by Norah Lofts
Father looked at me as though I had just performed a double somersault before his eyes.
‘By our Lady,’ he said, ‘you have a nimble mind.’
‘In your service, sire. And now it would be as well if you left us and went to spread the story and ordered another couch and some blankets and pillows. I shall need two pages in constant attendance and Ahbeg should come in twice a day.’
‘If you manage this, Anna, I’ll give you anything you wish.’
I was most oddly reminded of a morning very long ago when I was on one of my jaunts to the market and had bought some cherries at a stall and, turning, saw behind me a little urchin who had been fishing for tadpoles and held an iron basin full of them in his hand. I gave him a handful of cherries and with a quite heavenly smile he dived his hand into the basin and brought out one of the little black wriggling things and offered it to me.
‘My dear father,’ I said, ‘you have already given me so much. This is my chance to do something for you. Go now and talk loudly about the danger of plague. Tell the archduke and the archbishop that the princess is suddenly stricken down and if you see the slightest doubt in their faces ask them if they would like to see her… And, sire, keep Mathilde out; she would see through it in a moment.’
He looked relieved, glad to be told what to do. Then he turned to the table where Berengaria lay and his expression changed to one of most dismal bewilderment.
‘What in God’s name made her do it? I wasn’t threatening her, Anna; I wasn’t even shouting, just talking to her reasonably.’ He bent and stared at the unconscious face. ‘Do you believe what Ahbeg said about sleep? Shouldn’t we try to rouse her? Burnt feathers, I’ve seen them used to revive women. And wine. Do you think we could get a little wine between her teeth?’ It was the first time I had ever heard him express a doubt about Ahbeg’s infallibility or suggest doing anything counter to the old man’s advice.
‘I think it would be better to do exactly as we were told,’ I said. ‘You go and arrange for the bedding and the attendance and explain to our visitors.’
Still he hesitated. ‘I as good as promised them their answer tomorrow morning.’
‘The circumstances justify a little procrastination, I think.’ I smiled at him. ‘Anyway, refusals are always more easily made from a distance. Let them get home and then write.’
‘Well, I at least have had my answer!’ He looked down at his daughter again, yearning, remorseful and yet with puzzled impatience. As he moved away there was a little clinking sound, and he stooped and picked up the slender silver knife. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have my answer.’ Holding it in his hand; shaking his head a little, he went out.
I had an idea that we had heard the last of Isaac of Cyprus.
XIV
I spent the next six days in circumstances that taught me something about solitary confinement and something of what it feels like to be a leper. No one entered the room save Ahbeg and I found myself passionately looking forward to his visits though he, violently disapproving of the whole thing, was surly and rude and lamentably lacking in interest in his patient. Relays of couples of pages were always in attendance but they were all frightened out of their wits and would step backwards along the passage as soon as I opened the door of the sickroom and would often, with pretended eagerness, go darting away before I had finished asking for what I wanted.
On the first day and the second Father, devoured by anxiety, did look round the door and make inquiries; then some officious court busybody chided him for taking undue risks and thenceforward, to preserve appearances, he stayed away.
And Berengaria, as soon as she was conscious, began to cry; and cried and cried almost continually.
‘Why didn’t you let me die? I wanted to die.’ She must have said those words to me a hundred times.
The wound, as Ahbeg had promised, did not fester; she had no fever but I would rather have nursed six people through veritable plague. She wouldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep and she cried and cried.
Sometimes she talked a little. As I suspected, Father had told her about Richard’s going to England and the strong likelihood of his being married after Easter and there was no doubt that the news had cast her into such black despair that she was soul-sick.
‘Why should I take it?’ she would ask, pushing aside whatever I was offering her. ‘Just to keep alive? What is the good of being alive? I’ve nothing to live for.’
Assuming that she would never love anyone else, then she had exactly as much to live for as I had myself. She now stood where I had stood since I was thirteen or so. But the consolations I had found for myself weren’t easy to describe and didn’t sound very convincing. I loved my books. I was interested in the world and in the people in it. I liked my comforts. I looked forward to building my house. There was even something about the changing seasons, the kinds of weather. But to mention such imponderable pleasures to a woman in her state of mind seemed a little like offering a sweetmeat to a wretch that had been flayed at the cart’s tail, so usually I just let her talk and said nothing. It was solitary confinement for both of us. The bony skulls within which our thoughts and our feelings lived and moved were the cells of our imprisonment.
There were moments of contact, of course.
One day she asked me why I alone was tending her and where the others were. I explained.
‘It seems a coil to make about nothing. I wouldn’t mind the whole world knowing that I’d sooner cut my throat than marry a man I didn’t love.’
‘Not just now. But later on you would mind. And there’s Father. It would make him look as though he were forcing you.’
‘His feelings shouldn’t be considered. He’s been very cruel. If he’d wanted to choose a husband for me he should have done it when I was a baby. To wait until now and then shout at me that I must marry Isaac or be an old maid because Richard was going to marry Alys after all—that was cruel…’ She burst into tears again.
Every conversation ended the same way.
Suddenly, on the fourth day of my incarceration, the spring arrived. Through the narrow, unwelcoming windows of Father’s little room the sun forced its way and lay in golden patterns on the floor. I climbed onto the high stone sill of the window and looked down over Pamplona. In the past few days the trees in the gardens and orchards had come shyly and cautiously up to the very verge of blossoming and the warmth of this one morning’s sun had coaxed every petal wide open. The pink-and-white blossoms of peach and plum and cherry trees frothed and quivered in the lovely light and in the background the foothills of the Pyrenees wore their brief, unrecapturable green.
Inevitably I thought of Blondel. Up there in the north the winter would still lie cold on the land but even there spring would come. He would see a tree in flower and would think of Berengaria and know the ache of love this year—but next year the flowering tree would speak another name.
Never, even to myself, have I been able to explain why I so persistently underrated his constancy. I knew very well that next year and every year until I died I should think of him whenever I saw a lovely thing or heard sweet music or came upon something amusing or interesting which we might have shared. So typically egotistical to think that Blondel was suffering from a curable infatuation; that Berengaria was prey to an unreasonable, obstinate fancy; that only Anna Apieta was truly in love.
Two more slow days passed and then I fell into a state of panic. I wasn’t strong enough or nimble enough to follow Mathilde’s example with the mad Queen and hold open Berengaria’s mouth with a clothes peg while I poured in the broth, the posset, the wine. And no persuasion, no chiding of mine could persuade her to take nourishment. If I pressed her too hard she would finally push me away and generally what I offered her ended by being spilled on the covers. Every day her face looked smaller and more grey and her arms were as thin, as brittle-seeming as old dry sticks. What with the starvation and the crying and the sleeplessness, she was in very poor case indeed and, looking at her, I felt b
oth guilty and foolish. The hurriedly devised plan which had preserved her secret, saved Father embarrassment and got rid of the Cypriots now appeared thoughtless, reckless and childish. I dared not pursue it any more. So that morning when Ahbeg shuffled in I said:
‘The time has come to withdraw this story about the plague. The princess needs more company and better nursing than I can give her. If you will put the bandage on I will go tell the King and he can announce the good tidings.’
Ahbeg turned his milky old eyes on me in a gaze of sheer malevolence.
‘My lord King,’ he said, ‘explained his design and his wishes and out of the duty I bear him and the gratitude I owe I consented to play a part in this—masquerade. Go, then, run and denounce me as a bungling fool who does not know the difference between an abscess and a deadly bubo. Finish your mummery and strike down with a word my reputation as a physician. Mock your fill. But remember, those who mock at knowledge mock at God and no blessing attends them.’
Little as the old man mattered to me, his words increased my feeling of foolishness and guilt. I had taken no count of his professional pride and had I stopped to think about it I should have thought that he lived such a lonely, self-centered life that he was immune to considerations of public opinion. Apparently vanity was still active even in this morose, dirty, solitary old man.
‘I’m sorry, Ahbeg,’ I said. ‘When this thing happened we had to think and act quickly. I see now that it was a poor plan. To tell you the truth, I’m ashamed too. I’m the nurse who failed to persuade her patient to swallow so much as a milksop!’
‘You had no reputation to lose.’
‘I had. The King trusted me so completely that he left me alone to tend her. And now look… Yet where the plaster is beginning to flake off I can see the wound, clean and dry and healing well. All she needs now is more cheerful company and a nurse whom she will obey.’ And, I thought but did not say, the stimulating society of those who did not know her secret. With me she need make no effort to conceal her misery and her pining.
Ahbeg went over to the bed and looked down on Berengaria. Never did physician and patient regard one another with such complete lack of interest and confidence.
‘I would defer the change of story for two more days,’ Ahbeg said.
He folded his hands into his sleeves and began to move towards the door.
‘I dare not do that,’ I said, putting myself between him and the door. ‘I keep telling you and you take no notice—for six days now she has taken no sustenance. Can’t you see how she has shrunken? If I wait two more days and she remains in this state—’
‘She will be dead,’ he said calmly. ‘And since I am supposed to have diagnosed plague, that will be understandable and no shame to me…’
I stared at him, shocked past belief at my own hearing. He wanted her to die!
The panic which had been mounting in me since early morning reached a climax. I whisked round swiftly, opened the door and bellowed for the attendant pages.
‘Go and find His Majesty. Wherever he is and whatever he is doing, say that I say he must come at once. Run, run!’
They were, as was their wont, already running away from the plague that poured, as they thought, out of the open door behind me, out of my clothes, my hair, my very breath.
Father had been changing from his soft indoor clothes into his hunting hose and tunic; he had snatched up a cloak and cast it over his shirt and drawers and so arrived, his hair in disorder, his beard uncombed.
‘What is it, what is it, Anna? Is she better? Worse?’
I found myself clinging to his arm and gabbling like a frightened child. ‘She won’t eat; she hasn’t eaten anything for six days and she cries and cries. She’s wasting away. I can’t be responsible any longer, Father. Mathilde would make her swallow and you or somebody might be able to make her more cheerful. I’ve tried everything. Father, I have tried but I daren’t be left alone any longer, just watching her waste away.’
‘Poor child, you’re overtired and overwrought,’ he said, patting my arm but at the same time detaching my clinging fingers. ‘Ah, Ahbeg’s here. Good.’ Checking the pace of his step and his voice, he moved to the bed and looked at Berengaria. I saw him recoil: ‘Good my God!’ he said. ‘Sweetheart, what ails you? Why won’t you eat? Rosebud, you must eat. Even if it hurts your poor throat. You’re wasting away. Soon you won’t be my beautiful little girl any more. Look, Anna shall make you a milksop, very sweet and soft, and I’ll spoon it in for you. And you be brave, brave as a soldier’s daughter should be. Rosebud, if you’ll swallow a milksop though it hurts you, I’ll give you the Order of the Silver Spur. I will, I promise. The first, the only woman in the world to wear it.’
I hadn’t exactly promised her that—it wasn’t in my power to give—but I had talked to her in much this same way. And she had responded in the same way, closing her eyes and turning her head from me. One thing he did think of which I hadn’t.
‘My lovely, if you could only see yourself, thin as a tinker’s donkey. Anna, get a looking glass. What, no looking glass here!’
They fetched one; he held it.
But then Berengaria had never been one for looking in the glass except to inspect the set of a new headdress, the fit of a new gown.
Finally even Father was defeated. He rose from his knees by the bed, his face almost as grey as Berengaria’s, and walked over to Ahbeg.
‘Have you tried everything? Is it the wound? The shock? Or is it God might have had more mercy! Once, and she so lovely, so much beloved! Christ’s blood! Wasn’t once enough? What have I done to be punished twice over?’ He sank down on a stool and sat there, an old grey tremulous man with his head in his shaking hands. Before I could reach him or speak Ahbeg spoke.
‘She will die, sire. She is in no pain; she has been well nursed and the wound is healing well by first intention, no festering at all. But to recover, the patient must have the will to live and that the princess lacks. Rather she wills herself to die. And when that happens there is no hope.’
The sweetest-tempered animal caught in a trap and maddened by pain will try to rend even the hand which releases it. Father was like that. He stood up and wheeled round upon Ahbeg and began to shout.
‘The will to live! I never heard such gibberish. Filthy black magic and nonsense! Why, I’ve seen men stuck through, in dire agony, praying God to let them die, begging their fellows to despatch them to put them out of pain. Had they the will to live, as you call it? They had not but a goodly number of them lived, all the same.’ He lashed himself into rage, choosing that rather than despair. ‘This serves me right for harbouring you with your dark doings and your spells all these years. You call yourself a physician and then when a sickness defeats you, you blame the patient! Let’s take a look at this wound that is healing so well that she can’t swallow even a milksop.’
Without a word Ahbeg moved over to Berengaria and with the long curved blackened nail of his first finger chipped off the crumbling plaster. Berengaria just stared. Even when he plucked at the thread of the eight stitches and it resisted him and he said, ‘It is not quite rotten yet,’ she did not flinch. The wound lay there exposed to sight, the neatest, cleanest wound ever seen, a little red seam.
There was no refuge for Father there.
‘I’ll call in every doctor in Navarre,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll send to Valladolid for Escel, the best physician in the world. Do you hear me, sweetheart? I’ll fetch Escel to you; he’ll have you well in the twinkling of an eye. You’ve done bravely so far. Bravely!’
He might have been rallying a raiding party which had suffered a reverse. I could see that the feeling of despair which had assailed him a little while since had been too horrible for bearing, so he pushed that aside and was now trying, by means of an angry activity, to forget that he had ever entertained it for a moment. And that was well. Once given way to despair, there was nothing for it but to lie down and die—like Berengaria. Father and I must clutch at straws and
by saving ourselves hope to save her.
‘You send for Escel, sire, and anyone else whose name occurs to you. And I will fetch Mathilde who is a better nurse than I.’
‘And let in her ladies, her musician; she needs rousing, entertaining…’ He cast one more fearful glance at the bed. ‘The will to live! Bah!’ He stamped, out purposefully.
Ahbeg took from his aumônière a clean white bandage.
‘What must be will be,’ he said. ‘To humour my lord I have sacrificed my reputation and as a reward I have lost his confidence. But he will learn that the will to live is something more than an idle mouthing of words.’
He gave his attention to the fixing of the bandage, handling the princess as though she were an inanimate bundle. Then he shuffled away. Possibly I was the last person to see or speak to him. Three weeks later on a warm day, somebody with a more than ordinarily sensitive nose passed his room in the Roman Tower, somebody curious investigated and somebody too menial to evade the task took up the body of the unbeliever and buried it in a patch of ground between the armoury and the stable yard where a succession of Father’s favourite hounds had been interred, often with more ceremony. When the news reached me I thought certainly he was old and frail, ripe prey for death; but I could not avoid the thought that without his reputation and without Father’s confidence he had found life of no value and had attempted to prove the accuracy of his last diagnosis.