The union of Anjou and Maine did not, however, come to pass exactly as it had been first planned; Aremburg became the wife of an Angevin count, but he was not Geoffrey Martel the Second. That marriage, long deferred by reason of the bride’s youth, was frustrated in the end by the death of the bridegroom. His life had been far from an easy one. Fulk, prematurely worn out by a life of vice, had for some years past made over the cares of government to Geoffrey.[548] Father and son agreed as ill as their namesakes in a past generation; but this time the fault was not on the young man’s side. Geoffrey, while spending all his energies in doing his father’s work, saw himself supplanted in that father’s affection by his little half-brother, Bertrada’s child. He found a friend in his unhappy uncle, Geoffrey the Bearded, whose reason had been almost destroyed by half a lifetime of captivity; and a touching story relates how the imprisoned count in a lucid interval expressed his admiration for his nephew’s character, and voluntarily renounced in his favour the rights which he still persisted in maintaining against Fulk.[549] On the strength of this renunciation Geoffrey Martel, backed by Pope Urban, at length extorted his father’s consent to the liberation of the captive. It was, however, too late to be of much avail; reason and health were both alike gone, and all that the victim gained by his nephew’s care was that, when he died shortly after, he at least died a free man.[550] His bequest availed as little to Geoffrey Martel; in 1103, Fulk openly announced his intention of disinheriting his valiant son in favour of Bertrada’s child. A brief struggle, in which Fulk was backed by the duke of Aquitaine and Geoffrey by Elias, ended in Fulk’s abdication. For three years Geoffrey ruled well and prosperously,[551] till in May 1106, as he was besieging a rebellious vassal in the castle of Candé on the Loire, he was struck by a poisoned arrow and died next morning.[552] The bitter regrets of his people, as they laid him to sleep beside his great-uncle in the church of S. Nicolas at Angers,[553] were intensified by a horrible suspicion that his death had been contrived by Bertrada, and that Fulk himself condoned her crime.[554] It is doubtful whether her child, who now had to take his brother’s place, had even grown up among his own people; she had perhaps carried her baby with her, or persuaded the weak count to let her have him and bring him up at court; there, at any rate, he was at the time of Geoffrey’s death. Philip granted him the investiture of Anjou in Geoffrey’s stead, and commissioned Duke William of Aquitaine, who happened to be at court, to escort him safe home to his father. The Poitevin, however, conveyed him away into his own territories, and there put him in prison. Philip’s threats, Bertrada’s persuasions, alike proved unavailing, till the boy’s own father purchased his release by giving up some border-towns to Poitou,