Free The Secret Eleanor by Cecelia Holland Page B

condemn me for that?”
    Bernard looked down his long nose at him. “I have no need to condemn you.” His gaze flicked toward Eleanor. For an instant, his eyes opened wide, blue as stars. “You’ve chosen your own fate.” He turned and walked slowly away, trailed by his acolytes.
    Eleanor stared in another direction, fighting a rising pitch of anger. She thought, To him, I was damned when I was born with a keyhole where he has a key . She wanted to look at Henry, but could not; she thought, What if he shrinks? If Bernard intimidated him, she didn’t want him.
    On her right side, between her and Henry, Louis said, “What did he mean by that?”
    Eleanor sighed; she had been perched rigid in her place, and now she subsided a little, calmer. Through the corner of her eye, over beyond Louis, she saw the Count of Anjou turn toward his son, who was sitting still for once, his hands raised before him and his head down. The father’s face twisted with suspicion.
    “Let’s get out of here.” His gaze slid from Henry toward Eleanor and back. “My lord,” he said to Louis, “we’ll take our leave—we’ve been here too long—our work here’s done, and it’s a long road back to Angers.”
    Eleanor turned to look at him, puzzled; under the pear tree, the mottled shadows and sunlight blurred his face, so she couldn’t quite make him out, as if he were disappearing away in front of her eyes. Bernard’s curse, already working. She shook that folly off. Henry was trading some parting words with Louis. She lowered her eyes from him, trying not to seem too interested.
    It didn’t matter, because somehow everyone around them knew anyway, some mystic cord already binding them. She was almost bursting with the will to speak to him again. That rasping, growling voice declaiming of Alhazen, quick with passion for newness and ideas, ready for anything. Wanting everything. And yet he had let Bernard shut him up. She found herself with her arms crossed, as if she warded something off. She could not raise her eyes to see him leave. If she found him looking back at her, she would throw herself into his arms. And once he was gone, the space between them would grow cold. She felt as if some huge stone door were shutting on her, sealing off the world. Maybe this was done before it started. She lifted her eyes toward his disappearing back, bereft.

Eight
    The Queen’s chief lady, Alys, was of the highest blood in Aquitaine, but she had been born on the wrong side of the blanket. So she served Eleanor, and did her needlework, and seemed content at it. Petronilla envied her this repose, this way of belonging. She leaned over and poked into the tangle of colored silks in Alys’s basket. Against the pale purple the green suddenly seemed much merrier. “Those are pretty, and prettier together. You have such an eye for those things.”
    Alys made soft disparaging noises, smiling. Her modesty became her because she so obviously knew her praises were earned. She changed the subject. “Why didn’t you go to the feast? Isn’t the cathedral beautiful? The light there is so wonderful. The first time I saw it I wept.” She crossed herself. She had long, fine-boned hands, with perfect oval nails.
    “Yes,” Petronilla said. “But it’s a long ride for monk’s meat.” They were walking up the street from the Little Bridge, where Alys had gotten the silken ribbons in the basket. The day was hot again, dry, with billowing big clouds gathering up out of the haze in the distance. Two pages followed them and Marie-Jeanne. “Besides, soon enough we’ll be riding every day.”
    “We’re going on another progress?”
    “We’re supposed to go to Poitiers,” Petronilla said.
    “Poitiers!” Alys turned and beamed at her.
    Petronilla felt that same excitement, just to say the name. In the course of the King’s progress they would spend the whole fall riding down to Limoges for Christmas, stopping along the way, for a while, at Poitiers. She