest she had ever come to it.
But after Mirabeau, John had murdered Arthur. He never confessed to it, and it was not the kind of thing people spoke of other than covertly, but she had known. There were awful tales being whispered. Some said the King had ordered the boy’s gaoler to have him blinded and castrated; others that John himself killed Arthur and had his weighted body thrown into the Seine. Eleanor had pleaded with her son for her grandson’s life, but John was not able to meet her eyes. That was when she knew. Again, it seemed that the Angevin family was cursed, and that its scions, those hapless descendants of the witch Melusine, must forever be destroying one another. Was there to be no end to it?
And now they were saying that John had lost Normandy, that proud heritage of the Conqueror, that jewel in the Angevin crown. It would fall, the empire, she knew it; if Philip’s successors were as ambitious and tenacious as he, they would claw it away, inch by inch. It might take hundreds of years, but the great empire that she and Henry had built would crumble in the end, and its legacy would no doubt endure to trouble Christendom for centuries more. That much we achieved! she thought grimly, thanking God that Henry and Richard were not here to see this day. Yes, Henry, we built a great empire, she reflected, but it may well leave a bloody legacy. Had her life been worthwhile? Not in human terms, she felt. When all her passion had been spent and her hopes dashed in the dust, what was left to show that she had made the best use of her time on Earth? The great dynastic marriage that she schemed and sinned to make had brought neither happiness nor peace, even if it had invested her and Henry with a fleeting greatness. Instead, they were leaving a bitter heritage to those who came after them. Already, the reckoning was due.
But Normandy, and the problems of the empire, could not concern her now. God had other priorities. True greatness lay in living in harmony with Him, and in living wisely and exercising power with humility. Often, she knew, she had signally failed, but in the main she had done her very best, even if her motives had not been the purest. You could not say much more for anyone than that. The book of her life was almost written, and nothing could now be changed. She was done with earthly things, had put them firmly behind her. John must go to Hell in his own way …
By the time of Arthur’s disappearance, she’d had enough. She was old and weary, and her task was done. All she sought was the peace and tranquillity of the cloister, and a quiet mind. She had benefited from the former, but doubted she would ever achieve the latter. Had it not been said, by someone very wise—she forgot whom; she was very forgetful these days—that the blood of the wicked would not thrive? Had she and Henry been so very wicked? She feared to answer that question, with death and Divine Judgment fast approaching. And yet—whatever she had done wrong, she’d done her best to atone for it and seek forgiveness. In the final accounting, God Himself would be all-merciful. Maybe she should do as the abbess said and put her trust in Him, and wait for death with serenity, embracing it rather than fearing it.
So here she was, shrouded among the shrouded women. She shifted a little in her narrow bed, causing the young nun to look up from her book. Still dead to the world, the girl thought. She did not know that in the old lady before her, a subtle change was taking place; but Eleanor was herself suddenly, joyously aware that a golden door had burst open, that it opened to receive her and that she was drifting toward the brilliant light streaming from it, dazzling her with its splendor. She had one last, lucid thought: that we none of us know exactly what lies beyond the door to eternity, but if Our Lord is kind, our loved ones will be waiting there for us, in His tender care, and we will be in a Paradise far beyond our earthly imaginings.
If she’d had a voice, she would have cried out in rapture, for, suspended in the light, she saw again, as she had seen in a dream all those years before, a circlet of blazing gold that shone with incomparable brightness, a crown with no beginning and no end, so gloriously pure and resplendent with its assurance of everlasting joy. And in that wonderful moment, as the candle beside her bed flickered gently and went out, and the young nun called in alarm for the abbess, Eleanor felt her soul suddenly take wings and fly, south to Poitiers, Bordeaux, Aquitaine.…
Author’s Note
This novel is based on historical facts. However, Eleanor of Aquitaine lived in the twelfth century, and contemporary sources for her life are relatively sparse, as I found when I was researching my biography of her in the 1970s and 1990s. It was while I was writing that book that I first conceived the idea of writing historical novels. Essentially, the nature of medieval biography, particularly of women, is the piecing together of fragments of information and making sense of them. It can be a frustrating task, as there are often gaps that you know you can never fill. It came to me one day, as I realized I could go no further with one particular avenue of speculation, that the only way of filling those gaps would be to write a historical novel, because—as I then thought—a novelist does not have to work within the same constraints as a historian.
But is that strictly true? What is the point of a historical novel (or film, for that matter) based on a real person if the author does not take pains to make it as authentic as possible? You can’t just make it up. I know, because my readers regularly—and forcefully—tell me so, that people care that what they are reading is close to the truth, given a little dramatic license and the novelist’s informed imagination. For lots of people—myself included—come to history through historical novels, and many will never make that leap from such novels to history books; they rely on the novelist to tell it as it was, and to set the story within an authentic background, with authentic detail. Of course, historical sources are subject to a wide variety of interpretations, but they are the only means we have of learning what happened centuries ago, and it is crucial that a historical novelist, just like a historian, uses them with integrity. Otherwise a novel must lack credibility.
But what of the gaps? How should they be filled? Yes, it is liberating to be able to use one’s imagination, but you can’t simply indulge in flights of fancy, and what you invent must always be credible within the context of what is known. Making up wild, unsubstantiated stories will always fail to convince, and sells short both those who know nothing about the subject and those who know a great deal. There should always be a sound basis for writing anything that is controversial, and any significant departure from the historical record should be explained in an author’s note like this one.
Hence, because this is a novel, I have taken some dramatic license. Eleanor’s sexual adventures, for
