Daughters of Babylon (27 page)

“
Álie, ma petite
, is it really you?” She opened her arms to embrace Eleanor.

“
C’est moi
,
Tantie
Ben. A thousand years older, but still in one piece.” They hugged long and kissed each other’s faces, and it seemed that the ground trembled a little.

The Prioress stepped back and held her by the shoulders. “You look so much like your grandfather. You’ll have his laugh lines one day, mark my words. How was the journey? I’d heard the road from Foix was washed out.”

“It was, but shepherds came to our aid. They walked us and the horses along a trail above the road, dismantled the carriage, piece by piece, and reassembled it where the road was clear. By then, it was too late to reach St. Jacques, so we spent a wonderful night in a hut in the mountains in the company of Basques and Catalonians. Marie has not been able to stop talking about the lambs.”

The little girl, Marie, crouched at the foxgloves where a fat bumblebee had wriggled into a bloom. “How beautiful she is. She’ll be tall like you.”

“I think so. She keeps the court ladies busy letting out hems. Speaking of ladies, I’d like you to meet my
femmes de chambre
and dearest friends, Catarina and Bilqees. This is Sister Benedicta whom I’ve known since the moment I was born. She was my midwife, and then my wetnurse.”

The women exchanged greetings, while the infant suckled at Catarina’s breast.

“And this,” Eleanor said, touching the baby’s head, “is Marie’s sister, the Princess Alix.”

The prioress glanced into the shadowed eyes of Catarina, wetnurse, and saw what she had suffered in her own fertile years. “Aah, such a blessing. The baby is feeding well?”

Catarina bobbed a curtsy. “Very well, Reverend Mother, thank you.”

“Now then,” she said, with a brisk clap, “let me take you to your suites, and you will see what the bounty of two chests of pearls has made possible for the Queen of Heaven.” She led them through the cloister gallery with its stately Grecian pillars and latticed ceiling, festooned with clusters of ripening purple grapes.

“It’s quite safe to run, Marie,” the Prioress said, “if your attendants are amenable. It is gratifying to hear the slap of young feet on tiles. Your rooms are at the end of the gallery. Álienor and I will catch up.”

“So how is
Mamie
?” Eleanor asked, when the others had gone off ahead.

“She has good days and bad. She’s been watching the sky for weeks.”

“Did she think we would fly in?”

Benedicta laughed. “No, but she remembers how you loved the hunt as a girl. Whenever she sees a falcon, she knows we’ve had word of you.”

“I like that augury. I hope it continues to prove itself.”

“There was one night, two summers ago, where she screamed and tore the tapestries from the wall and nearly set fire to her cottage. I made note of the date, August 14. I felt it might be significant.”

“Were her cries intelligible?”

“Oh, yes. They were banishments in the Old Tongue, as I’ve not heard since I was a maiden.”

The colour drained from Eleanor’s face. She paused at a pillar, placed her fingers into the grooves, and looked up at the latticed ceiling, at the bounty of grapes made possible, perhaps, in some small way, by a bounty of pearls.

“The night you speak of,
Tantie
, Louis and I were guests of Pope Eugene at his villa in Tusculum. We had been separated for months by tempest and were on our way home. The Holy Father showered Louis with accolades for his selfless dedication to the Crusade, which of course thrilled my husband. The Pope was also anxious to repair the ruptures in our marriage, and so he prepared a special bed for us sprinkled with rose petals and holy water, and reminded Louis that his duties to the Crusade included a male heir. Nine months later…Alix.”

“Would I be amiss to assume the bed of roses was not rapturous?”

“No, Reverend Mother, you would not be amiss.”

Sister Benedicta gave a soft sigh. “It always grieves to hear of the Church’s intrusion on such matters. On the other hand, your little Alix is beautiful...and I am reminded not to be so quick in future to dismiss your grandmother’s episodes.”

“Thank you. May I see her now?”

“Of course.”

With the children and ladies settled in their rooms, Eleanor followed the looping pathways to a small cottage in a grove of pecan trees. Sister Benedicta suggested that she enter after knocking, which she did. “She will become aware of your presence when she’s ready.”

The woman they still gossiped about in the courts and villages of Aquitaine sat near a window with a crocheted blanket over her legs. Lustrous silver hair fell to her shoulders, and her fingers worked imaginary stitches, while she talked to a pitcher of red roses on the table.

“Make sure he builds you a
chatillionte
, and pay attention to his bones. Willingness always shows itself in a man’s bones.
Pos vezem de novel florir / pratz, e vergiers reverdezir …
because we see again, the plains are in bloom, the meadows greening. He wrote that. Have you ever heard anything so exquisite?”

“
Mamie?
”

The old woman turned in Eleanor’s direction and carried on talking. “People think Guillaume and I spend all our time banging the cymbals of Demeter, plucking the joy strings of Hermes. How feeble imagination has become. And how cowardly the euphemisms, even among country folk, don’t you find?”

“
I…hadn’t given it much thought, to be honest.”

“Come closer,
ma poussette
. I am not yet fully blind, and the light slants so beautifully here.”

Ma poussette
, my little sprout. Eleanor’s heart thrilled—she
did
know!

Her grandmother pressed a fist to her heart. “You have his stride. I can hear him.”

“Whose,
Mamie
? Whose stride do you hear?” There was a low, three-legged stool with scissors and bobbins of thread near the fireplace. Eleanor moved them to the table and brought the stool close to her grandmother.

“Raymond’s, of course. He was your uncle twice.”

Anguish caught at Eleanor’s throat. She had not seen this topic coming.

The two of them clasped hands. Grandmother’s skin was paper-thin and cool. There was strength yet in the fingers, and although cataracts dimmed her crystal blue eyes, the woman people called
La Dangereuse
was still handsome. Eleanor kissed her cheeks. “You look radiant as ever.”

Her grandmother appeared not to have heard the compliment. “Did you see him? You saw Raymond? How did he look?”

“I saw him, yes. We spent many happy months together in Antioch. He looked fit and hale, every inch the prince.”

Did
Mamie
know? Eleanor couldn’t tell. She hadn’t thought to ask
Tantie
Ben if the news had reached them.

For Eleanor’s small court of knight and two ladies, Palermo, Sicily had provided a sort of giddiness. They were the stranded guests of King Roger who had been kind enough to house the French queen and her attendants in a private villa, billeting the other survivors of piracy and a capsized ship throughout the city. One morning, though, Eleanor woke from a troubled sleep where she’d dreamed of a battle in the flooded captain’s cabin. All her joints ached from kicking and wielding swords and maces; the bedding lay everywhere. Bilqees had left her a breakfast tray with a note:
I thought it best to let you sleep, Madame
.

She was still feeling anxious when she stepped onto her balcony with a cup of mint tea and saw Arturo creeping down the vines outside Catarina’s terrace, next door. At first, she’d felt an anger so intense she nearly threw the hot liquid at him. Then Arturo saw her, and he looked so embarrassed, her turmoil dissolved.

“I believe a wedding may be in order,” she teased, at which point Arturo lost his footing and landed in a prickly bed of juniper.

Catarina, who saw and heard it all, whooped with laughter, and Eleanor joined in, night terrors forgotten. Her besotted
femme de chambre
refused to allow Arturo to launder the shirt that was spotted blue with squashed juniper berries. Arturo insisted, as the ever virtuous Galician, on requesting permission from Queen Eleanor to marry Catarina.

“You have my consent, of course, if it’s what you both want, but there is no sin in pleasure, Arturo, and you are both very young.”

Ten days later, Cati, a radiant bride, held up her husband’s stained shirt at their wedding feast. “Lest it be thought that only women leave evidence.”

Arturo had not laughed as heartily as the guests, Eleanor noted, but he was shy that way.

Toasts to the newlyweds were still being proffered when a page summoned Eleanor to Roger’s private chambers. “Please sit down, my Lady,” said the king. “I have bad tidings, I’m afraid.” And he told her of the Byzantine forces that had attacked Antioch, led by Shirkuh, the new ruler of Aleppo. Prince Raymond of Poitiers was killed during battle, his head later severed by the gloating Shirkuh and shipped in a silver box to the caliph of Baghdad.

After the initial hot irons of grief seared through her, Eleanor asked, “When did this attack happen?”

“About ten days ago.”

“But when? The exact date and time, if you please.”

“I don’t recall off-hand, but I have the missive here.” He went to his desk and read the small curled message that had traveled by bird. “The 29th of June, in the pre-dawn hours.”

She thought back and calculated: yes, it was the morning of her nightmares. It was not the flooded cabin of a
barca-longa
she’d been warring against, but her uncle’s enemies.

Eleanor wondered again how much
Mamie
knew and recalled Grandmother’s odd choice of words. “What do you mean, he was twice my uncle?”

“Your grandfather William and I were both married to unhappy people when we met, and we were parents. If he’d had a choice, William would have been a troubadour, living by his voice and wits, but he was our Duke, and the people of Aquitaine adored him. I became pregnant, and neither of our spouses, your other grandparents, would permit a divorce. William did not want our progeny raised by a man who might, in a fit of pique, disinherit the child for not being his. So Raymond, our son, was installed as your father’s younger brother instead of your mother’s half-brother. The Duchess Philippa had her faults, but I will always be grateful that she treated Raymond as her own.”
Mamie
’s voice broke. “And now my beautiful son is dead.”

She knew; she knew. They grieved together, and then Eleanor rose to hang a kettle over the fire. While she crumbled dried chicory and mint for tea, wondering whether Marie and Alix had woken yet from their naps,
Mamie
rocked back and forth, crooning Grandfather’s poems.

“Ben deu chascus lo joi jauzir / don es jauzens…D’amor non dei dire mas be. Quar no-n ai ni petit ni re?”
All should enjoy what makes him joyous. I can’t speak of love, but why am I deprived?

By the time she carried the steaming cups of honey-sweetened tea to the table,
Grand-mère
was composed again.

“You haven’t found him yet.”

“Found who?” Eleanor said.

“The one who makes your soul sing.”

She dropped her gaze. “No, I have not.”

“You have called upon the right winds. It’s only a matter now of keeping your heart untroubled.”

“I don’t know how to untrouble my heart, and even if I could, I’m married to the king of France.”

Mamie
held the cup to her nose and breathed in the vapours. “Do you think our pain goes unheard? What do you think becomes of our cries for happiness? Why do I sing my beloved’s poetry all these years after he’s gone?”

“Because it soothes you.”

“Of course, it soothes me, but I do it because we are infinitely stringed and divinely tuned instruments of God. I told you when you crossed the room that you have your uncle’s stride. You also carry your lover’s touch and the laughter of your granddaughters, and the shine in your eyes comes from every soul who is blessed by your presence—and child, you have blessed many. This valley has been singing of your coming for weeks.”

Hearing
Mamie
’s words was to be four years old again, allowed to stay up for the poetry and dancing. “You say I called upon the right winds. I don’t know what that means.”

“No, you wouldn’t, not with that Blessed Eugene and his vultures breathing down the necks of good people. Have you ever heard a more self-obsessed moniker—
Blessed
Eugene?”

Eleanor sprayed her tea in laughter. “Well, he is the Holy Father.”

“And I am
La Dangereuse
, what of it? But you ask about winds, and I tell you, they are language. Language is the inner wind that drives the power of
Reine du Ciel
. Long before usurpers of the Good Shepherd planted their plush bottoms on the Seat of Saint Peter, we knew peace. We knew prosperity. It was all we knew.

“On this land of Queen of Heaven, no one in need has been turned away in four thousand years. When St. Jacques drew his maps to Compostelle, the river, it is said, changed course to touch the hem of Her robe, so that the miracles of healing and abundance would never cease.

“I know the miracles have felt thin on the ground for you, child, but they are amassing—I can see them, heaped around your grandfather and uncle now, I see them.” The entire time she spoke,
Grand-mère
rocked back and forth from the waist, like the Jews when they prayed at the Temple wall in Jerusalem, and her eyes were crystal blue and shining even through the cataracts.

Eleanor felt like a fledgling bird, a falcon, tiny beak open to capture every morsel of her grandmother’s words. But still, she felt compelled to say, “There was a ship, a
barca-longa
that capsized during a storm in the Mediterranean.”

The woman went on rocking, staring off into the middle distance.

“I was dining with my
femmes de chambre
and my scribe—”

“Know the power in your womb. It is the holy serpent’s eye that guided Eve and the first wife. All the kings and judges since the Tower fell seek the serpent’s eye. When found, they try to kill it. Beware what you weave into words, for every thought is a string, and spoken, triples in strength.
The Power, the Glory, the Kingdom
.”
Mamie
pointed toward a high cabinet. “Feel around at the top, and bring me what you find.”