Anne O'Brien - Devil's Consort

‘If I deem it necessary, I will, madam,’ I responded promptly, switching to perfect Latin. Satisfied with the temporary outcome, my answering smile was bright and my Latin excellent. ‘I have great skill with languages.’

The Dowager Queen allowed her pale eyes to travel over my figure, taking in every aspect of my clothes and appearance. For a brief moment I wished I was not so travel-stained but I raised my chin. I was not answerable to this woman for what I wore. And I deliberately caught her eye.

There! I had not been mistaken. Loathing. A rampant hatred. The depth of it startled me. I had never experienced such abhorrence—one did not exhibit such flagrant emotion towards the Duchess of Aquitaine—but it was impossible to mistake it. Adelaide’s nostrils flared, her lips narrowed into a curl of disdain. The glitter in her eye was an acceptance of my challenge, a return of my gauntlet to signal the onset of warfare between us.

And the prize for the victor?

Louis, of course.

Abbot Suger’s warning had arisen from political necessity, as he saw it. He would control Louis’s ruling of France and thwart me if I demanded a voice. Here before me was quite a different level of opposition: vindictive jealousy, entirely personal, and perhaps all the more dangerous for it. Adelaide would control the heart and soul of her son.

And the object of so much desire to control and manage? I glanced at him. Did Louis see this potential battle of wills between the two women in his life? Would he stand up for me against Queen Adelaide if it ever became necessary? Was he even aware of the tone of our exchange?

Of course he was not. Louis was irritatingly occupied elsewhere, astonishingly oblivious, leafing through the pages of one of his mother’s devotional missals. So be it. I must rely on myself in a conflict that Adelaide must not win. I was not raised to bow before an inferior force.

Adelaide deliberately turned her shoulder to me and addressed Louis. ‘We shall meet again at supper, my son—a banquet has been prepared to mark your return and your marriage.’ She fixed him with the same formidable stare as she must have done at any time over the seventeen years of Louis’s life. ‘You will be there, of course. There must be no excuses.’

A strange comment, one that caught my attention but then slid away as Louis bowed and ushered me rapidly from the room, striding away purposefully.

‘Will you show me my own rooms?’ I asked, trying to keep up and my skirts from contact with the walls, watching my footsteps in the gloom.

Suddenly Louis was in a hurry. ‘Yes.’ He did not slow his pace. There was an urgency about him.

‘Where are your own chambers?’ I asked.

‘Through there.’ He waved vaguely towards a distant door before ushering me into my suite of rooms. ‘There!’ A light kiss on my cheek, his words delivered in a rush. ‘If anything is not to your taste, you must tell me. This is now your home. I want you to be as comfortable here as you were in your own lands in the south.’

Looking around the stark rooms, their air of abandonment, I doubted it.

But before I could reply, Louis had gone and closed the door behind him. I sat on the bed, sneezing as the mildew from the hangings released its unpleasant odour. Whatever was pulling at him was far more important than his staying with me. But at least now that we were here, in Paris at last, even in the face of the Dowager Queen’s disapproval—which I intended to ignore—we could start to make some sort of life together.

* * *

By the end of that day I was more exhausted than if I had—in my imagination since I had no experience of it—been on a military campaign. Moreover, it proved to be an education, a squint into what was to be my future. How little of my life I had lived so far—a mere fifteen years—and how much still stretched before me with all its promise and excitement. The promise was smothered by my experience of that day, the excitement all but snuffed out. What I had seen so far in the palace, the lack of any refinement or luxury, was merely replicated in the royal apartments. The vast bed with its moth-eaten hangings and damp linens made me shudder. My women for once were smitten into silence.

‘By the Virgin!’ Except for Aelith.

And then the ceremonial feast to acknowledge the new King and Queen.

Louis presided. Why had his mother found the need to insist? He led me to the dais and presented me to my new subjects. I felt their interested gaze, heard the whispered comment, particularly of the women of the court who were so far behind the fashions of the day as to appear ridiculously outré. Louis attracted no such attention. He looked no better than a well-to-do merchant in a plain tunic and hose. His chamberlain was better garbed. How could he demand their respect as King when dressed little better than a servant? I determined to take him in hand. But for tonight I settled myself to be celebrated and entertained.

I did not expect to be astonished: to be so rudely awakened into the reality of the Frankish court. But I was.

Where was the procession of courses at the royal feast? The peppered peacocks, the candied fruits, the rice cooked with milk of almond and powdered cinnamon? The lobsters fried with egg? There was no shortage of food, for sure. Meat upon meat upon meat—venison and wild boar, game birds aplenty—but so coarse and unflavoured. Fish appeared—and languished on its platter. It was not popular. No delicacies of tarts or junkets or fritters. No leaves or salads. Vegetables abounded—particularly onions and garlic—a matter for much regret—stewed or pounded without finesse into an unrecognisable mush.

Louis ate sparingly. I did what I could. And made a point of ignoring the fastidious grimaces of my women. But even I could not pretend indifference for ever to the presentation of the food.

‘What is it?’ Louis raised his cup to sip the thin wine.

I found my attention fixed on a congealing pool of strangely green sauce on the scrubbed table surface, where a clumsy page had spilt it and failed to mop it up. Nor was the wooden planking that made up the table-top particularly clean despite the scrubbing. It looked no better than the butchery block from the kitchens, and the scars might suggest a pig had been dismembered on it. Did no one care?

‘Do you have no table linen?’ I asked bluntly.

‘No.’ Louis was surprised.

‘Not even for the High Table?’

‘No.’

I focused on the charred-edged flatbread before me, a trencher to serve in way of a plate, beside it a drinking vessel and a knife to hack off portions of meat.

‘Are there no spoons?’ I eyed a dish of stewed elvers that would be impossible to deal with if a knife was all I had to hand.

‘Do you want one?’ Louis asked solicitously, already raising a hand. ‘I’ll send for one from the kitchens if you wish …’

I shook my head, repressing a sigh. Glancing along the table, I watched one of Louis’s barons scoop up the elvers with the flat of his knife, from dish to lips with a noisy slurp. I would forgo the elvers.

The Dowager Queen, clad entirely in black in markedly unfestive manner as before, interjected sharply, ‘I have always found the provisions of our High Table satisfactory.’

‘Have you?’ I gave a long look at a thick, glutinous dish that defied recognition. Louis had already given his attention to his Seneschal Raoul de Vermandois on his right so I felt at liberty to allow my dissatisfaction to show.

‘You will find life very different here, Eleanor,’ Adelaide reprimanded with a humourless smile. ‘My advice is to learn the ways of the Frankish court and accept them. It is what I did as a bride.’

‘It is certainly different from my experience.’