The Falcon's Eyes Read online

  Dedication

  To RBN

  magna gratia et caritate

  Epigraphs

  As for birds, they were a medieval obsession. They are the subject of one of the earliest medieval sketchbooks, and they fill the borders of manuscripts. . . . they had become symbols of freedom. Under feudalism men and animals were tied to the land: very few people could move about—only artists and birds.

  —Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

  Queen Eleanor, a matchless woman, beautiful and chaste, powerful and modest, meek and eloquent, who was advanced in years enough to have had two husbands and two sons crowned kings, still indefatigable for every undertaking, whose power was the admiration of her age. . . . Let none speak more thereof; I also know well. Be silent.

  —Richard of Devizes, Chronicle, Concerning the Deeds of Richard the First, King of England, ca. 1192

  Brutal, hard

  blood shed.

  No warning.

  Eyes see.

  Talons take.

  —“On a Hawk” by Ibn al-Mu’tazz, Arabic poet, ninth century. Trans. by Professor James E. Montgomery, 2020, University of Cambridge

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Part II

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Part III

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Part IV

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Part V

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Part VI

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  FONTEVRAUD ABBEY

  LOIRE VALLEY, FRANCE

  Thursday, the first of April

  Anno Domini 1204

  The queen, my queen, died shortly before dusk.

  Darkness has descended with her death, and with it all the warmth of her beloved Aquitaine. Her hand rests in mine, her fingers colder than the cloister’s stone. Gently I draw the sable about her neck and shoulders; it has been a frigid month, and it comforts me to know the cloak will enshroud her still. She goes to a realm of radiance, they say, yet a desolate part of me fears it will be icy, lightless. Even for her, Eleanor, queen of England and France, the fabled Duchess of Aquitaine.

  Her smile is serene, her brow tranquil, the expression of her eyes poignantly questioning. How wondrous that her face hardly betrays the tumult of these years! That she should go to the afterlife with some vestige of her beauty would have gladdened her, no doubt—vanitas vanitatum, she would have quipped. It is only her hands that suggest the weighty procession of eight decades. Her fingers are gnarled and heavy; I touch the bloodred signet ring, then the others, glimmering with the seals of Athena and Aphrodite.

  Earlier I had summoned Father Luke to issue the last rites. Flickering images return to me: a flock of black-robed figures in the mauve light, the host placed upon her tongue, the gold crucifix studded with amethysts pressed into her hands, now as pale and translucent as the wafer itself. We, her companions of many years, had knelt by her side in desolation, murmuring the words of the viaticum we know all too well. Instants later, she drew her last breath. Silence fell, followed by stifled sobs and the bittersweet strains of our voices as we intoned a planctus.

  For one phantasmal moment it had seemed she merely slept. I had drawn closer, touched her arm, and murmured, “My lady,” as if to waken her. Suddenly I had felt a hand upon my shoulder: the Abbess Mathilda. “Remember the queen and her example,” the abbess said, with a firmness that was not without compassion. I turned away from the body in order to regain my composure. It would be my duty, as the one closest to the queen, to lead us in the rituals that would follow.

  Even so, I begged the abbess for a few final moments alone with the queen: a time to reflect, I explained, to bid adieu and to assemble the mantle, crown, and the keepsakes that would accompany her on this, the final voyage of a queen who had known so many. The abbess and the others—even Sister Alix, the queen’s granddaughter—had no idea of my other mission.

  Others had already done the work of anointing her body with holy unguents and precious scents. I had watched from a distance as they performed the morbid tasks, all the while recalling other perfumes, those she had used in her lifetime with abandon. How unlike those, today, with their dark, funereal purpose!

  Turning to me as she prepared to leave, the abbess gently said, “We will leave you, Isabelle, to close the queen’s eyes. It is only right and fitting that you do so.”

  I glanced at Sister Alix, who stood close to the abbess. “But surely, it should be you, her granddaughter,” I entreated.

  “No,” Alix replied. “We know the queen would have wanted you to do it.”

  I gave a mournful nod of acquiescence before curtseying and making the sign of the cross. Then the sisters filed out—a noiseless phalanx, phantomlike, followed by the abrupt sound of the door closing.

  Now, when the moment comes for me to close those vivid eyes, I find even my own strength faltering. Several times I steel myself, only to turn away, unable to touch her lids. Still hesitating, I make my way from the coffin to the prie-dieu before the altar. Banks of tapers burn before me. I gaze at them hungrily, as a starving person might a feast; perhaps part of me hopes their fire will burn away my sadness. I draw my hand close, searing one finger in a flame before dipping another into hot molten wax. The pain seems to jolt me past inaction.

  I return to her, implore God for strength, and force myself to seal her eyes shut.

  Those eyes! I dare not think what they had witnessed during her long life—even I, who know so much. The anointing of two husbands as kings, of two sons as kings, the crowning of two daughters, the murders of bishops, the betrayals of children, the passionate love affairs, the perilous journeys across storm-wracked seas and menacing mountains. All the bitter cares and struggles, which she had, throughout the years, confided to me. All now subsided into chilling silence.

  Would she were still here to guide me! Would it were day, for I long for the orderly light of morning and the call of matins.

  I turn once more to gaze upon her face: it seems scarcely less imperious with its shuttered orbs. Eleanor, the great queen whom Egyptian slave traders in Messina had likened to the goddess Isis and called the “shameless, magnificent one.” “The comparison does not seem to displease you,” I had teased, when she had related this story. “Many would say far more shameless than magnificent!” she had replied with a rueful laugh. “About that I have no illusion. But if I were to be compared to a goddess, let it at
least be Helen!” Now, at this dark hour, it comforts me to remember those moments of mirth, those larksome references to the Trojan princess who had enthralled her since childhood.

  In her final weeks, I begged the queen not to leave me, all the while knowing my entreaties were futile. She knew her time had come, and greeted death as she did all journeys, with courage and resolute, albeit somber, preparation. All the while she tried to cheer me, offering me the jewels and finery she knew my station would not permit. She had the grace never to acknowledge what she had from the first intuited: my fascination with such things. “Keep them as relics then,” she said with a conspiratorial smile, pressing some lustrous pearls into my palm. “If you do not see them as frivolous and vain, then I doubt God will either.” It was her wont, her way of summoning the transformative power of the mind. Willful to the end, she seldom doubted that the Lord would accede to her wishes.

  She had honed this turn of mind in England during the long years of captivity. I remember that bleak November afternoon when we walked together within the grounds of Winchester and she told me, “Before this time, it was always my bodily strength that sustained me through the pregnancies year after year, and the pain of childbirth. Yet both were welcome to me, for each creature wrenched from my womb meant another successor to the throne. But in these past years, it is my mind which has anchored me. I have learned to have faith and be patient. So perhaps I should thank Henry for this ordeal, after all?”

  The years I spent with her, during her imprisonment in England, passed slowly, dimly, in turreted monotony. We spent the time telling tales; it was then she began to relate the story of her life. At the beginning, this was simply a way to flee the moated towers, to escape the knights engaged by King Henry, and to distract us from the sentinels who were always at the ready, suspicious of us women, suspicious of our motives and movements. The stories were a way to bend our minds to freedom—the freedom she prized above all else—and to wrest ourselves from the savage cold of Britain to distant sunny climes. To a Sicily of lemon trees and doves; to Aquitaine with its fields of lavender and skies scattered with purple starlings; to sea-sparkling Cyprus, and to Antioch, with its sensual pleasures and scintillating mosaics.

  She told me of the lost weeks in Ephesus during the Second Holy War, with King Louis. It was Christmastime; she and her husband, the king, had set up camp below the ramparts. Few among the soldiers had chosen to venture to the ancient Roman city, as she had, if only to escape the smell of roasting flesh—the detritus from the disaster of the preceding weeks. There, in the Holy Land, she first saw the ancient tombs, which so impressed her, and which would become the inspiration for her own. They reminded her of other tombs, vacant and crumbling, that she had seen as a girl in the Aquitaine, her homeland. The Aquitaine, with its tantalizing echoes of the pagan world, which had fascinated us both.

  Hence the singular plan for her tomb, which she has left with me, and that the artisans at the abbey, who both feared and worshipped her, will implement. It seems logical that she, who adored the ballads of the troubadours and who had herself sparked so many stanzas, should be portrayed holding an open book. “Let them think it is a prayer book,” she told me with a mischievous glance. “But you and I know better.”

  She entrusted me with its completion. “Leave the rest to me,” I told her, my brisk tone masking sadness; never had my own words resounded with such dreadful finality. She knew I would have the tomb executed to her liking, and that I would also gather the requisite talismans to accompany her to the afterlife. Her simplest crown, “to keep me company” she had instructed; her favorite rings, a lock of her daughter Joanna’s hair, the signet of Richard’s reign, a carnelian scarab given to her by her father, who had been given it by his. The pilgrim shell from Santiago de Compostela and the Becket casket she had already bequeathed to me.

  She was, by then, that darkest January, nearly sightless. “Give me music,” she commanded one especially dismal afternoon. Thus, as I had done before, I summoned Alardus the minstrel to play her favorite songs—the music she had heard as a girl in the courts of her father and grandfather, the dukes of Aquitaine. There was no need to ask Mother Mathilda to grant permission for this irregular act: this was a request from the dying queen, after all. “As queen, I overrule the abbess,” she once told me, adding with characteristic realism, “and in any case, even here the highborn have privileges—surely you, as a countess, must at least tacitly acknowledge that.” And if I were, one day, to take the veil? I asked somewhat slyly. To this she merely responded with a sphinxlike smile.

  During that week we burned many of the queen’s private letters and documents. “You have burned them all,” she said to me several times; this was framed as royal dictum, rather than question. Over the years she had entrusted me with preserving, and sometimes copying, her most important letters—as keepsakes, as evidence, as means of vengeance. The letters to and from Hildegard of Bingen, for instance; others from Richard when he was held for ransom by the Holy Roman Emperor, still others from the queen’s daughter Joanna when she was married to William of Sicily. Letters the queen had either written or dictated herself, or received from friends, lovers, and conspirators.

  Her sight had nearly failed by that time—that gray afternoon in early March—when, one by one, I pitched rolls of parchment into the fire as she sipped mulled wine. As the flames crackled, she asked again with unnerving insistence whether “all the letters and documents” were burning. Yes, I confirmed, keeping my voice steady as I lied, for I was no stranger to dissembling.

  “Can you not smell the parchment burning?” I asked coolly enough. Satisfied, she nodded—unaware, of course, that I had tossed blank parchment into the fire. To reassure her, I took her frail hand, filling its palm with still warm ashes, as further “proof.”

  I hold my head in my hands now, trembling, every time I think of that moment when I had lied to her, when I had pretended to obey. I saved the letters and papers she had ordered me to destroy. I have committed many other sins, but few as haunting. The betrayal pierced me with guilt I could not eradicate even by fasting: in the weeks that followed I began to starve myself, as if in self-deprivation I would find some peace, some penance.

  Clementia and Marie had noticed how thin I had become and mentioned it to the queen, who could not, of course, discern the changes in me herself. “I hear you are not eating,” she told me with concern, groping for my gaunt hand. I told her it was nothing—I often lost my appetite in winter. All the while, I kept my voice steady, composed, opaque.

  I tell myself ad infinitum that my intentions were honorable, that it was better she go to her grave unaware of the only sin for which she would never have forgiven me. The sin that I cannot confess, for it would be too dangerous, especially here, at Fontevraud, where King John’s men encircle us and where his other henchmen wait nearby in expectation. At other moments, still searching for absolution, I comfort myself with the notion that my seeming to obey her last commands gave her the forbearance to survive another month. In my heart I realize this is only a delusion. Personal slights, even calumnies, she could bear: any violation of her legacy as queen, or that of the Plantagenets, was unforgivable.

  But now I hear the strains of the funeral chant, Dies Irae, come closer: Lacrimosa dies illa / qua resurgent ex favilla. I must work quickly to carry out the queen’s commands.

  All she had requested must be tucked deep within the silken folds of her coffin. And then the forbidden book itself—the copy I created, my final gift to her, for it seemed unthinkable that she should go to the afterlife without it by her side. As for the other, the original—that is hidden here with me, with the letters and papers I have secretly preserved. I must safeguard all when we leave for Castile, to her daughter’s court. Word of the queen’s death will soon reach King John, and spies tell me his henchmen, awaiting the signal in Chinon, will then advance to the abbey. Among them may be—no, I dare not think of it now.

  Kneeling by her, I utter one final prayer. May God protect her and forgive her all her sins. May He grant peace eternal to her, Eleanora Regina, queen of England and France, and Duchess of Aquitaine. May He also forgive me my trespasses, and for the sinful acts that I kept even from her.

  The footsteps of the monks draw close. Then—at the door—the three knocks I have both anticipated and dreaded.

  They have come to take the body. Sauve qui peut.

  Part I