The Young Lion by Blanche d'Alpuget

many feminine eyes. He had overheard the girls saying in English that Guillaume was a troubadour from Aquitaine. To David it felt as if some huge female beast, eager to mate, had surged into his banquet hall.
    He decided Henry had met enough heiresses.
    Those at the end of the queue were dismissed and returned to their places with doleful looks, some sniffling into little handkerchiefs or patting at their eyes.
    ‘There’s someone else I’d like you to meet,’ the King said. He beckoned forward an older woman who had been toying with a fan. Aged almost thirty, Henry guessed, she was the most beautiful of the ladies present. Straight and slender, she wore a gown of dark green velvet and a headdress of golden mesh over what appeared to be honey-coloured hair, her long fingers jewelled like a queen’s. He remembered a certain look on Ranulf’s face when the Earl had mentioned her: ‘Keen to rise in social status,’ Ranulf had said. On any cock she can elevate, Henry had thought. And you, my lord – pillar of probity – lust for her.
    ‘Edith, Lady Walter. Henry Foulques, Young Duke of Normandy, Young Count of Anjou and Maine.’
    Lady Walter swept the fan of iridescent feathers across her face and down her torso, drawing Henry’s eyes to her small, high breasts. She darted a smouldering glance at the King. ‘I’m honoured to be called forward, Your Highness,’ she murmured. ‘And you, Lord Henry, astonish us all with your maturity and your martial bearing.’ Her French had a lilting English accent and was risibly ungrammatical. Henry found it touching, for clearly she had no idea she spoke so badly. He bent over her hand. ‘You come from such a famous line of warriors,’ she added, ‘so many kings. So many dukes and counts.’ Beside him the King felt as hot as a horse. ‘I have something – a relic – I’d love to give you as a memento of your visit to us. It was discovered quite accidentally. But I think you will be as astonished as I was when you see it.’
    ‘Most kind,’ Henry murmured.
    She made further play with the fan. ‘The other ladies will want to tear my eyes out for talking to you so long.’ She laughed at her own wit. ‘They ask if your brother sings?’
    ‘A nightingale.’
    Henry beckoned Guillaume and introduced them. Guillaume took Edith’s hand, gently rested it on his arm, placed his otherhand on top of hers and with a wordless smile led her away. Her face turned up to gaze at him.
    ‘I believe you sing …’ were the last words Henry and King David heard her say.
    Sir William stroked a hand across his shiny pate and squinted at the disappearing forms of his wife and the tall, young foreigner whose curls fell in glossy abundance to his gold-embroidered shoulders.
    ‘I don’t know that her husband’s too happy about that,’ David said.
    I don’t think you are, either, Henry thought.
    ‘In the presence of you young Anjevins every man in this hall grows anxious about his women folk.’
    David was remembering other attributes of Henry’s ancestors: William II, known as Rufus, was an outrageous sodomite who flaunted his retinue of lovers during Mass. William’s younger brother, the Lion, filled his palaces with whores and sired twenty-five bastards on ladies of the baronage. Nobody had tried to count the others. As for Geoffrey Foulques …
    ‘My brother is chaste,’ Henry said.
    ‘I suspect what you call chaste, lad, and what I call chaste are different – but we won’t argue about it.’
    David continued to keep his eye on Sir William. ‘I want to tell you about him and Edith,’ he said. ‘She’s courageous and I admire her. She was Stephen’s partisan. He promised her son advancement in the Church, but that conniving Bishop of Winchester persuaded him against it. She did a brave thing. She rode herself, and alone, up to Carlisle to ask for an audience with me. I could’ve seized her and had her ransomed. But she put her case well, and vowed allegiance to me.