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dined.
    Alienor smiled and answered when addressed, but she was preoccupied and finding conversation difficult. A huge weight had landed on her with Louis’s arrival and the knowledge that the changes in her life were now irrevocable. There were too many new people to weigh up, all so different in their speech and mannerisms to her own courtiers. They spoke the dialect of northern France, which she understood because it was the common language of Poitou, but the Parisian cadence was harsher on the ear. Their garments were of thicker, more sombre cloth, and they seemed to lack the vibrancy of her people. But then they had been travelling hard in the blistering summer heat, so perhaps she should give them the benefit of the doubt.
    Her fears that Louis would be fat and loutish were ungrounded. He was tall and narrow through the hips like a good gazehound. He had glorious, shoulder-length, silver-blond hair and wide blue eyes. His mouth was thin but well formed. She found his manner stilted and rule-bound, but that could be caused by the pressures of the day. He did not smile much – unlike his seneschal, Raoul de Vermandois, who never seemed to stop. De Vermandois was showing Petronella his sleight of hand by hiding a small glass ball under one of three cups and getting her to guess where the ball was. She was giggling at his antics, her eyes shining. The rest of the French party were more watchful and reserved, as if they all had planks stuck down the backs of their tunics. Theobald, Count of Blois Champagne, was eyeing de Vermandois with irritation, a muscle ticking in his jaw. Alienor wondered at the tension between the men. There was so much she did not know, so much she had to take in and assimilate.
    At least, even if he was reserved, Louis did not appear to be an ogre, and she could probably find ways of influencing him. It might be more difficult to circumvent the older men, especially Suger and Louis’s uncles Amadée de Maurienne and William de Montferrat, but she had been accustomed to getting her own way with her father, and there would be occasions when she would have Louis to herself with no one to interfere. She was of a similar age to him and that meant they had some common ground.
    When everyone had eaten and drunk their fill, Louis formally presented Alienor with the wedding gifts he had brought from France. There were books with ivory cover panels, reliquaries, boxes of precious stones, silver chalices, glass cups from the workshops of Tyre, tapis rugs, bolts of fine fabric. Boxes and chests and sacks. Alienor’s eyes ached at the largesse. Louis presented her with a pectoral cross studded with rubies as red as small drops of blood. ‘This belonged to my grandmother,’ he said as he fastened it around her neck and then stepped back, breathing swiftly.
    ‘It is magnificent,’ Alienor replied, which was the truth, even if she did not particularly like the piece.
    His expression had been anxious, but now he stood tall and proud. ‘You have given me the coronet of Aquitaine,’ he said. ‘It would be a poor thing indeed if I could not gift my bride with the wealth of France in return.’
    Alienor felt a frisson of resentment. Although she owed him homage as a vassal of France, Aquitaine belonged to her and always would no matter that he was to be invested with the ducal coronet after their wedding. At least the marriage contract stipulated that her lands were not to be absorbed into France but were to remain a separate duchy. ‘I have something for you also.’ She beckoned, and a chamberlain stepped forward with a carved ivory box. Alienor carefully lifted her vase from its fleece lining. The dimpled rock crystal was cool against her fingers as she turned and presented it formally to Louis.
    ‘My grandfather brought this back with him from a holy war in Spain,’ she said. ‘It is of great antiquity.’
    The vase looked austere and simple when set against the opulent gifts that Louis had given her,