The Lute Player

by Norah Lofts

  ‘I gave him leave to go, madam, but the others are fretting. Often in January it snows and then the road is closed, sometimes for three weeks together.’ What he left unsaid I understood and answered.

  ‘Richard has given no sign,’ I said. ‘He was anxious to bring his quarrel with the King of Sicily to an end before we went. And perhaps the rogue put up more opposition than he expected. But I have heard nothing.’ I looked at the handsome young man and remembered that he was Richard’s friend. It was he in the first place who had brought the pair together; the idea of using him occurred to me.

  ‘If I were younger and more apt for travel,’ I said, ‘I would go to Sicily and remind my son of his unmartial obligations. For the truth is when Richard has a war, however petty, on his hands, he thinks of nothing else until his opponent sues for mercy.’

  ‘I know,’ Sancho said, laughing. ‘I know my Richard—the best fighter since Charlemagne!’ He grew serious again. ‘How would it be, madam, if I went to Sicily? I have never seen the island, though I have heard my father talk of it. And it is a long time since I saw Richard. I might see some fighting and they’—he indicated with a wave of his hand the discontented courtiers whose mouthpiece he undoubtedly was—‘would be more content if they thought that some action was being taken.’

  (The old woman will never move! Prod her, Sancho, or we shall be here next year at this time. Remember what happened to Alys of France! And what is all this talk about Tancred’s pretty niece? I knew very well what was being said!)

  ‘Go with my blessing,’ I said. ‘The sooner they are married and Berengaria with child, the better shall I be pleased.’ I wanted to let him know that my impatience had more vital roots than my personal boredom. ‘But be tactful. Richard has in the past been so bullied about and ridden by chancellors and cardinals and their ilk that at the slightest hint of coercion his bile rises.’

  ‘I know my Richard,’ he said again.

  Maybe he did, maybe not. The sure thing is that he did not know himself. I saw him leave with the unexpressed determination to tell Richard that though he was King of England he couldn’t keep the princess and half the court of Navarre hanging about as a housewife keeps a pedlar waiting at the back door. And I saw him return, his errand forgotten and nothing in his mind save the urge to take the Cross and join Richard’s crusade at the first possible moment. For Richard had greeted him with affection, put his arm across his shoulders, led him about through camps of men and pickets of horses, showed him his muster of stores and ships and talked to him until the boy was bemused and bewitched. He came back to Brindisi to tell Berengaria that Richard was busy, that Richard was wonderful and that he was going back to Navarre to seek their father’s consent and support because he meant to go on crusade himself.

  Berengaria listened to every word he said about Richard but she was not interested in his own plans. It was left to me to draw him aside, and confront him with the question:

  ‘And what of your errand?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I could see that Richard had too much in hand and in mind. I forebore to bother him. Madam, if you could see what he does in the course of a day! He will throw off his doublet and work with his men; I even saw him dressing sores on pack mules! He says he will attend to the wedding when he has time and that, I judge, will not be before spring.’ He began to talk of his own plans. I interrupted him.

  ‘Your going home will worsen the situation, Sancho. They will all want to go with you. They’ll believe that the betrothal has gone awry; whatever you may say, they’ll prefer to believe that you are going home because you have discovered Richard is philandering with Tancred’s niece!’

  ‘I assure you, there is no truth in that rumour. The man is too busy. If you could see him as I have seen him, you would believe.’

  ‘I can believe without seeing. I know Richard. I believe that he is busy and that he will marry Berengaria in the spring. But the others… No, Sancho! They were all very restive when Garcia went; when you go they will go with you. And your sister will go to her wedding worse attended than any merchant’s daughter.’

  ‘If she went barefoot in her shift she’d be a damned lucky woman and so I shall tell her.’ He laughed. ‘Berengaria knows that. As for the others, I shall explain.’

  But he hadn’t the personality to give his explanations any force and the thing turned out as I expected. It was as it says in the Bible, “They began with one consent to make excuses.” This one remembered a daughter due to be brought to bed, this one a son who was to be married, another an old father about to die, another an old mother left in charge of estate; two or three ladies discovered that they were suffering from ailments only Navarrese physicians could deal with; several young gallants recalled the charms of ladies left in Navarre. And who could blame them? They had come out to attend a wedding; the date was still unfixed, the bridegroom was too busy even to discuss it and the prince was going home. To be sure, he had a high-sounding excuse—but everyone knew better. And they all wanted to go home.

  So far as I was concerned they could all have gone and jumped into the sea; I didn’t care a groat whether they went to Navarre or to hell but I did fear for the effect of the general exodus on Berengaria who had behaved up to that moment so impeccably.

  However, I had misjudged her. ‘Let them go,’ she said when at last the matter came under open discussion. ‘Without them, when Richard does send for us, we shall travel more quickly.’ And on the day of leave-taking there was no shadow, not even of homesickness, over her mood. When the bowing and kissing of hands was done she embraced Sancho and sent her love to her father and sent him a message that he was to let Young Sancho join Richard as soon as possible. Her last words to her brother were:

  ‘I will see you in Acre.’ Then she turned back and was soon at work on the baldric. I was filled with admiration and affection for her and thought, for the hundredth time, that Richard was uncommonly fortunate. I also thought that he had but to see her to love her.

  Winter closed in upon our narrowed company. We were comfortably housed and well fed and, although there were the inevitable little squabbles which must arise in any company kept in close quarters for protracted lengths of time, we were, on the whole, happier than we were before Sancho and the discontented contingent had left. The members of our company now, with a few exceptions, were going on crusade together and were bound by an unspoken unity of purpose. The little duchess and I avoided one another by common consent. Blondel, of whom I had taken a more tolerant, if mystified, view since my talk with Sancho, I might have come to like had it not been that Berengaria and Anna and Pila and Joanna all vied with one another to spoil him.

  So Candlemas passed and winter began to wane. I began to feel impatient again and the feeling grew until the pleasant, aimless days following one another seemed as long and tedious as the days of my imprisonment at Winchester.

  VI

  Everything comes to an end and one bright mild morning when spring seemed near at hand a small ship put into port and presently a little scrubbed page, wearing Richard’s livery, was brought into my presence and delivered into my hands the letter for which I had so long waited. I broke the seal eagerly and looked at the page which was written in a good clerkly hand, not Richard’s hasty scrawl. The phrases, too, were pompous and polished, though the directions were Richard’s entirely, very abrupt and very clear. The small ship, St. James of Padua, would wait and carry us back to Sicily where we were to board a more seaworthy vessel, Mary the Virgin, and proceed to Cyprus. I was to tell Joanna that Tancred had capitulated and that her dowry was safe. The consumable goods Richard had commandeered and would pay for at current prices; the golden table and cups had been sent back to England and deposited in various religious establishments where they would be safe. So far, so good, a very cheerful letter. For me the sting lay in its tail.

  ‘I have arranged with Isaac of Cyprus to receive you and to aid you in preparing for the wedding which will take place as soon as I
join you there. Since your stay in Sicily will be brief and I am much occupied, I trust that the princess will excuse me from waiting upon her. Philip of France is with me now and for reasons which you will understand it is advisable for me to concentrate upon the business of the crusade…’

  I understood that well enough. Philip was still sore and in a touchy mood; the less said about or seen of the new bride, the better. Richard at his foxiest! But it wasn’t Richard who had to tell Berengaria that we were off to Sicily or saw her hands fly to her breast or heard her voice, for once expressive and ecstatic, say, ‘I shall see him at last!’ And it wasn’t Richard who had to say, ‘My dear, I am afraid not. Not until we reach Cyprus.’

  I thought it inconsiderate, if not positively unkind, of Richard to have arranged for us to go to Sicily at all. Why not, I wondered, let us ship for Cyprus at once in the small ship? But before we reached Messina I changed my opinion; St. James of Padua was an unhandy vessel and rolled like a drunken tinker even on the calmest day; and her master, apologising for our discomfort, promised us many things of Mary the Virgin, a fine new ship, he said.

  It was a pity that she could not have been sent to Brindisi to carry us direct to Cyprus but it seemed that she was at the moment bringing a contingent of French soldiers from Marseilles and would land them, reload with stores and be ready to sail as soon as we reached Messina. It was, in fact, a reasonable, sensible and time-saving arrangement if one could ignore the feelings of the girl who had set out from Navarre, waited long in Italy and was now to go to Sicily and leave without so much as a glimpse of the man she loved.

  Berengaria earned my astonished admiration anew on that voyage. She never questioned the arrangement; even in the throes of seasickness she uttered no complaint. And I believe that if Mary the Virgin had been ready to sail as soon as we arrived, we should all have gone on to Cyprus together in good heart and everything would have been entirely different. But the ship was not ready.

  It is grievous to a thinking person to reflect how many troublesome things arise from the best intentions.

  At that moment, when all Christian Europe was afire with ardour to recapture the holy places, a markedly communal spirit was abroad and gifts from groups, orders, communities and guilds, all of them most well intentioned and almost all bound to be the subject of fierce dissension, came pouring in. For a short time the Cross on a man’s shoulder set him apart, a dedicated man. The Pope, with tears running down his face, had blessed the leaders and they had all sworn to hold faith as brothers; old feuds, differences of rank and language were momentarily forgotten in a great spiritual afflatus which, because it took no count of realities or of the experience of centuries, held within it the seeds of disaster and disillusion.

  We read in the Gospels that the early Christians “held all things in common.” We are not told for how long or short a time such an idealistic affair lasted, nor in what confusion it ended, but we know that it did end. To the ordinary well-meaning Christian person this crusade appeared to call for a return to communal effort, communal ideas of property. So the imaginative (and singularly well informed) nuns of Brittany all combined their resources and forwarded a considerable sum of money “to be used to provide camel transport in the desert.” The Guild of Clothworkers in Amsterdam contributed eight scaling ladders “to be reared in our name against the walls of Jerusalem.” Every woman in Aquitaine whose name was Mary contributed a coin great or small and sent the total, “to be used to liberate the places where she whose name we bear walked and sorrowed.” There were thousands of such offerings, worthy, touching, mostly wasted. ‘Devil take the camels, I want a hundred donkeys now,’ Richard is said to have shouted at one juncture and that summed up the whole situation. If every gift could have been labelled, “For Richard Plantagenet, to use as seems him best,” nothing would have been wasted or misused. A communal spirit is an excellent thing; all men and women of good will pouring all their efforts and all their resources into a common cause could be invincible but only if such efforts and such resources are at the command of one person, the most capable and vigorous and in complete authority.

  Mary the Virgin was one of six ships contributed to the crusade by the mighty and wealthy College of Cardinals. One of the six bore an English name and was manned chiefly by English sailors; one was entirely French; one German, one Italian; one Flemish; one Spanish. They were the largest and most modern ships afloat and they were all under the vague but comprehensive authority of “The Leaders of This Crusade.” Richard, who found the entirely English ships of the fleet rather small and in need of different rigging for the Mediterranean, had settled on the English-flavoured Mary the Virgin as the vessel to carry us to Cyprus. But the ship’s master, a surly misogynist, the illegitimate son of a Bristol archdeacon, demurred at the arrangement and said that his commission was to carry crusaders and their armaments, not women and their gear. Richard, who could never bear any hint of opposition in a menial, said bluntly that the master’s trouble was that he was afraid to set sail ahead of the main fleet and ordered him an escort of baggage vessels. The man, extremely offended, mustered the five other masters of what was known as the “Cardinals’ Fleet,” and the six waited upon Richard to tell him that since their duties were undefined they would welcome the decision of the College of Cardinals who had commissioned them and in whose pay they were. The College of Cardinals had a nominal headquarters in Rome but the full body met only at the election of a new pope, so heaven knows to whom, or exactly where, they would have lodged their appeal. However, Richard was resourceful. He asked, ‘Which one of you has a grievance?’ The man from Bristol—Saunders, they called him—stood out.

  ‘And the ships were to be devoted to the service of…?’

  ‘The leaders of the crusade, sir.’

  ‘And they are, at this moment, in this island?’

  ‘Yourself and the King of France, sire.’

  ‘Very well, you, the aggrieved, and we, the leaders, will meet at supper and discuss this matter. Is that agreeable to you?’

  Master Saunders said that that was fair enough.

  He spoke no French; Philip of France spoke no English. Richard could understand English, though he spoke it rarely. But over the meal, while he plied Master Saunders with strong wine, he acted most agreeably as interpreter. What he said to Philip nobody knows but at the crucial moment he called in Robert of Boxford, who spoke both French and English, and asked him to translate to Saunders Philip’s decisive word which was:

  ‘This crusade cannot be pursued without all sorts. Your ship and every other ship must carry all sorts. The leaders of the crusade decide that in the name of God you must carry all sorts.’

  ‘Women and their gear?’ Saunders asked.

  Robert of Boxford put the question in French to Philip who obligingly said again, ‘All sorts.’ And Philip was known by everybody to be more than half a churchman; the nearest thing to the College of Cardinals that Saunders was likely to reach with any ease. So he gave in, albeit ungraciously. And Richard compromised by packing the vessel so full of crusaders’ gear that she lay low in the water and shipped it in the slightest wind; and he crammed the stern with archers who lived in supreme discomfort envying, no doubt, the ladies who, equally cramped, were to live on the foredeck with a canopy for shade and curtains for privacy. The cardinals had meant well, Richard had meant well; possibly Master Saunders had meant good rather than evil but the ladies would have been far happier on a small, entirely English ship where the captain would have welcomed them. A trivial and silly business but typical of much that took place.

  VII

  My trouble began as soon as we found ourselves lodged in a half-ruined castle on the inland fringe of Messina, not more than half an hour’s ride from the camp which lay on the other side of the town, a short distance along the coast. The tents and the pavilions with their pennants and standards had been clearly visible as we sailed into the harbour and Berengaria had looked towards them with great intensity and
said, ‘Isn’t it strange to think that Richard is there?’ And Joanna, who should have known better, for I had warned her—but she was always a simple fool at heart—had gasped out, ‘And doesn’t it seem hard that we shall not even have time to see him?’

  At that moment time—or the lack of it—was my ally and friend. I still thought that as soon as our gear was shifted we should be off for Cyprus where both young women could amuse themselves with arrangements for the wedding. But Master Saunders, little knowing what he did, put up his protest and time ceased to be my friend. There we were, with some days of waiting ahead of us, and there was Richard within easy distance and the whole situation became very awkward indeed.