Anne O'Brien - Devil's Consort

I was Eleanor, daughter and heir to William, the tenth Duke of Aquitaine, the eldest of my father’s children, although not born to rule. Not that I, a woman, was barred by law from the honour, unlike in the barbaric kingdom of the Franks to the north, but once I had had a younger brother who had been destined to wear the ducal coronet. He, William—every first-born son was called William—was carried off by a nameless fever, the same as relieved my mother Aenor of her timorous hold on life. Leaving me. In the seven years since then I had grown used to the idea. It was my right to rule.

But I was nervous. I did not think I had ever been nervous before: I had had no need, as my father’s heir. My lands were vast, wealthy, well governed. I had been brought up to know luxury, sophistication, the delights of music and art. I was powerful and—so they said—beautiful. As if reading my mind, my troubadour Bernart began to sing a popular verse.

He who sees her lead the dance, sees her body twist and twirl,

Can see that, in all the world, for beauty there’s no equal

Of the Queen of Joy.

I smiled. The Queen of Joy indeed. My looking glass confirmed what could be mere flattery, the greasy, self-seeking compliments of a penniless minstrel towards his patroness. But I was not ingenuous. Alone, unprotected, unwed, there would be a limit to my powers. I needed a husband with a strong sword arm, and powerful loins to get an heir on me—for him and for myself. A puissant lord who would stand with me and secure the future for Aquitaine, a man who could lead men and demand the obedience of the power-hungry lords who would snatch what was mine. A man who would be a fit mate for such as I.

Ah, but would Prince Louis fit this mould?

‘Well?’ Aelith nudged me.

‘What do I hope for? A prince, of course,’ I replied.

‘That’s no answer.’

‘A man after my own heart.’

‘Self-important?’ Leaning against the carved window ledge, Aelith ticked them off on her fingers. ‘Opinionated? Arrogant?’

But I sidestepped my sister’s chuckling malice and answered seriously enough. ‘Why not? He will rule my lands. He must do it well. He’ll not do it if he has neither the backbone nor the spirit for it. Better a man with arrogance than one who’d sell himself short to make friends. My vassals need a firm hand.’

We were standing in my bedchamber, Aelith, my women and I, high in the old keep, a spacious, graceful room with large windows to catch the light and any breath of air on this day of impossible heat. A room that I loved, full of my own possessions, and from where I could look out across the Garonne to observe the whole scene unfold hour by hour. It was July, hot as the gates of hell, and I was restless with impatience as Aelith and I observed the settlement grow. Tents, pavilions, sprouting like mushrooms, covered the open meadows, transforming them into a town in its own right. A vivid, richly-coloured Capetian town on Aquitaine soil. A foreign presence, and above it all the fleurs de lys of France. A portent for the future, I acknowledged, a French symbol of ownership over the mighty Duchy of Aquitaine. Before me, horses and armed men swarmed. Farriers and wheelwrights set up their booths and a market was soon under way. Small boats plied back and forth with Frankish noblemen or mounds of cabbages. My vassals, I was well aware, would question the relative importance of the two. It would not be a popular marriage but we would all have to live with it.

‘He must be handsome, of course,’ Aelith announced. She was already precociously aware of the male sex.

‘Of course.’ I had no thought of a husband who was less than pleasing to the eye.

‘Like Raymond.’ Aelith sighed a little.

Raymond of Poitiers, my father’s young brother, now ruling as Prince of Antioch in distant Outremer.

‘Yes. Like Raymond,’ I agreed. My only meeting with Raymond had been of the briefest, four years ago now and for a mere few weeks, but my memory of his golden beauty had not faded with time. Raymond was to my mind the epitome of the perfect knight. ‘If the French prince is in any measure like Raymond, I shall be everlastingly grateful.’ My attention was caught by a flurry of movement across the river. ‘Look! That’s the royal standard!’ I pointed. Aelith leaned to see the blue pennants with the gold lilies of France. ‘So Prince Louis is here at last.’

‘As long as he’s prettier than Fat Louis,’ she remarked.

‘I’ll give you my gold circlet if he’s not. Fat Louis is naught but a mountain of lard ridden with dysentery.’

But I knew better than to underestimate King Louis. His body might be corrupt but his mind was still keen. He might be too corpulent to rise from his bed, too obese to mount either a horse or a woman, so rumour said, but he had seen me as a gift dropped from heaven into his enormous lap.

We watched as another pavilion was erected, larger than all the rest. The Capetian banner was planted beside it to hang limply in the windless air. A group of horsemen drew up and dismounted. Impossible to make out one figure from the next at this distance.

‘They won’t like it, you know.’ I spoke softly. ‘My vassals will detest it.’

‘But they have no choice.’ Aelith pursed her lips. ‘And if the Prince keeps the brigands from our doors, they’ve no right to complain.’

True in essence, but far too simplistic.

Was this, this Frankish marriage, what the Duke my father had intended when he had placed me into King Louis’s keeping? Arrange a marriage for my daughter, he had left instructions for Louis as his life drained from him on the pilgrim’s road to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. And do it fast, before rebellion can take hold. Until that time, I give her and Aquitaine into French safe hands.

What was my father, Duke William the Tenth of Aquitaine, thinking? Surely he’d understood that King Louis would never allow me to escape from his fat fingers. It would be like expecting a fox to show goodwill by keeping out of the hen coop even though the door was left invitingly open, and the King of France was no kindly fox. Arrange a fast marriage for me? By God, he had. Between the vomit and the bloody flux that tied him to his bed, Fat Louis had moved heaven and earth to secure me for his son before anyone could voice a protest.

And there had been plenty. My father’s vassals may have sworn an oath of homage to me in his lifetime, but our lands were torn by unrest. The Count of Angoulême, a vassal lord of Aquitaine, was vicious in his condemnation and was not alone. They would have accepted someone like Raymond, one of their own. They would have just about tolerated a noble lord of the south who might win my hand. But not this Capetian interloper, this foreign northerner from some insignificant Frankish tribe. I knew what they would be thinking as they too watched this impressive arrival. They would see Louis Capet as a foreign power who would drain us to further his own ambitions. My father may have insisted with his final breath that Aquitaine remain independent from France, ruled separately, to be inherited in some distant future by the heir of my own body; he might have insisted that Aquitaine must not be absorbed into French territory, but how many of my vassals would remember that, when faced with this invasion of unveiled power?

‘It might have been more politic—’ I spoke my thoughts ‘—if my father had not thrown us into the hands of a Frank.’

And I marvelled at my father’s unwarranted stupidity in drinking water fouled by a horde of pilgrims, all of whom had doubtless washed and spat and pissed in its shallows. Did he not see, scooping up the bad fish, gulping the rank water, his mind taken up with the successful culmination of his pilgrimage? All he got was a night of fever, of vomiting and flux, rapidly followed by a pain-racked death before Saint James’s altar.