Star Of Bliss

Winter 1166 

On Christmas Day, Eleanor gives birth to a boy. The prolonged effort is scarcely worth it, but she will not know that for some years. After so many children, the process of bearing them is as routine as begetting them, as familiar to her in all its mysteries — quickening and churching, mending up and lying-in. Already she knows this will be her last child; time is against her. Henry may carry on begetting sons with whomever he likes, putting babies into bellies well into senility, but they will not be Eleanor’s children. 

Here, at least, is one thing no man can do; here is her privilege as a wife, the privilege she shares with every unmarried milkmaid since Adam was a pup. The midwives and gossips have come and gone; they have rubbed her aching feet with vinegar and oil of roses, they have given her mint and wormwood to drink, they have overseen the grueling toil of her body and at length, she has been delivered of a son. 

Henry has blustered his way into her tower, looking every inch an intruder — golden-haired, in these days, with a beard like dark brass and a figure like Absalom. The look of love on his face when he sees her, propped up in bed with a scarlet-faced infant asleep at her breast is enough to stir her from exhaustion.

“Don’t you know? You’re intruding in the kingdom of women. At least have the good manners to put a bonnet on, husband of mine. Achilles did as much.”

 “My lady Eleanor. How could I keep from seeing you?”

 His spreading smile, his shining eyes, his strong arms spread — this is her husband in fine form, not worn down by fretfulness but buoyed up by absolute confidence. He kisses her face, though it is so lately sweat-washed, and strokes her hair, though it has been braided for convenience all into one great bundle.

“God be thanked,” Eleanor says; her throat is parched, and her body is aching, but she is full of the exultation of victory. 

“I’ll found Him a monastery for this. You look beautiful, both of you.” 

Henry kneels on the carpets at Eleanor’s bedside and embraces her, kisses her on the crown of her sweating head — he is gentle with her, like a treasure, as if she hasn’t just been through a more grueling experience than he can hope to meet this side of a mud-drenched battlefield. The bundle in her arms is restless against her breast. She cannot say whether the child is beautiful, but he is hers regardless — the joint product of its parents’ labors. 

Eleanor runs a finger along the baby’s furred and fitful head. Bad luck, some say, to be born with hair, but others say good luck, so the point is moot. “We’ll call him John.” 

There was never any question about the name, for there are fewer names in the world than there may one day be, and Eleanor knows them all. She is the most accomplished woman in all Christendom. She has borne nine children, six sons and three daughters, enough for a full set of Gospel writers and then some if the family pride hadn’t intervened. John of the Gospels, the John who wrote, “in the beginning was the Word” — this John whom she bears in her arms will be archbishop one day, or Pope, or he will be a great man of law and argue them all out of purgatory in a trice.

King Henry is every inch the proud progenitor. He has nothing but love to give — for it is always like this, he has nothing but pride at the birth of his sons and no overt disappointment at the appearance of daughters. Every time at the end of a long season of childbearing he kisses his queen and showers her in gifts (item, one cedar chest carved with cherubs; item, one gold crown with pearls and pomegranates; item, one Barbary roan) and then makes himself so efficiently scarce that he never has to see his precious child again until it’s old enough to use a sword on someone. The early education is all for Eleanor — not all on Eleanor, there is a small army of nannies and nursemaids at her disposal, but at Eleanor’s direction — and then their youth and manhood are all for Henry. 

This is how it always goes between them. Eleanor doesn’t take it personally. She is harried, hurting, and bone-deep weary, but she is the mother of many sons, she is the holder of a great deal of land, and her husband is King of England. What can’t she do? 

*

Winter 1169 

Eleanor is alone at Poitiers, and she is the magistrate of the court of love. It is the coldest winter she has known in some forty-seven years of life on this gracious earth. Her women gather around her, quite apart from their men; whether it is from deference for their queen’s separation from her spouse, or simply a natural division from the sweating and bristling crowd who ordinarily maintain good order, it doesn’t seem to matter. They make a pet of John, who is still young enough to be looked after by women and pink-cheeked with the pleasure of it. Eleanor’s sons are only in her custody for some seven years, but they remain her sons for ever. 

There is hospitality in scads, for they’ve money enough for it — flute and tambor, wine and song. The servants hang the tapestries end to end, so the heat doesn’t rush away like a bucket of water poured out on the rushes, and so they are joined in their court of love by the Queen of Sheba and the Blessed Virgin, by saints and wronged women. 

Why let the ecclesiastics ruin Christmas? Louis had spent his holy days in a state of pious deprivation, kneeling and beating his breast; Eleanor prefers otherwise. Not to fast at all in the lead-up to the feast of Christmas would be in poor taste, but there’s no need to make a second Lent of what should by rights be a period of joy. They serve figs in honey, spiced apples, sugared almonds — the fruits of distant gardens, eaten up by the handful in days of bitter cold, in quarters hung with scenes of summer on every wall. 

To Eleanor, Henry has sent a composer with his best wishes — he does this to amuse her, for the composer is a pretty Poitevine, a courtly maid with fire-red hair and a rasping voice. Perhaps she is some misplaced sister of his, for she has a similarly colorful vocabulary in describing deeds of valor and matters of exalted love. She serves as the centerpiece of the session, spinning verses out of well-worn tales like a wire-drawer, and there’s even a few new lyrics for the occasion to please the palates of jaded old women. Eleanor sits among the cushions and holds court. 

The ladies tell stories of their admirers — eager gallants, jealous husbands, covetous fathers-in-law. The court hears arguments on several matters, all matters of the heart. Whether propinquity is necessary for love — whether, for instance, a man can love a woman who is on the other side of the English Channel, or the other side of a walled garden. Whether an older lover or a younger lover is best, and whether a lady may be too old to love, or too young. Arguments on the nature of delight, on the nature of torment — Eleanor delivers her judgments with an equitable hand. 

She might love Henry less if she had to bear him all the time. If she had him in her bed every night, snoring and snuffling like some women’s husbands do, and not like now where every occasion for their bodies to meet is like a grand astronomical occasion, a conjunction to shake the earth. Eleanor does miss him, when they are apart, though she will never flatter him by saying so. Henry will come back to her, and she will play the goodly matron like they do in Normandy — though Matilda was an empress and no happy housekeeper. 

Her husband will come back to her again. No doubt he has tried the lady balladeer and found her pleasing, though for that Eleanor will not begrudge her nor him — the two women share a Christmas bed, and that flickering winter fire spread against the pillow is enough to keep Eleanor warm through Twelfth Night. 

*

Winter 1174

Solomon had his Sheba, and Henry has his Rosamund. He is flaunting her, right under Eleanor’s nose – parading her like a prize horse or an all-white hound in a foiled collar. The king’s whore wears a sky-blue dress and a furry pelisse on top, bundled up like an ell of wool with her hair in two tight fillets; still, she glitters. She is the subject of every gaze, every dirty riddle and soppy rhyme is recited with one eye fixed on Rosamund, an ear cocked for a laugh or a hiss.

Worst of all, the girl seems faintly embarrassed by it. She minds her manners, and thanks her hostess, and smiles her shy sweet smiles, and it’s all enough to make Eleanor want to slap her silly. She could boil her alive, she could pierce her with hairpins, she could eat her heart up raw and dripping, and all the while the girl would thank her for it. She’d apologize for the mess.

(Time will do these things for Eleanor – time will pierce Rosamund to the heart, and her rose will wither. But Eleanor does not know that yet; she cannot.)

How long have the pair of them carried on, her husband and his chief harlot? Long enough for the bloom to have rubbed off a little, long enough that he cannot be doing this out of clumsy balkish lust. Already Rosamund Clifford looks a little dimmer; her beauty has faded for Henry having gotten his hands on it, her breasts sit a little lower, and her little round belly is a little less pert. Henry has tarnished her, like the feet of a brass saint polished by the hands of pilgrims; familiarity has bred contempt. For any reasonable man, the charm must have long since run dry by now – Henry does not even like to wear the same pair of gloves for more than a year or two, and how long has he been bellying with Rosamund? It is not charm that binds them together, nor novelty, nor raw simmering sex appeal. They are bound together in allegiance against Eleanor, only Rosamund doesn’t know it yet. 

Eleanor buries herself in the labors of the household, in delegating and overseeing and minding the girls. Dear little Alais is little help, but her presence is cheering — she is too old now to be content minding the children, but her undivided attention is like a balm. The kitchens churn out fritters and wafers, sauces and puddings and little cakes soaked in orange-flower water. The household will need these things to sustain them, after all the fasting and penitence of Advent. Over all of this bounty, Eleanor presides. It isn’t strictly the done thing — cooks are all fat men, as all know, and the smoky sooty sweating labor of turning spits and beating eggs is best delegated to sturdy boys who can be readily replaced. But there is something rewardingly brutal in all that slicing, stabbing, beating, piercing, and boiling. It gives Eleanor something to relish. Who could think of severing himself from such an industrious wife as this? 

The great hall is the domain of the real men. Geoffrey is smoothly politic, young Henry is sober, verging on sullen, and Richard is haughty in defeat – all three of them brought to heel like dogs the moment the chain is given an almighty tug, and now they are behaving nicely to demonstrate how sorry they are. There will be no peace this Christmas, but among the boys, there is an appropriately chastened air. Only John lives in the bliss of boyhood innocence. 

Father and sons together again, pretty as a picture in a missal. You’d never know they just got done trying to rob and kill one another. Oh, not kill, kill is such a strong word, but only a little war, a little business with sword-rattling and shield-thumping. Young Henry wants the Norman castles for himself, old Henry wants to shuffle them off as a sweetener for whatever match he will make for John, there’s a lot of grumbling and in the end, it’s all pawned off on mother. 

Christmas is a time for telling stories — the Scripture stories, yes, but ghost stories, love stories, sad stories, dirty stories. At supper on Christmas Eve, Eleanor spins a tale of lechery rewarded that makes sweet Rosamund flush red to the roots of her hair. That night, young Richard sits beside her in the chapel, down among the women — his eyes follow the gestures of the young priest’s hands with martial precision. He stands and kneels and mouths all the prayers, and in between the Latin, Eleanor watches him. 

Early in the afternoon, after the presents have been opened but before the singing, King Henry intercepts her in the corridor to the kitchens. He has the nerve to put an arm around her waist when she’s sweating beneath her bliaut and her veil is askew. It is in moments like these that he wishes to be her husband all of a sudden — not when he is thrusting Rosamund in her face like the consecrated Host, to be gawked at by the congregation. As if Eleanor will not remember her once she is out of her view, like a dog under a blanket.

 Her husband wears red. There are roses in his cheeks, and for a moment he is the man she married again until she notes the lines around his eyes and then the only rose she sees in him is Rosamund. Eleanor wishes she had a skewer to stick him with. 

“Why, Henry, am I not mistress of the household? That expression on your face resembles surprise.” 

“Pleasant surprise. I’ve never known you to slave over an open hearth before, but it’s enough to put me in the Christmas spirit. I can picture Our Lady in her splendor, stirring her husband’s morning pottage over a wood fire, looking just the same.” 

Our Lady herself, up and cooking so soon after being delivered of a son – Joseph would have to be a real swine to put her up to it. Eleanor fixes a pin deeper in her veil and tries to look appropriately Marian. 

“You look famished, darling.”

“Oh, yes. I could eat up your whole dowry.”

Eleanor smiles with her teeth. “And have the Vexin for dessert.” 

One moment he wants her, the next he spurns her. She kisses his mouth with ostentatious affection and returns to her labors.

*

Winter 1182 

There is no Christmas court this year. The King has forgotten, or he does not care, or he is simply too busy. Eleanor is alone at Sarum, and she dreams of the death of kings.

In her dream, she hears the sound of bells. She sees on an open bier a king of England with a bleeding crown like Becket’s — he is cut across the forehead with a scarlet cross, marked like the Host. The king is dead, there as plain as Latin, sung out — nothing left for it but the funeral Mass, the beadsmen and the bawling. A terrible sense of cold creeps over her, like peeling back a heavy mantle on a winter’s day. The king is dead, Henricus rex will turn to dust, all his long bones will rattle in their leaden casket when the troops march by. His properties will be carried away, his holdings will be broken up and parceled out for lesser men to own, his unwanted wife will be a widow again, sent packing for France. 

Who is he, this slain king? This dead man is not her husband. That, at least, would make sense. Eleanor wakes up on the chapel floor with an aching shoulder and an aching back. The velvet kneeler is picked out in silk initialisms, little letter Hes, crowned. 

The death of young King Henry — not young Henry, he is only an arm of his father, another one of old King Henry’s insufferable members. A king with no real kingdom, and therein lies the trouble. Not old King Henry, for what does that make her — a crone, a fossil, a husk? Her husband the king is not half so spry as she is, though her joints ache and her feet hurt — her eyes are as keen as ever, her mind as vicious. Women lose their sons every day now, and they weep and make atonement for it, but not her. To lose young Henry will be a blow, but it is a blow that will only stagger Eleanor; Henry the elder, it will topple. For her, young Henry is already lost. He has been lost to her for a long time.

Young Henry is abroad on campaign, looting and pillaging and enjoying greater liberties than Eleanor will ever know again. He’s a beautiful young man, a gallant, a spendthrift, and he is the flesh of her flesh, her eldest son. How delicately he had sounded her out for an interest in treason — only a little treason, only a small piece of treason, treason shared a dozen ways — and how earnestly he had sought her counsels against his father’s forces, how lovingly. How readily he had thrown her over, the moment daddy caught wind of it. Big bad Eleanor, ruining her husband’s sons with her motherly wiles, turning Henry’s innocent little lambs into a pack of baying wolves. As if any of them needed tutoring in treason. Easier to pin the blame on mother, and carry on. 

Her husband may do as much butchery as he likes on all the holy ground in Christendom, but no one keeps him under house arrest for long. If Becket were a woman, perhaps Henry would have locked him up too — or if Eleanor were a man, perhaps Henry would have dashed her brains out. 

An earnest young nun hurries to her side to help her up— how solicitous this new breed of jailer is — but the queen needs no assistance, however stiff her old bones may be. Eleanor rises, surveys the stones on which she rests, makes the sign of the cross, finishes her prayers. How she longs to travel again — how cruel it is, to take a woman who has seen Constantinople and who has felt against her cheek the salt spray off the Barbary Coast, to pen her up in this castle or that castle with nothing to do, and to deny her. Every year that passes is a sacred calendar’s worth of pilgrimages — Easter at the Holy Sepulcher, summer at the shrine of St. James. Every night that passes is a night not spent in her husband’s arms. 

It is Christmas morning. Such-and-such many years ago, the Blessed Virgin was delivered of a son. May God deliver Eleanor from such a husband as she has, and such sons. 

*

Winter 1189

Both her husbands are dead, lying serenely in their tombs until Judgment Day; young King Philip of France remains. Eleanor herself remains, like the chalk cliffs at Dover or the rocks at Stonehenge. This night she sits at the fireside, playing at chess. Her fingers are not so nimble these days, but they’re hardly crabbed with age, only from cold. The castellan is snug in his bed, dreaming of plump widows, and she must enjoy her new liberties when she can get them. 

King Philip sits in his carved chair and frowns down at his pieces. Each of the figures is carved from sable wood and ivory — a passel of carved horses and pensive queens, one of Richard’s festive tributes from his travels abroad. Philip takes one up between his fingers and weighs it in his hand. She can see much of Louis in him, despite their differing natures — he has his father’s beauty, all his kingly courtesy, and none of his humility. What a treat it would be to see his temper let fly. 

Eleanor murmurs over the board when the conversation has hit a lull: 

“You remember our last Christmas together. You left in quite a hurry.”

“King Henry was in a temper over something I’d said regarding his son. It seemed more polite to make myself scarce.”

“Did you love him terribly then?” 

“Did I love whom? Not Henry.” 

“No, not Henry. Heavens, no.” Eleanor adjusts her skirts into a nice spill and moves a bishop. “Oh, any of my sons would do. Say you cherished a flame for Geoffrey, or you wept nightly for want of John. Stranger things have happened in this world.”

The King of France is twenty-four and handsome as a wolf; his beard is dark, his eyes are bright, and he has the martial aspect of a Caesar, an Alexander. It would be more shocking if Richard hadn’t fallen for him.

“Spoken like one who knows. Unlawful coupling is not outside your repertoire.”

Ah, yes, incest. If Eleanor had only known, in her younger days, what a great tissue of rumors would have been spun out of her cordial relationship with old Uncle Raymond, she would have gone ahead and bedded him, just to see what it was like. 

“Unlawful, nothing. I know what young men do together. Did you love him?” 

“Richard is my particular friend. But I have many friends.”

Not right now, he doesn’t. He has allies, 

“He will never forgive you for that stunt of yours. How many years ago was it? You’d have damn near ruined Christmas if my late husband hadn’t had a change of heart. But then he was always changing. Richard is not so changeable.”

“It doesn’t matter whether he forgives me, madam.”

“Suppose he gets himself another boy.”

“He doesn’t want a boy. He wants me.”

“How lucky. You’re no boy yourself, these days.”

Eleanor had understood that to be much of the appeal of sodomy — the love of boys being always fresh, and never inconveniently generative. If Philip and Richard were ever left to raise a child together, the earth would shake and the mountains would tumble down from sheer dread. 

“Richard may surround himself with as many valets as he likes, but he will never be twenty-five again. He needs me more and more. I’ve earned his trust; I haven’t been given it.” 

Meaning, Richard needs Philip, almost as much as he needs his soldiers. He needs supply chains, territory, arms. These things are not the entirety of modern love, but they are more than trifles. How goes such courtesy among sworn brothers? Without the flimsy mortar of a marriage to fix things, there are only promises, compacts, and wars. Philip moves one of his pieces. Eleanor considers its new location and makes her move in turn.

“That’s quite the feat,” Eleanor says, sanguine. “He’s never been the trusting type.”

Philip makes a cynical gesture with one pawn. “Is trust such a necessity in a relationship, madam? I hadn’t known.”

If only he’d been shipped over with poor Alais to keep the poor creature company — if only Philip had been given to her to raise for those first long years of life, what a monster she might have made of him, with the face of Absalom and the morals of Judas. He might have been her son, in another life, and with God willing she would have loved him like her own flesh. 

She could learn to love him now, for Richard’s sake. She will never trust him. Even now, there is charm in such a face. Eleanor isn’t dead yet, merely old, and moreover, she can recognize a talent for genteel brutality when she sees it. Diverted from their conversation, the two continue their game of chess. 

The chessboard makes a wonderful little space; it may stand in for a walled garden, or a battlefield, or a continent from sea to sea. One move, another; a single square on a field of five dozen, give or take. Even an old woman may travel as far as she pleases along its mathematically precise corridors, so long as her defenses are good. Eleanor is the oldest woman she knows, and she isn’t even a nun — hasn’t lived like one, either. If she’d been a man, she might show herself like Philip, proud and haughty with a little beard and a stable of high-born brutes for bedmates. It must be an awful lot of fun to be a prince. 

Eleanor slides an ivory token along the board. “Our Richard is a marvel, isn’t he? A perfect monster, a butcher, a brute. Never happier than when he’s swimming in blood.”

“But you do love him.” 

Philip’s smooth white forehead furrows. She has checkmated him. Without the old lion in it, all gambits seem easier; the world is emptier, and the playing-field smaller.

“Oh, I do. Handle him with care.” 

She does not mean, for Richard’s sake. A scorned lover makes a fearful enemy. The pair of them are monsters, each in their way. They will be very happy together.

Philip nods graciously, and rises, and goes away without a word. A man should take all his losses so gracefully.