Alison Weir - Captive Queen

“That’s enough!” the Queen reproved, raising a hand in warning. Constance scowled at her and subsided.

Henry was remote but polite, Richard studiedly courteous to his father and overly attentive to his mother, John mutinous and foul-tempered. The court held its celebrations in an atmosphere as hostile as it was tense, making a mockery of the holy season of Christ’s birth. Not all the lavish outlay of fine wines, meats, spices, choice fare, and gifts could compensate for the rifts that had opened up within the royal family, and as soon as Twelfth Night had come and gone, Richard hared off south to Poitiers. A day later, with a perfunctory kiss on her hand and a lowering look of dislike, Henry dispatched Eleanor back to Winchester.

Eleanor was glad to leave England. After that mighty earthquake, which had been heard and felt throughout the whole realm and brought the mighty cathedral at Lincoln crashing to the ground in a storm of dust and masonry, she had not felt safe there. Cracks had even appeared in the walls of Winchester Castle. She had lain there at night tormented by fears that the building would collapse over her, crushing her as she slept.

But now she was bound for Normandy, on Henry’s orders, with Matilda and her husband for company. Could it be that the King too was concerned for her safety? She would have liked to think so, but she suspected it was something other than that. And, as so often before, her intuition was right.

No sooner had Henry received her, as coldly as he’d left her all those months before, than he raised the matter of Aquitaine. They were alone in his solar this time; he was not about to risk any more public outbursts of disobedience.

“I have decided that Richard must surrender the duchy to you, Eleanor, and that you will rule it once more,” he said, his tone brooking no defiance.

She sank down wearily into her chair, bone-tired after the long ride, and momentarily defeated. Oh, but he was clever! To offer her the one thing that meant so much to her, the chance to return to her beloved lands after so many long years of exile, and the liberty to rule them as sovereign duchess—but only in return for the dispossession of the person she loved best in the whole world, her lionhearted Richard. It was an exquisitely cruel choice. How her husband must hate her! Yet did she have a choice? One look at Henry’s face gave her the answer to that.

“And if I refuse?” she challenged.

“Then you go back to Sarum,” he replied brutally. It was like a blow.

“I suppose you will dispossess Richard anyway, whether or not I agree?” she said. At least let Henry bear the guilt for injuring his son, rather than herself.

“No, you will do it,” the King said. He was being deliberately vengeful.

“Ah, but I will not,” she declared, her old spirit flaring. “You are only doing this to show Richard who is master. How low of you!”

“I think you will agree, Eleanor. You have no choice. You are my wife, and have vowed obedience to me. I could make a public example of you. Already your faithlessness is notorious. You had your way at Christmas, and made me look a fool. You will not defy me again. Now, say you agree to demand Aquitaine back from Richard, or you go straight back to Sarum, and I warn you, you will not be so comfortably accommodated!”

It was at times like these that Eleanor found it hard to reconcile the nasty, brutish Henry of recent years, the Henry who was descended from the Devil, with the Henry who had desired her, who had bedded joyfully with her, bred children on her, and cried out his grief to her, the one person who could console him. It was as if he possessed two souls in his one body, and the one she was dealing with now was certainly not the one to whom she had once jubilantly given her heart and her body. Because her insubordination had rankled so deeply and publicly humiliated him, this ferocious Henry was taking his revenge—she could see it, very clearly. It was his pride, his stubborn pride, that drove him—and his usual talent for walking roughshod over people’s sensibilities. How tragic, though, that they should have come to this—and how tragic that he should no longer have the power to break her heart with his cruelty, and that all that was left of her for him to arouse was her anger and contempt!

She had no choice—she saw that too, and prayed that Richard would understand her predicament.

“Very well, as you insist so persuasively,” she said dryly.

“Good! I’m glad you’ve seen sense at last.” There was a hint of relief in Henry’s steely eyes. He called immediately for his clerk to bring parchment and writing materials, and then began dictating a letter to Richard. She listened in mounting consternation as he instructed his son to surrender without delay the whole duchy of Aquitaine to his mother, Queen Eleanor. The only reason he gave for this was that it was her heritage—as if that would satisfy Richard as an excuse for robbing him of the inheritance he had fought bloodily to secure. But there was worse to come. If the Lord Richard in any way delayed to fulfill his father’s command, the King went on, he was to know for certain that his mother the Queen would make it her business to ravage the land with a great host. Eleanor gasped aloud at that.

“As if I would set myself up in armed opposition to my own son!” she cried.

“You did not scruple to set yourself up in armed opposition to your King and husband!” Henry reminded her. There was, of course, no answer to that.

She spent the next weeks agonizing over what Richard might think of her when he received Henry’s orders, and grieving for him, knowing that they would come as the heaviest of blows. Secretly, she smuggled out a letter explaining how his father had suborned her and advising him to surrender with all meekness, laying aside his weapons. She never knew whether he received it, but was utterly relieved to learn, in due course, that Richard had wisely ceded Aquitaine into her hands and was on his way north to Normandy. Later still, she stood looking on as Henry received him with open arms, and saw incredulously that—for the moment at least—the lion had been tamed.

Toward herself, Richard betrayed no shred of animosity or resentment. She was a woman, subject to her lord’s will, and the King’s prisoner. She’d had no choice—that much was clear to him.

Soon, though, it became perfectly clear that Henry meant to rule Aquitaine himself.

Things had not turned out as badly as she’d feared, Eleanor reflected as she stood on the ramparts of the Crossbowman, the tall keep of the Ombrière Palace, looking down with pride on the beautiful courtyards with their tiled fountains playing in the sunshine and the gardens with their exotic plants and flowers, spread out before her like a carpet of jewels in myriad colors. It was heaven to be back in Bordeaux, her southern capital, to feel once again the summer’s heat warming her aging bones, and the soft breeze from the ocean breathing new life into her, making her feel young again, and deliciously aware that the familiar air once more held a promise of something wonderful and precious.

Thus she had felt long ago, a young girl standing on these very battlements, imbibing the heady scent of the sea and the flowers, and sensing in the gentle winds that teased her hair and her skirts some joyful anticipation of the life she had yet before her, and the love that she was sure would be hers one day.

She frowned. She was sixty-four now, and rather old to be dreaming wistfully about love. That was all behind her now. Yet some trace of yearning remained for Henry as he had once been, young and magnificent in all the vigor of his early manhood, before time and strife had soured and changed him. She did not want the man he had become, but she would always mourn the loss of the man he had once been.