The Courts of Love - Jean Plaidy [35]
Not a woman, child or old person who had sheltered in the church survived. They were all burned to death.
When Louis heard what had happened, he was overcome with remorse.
I think what upset him more than the deaths of the people was the fact that his men had burned them to death in a church.
Louis had little stomach for war after that. He had been successful for once and almost the whole of Champagne was in his hands. Thibault was once again speaking to the Pope. This time Bernard took a hand.
The terrifying man wrote to Louis in a forceful manner. What did he think he was doing? He was waging war on an innocent man who had done nothing save protest at a wrong done to a member of his family. What devil’s advice was Louis taking?
Was I that devil? I think Bernard regarded all women as such, and I was the chief demon. Louis was being used by the enemies of the Church for their own ends, he said. He believed that if Louis would give up the lands he had sequestered, Thibault would do all in his power to get the sentence of excommunication rescinded.
Louis, of course, was eager for peace but I urged him to be cautious. It never occurred to him that Bernard and the Holy Father could be capable of duplicity; but this was proved to be possible, for when he eagerly called a halt to the war in Champagne it was only to find that the sentence of excommunication was still in force.
A certain antagonism was building up between Louis and me. I think he partly blamed me for Vitry, remembering that I was the one who had urged him to go to war; I had tried to persuade him against giving way to the demands of Bernard and Rome. Bernard then had the temerity to suggest that when Raoul of Vermandois returned to his true wife the ban would be lifted.
“This was not what was promised,” I cried in fury.
“They say that all will be forgiven if Raoul will take his wife back.”
“But we shall have gained nothing. All that expense . . . all these victories and . . . nothing!”
I do not know what would have been the outcome if Innocent had not died suddenly in the midst of all this. It was a happy release . . . for us.
Celestine II was elected Pope and no doubt because of the pleas of Suger was persuaded to lift the ban of excommunication from Louis. Louis’s relief was great. But I was furious because nothing was done about that on Raoul and Petronilla. They must remain outcasts. Not that they seemed to care. They appeared to be satisfied with each other. They now had a son named after his father. I could feel almost envious of Petronilla. She had a man and a child. I had neither.
I was now twenty-one years of age and barren. Yet in my heart I knew that the fault for this did not lie with me. But the matter concerned me deeply and I gave a good deal of thought to it.
Life was becoming intolerably dull. Louis was turning more and more to religion. There was hardly any intimacy between us. I might have been living in a nunnery. I had little desire for him, Heaven knew, but desperately I wanted a child.
In a way he was still in love with me. Sometimes I would find him watching me furtively, but in his mind was the thought that I was the temptress urging him to acts which although he might indulge in them with mild relish, were repulsive to him in retrospect. I understood him well. It was ironic that such a man should have come to the throne. I often thought of that pig as one of Heaven’s jokes.
He was growing rather haggard. The nightly prayers were longer than ever. There we lay at our respective ends of that cold, cold bed from which he would often start up in nightmares, shouting: “The town is burning. Save them. Leave everything. Save them. Save the church.”
Vitry lived on in his tortured mind.
And I lay there thinking: I must get a child. What a temptation to give up to my impulses. There were so many handsome, virile men at Court, so many in love with me . . . if one could trust their words. But could one? All the time Raoul of Vermandois had been singing his love for