stayed to commiserate with Richard and Will Marshal and Hubert Walter, the newly named Bishop of Salisbury, who’d be accompanying Richard to the Holy Land. But the longer Philippe was gone, the more impatient Richard became, and by the time the French king finally returned to the hall, the English king’s temper, never dormant, was beginning to smolder. Striding over to confront Philippe, he said, with pointed politeness, “Are you ready to resume our talks now, my lord?”
“No, I am not. We’ll have to address these matters at a later time.”
Richard’s mouth tightened. But his protest never left his lips, for he was becoming aware that something was not quite right with Philippe. The younger man had a naturally ruddy complexion, but now his face had taken on a sickly ashen hue, and his voice sounded oddly hoarse, as if his words had been forced from a throat swollen and raw. “Are you ailing?” Richard asked abruptly, dispensing with court etiquette, but Philippe merely looked at him stonily.
“We are done here,” he said curtly. “We’ll meet at Vézelay in July as previously agreed upon. Any remaining matters can be resolved then.” And to the astonishment of Richard and the others within earshot, he then turned on his heel without another word and walked away.
No one knew what to make of this, and speculative murmurs swept the hall. Richard was angry, but puzzled, too. Drawing Henri aside, he said quietly, “If he is playing some damnable game to delay our departure yet again, he’ll regret it. Can you find out what he’s up to, Henri?”
“If I have to sneak into his chapel and overhear his confession,” Henri promised cheerfully, and when Richard departed soon afterward, the Count of Champagne remained behind in Dreux, eagerly embracing this new role—that of royal spy.
MOST PEOPLE ARRANGED their lives around the cycles of the sun, rising at dawn and going to bed once darkness descended, for candles and lamps were expensive, and few could afford the vast numbers of tapers, torches, and rushlights needed to keep night at bay. As kings did not have that concern, Richard and Eleanor felt free to follow their own inner clocks. After a late supper upon his return to Nonancourt, Richard was holding court in the great hall. A minstrel and musicians had entertained, followed by a jape in which a motley-clad fool juggled balls and knives, accompanied by a small dog that danced on her hind legs, turned cartwheels, and balanced on a beam set between wooden trestles.
Richard had enjoyed the minstrel’s songs, but he soon lost interest in the antics of the fool and his dog, and withdrew to a window-seat for a low-voiced conversation with his chancellor and Will Marshal. From her seat upon the dais, Eleanor glanced his way from time to time, knowing he was trying to anticipate any crisis that might arise in his absence. The coordination of a crusade of this size was more than daunting. While lords and knights would provide their own weapons and armor, infantrymen would have to be outfitted. The army would need horses and fodder, crossbow bolts, beans and cheese and salt and dried meat, blankets, wine, barrels of silver pennies for expenses abroad, medical supplies—the list was endless. Richard was doing what no other crusading king had dared—assembling and equipping his own fleet of more than a hundred ships, and the cost of these ships and wages for the crews was likely to reach fourteen thousand pounds, more than half the royal revenue from England. Richard had raised huge sums by methods that sometimes verged upon extortion, dismissing all his sheriffs and making them buy their posts back, levying heavy fines, offering town charters, forest rights, earldoms, lordships, and bishoprics for cash, recognizing Scotland’s independence in return for ten thousand marks. Men joked, some bitterly, that it was a wonder he’d not taken bids on the very air the English breathed, and Richard himself had jested that he’d have sold London if only he could have found a buyer.
Eleanor was uneasy about such massive expenditures, wondering how the royal treasury could ever be replenished, for she’d been spared the crusading fever that had infected her son and so many others. But she took comfort in Richard’s strategic sense, his impressive grasp of logistics. Her French husband’s crusade had been a catastrophe of inept organization and shortsighted mistakes. If Richard must do this, she wanted the odds to be in his favor, and she was grateful that