“Tell me truly, my son,” Eleanor asked seriously, “what you hope to gain from taking up arms against your father.”
“I thought you supported me!” he flared.
“I do; I believe you have a just grievance. But we all need to be clear what the objective is. Do you intend to force the King to share his power with you, or do you mean—as report has suggested—to overthrow him and rule in his stead?”
“Would it make a difference to your supporting me?” Ah, she thought, so he does understand the moral issue at stake.
“It might have done once,” she said bitterly, “but your father has since forfeited all right to my loyalty. I am as a widow; he has insulted and abandoned me, and he has treated you, his sons and mine, with contempt—and I will not stand by and allow it. A rotten branch must be cut off before it infects the healthy tree.”
“You are prepared to go that far?” Young Henry was staring at her in amazement.
“Yes,” she told him. “Your father has forced me to make a choice between my loyalty to my husband and king, and my desire to protect the interests of my children. I am a mother. There can be no contest. Whatever love and duty he once had from me, as of right, he has killed, stone dead.” She stepped forward and hugged her tall son.
“What has he done to you?” he asked angrily.
“He struck me, that you know. I do not care to go into the rest.”
“You do not need to,” the Young King fumed. “None of us are blind. We know about the
“It seems I was the only one who didn’t,” Eleanor said lightly. “But now we must forget about all that, and discuss this war with your brothers.”
She summoned Richard and Geoffrey to her solar. Constance arrived too, full of her own opinions, but Eleanor shooed her away impatiently. She did not want the silly girl meddling where she had no business to. The Young King’s brothers were surprised to see him, and listened gravely, and in mounting fury, to what he and their mother had to say.
“It is up to you what you do,” Eleanor told them both. “You are almost grown to man’s estate, and I will not treat you like children.”
Richard got up and embraced Young Henry. “I choose to follow my brother rather than my father, because I believe he has right on his side.”
“Well said!” Eleanor applauded. “And you, Geoffrey, will you join with your brothers against your father the King?”
Geoffrey drew himself up to his full height; at fifteen, he was undergoing a growth spurt, but he would never be as tall as Young Henry and Richard, of whom he was intensely jealous. Unlike them, he was dark and saturnine in appearance, and it was rapidly becoming evident that he had a character to match. He was clever with words, perhaps the most intelligent of all Eleanor’s brood, but untrustworthy and ruthlessly ambitious.
“Naturally, I support my brother,” he said smoothly. “I too am a victim of our father’s pigheadedness. I should be ruling Brittany without his endless interference.”
“Then we are of one accord,” Eleanor declared. “Yet before we go ahead and make plans, I must ask of you all if you are aware of the implications of what you are doing, for you must go into this with your eyes open. By anyone’s reckoning, it is treason.”
“Treason,” interrupted Young Henry hotly, “is a crime against the King. I am the King, am I not? Even my father cannot dispute that. And King Louis says that, in making me King, he abdicated all sovereign authority.”
“That last is open to dispute,” Eleanor said, “but it will serve for now. You do realize you are effectively declaring war on your own father, to whom you owe love and obedience?”
Geoffrey shrugged.
“Do you not know it is our proper nature that none of us should love the other? We came from the Devil, remember? So it is not surprising that we try to injure one another!”
“Our father has forfeited his right to our love and obedience,” Richard averred, his handsome face creased in resentment.
“Aye, indeed!” the Young King agreed. “So you are both for me in this?”
“Yes!” the brothers chorused.
“You must go directly to Paris, to King Louis,” Eleanor urged them. “He is your greatest ally, and will back you with military force. I will give you letters informing him and his council of my support. I will dictate them now, while you make ready.”
Within an hour she was in the palace courtyard, kissing her sons farewell and wishing them Godspeed, wondering if she would ever see them again. Their departure was supposed to be a secret, but within hours word of it, and excited speculation as to their purpose, had spread throughout the city of Poitiers, and within a week the whole province of Aquitaine was in jubilation at the prospect of an end to the rule of the hated Duke Henry. Eleanor only became truly aware of this when a troubadour, Richard le Poitevin, visited her court and played before her and her company. His words, sung in a rich baritone voice, conveyed just how strongly her subjects really felt:
Deeply moved, Eleanor turned to Raoul de Faye.
“We cannot ignore the voice of our people,” she murmured. “It further strengthens my conviction that opposing Henry is the right thing to do.”
“I think many of us have been waiting a long time for you to come to that conclusion, Eleanor,” Raoul said with a gentle smile. She gripped his hand.
“Will you go to Paris for me?” she asked. “Will you be my envoy, and convey a personal message from me to Louis, thanking him for his support for my sons, and begging him to have a care for their safety? He will appreciate such a personal gesture, and while you are there, you can send me word of my young lords’ welfare, and perhaps contrive to have some say in making decisions.”
“I will go with pleasure,” Raoul agreed. “I will be the voice of the Duchess of Aquitaine. You may depend on me.”
Raoul had gone, but now there came a letter, bearing the seal of Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen. What business had he, the Primate of Normandy, to be writing to her, Eleanor? Then fear gripped her. Could the Archbishop have written to tell her that something terrible had befallen one of her sons? With trembling fingers she cracked open the seal and read, her jaw dropping in horror.
Rotrou had begun courteously enough: “Pious Queen, most illustrious Queen …” But then he had gone on immediately to deplore that she, hitherto a prudent wife, had parted from her husband. That was not what appalled her—she could deal with sanctimonous platitudes any day! It was the Archbishop’s accusation that she had made the fruits of her union with the King rise up against their father. It was terrible, such conduct, he fulminated, before going on to warn her that unless she returned to her husband at once, she would be the cause of the general ruin of Christendom.
He knew! Henry knew of her betrayal. He had made Rotrou, his Archbishop, write this letter, there could be no doubt of it. But how had he found out? Everything had been planned in secret. Had her letter to Louis been intercepted? Worse still, had Raoul been taken on the road and forced to confess what he knew? Worst of all, had Henry planted spies at her court? She tried to recall the names and appearances of those who had recently joined her household, and remembered that before he left, the King had appointed four of her Poitevin countrymen to her chancery. She could not think there had been anything sinister about that, but one never knew with Henry. He was a suspicious man. Of course, it might not be the Poitevins at all, but one familiar to her, who could have been suborned into turning his coat. That was a chilling thought. Yet maybe her imagination was running away with her —Louis could well have implicated her in a letter to Henry.
Shaking, she read on, casting her eyes over pious exhortations to return with her sons to the husband whom
