Devil's Consort

‘A man after my own heart.’

‘Self-important?’ Leaning against the carved window ledge, Aelith ticked them off on her fingers. ‘Opinionated? Arrogant?’

But I sidestepped my sister’s chuckling malice and answered seriously enough. ‘Why not? He will rule my lands. He must do it well. He’ll not do it if he has neither the backbone nor the spirit for it. Better a man with arrogance than one who’d sell himself short to make friends. My vassals need a firm hand.’

We were standing in my bedchamber, Aelith, my women and I, high in the old keep, a spacious, graceful room with large windows to catch the light and any breath of air on this day of impossible heat. A room that I loved, full of my own possessions, and from where I could look out across the Garonne to observe the whole scene unfold hour by hour. It was July, hot as the gates of hell, and I was restless with impatience as Aelith and I observed the settlement grow. Tents, pavilions, sprouting like mushrooms, covered the open meadows, transforming them into a town in its own right. A vivid, richly-coloured Capetian town on Aquitaine soil. A foreign presence, and above it all the fleurs de lys of France. A portent for the future, I acknowledged, a French symbol of ownership over the mighty Duchy of Aquitaine. Before me, horses and armed men swarmed. Farriers and wheelwrights set up their booths and a market was soon under way. Small boats plied back and forth with Frankish noblemen or mounds of cabbages. My vassals, I was well aware, would question the relative importance of the two. It would not be a popular marriage but we would all have to live with it.

‘He must be handsome, of course,’ Aelith announced. She was already precociously aware of the male sex.

‘Of course.’ I had no thought of a husband who was less than pleasing to the eye.

‘Like Raymond.’ Aelith sighed a little.

Raymond of Poitiers, my father’s young brother, now ruling as Prince of Antioch in distant Outremer.

‘Yes. Like Raymond,’ I agreed. My only meeting with Raymond had been of the briefest, four years ago now and for a mere few weeks, but my memory of his golden beauty had not faded with time. Raymond was to my mind the epitome of the perfect knight. ‘If the French prince is in any measure like Raymond, I shall be everlastingly grateful.’ My attention was caught by a flurry of movement across the river. ‘Look! That’s the royal standard!’ I pointed. Aelith leaned to see the blue pennants with the gold lilies of France. ‘So Prince Louis is here at last.’

‘As long as he’s prettier than Fat Louis,’ she remarked.

‘I’ll give you my gold circlet if he’s not. Fat Louis is naught but a mountain of lard ridden with dysentery.’

But I knew better than to underestimate King Louis. His body might be corrupt but his mind was still keen. He might be too corpulent to rise from his bed, too obese to mount either a horse or a woman, so rumour said, but he had seen me as a gift dropped from heaven into his enormous lap.

We watched as another pavilion was erected, larger than all the rest. The Capetian banner was planted beside it to hang limply in the windless air. A group of horsemen drew up and dismounted. Impossible to make out one figure from the next at this distance.

‘They won’t like it, you know.’ I spoke softly. ‘My vassals will detest it.’

‘But they have no choice.’ Aelith pursed her lips. ‘And if the Prince keeps the brigands from our doors, they’ve no right to complain.’

True in essence, but far too simplistic.

Was this, this Frankish marriage, what the Duke my father had intended when he had placed me into King Louis’s keeping? Arrange a marriage for my daughter, he had left instructions for Louis as his life drained from him on the pilgrim’s road to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. And do it fast, before rebellion can take hold. Until that time, I give her and Aquitaine into French safe hands.

What was my father, Duke William the Tenth of Aquitaine, thinking? Surely he’d understood that King Louis would never allow me to escape from his fat fingers. It would be like expecting a fox to show goodwill by keeping out of the hen coop even though the door was left invitingly open, and the King of France was no kindly fox. Arrange a fast marriage for me? By God, he had. Between the vomit and the bloody flux that tied him to his bed, Fat Louis had moved heaven and earth to secure me for his son before anyone could voice a protest.

And there had been plenty. My father’s vassals may have sworn an oath of homage to me in his lifetime, but our lands were torn by unrest. The Count of Angoulême, a vassal lord of Aquitaine, was vicious in his condemnation and was not alone. They would have accepted someone like Raymond, one of their own. They would have just about tolerated a noble lord of the south who might win my hand. But not this Capetian interloper, this foreign northerner from some insignificant Frankish tribe. I knew what they would be thinking as they too watched this impressive arrival. They would see Louis Capet as a foreign power who would drain us to further his own ambitions. My father may have insisted with his final breath that Aquitaine remain independent from France, ruled separately, to be inherited in some distant future by the heir of my own body; he might have insisted that Aquitaine must not be absorbed into French territory, but how many of my vassals would remember that, when faced with this invasion of unveiled power?

‘It might have been more politic—’ I spoke my thoughts ‘—if my father had not thrown us into the hands of a Frank.’

And I marvelled at my father’s unwarranted stupidity in drinking water fouled by a horde of pilgrims, all of whom had doubtless washed and spat and pissed in its shallows. Did he not see, scooping up the bad fish, gulping the rank water, his mind taken up with the successful culmination of his pilgrimage? All he got was a night of fever, of vomiting and flux, rapidly followed by a pain-racked death before Saint James’s altar.

An excess of piety can make us all stupid.

‘Perhaps the vomiting addled his brain,’ remarked Aelith dryly.

And perhaps the outcome would be civil war. It might be like setting a brand to dry timber, insurrection sweeping through Aquitaine and Poitou before we had finished dancing at my marriage feast.

A quick wash of fear replaced the nerves and the anticipation.

Behind me the troubadour, obviously listening in, struck a strident note on a lute so that I turned to look, seeing the lifting of his brow in my direction. When I smiled in appreciation of his intent, Bernart began to sing a popular if scurrilous verse in a soft growl.

Your Frank shows mercy, just to those who can pay him,

There’s no other argument ever can sway him …

He hesitated, breath held, fingers lifted from the strings, to assess my reaction, and even though I knew what would come next, I waved him on. Bernart struck another heavy chord.

He lives in abundance, his table’s a feast,

But you mark my words, he’s a treacherous beast.

My women joined in with relish in the last line. The Franks were not well loved. A coarse, aggressive, unpolished people, compared with our Roman sophistication in Aquitaine.

‘Enough!’ I moved into their midst. ‘We’ll not be discourteous.’

‘No, lady.’ Bernart bowed over his beloved lute. ‘We’ll make our own judgement when the Prince becomes Duke of Aquitaine.’

I frowned at the smooth cynicism but could find no fault with so obvious a statement.

‘It’s an honour that he should come to you.’ Aelith still leaned her arms along the sill, unwilling to abandon the entertainment without. ‘Travelling all this way from Paris, in this heat. They say he travelled at night.’

It was true. Everything had been settled with such speed, as if the King of France had the hounds of hell baying at his heels, although what Prince Louis thought of it I had no idea. Perhaps he would have preferred a Frankish bride. I lifted my chin. I too could be cynical.

‘The Prince only came to me because his father the King instructed him to do so. Fat Louis and my guardian the Archbishop feared that if I set foot outside this palace I would be abducted by some scruffy knight with an eye to a rich wife. I’m far too valuable to be allowed to travel the breadth of the country.’ Impatience tightened its grip, now that the Prince was in my sights. ‘How long do I have to wait before I can see him?’

Aelith laughed, a pert toss of her head. ‘At least he’s old enough to play the man and not so old as to be near his grave.’

‘He’s two years older than I.’

‘Old enough to keep you in line?’

‘No.’ I didn’t like this line of humour. ‘I’ll not be a vessel merely to bequeath my royal Aquitaine blood to my children. I am no brood mare, without opinion or wit, to slave and carry at the behest of a husband. I’ll rule my own lands. The Prince must accept that.’

‘But can you protect them, lady?’ Bernart asked with grave familiarity.

Before I could reply, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Geoffrey of Lauroux, my kindly guardian since my father’s death, was announced and entered. Resplendent in clerical robes despite the heat, he bowed, puffing from the effort of climbing the stairs.

‘Lady. The Prince is come.’

And I knew immediately what I wanted. ‘I would go out and meet with him.’

‘No.’

I thought I had misheard. ‘I wish to see the Prince. Will you arrange it, sir?’

‘Regretfully, no, lady. You will wait here.’

‘But I wish it.’ I would not be thwarted in this.