The White Ship

by Nicholas Salaman

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘Send the boy back to his father as Amaury suggested.’

  XL

  The weather this year was more erratic than usual, and Normandy weather is erratic by its nature. We had had some hail which is unusual for late Spring. Now, right on cue, there was a loud peal of thunder.

  ‘You did what?’

  Juliana’s face had gone white.

  ‘I sent the boy back to his father.’

  ‘But then we would be the losers, for our daughters are still hostages.’

  ‘But only in the keeping of their grandfather. Do you have any more of that alcohol, Bertold? It is a brave juice.’ he asked, turning to me, and using my name for the first time, for which I hardly felt better. ‘They make it out of wine, you say? They could make it out of cider, I daresay. If I had but the secret, I could be as rich as the Great Sophy.’

  I could feel the sinister unfolding of something that I was beginning to recognise as guilt. What had I done?

  ‘You do not know my father,’ Juliana told him. ‘He will do anything to keep this kingdom and his inheritance together for his son.’

  ‘That spoilt codling!’ snorted Eustace, glad to shift attention away from himself.

  ‘Don’t let his father hear you say that. And don’t let me hear it either. He is my brother.’

  ‘Half-brother,’ corrected Eustace.

  ‘Half-brother is better than no brother. And who are you to talk anyway! Your mother was not married either,’ she told him.

  Eustace reddened. He did not like to be reminded of his bastardy. So that was how it was left, there was nothing we could do now, the bird had flown, the stable door was open.

  ‘Nor was mine married either,’ I said. ‘God stand up for bastards because no one else does.’

  ‘The al-cohol, Bertold,’ Eustace mumbled.

  I said nothing. Alarm was gathering in me like wind.

  ‘We are getting away from the point,’ said Juliana. ‘With whom did you send the boy back? You must have given him an escort?’

  ‘A couple of knights and a page to hold his hand. It is not far to Ivry.’

  ‘Well, it is done now,’ said Juliana. ‘Heaven knows what my father will think of it.’

  ‘I do not care what the Duke thinks,’ cried Eustace, suddenly full of a kind of truculent bravado. ‘There are soldiers and barons in plenty who can chase his arse all the way back to Winchester. Alcohol, Bertold!’

  He gripped my arm urgently. Juliana answered for me; she had seen the damage the stuff had done.

  ‘There is no more alcohol,’ she told him.

  ‘What do you know, woman?’

  I decided step in.

  ‘It is true. It can only be made in small quantities. You have drunk all we have.’

  The Marshal, who had entered the hall and joined us as we stood around Eustace, now entered the lists.

  ‘You have drunk enough strong waters, sire. Come, let us drink some wine. I am sure Odo can find us some.’

  ‘That I can, sire,’ said the fawning steward. ‘There is Burgundy, newly brought in.’

  Outside, the thunder grumbled away. Eustace would not give up.

  ‘You must get more, Latiner, do you hear?’

  ‘I will see what can be done.’

  ‘I will chase your arse from here to Saint-Sulpice if you don’t. Meanwhile, bring the wine to my chamber, Odo. And you too, Marshal. We will need to be prepared. The fire is laid, Odo. It just needs a torch and the whole of Normandy could be aflame. Here’s what I need you to do…’

  He launched into an extravagant scheme which involved a strategy to bribe a neighbouring castellan who controlled a small castle of no strategic importance. Juliana and I moved a little way off and continued to talk in undertones.

  ‘That stuff you gave him has done something to his brain,’ she complained. ‘Imagine sending the hostage back! Even Eustace would never normally do that. It simply isn’t done. Hostages must be exchanged. There’s something he’s not telling us…’

  XLI

  For a few more days, things continued as they were. I talked and walked with Juliana in the herb garden while Eustace marshalled his little army in the morning and drank his wits’ ends away in the afternoon.

  Perhaps I am being unfair to Eustace. I can admit the possibility at a distance. He was married to a remarkable woman who was his superior in every regard; he was overwhelmed. You can serve a woman like that, acquiesce to her peaceably, fight her, or fall by the wayside. You cannot simply ignore her, it would be like ignoring a volcano; you would be destroyed. Eustace adopted a combination of fighting and wine.

  So things continued for a few days, as I say.

  I was young, it was a remarkably fine spring, at last. I had a beautiful mistress and in the afternoon, when Eustace drank himself into oblivion with a few choice fellows, she revoked her rule that we must wait until her husband was absent from the castle, and let me pleasure her in the wardrobe while her ladies embroidered and fluttered in their canary cage below. Afterwards we walked and she pressed rosemary spikes on me for remembrance – which I thought at the time rather ominous, and I told her I didn’t want to be a memory just yet – or ever. She looked at me sadly, touched my cheek, and we walked on. She wanted the girls back from her father, and though we made love again, she was not completely mine.

  It was as well the chaplain (‘my door is always open’) was away. He had been taken sick with a fistula of the fundament, and sent to Saint-Sulpice of all places. God knows what he had been doing. I sent Brother Paul a note of sympathy that he would have to cure him. We had, for a week or two, a temporary substitute from Verneuil who was another poor advertisement for the Church. His door was always shut. He was in some way beholden to the steward, always creeping about, and tipping a cup of wine down his throat whenever he could. No wonder Eustace found him helpful at Confession.

  In the mornings, Eustace would mount his great horse and survey the men at their exercise. Sometimes it would be the tilt and the quintain, at others he would ride down to the butts and watch them practise with the crossbow. Then out would come the swords and shields, and there would be parrying, clashing and slashing and a great deal of shouting. Inevitably blood would be shed. It was at this last stage that my limited medical knowledge came in useful. Rather than cleaning the wounds in water and then leaving them to heal – which was the usual recourse – I mixed the water with some of the alcohol I had kept back and tinctured with aloes so that Eustace could not drink it. Pure alcohol was too strong, Brother Paul told me, it almost cooked the flesh, but the mixture purified the wound and stopped the suppuration. It was fortunate that I had this skill or else Eustace and his sergeant would have had me enlisted as a crossbowman. Fighting for Eustace would land me inevitably on the wrong side. Juliana’s father had a long memory as well as a quick temper. It didn’t do to get on the wrong side of the Duke.

  The steward whispered urgently in his master’s ear one morning when Eustace descended from his horse. Some kind of message had arrived. Instructions were issued. Messengers came and went. Eustace seemed to be waiting for something that could go either way. His confidence waxed and waned. His swagger faltered and then picked up again with the next messenger. He looked for certainty in every cup of wine.

  Juliana said things could not go on like this, but I saw no reason why they shouldn’t. When you are young, uncertainty is invigorating; it is a challenge and keeps you on your toes. However, when you are a mother, it is different; Juliana fretted for her daughters, more now that the boy had gone. I tried to understand, but I was not at that time a father myself and even that is not the same as a mother who grows the rose in her own garden and feeds it with her blood.

  And then one day, a horseman appeared – a messenger, wearing the Duke’s livery. It was afternoon so Eustace was busy in his chamber where he drank with his cronies. I must confess I had given him some more alcohol, untinctured this time, which we now cal
led aqua vitae because it made him feel better. It made me feel better too, because it kept him happy and allowed me more time with Juliana.

  I would have been talking upstairs with her at that time, going over castle accounts or playing cards, but it had been a violent morning of mock fights, and I still had a couple of wounded soldiers to attend to, one of them was Fulk, feeling sorry for himself now and glad of my attention.

  ‘I still think you are a prancing Latinising fuck-face,’ he said.

  ‘I have been called worse,’ I told him, and carried on dressing his wound – it was a deep cut across the forearm. There was a silence for a while but I could sense that he wanted to say something.

  ‘She laughed at me,’ he said.

  ‘She did not know what to say,’ I told him. ‘People laugh when that happens sometimes. She would not have meant it cruelly. It was my fault for suggesting you speak to her. I don’t know why I did that.’

  ‘There is nothing for me now. Just this and more of it. I should hate you. I did hate you, but now…’

  He made a hopeless, waving gesture at the hall, the castle. I did not know what to say, but I didn’t laugh.

  ‘Do you know what happened to the boy?’ he asked, after a while, as I applied a cloth bandage to the arm, and turned to pick up my medicine box.

  ‘Which boy?’

  ‘The son of the castellan from Ivry.’

  ‘Monsieur le Comte sent him home,’ I said. ‘It was a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘The word is he blinded him first.’

  The words hit me like a dagger, and I almost dropped the glass vial of alcohol with which I was treating him.

  ‘What?’

  I almost shouted, and others in the room, the chamberlain – friend of the steward – and two of the knights looked round to see the cause of the commotion.

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ Fulk urged. ‘No one is supposed to know.’

  ‘He can’t have done,’ I spluttered. ‘Why would he have done that?’

  ‘I had it from the groom. He told me to keep it quiet, but you looked after the lad so you should know. Keep it to yourself, eh?’

  ‘You too, Fulk. Tell no one else – especially not the Comtesse.’

  ‘I would die before bringing her ill news.’

  I looked at him with surprise and some concern. The boy was too much in love, but of course where love is concerned there are no limits. Strange that I should ever have thought of him as uncouth.

  Just at that moment, there was a commotion at the door, and the porter ushered in a messenger who wore the royal livery. Messengers love to make a commotion, it makes them feel important – unless of course they bear bad news in which case they creep in and creep out again like the cat who crapped in the crypt.

  ‘Greetings,’ said the man, entering the hall and approaching me. ‘I am looking for Madame la Comtesse. I have a message from the Duke, her father.’

  ‘I am the Comtesse,’ said Juliana, appearing – as she so often seemed to – out of nowhere, floating down the stairs on air. She had eyes everywhere, that girl; nothing seemed to escape her. ‘What is the message?’

  ‘The Duke is on his way here. He sent me to warn you to prepare for his arrival. He will not stay long for he must go on to Ivry.’

  ‘Is that it? All of the message? No greetings? No requests?’

  ‘Only that he is coming, Madame. He will be here in two days.

  The messenger bowed his farewell, and made his way out. I could see Juliana was troubled, but I could not tell her the terrible news I had just received. It might not be true, and it would surely better for her to face her father in ignorance. Her innocence would be better proclaimed without feigning and subterfuge.

  ‘This does not bode well,’ she told me. ‘Why would he come here? And yet, perhaps he has heard of the return of the boy to the castellan, and is bringing my daughters home. That might be it.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I told her. ‘More than likely.’

  My heart bled for her since an unpleasant suspicion was growing in me. The whole point of taking exchanging hostages was that it guaranteed the safety of both parties. If one was harmed, surely the other was in jeopardy? And yet the Duke who held the little girls hostage was their grandfather. It was inconceivable that he would allow any harm to come to them. That, at least, was comforting.

  The next couple of days passed slowly; both Eustace and Juliana were preoccupied. Eustace did his best to subdue his dark thoughts with strong Burgundy, but Juliana, true to form, made no attempt to avoid hers, and paced about her chamber or in the garden alone, shunning me when I tried to make conversation. My own thoughts were gloomy; I had grown to love the little girls and I hated to think of them as pawns in this game of kings, knights, bishops and castles.

  The Duke, with a face like thunder, duly arrived on a rainy morning. The wind madly twitched the knights’ cloaks about and rattled the candles from the chestnut trees. Blossom fled across the land as if in awe of the Duke’s approach. I said as much to him when he arrived, hoping to draw attention to myself, but he waved me away as if I were a gadfly. I am not a natural at sycophancy, but I like to give it a try now and then. I offered him a seat and some wine. He drank the cup down and asked for more. That was unusual. He was not a drinker.

  ‘Where are the Comte and Comtesse de Breteuil?’ he enquired, ‘Did they not know I was coming?’

  ‘They knew you were coming, sire, but they did not know when.’ I told him. ‘I have sent word that you are here now. They will not be long.’

  ‘I expect you will be on your way soon,’ he said to me. ‘What do they call you? Latiner? You are Perche’s bastard, aren’t you?’

  He had a fresh way of talking, but he had a good memory.

  ‘Yes, sire. I am here to teach the little girls Latin.’

  ‘You will be on your way soon. You are no good here. They won’t need Latin.’

  ‘But your daughter, sire, Madame La Comtesse. She wishes me to stay and…’

  ‘I know what she wishes, Latiner. Things are hard enough in Normandy without you putting horns on your host. He may not be up to much, he may be a fool and a trouble-maker, but he is my appointment.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I spluttered.

  ‘By the blood of our Lord, you know very well what I mean. And I shall be watching you.’

  I looked around the hall. There were young men everywhere, talking together, looking at us. I wondered which of them were the Duke’s eyes, which one had sneaked on me. I felt sick at heart. He was telling me to leave Juliana.

  ‘If I am to go, I would rather leave now,’ I told him. ‘It would be painful to linger on.’

  ‘You will leave when I tell you to. You can at least be of some use to my daughter for a week or two.’

  ‘Use?’ I mumbled. ‘I don’t understand.’

  There was a stirring in the hall behind me.

  ‘Shut up and listen,’ he said, and stood up.

  Juliana had arrived. She stood and looked at us. There was a terrible look in her eyes that I had not seen before. The Duke walked towards her and embraced her; he might as well have embraced a standing-stone. There was no movement or reciprocation in her, only a look of desolation. He returned to his seat and motioned her to sit down.

  ‘Thank you, Father. I prefer to stand.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  ‘Where are my daughters?’ she asked him. ‘Why have you not brought them with you?’

  ‘You remember, I am sure, the terms on which we parted last, concerning the matter of the castle of Ivry and your husband’s interest. The Castellan, Ralph Harenc, was very much against the idea and opposed it violently. He did not see why, to use his own words, a stupid toss-pot who couldn’t find a pot to toss in, should lay claim to his home and my castle.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know all that,’ said Juliana, miserably.

  ‘Well, you also know that I went through the motions of listening to Eustace and, more than that, tr
ied to find some reason, any reason, why I might favour him over my own rights and over the rights of my good servant Ralph Harenc. I did not want to offend my lord of Breteuil so that Normandy might hear there was a division between us. These are difficult times, Juliana, and there are many like Amaury de Montfort and my Lord of Mortain, to say nothing of King Louis, who will snatch any excuse to take up arms and seize advantage. I have to be diplomatic, Juliana, for form’s sake. And how important that is, especially to people like Eustace – ah, here he is now, coming down the stairs, oh dear, just a little slip, help him up, somebody. For form’s sake, I had to go along with him, to humour him and not to turn him down out of hand.’

  Eustace, having tripped on the shoes he only wore for special occasion, took a little while to adjust himself. He now advanced at last on the Duke and embraced him closely.

  ‘Ah, Henry,’ he said, ‘good to see you, no one told me you were here. Are you staying? What about some hunting?’

  The Duke disengaged himself. He hated to be called Henry by Eustace. Though technically as a member of his family it would be permitted, it was a privilege normally suggested by the Duke rather than grabbed by a less-than-favourite son-in-law. On this occasion he had bigger things on his mind.

  ‘I was just reminding Juliana,’ he said, ‘of the agreement that we reached last time I was here. Because of the impasse over the castle of Ivry …’

  Eustace put his hand up and lurched forward, tugging at the Duke’s sleeve.

  ‘Yes?’ asked the Duke, dangerously.

  He did not like to be touched.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ said Eustace with that irritating over-emphasis of the inebriate. ‘I don’t wannit. You can have it. I don’t wannit. Got enough castles. Castles are shit.’

  This seemed to exasperate the Duke. He turned on Eustace and berated him.

  ‘Don’t interrupt. Do you know how much trouble you have caused? You are a very stupid man. You remember the agreement? You remember that we decided on an honourable exchange of hostages while we examined the various possibilities of ownership, so that there should be no cause for calls to arms or sieges or burnings of the Ivry township while deliberations took place. All these things can happen when men with hot heads get ideas into their skulls.’