Jordan’s beard and hair were incongruously seeded with flecks of torn foliage, but his smile never faltered. “So it’s a race, is it?” he said, and Eleanor nodded. Renee was ashen. She offered a smile, too, though, or at least a game imitation of one, and Eleanor gave her an encouraging look, then assured them there was a shallow ford just ahead.
Leaving the cover of the woods, they had gone only a short distance before horsemen came bursting out of hiding, closer than Eleanor had expected. Giving Will’s stallion his head, she raced for the river. He slackened speed only slightly as he splashed down the bank, and she blessed the young knight’s foresight; her own mare was skittish around water. She heard a choked scream from Renee, but the girl was on her own now; they all were.
Risking a glance over her shoulder, she was sorry she had, for their pursuers were only a few yards behind. A spear struck the water to her right. If that was an attempt to intimidate her into giving up, it was a waste of good weaponry. As her stallion scrambled to shore, a flock of arrows flew over her head, but these shafts had been launched from the walls of the castle. She could see faces peering over the battlements and she opened her mouth to demand entry, but there was no need. A postern gate was opening. She asked her stallion for one final burst of speed and he surged forward, galloping through the gate into the bailey.
Reining him in, she turned in the saddle, just in time to see the gate slamming shut behind Jordan and Renee. Men were crowding around her, shouting questions, asking if she’d been attacked by bandits, if there were others in danger, any deaths. Eleanor waited until she got her breath back, and by then, someone recognized her. An incredulous cry went up: “The queen!”
Hands reached up to her and she slid from the saddle. The faces surrounding her were so alarmed, so solicitous that she thought she must look like the Wrath of God. Jordan shoved his way toward her, a supportive arm around a stumbling Renee. If she was as disheveled and wet and dirtied as they were, no wonder these men were staring at her as if doubting their own senses. “Where is your castellan?” She was still somewhat breathless but pleased by the level tones of her voice.
“Madame!” A path was clearing for him. He was one of her husband’s handpicked constables. She could only hope that he was as capable as Harry thought him to be, for there was no time to lose. Stilling his questions with an upraised hand, she told him, as concisely and quickly as possible, what had happened and her belief that the de Lusignans were the ones behind the ambush. He at once put the castle on a war watch in the unlikely event that the de Lusignans should launch an attack upon Lusignan itself. He then led the rescue mission himself and that, too, won him favor with Eleanor. Only then did she let them escort her into the hall.
Renee gratefully accepted the assistance of the castellan’s wife, but Eleanor declined. She had her share of vanity, as most beautiful women do, but washing her face or tending to scratches and bruises seemed of small matter, as long as the fate of her men remained unknown. It was only when she noticed that her skirt was ripped from waist to hem that she agreed to change into clothes provided by the Lady Emma. As soon as possible, she returned to the great hall, where she interrogated the garrison until she found a man who seemed reliable and dispatched him to Poitiers with a terse letter in her own hand. After that, there was nothing she could do but wait.
The two hours they were gone seemed interminable to Eleanor. Jordan and a still visibly shaken Renee had joined her vigil by now. Unfortunately, so had the Lady Emma, and in no time at all, she was rubbing Eleanor’s nerves raw with her well-meaning, smothering attentions.
Eleanor understood her agitation, even her compulsive need to play the lady of the manor, offering every hospitality to England’s queen, Aquitaine’s duchess. But the last thing she wanted was to commiserate with Emma about “the outrage,” as the castellan’s wife kept calling it. Jordan finally took Emma aside and, as politely as possible, explained that the queen had faced down bandits before. She had been in a caravan attacked by the Saracens; she had thwarted several attempts at abduction by would-be suitors; her ship had even been captured by the fleet of the Emperor of Byzantium, rescued in the nick of time by the King of Sicily’s galleys. Emma listened, openmouthed, to this recital. Agreeing meekly that the queen’s earlier experiences were indeed more harrowing than this encounter with the de Lusignans, she promised to say no more of the unfortunate events of the day, at least not in the queen’s hearing. Jordan sighed with relief, grateful that he’d averted bloodshed at least once today.
The castellan and his men returned at dusk, bearing a body wrapped in a blanket and grim word for Eleanor. They’d arrived too late to be of help, had found only the corpses of the dead and a few men too badly wounded to be worth carrying off. He was bringing the injured back by horse litter, but he held little hope for their recovery. They’d need an ox-cart to retrieve the other bodies, but out of respect, he’d brought back the remains of my lord Salisbury.
Eleanor watched bleakly as the body was carried into the castle chapel. When the priest gently pulled away the blanket, she gazed down for some moments into the earl’s face, and then made the sign of the cross.
“My lord Raymond?”
The castellan turned at once. “Madame?”
“The earl had a nephew with him, a young knight named William Marshal. Was he amongst the wounded?”
“No, Madame,” he said quietly. “But it may be that he was amongst those taken prisoner. God grant it so.”
Eleanor nodded somberly and they walked in silence from the chapel. Outside, the sky had begun to darken. This accursed Wednesday in Easter Week was at last coming to an end. But she did not yet know how many men had bought her freedom with their blood.
Henry had never been so exhausted in all his life. Upon getting word of the attack upon Eleanor, he had immediately broken off talks with the French king and raced south. By skimping on sleep and changing horses frequently, he and his men had reached Poitiers a full day before anyone expected him. But almost from the moment of his arrival, nothing had gone right.
With an effort, he fought back a yawn. His head was throbbing, his eyes red-rimmed from the dust of the road, and he doubted that there was a single muscle in his entire body that was not aching. He wanted nothing so much as a few uninterrupted hours of sleep now that he knew Eleanor was indeed unharmed, but instead he found himself presiding over the high table in the palace’s great hall, having had time only for a brief, unsatisfactory reunion with Eleanor and a quick wash-up. Even Henry’s careless disregard for protocol would not permit him to miss this solemn meal of mourners. Just two hours before his arrival, Patrick d’Evereaux, Earl of Salisbury, had been laid to rest in Poitiers’s church of St Hilary, far from the mausoleum in Wiltshire where his kindred were buried.
The Countess of Salisbury had been given a seat of honor on Eleanor’s left. She looked wan and weary, but she’d always struck Henry as a very competent, no-nonsense kind of woman, and he expected her to cope with her husband’s death as capably as she had life’s other crises. For a moment, his gaze rested upon his own wife, regal in black. Wearing dark colors for mourning was essentially a Spanish custom, but once word spread that Eleanor had worn black for the Earl of Salisbury, Henry felt certain that it would become the fashion at funerals throughout Aquitaine, Normandy, and France.
Eleanor looked tired, too; the powder she’d applied with a skillful hand could not quite camouflage the shadows hovering under her eyes. But with him, she’d been infuriatingly offhand, almost dismissive of her ordeal, brushing aside his concern for her emotional well-being, acting as if her physical safety was all that mattered. He knew better than most that the mind could be wounded by violence as easily as the body; he’d seen hardened soldiers haunted by battlefield memories, and he assumed that women would be far more susceptible than men to dark thoughts and dreads. Eleanor would have none of it, though, refusing to admit her fears even to him. He’d been irritated by her bravado, reminding her that it was well and good to assume an air of public sangfroid but hardly necessary in the privacy of their bedchamber. But he’d gotten only an unfathomable look from the depths of those greenish hazel eyes, a shrug, and a murmured, “I do not know what you want me to say, Harry… truly.”