Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

The wife Henry brought with him to the throne had also stepped out of a fairy tale-a highly colored one. Here was no shy virgin princess; Eleanor was the greatest heiress in Europe, a radiant personality who’d ruled her Duchy of Aquitaine in her own right before wedding the meek and pious King Louis of France-a man who’d bored her so much that the marriage had ended in divorce. At which point nineteen-year-old Henry Plantagenet had stepped forward to woo the beautiful thirty-year-old Eleanor and marry her, thus taking over her vast estates and making himself ruler of a greater area of France than that belonging to its resentful King Louis.

The stories about Eleanor were legion and scandalous: She’d accompanied Louis on crusade with a bare-breasted company of Amazons; she’d slept with her uncle Raymond, Prince of Antioch; she’d done this, done that…

But if her new English subjects expected to be entertained by more naughty exploits, they were disappointed. For the next decade or so, Eleanor faded quietly into the background, doing her queenly and wifely duty by providing Henry with five sons and three daughters.

As was expected of a healthy king, Henry had other children by other women-what ruler did not?-but Eleanor seemed to take them in her stride, even having young Geoffrey, one of her husband’s bastards by a prostitute, brought up with the legitimate children in the royal court.

A happy marriage, then, as marriages went.

Until…

What had caused the rift in the lute? The advent of Rosamund, young, lovely, the highest-born of Henry’s women? His affair with her became legendary, a matter for song; he adored her, called her Rosa Mundi , Rose of all the World, had tucked her away in a tower near his hunting lodge at Woodstock and enclosed it in a labyrinth so that nobody else should find the way through…

Poor Eleanor was in her fifties now, unable to bear any more children. Had menopausal jealousy caused her rage? Because rage there must certainly have been for her to goad her eldest son, Young Henry, into rebellion against his father. Queens had died for much less. In fact, it was a wonder her husband hadn’t executed her instead of condemning her to a not uncomfortable imprisonment.

Well, delightful as it was to speculate on these things, they were all a long way away. Whatever sins had led to Queen Eleanor’s imprisonment, they had been committed in Aquitaine, or Anjou, or the Vexin, one of those foreign places over which the Plantagenet royal family also ruled. Most English people weren’t sure in what manner the queen had offended; certainly Gyltha was not. She didn’t care much. Neither did Adelia.

There was a sudden shout from the bedroom. “It’s here ? She’s brought it here ?” Now down to his tunic, a man who looked younger and thinner but still very large stood in the doorway, staring around him. He loped to the basket on the table. “My God,” he said, “my God.”

You dare, Adelia thought, you dare ask whose it is.

But the bishop was staring downward with the awe of Pharaoh’s daughter glimpsing baby Moses in the reeds. “Is this him? My God, he looks just like me.”

“She,” Gyltha said. “ She looks just like you.”

How typical of church gossips, Adelia thought viciously, that they would be quick to tell him she’d had his baby without mentioning its sex.

“A daughter.” Rowley scooped up the child and held her high. The baby blinked from sleep and then crowed with him. “Any fool can have a son,” he said. “It takes a man to conceive a daughter.”

That’s why I loved him.

“Who’s her daddy’s little moppet, then,” he was saying, “who’s got eyes like cornflowers, so she has-yes, she has-just like her daddy’s. And teeny-weeny toes. Yumm, yumm, yumm. Does she like that? Yes, she does.”

Adelia was helplessly aware of Father Paton regarding the scene. She wanted to tell Rowley he was giving himself away; this delight was not episcopal. But presumably a secretary was privy to all his master’s secrets-and it was too late now, anyway.

The bishop looked up. “Is she going to be bald? Or will this fuzz on her head grow? What’s her name?”

“Allie,” Gyltha said.

“Ali?”

“Almeisan.” Adelia spoke for the first time, reluctantly. “Mansur named her. Almeisan is a star.”

“An Arab name.”

“Why not?” She was ready to attack. “Arabs taught the world astronomy. It’s a beautiful name, it means the shining one.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t beautiful. It’s just that I would have called her Ariadne.”

“Well, you weren’t there,” Adelia said nastily.

Ariadne had been his private name for her. The two of them had met on the same road, and at the same time that she’d encountered Prior Geoffrey. Although they hadn’t known it then, they were also on the same errand; Rowley Picot was ostensibly one of King Henry’s tax collectors but privately had been clandestinely ordered by his royal master to find the beast that was killing Cambridgeshire’s children and thereby damaging the royal revenue. Willy-nilly, the two of them had found themselves following clues together. Like Ariadne, she had led him to the beast’s lair. Like Theseus, he had rescued her from it.

And then, like Theseus, abandoned her.

She knew she was being unfair; he’d asked, begged, her to marry him, but by this time he’d earned the king’s approbation and was earmarked for an advancement that needed a wife devoted to him, their children, his estates-a conventional English chatelaine, not a woman who neither would nor could give up her duty to the living and dead.

What she couldn’t forgive him for was doing what she’d told him to do: leave her, go away, forget, take up the king’s offer of a rich bishopric.

God torment him, he might have written.

“Well,” she said, “you’ve seen her, and now we are leaving.”

“Are we?” This was Gyltha. “In’t we going to stay for supper?”

“No.” She had been looking for insult from the first and had found it. “If someone has attempted to harm this Rosamund Clifford, I am sorry for it, but it is nothing to do with me.”

She crossed the room to take the baby from him. It brought them close so that she could smell the incense from the Mass he’d celebrated clinging to him, infecting their child with it. His eyes weren’t Rowley’s anymore, they were those of a bishop, very tired-he’d traveled hard from Oxford-and very grave.

“Not even if it means civil war?” he said.

The pork was sent back so that the smell of it should not offend Dr. Mansur’s nose and dietary law, but there were lampreys and pike in aspic, four different kinds of duck, veal in blancmange, a crisp, golden polonaise of bread, a sufficiency for twenty and-whether it displeased Mohammedan nostrils or not-enough wine for twenty more, served in beautiful cameo-cut glass bowls.

Once it had all been placed on the board, the servants were sent from the room. Father Paton was allowed to remain. From the straw under the table came the crunch of a dog with a bone.

“He had to imprison her,” Rowley said of his king and Queen Eleanor. “She was encouraging the Young King to rebel against his father.”

“Never understood that,” Gytha said, chewing a leg of duck. “Not why Henry had his boy crowned king along of him, I mean. Old King and Young King ruling at the same time. Bound to cause trouble.”

“Henry’d just been very ill,” Rowley told her. “He wanted to make sure of a peaceful succession if he died-he didn’t want a recurrence of another Stephen and Matilda war.”

Gyltha shuddered. “Nor we don’t, neither.”