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Death, they say, has a thousand doors, and Eleanor was death incarnate, passing from room to room, from narrow stone stairwell to blank-walled courtyard, from echoing halls to tiny chambers, door after door, untiring. For what work of man’s hands can withstand death? Can wear out its endless patience, or tire its unflagging feet?
Ai las! tan cuidava saber d'amor, e tan petit en sai
(Alas, I thought I knew so much about love, and I know so little)
Years past, there was a garden, the sky wide and blue above, birds singing, and all her life before her, ready to be seized. Henry had been young then, they’d both been young, tearing at life like a thing to be devoured, proud of their ambition: they’d looked at each other, and seen their own desires reflected, two matched souls who had … but what was the use in remembering that? Her ambitions had not died, nor his, and yet they were hardly matched now, and the years they had counted up together, a storehouse of memories, that should surely have left them ever more familiar, ever more entwined, through long habit moving as one, with almost a single will, had instead worn away desire and friendship so that they were now strangers of the soul, even as their every mood and thought was familiar to each other, even though they hungered still.
How was it he could still be the ruthless, dashing, mercurial, bullying, scheming man she’d once seen utterly and utterly desired, and she still seem, to her own mind’s eye, unchanged from the girl she’d been, and yet they looked upon each other now with coldness?
E can se.m tolc, no.m laisset re mas dezirer e cor volon
(And when she took herself away from me, she left me nothing but desire and a longing heart)
Rosamund had seen her once, at a distance, and thought her ever afterwards the pattern what a queen should be. She did not try to model herself on her, any more than she tried to model herself on the sun, or a hawk in flight, but nonetheless, afterwards when she thought of grace, or wisdom, or honour, she thought of Eleanor. How then could she truly hide from her? It would be like hiding from the sun, condemning yourself to skulk in darkness like the most wretched of prisoners, or like hiding from a priest, childishly refusing confession, locking yourself away from punishment but also from redemption.
But all the same, she did not quite expect to see her. An ideal of queenship does not walk into your bower, solid and angry, indisputable real in a way little in Rosamund life now was.
Anc non agui de me poder ni no fui meus de I'or' en sai
(I never had any power over myself, nor was I my own)
They called her the rose of the world, and Henry called her his mortal flower, meaning that she was young and flourishing, and that he was too old to bother believing he saw anything in her beyond that. They called her other things, too, beyond the walls of her tower, but for all that she was of the world, mired in the sin of the world, to hear it told, she found herself always set apart from that world, able to glimpse it only through windows, at a distance, unreachable. He life was measured in rooms, her father’s, then her lover’s, an endless maze built up around her, so that she might never find her way to freedom. They cherished her, these men, but sometimes at night she’d wake in fear, having dreamed she was abandoned, forgotten, running endlessly from room to room, with no-one to hear her.
Com perdet se lo bels Narcisus en la fon
(Just as the fair Narcissus lost himself in the fountain)
Up the steep, narrow steps that circled round them selves, and through another door, and yet another. Every room empty, filled with dead air. Had she truly cared anything for Henry, except that which reflected herself? But at the time, that had seemed love, to see your perfect other half. And now where was that reflection? In his eyes, she was replaced by any pretty face, any shapely body. Had she demanded he be tall and handsome? What right had he to think her old? What right to value a pretty girl over a kindred soul? And besides, in her heart, which surely he should see, she was still the queen of courtly love, the fierce sun who outshone every other woman, who burnt with an undying flame.
Merces es perduda, per ver, et eu non o saubi anc mai
(There is truly no mercy and I knew nothing of this)
There were so many doors, and Eleanor might have found her anywhere. Might have come upon her by her bed, and sunk a sword into her breast, staining her white robes red. Might have come upon her bathing and twisted her hand in her golden hair, forcing her head back, forcing her to drink poisoned wine. Might have forced her to her knees in some cellar, and left her entombed. Might have smothered her in her sleep, or summoned guards to beat her.
Might have looked right past her and walked away, leaving Rosamond to the cold stone walls.
Laisse morir
(Let him die)
She had known, of course, that Rosamond was young and fair. But she had not thought to find youth incarnate, the very image of the girl who had once sat in a garden and planned to be queen twice over, who had had two kingdoms at her feet and found it insufficient. Now, at this final moment, face to face and meeting no resistance, who did she truly desire to kill? This soft, golden-haired little thing, who hovered somewhere between shy and brave, and had all her life still before her, a life which might be anything, which quite well might be ordinary, valuable only to its possessor? This girl whom Eleanor did not know, and who might be anyone at all? Or that other girl who had had her kingdoms, and her husbands, and her way in all things, and had never yet been satisfied?
Pus ab midons no•m pot valer precs ni merces ni•l dreihz qu'eu ai
(Since neither beseeching nor begging for mercy, nor any right that I have get me anywhere)
Does the mouse admire the cat that catches it, the vole the hawk? Rosamond should be afraid, she knows. But she wanted someone to find her, someone to be unafraid of those endless empty rooms. Someone clever and determined, who couldn’t be tricked or discouraged, who thought she was worth seeking out. Her own future self perhaps, who would be better and braver than she is now, more knowing, more skilled, assured in herself. Or if there was to be no future self, then this would do, a glimpse of a future that might have been, how she might have looked had she patterned herself a queen.
Chaitius, en issilh, no sai on
(Wretched, in exile, I know not where)
What’s done is done, and the past is dead. Better to live on, burying friend and enemy alike, burying dreams and illusions and hopes. Survival is what counts. But there are a few moments that live on in memory, their colours still rich. A girl in a garden. Another girl in a tower. A story that runs on and on, wearying even its heroine, or one that stops abruptly short, barely begun, all its future still unguessed at.
Death, they say, has a thousand doors, so that you may come upon it unexpectedly, at any moment, whilst in the midst of life. Man proposes, he builds and he schemes, but fortune is patient and spins out the single thread of fate.