Richildis would have been deeply pleased to depart this house and never set foot in it again, but that was hardly possible. Her jailer had gone, only to be replaced by one even more vigilant and even less easily escaped. She conducted Richildis down a narrow twisting stair and into the garden.
It was not yet evening, but the sun had sunk from its zenith. It hung over the garden’s wall, trapped in a net of vines.
The roses that had so dizzied Richildis’ senses were but a corner of a greater garden, a sheltered court that opened on an expanse of green: a little sward, a grove of trees, a pool with fish swimming in it, bright as coins. It was all much smaller than it looked, the trees hardly higher than Richildis was tall, heavy with scented blossoms. “Lemons,” Helena said, pausing to draw in the fragrance, “and oranges, and citron. Do such grow in your country?”
“Not in mine,” Richildis said, determinedly polite, “but in the southlands their like is known.”
“Ah,” said Helena. “You come from the northern country, from Anjou, like the man who will marry the Princess Melisende.”
“Like the man who left me here,” said Richildis. “You do know him well, I trust. Well enough that he would feel free to drop his sister in your lap.”
“We are friends,” said Helena, sweetly serene. “He did believe, and I agreed, that you would be in greater comfort here than in the palace or, saints forbid, a convent.”
“Perhaps it is not comfort that I crave,” said Richildis.
“Perhaps,” said Helena. She sat gracefully on the pool’s tiled rim, took up a bowl, scattered crumbs from it upon the water. The fish flurried, swirling over and about one another in their greed for her largesse. She watched them calmly, her dark eyes quiet.
When she spoke again, it was of nothing that had come before. “I’m glad to meet you at last. Your brother has spoken often of you.”
“Has he?” Richildis made no effort to keep the bitterness from her voice. “We had no word from him, not in all the years that he was gone.”
“He wrote you,” Helena said. “Often. Every time something happened that would make you laugh, as he said to me; or that would interest you; or that would make you proud of him.”
For a moment Richildis did not know what to say. For all she knew, the woman was lying. And yet it was a thing that she could well imagine Bertrand doing: Bertrand at least as she had known him then, her tall boisterous brother who could always spare a moment for his sister. “His letters never came to us,” she said at length, struggling not to sound aggrieved, and fearing that she failed.
“He never sent them,” Helena said. “He was so angry at first, you see, and when his anger cooled, he grew shy. You might have learned to hate him, after all. Or simply to forget him.”
“None of us ever forgot him,” said Richildis. She was weary of standing, but she was not inclined to sit as Helena was doing. She wandered a little round the pool and past the most fragrant of the trees. It hummed with bees: a rich sound, and drowsy, though it little tempted her to fall asleep. She was out of her element here. It made her awkward, and worse than that, ungracious. Lady Agnes would have been appalled.
She could not bring herself to offer an apology. Easterners, she had heard, were scornful of Franks new come from the west, and reckoned them uncouth. They were slippery creatures themselves, sly and apt for treachery; Frankish directness amused when it did not offend them. Even as kind as this woman seemed, and as inclined to forgive Richildis her lapses, still she was of this country.
And Richildis had begun to suspect what kind of woman she might be. A woman who lived apparently alone, attended by villainous Turks and soft-voiced doe-eyed women; who professed intimate knowledge of a man who was not her husband…
She looked nothing like the painted strumpets of Paris or Poitiers. Her manners were impeccable, her bearing dignified, even queenly. Her speech was soft, its accent noble. She might have been a lady of high degree.
Perhaps she was, a widow it might be, wealthy and eccentric. Richildis was a fool and low-minded, to think her a courtesan.
The fish in the pool had eaten the last of the crumbs. Helena rose with grace that a princess should have studied, smoothed her skirts, smiled at Richildis. “I believe,” she said, “that our dinner may be ready. Cook has been cherishing secrets all day long; I’ll wager he’s outdone himself.”
Richildis opened her mouth to declare that she was not hungry; but that would have been an arrant lie. She was starving. Surely there was no sin in breaking bread with a courtesan, if courtesan this was. Had not the Lord Christ done the same?
The Lord Christ had not been a lady of good family and pristine reputation. Whose brother had left her here, as if he cared not at all for either honor or appearances.
She was angry a great deal, here in Outremer. Later she would deplore it. For the moment she needed it, to stiffen her back and her courage.
* * *
Lady or courtesan, Helena set an elegant table. It lacked the excesses of a royal feast, the parades of whole oxen, swans and peacocks roasted and clothed in their own feathered skins, elaborate subtleties depicting this extravagance or that. It was simple, but deceptively so. Fine white bread, cheeses of varied pungency, a young kid served on a heavy platter in a bed of rice and strange fruits, sweetmeats fragrant with honey and rosewater. The wine was sweet and heady, and there was sherbet too, cooled with snow.
Richildis discovered in herself a hitherto unsuspected passion for dates stuffed with almonds and dipped in honey, and for oranges eaten simply as they were, without sweetening or enhancement. Once she had determined to yield to the inevitable, she let herself enjoy flavors both strange and familiar, delicacies that she had heard of – even read of in Scripture – but never tasted. And yes, the pleasure of her companion.
Helena was not only well schooled in the manners and deportment of a lady; she was learned, could read Latin and Arabic, and Greek, too. She spoke all those languages, and both the langue d’oc and the langue d’oeil of the Franks, though not all, she professed, with equal facility.
“I’ve been fortunate,” she said over wine and a platter of cakes of every kind and color imaginable. “My mother was a Saracen and a slave, but she belonged to a woman of a sort who is somewhat common in Islam: well born, twice widowed, wealthy and possessed of authority over a family of merchants. This woman, before she died, saw that my mother was educated – such might be wasted on our sex, she used to say, but it had served her well enough, and might serve my mother.
“When she died, my mother was left her freedom and the wherewithal to set herself up in a house of her own with a man or men of her choosing. Those whom she chose, she could choose carefully. My father was a Frank, a sergeant in service to one of the great lords. He could never marry my mother, of course, since she was an infidel, but he looked after her as he could, and after me when I was born. Between them they saw that I had teaching well above my station in the world. Mother had won herself a sergeant; she meant me to win a prince.”
“My brother is hardly that,” Richildis said. The wine was in her; it made her warm and rather silly, but not so silly as to forget who she was.
“Your brother is a baron, which is rather better than a sergeant,” said Helena. “He’ll never marry me, of course. It’s much better for his position if he finds a woman of suitable rank and property, and makes her the mother of his sons.”
“If he does that, she might make him give you up.”
Helena favored her with a long dark stare. “Is that how it’s done in France? Does a man give up his mistress once he’s taken a wife?”
Richildis should have blushed, but the wine had a will of its own. It made her say, “That depends on the wife.”
“He would find a sensible one,” said Helena. “Men are few here and women many, at least among the Franks. Sons die young or in battle. Daughters fill the noble houses and overflow. Only look at the king: four daughters and never a son, so that he must send for
a man from France to be king after he dies. The woman in this country who finds herself a noble husband knows better than to interfere in his more private pleasures.”
“Such pleasures are a sin,” Richildis said.
“How severe you are!” said Helena. “Was life so bitter for you, away in Anjou?”
Richildis blinked. “Bitter? What’s bitter about proper Christian virtue?”
“Why, everything,” said Helena.
“Are you not a Christian then? Are you an infidel?”
“I have never professed the Faith,” Helena said, “and I was baptized at my father’s insistence, in the Latin Church and not the Greek. I was never sufficiently devout. I think I may be a kind of pagan.”
Richildis shivered. Everyone who was not Christian was infidel; that, she had been raised to believe. And anyone who, once baptized in the Church, thereafter repudiated it, was worse than any infidel, who after all had the excuse of ignorance. “Do you mean to say,” she said, breathless with the shock of it, “that you are apostate?”
“Of course not,” said Helena, no more angered by this than by anything else that Richildis had said. Her equanimity was remarkable. Or perhaps she was a marvel of deception. “I’m not passionate enough to be either heretic or apostate. There’s so much in the world, you see, that isn’t endless fretting over the number of angels in the eye of a needle.”
“Head of a pin,” said Richildis. “It’s the camel that—” She stopped herself. Folly, all of this; pure folly. Sitting in this place, drinking too much wine, conversing with this woman who was nothing that Lady Agnes would ever have approved of.
For a surety, she had had more wine than she needed. When she tried to rise, the world reeled. A hand steadied her, attached to that same rogue of a Turk whom Bertrand had set on guard over her. He was infidel. His very touch sullied her.
The thought was impossibly ridiculous. Once she had begun to giggle at it, she could not stop. Even when he carried her away in ignominy, gave her into the hands of silent expressionless women, and went wherever servants went when their duties were done.
And where did they go? She had never stopped to wonder before. Servants served. What they did, where they went, when they were not performing their service, a lady did not ask.
Perhaps a lady should. With that markedly heretical thought, Richildis came to a conclusion. She was not going to try to escape from this peculiar prison. She would stay, and study it, and let it entertain her. Then, when her brother came to release her, if he came…
Of course he would come. He was honorable, in his way. That could not have changed since he was young.
So much wine, rivers, oceans of it, and she could still think. She was pleased with herself. Oh yes: very greatly pleased.
Five
Richildis was not so pleased to wake to a stabbing agony of light, and a voice like drums beaten in her skull, and her brother’s face staring down at her, looking as if he struggled not to laugh. She shut eyes tight against the light and that irresistibly grinning face, clapped hands over her ears, burrowed into bedclothes too richly scented with herbs. Her stomach heaved, but that she mastered.
“Sister,” Bertrand said above her, echoing in her brainpan, “your most humble pardon, but you’ve been granted a great gift: the Princess Melisende will see you this very day.”
Richildis crawled out of hiding, ruffled and scowling. “Gift? Why is that a gift? I never asked to intrude upon her presence.”
“No,” he said; “but I did. She’s been in need of a lady to wait on her, someone sensible and intelligent, who can converse with her on subjects other than this new fashion and that new beauty from France.”
“I’m sure every princess needs such a companion,” Richildis said, “but I am not in need of a lady to wait on. As soon as we can find passage, we are returning to Anjou. La Forêt has need of its lord.”
“I am not going back to Anjou,” Bertrand said. “And since you are hardly likely to leave until I do, I’ve found you a place and a purpose.”
“You have to go back,” said Richildis. “You can’t stay here.”
“Can’t I?” He said it without anger, nor with any particular emphasis, but she sensed the iron beneath, the will set firm and immovable.
Wise of him, to know that she would not go until she had succeeded in prying him loose. Wiser still to find her something to do; though if he thought to bind her with friendship to that lovely, sullen princess, he was not as wise as he fancied himself.
He retreated as she rose from the bed, withdrawing in favor of the maids who had waited on her the day before. She had a clouded memory of their bathing her – twice in a day; how decadent – and putting her to bed. And here they came to bathe her again, dress her in another gown that must have been cut hastily to her measure, and weave her damp hair into an intricacy of plaits.
She had never been so conscientiously clean before. It felt sinful. To feel her skin so smooth and scented; her hair clean, freed of its burden of small visitors; her garments fresh that very morning, scented with sweet herbs – surely the priests would condemn her for a harlot. But ah sweet saints it was wonderful. She said a prayer against vanity, and another against pride; and when that was said, she followed one of the servants to the room in which she had dined, where Bertrand was, and Helena looking as fresh as if she had never drunk the night away.
Richildis wished that she could look as well. She rather suspected not: there was an art of paint and kohl that she did not have, nor had she suffered the maids to practice it upon her. Her bleared eyes and her pallid cheeks were as God had made them. The gown at least was becoming, sewn of a marvelous fabric that, the maid had told her in hesitant Frankish, was raw silk. Its color was somewhere between amber and gold, its sleeves embroidered with gold, and the shift beneath of cotton as whitely pure as the robe of a virgin martyr. The gown caught the lights in her hair, the maid had observed, and suited her well. It would not shame her in front of the Princess-Heir of Jerusalem.
It seemed she had decided to play the game as Bertrand wished to play it – if decision it could be called, to abandon open resistance. She had not failed to take note that if she served the Princess Melisende, she must of necessity live in the palace and not in this house, with this courtesan whom she should not, she truly should not, like as well as she did.
Helena’s smile warmed her as she entered. There was a place laid at the table for her, on her brother’s right hand as Helena sat on his left. In France one broke one’s fast as one could, a sop of bread in wine perhaps, or a bit of cheese. Here one ate in greater dignity, from an array of breads and cakes, cheeses and fruits, and more of the perpetual sherbet.
Richildis’ stomach heaved, and yet oddly she was hungry. She ventured to nibble on a flat round of bread that was, Helena told her, the common bread of the east. It was surprisingly good to be so unassuming. And there were oranges; she had discovered in herself a passion for oranges. She ate two and restrained herself from a third.
Somewhere between the bread and the oranges, Richildis had lost the greater part of her wine-sickness. Her brain was dull still, and her head ached dimly but persistently; but she felt like a living creature and not the walking dead.
The others helped by not insisting that she make conversation. They spoke little themselves, but not as strangers; as friends so comfortable and so long accustomed to one another’s company that they had no need to fill the silences with words. They did not act like lovers, that Richildis could see: though that might be played for her benefit. They acted like friends and long companions.
She had never seen a man and a woman act so before. Man and man, yes; or woman and woman. These two seemed not to regard the differences of sex and station. There was no deference in Helena’s manner, and no condescension in Bertrand’s. Nor did they touch one another as lovers did, to lay claim to the body.
It was strange. Almost disturbing. Richildis was glad to finish breaking her fast, to bid farewell to
Helena with ample and suitable gratitude; to let Bertrand carry her away to the place that he had found for her.
* * *
She had in some fashion expected the royal residence in Acre to be such as she had seen in France: crowded, drafty, reeking of smoke and humanity. Of course it was crowded, but the rest was profoundly different. It was a castle, yes, a strong fortress, but its halls were open and airy, its courts clean and swept, and its gardens rich and strange. The people therein were Franks, well enough, but dressed in eastern fashion, moving with eastern grace, greeting one another with eastern effusion. The newcomers from the west seemed greatly uncouth, ill-washed and ill-kempt and sweating in garments much too heavy for this place.
She could not avoid a moment’s relief, and a moment’s shame too, because she had been made into an easterner. Not in heart, God knew, but in the body certainly. The flow of her garments washed her in coolness as she walked; the whisper of silk followed her, compelling a more supple stride. Her feet in silken slippers stepped delicately on the pavements. The crown of plaits gave her no choice but to hold her head high, as if she were royally haughty and not simply afraid that the whole edifice would collapse and slither down her back.
Bertrand was well known here. He was admitted not only through the outer gate as any man might be, but through the inner as well, past companies of idlers and unoccupied persons, petitioners to the king or seekers of his favor. When one of those tried to slip in in Bertrand’s wake, the door-guards warned him back with lowered spears.
Some of the idlers had even called to him, addressing him as a personage. “My lord! Lord Bertrand! If you would, if the king could spare a moment—”
“My lord, if you have a moment—”
“Lord Bertrand, do remember, we were together at—”
He strode through them without rudeness but without slackening of pace, smiling at this one, nodding at that, and neatly evading speech with any of them. Richildis had seen the King of France do less well in this princely art than her brother was doing. She found it as disconcerting as everything else he had done and said in Outremer. He was her brother still, her Bertrand whom she had loved, but he had changed – more than she would ever have believed, away in La Forêt, when she spoke so lightly of bringing him home again.
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