“They say he’s a strong fighter,” Richildis said. “If he has something to hide, he may think to conceal it completely in Hugh’s grave.”
Melisende rounded on her. “There will be no killing!”
Her vehemence took Richildis aback. Lady Agatha, less evidently startled, said placidly, “I suppose you think you can stop them.”
“I can try,” Melisende said. “Agatha, fetch my writing things. I have a message to send.”
Melisende’s box of pens and inks and parchment lay near to Agatha’s hand. She set it on the table where Melisende could come to it.
Melisende could write well and quickly, in a good if not elegant hand. She murmured the words as she wrote them, perhaps for the others’ benefit.
“‘To Hugh de Le Puiset, Count of Jaffa, knight of the queen,’” she wrote, “‘from his queen, greetings. My lord, this fight is folly. What can you gain from it? How can you prove either guilt or innocence, when it is known that your adversary travels hither and yon in search of battles to fight and duels to win, whereas you only fight if necessity commands it? If there is a conspiracy, it is that of your stepson and his allies against you. They whisper in the king’s ear. They teach him to hate you for no reason but that you are my friend. They convince him that you were better dead or maimed than alive to mock their follies.’”
She paused, flexed cramped fingers, considered what she had written. Her frown deepened. After a moment she bent again to the page. “‘My lord, that man will kill you if he can. He is known for his hard hand and his disregard of the rules of combat. If you insist on facing him, face him at least with all your defenses raised, and pray to God that He will protect you from that murderous hate.’”
She laid down her pen and sighed. “They always hated him, the twins, Eustace and Walter. Now Eustace is dead – I wonder, does Walter blame Hugh for his brother’s succumbing ignobly to a fever? Is that why he accuses Hugh so furiously, to punish him for an imagined crime? Or simply for marrying their mother, and for being so much beloved?”
“What if there is a conspiracy?” Richildis inquired.
“How can there be?” Melisende demanded. “What profit would he take from it? What that fool said – that he would seize me and make himself king – nonsense! Hugh is charming, intelligent, and quite without ambition. He wants what he has, and no more.”
“I think he wants you,” Richildis said.
“I know he wants me. Me, not my crown or my lineage. He’ll never have me. He knows that, too.” Melisende flung up her hands in disgust. “God! Men are such fools.”
She bent to write again. “‘My lord, be wise. Shun this foolish battle. Armor yourself in your innocence, but let it protect you far away from Walter Garnier. He means you nothing but ill. He will kill you – right and justice be damned.’”
She stopped. Her fist clenched. She rent the parchment in two. “No! He’s a man. He’ll never listen. It has to be face to face. But how can I—” Her face lit. “Yes. Yes, I will do that.”
That, as Richildis saw, was to begin another letter, this to Countess Emma of Jaffa: widow of Eustace Garnier, mother of Walter and the younger Eustace, Hugh’s lady wife who by all accounts doted on her beautiful young husband. It said a great deal for either Melisende’s arrogance or her innocence, Richildis thought, that Melisende could write to this woman whom rumor made a rival. Her letter was brisk, frank, and civil, and said much of what her discarded letter to Hugh had said. “‘My lady,’” she wrote, “‘guard your husband. Prevent him from this folly. You know what your son is, and what my lord Hugh is. Hugh cannot defeat Walter in combat. If he loses this fight, he is maimed or he dies. My lady, if your wisdom can see a way – keep him from the fight. Together by God’s grace the two of us will salvage his honor. A sudden sickness, perhaps – a fall on the hunt – my lady, whatever will help him, for your husband’s sake, do it.’”
She signed the letter with her titles, sealed it with the ring that she wore, that had been her mother’s; summoned a messenger and sent it on its way to Jaffa all so swiftly that no one could have remonstrated.
But once the messenger was gone, Melisende sagged as if the iron had gone out of her. “Pray God I did the right thing,” she said. “Pray with all your hearts.”
Richildis was already doing so. She added a prayer for Hugh. Poor pretty creature – if he had plotted anything, she doubted that it was of his conceiving. Melisende had the right of it. He did not covet power; not beyond what was his already. He wanted Melisende; but that was a wanting of the body, not of the mind.
She could find it in herself to pity him. So simple a creature should have been left alone, and not vexed with venomous stepsons or fancied conspiracies.
* * *
The day of the duel dawned clear and warm. By noon the heat would be powerfully fierce – unusual so late in the summer, so close to the gate of winter. The lists were ready, the field laid out on sacred ground, within the walls of the Temple of Solomon. People crowded there, as many as could pass the gates, the poor and the pilgrims as well as the great ones of the High Court. For the king and his high lords a dais had been set up, and for the barons ranks of benches. The rest must stand or sit as they could, and see what they might.
Banners hung limp in the still air of the morning. Their devices were hidden, but by their colors one could tell: white and gold for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, white and scarlet for the Templars, white and black for the knights of the Hospital. On either end of the field a tent had been set up, a pavilion in the eastern style, white and gold for Jaffa, blood-scarlet for Caesarea.
Already before the dawn people had gathered at the field. By full light only the king and his highest lords, the queen and her ladies, had yet to arrive.
Bertrand had elected to stand well down the field among the common people. The view was better there than from a bench among his fellow barons, and he could move about as it pleased him. His squire Gabriel was wandering now, gossiping as he so loved to do. The boy wore Frankish dress and spoke the langue d’oeil without accent, but in heart as in face he was utterly an easterner.
In time he wandered back, slid into Bertrand’s shadow, made himself as much at ease there as a favorite hound. “Walter’s here,” he said, “sitting down yonder in the tent that’s as red as his wrath, sharpening his sword and breakfasting on iron nails. The other tent is empty. Hugh’s not there. Nor, they say, is he even in Jerusalem.”
Bertrand’s brows went up. “What, he’s not in the palace, with the queen to hold his helm, and the queen’s ladies to serve as his squires?”
“Not at all,” said Gabriel, “they say. They say he never left Jaffa. He may be ill, it’s said. Maybe a fever. Maybe an attack of the galloping terrors.”
“That doesn’t sound like Hugh,” Bertrand said. “I’ll wager he’s here, he just hasn’t troubled to announce his presence.”
Gabriel shook his head. “No, the people who are talking know people who know the guards on the city gates. Nobody with Hugh’s face has come from Jaffa. He’s not in the city.”
“I don’t believe it,” Bertrand said. “Hugh has more looks than sense, but he’s never been a coward.”
“Maybe not Hugh,” Gabriel said, “but you know women. The queen adores him, everybody knows that. So does his lady wife. What would you wager that one or both of them leashed and muzzled him and kept him from coming to be cut in collops by Black Walter?”
That, unfortunately, Bertrand could almost credit. But Hugh must be here. A man did not accept a challenge to his life and honor, not such a challenge as this, and then fail to appear. Not simply because he had his honor to think of – because any man of wit or sense would know that if he ran away, he proved not only that he was a coward but that he was indeed guilty of the charge against him. Treason – conspiracy to murder the king.
Hugh was a bit of an idiot, but not as much as this. Surely not.
And yet as the sun rose higher, no one came to the white-and-gold
pavilion. The king did not appear, nor the queen. Did they know something? Had they had word that had not yet found its way into the common talk of the city?
The crowd began to grow restive. Walter Garnier came out of the scarlet tent in his mail and surcoat, with a squire behind him carrying the cumbersome weight of the helm. His warhorse waited, big stolid black creature, hipshot and evidently asleep. No such horse stood by the other pavilion, no squire or attendant. It stood all alone and empty.
Even from half the distance of the field, Bertrand could see how red Walter’s face had grown. It was nigh as scarlet as the tent.
By now the whole field was buzzing with the rumor that Bertrand had heard. Hugh was not here. Hugh was still in Jaffa. Hugh was coward, traitor, false to his oath and his king.
The mood was growing ugly. Walter flung himself onto his horse’s back, woke it with a raking of spurs, drove it lumbering down the field.
What he would do, whether simply to gallop about or even to mount an attack of pure frustrated fury on some baron whose expression did not please him, no one was about to discover. For as he reached the middle of the field, trumpets rang. A man on a light Arab horse rode swiftly in. He wore the garb of a king’s herald, and his voice was both stronger and clearer than the trumpets. “My lords, my ladies, people of Jerusalem, and my lord of Caesarea! The king bids you disperse. There is no battle. Hugh, Count of Jaffa, has failed to come as he agreed. By his absence he confesses his guilt. God gives you justice, my lord of Caesarea. The victory is yours.”
Walter Garnier hauled his mount to a halt. Bertrand could see no joy in that dark face – none at all. Indignation, yes. Thwarted rage. Bloodlust that must now be unfulfilled.
It would not matter to such a man that he had won. He wanted blood. He wanted his enemy dead, and at his own hand; not alive and dishonored in his mother’s arms, and no doubt at her instigation.
Some sons, Bertrand reflected rather distantly, were less than sane about their mothers. Add jealousy of golden beauty, and one had pure poison.
Walter spoke not a word, not to the herald, not to anyone on or near that field. He gathered his squire and his attendants, swept up everything that was his, and left the city in a storm of wrath.
He did not even wait for the king’s council to declare Hugh guilty by default – as it must. Even Hugh’s allies could not defend him in his absence. If there had ever been a plot, it was broken. If there had not, then Hugh was a fool and his countess was worse, to think that they could escape the consequences of what could only be read as cowardice.
If Hugh had had any respect in the kingdom, he lost it through that, and through what he did thereafter. When word of the declaration of guilt came to him in Jaffa, he fled in what must have been a madness of fear – fled to Ascalon that was held by infidels from Egypt. He cast himself on their mercy.
And they brought him back to Jaffa, a lord of the Crusade riding as an ally of the infidels. He kept his head up, said those who had seen him, and rode as if he had no shame, side by side with turbaned Saracens. Yet that must have been bravado, or purest idiocy. Certainly he was not in command of his new friends. They deposited him in the city with a kind of casual contempt, and rode out to harry the plain of Sharon.
* * *
It had to be idiocy. Melisende insisted on it. She had demanded to ride with the king to take back Jaffa, but Fulk, who had been denying her nothing, stood firm against her. He gave her instead the rule of the city and the kingdom.
She could not fail to understand the meaning of that. He would allow her to prove herself trustworthy. He would not punish her for the folly of her friend.
“It was idiocy,” she said more than once. “His own, his wife’s – what matter? Why in the world could they not have contrived a simple bout of fever, or a plain accident and a broken bone? Why did they sit like fools at a synod, helpless to act – and then leap to Ascalon? Ascalon, of all places! Why not Antioch? Why not Constantinople? Why not, for God’s sweet sake, somewhere safely Christian?”
“Ascalon was closer,” Richildis said, but Melisende was in no mood to hear the obvious. She could never abide fools, and Hugh had been fool and worse than fool. To evade the fight – that was common sense. But to run from it to the infidel made no sense at all. It only proved to those who sought such proof, that he was indeed a traitor.
The infidels to whom he had fled were infidels from Egypt, and that was an ill thing; but the infidels of Damascus, seeing the kingdom in disarray, had begun to move themselves, casting an eye on the Frankish castles along the borders of their own lands. Fulk must settle this trouble swiftly, or see his kingdom beset from within and without.
It was as if all the fears and resentments of a kingdom perpetually at war, the shock of a king’s death and the accession of a king from across the sea, the rebellion in Antioch and the endless shifting sands of alliances among the infidels, had foregathered to vex the beginning of this second year of Fulk’s kingship. Hugh’s folly, and Melisende’s folly born of Fulk’s ill judgment, heaped blunder on blunder until the whole of it tottered and bade fair to fall.
But Fulk could learn through suffering, and had. He was no more at ease with his queen than he had ever been. The shadow of their quarrel lay over them, never entirely banished. Yet there was no open war, and no skirmishes in the dark; simply a deepening of the constraint that was always between them.
She ruled while he led his army to Jaffa. She contemplated following him in defiance of his command, but she had too much sense. She remained in Jerusalem, and waited with tight-reined impatience for every messenger, and did what she did best, which was to hold in her hands the keys of the kingdom.
Jaffa fell without bloodshed – for which the people sang thanksgiving in every church of the Holy City. The infidels were gone as quickly as they had come. They had seen no profit in their alliance, had simply taken their horses and their booty and ridden back to Ascalon. Hugh had no choice but to bow before the king.
Fulk startled him – startled everyone. Fulk showed him mercy. “I see,” he was heard to say, “that we are condemned to the same fate: to love a woman whose heart will never be given to any man.”
What Hugh said, no one reported. Nothing, perhaps. He submitted. That was reckoned to be enough.
His sentence was light. Three years of exile, after which he might return to his domains. Too little, many reckoned – Walter Garnier not the least of them. But the king’s will was firm. Hugh alive was little enough threat to the royal life; and from exile he would be hard put to set the kingdom in greater jeopardy than he already had. Hugh dead made far too convenient a martyr. His friends would remember him then, and remember their dislike of the king.
It was much too practical a sentence for the wilder youths of the king’s court. Their complaints met deaf ears. “It is done,” the king said. “So let it be ended.”
Twenty-Five
For one last time before he sailed away to Italy, Hugh was permitted to come to Jerusalem. A pilgrim could not be denied the Holy City, nor a penitent its consolations.
But his pilgrimage was not to the Holy Sepulcher, nor did he make his confession to a priest of that great shrine. On a day of wind and rain, just at the middle mark between Christmas and Twelfth Night, he presented himself at the palace and asked humbly for audience with the queen.
She could have refused him. She should have, most felt; but he had been her friend. She valued friendship, who dealt it out so rarely. She suffered him to come to her.
She received him in the hall of audience. It was late in the day, most of the petitioners gone in search of warmth. The roof here was solid enough, and no rain seeped in; but the high walls and lofty arches that were so cool in summer’s heat, were clammily cold now.
The queen had a brazier nearby her throne, and a stone warmed in a fire and wrapped in wool to warm her hands. Her mantle was lined with fur, soft grey vair that shimmered against the gold of her hair. Her beauty would never be ethereal –
she was too robust, her face too strong in its bones – but the mingling of rainlight and lamplight laid a shimmer on her that seemed to dazzle the man who entered and bowed at her feet.
Hugh of Jaffa had not prospered in his adventurings. He was thinner, his cheeks pale as if with sickness or captivity. He had been kept close in Jaffa, Richildis had heard, by both his infidel allies and the king’s justice. His prettiness was faded, his beauty grown wan.
Melisende, secure in her strength, might have pitied him. It was difficult to tell. “Sir,” she said. She did not invite him to rise, did not offer him her hand to kiss.
He lifted his head. “Lady? Is that all the greeting you have for me?”
“Sir,” said Melisende again, “you were bold to come here.”
“I wanted,” he said, “I needed – I had to say goodbye.”
“Goodbye? So easy a word, for all that you have done and have still to do?”
He flushed. “I did ill. I atone for it.”
“And why did you do it?”
He of all people was accustomed to her directness. He must have expected it: he flinched slightly but held his ground. “I was afraid.”
“Because what was said was true? Did you conspire to slay the king?”
“No!” His vehemence might be pretense, but Richildis thought not. “I was ill – a griping in my belly. And when I went to demand my horse and armor, all doors were locked and the servants deaf. I was trapped. And then my lady – my wife—” His face twisted. “May God damn her. My lady wife informed me that I was to go nowhere unless it were back to bed to recover from an illness that, unless I am altogether a fool, she had the making of.”
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