Father Adalburt was expressing his surprise at Normandy’s similarity to England. “Look, look,” he kept saying, “fields and ... and reeds. And there . . . wading birds just like those at home. Who would have thought it? Dear Lord, how wondrous are Thy works.”
Slowly, with oars dimpling the water in unison, and to the sound of flute and tabors, they began to glide down the river from which the Norman warships of William the Conqueror had set out for England more than a hundred years before.
On the banks, reed cutters dropped their scythes to watch, and herdsmen left their cows, calling to their wives and children to come and see these unearthly swans go by
As the ships entered the harbor, the musicians on board changed their instruments to trumpets and blew a fanfare that was answered by a line of tabarded heralds on the quay.
Dressed in its best, Caen’s entire nobility had turned out to greet its Plantagenet princess.
It might have saved itself the trouble; Joanna had no eyes for anyone but the young man robed in peacock colors in the forefront of the crowd. Showing animation for the first time, she bounced, squeaking with pleasure. “Henry!”
Crowned eight years ago when his father had feared for the succession, the Young King was glorious, resembling his mother in his beauty and his father not at all.
And kind, Adelia thought, as Joanna ran across the lowered gang-plank to be picked up and whirled around in her brother’s arms, both of them abandoning royal dignity Here was someone showing more care for the girl than the parents who had let her go so easily.
And charming. Everybody on board the royal boat, from bishop to oarsmen, was thanked for his sister’s safe arrival in Normandy. He was gracious to Mansur ... “My lord, your fame in medicine precedes you.” To Adelia he said: “Mistress, we are honored by a lady so knowledgeable in Arabic. Have you spoken it long?”
By the time Adelia had risen from her deep bow and was ready to reply, he had passed on to the next recipient of his attention. She didn’t mind; it had been nice of him to distinguish her by asking. But she was left with an impression of lightness, an easiness without depth. A fine prince, maybe, but not a king. A symbol, not an administrator.
There was the trouble, she thought. When he was this boy’s age, Henry Plantagenet had fought for and won the throne of England and already given it a stability that was the envy of monarchs everywhere.
Young Henry, on the other hand, had been passed an easy crown without responsibility, because he himself either had none or wasn’t ready for it, leaving him with the trappings of kingship and no means to apply them, a situation that, egged on by Eleanor, had caused resentment and, eventually, rebellion.
Father and son had since exchanged the kiss of peace—but at a price. According to Rowley, Young Henry’s return to the fold had been bought with the enormous stipend of a hundred pounds of Angevin money a day Which, from the look of it, he was spending. His retinue as they progressed toward the Abbaye-aux-Hommes and its church of Saint Étienne for a service to greet Joanna included at least fifty noisy young knights complete with squires, all gorgeously dressed and mounted. To the disapproval of the staid Sir Nicholas Baicer and Lord Ivo, they chattered and laughed throughout the ceremony so that it was difficult to distinguish the words of the mass. Nor did their Young King attempt to quiet them.
Adelia, however, was encouraged; with an escort as large as this, she thought, the safety of the journey to Sicily was ensured.
She said so to Captain Bolt as she emerged from the church to find him and a troop of his men waiting outside, ready to escort her and the ladies of the party from the Abbaye-aux-Hommes to the Abbaye-aux-Dames, where they would spend the night, Caen being unique in having two great convents, one for men, one for women, standing on either side of the city; the first built by William the Conqueror and the second by his wife, Matilda, both in expiation of their sin of marrying each other against the law of consanguinity—they’d been cousins.
“Them,” Captain Bolt responded with all the contempt of a professional soldier for men who paid for the land they held of the king by a knightly service that allowed them to go home after thirty days. “No discipline. See how they behaved in church? Shocking it was.”
WARD SPENT THE NIGHT somewhere in the bowels of the nunnery with Boggart. Dog and maid had become delighted with each other, Boggart because, for the first time in her life she had something, however smelly, on which to lavish affection, and Ward because Boggart, though lacking skill as a lady’s attendant, was a marvel at stealing food from kitchens with which to feed him.
That’s one problem solved, then, Adelia thought, as she climbed wearily into the large bed already containing Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche. Dear Lord, keep Allie safe and don’t let her be missing me as much as I’m missing her.
THE MORNING BROUGHT its own problem, a larger one.
The ladies of the party had risen early to be escorted across Caen to the Abbaye-aux-Hommes, where they were now gathered in its courtyard waiting for the great journey to Sicily to properly begin.
And waited.
Loud and angry voices could be heard coming from inside the monastery, the Bishop of Saint Albans’s louder and angrier than anyone’s.
At last he emerged, flanked by Lord Ivo and Sir Nicholas Baicer, both looking nearly as thunderous as he did. He bowed to Joanna. “My lady, I must inform you that the Young King has gone to Falaise. For a tournament, apparently And all his knights with him. He begs you to expect his return in a few days.”
What the princess replied was inaudible, but Adelia heard Lady Priscilla exclaim, “A tournament, how I adore tournaments. Oh, that he might have taken us with him.”
A few days? It might not matter to that young woman how long the journey took—she had no child waiting for her to come back.
As for the Young King ... it was known that he was addicted to tournaments, but this was irresponsibility; what an abrogation of duty.
Adelia had been present at a tournament once during a visit to Emma’s Normandy manor near Calais and, for her, that had been one tournament too many. They were called entertainments, two teams of knights hacking away at each other in what was supposed to be a mock battle, but during the melee at Calais four young men had been killed and fifteen others permanently maimed.
The attraction for the victors was in holding the defeated to ransom, along with their armor and horses—a way of earning so much money that as many as several hundred eager knights would take part, not only wasting precious lives but trampling peasants’ crops for miles around. Henry in his wisdom had banned them from England but here, it seemed, under the nominal rule of the Young King, they were still legal.
She saw Captain Bolt talking with Rowley and, when he’d finished, went up to him. “What can be done?”
“Nothing.” Bolt was tight-lipped with fury. “We wait.”
They waited for four days, during which Caen’s welcome to the princess and her large company began to drain away—like its resources.
On the fifth day a messenger was sent to Falaise to ask the Young King when he was expecting to return.
Again, Adelia approached Captain Bolt. “What’s happened?”
“The messenger had to go on to Rouen. That young b ...” Bolt took in a long breath. “... the Young King’s heard as there’s another big tournament there and he’s off to fight in it.”
“Rouen’s, what, eighty miles away What are we going to do?”
“I dunno, mistress. The bishops and Sir Nicholas and Lord Ivo are in conference about it.”
Master Locusta, it appeared, was frantic that his arrangements with the castles and monasteries scheduled to receive them on the way would be put out. “I’ve no wish to speak ill of the Young King, but really. . . .”
“I think you’re justified in speaking ill of the Young King this time,” an impatient Adelia told him.
The conference lasted another day On the seventh, it came to a decision. Another
messenger was sent to the Young King at Rouen to tell him that Princess Joanna and her train were finding it necessary to set off for Aquitaine immediately in the expectation that her brother and his train would catch up with her en route.
So the next morning the citizens of Caen lined the road to the southern gate to cheer and wave off the marriage cavalcade, partly to honor it and partly in relief that it was going. After all, it numbered nearly one hundred and fifty people who, with their animals, the city had been forced to accommodate and feed at its own expense.
Riding with Mansur near the head of the column, Adelia glanced back at the long, long line following behind her, and was encouraged; nobles, clerks, musicians and squires, personal servants, laundresses, grooms, luggage, and treasure, all were accommodated in carts or on mule- and horseback, a luxury that required nobody to walk, thereby speeding the journey
As the procession reached the countryside and began passing through isolated little villages, their inhabitants came out to marvel at something to be seen once in a lifetime; the golden princess and ladies in their gilded palanquin, riders cloaked in crimson cloth or silk, horses in their rainbow caparisons, the shine of armor—like a jeweled dragon come glittering out of the age of myth to prance its way along the muddy high streets.
Captain Bolt’s practiced eye, however, saw it differently Pausing beside Adelia as he rode up and down the line to make sure his soldiers kept their posts along it, he cursed Young Henry and his lack of duty
“Aren’t we better off without him?” she asked.
“Maybe. But my men’ve got a princess with a mort of treasure to guard and, if so be it comes to an attack, we’re mightily overstretched.”
“THE JOURNEY BEGINS to be unlucky for them; Young Henry has deserted us. That great fool, the Bishop of Winchester, complains of it, mala tempora currunt, yet I see in it our Great Master’s hand. We are being shown the way, Lupus mine. Send us more misfortune, O deo certe, that I may contrive to have the blame for it heaped on the head of the woman we are to bring down.”
Five
IT WAS ADELIA’S CONTENTION from personal experience that riding sidesaddle was bad for the back. Not a good horsewoman, she also thought it dangerous to be hanging on at a twisted angle should one’s mount shy or bolt. Yet riding astride was denounced everywhere as unladylike, a style for peasants, especially by the exalted company in which she now found herself.
If King Henry’s strictures to the three ladies-in-waiting had been properly observed, she should have traveled in the de luxe cushioned cart in which they and Joanna passed the journey by teasing their perfumed lapdogs, playing cards, and watching the scenery they could see through its gilded and ornamented bars. Adelia’s only experience in it, however, was her last.
It wasn’t that the little princess herself was unfriendly merely withdrawn. Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche, on the other hand, had a curve to their lips as they questioned her about her “Saracen friend.” (“Do tell us, dear—is his skin naturally that color or is it against his religion to wash?”) And inquired after her new maid. (“We hope so much that the Boggart is proving satisfactory, how nice that she’s taken to your interesting little dog.”)
After a morning of it, Adelia reverted to the sidesaddle on the palfrey allotted to her. It was a pretty but very hard wooden sambue, a contraption resembling a three-sided box with a pommel that allowed her right leg to curve gracefully over her left, both of her boots fitting above each other into stirrups of disparate heights. At an amble the posture it demanded was uncomfortable; trotting was torture.
Bumping along on it beside Mansur, Adelia found her mind dwelling with admiration on the Empress Matilda, Henry I I’s mother, who had ignored opprobrium by riding astride during her war with her cousin, Stephen, for England’s throne. “The Plantagenets would never have won if she’d had to go sidesaddle,” she grumbled in Arabic.
“It gives elegance to a woman,” Mansur said, approvingly
“It gives her curvature of the damned spine.”
“And modesty”
That was it, she supposed. Men didn’t like women to have their legs apart unless they were in bed; yet how much more fittingly the female frame had been designed to ride astride than that of the male, with its protruding dangly bits.
She groaned. “A thousand miles of modesty, I’ll never survive it.”
“Then return to the royal cart.”
“With those three harpies? I’m hardly welcome there.”
At least this way, she didn’t have to restrain herself from punching ladies of the nobility in the mouth. Also, she could ride farther back in the procession among the lesser members of the household and occasionally give advice on their health problems, ostensibly through Mansur’s pronouncements.
Their arrival at the great Benedictine abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel was to set the tone for what, Locusta hoped, would be their reception at every stop on the journey He had gone ahead with a servant to alert the abbot of their coming and then returned to lead them on. “Thank God the tide’s out,” he said, as they approached the island causeway. “It took all my mathematics to time our coming exactly. I was afraid our delay would miss us another eight hours.”
“Let us hope the tide stays out,” the O’Donnell said. “For I’m told it comes in with the rush of a galloping horse.”
In fact, water was beginning to swirl around wheels and hooves as they crossed to the strange mount on which monks had been laboring for one thousand years to complete an edifice that the Archangel Michael had instructed their first bishop to build.
They hadn’t labored in vain. From a distance the top of the mount gave the impression that it had been set with enormous candles that had dripped wax into contorted and beautiful shapes.
It had been a hot day. August was going out with all the heat it could muster. The climb up the escalier street was hard on beasts and humans who’d already had a long and sweaty journey of it, but the prospect of rest in the cool of the lovely building above them spurred them on, as did the dizzying glimpses of the bay with a breeze coming off it, and the Normandy coast under the rise of a harvest moon.
Abbot and clergy waited to greet them; there would always be a crowd of clergy, and introductions and, invariably, a service of thanksgiving for Joanna’s safe arrival, then a banquet under vaulted ceilings and toasts, before the poor little princess and her yawning following were accommodated in their beds. Next morning she had to see the graceful cloisters, the gilded statue of Saint Michael, kneel before precious relics, until the time came to remount and set off again.
It was to be the pattern.
We’ll proceed by inches, Adelia thought in despair. Allie, oh Allie.
AT THE END of the fourth day’s journey, while Mansur was helping her to dismount—a clumsy business at the best of times—her horse made a sudden movement and Adelia’s right foot became entangled in its stirrup; Mansur staggered under her unexpected weight, and for a moment she was sent topsy-turvy with her veil dragging in the dust.
Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche stepped down the little ladder attached to their cart and clustered about her with delighted sympathy. “Are you all right, you poor soul? My dear, how embarrassing.”
It was. For an instant, before Mansur helped her up again, a small crowd of men, including Captain Bolt, Father Adalburt, Admiral O’Donnell, and the Bishop of Saint Albans, were treated to the sight of Adelia’s white thighs and a burst of good fenland invective against horse riding in general and sidesaddles in particular.
Next morning, limping out to the stable yard for another day’s suffering, she found Captain Bolt putting a different saddle on her palfrey. It was a small affair and cushioned in red leather, high at the rear in order to support the rider’s back.
He interrupted her explosions of gratitude. “Been made for a boy, I fear, mistress. You’ll have to go astride.”
“I don’t care. Where did you get it from?”
&
nbsp; “Weren’t me. We passed a saddlery away back and somebody . . .” He lowered his voice; Bolt was an old friend of the bishop’s and Adelia’s, and aware of their situation. “... somebody found this as had been ordered for a young lord as’d never come for it. So he bought it for you.”
Rowley Oh, God bless him.
Tightening the cinch, the captain said: “And I’ll spread it about as Queen Eleanor herself did sometimes ride astride. I know as she did; that time she escaped from the king and I had to chase her to bring her back—God help us, I had trouble a-catching her.”
“Thank you. And please thank the somebody.”
Bolt heaved her up onto the palfrey “I was to say as it’s to stop you breaking your neck as well as the Third Commandment.” He shook his head in admiration. “Gor, lady, you can’t half swear when it comes to it.”
AT THE NEXT MONASTERY there was a kerfuffle in the middle of the night; a woman screamed, men’s voices were raised, there was movement in the inner courtyard. The sounds incorporated themselves into part of a dream Adelia was having and, being exhausted from that day’s journey, she didn’t wake up but, like the three ladies-in-waiting with whom she shared a bed, merely groaned and stirred in her sleep.
Yet it was obvious next morning that something had occurred; Lady Beatrix, Lady Petronilla, and Mistress Blanche in their cart were to be seen in conversation more earnest than was usual with them while, all down the line, there was a frisson of talk, head-shaking, and, among some of the men, laughter.
“Do you know what’s happened?” Adelia asked Mansur. Thinking the Arab did not understand them, people were looser with their talk in his presence than hers.
“It has something to do with the Sir Nicholas Baicer and shoes, but I can gather no more than that.”
“Shoes?”
Isolated as she was from the general gossip, Adelia appealed to Captain Bolt as he rode past her on one of his checks up and down the procession.