?le-de-France February 1169 My mother died the day I was born. I now know that this was in no way unusual, but for the first years of my life, I felt quite singled out by the hand of God. She was a great loss to me, my first loss, though I never knew her. My nurse often told me that I have her bright eyes. On the day I was born, the King of France gained only me, another daughter who was useless except for the alliance my marriage might bring. The day that brought me also brought the death of his queen, so that after a decent period of mourning, my father had to go about the tedious business of finding a new one, and starting all over again. My mother was Spanish, and a great lady, or so everyone said. Of course, they would have told me no different, even if she had been a shrew. My father, King Louis, the seventh of that name, never spoke² of her. So my nurse, Katherine, brought me up on stories of my mother’s beauty, of her graciousness, of her unyielding courtesy. According to my nurse, my mother was a sort of saint on earth, a woman who never got angry, who never spoke a harsh word, neither to man nor woman nor servant. A woman who bred quickly and died quietly, her only fault delivering my father two girls, who could inherit nothing but pain. This paragon³ was held up before me always, so that I, too, learned silence and stillness. I learned that quiet in a woman is prized above gold, and that obedience⁴ was not only my duty but my honor. For in obedience, I best served my father and my king. My father was tall and thin, with the face of a monk⁵. In a better world, he would have been free to spend his life in holy contemplation, serving God. That was my father’s true gift: to sit in silence and feel the presence of God. Sometimes, when the business of state was done, and no one else had claim on his attention, he would let me sit with him in his private rooms, and kneel with him at his private altar. This altar was beside the bed of state, where my sisters and I had been conceived. My oldest sisters did not know me, for they had been married away from France long ago. They were also cursed, I was told, because they had been spawned⁶ by my father’s first wife, the wicked Queen Eleanor, the woman who had abandoned my father for a younger man years before. No one spoke of that queen except in whispers. My nurse would summon her memory when she sought to remind me to be a good girl, when she sought to turn me from wickedness. I spent my childhood in horror of that mysterious queen, a woman who was never obedient, a woman who had gone on Crusade against the infidel and ridden astride a horse like a man. I later learned that Eleanor was not dead and with the devil, but had married the King of England, who was another kind of devil, or so everyone at my father’s court said. Just before my eleventh birthday, my marriage was arranged, now that it looked certain that I would live. During this time, my father called me to him. The ladies of the court brought me into a large room made of stone. The windows far above us held clear

分享到：