The Winter Crown by Elizabeth Chadwick Read Free Book Online Page B

on her knee, vibrant as the sun with life, arms around her neck in a tight squeeze. All now to become corruption and dust. She whispered under her breath as she worked, telling him she was here, that everything was safe and all right, even though it wasn’t.
    Isabel and Emma took the baby and Jeoffrey elsewhere lest whatever ill vapours had invaded Will’s body affected them too. Father Peter and Alienor’s advisers tried to make her leave, but she refused, growing angry when they persisted. Let the room be fumigated with incense and let the shutters remain open to allow the spring day to flood the chamber, because she wanted to remember her son as a being of light, far removed from the suffocating night hours and the terrible fever that had burned him up before her eyes. Alienor’s numbness intensified as the hours passed until it was like a heavy iron lid covering a cauldron simmering with grief and guilt and fear. She dared not lift the lid because she knew the resultant burst of emotion would kill her too.
    By the time evening came round again, Will had been stitched in a shroud of the finest linen, double-wrapped and then enfolded in a length of red silk, but with his face exposed. A small coffin had been swiftly prepared and he was placed in it with rose petals and his favourite toy sword that only a day since had been killing imaginary foes in the garden, while death waited its moment in the shadows.
    Will lay in state in Windsor’s chapel surrounded by a blaze of candles and lamps, in order to hold the light as the sun went down. Alienor insisted on kneeling in all that hot shimmer to keep vigil throughout the night. Isabel and Emma stayed at her side throughout, and neither woman spoke out to try and dissuade her because they loved her and they knew the strength of her will.
    At dawn, following a requiem mass, Will’s coffin was borne from the chapel and placed in a cart decked with royal shields and rich cloth to be taken the seventeen miles to Reading Abbey where he was to be buried at the feet of his great-grandsire, the revered King Henry I.
    Father Peter tried to dissuade Alienor from accompanying the cortège, saying she had already endured too much, and for the sake of her unborn child she should remain at Windsor and let others attend to the burial, but Alienor was adamant. ‘I will be with him when he is buried,’ she said. ‘I am his mother, and he remains my responsibility, even if he breathes no more. You will not sway me from this course, so do not try.’
    Heavily pregnant, unable to ride a horse, she travelled in a litter. The road between Windsor and Reading was sound and they made steady progress. With the litter curtains drawn shut, Alienor tried to rest and gather herself for what had to be done. Her womb continued to contract and relax at regular intervals, although without pain. The journey was a risk, but she could not have let her little boy go alone into the dark. It would have been different had Henry been here, but he wasn’t and the responsibility was hers – all of it. She had to see it through, on this bright spring morning, to its bitter end.
    The weather changed for the return to Windsor next day. Clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon and heavy rain turned the road into a patchwork of sludgy puddles. The going was slow and behind the litter curtains Alienor counted her prayer beads through her fingers and saw images of the candles ranked around the tomb of King Henry I, and the darkness of the hole into which they had lowered her son. Not three years in the world and already finished with it. The chanting of monks; the scrape of a shovel tip on slate and soil; the weeping of her women. Alienor had not cried. That response was buried under a slab of numb disbelief.
    Two days ago people had run to line the road to watch the funeral cavalcade pass by in brilliant sunshine, expectant of receiving alms, curious, but respectful. On the return only a few hardy or desperate