Taper light had been kinder to the queen than the blazing illumination around them now. Elegance was there and always would be, so was the lovely, pale skin that went with auburn hair, now hidden, but wrinkles were puckering at her mouth and the tight, gauze wimple around her face did not quite hide the beginning of sagging flesh under the chin. Slender, yes, fine bones, yes. Yet there was another sag above the point where a jeweled belt encircled her hips.
No wonder, either. Two daughters by her first husband, Louis of France, and, since their divorce, eight more children from her marriage to Henry Plantagenet, five of them sons.
Ten babies. Adelia thought of what carrying Allie had done to her own waistline. She’s a marvel to look as she does.
There wouldn’t be any more, though; even if king and queen had not been estranged, Eleanor must now be, what, fifty years old?
And Henry probably not yet forty.
“There,” the queen said, and bit through the needle end of the silk now holding Adelia’s palm together. Producing an effusion of lace that served her as a handkerchief, she bound it efficiently round Adelia’s hand and tied it with a last, painful tug.
“I am grateful, my lady,” Adelia said in earnest.
But Eleanor had returned to her watch, her eyes on the corpse.
Why? Adelia wondered. Why this profane vigil? It’s beneath you.
The woman had escaped from a castle in the Loire Valley, had traveled through her husband’s hostile territory gathering followers and soldiers as she went, had crossed the Channel and slipped into southern England. All this to get to an isolated tower in Oxfordshire. And in winter. True, most of the journey had obviously been made before the roads became as impassable as they now were-to arrive at the tower, she must have been camped not far away. Nevertheless, it was a titanic journey that had tired out everybody but Eleanor herself. For what? To gloat over her rival?
But, Adelia thought, the enemy is vanquished, petrified into a winter version of Sodom and Gomorrah’s block of salt. An assassination has been thwarted by me and an Eleanor-preserving God. Rosamund turns out to have been fat. All this is sufficient, surely, to satisfy any lust for revenge.
But not the queen’s, obviously; she must sit here and enjoy the vanquished one’s decomposition. Why?
It wasn’t because she’d envied the younger mistress the ability to still bear children. Rosamund hadn’t had any.
Nor was it as if Rosamund had been the only royal paramour. Henry swived more women than most men had hot dinners. “Literally, a father to his people,” Rowley had said of him once, with pride.
It was what kings did, almost an obligation, a duty-in Henry’s case, a pleasure-to his realm’s fertility.
To make the damn crops grow, Adelia thought sourly.
Yet Eleanor’s own ducal ancestors themselves had encouraged the growth of acres of Aquitanian crops in their time; she’d been brought up not to expect marital fidelity. Indeed, when she’d had it, wedded to the praying, monkish King Louis, she’d been so bored she’d petitioned for divorce.
And hadn’t she obliged Henry by taking one of his bastards into her household and rearing him? Young Geoffrey, born of a London prostitute, was proving devoted and useful to his father; Rowley had a greater regard for him than for any of the king’s four remaining legitimate sons.
Rosamund, only Rosamund, had inspired a hatred that raised the heat of this awful room, as if Eleanor’s body was pumping it across the chamber so that the flesh of the woman opposite would putrefy quicker.
Was it that Rosamund had lasted longer than the others, that the king had shown her more favor, a deeper love?
No, Adelia said to herself. It was the letters. Menopausal as Eleanor was, she’d believed their message: Another woman was being groomed to take her place; in both love and status, she was being overthrown.
If it had been Eleanor who’d poisoned Rosamund, it was tit for tat. In her own way, Rosamund had poisoned Eleanor.
Yet Rowley had been right: This queen hadn’t murdered anybody.
There was no proof of it, of course. Nothing that would absolve her. The killing had been plotted at long range; people would say she had ordered it while she was still in France. There was nothing to scotch the rumor-apart from Eleanor’s own word.
But it wasn’t her style. Rowley had said so, and Adelia now agreed with him. If Eleanor had engineered it, she would have wanted to be present when it happened. This curiously naïve, horrible overseeing of her rival’s disintegration was to compensate her for not having been there to enjoy the last throes.
But damn it, I don’t have to witness it with you. All at once, Adelia was overwhelmed by the obscenity of the situation. She was tired, and her hand stung like fire; she wanted her child. Allie would be missing her.
She stood up. “Lady, it is not healthy for you to be here. Let us go downstairs.”
The queen looked past her.
“Then I will,” Adelia said.
She walked to the door, skirting Montignard, who was snoring on the floor. Two spears clashed as they crossed, blocking the doorway in front of her; the first man-at-arms had been reinforced by another.
“Let me by,” she said.
“You want to piss, use a pot,” one of the men said, grinning.
Adelia returned to Eleanor. “I am not your subject, lady. My king is William of Sicily.”
The queen’s eyes remained on Rosamund.
Adelia gritted her teeth, fighting desperation. This is not the way. If I’m to see Allie again, I must be calm, make this woman trust me.
After a while, followed by her dog, Adelia began circling the chamber, not looking for a way out-there was none-but using this trapped time to find out where Dakers had hidden herself.
It couldn’t have been under the bed or Ward would have sniffed her out; he didn’t have the finest nose in the world, it being somewhat overwhelmed by his own scent, but he wouldn’t have missed that.
Apart from the bed, the room contained a prie-dieu, smaller than the one in the bishop’s room at Saint Albans but as richly carved. Three enormous chests were stuffed with clothes.
A small table held a tray that had been brought in for the queen’s supper: a chicken, veal pie, a cheese, a loaf-somewhat mildewed-dried figs, a jug of ale, and a stoppered bottle of wine. Eleanor hadn’t touched it. Adelia, who’d last eaten at the nunnery, sliced heavily into the chicken and gave some to Ward. She drank the ale to satisfy her thirst and took a glass of wine with her to sip as she explored.
An aumbry contained pretty bottles and phials with labels: Rose oyl. Swete violet. Rasberrie vinigar for to whiten teeth. Oyle of walnut to smooth the hands. Nearly all were similarly cosmetic, though Adelia noted that Rosamund had suffered from breathing problems-I’m not surprised, with your weight-and had taken elecampane for it.
The bed took up more of the center of the room than was necessary by standing a foot or so out from the wall. Behind it was a tapestry depicting the Garden of Eden-obviously a favorite subject, because there was another, a better one, on the same theme on the easterly wall between two of the windows.
Going closer, so that she stood between the bed and the hanging, Adelia felt a blessed coolness.
The tapestry was old and heavy; the considerable draft emerging from underneath it did not cause it to shift. Where in the one on the other wall Adam and Eve sported in joyful movement, here cruder needlework stood them opposite each other amid unlikely trees, as frozen as poor Rosamund herself. The only depiction of liveliness was in the coiling green toils of the serpent-and even that was moth-eaten.