Devil's Consort. Anne O'Brien

      CHAPTER SIX

      LOUIS acted. The extent of his enthusiasm astonished me as much as it horrified his mother and drove his royal counsellor into a fury. I had not thought he would take my advice so much to heart, or quite so precipitately. I had thought it would take more than one night in my bed to stir him to open hostility against Toulouse, but Louis leapt on the excuse for invasion as a hungry cat leapt on a bird that threatened to escape. The voices raised against such a project were loud and vociferous but Louis was deaf to them all.

      ‘Why in the blessed name of God make an enemy of the Count of Toulouse?’ Abbot Suger, excruciatingly civil but furious that Louis had made his decision without once consulting him, questioned both the cost and the ultimate value to France.

      ‘Because he has no claim to it,’ Louis stated. ‘Toulouse is Eleanor’s.’

      ‘You have been ill-advised.’ Suger’s flat stare encompassed me before returning to Louis. ‘Are you not aware that your vassals will not support you, sire? They’ll refuse to supply you with knights. Not one of them wants an angry neighbour on his doorstep. We have no argument with Toulouse.’

      ‘I will defeat Count Alfonso, my lord Abbot. He will no longer be a neighbour and his anger will be a thing of no importance.’

      Suger lifted his hands helplessly. ‘I pray God thinks you worthy of victory, sire.’

      ‘I will ask Him. He’ll not refuse me.’

      And Adelaide? Her civility was negligible. ‘You will not go, my son.’

      A mistake. I saw Louis’s nostrils narrow.

      ‘I will, madam.’

      ‘Louis! You will listen to me, even if you refuse to heed Abbot Suger.’

      Ha! Adelaide still had not learned. Louis listened to me, and we set out for Poitiers together, where I prepared to stay as Louis gathered his troops. I wished with all my heart to travel farther south with him, into the centre of my own lands, and the temptation to do so stirred my blood from its northern languor—but a miracle had happened. That one night when I had painted for Louis the glory of his victory over Toulouse, his ownership of me, however brief and perfunctory, had been effective. My courses had stopped and nausea struck in the morning hours.

      Praise the Virgin! I would carry an heir for France and for Aquitaine.

      My delight superseded my wretched mornings when my belly heaved and the thought of food made me retch. Louis proved to be mildly sympathetic but more taken up with the magnificence of his own achievement. I tried not to fall prey to cynicism. The heir would enhance my importance and win over those of Louis’s court who still saw me as an undesirable southern influence in France. No one would dare to slight me when I bore the King a son.

      Even Abbot Bernard would be forced to temper his denunciations.

      But for now Louis was intent on conquest in my name. Emerging from my chamber, a linen cloth pressed to my lips, I listened to his enthusiastic explanation that they would take Toulouse by surprise and starve the city into submission. Even through my misery I noted that for a siege Louis employed few siege engines. Neither was Louis’s army particularly impressive in size. Was the whole operation too small, too ill-prepared? Yet Louis was so confident that I too saw no impediment to his success. If Count Alfonso did not expect the descent of an armed force, he would be unprepared and the campaign brought to a swift end. Louis would return to me, full of courage and male pride. Perhaps his rejoicing would take him from the long hours on his knees.

      ‘I will return and lay Toulouse at your feet,’ he promised. ‘I’ll drag Alfonso to his knees to ask your forgiveness.’

      I kissed Louis farewell and retired to vomit into a basin.

      How many days before Louis returned. Two weeks? Three? We saw the cloud of dust from Poitiers and knew there had been no effective siege. We knew the outcome anyway, long before I saw Louis’s crestfallen face. Rumour travelled faster than the Capetian troops. Count Alfonso had been warned and waiting for him. Formidable defences, banks and ditches and wooden palisades, sufficient to repel Louis’s meagre army, had been hastily thrown up.

      And my noble, all-powerful, ambitious King of France, drunk on pride and certain victory? Louis did not even stay to make a token attack but turned on his heel and retraced every inch back to Poitiers without one blow being struck, whilst in Toulouse Alfonso thumbed his nose from the castle walls, catcalls screeching the derision of the Toulousians, the soldiers’ gestures obscene and graphic.

      Alfonso could not believe his luck.

      I despaired.

      Louis begged God’s forgiveness for the unspecified sin that kept him from victory.

      A humiliating disaster all round.

      I did not use such words to Louis, although it was in my mind to blame him. Where else to lay the faults of lack of preparation, even of abject cowardice, in making no show of force?

      ‘I failed to take Toulouse,’ was all he said. The misery of failure sat on his shoulders as surly a thunder cloud. The chapel at Poitiers saw more of him than I did.

      After a gloomy progress through my domains, we returned to Paris where the reaction of Abbot Suger and the Dowager Queen would await us. With one look at Louis’s doleful expression, Suger desisted, doing nothing more than frown sternly at both of us, as if we were errant children, then unbending enough to take Louis’s arm in a fatherly manner with a sigh. No point, I suppose, in ringing a peal over his head so long after the event.

      Adelaide would have something to say about it, she would not hold back. Nothing would keep her silent when she had