Mariam smiled, too, touched by Joanna’s pride in her husband. She was rarely so na?ve, for surely the bishop was honoring the Lionheart’s sister, not Raimond’s wife. Joining Joanna beside Roger, they watched as the riders approached. Joanna’s smile soon vanished, for the bishop and his entourage were as somber as men leading a funeral cortege and Alain slumped in his saddle as if he bore the weight of the world upon his shoulders.
Joanna took an instinctive backward step as she realized she was watching a wave of sorrow sweeping toward her, one that would engulf her world. She knew, of course, what grief they were bringing her. Her mother was in her seventy-fifth year. Rarely a day passed that Joanna did not thank the Almighty for letting her mother live to such an impressive age, but she never forgot that Eleanor’s remaining time on God’s Earth was borrowed and payment would eventually come due. Because she’d so often dwelt upon this inevitable loss, she’d believed that she would find that loss easier to accept when it came. She now knew that she was wrong.
“My mother . . .” Discovering that the words were impossible to say, she let them hang in the air, like distant echoes of thunder. Alain had already dismounted. He knelt before her, and she saw tear tracks streaking through the dust of the road on his upturned face. He said nothing, though, and it was left to the bishop to break her heart.
He was not a young man and had been afflicted with the joint evil, so he needed help in dismounting. “My lady countess, there is no easy way to deliver such news as this. It is the king. He is dead.”
There were outcries behind her, but Joanna never heard them. “No,” she said. “That cannot be.”
“I am sorry, my lady. The ways of the Almighty are not always easy to understand. But with God’s grace, even the greatest losses can be endured. It will be my privilege to pray with you and my honor to say a Requiem Mass for the king on the morrow. If you open your heart to God’s healing, He will not deny you His mercy.”
Joanna was not listening. “No. Not Richard. I do not believe you.” She would have continued to deny it, this monstrous lie. But something strange was happening. The ground was shifting under her feet and the horizon had begun to tilt, as if the world were suddenly out of focus. Mariam and Roger got to her before she fell, but by then she was already spiraling down into darkness.
THE ABBESS MATHILDE PAUSED in the doorway of Eleanor’s bedchamber, not wanting to disturb the woman in the bed. “How does she?” she asked softly as Mariam hastily rose to bid her welcome.
“She is sleeping now.”
“I was told she fainted in the church?”
Mariam nodded, thinking it a miracle that Joanna had not collapsed sooner. She’d agreed to stay just one night at Poitiers before riding on to Fontevrault, only to be told that her mother had departed the abbey not long after Richard’s Palm Sunday funeral. Joanna had insisted upon going at once into the church then, where she’d knelt for hours in the nun’s choir, praying for her brother until her body could endure no more. Now she slept but she did not seem to be finding any peace in her dreams, for she whimpered from time to time, turning her head from side to side as if seeking escape from a reality too painful to be borne.
The abbess soon departed, saying she’d be back later. The Prioress Aliza was the next visitor, pulling up a chair and joining Mariam’s bedside vigil. “She does not look well,” she murmured. “Shall we send for a doctor?”
Mariam hesitated before shaking her head. “I think she just needs to sleep.”
They’d been keeping their voices low, but Joanna’s lashes had begun to flutter. Her eyes were swollen to slits and filled with such anguish that Mariam’s own eyes blurred with tears.
The prioress reached over and took Joanna’s hand in her own. “I can tell you what has been happening if you wish. Once he was safely away from Brittany, Count John’s first action was to ride to Chinon and take control of the royal treasury. The young Breton duke and his mother chose to head for Angers, where he was warmly welcomed and, on Easter, proclaimed as Count of Anjou. Count John then had a very narrow escape, for he was almost captured at Le Mans. But the citizens had been so unfriendly that he’d departed at dawn, just hours before the Bretons arrived to occupy the city, where they were joined by the French king. By then, Count John was racing for Rouen, with the intention to be invested as Duke of Normandy ere he sails for England. I’ve been told that Normandy and England are likely to back his claim whilst Anjou, Maine, and Touraine favor Arthur—”