The Conqueror's Queen by Joanna Courtney

Author:Joanna Courtney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Rouen, October 1057

The army rode out barely a week later, high in their saddles and whooping with bloodlust. Then silence. Messengers reported that William was letting Henri come, luring his troops out like pieces in a tafel game. They reported also that French intelligence must be good for always they found them faster than expected. Mathilda, lying cold in her empty bed with her belly pushing painfully on her bladder, knew William would suspect treachery and feared it herself. Maybe they had been too ready to trust Raoul who could, after all, be feeding information on the Normans to the French rather than the other way around. That was the trouble with spies – duplicity was sewn into their very nature.

‘What if they lose?’ Cecelia asked one day when dark clouds had settled over a still-empty Rouen and it seemed as if God himself was seeking to crush them. They were in the schoolroom, supposedly supporting Adela in her studies, but the girl needed no encouragement and was poring over a Greek text with her tutor leaving them free to talk. ‘What if William is defeated and King Henri rides into Rouen to claim it as his own?’

‘Not possible,’ Mathilda said stoutly, shifting her heavy body and straining to remember a time when her womb had been empty for more than a month. Sometimes she felt less a woman and more just a receptacle for ducal children.

‘It is possible, my lady. Not likely perhaps, praise God, but possible.’

Mathilda supposed it was, for news had just come in that William was sick of playing cat and mouse with the French and, with winter fast approaching, was to engage them in open battle. He had marched to Varaville near traitorous Caen to meet Henri’s troops at the point where they would have to cross the River Orne. Mathilda had called for maps the moment she’d heard, but a mark on a parchment was hardly a fit representation of the battle site, no doubt alive with men and horses and all the trappings of a war camp, and she had rarely felt so helpless. Roger was in control of matters of state and William matters of defence and she was left with nothing.

Part of her longed to ride forth to join her husband so she could at least be a part of whatever was happening to their people but she only needed to call up a memory of Alençon to send that foolish idea from her mind. War was best left to men but still she felt robbed of the title of regent and trapped in a world of threads and toys and babies, as if she had been in the bower so long she had been woven into one of her own woollens.

‘What would we do if we did lose?’ Cecelia fretted. ‘Would we have to flee? Where would we go?’

Mathilda shushed her. Poor Cecelia had been very nervy recently and Mathilda suspected she missed Emeline, who was even heavier with

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