The Secret Eleanor Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Afterword

  READERS GUIDE

  “A commanding voice in the historical fiction genre . . . Holland consistently satisfies her readers.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ACCLAIM FOR THE NOVELS OF CECELIA HOLLAND

  “[Holland] is at all times a superb storyteller, and her talents have never been better displayed. She not only re-creates a prehistoric people with every aspect of their life opened up for us; she also makes us share that life.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “[An] intelligently and lushly developed saga . . . moves with great energy but without neglecting rich detail; the dim past springs to buoyant and believable life.”

  —Booklist

  “Lively and entertaining . . . a rousing good read.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Engrossing narrative . . . excellent descriptions.”

  —Los Angeles Herald Examiner

  “Miss Holland’s style is simple, almost stark. She belongs to that small band of writers who can still show us what distinction the historical novel can attain.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “Full of action and imaginative twists of plot. A considerable achievement.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A fast-paced, action-driven, and highly satisfying saga . . . a wonderful story.”

  —Library Journal

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  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2010 by Cecelia Holland.

  All rights reserved.

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  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / August 2010

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Holland, Cecelia, 1943-

  The secret Eleanor / Cecelia Holland. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18899-6

  1. Eleanor, of Aquitaine, Queen, consort of Henry II King of England, 1122?-1204—Fiction. 2. Louis VII, King of France, ca. 1120-1180—Fiction. 3. Queens—France—Fiction. 4. France—Fiction. 5. Courtly love—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.O348S43 2010

  813’.54—dc22

  2010011392

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Ralph V and Chris S,

  for all their help.

  One

  Louis, King of France, seventh of that name, kept his court in his great hall in Paris, on its low sandy island in the River Seine. The hall was a low cave of stone at the center of the palace, dim and shadowy, with loops of filthy cobweb hanging from its upper reaches, and banners and pennants too dusty to distinguish drooping on the walls. Two tall double doors, now yawning wide, led in from the wide porch; the roar of the crowd beyond gusted out like a hot breath, a hundred struggling voices, the stamp and rustle of feet. Petronilla led the little parade of the Queen’s women up onto the porch and stopped, looking around for Eleanor.

  Her sister came up beside her. In the magnificent long gown, the golden crown on her head, Eleanor was already drawing every eye to her. She turned to Petronilla and nodded.

  Petronilla set forth to lead them into the hall. She dreaded this; she hated calling attention to herself. Nonetheless, as she always did, she obeyed Eleanor. She brought the edge of her widow’s veil over her face and pinned it above her ear and marched toward the throne.

  The King’s court always drew a crowd, hangers-on, monks and churchmen, people with petitions, gawkers, Louis’s men, the few faithful Poitevin knights who had followed Eleanor to Paris when she married. The hall was stifling hot, the damp air heavy, stinking of the close-packed people; when Petronilla went in through the door, it was like walking into the sea.

  Of course no one really heeded her. At first, just entering the hall, she saw nothing but the backs of the court, a wall of bodies facing toward the throne; but as the pages called for room, in among the packed bodies, heads began to turn, one after another. For an instant, their eyes probed at Petronilla, striding through their midst, her hands lifting the hem of her skirt up out of the mucky rushes on the floor, her eyes aimed straight ahead of her. Then, all together, they looked beyond her, and saw Eleanor.

  Her name went up, and all around the hall everybody was turning, in a rustle and stamping like a herd of restless horses. They moved out of Petronilla’s way, doubling over in bows that swept the floor, but they hardly noticed her: they all yearned toward Eleanor. A momentary hush fell over them. Petronilla reached the dais at the far end of the hall, bowed down to the dim man on the throne there, and then stood off to one side to watch her sister approach.

  Eleanor moved through the crowd like a swan over a lake, looking neither left nor right, while the courtiers surged around her, bent and bobbed and jostled each other and waved their hands and spoke her name, begging for a glance. Her name sounded constantly. Among this homage she walked as if she were utterly al
one, her attention fixed on the throne, and the whole crowd turned after her as if she held their eyes on leading strings. Coming up to the foot of the dais, she dropped into a bow down to the floor and bent her head until the tender nape showed.

  “My lord,” she said, and lifted her head up and looked him in the face. “God give all grace and honor to the King of France.”

  King Louis was leaning forward a little, his face pale and puffy, his eyes soft. He had limp, stringy hair. His long hands were knobby, his fingernails bitten. He said, “Eleanor. My Queen and wife, come sit.”

  Eleanor straightened. The King’s secretary, Thierry Galeran, stood beside the throne, as always, his chubby beardless cheeks creased with his humorless smile; he came forward to help her and she ignored his outstretched hand. On the dais, she turned deliberately around toward the crowd. She gave them a long, heavy look, as if she saw each one separately; spoke to him alone; and beneath the pressure of her gaze, they bowed again, all together as if in a dance, a ripple of flexing bodies across the great shadowy room.

  Petronilla clasped her hands before her, warm with pride. She is true Queen, she thought, and everybody knows it. The other women had come up around her, and now they bustled around Eleanor, settling her on the stool beside Louis, straightening her skirts and smoothing her sleeves, and then drew back behind her. Petronilla sat on the dais beside her stool, drew her feet up under her skirt, and sat there quietly and waited.

  Louis had turned toward Eleanor, as longing as the rest of them, soft-eyed, moist. “You look more beautiful every day, dear Eleanor.”

  Eleanor’s hand, resting on her thigh, tightened almost to a fist. Petronilla was glad of the veil to hide her smile. She looked quickly through the side of her eye at Louis, whom she could see well enough beyond Eleanor on his lofty throne; his face was drawn, lined, still fish-belly pale from the recent fever. Gray strands glinted in through his yellow hair. She remembered her onetime husband, Ralph, saying the King had been born old. She crossed herself, burying the familiar ache of loss.

  Eleanor said, “Sir, I hope you are feeling better.”

  “Much better, in fact, my dear. You are kind to ask.”

  So close beside her sister, Petronilla could sense every move; she felt Eleanor recoil slightly, and guessed he had tried to touch her. He loved her still, Petronilla realized. Like everybody else, he loved her.

  Eleanor said, “What do we have here today, sir? Has the Count of Anjou come yet?”

  On his far side, Thierry Galeran said, “Oh, don’t bother yourself with that, Your Grace.” He had a greasy voice. “Such is kings’ work.” He rocked back and forth as he stood. It was rumored he had suffered an injury to his male parts, making a gelding of him, and his looks confirmed this.

  Petronilla turned away from them all. She disliked Louis, although she knew he didn’t deserve it; he wasn’t wicked, merely weak.

  She wondered if being weak in this world were not worse than sin.

  Louis always reminded her of the first time she had seen him, and thus of the calamities that had brought her there: her father’s death off on pilgrimage, the sudden news, the horrible sinking awareness that he would never come back again, that she would never see him again, who had been more wonderful than a god, and who had given her everything.

  Worse, that she might always be an exile, all the rest of her life.

  Eleanor was talking to the King. “When the Count of Anjou comes, my lord, you must insist on our rights. He settled Normandy on his son, and the boy has to give us the proper homage. You are his overlord and you can’t let that slip out of your hands.”

  On the far side of the dais, out of Petronilla’s sight, Thierry said, in a chiding voice, “Your Grace, we are masters of this; this is no matter for a woman.”

  Louis rocked in his throne, looking unhappy. He smelled bad, and he looked feeble. Petronilla could tell that Eleanor was losing her temper, not at him, but at Thierry; she sat rigid, canted a little forward, scowling at him, and her hand was fisted in her lap.

  Then Louis turned his eyes toward the hall, and his voice lightened, relieved. “God be thanked. Here is the blessed Bernard.” He stood up, his hands out, speaking out.

  “My lord Abbot, you are most welcome here. Come grace us with your presence.”

  Petronilla hunched her shoulders, her hands together, and ran her tongue over her lips. The Abbot of Clairvaux frightened her. She hoped he would not notice her, even to look at her. He had led the Pope to condemn her marriage; he wished ill to her sister. From the shelter of her veil, she watched him approach, tall and gaunt as a stork, moving up through the crowd like something on stilts. Eleanor had turned to cast an arrow of a glare at Thierry, but now she sat back, her hands in her lap.

  Bernard of Clairvaux was as thin as the walking stick in his hand. His face hung from his skull like a sheet over scaffolding, the sunken cheeks stiffly pleated above his narrow jaw, his eyelids draping his eyes in their hollowed pits. His hands were bony claws. The heavy white habit of the Cistercian order covered him like a husk. Rumor said that he ate as seldom as most men fasted. He seemed worn down to his truest, most essential self, hard as adamantine, and pure as a flame. He made the rest of them seem like gross fleshmongers, and he loved to tell them so.

  “My lord King,” Bernard said. His voice was cavernous. He leaned on his staff like a vine on an elm tree. His gaze flicked toward Eleanor and steadied on the King. “I am pleased to see you, since I had been told you were sick.” There was a faint scolding tone to his voice, as if being sick were Louis’s fault. He spoke to Louis as though the man were one of his monks, and not the King of France.

  “I was,” Louis said, tremulous, reminded of his trials. “I burned with fever, like the pains of hell; when I woke from it, I was so glad to find myself alive that I wept.”

  Petronilla felt a sudden stab of contempt for him, as much that he would admit it as that he would weep at all, and under her breath, Eleanor muttered something of the same sentiment. Tilted up against his staff before them, Bernard gave the Queen another sharp look. He paid no heed to Petronilla.

  Turning back to the King, the saint made the sign of the cross and said, “God has spared you for a purpose, Sire.” His voice sounded like thunder out of the cavern of his chest. “Listen to God, Sire, and to His purpose for you, and no other.”

  Eleanor said, “And what is your purpose, my lord Abbot?”

  His head swiveled toward her, his deep-set eyes half hidden behind the curtains of his lids. “I have no purpose of my own, woman. I serve only God.”

  She said, “And are you proud of that humility, my lord Abbot?”

  Petronilla covered her mouth with her hand, alarmed; only Eleanor dared to provoke the saint. But Bernard was looking toward the King again and ignored her.

  “Sire, I come here this day to make peace between France and Anjou, and I will have your word that you will take my peace as I have made it.”

  At that Eleanor recoiled back on the stool, and Petronilla herself gave a startled little twitch. Not even Bernard, a mere abbot, should speak so to the King, however close he was to God. Eleanor clamped her lips together and shot Louis a hard look. But Louis said, “My lord Abbot, you have done great service to me and my kingdom, bringing the Count of Anjou to be reconciled to me. I will take your peace as you have made it, if he only do the same.”

  Bernard said, “I have his word on it.”

  “Bah,” Eleanor said, furious. Petronilla reached out and took hold of her hand again, afraid of what she might say next, of what she might draw down on them. Then suddenly there was a crash at the far end of the hall, and the main door slammed open.

  A harsh roar of voices sprang up around the vast crowded hall. Through the open doors a gust of wind made all the hangings flutter up off the walls. Everybody turned to look as in through the open door a crowd of men tramped, mailed and helmed, their spurs jingling, as if they had just gotten off their horses. There were some ten or twelve
of them, and in their midst they dragged someone all loaded down with chains. Shoving and pushing through the crowd, they marched straight through the hall up to the foot of the throne, and there stopped, and from their midst they cast the chained man forward to lie on the ground at the King’s feet.

  The King hunched down onto his throne. Thierry Galeran rushed out before him, shrilling, “What is this? My lord Count, what do you, coming into the King’s hall like this?”

  Count Geoffrey of Anjou stood forward, his face still masked behind the cheek pieces of his helmet. His men all shifted back, save for two who prowled after him like wolves in metal pelts. Before Louis’s throne, the Count pulled off his helmet and stood there, at his ease, one knee bent, the helmet in the crook of his arm.

  As a boy he had been named Le Bel, the Handsome, and for good reason: He was a splendid beast, a manly lion, with bold, strong features in a high-colored face. When he was only fifteen, his father had gone to be King of Jerusalem and left Anjou itself to him; he had commanded men for twenty years and he knew the art. Stuck in the crest of his helmet he wore a sprig of green plant to ward off demons, from which it was rumored he was descended.

  He stood there with his head thrown back and talked straight into the King’s face, with no grace and no respect.

  “You sent for me, Abbot, so don’t bother to ask me what I’m doing here. Out of respect for Mother Church!” Anjou stuck his chest out, grinning. “Not anything I owe you, Louis Capet. I am lord of Anjou, and we were masters there since before your family ever heard of Paris.”

  He swung his foot back and kicked the captive on the ground before him; the chains clicked, and the man in them groaned. “This dog dared hold a castle against me, and this is what happens to those who stand against me.”