The Courts of Love - Jean Plaidy [91]
It was at this time that I saw him in one of those rages which amazed and alarmed me and which later I was to dread. I really believed the story of the devil woman who was the ancestress of the Counts of Anjou when I saw him writhing on the floor, his ruddy face purple, his eyes bulging, shouting blasphemies and rolling about biting the rushes. He was like a man possessed.
I really thought he had gone mad.
Fortunately Matilda explained to me.
“He has these fits of temper,” she said. “He always has had. He is so enraged that he has to give vent to his feelings.”
“He is wasting his energy.”
“He has plenty to spare. He will recover quickly and take action. Then he will give all his energy to teaching these men a lesson.”
I remembered the walls of Limoges. There was yet something else I had to learn of him.
Matilda was right. In a short time the fit was over; his energy was unimpaired. Within a few hours he had gathered together his men and was riding off to deal with the recalcitrant rebel.
Matilda and I were often together. She heartily approved of the marriage. She was without sentimentality and I doubted she would have welcomed me into the family circle but for my possessions. But she liked my good looks and good health.
“You will have many children,” she prophesied.
“One needs opportunities,” I reminded her. “I have never had a surfeit of those.”
“Henry has the energy of ten men and you, my dear, are no frail flower. There will come a time when you and he will be together more often, although of course a king is always roaming far and wide if he looks after his country as he should. There is lusty blood on both sides of Henry’s family and on yours too if I have heard aright. It will be one of the happiest days of my life when I see Henry on the throne of England.”
“There may be many years before that comes to pass.”
“Who knows?” said Matilda.
I was very amused to hear that Louis had married again. His bride was Constance of Castile. Poor Louis, one thing I could be sure of—he would be a reluctant bridegroom.
I wished him luck and I wondered what Constance would be like, and how she would relish those nights in a cold bed while he was on his knees praying . . . for what? Courage to approach his wife? I could never feel anything but a mild and slightly contemptuous affection for Louis.
Matilda and I grew close during that period. She liked to talk of the past. I recalled mine, too—life at the Courts of Love, marriage with Louis, my adventures in the Holy Land. We had both lived dangerously.
I learned much about her and grew fond of her, but I could see clearly why the people of England had rejected her. Her life was a lesson to us all—but then I suppose most people’s lives are.
She talked vividly of herself and I think she was glad to have an audience of a kindred spirit. She made me see how alarmed she must have been when, at the age of five, she was told that she was going to Germany. What effect would that have had on a child of her age to be told that she was going to be sent away from her home and all that was familiar to her, to be the wife of a great man—an Emperor who was thirty years older than she?
“I was lucky,” she said. “Like you, I had good looks. What a boon they can be! Henry, my husband, was a kindly man and he liked the look of me from the start. But he sent all my English attendants away—they always do. They want to make you one of them. So I was German, my upbringing, my outlook. I spoke in German; I thought in German; I was the little German my husband intended me to be. But the English do not like the German ways, it seems. I was crowned almost as soon as I arrived—that was when I was betrothed to Henry. I remember how the Archbishop of Trier held me reverently in his arms while the Archbishop of Cologne put the crown on my head. And when I was twelve years old Henry married me and once again I was crowned. He was kind to me; he seemed to me a very old man. Thirty