Captive Queen

flesh …

“I will weigh everything carefully before committing myself to marriage again,” she was saying in a noncommittal tone.

“You cannot seriously be thinking of ruling alone?” Louis asked, shocked. “You will need a protector, a strong man who will govern in your name. And one, I might remind you, who is loyal to me and would not seek to abuse his power.” Which, he thought to himself, is probably asking for the moon.

“I had thought of that,” she said evenly, “which is why I am making no hasty decision. This has to be resolved in everyone’s best interests.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Eleanor was holding her breath, waiting.

“Then it seems I must grant your wish,” Louis capitulated. She tried to look suitably sorrowful.

“I wish it could have been otherwise,” she said gently, reaching across to lay her hand on his.

“You cannot know how deeply I wish that,” her husband replied, removing his hand and pushing his plate away, sickened at the sight of the uneaten meat congealing in its thick sauce. “There is but one thing I ask of you, for the sake of my pride, as a king and as a man.”

“Yes?” Eleanor responded warily.

“That you allow me to initiate proceedings. Never let it be said that the King of France was abandoned by his wife.”

“I agree,” Eleanor said, biting back the retort that she was not really his wife. There was no point in making matters worse by sparring. She had gotten what she wanted.

“There is another thing,” Louis went on. “I take it you have thought of our daughters.”

Eleanor had thought. Those two beautiful little girls with their blond curls and wide blue eyes. Every time she looked at Marie and Alix, she marveled that she herself had helped to create them. She loved them, of course, yet had been constrained to do so from a distance. They had never seemed like hers anyway. As the daughters of France, they were given over at birth to a gaggle of nurses and servants, and she had not been involved in their daily care. They were far closer to Thomasine, their Lady Mistress, than they ever had been to their mother. She had rarely seen her children, and consequently established no close bond with them.

Yet there had been precious moments, as when her daughters twined their soft arms around her neck, resting their downy little heads against her cheek as she told them stories of fairies and demons, or sang them lays of the South, learned in her girlhood; but these came rarely. And of course it was better that way, for one day, not far distant, those little girls would leave France forever, to be married to great lords or princes. It was the way of the world, and she had known from the first that it would not do to allow herself to become too attached to them, for she might never see them again afterward.

For all that, she was hoping she might have a chance to enjoy many more sweet moments with her daughters before that inevitable parting, and the opportunity to forge a closer bond with them.

“Yes, I have given them much thought,” she told Louis. “How could I not? Marie and Alix are flesh of my flesh, and very dear to me. How will it be if I take them with me to Aquitaine, then send them back to you in a few years when you have found husbands for them?”

Louis frowned. “Eleanor,” he said, his voice cold, “have you forgotten that Marie and Alix are princesses of France? Their place is here, in France, with me, the King their father. My barons would never agree to them going with you.”

Eleanor blanched. “Louis, they are but six years and one year in age. I am their mother.”

“You should have thought of that when you pressed for an annulment!” Louis said reprovingly.

“I did think of it, constantly! Is it my fault that we are too near in blood? Louis, I beg of you …”

“Is it not enough that I am to be deserted by the wife I love? Should I lose my children too? I tell you, Eleanor, no court in Christendom would award you custody of them, and it would kill me to have you take them away.” There were tears in Louis’s eyes, his pain not all on account of his daughters.

“So you would deprive them of their mother?” Eleanor persisted.

“They will have a stepmother before long. You said that I must remarry, remember? And I will be expected to, for the sake of the succession.”

“I realize that, but they are my children too!” Eleanor cried. “Do not deprive me of them, I beg of you.”

“Eleanor, you know, as do I, that this is not about consanguinity,” Louis replied sadly. “You want your freedom, I have long been aware of that. Who is doing the depriving here?”

“I never intended that, God knows,” she sobbed, sinking to her knees. “I know you love our girls.” They were both weeping now.

“As usual, you never think things through, Eleanor,” Louis said, resisting the urge to kneel down and comfort her. “You just act impetuously, causing a lot of grief. I loved you—God help me, I love you still—and I feel for you. But on this issue I will not—nay, I cannot—bend. Princesses of France must be reared in France. The people would expect it. Besides, you left Marie for more than two years to go on the crusade. You insisted on coming with me, as I recall.”

“It grieved me to leave her, you must believe that. But I had to accompany you, Louis. My vassals would not accept you as their leader. Besides, I rarely saw Marie anyway. She did not need me. Neither of my daughters needs me. It is I who need time to get to know them, to make up to them for what I have not been.”

“Alas, I cannot grant you that,” Louis said. “Be realistic, and understand my position.” There was a pause, a heartbeat as his gaze held hers. “You could always reconsider.”

“You know that I cannot,” Eleanor told him. She was trembling. The prospects of her freedom, her return to Aquitaine, and a life with Henry of Anjou, not to mention the manifold benefits their marriage would bring, were too precious to her to give them up, but she had now been made devastatingly aware of just how high a price she was to pay for them. Desperately, she conjured up Henry’s leonine face in her mind, trying to blot out the plaintive image of those two sweet, fair-haired little girls.

Louis shook his head. “What a mess. We made our marriage with such high hopes.”

“We did our best,” Eleanor consoled, her mind still fixed fervently on Henry. “But God’s law must prevail.”

“I will speak to my bishops,” Louis said wearily. “Then we must attend to the practicalities.”

“You mean the transfer of Aquitaine to me?” Eleanor snapped.

“Yes. There will be a peaceful withdrawal of my royal officials and French garrisons. We will go there together and oversee it. Your vassals shall attend you.”

“All those defenses you built must be dismantled,” Eleanor insisted. “My people resent them.”

“It shall be done,” Louis agreed.

Eleanor rose and went to look out of the narrow window—barely more than an arrow slit—across the broad Seine and the huddled rooftops of Paris. Above them, the inky sky was studded with stars—those same stars under which Henry of Anjou was living, breathing, waiting … She caught her breath suddenly, certain she had made the right decision. She must suppress her sadness, for there was no other way for her. Her daughters were well cared for and would barely miss her; she must love them from a distance, as she always had—except the distance would be farther. Her own future was mapped out by destiny, and there was no escaping it, even if she wanted to. She had only to contain herself in patience for some while longer, and in the meantime she would be returning to Aquitaine, to reclaim her great inheritance. She was going home, home to the sweet, lush lands of the South, the lands of mighty rivers and verdant hills, of rich wines and fields of sunflowers; where people spoke her native tongue, the langue d’oc, which would sound as music after the clumsy, outlandish dialect they spoke in the North. She could not wait to be once more among her own people, quarrelsome and often violent though they were. It meant more to her to be Duchess of Aquitaine than it ever had to be Queen of France, or queen of the whole world, for that matter.

4 Beaugency-sur-Loire, 1152

The whispering was hushed in the vaulted hall as the princes of the Church took their seats on the stone