The Passionate Enemies Read Free Page B

younger son of my mother! Why, my brother Theobald would come before me.’
    â€˜The English would never have Theobald. You have been here so long, you have made yourself popular with the people. They would choose you, Stephen.’
    â€˜Yes,’ he said, ‘the people would choose me.’ His expression clouded temporarily. ‘Oh, but Matilda, how I wish that he had not decided to marry. How much better if he had named me as his successor and taught me all the ways of kingship, which is what I have dreamed he would since William died.’
    â€˜Be patient, Stephen.’
    He smiled at her. ‘I needs must. I am a lucky man. I have the King’s favour. I have my hopes; but my greatest treasure is the devotion of my loving wife.’
    Words, she thought, charming words. And before the day was out he would be sporting with his newest mistress and telling her she was the most important woman in his life. Life was hard for some women. She knew that good Matilda, her aunt for whom she had been named, had suffered in the same way as she did. The King had been affectionate towards his wife; indeed they were said to have been in love at the time of their marriage – the Queen certainly had been with the King – and she had to endure his faithlessness. Was it the fate of women?
    Perhaps a convent upbringing did not prepare one for the ways of men.
    She herself had spent her childhood in the Abbey of Bermondsey – the dear peaceful abbey where a young girl dreamed her dreams of romance, for she had known all her life that when the time came she would leave the sequestered life for that of marriage.
    Her mother had made this clear to her when she had told her of the unhappy childhood she had had with her sister the Queen, when they had been sent first to Rumsey and then to Wilton Abbey to be under the care of their tyrant aunt, Christina, the Abbess.
    She had visited the King’s Court with her mother on one ortwo occasions and there she had made the acquaintance not only of Stephen, her future husband, but of her cousins Williams, the heir to the throne, and his sister Matilda. She had thought Stephen charming from the moment she had seen him and had been so happy that he was to be her husband. She had not known then that the charm she had thought was especially for her was for everyone and it meant little except that Stephen had a gift with words and he liked to say what he thought would best please people – which was not necessarily what he meant.
    She would never forget that other Matilda – a little older than herself – forceful, handsome, demanding the attention of all the others. She had been rather glad when she had heard that Matilda had made a brilliant marriage and had gone to Germany to be an Empress. Even as a child she had had uneasy feelings that Stephen might have preferred the bold flamboyant Matilda to the self-effacing one.
    There had come the happy day when she had been betrothed to Stephen, to be followed by sad ones due to her mother’s death. The Countess of Boulogne had been well one day and dead the next, and strangely enough she had died in that Abbey of Bermondsey where Matilda had received her education. She was buried in the Abbey and Matilda had made many a pilgrimage to her mother’s grave.
    As for her father she had scarcely known him. He had been much older than her mother and it seemed to her that he was always away from home fighting with the crusades.
    But she had her husband – the handsome Stephen – and she should be happy, for even though she had learned that he was not the hero she had made of him in her dreams, he was still the most attractive man at Court and, if she did not attempt to interfere with his pleasures, the kindest of husbands.
    Now she set about soothing him, pointing out the chances against the King’s producing a son. She reminded him that the King’s daughter Matilda was safe in Germany.
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