‘Well, ‘I said, ‘thank you for bringing the palfrey, and please thank the Marshal too. I thought he might have been taken prisoner by the Duke.’
‘The Duke has taken no prisoners. He blames his daughter the Comtesse for stirring up enmity against him while all he wants is accord.’
‘Or so he says,’ I suggested.
‘Or so he says. At any rate, the Marshal is free. I think he is leaving Breteuil for Pacy tomorrow, and I with him. He sends his greetings and hopes that you will meet again ere long.’
‘And please return the greeting, and say that we very much hope so. Thank him for the palfrey. We are off to…’
I paused, wondering whether it was wise to declare our whereabouts. The Duke had not looked friendly when I saw him last.
‘Maybe to Paris,’ I said. ‘Or to Caen. Or to Chartres…’
But I had some compunction about Juliana. I did not wish her to think that I had totally deserted her. I might no longer be considered a lover, but at least I could be a friend.
‘Or very possibly to Rouen,’ I concluded.
‘The Marshal asked me to say that he knows the chief butcher in Rouen. He supplies the Duke’s army. The Marshal said if you go there, be sure to look him up and mention his name.’
I wasn’t sure what we would do with a butcher – I had no experience of chopping up dead animals nor had ever had a wish to – but any introduction was better than none.
‘Tell him I will, and please thank him again.’
The groom wished us well, and rode off back down the little path towards Breteuil. The girl meanwhile put some bread and cheese together for us which she wrapped in a cloth (clean, I was glad to notice) and gave us directions for the road to Rouen – where she had evidently decided we were going.
‘You must go back to the path you left to come here,’ she said. ‘Turn right when you reach it and then take the third path to the right, easy to miss, so keep your wits about you. That will bring you out of the woods in half an hour or so, and you will see the road to Conches-en-Ouche in front of you, if it hasn’t been moved.’
‘Moved?’ asked Alice.
‘Oh, my duck, roads round here in the woods they move a lot. They get worn down or muddied out and then we move ’em. It helps to keep the soldiers guessing.’
‘We’ll find our way,’ I said. ‘There’s always the sun. We just keep going north.’
I gestured at the morning. A spell of bright sunshine filled the clearing where the little cottage stood. A robin appeared and chattered at us. Speckled brown butterflies busied themselves on a bank of cowslips, near a trickle of stream.
‘There’s always the sun until it goes in,’ she said.
‘We’ll manage,’ I told her with as much assurance as I could muster.
I did not want to alarm Alice. The woods were very deep the further you went and, I heard, dangerous. I was afraid Mother Merle or Merle the girl or whoever she was, was going to start talking about wolves and wodwos.
We thanked her for her hospitality and I gave her two silver pennies. I mounted the palfrey and Alice stood on a convenient bench and jumped up behind me. Merle the girl waved with a crooked finger as we ambled off into the forest. Just before we turned the corner where the big holly tree obscured the view, she shouted something I did not quite hear.
‘What did she say?’ I asked Alice.
‘Something about water,’ she said. ‘Death by water … What does that mean?’
‘Maybe the water’s bad in Rouen?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Better stick to the wine,’ I told her.
LV
The journey to Rouen was, to my relief, uneventful after the alarms of the previous days. Alice and I ambled along on the palfrey, meeting few people on the road. The country folk had drawn in their horns these last cold days, unnaturally cold they said for May, the hay wasn’t ready to cut, and it seemed even the soldiers had stayed at home. There were a few wounded stragglers, some English, limping along towards the coast.
At mid-day we stopped for refreshment in Conches-en-Ouche, a funny little place with a big stone castle, seat of Roger de Tosny, a friend of my father’s. He was not at home, we were told – not that we wanted to meet a local lord, there was no knowing which side he might be on or what kind of ransom he might ask for our safe return. Happily, we were not questioned or molested, but we did not stay long – the inn had been ransacked the week before by English soldiers on their way to the port of Barfleur, and the innkeeper was still clearing up and telling us about it.
That afternoon the weather turned milder, and we enjoyed periods of sunshine and a softer wind from the south west. Coming out of Conches, as we passed the crossroads that led west towards my old abbey of Saint-Sulpice and east to the town of Évreux, I allowed my thoughts to wander back to the old Jew Saul, my mentor, and the quiet life of study that I could have had, and the many roads that lead to that single point of the present. But Alice’s warm hands were about my waist and soon I looked ahead again.
We were making for the village of Le Neubourg, which was still some nine miles away, and we would be lucky to get there by nightfall. From time to time, Alice broke into my reverie by complaining of a sore arse, and her arse was such a pleasant conjecture, sore or otherwise, that I abandoned my regrets for lost monasticism. She wasn’t used to riding, she told me. I assured her that I would rub the afflicted part with one of my unguents that every evening, if she would just hold on for a few more miles. She grumbled, but held me tighter. We rode on, companionably, still with no sign of pursuit.
The light was just beginning to fail when we finally reached Le Neubourg, and tied up our palfrey at the sign of The Falcon.
It looked a promising place – a good fire and a friendly landlord called Hugues who told us Neubourg was in fact a very old bourg indeed with five roads fanning out from it, and that the manor belonged to Henry de Beaumont, Earl of Leicester. Hugues had got rid of the English soldiery by telling them about the English Earl and his legendary temper when people damaged his property.
The smells from the kitchen were encouraging. Alice and I had a jug of wine and a pigeon pie, and when we had finished the wine, we went upstairs to a room we had all to ourselves. I unpacked my medicine chest and found some liniment that Saul always recommended for bruising: arnica, witch hazel, elecampane root and grani paradisii mixed in sage oil. Alice’s bottom, I’m sure, would have looked perfect to me, but she went behind a screen and doubtless massaged the oil into both cheeks and maybe one or two other places, and declared herself somewhat reconciled to riding.
There was still this little distance between us, and I think it was called Juliana.
I wanted Alice and I think she wanted me, but it was too soon. She was loyal to her mistress, and she did not want to think of me as a traitor to love, and no more did I.
We slept well that night and so did our little palfrey, it seemed, since she whinnied to see us next day when we went round to say good morning, and gave a little clog-dance of impatience to be off. As we said goodbye to Hugues, our host, after our breakfast of bread and ham and ale, he remembered something, or pretended to do so.
‘There was this jongleur fellow, decent bloke, left a message for a Master Bertold which he said I was to give you. When you’re in Rouen, look him up. He is at the Rose Tavern on Fish Street. You’ll find it by the smell.’
‘Of fish or roses?’
‘You’ll have to work that one out.’
We said our goodbyes, collected Blackberry, and started once more on our way. I was struck again by the network of news and information that seemed to run from inn to inn and included the odd wise woman. Their number somehow seemed only to involve decent people, good sorts; pleasants not peasants, according to Alice. That is the true class division of the world.
I was discovering that Alice had a wry kind of humour which charmed me as much as, if not even more than, her other attractions, and yet I had vowed never to love anyone bu
t Juliana. Alice would respect me for that. Better perhaps to say nothing. It is one of the things one learns.
After an hour or so on the road, we caught our first sight of Rouen. I had never seen a really big town, a city indeed, with a huge cathedral towering above it. Twenty thousand chimneys added their smoke to the morning clouds. Alice told me her mother’s family came from a place called Les Andelys nearby. Her mother knew the city and had told her stories of it, but Alice herself had never been there.
‘However shall we find our way?’ she exclaimed. ‘All those streets and all those people. What do they all do?’
Secretly I rather agreed with her, but I did not want to show lack of worldliness.
‘It is a collection of villages, just like Les Andelys. We will start by getting to know one of them and then we will get to know the next, and so on. It is an adventure.’
Alice looked doubtful.
‘I have had enough adventure in the last few days,’ she said. ‘I would like a little ordinariness and home cooking. What are we going to do for money?’
‘I will find work,’ I told her, with a confidence I did not exactly feel, though I did have some faith in the league of jongleurs, pedlars and innkeepers that had served us none too badly so far; I had faith in my friend Eliphas.
We rode on. Our first impression as we entered the town was of the smells of woodsmoke, horse-shit, cooking and baking, and blood and guts from the slaughterhouse. There was the salty smell of the tidal river which I would get to know so much better, of wine lees and ale and cider, and kitchen waste running down the kennels in the middle of the cobbled streets, mixing with urine thrown from windows. And as we followed our instructions from the innkeeper at Le Neubourg, there was fish; a most pervasive smell, not unlike urine, but quite different.
No one paid attention to us as we rode in through the city gates. And then I thought again about that. There was surreptitious movement in the turrets by the south gate and I could feel eyes on my back.
‘At home they would be asking where we came from and what we were after by now,’ she said. ‘They all seem so busy here.’
‘It is the city way,’ I said, knowingly. ‘Here it is we who have to speak first.’
I addressed a man carrying a sack of what looked like kale.
‘Fish Street?’ I asked him.
‘Next on the right,’ he grunted and moved on.
The overpowering aroma as we rode forward told us we had arrived. Fish Street ran along the docks and a fine street it was for every manner of catch the sea could throw at you. We dismounted and I tied our palfrey to a post at the corner of a warehouse. It was my first sight of salt water. We walked along the harbourside, where the tidal Seine lapped the greasy wall, inspecting the baskets. There was cod, there was hake, there was haddock and halibut, and mackerel fresh as a rainbow, there was pilchard and John Dory, pollock and flounder; there was herring which made me think of the grim castellan Harenc; there was prawn and crab and lobster and squid, and even a bucket of seahorses which Alice wanted to buy and throw back in the water.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised to find a mermaid here,’ she told me, ‘sitting on a basket and waiting for a buyer. There’s just about everything else.’
We found the inn that the innkeeper Hugues had told us about, and discovered my friend the jongleur Eliphas sitting outside in the mild evening air, drinking a stoup of ale.
‘What kept you?’ he asked. ‘I expected you yesterday. But the ale is good so there has been no discomfort. And this is Mademoiselle …?’
‘Alice,’ I told him.
‘Ah yes. Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mistress Alice. Our friend Bertold has excellent taste…’
‘In travelling companions. Thank you,’ she told him. ‘Your friend is very civil,’ she said to me.
I could see she was pleased with him. We had got off to a good start. I bought a jug of wine, and we sat down with Eliphas on the fish-quay in the mild late afternoon watching the sun dip below the rooftops. Mist was already gathering in the meadows across the river.
‘Your system of messages is very efficient, Eliphas,’ I said. ‘And we must thank you for it. It would have been hard to know where to go and what to do after we left Breteuil.’
‘The barons don’t like it,’ he told me, smiling. ‘They have their own way of communicating and it is nowhere as good as ours. Likewise the priests. They would prefer us to be ignorant and therefore more controllable. The Duke, of course, has his own system which is excellent. He has spies everywhere.’
I launched into the story of our adventures, the blinding, mutilation and death of the Comtesse’s two daughters, and how that had precipitated the feud between the Comtesse and her father. It was clear to me that Eliphas knew most of it already.
‘It is a terrible tale,’ he said. ‘Only a man of stone could do that to his grand-children. What was the Comte thinking of to blind the Castellan’s son?’
‘The Comte is a fool and a drunkard, but he thinks he is clever. The worst sort of fool. The Comtesse is as far above him as the cathedral here is above the shambles.’
‘It is the sort of story one could make a play about,’ said Eliphas.
‘If the Duke heard you were doing that,’ I told him, ‘you would not be playing for very long.’
Alice had been sitting patiently, almost in a reverie, looking out across the boats bobbing gentle in the river’s little swirls and eddies. She was thinking of her childhood by the sea.
‘I saw a merman once,’ she said. ‘They caught him out at sea and put him in the harbour with nets to stop him escaping. The priests wanted him to confess that he was a devil, but one day he escaped and swam out to sea.’
‘Wise fish,’ said Eliphas. ‘If he’d confessed, they’d have killed him. That’s if they hadn’t killed him already.’
‘Is Eliphas your real name?’ Alice asked him.
‘What is real?’ he replied with a smile.
‘No … really …’ she insisted.
‘It is real, in so far as I am known by it, but I was not christened with it. It is a Jewish name although I am not Jewish. It is a name of secrets and of mysteries, it is Talmudic, magic one might say, and that is my trade.’
I could see Alice was tired after the cumulative exertions of our escape from the castle along with another day’s travel, and Eliphas noted it too.
‘Before you tell me of your adventures,’ he said, ‘we must find you your lodgings which I have taken the liberty of reserving for you. It is a short distant from the fish market, but I think you will like the house.’
‘Will it smell of fish?’ asked Alice, cautiously.
‘Hark at Little Miss Fancy-pants,’ he smiled. ‘No, it will not smell of fish except on Fridays. The landlady is an old friend of mine and a good woman. Name of Berthe. It will smell of sweet herbs for that is Berthe’s trade. She is an apothecary.’
‘I never heard of a woman apothecary,’ I said.
‘Well, you have now,’ said Eliphas.
‘I think it is a good trade for a woman,’ said Alice. ‘I hope she may teach me some of her learning.’
We walked down a couple of streets, built out on a curve of the river bank beyond the harbour, until we came to a house built right out, almost on top of the water, with a private jetty in front of it. A smell of some spice I knew but could not immediately name came from a sack a man was dragging up from a small hulk moored to the little wharf.
‘Here it is; your new home,’ said Eliphas.
‘It’s lovely,’ said Alice. ‘Not so much as a kipper. What is that smell?’
‘It is grains of paradise,’ said the man over his shoulder, carrying the sack to a little warehouse that stood beside jetty.
Of course I knew it by its Latin name of grani paradisii; the mention made Juliana and her wardrobe come back to me, and my eyes pricked.
‘It is said to fall from the trees in Eden, and they gather it from the rivers that run out of paradise
– or Africa as it is commonly called,’ Eliphas told her. ‘Very good in spiced wine and cooked fruit.’
He took us round to the front door in the street, and knocked. A plump, smiling woman appeared.
‘Well, if it isn’t my favourite magician and the two travellers he’s spirited away from the cruel wars,’ she said. ‘Come in, my dears. You must be tired.’
She held the door wide open and we stepped inside, but Eliphas held up a hand.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You find your rooms, and get acquainted with the place. Time enough to talk then.’
We protested, but his mind was made up. Berthe took us upstairs and showed us a bedroom and a sitting room at the top of the house that looked south over the river. She seemed to take it for granted that we would be sharing a bedroom. I could see that Alice was not entirely sure about it, but was too polite and tired to demur.
‘Best view in Rouen,’ she told us, and we believed her. ‘Now, when you’ve made yourself at home, come down for a cup of wine and a little stew I’ve had on the hob simmering all day. Lovely and tender that’ll be. I’ll leave you now and see you in half an hour.’
Alice and I looked at each other.
‘How are your feet?’ I asked her.
She had rather fine feet, actually. In fact, as I may have indicated before, the tout ensemble was altogether to my liking. As I thought that, a sudden vision of Juliana crossed my mind again. ‘Feet pretty good. How are yours?’’ she asked.
‘They feel as if we’ve landed on them,’ I told her.
We sat on the bed looking out at the river and the watermeadows beyond.
‘I should like to draw that,’ she said.
‘You draw in colour too?’
‘Yes, my mother taught me and her father taught her when she was a girl. His brother worked on manuscripts at Bayeux Abbey.’
I thought it was time to broach the awkward subject. ‘How do you feel about sharing with me?’ I asked.
She evaded my question with another. ‘What did you think of me at Breteuil?’
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