Sharon Penman: The Queen Man

Up close, the city was even more daunting, exciting and crowded and chaotic. The streets were narrow, unpaved, and shadowed by overhanging timbered houses painted in vivid shades of red and blue and black. The sky was smudged with the smoke from hundreds of hearth fires, and flocks of sea gulls wheeled overhead, adding their raucous cries to the clamor of river traffic. Ferrymen shouted "Westward ho!" as they steered toward Southwark, "Eastward ho!" for those wanting to cross over to the London bankside. Some peddlers hawked "Hot pies!" along the Cheapside, others sought to entice customers with bellowing boasts about the fine quality of their needles and pins, their miraculous salves and healing balms, their ribbons and wooden combs and wrought-iron candlesticks. Justin did not doubt that if he asked one of them for the Holy Grail, the man would promise to produce it straightaway.

Weaving his way along the Cheapside, Justin had to check his stallion frequently, for the street was thronged with pedestrians, darting between lumbering carts and swearing horsemen with the aplomb of the true city dweller. They seemed equally indifferent to the dogs and geese and stray pigs wandering about, and were not fazed even when a woman opened an upper-story window and flung the contents of a chamber pot down into the street's central gutter. The Londoners scattered in the nick of time, a few pausing to curse upward, most continuing on their way without losing a stride. Marveling at this urban insouciance, Justin rode on.

Theirs was a world constantly echoing with the chiming of church bells, for they were rung for festivals, for funerals, for marriages, for royal coronations and city elections, for processions and births and to elicit prayers for dying parishioners, to call Christ's faithful to Mass and to mark the canonical hour. Like most people, Justin had learned to be selectively deaf, so that the incessant pealing faded into the background noises of daily life. But never before had he been in a city with more than a hundred churches, and he found himself engulfed in waves of shimmering sound. The sun had slid below the horizon, and he hastily stopped a passerby, asking about lodgings. Directed to a small, shabby inn off the Cheapside, he engaged a bed for himself and a stall for Copper in the stables. The inn offered no meals; Justin was told brusquely that if he was hungry, there was a cookshop down by the river.

Justin was indeed hungry, but even more exhausted. He'd gotten little sleep since the Epiphany ambush on the Alresford Road. He and Gervase Fitz Randolph's groom, Edwin, had taken the goldsmith's body to Alresford, where the village priest had promised to alert the sheriff of Hampshire and to break the sad news to the Fitz Randolph family. Justin had then continued on toward London, but he was trailed by memories of the killing, and the letter he'd hidden within his tunic was heavier than any millstone.

According to the innkeeper, Justin would be sharing a chamber with two Breton sailors, but they were out. The room was scantily furnished, containing only three pallets covered with moth-eaten woolen blankets and a few stools, not even a chamber pot. Sitting down on the closest bed, Justin set his candle upon one of the stools and then drew out the letter.

Gervase had secreted it in a leather pouch around his neck, a pouch so soaked with his blood that Justin had discarded it at the murder site. The parchment was folded, threaded through with a thin, braided cord, the ends sealed with wax. The signet was still intact, although it meant nothing to Justin. No matter how many times he examined it, the letter offered no clues. As evidence of a man's violent death, it was compelling. But was it truly meant for England's queen?

A dozen times he'd been about to break the seal; a dozen times he'd checked the impulse. Was it the dried blood mottling the parchment that gave him such a sense of foreboding? What in God's Name had he gotten himself into? How was he supposed to deliver a dead man's letter to Eleanor of Aquitaine?

He knew of Eleanor's remarkable history, of course, as who in Christendom did not? In her youth, she'd been a great beauty, an even greater heiress, Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right. At age fifteen, she'd become Queen of France. But the marriage had not prospered, for wine and milk were not meant to mix. The pious, painfully earnest Louis was as baffled as he was bewitched by his high-spirited young wife, while his advisers whispered that she was too clever by half, more strong-willed and outspoken than any woman ought to be. There had been rumors and hints of scandal as the years went by, a disastrous crusade to the Holy Land, a public estrangement and reconciliation, at the Pope's urging. Few were surprised when the French king and his controversial queen were eventually divorced, for however much Louis still loved her — and he did — she'd failed to give him a son, and that was the one sin no queen could be forgiven.

Eleanor had then returned to her own domains in Aquitaine, and it was expected that after a decorous interval, Louis and his council would choose another husband for her, a man deemed acceptable to the French Crown. What Eleanor might want, no one even considered. And so the shock was all the greater when word got out of her sudden, secret wedding two months after the divorce to Henry Fitz Empress, Duke of Normandy.

If Eleanor and Louis had been grievously mismatched, she and Henry were almost too well matched, two high-flying hawks soaring toward the sun. Eleanor was nigh on thirty,

Henry just nineteen, but they were soulmates in all the ways that mattered, lusting after empires and each other, indifferent to scandalized public opinion and the wounded outrage of the French king. Henry soon showed the rest of Christendom what

Eleanor had seen in him. When Louis was goaded into a punitive expedition against the newlyweds, Henry sent the French army reeling back across the border in six short weeks. He then turned his attention to England. His mother had fought a long and bloody civil war with her cousin over the English throne. Henry avenged her loss, claiming the crown she'd been denied. Barely two years after their marriage, Eleanor was once more a queen, this time Queen of England.

Her marriage to Henry had proved to be a passionate and tumultuous and, ultimately, doomed union. The "barren queen" bore him eight children, five sons and three daughters. They loved and quarreled and reconciled and ruled over a vast realm that stretched from Scotland to the Pyrenees. But then Henry committed an unforgivable sin of his own, giving his heart to a younger woman. In their world, a wife was expected to overlook

a husband's infidelities, no matter how flagrant. Eleanor was not like other women, though, and Henry was to pay a high price for his roving eye: a rebellion instigated by his queen, joined by his own sons.

But Eleanor paid a high price, too. Captured by Henry's soldiers, she was held prisoner for sixteen years, freed only by Henry's death. Such a lengthy confinement would have broken most people. It had not broken Eleanor. The passionate young queen and the embittered, betrayed wife were ghosts long since laid to rest. Now in her seventy-first year, she was acclaimed and admired for her sagacity and shrewd counsel, reigning over England in her son's absence, fiercely protective of his interests, proud matriarch of a great dynasty. A living legend. And this was the woman expecting a letter from a murdered goldsmith? Justin thought it highly unlikely.

Sounds in the stairwell roused Justin from his uneasy reverie, reminding him that his privacy was fleeting; the Breton sailors might return at any moment. It was time. Jerking the cords, he broke the seal and unfolded the parchment. There were two letters. Justin picked one up, catching his breath when he saw the salutation: Walter de Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, to Her Grace, Eleanor, Queen of England, Duchess of Aquitaine, and Countess of Poitou, greetings. So the goldsmith had spoken true! Scanning the page, he read enough to make him reach hastily for the second letter.