Here Be Dragons - 1 Sharon Penman (paper ebook reader .TXT) 📖

Anjou, not far from the crossing of the Rivers Vienne and Loire. It was a rich land, famed for its vineyards, lush and green in the summer sun, and Joanna's journey from Rouen should have been a pleasant one. But the threat of war overhung the countryside, hovering like woodsmoke along the horizon, andJoanna soon discovered that distance did little to ease her fears for her father's safety. She was nervous, moreover, about meeting her grandmother.Eleanor was entering her eighty-first year, an age no less vast to Joanna than that of the ancient, gnarled oaks shadowing their path, Joanna's craving for family, for belonging, was the mainspring of her being, but as FontevraultAbbey came into sight, she found herself beset by misgivings. She had no right to her father's name, was accepted at court only on his sufferance. WouldEleanor welcome a grandchild born of sin?THE room was in shadows, shielded from the sun by heavy linen hangings. Joanna groped her way forward, blindly, knelt before the woman sitting in an oaken, upright chair, much like a throne."Come closer, child, so I might see you." The voice was not at all the croaking whisper Joanna had been expecting; it was clear, perfectly pitched, made her long to hear it again.Joanna rose shyly, took the hand outstretched to her. It was hot ana dry, so frail she could think only of the time she'd held a captive bW within her palms; her grandmother's bones seemed no less fragile, to b« broken by a breath. But then the fingers, long and tapering, ablaze win1 emerald and opal and turquoise, closed around her own, firmly, draw ing her forward. For a moment she felt a cheek pressed against her own it, too, was hot, crinkled like parchment. An exotic, beguiling fragran^ perfumed the air; as her grandmother embraced her, she heard the

247er of silk. She lifted her lashes, looked into hazel eyes much like vvhisr^e //go you are Joanna," Eleanor said, and when she smiled, Joanna, ht like so many others before her by the potent pull of that sudcacapricious charm, gave up her heart with reckless and innocent abandon.Sj0es were cloudless, shimmering metallically above vines scorched beyond renewal by the unrelenting sun. Joanna rarely ventured out into the midday heat, having adapted her habits to those of her grandmother. Eleanor was that rarity in an age of dawn-risers, a creature of the night. She flowered in those hours after dusk, not going to her bed until the world was long stilled and hushed, sleeping away the bright, hot afternoons under the soft swishing of her ladies' fans. That was, she told Joanna, one of the advantages of age, that she could at last follow her own inner clock."What other advantages does age offer, Madame?" "Precious few, child. The sweet satisfaction of outliving all my enemies, of burying my mistakes, of remembering and savoring my triumphs. Memory is merciful, Joanna, more so than man. It fades past pain, yet holds bright the colors in recalled joy."Joanna was not long in discovering that Eleanor's memory was no less remarkably preserved than her small white teeth. It was rare to reach such an age without gaping blank spaces in the mouth and mind; most ancients were reduced to gruel and muddled memories in which time blurred all boundaries.But Eleanor had somehow triumphed over the vagaries of age, just as she'd somehow triumphed over the confines and constraints of womanhood. Her past was very much with her, vivid and precisely drawn, a treasure trove of memories ripe for sharing. And share them she chose to do, in those sultry summer nights when sleep would not come and her yesterdays seemed so very close, just beyond reach.She told Joanna of her long-ago girlhood, conjured up the ghosts of her marital bed: Louis, so mild, so pious and softspoken, so utterly un-Me the Angevin great-grandson of the Conqueror, the youth who'd dared to seek her out at her husband's court, caressing her boldly with not grey eyes as he talked of empires. "I was twenty-nine and HenryWas eighteen, but more of a man than any I'd ever known, in bed or ut' Eleanor said softly, startling Joanna by the nonchalance with nich she confessed to adultery, but then she gave the girl a self-°cking smile not entirely free of bitterness. "I must have loved him, in^fh, else I could not have hated him so much after."

148She told Joanna of Henry's bitter quarrel with Thomas a Becket how Henry had sealed Becket's doom by crying out in a fit of rage, "Vtaj none rid me of this turbulent priest?" Told her the legend that the royai House of Plantagenet came from the Devil; told her, too, how her sons had laughed at their Angevin heritage, turning aside criticism with jest about the demon Countess of BlackFulk of Anjou.Some of her memories were tragic: her daughter Joanna's death ^ childbed at thirty-four; Richard's foolish and fatal bravery before the walls of Chalus.Others were fraught with menace: Eleanor's perilous journey from French territory into her own lands in Poitou after her divorce from Louis; two separate attempts had been made to ambush and abduct her, for landed women were often forced into marriage against their wills, and Eleanor was the greatest heiress in Christendom.And some of her stories were tales of horror, none more so than that of the massacre of the Jews the year before Joanna's birth: "Richard had forbidden all Jews to attend his coronation, but some wealthy merchants brought gifts to the banquet following. Members of his court, the worse for wine and having no liking for Jews even when sober, expelled them from the hall, and the citizens of London took this to mean all Jews in the city were fair game. Rioting broke out, the ghetto burned, and many died. Other cities were soon caught up in the same violence, as it swept like plague across the realm, but nowhere was the outbreak worse