debt of honor, one that had to be repaid, no matter the cost, and he brushed aside their emotional praise, explaining that he’d said nothing in case the negotiations failed at the eleventh hour. He’d also wanted to surprise them, looking forward to their joy when Guilhem was restored to them. Their reunion was all he could have hoped for; never had he seen three men as happy as the Préaux brothers were on this October afternoon in the royal palace at Acre. But as he looked at their tearstained, blissful faces, he was taken aback by what he felt—a sharp prick of envy.
After they eventually left, so euphoric they practically seemed to float down the stairs, Richard and Henri shared gratified smiles. Richard then surprised his nephew by asking him if he was close to his younger brother. “I’d say so,” Henri confirmed. “I am much older than Thibault, of course; he was born when I was thirteen. So that gave me the opportunity to play the wise elder brother, which I enjoyed enormously,” he said, with a reminiscent chuckle. “And when our father died two years later, I suppose I became even more protective of Thibault. He’s a good lad, wanted so badly to come with me to the Holy Land. . . .” A shadow crossed his face, but his homesickness was forgotten when Richard began to speak of his own brothers, for he’d never heard his uncle mention them before.
“Hal was no ‘wise elder brother,’ for certes. He could not find water if he fell into a river. Even worse, he was as malleable as wax, swayed by the slightest breeze. Had he ever become king, it would have been catastrophic for all but the French king. Now my brother, Geoffrey . . . he was too clever by half and, as far back as I can remember, we were at odds. Mayhap it was because we were so close in age—just a year between us—but we were always rivals, never friends.”
Richard moved to the trestle table, reached for a wine flagon, and then changed his mind. “With Johnny, it was different. He was nine years younger, and I did not see him much as we grew up, for he spent several years being schooled at Fontevrault Abbey. My parents may have been considering a career in the Church for him; if so, he’d have been spectacularly ill-suited for it. The one time our father entrusted him with any authority—sending him to govern Ireland when he was eighteen—he made an utter botch of it. And when he was seventeen, he joined Geoffrey in invading Aquitaine. I blamed our father for that, though. He’d told Johnny that Aquitaine was his if he could take it away from me. When Geoffrey and Johnny then tried, he hastily recalled them, insisting he’d never meant to be taken seriously. I’ve sometimes wondered if he said that, too, to the knights who murdered Thomas Becket after he’d raged about being shamefully mocked by‘a lowborn clerk.’”
Henri was fascinated, for his uncle’s turbulent family feuding had always been off-limits, and since he was kin to Richard on his mother’s side, he didn’t have personal knowledge of the Angevins’ internecine warfare. “But you were very generous to Johnny once you became king,” he interjected, unable to resist adding, “more than he deserved,” for he’d always viewed John with a jaundiced eye. “You gave him a great heiress and lands worth four thousand pounds a year!”
“And my mother had misgivings about that,” Richard admitted. “But our father had played the same damnable games with Johnny that he had with the rest of us, so I felt he deserved a chance to show he could be trusted.”
“And he showed you.” Henri was not usually so harshly judgmental, but he thought John’s sin—betraying the man who was his brother, his king, and a crusader in God’s Army—was beyond forgiving.
Richard nodded grimly. “Yes, that he did.”
ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, Richard was ready to go home. The vast army that he’d led to Sicily, Cyprus, and the Holy Land had been decimated by illness and war. Galleys would have been swamped in heavy winter seas, so he’d given the ones that were still seaworthy to Henri, and planned to sail in a large buss. It could hold hundreds of men, but as Henri looked at that lone ship, it seemed like a great comedown from Richard’s spectacular arrival at Acre sixteen months ago, and he thought his uncle would