Almodis Read online

  ‘How so, Lady?’ asks Bernadette, yawning.

  I am getting quite tired myself having to speak in Langue d’Oil to her all the time. I frown at her open maw and she shuts it up. ‘My grandmother had thought to circumvent some of her second husband’s destruction of the La Marche fortunes by confirming me as her heir, to her Limoges wealth at least.’

  Bernadette perks up at that. ‘So you’re rich?’ she says, brush in hand, her eyes wide.

  ‘In theory,’ I say, ‘but my step-grandfather took me as a hostage here when I was five, as guarantee of my father’s good behaviour.’

  ‘And Piers, too,’ she interrupts.

  ‘And Piers too,’ I say, cross that she is already flirting with my other servant. ‘When I was five Duke Guillaume betrothed me to Hugh of Lusignan, who owns good lands but is a minor lord. It’s a way of controlling the La Marches you see?’

  She shrugs her ungainly shoulders and says, ‘Women don’t rule on their own or own property where I come from. We leave that to men. Much safer that way.’

  I roll my eyes to the ceiling in despair.

  When she leaves me, I continue my unsent letter to Raingarde: So you see what a hopeless confidante this Bernadette will make.

  She was more interested in hearing about Piers than me, her mistress. ‘He came with you as a hostage too when he was a little-un did he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he’s your father’s son?’

  I was about to shout at her angrily at that but what is the point in denying it. ‘All noble houses are swarming with bastards,’ I said instead which silenced her. I suppose that Piers has told her that my father is his father, wanting to impress the foolish chit.

  Now we are all waiting outside the entrance to the Great Hall for the party of riders sighted from the tower. The Aquitaine family is ranged across the top of the steps, preparing to formally greet the visitors, but it is taking a long time for them to reach us and I am getting bored. I try out the skipping steps of the dance that the jongleur performed in the hall last night.

  Agnes buffets my head, knocking the careful concoction of my plaits. ‘Stand still! Do you want your mother-in-law to think you are a capering idiot?’

  I stand still and try to push my wound plaits back into place under my head veil but they won’t be perfect now. This is the first time that I have worn a woman’s head veil – a couvrechef – and I am mortified that Agnes has ruined its appearance. I plunge my hand into the deep pocket of my gown where two of my ivory alphabet tiles click softly against each other. I feel their letters: A for Almodis (and unfortunately, Agnes), H for Hugh. Across the courtyard there is still no sign of the riders at the castle gate. Grandfather gave me the tiles. They were his when he was a child. He told me that I am quicker at my letters than everyone, quicker than his eldest son, Guill (my uncle), who is a tall, fat man, standing next to grandfather; quicker than Eudes, who is seventeen and the son of grandfather’s second wife, Sancha. We all learnt to read and write together at the cathedral school, with Geoffrey too, using a psalter and a book of grammar called The Back Sparer, but I had no need of back sparing. I loved my lessons and learnt fast. It was the best part of my day.

  Eudes stands on the other side of Agnes, trying to keep her seven-year-old twins, Pierre and Guy, from falling down the steps. A maid stands behind Agnes holding her baby daughter. I glance up at the dark, red coils of Agnes’ hair under her fine head-veil edged with gold stitching. She made me brush her hair last night, and that is a servant’s job. The thick, dark red mane crackled and sparked under the hard strokes of the brush like a wild animal, like a fox. It is the only thing about Agnes that I like.

  Agnes looks down, turning her reddish brown eyes on me. ‘Well, here comes your lordling.’

  I grit my teeth against her insult. Grandfather likes to tell me that I, the daughter of a count, am to marry a mere lord, because I am ‘The Peacemaker’, settling years of bitter disputes between the three families of Aquitaine, La Marche and Lusignan. I try to find excuses for Agnes’ meanness. It must be hard for her, a young girl, married to an old man, more than thirty years older and anyone can see that the duke loves me a great deal more than Agnes who just serves him in bed. She is unkind, jealous, gleeful in her power. I have to stop my thoughts in their tracks. It is not christian or dignified of me to think like that about my foster-mother.

  ‘Hugh owns the largest castle in Aquitaine,’ I say sullenly, ‘and rich lands.’

  Agnes opens her mouth to respond with another mocking comment.

  ‘Silence, ladies,’ the duke commands, as the horses enter the bailey and clatter rapidly to the bottom of the steps.

  I watch Hugh dismount, help his mother, Lady Audearde, from her horse and then kneel to my grandfather. This muscular, black-haired man bears no resemblance to my vague memories of a lanky boy holding my hand in the betrothal ceremony seven years ago. Whilst my grandfather and Agnes welcome the guests, and Lusignan and his mother make the customary responses, I study him and feel glad at what I see. He is tall, six feet perhaps, which is good because I am already tall. I wrote in a letter last night to Raingarde, how foolish we would look if our husbands are shorter than we are. Hugh’s hair is truly black, not just dark brown, but a thick, shiny black with a tufted texture. I imagine how pleasant it might feel to run my fingers over his head. His beard is the same black and cut short to his face. I am glad to find that my betrothed husband is strong and handsome. I am startled from my reverie as his eyes alight suddenly on me: gentle black eyes. He soon turns back to my grandfather and I become conscious that my mouth is open and I have been holding my breath as he looked at me. What does he think of me?

  His mother, Lady Audearde, is very thin and her hair is dark grey under her veil. After the recent death of his father, Hugh is now the fifth Lord of Lusignan. He is here to give his fealty to the duke and to pay his respects to me, his bride-to-be. He is of age now, twenty, but at twelve, I am still too young to marry. Perhaps it would be good to escape soon from Agnes’ household and command my own.

  Hugh turns smiling towards me and I smile shyly back and then look up at my grandfather who is also pleased and squeezes my hand. Suddenly I feel a terrible pain slash at the side of my leg. I scream and fall clutching my leg, wailing. Anxious faces crowd above me blotting out the sun.

  ‘What is it darling! What’s the matter?’ grandfather cries.

  I feel nothing but the pain. Raingarde. When I am conscious again to what is happening around me I find that Hugh is lifting me from the ground and carrying me into the Great Hall. He perches me on my grandfather’s throne and calls for a doctor to examine me. Everyone is offering suggestions. Has she been stung by a hornet? Is it the onset of a sickness? Now that the pain and my gasping have subsided, I can look at them all again. Hugh’s mother Audearde, is standing back from the anxious crowd of people with a look of great disapproval on her face.

  ‘Nothing wrong there,’ the doctor finally announces.

  ‘Nothing?’ echoes the duke looking with puzzlement at me.

  ‘She is seeking attention as usual,’ Agnes pronounces and I watch with dismay as Audearde nods her head, her lips grimly set in a line.

  ‘I feel fine now,’ I say. ‘It must have been Raingarde. Something bad has happened to her leg. May I send a messenger to ask if she is alright Grandfather?’

  ‘What is the child babbling about?’ Audearde asks. ‘Does she have a fever?’

  The doctor shakes his head.

  ‘Raingarde is her twin,’ Duke Guillaume offers the explanation in the direction of Hugh. ‘It is said that twins do feel each other’s pain at a distance.’

  Hugh’s black eyebrows arch.

  ‘What blasphemous nonsense!’ Audearde exclaims. Agnes smiles smugly and pointedly at me. ‘Some say that twins are the seed of two men – of adultery,’ Audearde continues, ‘and others that they are the offspring of the Devil.’

  I look with dismay at the frown forming on Hugh�
��s face. Is he frowning at his mother’s words or at me?

  ‘It is those sayings, Lady Audearde, that are nonsense!’ my grandfather says swiftly. ‘Do I not have twin sons myself?’ he asks and the smirk on Agnes’ face disappears as she is anxious not to be implicated in my contagion. ‘Almodis is a good girl, the apple of my eye,’ Grandfather tells Hugh.

  I want to explain how I can sometimes feel Raingarde though I have not seen her for seven years. ‘It …’ but the Duke has clamped a big hand over my mouth and is staring into my eyes meaningfully. When he removes his hand I stay silent.

  What do they know? They know nothing. I hope ardently that Raingarde’s leg was something simple – like a bee-sting – nothing serious. Hugh smiles at me again, but now his smile is lopsided, uncertain. I leap to my feet to show that I am fully recovered and curtsey to him. ‘I am recovered my Lord. I thank you for your care of me.’ They laugh at my womanly gestures as I intend.

  That night I lie in my curtained feather bed thinking of my husband-to-be. He has given me an exquisite white-enamelled swan on a golden chain. He seems kind and he is beautiful. During the feast Agnes whispered mockery in my ear at every opportunity, pointing out how Hugh still demurs to his mother’s lead ‘as if she were still regent of his large castle’ and how ‘the old harridan’ would rule both Hugh and his little wife. No, I thought, she certainly won’t. Probably she will be dead by the time I marry and go to Lusignan, and if not, well I will better that old lady. I mean to be an excellent wife. I am learning the duties of a chatelaine avidly and I carry my girdle with its jangling keys with pride, even though they are only the keys to my own casket at present. I will attach the swan there to sway against my hip.

  3

  November 1036

  Dramatic changes in the weather began three years ago with torrential rain, and the ground has been waterlogged all this time, impossible to plough or sow. A terrible famine began and the people were compelled to eat grass and acorns. Weeds covered the fields at harvest time. Men, women and children died in thousands. Many dead lay out in the open because no one in the villages had the strength left to bury them, and the corpses were eaten by wolves. Survivors left their homes and migrated west in search of food. We heard that Odilo, the Abbot of Cluny, had buried ten poor children dead of cold and hunger in his own cloak. Mass pilgrimages set off to the Holy Land from Limoges and many other cities, desperately seeking God’s mercy in these dark days. My grandfather became a little crazed with the bad news we heard day after day. He came back from a visit to his coastal holdings saying that he had seen the sea and the rain turn to blood. Agnes looked on his increasing age and feebleness with a smug smile that she directed at Geoffrey too often for my liking. We all began to think about the succession, when my grandfather might no longer be able to rule his Duchy.

  Not long after Hugh and his mother visited us, my grandfather went away to the monastery at Maillezais, and my uncle Guill became the new duke. I sobbed loudly when grandfather prepared to leave.

  ‘I am tired and old, little one,’ he remonstrated as I clung passionately to him. ‘My son needs to take control of Aquitaine and grow into his command. It is time. He is a full-grown man and I am a sick old man.’

  In the long winter nights, I had stroked his hair when he fell asleep by lamplight amongst the books, his white head resting on the gold letters of a manuscript that was a gift from Cnut, the Norse King of England.

  ‘But you’re not sick or old Grandpapa,’ I wailed, ‘you’re just middle-aged. And you’ll look really silly with a bald patch shaved on your head.’

  He laughed at my carefully thought-out objections, with tears in his eyes, and then left me with Agnes. I knew that I would never see him again.

  I like my uncle Guill, now Duke of Aquitaine, and his wife, Eustachie, is young and has been kind to me, but now I watch as Eustachie wrings her hands in despair at the scroll that I have just read to her.

  ‘Three million kroners!’ exclaims Eustachie again, looking in bewilderment to me. Even the rich lands of Aquitaine cannot muster such a high ransom for my uncle who has been captured and imprisoned by my childhood friend, Geoffrey of Anjou. The Geoffrey I had known disappeared after his mother’s burning and never came back. He seemed deadened and stiff all the time. He turned his attention to developing new fighting games that he called ‘tournaments’ and, worst of all, he began to flirt with horrible Agnes, a widow after my grandfather died in the monastery, and hungry for a new young husband.

  There was something between them even before Grandfather died. I caught Agnes one morning kissing Geoffrey in the stone passageway. I looked away quickly, but I had seen that his hand was up her skirts and hers was in his clothing. She called me to her room later, but before she could speak I said, ‘You don’t need to worry. I would never betray Geoffrey and I would never betray a woman,’ (even you, I thought) ‘to the anger of a man.’ She considered me gravely, wondering if she should threaten or cajole me; but eventually she nodded, decided to hold her tongue, and dismissed me. She treated me more kindly, of course, after that.

  When Agnes married Geoffrey last year my first reaction was a desperate jealousy that she should have my friend, but then my jealousy turned to anxiety when I thought of Agnes’ ruthless ambition combined with Geoffrey’s famed prowess on the battlefield. Agnes never made a secret of the fact that she wanted her own son to rule Aquitaine even though my grandfather had left two other heirs, Guill and Eudes. Now Geoffrey and Agnes had captured my uncle Guill and set a ransom so high that it was impossible to meet. Duchess Eustachie handed out justice at the Assemblies with assurance in the first months of her husband’s absence and her Regency, but if Agnes and Geoffrey took this opportunity to invade, I doubted that Eustachie would prove much of an adversary for them.

  ‘Should I send to my father and brother for support?’ I ask.

  ‘What! Do you think Geoffrey and Agnes will bring an army here?’ Eustachie looks terribly alarmed.

  ‘It’s possible,’ I say slowly, not wanting to send her into more panic. We are surrounded on all sides by Anjou allies. If Geoffrey rose against Eustachie and tried to take the throne of Aquitaine for Agnes’ young son, we are not in a good situation. ‘I should write and inform my father how things stand and ask for his advice. We should ensure that the outlying garrisons all have full musters and that we have spies out to tell us if Geoffrey is preparing an army.’

  ‘Yes, yes, will you give those orders?’ she says. ‘Where would I be without your good sense?’

  I nod and go to seek out the steward.

  But Geoffrey and Agnes did not come that summer. Geoffrey had other military business in the North where he was intent on extending his power towards Saintonge. My uncle Guillaume mouldered somewhere in a black dungeon behind the towering Roman walls of Angers, that was if they hadn’t already murdered him. I thought of him often and sadly. He would not manage captivity well and I doubted that he was being kept in good conditions. Whilst Geoffrey has been brought up by Fulk in the harsh Roman way – seriousness, modesty, plainness – Guillaume was a man who had luxuriated in rich food and beautiful things. In truth, I was not certain which way the wind would blow with my father and brother. The La Marches had been allies with the Anjou family, successfully waging war against the Aquitaines, until my step-grandfather had murdered my real grandfather. It was possible that my father would side with Anjou, but on the other hand he would not be happy to see Aquitaine in the hands of Agnes and Geoffrey, who had such strong inclinations and connections with the northern Capetian king.

  For three summers Eustachie ruled in her husband’s stead, no news came of Uncle Guillaume, and I grew taller and taller and thought of Raingarde doing the same. The time of famine has passed and the harvests these last few years have been especially celebrated when the people remember their deliverance from that earlier devastation. Last year Geoffrey’s father, Fulk, went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, perhaps, I thought, seeking forgiveness for wh
at he had done to poor Elisabeth, and, I added tartly in my head, I hope he doesn’t get it. Fulk had left Anjou in his son’s command, giving us all the more reason for disquiet at what Agnes might push Geoffrey to do about Aquitaine; but again, Geoffrey’s military exploits were focussed in the North, towards Normandy and not towards us in the South. Perhaps he refuses to comply with his horrid wife’s wishes, but I knew that this was just a delay, that sooner or later, Geoffrey and Agnes would come for Aquitaine.

  A messenger is hurrying into the hall, running down the aisle towards us, scattering the jongleurs unceremoniously to either side. Eustachie holds up her hand for a halt in the music. Clearly the messenger brings important news and I recognise him as one of the spies that Roland, our steward, had sent to keep watch on Geoffrey. The messenger kneels and Eustachie waves him, Roland and me, back into the curtained chamber to hear the news in private. I can already see from the messenger’s face that this is good rather than bad news.

  ‘Is my husband released?’ Eustachie asks.