And then peace no more, William thought pityingly. Now would come the platitudes, about the child having lived long enough to be baptised, about Henry and Marguerite being young and strong and with time enough to begin again. But he wasn’t going to be the one to utter them.
Henry gazed down on his dead son for a moment longer, before pivoting abruptly on his heel and striding from the room. William hesitated, glanced towards the closed bed curtains, and then hurried after his lord. Henry had turned aside into one of the garderobes cut into the wall and was retching down the waste shaft, his hands braced on the wooden seat.
William waited, saying nothing, feeling inadequate. There were no words of comfort that would cocoon the rawness of Henry’s bleeding grief and lacerated pride. The flood of joy followed by the back-surge of loss was bound to drown all but the strongest swimmer. Slowly Henry straightened and wiped his mouth. His eyes were dull now, quenched of light. “Why does God allow these things to happen?” he asked William in a torn voice. “If he didn’t want my son to live, why did he make her quicken with my seed in the first place?”
William shook his head. “You should speak to your chaplain, sire. I have no answers.”
“He won’t have any either.” Henry sat down on the garderobe seat and put his head in his hands. “Christ, I’m drunk. I thought this was a celebration. I thought that in the morning I would…Oh Christ Jesu, Christ have mercy.” His body shuddered with dry sobs. “Why does the gold in my hands always trickle through my fingers like common sand and leave me no better than a beggar?” he demanded in an aching, forlorn voice.
William swallowed and felt his own eyes burn. What could he say? That if one spread one’s fingers instead of making a fist, one would never hold on to anything. That Henry had the choice between cladding himself in the riches of a king or a beggar’s rags. Even now he was mourning for himself, not the piteous swaddled scrap lying cold and pale in the royal cradle. But that didn’t make the heartache any less intense. In Henry’s case, the opposite.
William cleared the harshness of emotion from his throat. “You should sleep, sire,” he said, “and in the morning, do what you must.”
Henry swallowed and palmed his hands over his face. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right. Do what I must.”
Clara took one look at William’s pouched and reddened eyes, the stubble foresting his jaw, his blank expression and, without a word, fetched wine laced with aqua vitae and pressed him down on the bed. Totally passive, William allowed her to strip his garments, standing when she bade him stand, sitting when she bade him sit. Once he was clad in a fresh shirt and loose-fitting tunic, she laid her hand to his shoulder and placed a kiss at the corner of his mouth.
“Have you eaten?”
He shrugged, unable to remember. The hollow sensation in his gut might be hunger, but could as well be a reaction to the atmosphere at the palace; to being drained by all that he had witnessed and the burdens he had been forced to shoulder. Marguerite distraught and wild-haired in her bed, racked with grief and guilt; her husband drunk, then sober, then drunk again. The wine he had consumed half keeping pace with Henry had soured his gut and caused a dull ache behind his eyes. Babies died unborn or at birth. Children did not survive infancy and childhood. Only the strong and the fortunate grew to maturity…only those blessed by God. Everyone knew that; everyone was prepared until it happened to them.
Clara brought him fresh wheaten bread and a pot of game terrine. When he didn’t touch it, she broke the bread herself and put a chunk of the spicy paté on it. “Eat,” she commanded.
The strong aroma reached his nose and made his mouth water and his stomach rebel. “I will be sick,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter. Eat.”
William did as she commanded, glad to have someone make a decision for him. She watched him, saying nothing, as William had watched and waited and said nothing, a witness and a beast of burden to the Young King’s grief and Marguerite’s suffering. The robust flavours of the food awakened his appetite and after the first mouthful, his nausea was subjugated by ravenous hunger, as if he had been starved of life itself and now felt it returning in the tastes and textures exploding on his tongue. He forced himself to eat slowly. Clara replaced the fortified wine with an ordinary jug of Gascony and brought a platter of sweet dried dates and figs to the low bench they were using as a table. Gradually the colours of the world returned and came into sharper focus. He became aware of Clara’s quiet stare and the fact that he was wearing more comfortable clothes than his formal court attire, although how he came to be doing so, he could not remember.
“You should sleep,” she murmured.
He sighed hard. “Yes, I should, but I don’t know if I can.” He took her hand and looked down at their linked fingers. “It was bad,” he said. “I stood in vigil with Henry last night, as did all the knights of his mesnie.” His throat worked. “The coffin was no bigger than a reliquary box. The Queen…” He shook his head. “The Queen has taken it ill. She was sleeping when the child died and she thinks that in some way it is her fault.” His mouth twisted as he remembered her pale, tear-tracked face.
“I prayed for her at mass this morning—and for the child and the Young King too,” Clara said. “The churches have been tolling a knell the day long.” She laid her palm against her own flat stomach. “I grieve that my womb is barren, but sometimes I think that it is a blessing too. It is easier to mourn the children I will never have than see them taken away in the hour of their birth.”
William lay down on the bed and she joined him, although it was full daylight. Waiting for him to return, she had kept her own vigil and she was tired, although not with the same exhaustion that William felt. “There is time for them to have other sons,” she said.
“That is what her women have been telling her, and what the Bishop of Rouen said to my lord.” He closed his eyes, and behind his lids saw Henry’s fury at the Bishop’s words. Not because they came too soon on the heels of tragedy, but because they were a reminder of a duty that Henry would have sooner forgone. He had little interest in his wife’s bed to begin with, and could see no point in mating with her if the result was to be failure. “It makes sense,” William said without lifting his lids, “but there’s not a lot of that about at the moment. The best I can do for Henry is take him to the next tourney and hope to ride his demons out of him.”
“And his wife?”
He pulled Clara into his arms, seeking comfort. “Time, I suppose, and gentle handling, but how much she will have of either, I do not know.”
Thirteen
Port of Wissant, Artois, February 1179
“No, I am certain,” Clara said, shaking her head. Her warm complexion was pale as she stood beside William on the wharfside and watched the ships tossing at their mooring ropes like new-caught wild horses. “I will go to the ends of the earth for you, but only if I do not have to cross water.”
William could understand her reluctance because he hated sea crossings himself, but her fear went much deeper than his did. Until yesterday when the Young King’s court arrived in Wissant to prepare for the crossing, Clara had never seen the sea, and the sight of its grey-green vastness spreading to meet the low clouds on the horizon had terrified her almost out of her wits.
His reassurances about the crossing had fallen on deaf ears, partly because he was being too hearty to compensate for his own fears and partly because Clara didn’t want to listen. Nor did she want to see England. From hearsay it was a cold, misty land filled with surly peasants and a dour aristocracy who viewed anyone from Poitou as soft, pampered, and tainted with heresy. That William was English, as were several of the Young King’s household, had not allayed her fears. There were always exceptions and much of William’s life had been spent away from his native island. She was afraid, too, of meeting his family. On the tourney circuit she was accepted and respected as the mistress of the best knight on the field. But there were no tourneys in England, none of the dazzle and glamour that made for a relaxed acceptance of mistresses, troubadours, and dancing girls. Even the fact that William’s older brother had a mistress and a bastard child had not reassured her. She was as adamant about England as she was about the sea.
“I cannot,” she repeated with a shudder, her gaze on the milky-green waves slapping against the harbour side.
William made an exasperated sound in his throat, drew her roughly to his side, and hugged her. “I would never put my courser at a hedge too high for him to jump,” he said. “I won’t push you.”
She blinked on tears, her eyes stinging from the cold, salt wind. “Just don’t be too hasty to find another mount while you’re in England,” she said with a tremulous laugh. “One that can jump higher.”
