Fra Peter gave me one of the warmest smiles I’ve ever seen.
‘While,’ I went on, ‘in fact, the Papal Legate has directly ordered this expedition, and he is, in fact, your direct spiritual superior—’
‘Don’t tell me, you bloody-handed—’
I am very loud when I want to be, and I just spoke over him. ‘… we will ignore your arrogance and accept that you must work every day with the infidel government. For which purpose, I have these licences.’
He fell silent at the same time I did.
He seized both pieces of parchment and read them. While he read, I feared that we’d been taken by the dragomen, but apparently corruption had limits. Both documents were as pronounced.
The priest handed them back to me. ‘On your head be it,’ he said. ‘I will accompany your pilgrims at all times.’
Fra Peter opened both eyes very wide at this volte face. He took a deep breath, mastered himself, and nodded.
‘Excellent, Father. Perhaps you’d like to say Mass?’
Miles Stapleton still didn’t understand why we’d paid for horses, much less paid the dragoman.
Sabraham nodded in the direction of Jerusalem and raised both eyebrows. Quietly, to the dozen of us standing there, he said, ‘Here in the Holy Land, there are as many bad men and fools as anywhere else. But those who are not wholly evil have learned to look past the surface and help their neighbours. Any invader who comes will eventually leave – today’s conqueror is tomorrow’s victim. So we pay.’ He smiled grimly. ‘There used to be old men – sergeants of the Order from before the fall of Acre – who said that it was Crusaders from Europe who destroyed us, and not the Moslems. A little tolerance goes a long way here.’
Miles shook his head.
‘They are different from us,’ Sabraham said. ‘Accept it.’
Stapleton didn’t.
I had no trouble paying for horses, and with the Order’s funds I paid for more, and by Vespers, our little company looked more like an army than I expected. In addition to our two hundred archers and men-at-arms we had Emile’s knights and followers, as well as the two Greek knights whom I have mentioned, Syr Giannis Lascaris Calophernes, of middle height, with a thicker black beard than a Latin might have, who had been with us at Alexandria, and his friend Syr Giorgios Dimitri Angelus, who was tall, ascetic, and looked like one of their Byzantine saints. Both were followers of Father Pierre Thomas; both had marched in his procession at Famagusta. Syr Giannis was married to a niece of the Emperor, and was yet a very humble man. The two of them had a dozen horsemen apiece, in light saddles; they came in a military galley that they owned.
And there was Lord Grey and his retinue, which, of course, included Sir Steven Scrope. I had no time for the young gentleman, but he was in good harness, and they had their own horses as we had ours. All told, then, when we mustered in late afternoon after stripping the hostels and stables of horseflesh, we had almost all of our pilgrims mounted, at least on donkeys, and all our men-at-arms and archers were mounted on horses, although we had damn few remounts.
And on the beach, Syr Giannis unfurled the legate’s banner and gave it to Lord Grey.
Fra Peter, who, as a celibate, never wore a favour on his harness, took a plain square of cloth from a pack and pinned it to his surcoat. It was old, threadbare and brown – Father Pierre Thomas’s Carmelite robe.
‘I promised to take it to Jerusalem,’ he said.
Sister Marie had a good palfrey, and I was disturbed to see her by Emile d’Herblay. They were both friends to me, and yet perhaps I feared what they might say to each other. And we also had Father Pierre Thomas’s confessor, and now we had the Franciscan priest named Angelo, an Italian of good breeding from Vicenza who knew the della Scala and Cavalli and other men there I knew. He had climbed down from his high horse very successfully, by then.
At any rate, we said a prayer on the beach, and then dispersed to the various hospitals and inn and hostels of Jaffa. The town was built, or rather, once had been built, to take pilgrims; there was no need to use our small store of hard bread and sausage on the first day. But it was a difficult town, half down on the beach, half up high by the citadel, mostly in ruins, with good buildings on old foundations and terrible hovels built up against the ruins of old walls. And the walls themselves were not good for much.
Sabraham and Syr Giannis borrowed John and rode off into the evening sun of the Holy Land, determined to find more remounts in the open country to the north.
I walked out in my arming coat, equally determined to find Nerio and Fiore. And even more determined to have a few words with my lady-love, for whom I was as parched as a shipwrecked man on the salty sea. I had a good story to tell myself, too, as you shall hear; I had a reason to prowl the inns of Jaffa. I was protecting pilgrims. But in truth …
I understand that Sir Galahad was pure of his body like a nun all his days, and that this gave him strength, but I confess that I am a lovesome man and chastity has rather the opposite effect on me.
At any rate, I walked out into the pleasant air. The Holy Land in winter can be cold and rainy, but nothing like London, I promise you. Indeed, I landed expecting a desert and found a great many flowers in bloom, and the fragrance of Jaffa stays with me to this day – flowers I knew only in stories, like jasmine.
And there was filth.
I passed through the market, which had marvels, for such a small, decayed place: good silk, cheaper than Cyprus; saffron, which was worth more than gold at home. I bought a packet said to come from Cilicia, from the very cave of Tartarus, which sounded wonderful to me and still does. I suppose it is worth mentioning that there was still a Christian king in Cilicia then – Constantine, and he was an ally of Peter of Cyprus. The saffron seller told me a rumour – in French as good as my own – that the Cilician Armenians and the Turks were already fighting over the hills of Lebanon to the north, and around Antioch, because the Mamluks had abandoned all their garrisons.
And further along, I bought a lump of lapis lazuli for no better reason than that I fancied the colour. The blue is superb – the very blue you see in the best manuscripts and paintings. I suppose I had some notion of getting it carved, or having a clasp belt made for my lady. The stuff was rare even in the Holy Land, and considered almost magical. I parted with the whole of a Cypriote gold coin for the chunk. I dropped it into my purse and walked on in the beautiful light, looking for something with which to woo my lady.
I found Bernard and Jason playing cards with Fiore, and looking the way men always look when facing him at cards. His memory was formidable, and he could sometimes find you near the bottom of the pack, saying things like, ‘Whichever one of us gets the ten of swans will make his point,’ while someone like you or I would still be trying to remember what makes a score and how the rules work.
Nerio, may I add, only ever played with Fiore as a means of giving the poverty-stricken Friulian some silver.
Emile and her people had a hostel that was considerably grander than ours, with a fine open room painted white, and a courtyard with a fountain and lemon trees, probably the best building in the town. I sat in the good white room until the oil lamps were lighted, very different from the candle-and-tallow stink of home. I had olives, which I didn’t like but have since learned to love, and some not very good cheese. The bread was odd, and there was no butter, and you had to dip your bread in oil – I’d done it in Italy, but everything was a little different in the Holy Land, and had a sort of magical air about it.
I had written out a watch schedule on my wax tablet, just the way the Order and Sir John Hawkwood arrange watches in hostile billets. It was difficult, sitting comfortably in a good inn, drinking bad wine in a city manifestly at peace, to be practising the art of war, but I was damned if I was going to be surprised here, and Fra Peter was very much of the same mind, and we’d written a watch schedule for two days. We’d had a dif
ficult conversation dividing the knights of our little army into those we considered reliable and those we did not. At any rate, Ser Jason was commanding a watch, and he affected to grumble a great deal, pretending that he had not the skill of arms or the name to lead a contingent of knights and archers. But he did, of course, and he did so right well.
And Bernard, of course, merely accepted the tablet and copied his times onto his own tablet.
Jean-François was feeling poorly, so I took his name off the list for the day.
I had saved Emile’s inn for last, after a long round of watch assignments, and I sat drinking wine, hoping that she might appear. I suspect I was tolerably transparent to my friends, but at the same time, there were, and are, rules to be maintained. I knew that to flagrantly visit my love would offend her men-at-arms. Not to mention fuelling certain rumours.
Nerio strolled in after me with his squire Achille, and he joined us. He and Jason engaged in a ritual of mocking each other that seemed odd to me and always made me fear they would reach for weapons, but no one else seemed uncomfortable.
‘I think we should eat here,’ Nerio said, glancing at me. His expression suggested that he knew exactly why I was sitting there.
‘Perhaps my lady would care to dine with us today,’ Jason said. He raised an eyebrow.
I longed to jump to my feet and shout ‘I’ll go and ask her!’ but I did not. Nor was a messenger needed, because just then, as a reward for my waiting, Emile appeared with both her children in tow. The young nun who acted as her governess had Edouard by the hand, and he came into the room and made a reverence, a bow on one knee, to the knights.
The Savoyards rose and bowed in their turn, and Nerio and I joined them. Fiore never raised his eyes from his cards.
Little Magdalena was six months older than when I’d last spent any time with her, but she remembered me, which pleased me, and she came and made a deep curtsy, and smiled shyly. She was a little more like a sausage in a casing than a child – pudgy and very jolly, with deep dimples and a desire to laugh. Edouard was a solemn sprite by contrast, and it was very difficult to make him laugh.
Sister Anne – I think that was her name – took both children to the garden, and Emile followed her. But she stopped.
‘Sir William,’ she said, happily enough, ‘won’t you walk with me in the garden?’
‘Watch out, or he’ll assign you a watch,’ Nerio said, sotto voce, and all the gentlemen laughed. If I have not done Nerio justice, let me say that he was very good at this sort of thing – a laugh or a jape to cover any little social stress.
At any rate, I rose, perhaps a little too eagerly, and followed Emile into the inn’s little garden, which had a tiny fountain and a bed of flowers. The courtyard garden reminded me of pretty convents and priories I’d seen in England, and it occurred to me that the Holy Land might have exerted some effect on the rest of Europe in this manner, because flowers were so common in the Holy Land.
At any rate, I made some banter with Emile and then played a little with Edouard, but he was still afraid of me. I found him a small stick, though, and he began to fight one of the columns with all the energy of a knight practising on a pell, and that made his mother smile.
‘Do you think you will teach Edouard to be a knight?’ she asked me suddenly.
‘Perhaps,’ I said. And then, because there would never be a better moment, I said, ‘It would be certain, if you would marry me.’
‘Marry you?’ she asked. Her eyes flashed a moment. She was a countess, and I a sort of jumped up hedge-knight. I had once been an under-cook. And she knew it all.
But it was she who smiled. ‘Marry me?’ she asked. ‘Most men do not marry their lemans.’
I knew that tone. I knew her sudden desire to hurt herself.
And, because I’m not quite a fool, I realised in that moment that the japes and insults hurt her. Because she feared that they were true – that she was a bad woman.
I was suddenly ashamed that I had not challenged Scrope. What kind of knight was I, to accept an insult against my lady, an insult of the most vulgar kind?
Had she heard of it? I had to assume she had. That was like swallowing a knife, I promise you. And never, never had the Order’s rules and the world of arms been more at odds.
All these thoughts, and some others, passed in one beat of my heart. I had time to take a breath. There was no good answer – there never was, when Emile was bent on causing herself pain. But I loved her, and there was nothing to be gained from denial.
‘Marry me,’ I said. ‘I love you.’ I might have said, ‘We can put an end to gossip,’ and I might have said, ‘We can lawfully enjoy one another,’ but those were not the arguments for that moment.
Emile had an odd smile on her face, and just for a moment, she looked down at her feet. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘how rich an heiress I am?’
In truth, I had some notion, as she could maintain six knights and a dozen other retainers, wait months in Venice, sail to Rhodes, and then to Jerusalem. Her husband had led quite a tail of routiers. She had to be very rich.
‘I do not want your riches,’ I said.
Emile put a hand on my arm. ‘William. Would you marry me if I told you that every estate I own is entailed to my son, and you will own none of them?’
I laughed. By God, that was a good laugh. Oh, I can put myself in her place easily enough – the up-and-coming landless knight, the entailed estate, the hated husband. Now dead. She must have thought …
I didn’t need to care. I suspect I grinned. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Then no man can say I love you for your lands.’
‘Truly?’ she asked. Sister Anne was scowling. Each of us had just touched the other; this was not a court of love, but the courtyard of an inn.
‘Truly,’ I said.
Edouard chose that moment to assault Sister Anne, and she was, despite her strong ideas of rules for her betters, a fine young woman with a vigorous touch, and she tussled with the boy and he screamed with pleasure. Magdalena began to pummel her governess with her small fists to support her brother, and Emile’s hand found mine and pulled sharply. It was sometimes easy to forget that Emile had a will of her own. As she tugged, she stepped back, between the columns that supported the stable roof, and before I was inside its arch, we were kissing.
That was quite a kiss, for all that it lasted perhaps as long as it takes a governess to tackle a young boy and take away his stick. I confess that the kiss had a moment in it where it seemed completely reasonable to me that I was about to make love to the Countess d’Herblay standing up in a stall with a donkey, but, of course, that was not to happen. She bit my lip, pushed me, and walked away, tugging her kirtle down sharply over her hips.
She looked back at me …
I had to breathe. The look was as much as the kiss, or more.
I went to look at the horses. I had little choice, being in a state.
Such a state.
That night, while I stood watch and rode from picket to picket around the town of Jaffa, Emile drank wine with her knights, and broached to them the possibility of marrying me. And bless them, they made no quibbles, save that they feared the gossip of the Gascons and some of the other Savoyards about her honour. I think all of her knights assumed I’d killed d’Herblay. And thought the better of me for it.
At any rate, the next day, short on sleep and cursing Marc-Antonio, who had not curried my warhorse, I was standing in the stable just after daybreak. Marc-Antonio was making some miserable excuse, and John was looking at both of us with a sort of contempt that raised my ire. I’d had little sleep and my mood was not good.
‘He always says it is my job to care for you and he cares for your horses,’ Marc-Antonio whined.
‘Lie,’ spat John. ‘I went on scout, Lord leads. You do work. We agreed.’
Marc-Antonio was miserable with the knowledge
of having failed, and, like many young men, chose to vent his anger at me. ‘It’s not fair,’ he said.
I hit him. I hadn’t hit him often in our year together, but I’d had enough of his whining and I knocked him down.
John gave me a funny look.
‘Get up,’ I said. ‘That was for lying. And whining.’
Marc-Antonio was so angry he could barely contain himself. He pushed past me and John frowned. ‘He say …’ he began, but Emile, dressed for riding in her pilgrim clothes, pushed into the stall.
‘I am interrupting something,’ she said. ‘Why is your Marc-Antonio looking all blotchy?’
‘I hit him,’ I said.
John made a little bobbing motion of his head and slipped under my warhorse’s belly and began currying, the brush going very fast.
Emile looked interested. ‘My pater always said not to hit people who couldn’t hit you back,’ she said. ‘Servants, slaves, monks, nuns. He could be a hard man, but he had some good rules.’
A hot answer came to my lips and I spat it out rather than speak it. I looked away. And back. She was interested.
It occurred to me that she was offering me good advice, and quite possibly assessing my willingness to accept it. You see? I have my moments.
‘Your father was a wise man,’ I said. ‘I’m not happy I hit him.’
She smiled.
John’s curry brush went whisk, whisk, whisk.
‘I would like to accept your offer of marriage,’ she said.
I did not whoop. But I did get an arm behind her, and a willing embrace that had every bit of the same potency that our brief engagement the day before had had. My knees went weak. It was quite remarkable.
John never stopped currying my horse, and otherwise, the big stall was as private as a castle.
‘I would like to be wed in Jerusalem,’ she said.
I floated through the morning after that, and it is probably a miracle that I had my warhorse tacked up, and was astride my good riding horse, was wearing my brigantine and maille, and carrying a pair of javelins in a case and my long sword. If you have not lived the life of arms, it might be possible to imagine that a knight rides abroad every day cap à pied in gleaming harness and carrying a heavy lance for jousting, but the Knights of Saint John had long experience in the Holy Land and tended to lighter harness and weapons more suited to fighting bandits than to tournaments. A heavy lance can be a very valuable tool on a close-packed battlefield, but in the open ground between settlements around Jerusalem, you’ll never catch the bandit who shot your horse, much less get to wield a heavy lance.
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