“Richard? Where are you going?”
He was dressing as quickly as he’d shed his clothes, already had his tunic on. “I had a bedchamber made ready for me.” He would rather have left it at that, but his wife was sitting up, looking so shocked that he came back to the bed. “I have not been sleeping well of late,” he said reluctantly. “I did not want to keep you from sleeping, too, Berenguela.”
She was still trying to make sense of this. “I do not mind.”
“Well, I do,” he said, summoning a smile. “I have enough on my conscience without robbing you of sleep, too, little dove.” Leaning over, he kissed her lightly and was gone before she could respond.
Berengaria sat without moving for a long time after the door had closed behind him. Kings and queens always had their own chambers. Richard had come to her when he wanted to claim his marital rights, as she’d suspected most kings did. But not once had he ever left her bed afterward. She was stunned now by his abrupt departure, feeling bereft, feeling rejected, feeling as if she’d just been slapped in the face. She realized suddenly that this was the first time he’d called her by his favorite endearment, “little dove.” And when had he used it? As he was about to leave her. She lay back, hugging the pillow tightly. After a while, she wept.
PHILIPPE WAS ABLE TO redress his humiliating defeat at Fréteval to some extent by inflicting an equally humiliating defeat upon John while Richard was off in Aquitaine. John and the Earl of Arundel had been besieging the stronghold of Vaudreuil, and when Philippe learned of this, he made an impressive march from Chateaudun to Vaudreuil, covering the one hundred miles in just three days. Arriving at dawn, he caught John and Arundel by surprise. John and the earl fled, as did their mounted knights, but Philippe captured their men-at-arms, supplies, and siege weapons.
Richard had a much more successful campaign than his younger brother. On July 22, he wrote to Hubert Walter that “By the Grace of God, who in all things upholds the right, we have captured Taillebourg and Marcillac and the whole land of Geoffrey de Ran?on; also the city of Angoulême, Chateauneuf sur Charente, Montignac, Lachaise, and all the other castles and the whole land of the Count of Angoulême in its entirety.” With perhaps pardonable pride, he boasted that he’d captured the city and citadel of Angoulême in a single evening, and had taken prisoner three hundred knights and a vast number of soldiers, signing it “Myself as witness at Angoulême, 22 July.”
Despite Richard’s overwhelming success in the south, he agreed to a truce that ratified the status quo, allowing Philippe and him to keep the lands they held as of July 23. The terms were favorable enough to Philippe to start rumors that Longchamp had acted on his own and that Richard was not pleased with his chancellor. But Longchamp did nothing that his king did not want him to do. As little as Richard liked the terms of the truce, he needed the breathing space, for although he’d easily quenched rebellion in his southern domains, he knew that the real war would be fought in Normandy, and because of the vast ransom he’d been forced to pay, for the first time he had fewer resources to draw upon than the French king. According to the Treaty of Tillieres, the truce was to hold until November of the following year. All knew, though, that neither Richard nor Philippe intended to honor it.
THE DEATHS OF TANCRED and his son Roger had taken the heart out of the Sicilian resistance to Heinrich and when he marched into Italy, he encountered no opposition. By August 13, the city of Naples opened its gates to him. He then exacted a merciless vengeance upon Salerno, whose citizens had seized his empress three years ago and given her to Tancred. Taking the city by storm, he turned it over to his army and the result was a bloodbath of rape and murder and plunder. The citizens not slain were banished into exile and Heinrich ordered the city walls razed. Tancred’s desperate widow fled with her daughters and her small son to Caltabellotta and Admiral Margaritis negotiated the surrender of the Sicilian government to the German emperor.