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to his coastal holdings saying that he had seen the sea and the rain turn to blood. Agnes looked on his increasing age and feebleness with a smug smile that she directed at Geoffrey too often for my liking. We all began to think about the succession , when my grandfather might no longer be able to rule his Duchy.
    Not long after Hugh and his mother visited us, my grandfather went away to the monastery at Maillezais, and my uncle Guill became the new duke. I sobbed loudly when grandfather prepared to leave.
    ‘I am tired and old, little one,’ he remonstrated as I clungpassionately to him. ‘My son needs to take control of Aquitaine and grow into his command. It is time. He is a full-grown man and I am a sick old man.’
    In the long winter nights, I had stroked his hair when he fell asleep by lamplight amongst the books, his white head resting on the gold letters of a manuscript that was a gift from Cnut, the Norse King of England.
    ‘But you’re not sick or old Grandpapa,’ I wailed, ‘you’re just middle-aged. And you’ll look really silly with a bald patch shaved on your head.’
    He laughed at my carefully thought-out objections, with tears in his eyes, and then left me with Agnes. I knew that I would never see him again.
    I like my uncle Guill, now Duke of Aquitaine, and his wife, Eustachie, is young and has been kind to me, but now I watch as Eustachie wrings her hands in despair at the scroll that I have just read to her.
    ‘Three million kroners!’ exclaims Eustachie again, looking in bewilderment to me. Even the rich lands of Aquitaine cannot muster such a high ransom for my uncle who has been captured and imprisoned by my childhood friend, Geoffrey of Anjou. The Geoffrey I had known disappeared after his mother’s burning and never came back. He seemed deadened and stiff all the time. He turned his attention to developing new fighting games that he called ‘tournaments’ and, worst of all, he began to flirt with horrible Agnes, a widow after my grandfather died in the monastery, and hungry for a new young husband.
    There was something between them even before Grandfather died. I caught Agnes one morning kissing Geoffrey in the stone passageway. I looked away quickly, but I had seen that his hand was up her skirts and hers was in his clothing. She called me to her room later, but before she could speak I said, ‘You don’t need to worry. I would never betray Geoffrey and I would never betray a woman,’ (even you, I thought) ‘to the anger of a man.’ She considered me gravely, wondering if she should threaten or cajole me; but eventually she nodded, decided to hold her tongue, and dismissed me. She treated me more kindly, of course, after that.
    When Agnes married Geoffrey last year my first reaction was a desperate jealousy that she should have my friend, but then my jealousy turned to anxiety when I thought of Agnes’ ruthless ambition combined with Geoffrey’s famed prowess on the battlefield . Agnes never made a secret of the fact that she wanted her own son to rule Aquitaine even though my grandfather had left two other heirs, Guill and Eudes. Now Geoffrey and Agnes had captured my uncle Guill and set a ransom so high that it was impossible to meet. Duchess Eustachie handed out justice at the Assemblies with assurance in the first months of her husband’s absence and her Regency, but if Agnes and Geoffrey took this opportunity to invade, I doubted that Eustachie would prove much of an adversary for them.
    ‘Should I send to my father and brother for support?’ I ask.
    ‘What! Do you think Geoffrey and Agnes will bring an army here?’ Eustachie looks terribly alarmed.
    ‘It’s possible,’ I say slowly, not wanting to send her into more panic. We are surrounded on all sides by Anjou allies. If Geoffrey rose against Eustachie and tried to take the throne of Aquitaine for Agnes’ young son, we are not in a good situation. ‘I should write and inform my father how things stand and ask