BERENGARIA AND JOANNA WANTED to find out all they could about Raimond de St Gilles since they’d be spending so many weeks in his company. Cardinal Melior was only too happy to repeat the stories he’d heard of Count Raimond’s transgressions. When the count was not keeping company with heretics, he was chasing after women; he’d had two wives, the cardinal related disapprovingly, and bastard-born children beyond counting. He had a subversive sense of humor that often bordered on sacrilege and the troubadours who flocked to his court were just as impious. Sadly, the man was very popular with his father’s subjects, which only confirmed the cardinal’s dark suspicions about the people of these sun-blessed southern lands.
Joanna and Berengaria then sought out Sancha, who had a keen ear for gossip and enjoyed sharing it. “I do not know Raimond well,” she confided, “but he and Alfonso are good friends. He is one of those men with more charm than the law should allow, and I daresay he could seduce a mother abbess if he truly tried. His first wife was some years older than he was; he was just sixteen at the time of their marriage. When she died four years later, he inherited her county of Melgueil. He then married the sister of the Viscount of Béziers—”
“You mean he wed the daughter of the murdered viscount, the one believed to have been slain by Count Raimond’s father? Good heavens!”
“They are a practical lot, these southerners. Raimond’s sister married into the Trencavel family, too. The idea was to patch up a peace between Toulouse and the Trencavel viscounts. Raimond and Beatrice have had only one child, a daughter, whom he named Constance after his mother.” Sancha smiled wryly. “This did not please Raimond’s father very much. He treated Constance so badly that she finally left him and fled to the court of her brother, the French king—the one who was once wed to your mother. It was a great scandal, for Constance was with child at the time, later giving birth to another son in Paris. She adamantly refused to return to Toulouse, dying a few years ago.”
“How old was Raimond when his mother sought refuge in France?” Joanna asked, and Sancha paused to consider the question.
“Raimond is close in age to your brother Richard, so he’d have been about ten at the time.”
“So he never saw her again? How sad.” Joanna found herself approving of at least one thing Count Raimond had done; naming his daughter after his mother honored her memory while expressing his disapproval of her maltreatment. “Does he have as many base-born children as the cardinal claims?”
“I know of only three, a son and two daughters. Alfonso says he was quick to acknowledge them and provides generously for them, too, which is to his credit, for not all men bother to look after their bastards.”
So far, Joanna had heard nothing particularly damning about Raimond de St Gilles from Sancha, for most of the men in her social class kept mistresses and had children born out of wedlock; her father had sired several of his own. “What of the cardinal’s other accusation, that he is a heretic? Do you believe it?”
“No . . . Alfonso insists he is not a Cathar.”
Joanna caught the dubious note in the other woman’s voice and prodded. “But . . . ?”
“It is just that he is strangely indulgent when it comes to the religious faith of others. He actually seems to think that it is none of his concern, that their beliefs are between them and God!”
Berengaria had been listening in silence, but at that, she shook her head, saying that to tolerate heresy was surely to encourage it. Joanna had a more nuanced view, for she’d come of age in Sicily, where Arabic was one of the official languages, her husband had been served by Saracen physicians and astrologers, and Jews were not segregated from society as they were in other Christian countries. She did not argue with Berengaria, though, not wanting to shock her with yet another example of Angevin insouciance; she knew that she and Richard had often disconcerted his sheltered Spanish wife with their candor and irreverent humor. But even if she could acquit Raimond de St Gilles of the most serious charge against him—heresy—he was still not to be trusted, for her House and his had been enemies for as long as she could remember, and she liked being in his debt no more than her sister-in-law did. There was nothing either of them could do about it, though.