Free Plantagenet 1 - The Plantagenet Prelude by Jean Plaidy

the enemy’s country. She exulted over the burning land. This would teach Theobald what it meant to flout his King because if that King was weak his Queen was not.
    They had reached the walled city of Vitry.
    There was little defence offered and in a short time the King’s men were in the streets killing, pillaging, shedding the blood of its inhabitants. The old and the maimed and the women and the children ran screaming before the soldiers and barricaded themselves into the wooden church.
    ‘Enough, enough,’ cried Louis. But his command was not heeded.
    His followers had come to pillage and murder and they could not be restrained. There then occurred a terrible incident which was to haunt the King for the rest of his days.
    Inside the church the children clung to their mothers, and mothers begged for the safety of their little ones. The King’s men knew no pity. They did not attempt to break into the church. They merely set it on fire.
    As the flames enveloped it and the thick black smoke filled the air the cries of the innocent could be heard calling curses on their murderers and screaming for mercy.
    ‘Have done. Have done,’ pleaded Louis but they would not listen to him. In any case it was too late. In that burning church were thirteen hundred innocent people and they were all burned to death.

    In his tent Louis lay staring blankly before him. Eleonore lay beside him.
    ‘I can hear their screaming,’ he said.
    She answered: ‘There is no sound now. They are all dead.’
    ‘All dead!’ he cried. ‘Those innocent people. Holy Mother of God help me! I shall never be able to escape from the sound of their cries.’
    ‘They should have denounced their lord. They should have sworn allegiance to you.’
    ‘They were innocent people. What did they know of our quarrel?’
    ‘You must try to sleep.’
    ‘To sleep. If I do, I dream. I can smell the smoke. I shall never be free of it. How the wood crackled!’
    ‘It was old and dry,’ she said.
    ‘And little children … They called curses on us. Imagine a mother … with her little ones.’
    ‘It is war,’ said Eleonore. ‘It is not wise to brood on these things.’
    But Louis could not stop brooding.
    He could not go on, he declared.
    ‘To give in now would be victory for Theobald,’ Eleonore reminded him.
    ‘I can’t help it,’ cried Louis. ‘I am sick of war and killing.’
    ‘You should never have been a king.’
    ‘You speak truth. My heart is in the Church.’
    ‘Which is no place for a king’s heart to be.’
    ‘Sometimes I think I should have refused to take the crown.’
    ‘How could you, the King’s son, have done that?’
    ‘Sometimes I think God is not pleased with me. We have been six years married and have no child.’
    ‘It is a long time to wait,’ agreed Eleonore.
    ‘Is there something we have done … or not done? Have I displeased God in some way?’ The King shivered. ‘I feel in my heart that whatever we did before the burning of Vitry was nothing compared with that great sin.’
    ‘Stop thinking of it.’
    ‘I can’t, I can’t,’ moaned the King.
    She knew that he would be useless to command an army in his present state.
    ‘We should return to Paris,’ she said.
    He was eager to agree. ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Disband the army. Go back. Call off the war.’
    ‘That would be folly. The army will stay here. We shall return. State duties call you to Paris. There you will rest and forget Vitry. You will learn that it is what must be expected in war.’

    The war continued. Louis was heartily sick of it but Eleonore would not allow Theobald to have the chance to say the King had been forced to retire from the field.
    The King’s ministers begged him to consider what good there was in continuing. Louis would have agreed but he dared not face Eleonore’s wrath.
    He could not understand his feeling for her. It was as though he were under a spell. Whatever he might promise to do, when she showed her contempt for his