The Lute Player

by Norah Lofts

  Was I getting old and muddle-minded? Not that my forgetfulness mattered in this particular instance, for had I kept my errand in mind I doubted whether I should have broached the matter. This was hardly the evening for tackling Richard about affairs matrimonial.

  Nevertheless, the sudden stab of memory gave me one of those physical jars which would have halted me in my stride had I been afoot; being on the mule’s back, and already bearing on the rein to maintain even pace, I bore harder and the mule, resenting the pull, lashed out with its heels, turning sideways. My escort was thrown into confusion and before we had recovered ourselves—I had been almost unseated—there came from behind us, from the direction of the camp, the call of a trumpet, the sound sweetened and muted and made sad by the distance.

  One of the men said, ‘My lady, if you would wait for a moment… That is the signal and the rule is, wherever we are, whatever we are about, if we hear it—’

  ‘What signal?’ Nobody answered. The six were shuffling into position until they stood shoulder to shoulder along the side of the path. Then as one man they lifted their arms and cried loudly:

  ‘Help, help for the Holy Sepulchre!’

  Three times they cried it; and though any solemn ritual intended to be performed by a mass of men can become ridiculous when performed by a small number, this was not ridiculous. It was, on the contrary, impressive and curiously moving. Gascon had lifted his lantern high and inquiringly and in the uncertain light I could see the six faces with disconnected features leaping to prominence as the glow touched them, a beard thrust forward as its owner threw back his head to make the call, a row of white teeth gleaming in a square-opened mouth, an eye, absorbed and earnest. I was abruptly conscious that these were dedicated men, soldiers of the Cross. A moment before we had been moving along as one body; now Gascon and I were set aside, an old woman and a page, outside the mystical union. Something in that thought made my throat thicken.

  They dropped their arms and the spokesman said in his cheerful English voice, ‘Thank you, my lady. At your service again.’

  ‘Do you do that every night?’ I asked, making no move to proceed.

  ‘Every night, my lady. Last thing before lights out. But only within sound of the trumpet. If we’d topped this next hill I doubt if we’d have heard it, then we needn’t have stopped you.’

  He spoke the words in a cheerful, matter-of-fact way, just explaining to me. Afterwards, looking back, I often wondered exactly why they should have affected me as they did.

  At the moment I heard there the very voice of England. The punctilious observance coupled with the complete lack of sentiment. One of my Aquitainians would either have considered a lady’s convenience sufficient excuse for ignoring the rule—thus being entirely practical; or, if he wished to observe it, he would have done so wholeheartedly without considering her convenience or the nearness of that hill—thus being completely sentimental. There was the difference and if there were a single word for it, it would describe all the English, gentle and simple, rich and poor. Scrupulous about the rules but sceptical, too. Stop because you are in earshot but cynically note that in another moment you would have been over the hill and free of the ritual. Exactly the same attitude as that of the London crowd, the loyalest on Earth, who interrupt their cheering with ribald and audible comments about royalty’s little physical peculiarities and who really liked Henry all the better for his red nose and potbelly. This apparent inconsistency in the English has made people of other nations call them two-faced and perfidious. I remembered that when I was trying to explain the English to Richard I had called them sly. I had almost said “hypocritical.” Both words were wrong. They had the peculiar capacity of facing both ways. Of seeing all round a subject.

  I have noticed repeatedly that though the English crowd could be very savage it was never deadly as a crowd of my own Aquitainians could be. Sooner or later, something would provoke its mirth and through the purifying laughter some lonely voice would say, ‘Poor old bugger!’ and with those words the mob’s sentence of death upon the subject of its interest, baited bull, chased pickpocket, discovered forger of coinage, brewer of bad beer, would lift. Even in the full heat of a hare-coursing, when the blood in dogs and men reached fever pitch, a hare had only to make one gallant or comic turn and somebody would cry, ‘Live hare!’ and somebody else would beat off the dogs and that hare would live to run another day.

  The English were never extreme. And that made them, up to a point, a very exploitable people. At this moment they were bearing with wry humour and patience the exhortations of Longchamp’s regime. When he fell they wouldn’t tear him to pieces. They’d handle him roughly, no doubt, but somebody would say, ‘Poor old bugger. He’s lost his flag and all his pretty soldier men.’ And the crowd would laugh and let him get away. Next day they’d regret it and spend hours describing what they ought to have done to him.

  That was my England. My? I was Eleanor of Aquitaine and there was no doubt that individual Englishmen, such as Nicolas of Saxham, had treated me ill. But although, or perhaps because, I was alien I could look at these people and understand them and love them. And I could see what Richard could not, that the sending of one more elderly cleric, however honest, however well-meaning, would mean nothing, less than nothing, to the ordinary mass and mob of people who made up the English nation. What they needed in this moment of confusion wasn’t orders or even support for either party but a rallying point, somebody outside—if possible, above—the quarrel between Geoffrey and Longchamp.

  Pursuing this train of thought, I had not noticed that we were on the move again. I became aware of external things to find that we had topped the hill which the man-at-arms had pointed out. On the downward slope, and with the smell of home in his nostrils, the mule renewed his efforts to brisken the pace and the soldiers were almost running, skipping and slithering on the loose rain-worn surface of the road. I had that feeling, which sometimes comes in a nightmare, of being momentarily powerless, pushed or dragged towards some dreadful yet obscure danger and unable to lift a finger, unable even to voice a scream of protest. The only difference was that in the dream the sensation of helplessness, of being carried forward, is accompanied by a sense of fear. That now was lacking. I wasn’t frightened; I was just being carried forward, futile, helpless, as inconsiderable as a leaf that the wind blows.

  Richard had brushed me away, first in anger and then with good-humoured contempt, and this mule was rushing me down to Messina, back to the women, back to the trivial exasperations, to a way of life and a pattern of behaviour which was a negation of all my understanding—and of the power which I knew I had in me.

  Conceit is the belief in a power which one does not possess; all too often it is confused with self-confidence which is belief in the power one does possess as surely as one possesses two eyes and two hands and two feet. I knew at that moment, without a trace of conceit that, given the chance, I could put things right in England and that, after Richard, I was the one person who could. I knew that just as I knew my own age and height and the colour of my own hair. I wasn’t frightened of Longchamp; I stood in no awe of John; I understood the English and they had affection for me; I had proved that when I reappeared in London.

  Even by virtue of my rank, I thought cynically, I was the best person to send. I had only to go to Windsor to spend a night and Longchamp’s flag must come down or he stand convicted of open insurrection—and he wasn’t ready for that yet!

  I wasn’t blown up with self-esteem. I sat there on that pulling mule and knew that I was over seventy and that everything I had ever previously attempted had miscarried: my crusade with Louis, my rebellion against Henry in support of Harry, my attempt to rule in Aquitaine. All failures. And a thousand lesser things too. But now suddenly it seemed to me that all my long life of failure had been a preparation for this task; I had been forged and tempered and sharpened as a good blade is fired by enthusiasm, plunged into the cold water of despair, beaten into shape by hard cir
cumstance and finally edged by conviction.

  Was I now to let this mule carry me down to Messina where I must say, “My dear, Richard is too busy to see you, there, there! Come, let us pack our embroidery and our little disappointments and go to Cyprus. There, there! Blondel will sing us a little song and Anna will make a little joke and Pila will arrange a nice little meal”? While Coutances went bumbling off to England with a letter, at which John and Longchamp would laugh, and Longchamp would go on filling his pockets and John his empty pride by wringing out my English people as a housewife wrings out a rag?

  By the Rood, no!

  I tugged at the mule and cried, ‘Halt!’ to the soldiers. It was again like that nightmare where, in the last extremity, the dreamer cries out and wakes.

  ‘I must go back to the camp,’ I said. ‘I have remembered something of importance.’

  The soldier whose peculiarly English attitude and cheerful English voice had affected my decision (or not? Had not this moment been approaching step by step since they laid me in the arms of my mother instead of the son she had craved? Who knows?) said kindly that if it was a message or anything that he could carry back to save me the exhaustion of the return journey he would attend to it. And thanking him for his offer, I thought: My poor good man, I am not a woman weakened by her seventy years and her grey hairs but strengthened and perfected.

  The soldiers accepted the change of direction cheerfully but Gascon sighed and I heard him and sent him home. The mule sighed, too, but I turned it to face the hill and the rising moon.

  The camp was very quiet; the fires were dowsed now and the lanterns out. But the men knew their way and we came expeditiously enough to the open space outside Richard’s tent where soldiers and servingmen and pages, wrapped in blankets against the chill of the early spring night, lay sleeping and looking like corpses. But the guard was wakeful. This time he gave me a look of recognition and respect. ‘His Majesty is within and not yet asleep.’

  ‘That is well,’ I said. I could indeed hear from within the tent the sound of music, of little broken melodies, the desultory, experimental plucking of the strings that comes before the lute player settles down to his song.

  The body of the tent was dark and empty but the oil lamp still shone above the dais. Once again it was like being in the nave of a church when the miracle play was about to begin.

  This time there were two players: Richard, who lay propped on his elbow on the bed, his head and torso visible, the rest of his body hidden by the screen, and the lute player who sat on a stool, holding his hands and his lute into the lamplight with his back to Richard. I knew him because the light shone on his white-gold hair and made a nimbus of it. It was Berengaria’s minstrel, the boy Blondel.

  I had entered the tent briskly, meaning to say what I had to say before my courage failed me. But surprise halted me. What was Blondel doing here? Had Berengaria sent him?

  At that moment Richard’s voice reached me.

  ‘That’s it! Perfect. Now, from the beginning!’

  The boy turned his head with a quick, delighted look and then turned back, bent over his lute, struck up the music and started to sing. I had never heard him sing so well, so sweet, so clear, so true and tunable and so merry, like a blackbird singing on an April day in England when the sun shines warm after a shower and the hawthorn buds break white in the hedges.

  The song was new to me.

  Sing of my mail that was dug in the darkness and fashioned in light

  That I might go armoured by sunshine and secretly move as the night.

  Link on link, chain on chain, polished and bright;

  Sing of my armour, dug in the darkness, forged in the light.

  ‘Now, sire, this is your verse. You must sing it.’

  Richard pulled himself from his reclining position and sat up on the bed’s end. His voice rang out, as tunable as the boy’s but deeper and harsher.

  Sing of my sword, heavy and sharp as fate,

  Sing of the sword that shall batter the Holy Gate.

  In the good enterprise

  Blood shall this blade baptise

  And leave immaculate.

  Sing of my sword.

  I was by this time close to the edge of the dais, ready to speak as soon as the song should reach its end. Blondel began on the next verse.

  Sing of my shield

  I had been looking at the boy as I moved towards the dais; my eye, first startled by the sight of him unexpectedly encountered, had been arrested by the fact that he looked different from the Blondel of the bower. Ordinarily he wore a hangdog look. I had once or twice wondered at it, for he had a very pleasant life; all the ladies spoiled him; he ate and lived very softly for one of his kind. But now and again his face reminded me of the faces of men who have borne some shocking experience—some of the Christian prisoners whom we released from Saracen hands (and our crusade, if it did nothing more, set scores of them at liberty) had worn that look; and I have also seen it on the faces of men stricken with mortal sickness and soon to die. But tonight that look was gone; his face was merry and young; even the white hair shone gold in the lamplight and lost its frosty incongruity; and his eyes took on a lustre and his teeth shone when he opened his mouth to the singing. One could imagine an archangel—not Michael for he, being a soldier, would wear a sterner look but Gabriel, perhaps—looking somewhat like that.

  And I remembered that earlier this evening—though it seemed much longer, years and years ago, in fact—I had had reason for gratitude towards him. Although in the confusion that followed his withdrawal I had lost sight of the fact, he had prevented Berengaria from making a fool of herself. And now he was doing well, too. Richard, after the music and the singing, would be in a softer and more amenable mood than he would have been coming straight from the interview with Coutances or from the mule pickets. More likely to listen to me.

  How you do seem to crop up, I thought quite kindly, looking at the back of the silver-gilt head bent over the lute. And then, coming back to practical things, wondering who sent him. Berengaria? Anna? Once before he had spied out the land—was he spying again? But the whole thing had a remoteness, an unreality which it would not have had if I had found Blondel in this tent before I had heard those soldiers say, ‘Help, help for the Holy Sepulchre!’

  I stood there, waiting for the verse to end and thinking these oddly assorted thoughts. Then it happened.

  Richard’s hand, lean and brown, cupped for caressing, reached out until it almost touched the back of that silvergilt head; it hesitated, hovered and fell away, as Eve’s hand must have fallen away once, twice, before it closed at last about the deadly apple.

  And I looked into Richard’s face and saw there what is perhaps the most shocking, most humiliating thing any woman—let alone a mother—can see on any man’s face; naked, hungry, lustful desire directed at another man…

  Quite unmistakable to anyone and to me horribly recognisable, for as a young woman I had spent some time in the company of my uncle, Robert of Antioch, the most charming and handsome man of his day but a notorious lover of boys.

  One can think many things in a second of time and I thought then: How odd that I should remember Robert this very evening. For when I was thinking over my thousand failures I had thought of how, full of the pride of young womanhood and beauty, I had flaunted my charms at him, exerted myself to be witty and companionable, not in jealousy exactly but certainly competitively with the favourite of the moment. And Louis had been angry and accused me of misconduct—and how could I say that Robert hardly noticed me because I was not a pretty page boy? That was one of the thousand of failures, remembered just before I had halted the mule.

  And now I saw in my most beloved son the taint. And knew that it had been transmitted through my blood. Henry and his kin had vices enough, God knew, but the vice of Sodom was not one of theirs.

  The full weight of my understanding and my knowledge fell on me like the lead that falls on the wretch condemned to peine fo
rte et dure; and I stood there, within arm’s reach of Richard, so shocked and stunned that if he had looked up and seen me I could not have spoken to him. If a lion had come rampaging through the tent I could not have stepped out of its path.

  Alys, I thought, and the long delay… Berengaria and the absence even of curiosity… It all fitted.

  So did that damned boy’s reluctance to accompany Berengaria on her innocent, girlish escapade.

  If there had been anything to sit on I should have sat down; if there had been anything to cling to I should have clutched it. But the trestle tables and the benches had been moved away and I stood there in the empty space and the darkness and the emptiness whirled round me and over me and through me. I was alone in the infinite night.

  But blows fall and none but the last is fatal; from the rest we reel and recover ourselves and go on. Presently my mind began to move again and I thought: This thing which I have stumbled on by chance in no way affects what I came back to say. England stands where she stood. And Richard, whatever he may be, is still my son.

  Just then the song ended. The boy swept his fingers across his lute in a final triumph-burst of melody, leapt to his feet and, facing Richard, said, ‘Sire, that was magnificent!’ And though my heart’s beat reverberated in my ears and made all my limbs unsteady I forced myself to move forward and say, before Richard could speak, ‘It was indeed.’