As a child Eleanor was frequently lonely; for the castle contained no other children of her own age except the children of the serving people, from whom she was largely excluded by barriers of rank and class. Most of her days were passed quietly in the company of her nurse and later her tutor, from whom she learned the several languages of the land. She proved to have a quick and receptive brain; she soon mastered the Norman French and Latin that had remained the tongues of the cultured world, even more quickly the churl talk of the peasants. It worried her father slightly to hear the old syllables bang and splatter from her lips; but because of it she was greatly respected by the few commoners with whom she came in contact. Indeed she seemed to identify herself more with the ordinary people of the countryside than with those of her own rank; which in a way was understandable considering that she was only partly of noble blood.
The peasants still lived and were governed by the ancient rhythms of moon and sun, ploughing and reaping, death and birth; and all old things, whether or not sanctified by the rulers of Rome, appealed strongly to her. Sometimes she would go with her nurse and her father’s seneschal and play on the nearby beaches. She would watch the endless roll and thunder of the sea, and ask strange questions of the seneschal; such as whether the Popes, from their golden throne, could order the waves that washed the shores of England, marching in their violet ranks to break against the ancient cliffs. He would smile at her, answering heresy with discretion, till she grew bored and scampered off to hunt for shells on the beach or seaweed, or pick the crinoid fossils from the rocks and give them to him for fairy beads. She felt an odd sympathy with the fabric of the land itself; once she took a flake of shale and pressed it to her throat and cried, and said that day she was made right through of stone, dark and stern as the Kimmeridge cliffs and as indomitable. Her waywardness caused in the end her removal to Londinium.
In her sixteenth year her father caught her with a bailiff, learning the handling of his motor vehicle; how to slip the bands of its gearbox and drive it in forward and reverse round the slopes of the outer bailey. Maybe some gesture, some turn of the head, reminded Robert too clearly of the girl who had died so many years ago; he pulled his daughter squawking from the machine, clipped her ear, and chased her off to her room.
The resulting interview, compounded as it was of Eleanor’s wounded dignity and her father’s always uncertain temper, proved disastrous. Eleanor vented her feelings in multilingual phrasing new even to Robert; he retaliated with a strap, the buckle of which left several marks that threatened permanence. He confined his daughter to her chamber for a week; on the day of her release she refused to leave and it was a fortnight before he caught sight of her down below the wet-ditch messing with some soldiers out at target practice. He sent immediately for his seneschal.
A time at the Court of Londinium seemed the only thing for Eleanor; there would be no more riding and hawking, and certainly no consorting with mechanicals. She must be brought if possible to a realisation of her station, and instructed in the skills expected in a lady of good birth. To the seneschal Robert entrusted the task, with the purely private directive that his daughter must be cultivated or killed. She left a fortnight later, with many snorts and head-tossings. He waited by the gate to see her go, but she ignored him. That was a flash of temper she regretted the rest of her days, for she never saw him alive again.
The accident happened on a feast day, when the lower bailey was filled with the tents of acrobats and jugglers and sweetmeat sellers, while the place resounded to shouts and laughter and the clatter of cudgels where the young bloods of the surrounding villages tried their strength one against another. Robert’s horse bucked as he crossed the outer bridge, and threw him; he struck his head against the stone, and fell into the dry ditch. The fair was quietened, and doctors brought from Durnovaria; but his skull was crushed, and he never reopened his eyes. Eleanor, summoned by a signal that fled from Challow Hill to Pontes inside an hour, rode hard; but she came too late.
She buried her father at Wimborne, in the ancient Minster there, in the painted tomb he had built to share with his wife; and the party rode back slowly to Corfe Gate, the horses and the motors dressed with black, the slack drums thudding out a dirge. It was still September; but a chilling wind moaned in from the sea, and the sky was grey as iron. Eleanor reined when she came in sight of the castle, and waved the rest of her people on down the long dim road. The seneschal waited, his horse fretting in the wind, till the mourners had passed nearly out of sight in distance; then she turned to him, her cloak whipping round her shoulders. She looked older and very tired, dark shadows under her eyes and tear tracks marking her cheeks. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘here I am a great lady; and that is the house I own…’
He waited silently, knowing her mind; she swallowed, and pushed the hair out of
her eyes. ‘John,’ she said, ‘How many years did you serve my Father, Robert?’
He sat his horse impassively and considered before he answered. Then finally, ’Many years, my Lady.’
‘And his father before him?’
Again the same answer. ‘Many years…’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You served him well; I left him alone, and sent no word. And it was all over such a trifling little thing. I’ve almost forgotten why we first fell out. Now it’s too late of course.’ She sat quiet a moment, stroking the neck of her horse as it fidgeted in the cold. Then, ‘Have you a sword?’
‘Yes, Lady.’ ‘Then give it me, and get down off your horse. This much I can do…’
He waited while she held the sword and looked unseeing at the damascene-work on the blade. ‘A title is a little empty thing,’ she said, ‘to such as you. Yet will you take it from me?’
He bowed; and she touched his shoulder lightly with the steel. "Whether the King confirms my choice or no,’ she said, ‘to us you will be Sir John…’ Then she turned her horse and rode hard for the castle, narrowing her eyes to see up at its glooming battlements and towers. So she came home, to a mourning place; and soon to the anger of Pope John.
From the outset Eleanor’s position was a curious one. The successive Lords of Purbeck had held their lands in feoff from the King; under normal circumstances she could have expected to be married off fairly rapidly and to see the demesnes granted to another. But she was, or would one day be, an heiress in her own right as granddaughter of the last of the Strange family; and in the restricted economy of the times the annual tax paid by that huge house accounted for a measurable proportion of the revenue to the Crown. Since Charles, King of England and nominally at least of the Americas, was expecting to make an extended tour of the New World in the spring he was content to let matters rest at least until his return; Eleanor was confirmed in her position of authority, although there were many up and down the country who resented the decision.
She took her duties with great seriousness. One of her first self-allotted tasks was to tour the boundaries of her lands with a circuit judge, settling such petty differences as had arisen since her father’s death. She rode informally, with only her seneschal in attendance, stopping off at cottages and farms as the fancy took her, speaking to all in the language of their birth, and her liege-folk scattered over the breadth and length of Dorset were much impressed. Where she found hardship she alleviated it not by gifts of money, too easily spent in the local taverns, but with clothing and food and grants of freeholds. She saw much suffering, and was shocked by it; she began in fact to feel dissatisfaction with her own way of life.