The Courts of Love - Jean Plaidy [70]
Suger said he would ask Bernard to come and they would summon Geoffrey of Anjou and his son to Paris, where a truce could be arranged.
Louis was quite pleased about this. It was a great relief to him when his doctors said he must keep to his bed. So the conference had to be conducted by Suger and Bernard.
Bernard arrived. His antipathy to me was obvious. He would know about my desire for a divorce. I had a sneaking feeling that it would not displease him. He was different from Suger. For all Bernard’s saintliness he lacked Suger’s single-minded devotion to France. Suger thought a divorce would not serve the country well. For one thing France would lose Aquitaine. Suger believed that, if Louis and I would continue together, God would relent in time and give us a son.
Bernard felt differently. Bernard was a man of the Church. I wondered if scandal concerning myself and Raymond had reached his ears. If it had, he would feel I was unworthy to bear the heir of France. He would, I was sure, like the King to have a more amenable wife. Bernard believed I had put a spell on Louis and that spells came from the Devil. Bernard might well help me in achieving my ends. As the days passed, my desire for release from this intolerable marriage grew greater.
Geoffrey of Anjou arrived in Paris with his son. I was mildly interested to see these two about whom there had been so much talk.
Geoffrey I had seen before and I remembered him vaguely. The son I had never seen. He was very young—seventeen, I had heard. I wondered what it was about him that made him so often the object of people’s attention.
I was told that they had brought Gerald Berlai with them—in chains.
“It is a most ignoble way of treating a noble lord,” said one of my ladies.
“They want us to know that he is their prisoner,” said another.
“What has he done . . . but defend his castle?”
“They say he sent forays into their land and made a nuisance of himself. They would tolerate it no more and have taken his castle and made him their prisoner.”
I had been feeling so bored and listless that I was quite looking forward to the confrontation.
I was seated beside Louis who had left his bed briefly to be present. He looked pale and wan. There was no doubt that he had been genuinely ill, but I was sure the illness had been brought on through his hatred of war. In any case, it had stopped that, so doubtless it was a blessing in disguise . . . certainly to those men who would have been killed in a foolish cause.
It was an amazing scene. The man in chains before them and, on either side of him, his captors. Geoffrey of Anjou stood there, legs apart, defiant. He was still a very attractive man, though he was reaching for forty. But it was the son who caught my attention. So this was Henry Plantagenet . . . the young man who was astonishing everyone with his military gifts. He was by no means handsome—quite the reverse, in fact—but one was aware of an intense vitality. He was not tall—stocky rather; he had reddish hair and a very high color; he looked excessively healthy. He did not seem to be able to stand still; he looked as though he found that irksome; his legs were slightly bowed as though he had lived most of his life in the saddle. I noticed his hands were red and chapped.
I could not stop looking at him. It was his overwhelming vitality which attracted me. There was an air of restlessness about him, as though he was straining his patience to the limits in order to stand there.
Now he was aware of me. He stared at me somewhat audaciously. I returned his gaze and for some moments he appeared to be assessing me. Insolent! I thought—and, oddly enough, I liked his insolence. I saw admiration in his eyes. They were warm, almost suggestive. I felt a pleasant excitement. I had heard he was a lusty young fellow and had, at the age of seventeen, already fathered two bastards.
A mere boy, I thought. I was eleven