MY FAIR LADY: A Story of Eleanor of Provence, Henry III's Lost Queen Read online

  MY FAIR LADY

  BY

  J.P. REEDMAN

  A Story of Eleanor of Provence, Henry III’s Lost Queen

  Copyright 2016 by J.P. Reedman/Herne’s Cave Publishing

  REVISED EDITION

  Cover art-public domain

  London Bridge is falling down,

  Falling down, falling down.

  London Bridge is falling down,

  My fair lady

  --traditional children’s nursery rhyme thought by some to refer to Eleanor of Provence, who held the bridge revenues and whose barge was attacked at London Bridge by an angry mob

  Prologue:

  Amesbury Abbey 1600’s: Age of Progress

  The two men stood amidst the ruins. Architects, eyes keenly scanning the broken stone, the shattered walls, the little niches. Seeing modernity amidst such ancient decay, these bones of bygone buildings, gravestones to a cast out religion.

  Out with the old, in with the new—they were surveying for a potential mansion, a grand house for a grand family, classical design with portico and pillars. That’s what the wealthy wanted in the modern age. Greeks. Romans. Not pointed arches and rounded Norman doors, fragments of broken icons and other Papist trappings.

  The men, Inigo Jones and his assistant, John Webb, were approaching the site of the high altar, tapping on the walls as if to seek treasure in hidden cornices. Tiny flakes of stone fell away, drifted on the breeze. “Careful, lad,” said Inigo, the elder of the two, steadying Webb as he leapt back in fright, narrowly avoiding a piece of masonry that tumbled from the edge of a lancet window. “You must be careful around old places like these. When the time comes to build, you can get stout lads from the village to bring rams, knock it all to ground level.”

  They continued to walk onwards, though John cast a rueful glance over his shoulder at the lump of stone that nigh-on brained him. Fragments of eroded walling thrust out of the earth all around them, like the decayed stumps of an old woman’s teeth. Grasses grew over them, and small wildflowers waved in the wind, dainty harebells, wild daisies, the ever-spreading buttercups. Below, nuns slept eternal sleep. Royal bones lay beside the nuns, silent in the dark.

  Inigo Jones lifted his broad brimmed hat, and pushed his long, wavy brown hair back from his sun-bronzed forehead. Nodding, he pointed to a series of low walls that stretched across the flower-strewn field to a tall, jagged fragment of stonework that bore the vague outline of a delicate, glassless, quatrefoil window. A piscina was clearly visible in the wall, speckled with bird dung, a bath for neighbouring starlings. A little further up the wall, attached to another slab of masonry, was a well-preserved row of sedilia, swathed in moss and tangled ivy.

  “The church?” asked John Webb, following Jones’s nod.

  “I deem so, John; look, there’s a tomb there. Can you not see it? Attached to the wall, but partly covered by turf. I would wager it is near the site of the high altar. Someone of importance is buried there.”

  The younger man walked over to where the architect indicated, after looking around carefully to make sure no more precariously balanced stonework threatened his precious pate. “You are correct, Master Inigo…a tomb it is,” he said, kneeling down beside the worn stone chest, uncaring that the knees of his breeches became muddied and stained. He scrubbed at the firmly affixed lid with his hands, dislodging a shower of earth and grass, a few frail dandelions that had gone to seed. Their white spores spun away, shimmering in the sunlight like faerie dust. “A fine piece of marble for a lid, but no effigy, no brass…and if there were markings I cannot see them now.”

  Inigo Jones approached the half-concealed tomb; his shadow fell over John, the bushy hair, the broad brimmed hat perched once again on his head. He had lit his pipe; smoke curled blue around him. “Open it.”

  His companion blinked up at him, a little perturbed.“ Excuse me, Master…but sh…should we? It is a grave. Untouched. We have not been asked to. It’s not ours to touch.”

  “We are working at Wilton now but this land is for sale. Soon it will be sold; the Dukes of Somerset are already interested. It may not be my job to build a new house here, my apprentice, but I think it could be yours. Then all this old rubble will be knocked down or buried…under a floor or a fine garden,” said Jones. “So does it truly matter if this tomb is explored?”

  “It could be the grave of a holy woman,” said Webb uneasily. He could not explain why he felt so squeamish. He ran his hands over his jacket, seeking to fasten the neat brass buttons. A high wind had blown down off the plain beyond with its gaunt ring of stones; across the ruin-speckled grassland, across twists and curves of the river Avon, the hill known as Wall after the old Britons who once dwelt on its summit turned dark as night as incoming clouds obscured the sun.

  “It could even be a Queen,” said Inigo Jones, matter of factly. “And what matter if it be one? This is the age of learning, of science. This very morning you and I visited the Hanging Stones up on the Plain. Foolish legend says it was built by Merlin…” He harrumphed with mocking laughter, his pipe rattling between his yellow teeth. “Men of science like you and me know better. It was Romans, I tell you, Romans. Only ones smart enough to make it.”

  “But if this tomb does belong to a Queen,” Webb protested, still uneasy, “wouldn’t it be respectful to leave it alone? It’s not some stone raised in a time of savagery. It is the grave of a monarch. A Christian grave.”

  “Papist,” shrugged Jones, “and long dead. Old bones will not rise to haunt you if you rattle ‘em, lad; does not Queen Catherine, wife to Henry V, lie open to men’s eyes in Westminster? They say she is black and mummified.”

  Webb grimaced.“Not a sight I long to see, for all it may be of interest…to...to science. Such dissolution I dread to think of. It comes to all of us, but I don’t particularly want it thrust in my face.”

  Jones’ bearded lips parted in a little smirk and he nodded toward the half-exposed coffin. “Come; let us not be coy and fearful like the men of the past with their foolish superstitions! Open it. For the knowledge. Otherwise, we will always wonder.”

  Webb placed his hand on the coffin lid; the age-pocked marble felt cold, a slab of snow—the sun did not reach here, never did, never would, even with the priory roof ripped away. A little gap between the rim and the interior of the sarcophagus showed a line of utter darkness. Infinity. He began to sweat despite the sharp breeze off the Plain.

  “I will need help, Inigo…master,” he gulped. “I am not strong enough.”

  Jones grunted and joined his fellow. His fingers gnarled in the edge of the coffin lid. “Hmm, we’ll need to lever it off.” He beckoned for their attendants who were lounging lazily about the site. Having enjoyed their morning at the great stones on the plain with Master Jones as instructor, they were not looking forward to getting back to the ongoing building works at Wilton House. Or any unexpected work here, which wasn’t even their remit.

  A bit churlishly, they joined Webb in the ruins of the priory church, gazed down at the revealed coffin near the high altar. “You, Peter…” Inigo Jones beckoned to a sandy-haired fellow built like a bull, great round head, mighty arms lined with muscles, legs that strained his trousers. “You have plenty of muscle on you. We need help removing a coffin lid. Extra pay for you if the job is well done and without damage.”

  Peter nodded, anticipating that well-earned pay. Bunching his muscles, he strove to wrest the stone away from the chest. “Won’t work on its own,” said Jones. “Levers! Come on, man, use this…” He tapped his skull with a bony finger.

 
The other men were in on the act now, interest piqued. A wooden pole was brought in and then another. One pole was jammed into the split in the lid; something crackled in the dark and Jones frowned at Peter. “Don’t break anything if you can avoid it,” he said tersely.

  The workers all gathered round, the burliest manhandling the coffin lid, while the others used wooden struts to lever the heavy stone away. Peter, strongest of all, neck bunched up and face crimson, was groaning and snorting like a pig giving birth as he swung about, throwing his full weight on the pole and trying to heave the lid of Purbeck marble aside. “I think the pole might break, master!” he panted. “It ain’t strong enough!”

  Just at that moment, there was a groan like a soul in torment, and the lid screeched aside an inch or two, the dust of uncounted years flowing out from its stygian interior like the long white hands of ghosts.

  Face impassive as the façade of Stonehenge up on the Plain, Inigo Jones swiftly walked over to see what was revealed. Webb peered over his shoulder, his hair whitened by the flying dust, looking a ghost himself.

  Inside the coffin, she lay on her back, gazing eyelessly to the sky, head to the east as in all Christian burials, her arms respectfully folded across her body. A woman’s skeleton, wrapped not in nunly garb but the decayed remains of brocade, blue and gold. A dusty ring clanked on her finger, its stone dimmed by age; its band was silver, tarnished. Threads of hair spread out about her head, bleached by death, its original colour robbed out, more like spider webs than human hair.

  “No humble nun is this,” Inigo Jones removed his pipe, tapped the bowl. Ash fell. “Not even an abbess would be wearing such garb. I believe that is cloth of gold. Here, Webb, you most surely gaze into the face of a queen of England.”

  Welles stared down. The wind, blowing down from the higher ground, grew stronger; he could hear it whistling in the fangs of broken stone. Hissing like a snake, then murmuring like forgotten voices torn from fleshless throats. A sense of unease washed over him and he glanced away from the heap of presumed royal bones. He did not like to look upon them, science or no. It seemed…intrusive.

  Suddenly he jumped back, muttering an oath, crossing his arms defensively.

  “What is it?” Jones stared at his assistant in bemused perplexity. “You are white as curds! Did you see a spirit? ” He laughed, his tone vaguely mocking.

  “Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone watching us! Not in the ruined church. Across the field, over by the river! A woman! ” Webb gestured with a shaking hand toward the swaying trees at the foot of Wall hill, a dark hump beyond the curve of the river. “Watching us. As if to see whether we touched…the bones.”

  “What a wild imagination, John—most likely some curious lass from Amesbury wondering what we are doing,” laughed Jones, but nonetheless he gestured to the rest of the workers with a sudden impatience. “We have seen enough. Cover her back up. Nothing here is ours to take. We are only here to observe and I shall record this day for posterity. Maybe one day others will come here and study these royal remains, if such they are, but it is not for me to do. Besides, I am more interested in stones than nuns…even nuns who were once queens. I prefer them. Roman, you know. One can see clearly by the architecture.”

  John Webb helped move the coffin lid back into place. The scent of a space long sealed off yet damp vanished…mercifully, the apprentice thought.

  He was glad that they were to leave her undisturbed.

  Sleeping.

  Chapter One

  I am old and when the wind shrills down off Salisbury Plain, my bones ache; my knees, my knuckles especially. Much have I seen of sorrow and care but not for much longer—the doctors say there is a canker in my aged body, burning me away from inside. It will kill me in the end, and that ending I fear will be soon.

  The nuns I live with in this fair house at Amesbury are kind and treat me well with whatever remedies they can make from herbs found in the garden; pain killing ones mostly, these days. The willow is good for that; I drink tea brewed from the bark every night.

  I am an oblate, not a nun, not professed, although I have lived with the order many years in these latter days of my widowhood.

  My husband was Henry III of Blessed Memory, Henry of England, France and Ireland. My son is King—he is Edward, that men name Longshanks, set to be a lion amongst Kings.

  I am Eleanor, Dowager Queen, and once, with my husband, I ruled all England.

  But before that, I was merely a pretty child born to a noble but destitute family in Provence…

  When I was a little girl, life was a waking dream, or so I thought in the silly way of little girls. My father, Lord Raymond Berengar IV, and my mother Beatrice of Savoy were like King and Queen within their lands, although they were not so titled…and were really quite poor.

  “You are our gems,” said my mother, to my three sisters, bright Marguerite, who was eldest, shy Sanchia, baby Beatrice and me…the outspoken one. Mother was clever and very beautiful; her marriage to my father, though contracted as a political alliance, had swiftly become a true love match just like in the romances that we all liked to read. “My four lovely daughters will one day bring us great fame and wealth. God has been good to your father and me, even though He has not given us living sons, but its is a great solace that you are all endowed with comely looks and sharp intellect, even as little children. I do not need a pack of boisterous boys, I do not weep for my lack—you four I shall ever call ‘my boys’. My special boys.”

  My sisters and I giggled at being girls who were called ‘boys’; we cared nothing for our futures then. Marriage? We dreamed of fantasy knights, like Lancelot and Gawain, handsome and chivalrous. We played at being great ladies of prominence in the gardens of our parents’ castle, wandering about with our noses held haughtily in the air beneath a burning sky, while our tired nurses held canopies above our bobbing heads so that our milky-fair skin would not grow red or dusky. Marguerite and I were the worst for affecting airs, and we would parade around the gardens, while the little ones giggled at us and my mother smiled indulgently behind her hand at our youthful pretensions.

  Sometimes, when the mood took our parents, we would all ride forth in a chariot to visit their various manors across Provence. My lord father’s land was beautiful beyond compare, with the Alps rising like white needles to the east, their peaks darning the azure skies, and the lush valley of the Rhone sweeping down to the banks of wide sparkling river, one of the arteries of Europe. The people of the towns and villages would cheer us, for despite their lack of great wealth, my parents always did the best for their vassals and never forgot them. Hence, townsfolk would give gifts of money or of bread and wine to father and sing praises mother’s beauty and intellect; some men even wrote in manuscripts that she was as beauteous and astute as the legendary Queen Niobe…a great compliment for an ordinary lady!

  My father was acclaimed too, naturally; he was courageous as a bear and a stout warrior who had survived into manhood by the skin of his teeth—when little more than a boy, he had been held in an Aragonese castle while his greedy, disloyal kinsmen battled over possession of his inherited lands. Luckily, he escaped in a daring rescue, shimmying down the high donjon on a flimsy rope, and became the Count of Provence, as was his right.

  While on these progresses around the country, we would also attend lavish banquets. My two littlest sisters were confined to the nursery but Beatrice liked to show her eldest daughters to the crowd. I loved to be seen and admired, twirling in the pavane in my green gown, my raven’s wing hair tumbling blue-black down to my waist, setting off my wide-set eyes, which were a lucky shade—the colour of the ocean. Secretly I believed myself to be even fairer that Marguerite, who was taller than I, but more angular in face and figure, and whose eyes were warm amber rather than blue.

  How glorious the feasts were! We had soup of ground-up capons and almond milk, flavoured with red pomegranate seeds, followed by tender lamb and ducklings on platters of polished silver. Hares and
peacocks followed, the latter still wearing their bright feathers. Marguerite and I would beg to keep the feathers after we dined, for we loved their colours so much; later, in our chambers, we would braid them into our hair. Cheese tartlets were also downed, and blancmange, and of course the entremets—bream in foil and crayfish quaking in rich jelly.

  Our favourite dishes, however, were the subtleties made of sweet marchpane—sometimes they were shaped like animals or castles or shields. Mother did not allow us to over indulge, however—she warned us about such vice in no uncertain terms. “Remember, my daughters, that beauty and virtue is your wealth, since we have relatively little in the way of dowries for you. You do not wish to end up like your aunt, Gersende, the Infanta of Aragon!”

  Such admonishments always made us titter as froth-headed little girls always did. Gersende was father’s sister and she was, rude as it might be to say so, enormously fat, with a great moon face and a heaving bosom which she would clasp when excited or distressed. In her wide, elaborate headdresses and sweeping brocade gowns, she outstripped most of the knights in size, let alone the rest of the women! Marguerite and I were determined we should never grow as huge as Aunt Gersende, the victim of many a bawdy jest, and hence limited ourselves to just one helping of the sumptuous deserts.

  In 1233, tales of our beauty, manners, and bearing had spread far and wide, exactly as our parents had hoped. Ambassadors arrived from neighbouring France, sent on behalf of King Louis’s mother, the fearsome Blanche, known as the White Queen. She was seeking a fitting bride for her beloved son, Louis—she sought a devout, pious girl whose virtuousness outshone even her beauty, and she had heard that a daughter of Raymond and Beatrice might fit her ideals.

  Almost immediately, I was deemed too young to be a marriage candidate, which left me in a foul mood; I stomped out into the castle gardens, quite unladylike in my manner, pouting as I sulked under the clusters of heavy purple globes dripping from the grapevines. As much as I loved Marguerite, I did not wish my sister to become a queen if I did not become one too. That just would not be…fair.