have thought about it long and hard. I stand before you, defeated, helpless, hopeless. Do you wish me dead? I give you my life.’
Ah … What eloquence! Mathilde had spent nights on end dreaming of such a declaration. Did she harbour a guilty love for her uncle? Indeed not. She scarcely liked him. Mathilde loved nobody but Mathilde de Souarcy, whom she found more and more beguiling. Even so, he was rich – or so she believed – and she found the scene stimulating; she had become an inaccessible goddess before whom men prostrated themselves. What a delightful idea! She stretched out her hands for him to kiss.
‘Dead? Never, Monsieur. What must I do to remain always by your side?’
‘Do you mean that you …’
‘Shh,’ she cut him short. ‘One should never ask such a confession of a lady.’
‘I am an unpardonable oaf, Madame. I apologise a thousand times over. But you have stirred me to the depths, brought me back to life. What must you do? After giving it much consideration I have found only one simple solution. If your mother gets hold of you, she will make your life a misery. You are young and lovely, while she is growing old and has no other prospects than the thankless toil at Souarcy. Her jealousy will know no bounds. She senses that you have won my heart – without doing much, it is true.’
The image he evoked of her having seduced him in opposition to her mother so pleased Mathilde that she accepted it unthinkingly.
‘What is this simple solution, dear Uncle?’
‘Call me Eudes, please. Do not evoke those ties that wrench my heart.’
‘Eudes … I have practised saying your name a thousand times over, Monsieur. Tell me, what solution is this?’
‘A nunnery, my beauty. You will be a guest at a nunnery for five short months, until you come of age.’
‘I will go to a nunnery?’
‘Not as an offering to God, but as a guest. This form of religious retreat is fashionable among the grandest ladies, including the King’s daughter, Madame Isabelle herself.’
‘Madame Isabelle, really?’
‘Indeed, and many others besides.’
‘Five months is a long time … Nunneries are such deadly places.’
‘Five months and you will be free for ever. You, I … But your beauty and elegance will one day take you from me …’
‘Don’t be silly, Unc— Eudes, dear Eudes,’ she assured him, even as she reflected that Château de Larnay would soon fail to live up to the glorious future she envisaged for herself. What was more, her half-uncle would never receive dispensation from the Church to marry her. ‘Very well, sweet Eudes, I agree to go on a brief retreat. But please, I beg you, find a nunnery less dreary than Clairets!’
‘I already have one in mind,’ he lied as he racked his brains to think of a place as far removed as possible from Larnay and Souarcy-en-Perche. ‘You will need to draft a brief letter explaining your wish to leave the world13 for a spell in order to be closer to God … It will help me to defend us against Agnès’s wrath.’
Eudes’s immediate choice was Argentolles, a Cistercian abbey founded by Blanche de Navarre and her son Thibaut VI de Champagne. It satisfied his requirements perfectly: it was far away, buried in the heart of the Champagne region and the rule drafted by Saint Benoît was particularly severe, requiring extreme poverty, strict observation of the cloister and a special emphasis on manual labour.
Your pretty nails will be torn to shreds from scrabbling in the earth, my little coquette; your back will ache from stooping to collect firewood and you’ll have to break the ice in your washbowl every morning.
‘You may dictate, Eudes.’
As he carefully chose the phrasing that would best give the impression that his niece’s decision was final, he envisaged her sitting naked on a hard stool in a freezing room. He saw a nun’s razor approaching her beautiful chestnut locks and slicing them off before shaving her head. He saw them fall to the ground in long wavy clumps. He saw the tears running down Mathilde’s cheeks and dropping onto her tiny breasts. He could almost feel the roughness of the long linen shirt as it slipped over her head. The whore!
By the time her mother found her the insufferable little flibbertigibbet would have come of age and then nothing and nobody could intervene to save her from the convent. Especially since he intended to be a generous donor, and releasing her might involve having to return the money. He was counting on being able to convince the Abbess that lust was leading the young girl astray and that he as her uncle and guardian was concerned for the purity of her soul, and trusted that God and discipline would keep her on the path of righteousness. How could the good woman who was about to do him such a great favour possibly find out that he wasn’t the foolish girl’s guardian?
The whore!
Chartres, ladies’ bathhouse, Rue du Bienfait, Beauce, December 1304
Aude de Neyrat stretched, gazing with satisfaction at her milk-white skin, which was slightly flushed after her rose-and-lavender-scented bath.
Wearing only a pair of embroidered silk shoes, she was studying her reflection in the small mirror in her private chamber. Perfect. She always looked perfect – from her toes right up to her lovely domed brow, which was accentuated by a subtle shaving back of the hairline in accordance with the fashion of the day. This was not vanity or conceit. Together with her intelligence and guile, her body and ravishing face were her two most powerful weapons, and as such deserved to be taken good care of.
While she awaited the arrival of her visitor, she decided to cross the communal baths in her simple attire. It was a test she liked to perform occasionally.
She stepped nonchalantly out of her chamber holding a goblet of mallow tea, and pretended to examine the recent arrivals as though she were an elegant lady searching for a relative who was meeting her at the baths. A dozen or so pairs of female eyes fixed upon her, looking her up and down, more or less discreetly, weighing up her beauty. Reassured, Aude returned to her private chamber. There is no harsher critic of a woman’s beauty than another woman, for a man’s judgement is quickly clouded by desire. Ten women!
These furtive evaluations were one reason why Aude frequented bathhouses. A woman of her position could afford to bath at home. The second reason was more strategic. Women gossip openly among themselves, even with complete strangers they have only just met at the baths. They exchange secrets of the boudoir, recipes, marital or financial problems and occasionally let slip an anecdote that might be useful to those who know how to bring down the powerful. Aude frequented bathhouses as a means of garnering information. Moreover, what better place to receive a female visitor whom she did not wish passers-by or servants to see entering the town house Honorius Benedetti had rented for her in Chartres. What better place for secret meetings than these rooms ringing with banter and laughter?
Mixed baths existed in those days when nudity was not considered shocking. Some were the setting for amorous trysts and, regardless of whether money changed hands, were little more than brothels. Aude avoided such places, some of which were high-class establishments where tables were beautifully laid out with food and wine in front of screened-off baths so that couples meeting for a few hours might replenish themselves between love-making sessions. With the exception of an occasional, yet burning, physical need, the pleasures of the flesh, whose every trick and ruse she was familiar with, had long since ceased to interest Madame de Neyrat. Her body had become a means like any other of achieving her ends.
Aude stretched out on the little day bed in her chamber and closed her eyes.
Honorius, dear Honorius. She had found the camerlingo older, shrunken, on her last visit to Rome. It was strange how some men’s appetite for power is never sated. They seize, devour, absorb fresh morsels of power, which