Ashes of the Elements Read Free Page A

Snow, bitterly cold lodgings, bedding alive with lice, inadequately salted meat, all the dangers of the open road, she took them all with her head held high and her mouth buttoned up. Unlike most of our attendants, I might add, who, to a man, moaned like a group of sickly dowagers.’
    ‘And, when you finally met up with the King’s party in Sicily, it was Lent, and so the marriage could not take place,’ Helewise said, recounting what the Queen had already told her.
    ‘I handed Berengaria over into my daughter Joanna’s care, and told her to get the girl wedded to Richard at the next stop, which was Cyprus,’ Eleanor continued. ‘I am reliably informed that they were married in the spring.’
    ‘I wish them luck,’ Helewise said.
    ‘So do I,’ Eleanor agreed fervently. ‘So do I.’
    ‘And now you go back to France, Your Majesty?’ It seemed wise, Helewise thought, to turn Eleanor away from contemplation of the apparently slim chances of her son’s marriage being a successful one.
    ‘I do. But not until the morrow. This night I stay with my dear friend Petronilla de Severy. Petronilla Durand, I must now call her, for she has a new husband.’ The Queen paused. ‘A new young husband. And, Helewise, I have to admit, although it pains me equally much to do so, that there is as little chance of this being a good marriage as there is of my son’s.’
    Helewise’s surprise and discomfort at receiving the Queen’s confidences had disappeared. Now, she felt honoured. Deeply honoured. Hadn’t Eleanor said earlier that Hawkenlye was one of her favourite places? If she felt that way because it was only here in the privacy of the Abbey that she was able to speak of private concerns, then Helewise could do no better than offer a discreet and sympathetic ear. ‘You emphasise the youth of your friend’s new husband,’ she said. ‘Is that a factor in the marriage’s chances of success?’
    ‘Oh, yes,’ Eleanor said. ‘Petronilla is a rich woman – her father left her extremely well provided for – but even those of us who love her couldn’t call her beautiful. She is tall, thin, with an indifferent complexion and those narrow lips which, when a woman grows old, appear to fold in on themselves. And dear Petronilla is old.’
    ‘What is the age difference?’ Helewise asked.
    ‘Petronilla is, I think, forty-two. Possibly more. Tobias Durand cannot be much over thirty, and I believe I have heard that he is even younger.’
    Involuntarily Helewise said, ‘Oh, dear.’
    ‘Oh, dear, indeed,’ Eleanor agreed. ‘And he is a handsome man, by all accounts, of good height, well-built.’
    ‘But impoverished,’ Helewise guessed. There seemed no other reason for such a man to have married a plain woman so much older than himself.
    ‘Again, you guess right.’ The Queen sighed. ‘I doubt she will keep him. She is probably too old to bear him a son, which alone might have ensured the continuance of his attentions. As it is, once he has access to her wealth…’ She did not finish the sentence. There was, Helewise thought, no need.
    What sorrow can be ushered into people’s lives by marriage to the wrong partner, she reflected. And, at the opposite end of the scale, what joy when the choice is good. Briefly she pictured her own late husband. Ivo had been a good-looking man, too, tall and broad in the shoulder like this opportunist Tobias. And what a sense of humour he’d had.
    Out of nowhere a memory flashed into her head. She and Ivo, enduring an apparently interminable visit from one of Ivo’s distant cousins, had crept out of their own house and, packing up food and drink, gone to spend a few blessedly private hours in a secluded spot by a stream. Ivo had stripped off and waded into the water, and, drying off on the bank, been stung on the left buttock by a bee.
    ‘What is amusing you, Abbess?’ The Queen’s chilly tones brought her abruptly back to the present.
    Recalling what she and Eleanor had been