Part 10 The first year of marriage

Louis and Alienor's marriage seems to have started off with promise - if a few caveats and pointers to later bones of contention - but on the whole to have been workable. But as conventional history tells us, that changed over the years until there was much bitterness and hostility between them. The Akashics is an unparelleled aid in getting at the mindsets and feelings of the personalities involved. 

Here are Eleanor and Louis in the early days of their marriage.

Now to 1138 and Alienor and her relationship with Louis a year into their marriage.

 I am getting Alienor very still, looking down.  There’s a feeling of a spiritual journey.  I feel that she’s meditating.  I feel that Louis is close by.   It feels as if they are joined as well.  For Alienor it feels as if they are sharing a spiritual moment.

Is it a spiritual moment for Louis?  I’m going to the bit after it (they’ve been making love). Louis  just loses himself in her.  It’s like liquid gold.  He loses the sense of himself as an individual being. It’s like his boundaries are all gone.  His body feels as if he’s not there; it’s just everything.  And afterwards he just feels so peaceful and still.  He’s kind of lost in space.  It’s a meditative state. 

How does this make him feel about her in non sexual circumstances?  It makes him a little bit confused because it makes him feel as if he is the same person as her, and when they pass, he feels as if it’s right because he’s becoming who he is with her, and when she goes past it’s strange and he gets a bit confused.  It’s as if he’s more himself when he’s with her, than he is when he’s not with her.  I’ll try and find a time in normal circumstances when they’ve not been close together.  There’s a level where they can intellectually beat each other.  It’s a bit like playing a board game where they can chatter and disagree with each other and be competitors, but only in that little context, so I suppose that would be like talking policy or planning things. Most of the time she just sucks in his senses.  If you imagine you’re taking a plateful of the most delicious meat to the table and your dog’s in the room.  You know how he follows his nose and his whole body follows afterwards, well that’s how Louis is with Alienor.  He feels her go past and – Alison inhales deeply -  He might not show it on the outside but it’s as if his aura is being sucked into her.

That is really fascinating that it has developed like this in the year since their marriage.  When they first married, it was just like 'driving a new car' as far as he was concerned.  So I think we need to go back and find out how this happened.  But  before we go, let’s find out how she feels about him in their ordinary life a year later.  She has an emotional attachment to him from the heart.  It is sometimes disappointed because it feels frustrated and unfulfilled as if something is not there. It’s like someone not being able to meet you intellectually in a conversation.  For her the emotions are not being met on the same level.  There's the sense that she sometimes thinks he’s a bit of a fool.  He doesn’t see the obvious and he’s stubborn in his stupidity sometimes.  He will stick to something for no real, obvious reason and he can’t really argue his case and it seems the most stupid thing for him to stick to and he won’t be moved, but then she can’t really do anything about it. But she’s happy enough with her sphere and to be honest she has quite a lot of influence in his sphere as well. She feels superior to him.  She feels as if he is servicing her needs in all ways – in her life and in her bed. It’s not the full thing, but it’s an aspect of what she’s sensing. So now she is driving the car.  Yes. She’s now in control.  Yes, powerful lady.  It’s not instinctual.  She is totally consciously making her own directions.

So go to snapshots of their marriage between the wedding and now a year later and find out how she got the control. Go to next time they came together after he had to leave her shortly after the marriage and go to Alienor’s POV. She’s very pleased to see him.  She kneels at his feet and kisses his hand.  I can see them dancing together and it makes them both enlivened and relaxed.  They’re breathing faster.  They are chatting in a very relaxed manner about their time apart and what they’ve been doing.   They’re still in the public arena where they’ve been chatting to each other rather than to anyone else.  The feeling in Alienor is of excitement.  She has got something powerful and interesting here, a new toy, and a new maturity.  There’s a feeling that she has entered the adult world and wants to be a proper part of it.  It’s like she’s been given permission and accepted into the adult world, and that has made her more open to her own feelings.    She is finding out about herself.  She feels very secure in her relationship.  It’s very solid, so she can be as free as open as she likes.  She can do just what she wants within that relationship and no one can say ‘You can’t do that’ or ‘that’s wrong, it shouldn’t have happened.’  Because it’s there for everyone to see and it has been accepted.

 So another snapshot.  What has changed that a year later Alienor is in charge?  When Louis comes home, he is not relaxed.  He’s feeling anxious and tight, like a band across his solar plexus area.  There’s distaste for a great deal that’s going on in the court. He finds that there are only a few people to trust. Issues of trust are very close to the forefront to his thinking, and distrust for the ways of the court.  When I say this, the double dealing, the lack of true integrity, so people are doing this for the wrong reasons and not in line with God.  Things are really heavy to move, to get things done, and to get changes made.  Everybody’s got their own vested interest.  Alienor pushes herself forward into his awareness and her whole being becomes more solid and detailed because of that.  She stands out from the others and she can make him feel like a human being.  So when they’re dancing and relaxing, he can react like a human being instead of like a king.  This is very different for him.  I think coming back to Paris as the King is a real awakening for him.  It’s a very different experience to what he had before or whatever he imagined.  So that in itself has knocked him off the pedestal he used to be on where everything was set along definite tramlines.  That surety has gone.  The tramlines have gone.  Very different.  It’s like he has now to make the tramlines for other people.  He wasn’t expecting that.  With her she doesn’t expect tramlines.

Another snapshot.  Alienor is sitting on a dais at the end of the room.  He’s walking round the room.  He’s working the room as they say, and every so often he’s looking at her and she is giving him a smile and a nod.  She is giving him confidence. Because of what’s been happening between them at a personal level, there’s a connection there and it helps him and she feels it’s perfectly how it should be and her mind is already in intellectual mode, planning.  I’m just trying to see what she’s planning, but it’s everything.  It involves people, projects, buildings, how things should look, everything. 

She’s world building then?  Yes, exactly, and he’s part of the plan.

So how is Louis feeling?  He is feeling so warm and full in the solar plexus.  It goes up to his heart and makes him feel warm and loved, as if his whole world is perfectly full.  What he is doing in the room is just the peripheries.  The real world is his heart.  It’s like a warm sun. This is the nitty gritty.  No one has ever understood him, supported him, known him and accepted him as he is ever before, without recriminations or criticism, just as he is.  And given him love.  He has never had an experience like this before.  All his previous relationships, where there should have been love, there has been an element of cruelty there as well, or indifference at the very least.  He’s never known acceptance love.  It’s been correction love that he’s had before.

Alison said something very pertinent to me during these sessions - something that I knew, but it was good to hear her mention it.  People alter.  They don't stay the same, even if certain traits are ingrained. Life experience and the physical metamorphosis from child to youth,  to adult, to old person, all have their part in changing the sculpture from moment to moment.  So when I write my work, I have to factor in those changes.  That's why, for example, Roger Bigod in The Time of Singing, is slightly different to the Roger Bigod in To Defy A King.  One is a young man, flexible and optimistic.  The other is a seasoned politician with the weight and responsibility of an earldom on his shoulders.

 

Alison said - having observed Louis and Alienor:

 

It’s amazing how relationships go through different dynamics.  I’ve seen this time and again in my job.  You think ‘Oh, that’s a marriage made in heaven’ and about 20 years later, it’s all turned to horror.  Or it can go the other way.  Sometimes a significant event comes along and sets in. It’s as if you’ve put a coloured lens in front of everything, and everything then is a different colour.  You can never see that person the same again.