The Rain Maiden Read online

  The Rain Maiden

  by Jill M. Phillips

  Isabel the Child—She was a forbidden fruit - voluptuous, ripe for passion, but still merely a child when she was forced to marry the king of France. So young and seemingly so naive, no one could guess that the child-bride possessed an astonishing sexual appetite.

  Isabel the Temptress—Her husband King Philippe-Auguste scorned her…until she set his bedchamber afire with her wild sexual exploration. If the young king was a slave to desire, Isabel would offer him an orgiastic feast, plotting that ultimate she would rule him.

  Isabel the Queen—Clever, cunning, willful, she seduced ad charmed the royalty of Europe, then dressed in rags and took to the streets to win the favor of the peasants. Many called her mad, but they all came to adore the flaxen-haired Queen of the Franks.

  Isabel the Legend—Though Isabel’s cold body lay entombed in the cathedral of Notre Dame, Philippe was haunted by the memory of her captivating beauty, her exquisite grace. He could not forget her dying words: “You are mine until the grave makes ghosts of both of us.”

  TO L.

  “What gift to give? I would as

  soon be blessed,

  To lay all this at your feet with

  all the rest…”

  “That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat

  Thy breasts like honey! that from face to feet

  Thy Body were abolished and consumed,

  And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed…”

  —SWINBURNE

  Prologue

  Grey. Rain-beaded stone tinctured by shadow-limbs of faded trees. Dismal dawn. Sky, ashen and oblique. Paris. Late winter. Everywhere, grey.

  Adele of Champagne stood at the window looking out over the city. Her thoughts, unsettled, fluttered like the wings of a thousand birds. Meaningless shadows chased through her mind. Uneasiness. Distemper. Fatigue after a night of nightmare vigil. She shivered. It was cold and the chill bit into her bones achingly.

  Once long ago she had been warm. Glowing with beauty and expectation she had come west from the wine country to marry Louis VII. Two renowned beauties had preceded her, both of them unable to bear the son he needed. Within a few years Adele had succeeded, and her future had glittered with promise and sunlight.

  But the world was a greyer place now. She was no longer young. She was no longer beautiful. Pity women. They might sniff power but never taste it; dream of love but never know it; have beauty but never keep it. She looked down at her hands. From their wrinkled perch the rings glinted up, rich and teasing. Memory steeped in vinegar …

  Oblivion was better. Death had its pleasures; the living could be just as cold. She thought of Philippe. Somewhere out in the royal demesne the young King of France was a widower and did not know it. Settling herself on the long stone bench, out of the way of the window draft, she waited for his return and dozed fitfully. A white wraith chased her through a foggy dream.

  She started to a sudden rush of wakefulness—footsteps on the stone stairs. He stood a few feet from her, tall and thin, his unruly black hair curled against his neck just brushing the shoulder of his rumpled surcoat. For a moment he looked at her without speaking, and she studied his expression. It was an old face, belying his youth—sallow, hollow-cheeked. His gaze leapt at her, black-eyed and intense but his voice was fainter. “Mother?”

  Her arms reached for him. “Oh Philippe . . Unaided the tears came, choking off the sentence, but the tears told him the answer. Involuntarily he stepped back, unwilling to believe. It was a moment before he found his tongue. “When?”

  “Just before dawn,” Adele managed to say. “She was calling for you.”

  “And the child?”

  Adele gripped her hands together. “Two of them. Both boys. Both dead.” The admission brought new sobs and she covered her face while Philippe stood by in stunned complacency. “If only you hadn’t been away,” Adele wept. “She was in torment … she swore she would not die until you returned. Time after time she refused Absolution. It was only at the last that Sully forced her to take it. She was wild, screaming foul things. It was as though she had lost her mind.”

  With uncharacteristic gentleness he took his mother in his arms, holding her silently for a few minutes. It was as tender as they had ever been. “Mother,” he finally said, releasing her, “I want to see her.”

  “Not now.” Adele clutched a little at his sleeve. “Sibylla is with her.”

  Tension sharpened his features at the mention of his sister-in-law. She was always at the apex of his anger. Headstrong and interfering, always critical, never at a loss to flaunt her dislike of him through witty epithets, Sibylla’s presence at court had been necessitated by his wife’s dependence on her. After today she would no longer be needed.

  With a sigh he drew himself up to his full height, his eyes never leaving his mother’s face. His voice was dagger-sharp. “I’m going to the chapel for an hour to pray. When I come back I want to see Isabel. You can tell Sibylla that until my wife’s funeral she is welcome here. Afterwards I want that bitch out of here for good. See to it!”

  Sibylla stood beside the bed, shivering in the dully-lit chill of a rainy morning. The fire had gone out hours ago and no one had thought to replenish it. Outside the wind was shrill but inside all was silent. Sibylla’s hands were folded and her lips moved in silent, habitual piety, but under her breast her heart was bitter.

  Beside her stood Philippe-Auguste. twenty-four years old and this day a widower. His taut features betrayed nothing and his eyes were dry as he stared down at the small, still figure: Isabel, his twenty-year-old wife. Beside her on the bed lay two swaddled bundles: infants who had not survived her.

  Sibylla stared across at her brother-in-law, hating him in silence. He was cold as ever. No tears. No show of grief. No evidence of any human feelings. All the loathing she felt for him rang in her voice. “Isabel called for you, she needed you with her. But you couldn’t even do that for her. You couldn’t even let her die in peace!”

  He could not play a scene with her, as he had so often in the past—not now, not today. She had never understood his relationship with Isabel. Like the other members of her family Sibylla thought him insensitive, cruel. Of course they could not comprehend. They did not know. They did not understand. Only Isabel. Only her.

  In a controlled voice he said, “You blame me for this, I know, Sibylla, but you are wrong. I can understand that you might wish to ease your own grief by accusing me, but you do me an injustice. I loved her.” Then with less conviction he added, “She knew that I loved her.”

  Sibylla swept her dark hair back from her forehead and faced him with blazing hazel eyes. “You loved her? She died for want of love from you! I wish to God she had never laid eyes on you!”

  Philippe slumped to the floor beside the bed. He covered his face with his hands and sat wordlessly for a few moments as Sibylla watched him, unmoved. He wasn’t grieving! Sibylla knew better, she remembered, she knew. She was not so young that she did not remember the ugly pictures: Isabel’s fits of hysteria, the tears, the sudden fevers, the bruises on her soft white skin. He had done this to her. He was a monster: he had driven Isabel to corruption and madness and death. “Will you still leave for the Holy Land in June?” she chided bitterly. “A living wife couldn’t keep you here—will a dead one delay you, I wonder?”

  “I am pledged to go,” he answered sharply. “I took the cross three years ago. It was your sister’s pleadings and demands that kept me here as long as this.”

  “She is dead—so now you bury her and pick up your plans where you left off. How typically politic of you. And how heartless!”

  Philippe wasn’t listening to her. He was staring at a memory, trying to fix it in
his mind. A girl with hair pale as the sun and eyes the color of the Seine. She was holding out her hand to him as he kissed it, kneeling before her, swimming in the scent of her perfume and watching as the wind made ruby ripples in her skirt … “Christ she was beautiful,” he whispered, fingering a strand of hair that streamed out, gold and silken over the bed and almost to the floor. “There was no one like her, no one. She gave me more pleasure than any pagan ever knew. To touch her—to have her was …” He grimaced in frustration, one fist pressed to his chin. “Now it is over, and I shall never have such fulfillment again. With anyone. Never.”

  Sibylla’s eyes were blazing with hate for him. “As always you think only of yourself! That is all she ever meant to you: a plaything for your lust! You never loved her, never cared for her, never brought her happiness. You degraded her, shamed her and made her miserable. She was so sensitive, vulnerable and fine—and you took away every gentle thing in her life. …”

  His voice was heavy, weary. “You’re just a child, Sibylla, you don’t understand. You don’t know how it was between us. She loved me! I made her happy!”

  Sibylla’s voice was steady. “You debased her! You treated her like a slut!”

  Philippe jerked his head up to look at his sister-in-law; a black-eyed stare. “She was a slut,” he answered quietly, “but it wasn’t her fault. Or mine. It was her father and her uncle—your family, Sibylla—with their unnatural love for her, using her for their own pleasure and purpose, trying to influence her against me, trying to make her hate me.” His lips trembled as though he was very close to tears and his voice throbbed with feeling, “None of you could face the truth: she loved me!”

  “Yes,” Sibylla conceded, “she loved you. But I can’t imagine why she did. I know how you treated her, the things you did to her—she told me! I’ll never forget, Philippe, and so long as I live I will never let you forget either!”

  He hadn’t moved or tried to silence her accusations but when she fled towards the door Philippe’s voice turned her around. His voice was thick, his words dark with the undercurrent of intimidation. “Because of the circumstances I shall choose to forget what you have said to me. But I advise you, Sibylla, and mark this down: you would do well to remember who I am… .”

  For only a second she stood there, rigid, unmoving, poisoned with hate. Her mind was whirling, chaotic; she wanted to strike, to hurt him any way she could. “You killed my sister!” she hissed at him. Then she ran from the room.

  Philippe sat beside the body of his wife for a long while without moving. His emotions were a tangle of anger and frustration. He needed to cry, and wanted to; he wanted to scream his sorrow to the ceiling, to pound the floor with his fists—to curse the God that had taken her away from him. But instead he sat, very still, numb with self-control, remembering… .

  Slowly he got to his feet and looked down at Isabel. Still so lovely! Her head was tilted back and her eyes were closed but her lips were slightly parted as though waiting to be kissed. His Isabel! Wherever her restless soul was now, her beauty remained to haunt him.

  He was instantly seized with the conflicting urge to touch her and the fear of doing so. Carefully he pulled aside the wool coverlet and stared down at her naked body. He had known her vibrant and flushed, pulsing and alive. He brushed his fingers (cautiously at first) across her flawless breasts, then let his hands cup them, the fingers prodding her cold flesh. The odd sensation of fullness and hardness stirred him, and he pillowed his face at her bosom.

  Nestled in a little grave between her breasts was the silver chain hung with a silver band. Philippe drew it out, looking down at the ring he had given her. The ring of the Druid priestess. A pagan relic to symbolize a Christian marriage … Isabel had said, and she had always worn it. More than the ivory cross he’d given her, or the Byzantine wedding ring, or the pearls of St. Clotilde; more than anything that ring had symbolized them. Philippe and Isabel. Pagan and saint, both. Always. Forever.

  With a free hand Philippe pulled the blanket off, tossing it to the floor. The sight of her blood-stained legs and belly sent a wave of nausea over his trembling body and he stumbled forward, collapsing onto the bed beside her. No one understood. No one. She had died for want of love from him, Sibylla had said. But he had loved her—loved her the only way he could love her; the only way she wanted to be loved: ruthlessly, jealously, passionately …

  … in imagination he fled from this place … he was sixteen again, bedding an unrepentant twelve-year-old in the shadow of a cathedral, bathed in twilight and silvery falling mists … and she—she was ripe and hot and wet with desire for him … Isabel, his beautiful child with the body of a woman and a soul as wise as the world …

  He grasped her hair, kissing it, burying his face in a sweet perfumed tangle, wetting it with his tears. In an agony of longing he pulled her closer and did what he had to do, whispering words she could not hear. She was his again—his for an instant as he fought to expel the obsession of a decade in a single sob of joy. Then just as suddenly he was alone once more, panting and sobbing against her unresponsive body; feeling as cold and lifeless as she. My blood is filled with you, my body, my soul… .

  She had always mastered him. First subtly; later with tears and passion and her fierce possessiveness. He had hated her more often than he had loved her, but her body was the only sanctuary he had ever known. “Let me go, Isabel … please let me go!” he wept against her.

  Francorum Rex Dominus Superior

  The King of France, Supreme

  THE ACCESSION of Philippe-Auguste confirmed a seven hundred year continuance of monarchy in France. Two formidable dynasties had soured into dissipation before Hugh Capet, Philippe’s ancestor, founded the Capetian line in 987.

  The earliest French kings were bred of a heathen Rhineland tribe which overran Roman-occupied Gaul in the year 275 A.D., terrorizing the Imperial legions with their fearsome axes and shrill battle cries. They called themselves Franks, and eventually became allies to the Romans. It was this unlikely alliance which repelled the advance of Attila the Hun and his Asiatic hordes in 451.

  One of the Frankish heroes of that famous battle at Chalons was Merovius, who gave his name to the first dynasty of Frankish kings. The Merovingians began as barbarians and scarcely evolved beyond that point. Legend consigned their beginnings to the mating of a mortal queen with a marine deity, but the fierce rulers who sprang from the line were real enough. Foremost was Clovis (the grandson of Merovius), first king of the Franks (481-511). From the age of nineteen he ruled as king at Toumai; within five years he had vanquished most of Gaul.

  The importance of Clovis is not measurable by his kingship (he was more warrior than ruler) but by the symbolism he brought to the French crown when he converted in 499, becoming the first Christian king in western Europe. He had married the Burgundian princess Clotilde a decade earlier; it was doubtless her persuasion which motivated his conversion, for despite their differences she held great sway over him.

  Bishop Remi of Rheims baptized Clovis and three thousand Frankish soldiers, charging them: “Adore what you have burned, burn what you have adored. …” Several centuries later an apocryphal account of the ceremony had a dove bringing a phial of sacred oil from heaven with which to anoint Clovis in baptism. This symbolic transfiguration was the cornerstone on which French monarchy was apotheosized in the centuries to come. Exalted above all other monarchs, the King of France alone ruled by divine right.

  But Clovis was still the barbarian chieftain at heart and at his death carved up his empire accordingly, making bequests to his four sons and charging them to maintain peace amongst themselves. That did not forestall the inevitable: division, destruction, and fratricide. After Clovis there were a few notable kings of the Merovingian line (Clotaire, Chilperic I, Sigebert, Dagobert) but not many. By the middle of the seventh century the Merovingians were a succession of addle-brained adolescents, the rois faineants. The real power was concentrated among civil servants—the “Ma
yors of the Palace” who eventually succeeded the Merovingians as kings of France. Sending the remaining Merovingian claimants off to the cloister, they established a dynasty which later came to be called Carolingian.

  Charles Martel (“The Hammer”) was the greatest warrior of this line; the hero at the Battle of Poitiers in 732, he saved Europe from an Arab invasion. But it was his son Pepin the Short who became the first Carolingian king in 751. Pepin in turn fathered the most magnificent of his race, the man who gave his name to the dynasty, Charles the Great. The French called him Charlemagne.

  He became sole king of the Franks in 771 and in the year 800 the pope crowned him Emperor of the West (a rough parallel to the later title of Holy Roman Emperor). Charlemagne’s territories spread over a tremendous area: from the Atlantic coast east to the Danube; from the North Sea south to the Mediterranean. He was a constructive administrator, a wise judge of individual capabilities, an awesome builder, and possessed a keen, logical, and inquiring intelligence. A profound influence upon learning and the arts, Charlemagne brought about a cultural renaissance which would forever remove the barbaric stamp from western civilization.

  By 843 the Treaty of Verdun had made piecemeal partition of Charlemagne’s great empire amongst the heirs of his son. Wars and intrigues (political and personal) had their way, and the proud Carolingians subsided into mediocrity. Once again the real power of the realm was in the hands of civil servants—the skilled and ambitious Mayors of the Palace. Yet these men—descendents of the Counts of Paris—were a cautious lot and did not seek to establish themselves on the throne by means of a violent overthrow. They bided their time instead and waited for a subtler method.

  It came as one of destiny’s ironic occurrences. The last of the Carolingian kings, Louis V—only twenty years old and newly crowned—fell from his horse and unexpectedly died in 987. Such was the odd chance which created a new dynastic line, whose exponents were to rule France for the next eight hundred years.