The Lute Player

by Norah Lofts

  It is to be hoped that Anna never gives this manuscript to my lady, Berengaria, to wile away an hour of tedium. But if she does… There you are, my dear. That is how Richard Plantagenet appeared to the impartial observer. (O God, forgive that word “impartial”! I lie. I hated him.)

  But it was quite plain that the story about dredging up beef casks had not been a fabrication. When he walked into his tent and I saw him in full light for the first time he was soaked from head to foot. The thin linen jerkin and hose which he wore clung to him like a skin; the red-gold hair was plastered to his skull; the red-gold beard came to a point like a rat’s tail and rippled water onto his breast. And I never in all my days saw a man look so radiantly, so beatifically happy and contented.

  He said, genially chiding, ‘I thought I gave orders that this tent was to be cleared thirty minutes after the supper bugle! Feed you I must, put up with your hullabaloo I will not. Get you gone. You all have duties or beds. Get to them.’

  He looked at the company and I had an odd feeling that he knew exactly what the duties and where the bed of each individual would be. His eye rested on me. Duty undefined, bedding place unknown.

  He strode through the tent until he was level with me.

  Then he put his hand, cold and rough from its contact with salt water, under my chin—just as a man greets a petted child, raising the shy face.

  ‘You play very well, boy. Welcome to our tent. Come along. Presently, when I am more at my ease, you shall play for me.’

  For a moment his pale eyes gazed at my face and I wondered whether he remembered that dim anteroom, the borrowed lute. But he strode on, saying, ‘Yes, Raymond, go on now, I am listening,’ and one of the men with him broke into gabbling speech.

  I could have turned and gone then. I had satisfied my curiosity. I was free to go and puzzle out some means of telling my lady that it was true about the dredging of casks. But something held me. It was just like another moment I remembered, a fatal, decisive moment when I had been free to go, free to stay. I could have turned on the market place at Pamplona and joined Stefan in the tavern and never set eyes on Berengaria; never in this world have looked on the Princess of Navarre. A staggering thought. And I was equally free, as men reckon freedom, to turn now and go from Richard Plantagenet’s tent. He might have remembered and asked: Where is that lute player? Where did he go? But no one could have answered him because nobody knew whence I came or whither I went.

  But I believe that we choose as we are meant to choose. Here I set it down in black and white and in my best writing. We do what we are ordered to do. By God or the devil. (Dear Anna, you understand; you wouldn’t publish that heresy while I was alive, would you?)

  I followed to a rough sort of platform which had been reared at the end of the tent and furnished with a rug, a table and chair and a screen.

  Standing near the edge of the platform in a waiting attitude was a small man wearing the black robe and the white tabs of the physician and as I drew near I recognized with a little shock of surprise Escel, the doctor from Valladolid whom Sancho, King of Navarre, had summoned in haste to Pamplona when Berengaria had lain a-dying. Escel had arrived to find his patient well on the way to recovery but he had borne no grudge because he was on the road to France to take the Cross. ‘The crusade will need those who can mend wounds as well as inflict them,’ he had said.

  Richard stopped by Escel’s side.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you again, Raymond,’ he said, ‘but this is urgent. Well, Escel, what news?’

  ‘Four more died today, sire.’

  ‘God damn it! Why? Escel, why? Young lusty men, well fed, well tended. And all in that quarter. That’s how many—fourteen, fifteen—this last week?’

  ‘Fifteen, sire.’

  ‘And you bled them?’

  ‘Yes, sire.’

  ‘And gave them the new draughts?’

  ‘Yes, sire.’

  ‘Then by God’s blood the place must be cursed or it’s bad air, as I said. They must be moved. Ralph.’ He looked round inquiringly, and an elderly, responsible-looking man pushed his way forward. ‘Ralph, I want every tent between what they called Pets’ Corner and the water moved. There’s something wrong with that site. Move the whole lot up here into the meadow at the back of this tent.’

  ‘My lord, in that meadow His Majesty of France has picketed his horses,’ Ralph said diffidently.

  ‘I know. But with all due deference, my archers are of slightly more importance. Nevertheless, Simon—’

  ‘Here, my liege.’

  ‘Simon, put on your most formal manner and go and wait upon His Majesty of France. Give him my greetings and tell him that I propose, with his kind permission, to set some tents in his horses’ pasture. Tell him the exchange will benefit his nags because down by the water the grass grows very green. No, wait a bit. Better begin with the horses. Say that I’ve noticed that the high pasture behind my tent is grazed to the ground; ask him whether he’d like to make the exchange. No. By the sacred wounds of Christ, he won’t like that either; he’ll take it as criticism. We’ve had words already about the French way with horses. Oh, devil take the lot of them. Ralph, get those tents moved; Simon, round up the French horses and drive them down. I’ll go to His Majesty of France in the morning and explain. That way my archers will have the benefit of the better air while we argue the matter out.’

  The solution seemed to me to be sensible, though some of the remarks preceding it reflected rather ominously upon the state of relationship between the two leaders. Richard reverted with scarcely a pause to whatever it was that Raymond was telling him. Finally he said, ‘Tell him I said so and I don’t propose to discuss the matter any further. His conscience, forsooth. Tell him I have a conscience, too, and that it has teeth!’ Raymond and two others who had not spoken bade their King good night and went away.

  Richard leapt lightly onto the platform and went behind the screen. I climbed up, too, and took my place at the end of the table, laying down my lute until such time as it was required. From this position I could see his bed, a canvas pallet stuffed with straw, protruding in places, set upon a wooden frame. I could see also two iron tripods, one holding a basin and ewer, the other his mail. My cell at Gorbalze had not been barer.

  He talked on and all the time an apparent half-wit called Dickon was clumsily wielding a towel and fumbling about for dry clothes. Not without surprise and some inner amusement I found myself thinking how much more nimbly I could have ministered to him; and when one of the remaining men started to make some complaint in a high raucous voice I thought: Oh, couldn’t you wait until the man is dry and re-clothed?

  But at last he was. Only he and Dickon remained behind the screen and to Dickon he said, ‘I can fasten my belt. You go and fetch me something to eat.’ He emerged from the screen, buckling his belt, and immediately began to talk to me.

  ‘Now, boy, we’ll have some music. By God’s toenails, I’m so sharp-set I could eat an old woman, provided she were well roasted. And if you play to me I shall feast like Jove on Olympus, whatever Dickon choose to bring me. I’ll wager you a crown to a groat it’ll be pease porridge. It is a most remarkable thing but a fact, I swear. If you demand a proper meal it will appear—on shipboard, in the middle of a march, anywhere—but once let it be known that all you ask is food and you’ll get pease porridge, certain as death itself. Ha, here it is and what did I tell you? Pease porridge, lukewarm and something that looks like dead donkey. All right, Dickon, if you say it is beef, beef it doubtless is. Run away. And tell that fellow on guard not to admit anyone except Escel. I’m going to have some music. And by God, I’ve earned it. Fifteen casks I brought in with my own hands tonight; and the men with me, just to outdo me, landed twenty. Good fishing, thanks be to God.’ He took up his knife, then halted it. ‘Boy, have you had your supper?’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’ And how much better I had supped! I thought of the little pasties, the fresh broiled fish, the tender young fowl, the ora
nges and the candied grapes, the cheese, the little sweet cakes all prepared in his honour. It had been a wonderful meal and nobody save the Lady Pila had really done more than pick at it.

  ‘Then play for me,’ he, said, and began to eat the stodgy wedge of cold pease porridge and the slab of beef which really did look very much the colour of a donkey. He ate, voraciously at first and then more slowly, while I played The Death of Roland.

  When I finished he said, ‘That would be a timely reminder—if I needed it. Once you depend on a man, you lose him; while he depends on you he is yours. Not that I’m prone—Tell me, boy, where have I seen you? It sticks in my mind that you once did me a service.’

  ‘I have never done you a service, sire, to my knowledge.’ I had lent him my lute but at that moment the service I owned was to Berengaria of Navarre, not to Richard of Aquitaine.

  ‘Where do you hail from?’

  ‘I am a minstrel in the service of Her Highness, the Princess of Navarre. But I am here without the knowledge or the permission of my mistress.’

  He wiped his knife, first upon the edge of the table, then on his sleeve, and sheathed it.

  ‘So you’re straight from the women’s quarters, eh? Tell me, are they all well? All in good heart?’ I thought there was something almost deliberate in his lumping them all together. Knowing that I had just come from the place where Berengaria was, wouldn’t any ordinary man have asked—

  ‘All the ladies are well in health, sire,’ I answered with equal deliberation. ‘The princess and the Queen of Sicily were sadly disappointed over your failure to sup with them.’

  He made a gesture of impatience. ‘It was impossible. Not only on account of the casks washing in; other things, a dozen of them. You heard Raymond and Escel, didn’t you? Women don’t understand. Even my mother who should know! When I am actually storming the walls of Jerusalem nobody will expect me to stop and clean myself and put on fresh clothes and go out to supper and make pretty speeches. What they cannot and will not understand is that the storming of Jerusalem has started here and now. If moving those men tonight has saved one life—by the grace of God, that man may be the one who will speed the arrow into Saladin’s heart. Just as one of those beef casks might provide rations for the one day that means the difference between defeat and victory. Nobody understands! Down to the last inch of a bowstring, down to the last nail in a horse’s hoof, everything is important and everything has to be seen to.’ He breathed hard through nostrils that were suddenly white against the red of his face, and continued more calmly: ‘Women seem to be incapable of understanding such matters. But there, I don’t suppose you understand, either. Play me another tune, boy. Then run back to your mistress and for the love of God tell her that I am indeed very busy.’

  But I did understand. He might push me aside, dismiss me, send me back contemptuously with a message for the women. But the very way in which he had said the word “Jerusalem” told me more than a thousand explanatory sentences could have done. He was in love with an idea. And a man has room in his life for only one love.

  I knew that. Christ Himself knew it. “No man can serve two masters”—they were His own words. And while my fingers busied themselves playing a little trio of songs which I had played so often during my itinerant days that I could have played them in my sleep—Caps on the Green, Gathering Peasecods and The Merry Windmill—my mind was slowly accepting the thought that when he had taken Jerusalem Richard might turn to Berengaria and love her; but not until then.

  Tinkle, tinkle, the last little tune ended.

  ‘You play very well,’ he said. ‘Do you ever make tunes of your own?’

  ‘Very often.’

  ‘So do I. While I walk about or just before I fall asleep. One has been dinning in my ears for days now. I’ll see if I can pick it out. Lend me your lute—though it’s long since I handled one.’ He reached out his hand.

  The gesture and the last sentence were exact repetitions of the action and the words with which he had borrowed my lute in the anteroom of William’s Tower. As our eyes met across our hands and the lute I saw memory and recognition dawn in his. He dropped his hand and said slowly:

  ‘You are that boy! I knew I had seen you before. Is that the very lute?’

  I nodded, apprehensive. After a moment’s thought, as though he were making up his mind how to take this news, he broke into laughter.

  ‘Well, well, an odd situation indeed. Tell me, what happened to you? After we had decided to hush up the scandal there were vigorous plans afoot for cutting your throat as a means to still your tongue. Did you guess that? Is that why you fled to Navarre?’

  ‘No, sire. I returned to Navarre because I then had the information I had been sent out to acquire. The king was anxious to know about your marriage.’

  ‘I see. So that was how he knew!’ He brooded and I hastened to say:

  ‘I never mentioned to anyone what happened, my lord. There was no need. That the betrothal was at an end was all anyone cared to know. My tongue has been as still as though you had indeed cut my throat.’

  ‘Oh, not I, not I,’ he said hastily. No, I thought, your gracious mother! I understood now why she had always detested me.

  ‘Were you never tempted to make the whole sorry story into a song?’ Richard asked. ‘I would have been, in your place. What a subject! Listen…’ He reached out again and took the lute and without hesitation broke into a song which, if ever it had been sung in public, would have been more popular than ’Twas on a Fair May Morning. The tune was catchy and memorable, the words excessively bawdy but extremely witty. If he were indeed extemporising he was a musician and a maker without peer but it seemed more likely, I thought, that the song had been ripening in his head for a long time.

  ‘One could go on for hours in the same strain,’ he said at last, ‘and may I rot in hell if I understand why you—’

  He broke off abruptly as, close at hand, a trumpet began to sound raucously. He pushed back his chair and stood upright. I got to my feet too. The four or five men who had remained in the tent after it had been cleared of the crowd were all standing and the servers who were swabbing down the tables ceased their labours. Evidently it was some sort of ritual but one I had never heard of.

  Richard lifted his right arm high in the air and, anxious to do the proper thing, I moved to imitate him but when my arm was level with my shoulder I became aware of his eye on me, warning, sternly disapproving. I cast a furtive glance into the body of the tent and saw that the only arms uplifted were those of the soldiers; pages and serving-men merely stood still.

  Then all the men cried together, ‘Help, help for the Holy Sepulchre,’ three times in loud, solemn voices. And for as long as it took to utter the threefold cry one realised that they were united, all dedicated men, followers of the Cross, not in the wide-embracing sense of being Christians but in the enclosed, esoteric brotherhood of crusaders.

  And I had moved my arm! I, who ranked with the swabbers of tables.

  The whole thing was over before the hot blush which my mistake had brought to my face had died down; the man who had been fondling his dog went back to his stroking; the man who had been polishing his mail began to ply his pad again.

  ‘I had no time to warn you,’ Richard said quite kindly. ‘It is the custom for those who have taken the Cross and for those who follow them into battle to make that call every night. Just to remind them that crusading isn’t all guzzling and looting and whoring. A sound practice. Do you know, at this moment I’m ashamed that that trumpet call should have caught me singing a ribald song.’

  Then he snatched up my lute again, plucked at it for a moment, and broke into a song that was new to me, Jerusalem, on Thy Green Hill.

  I hadn’t hated him because he was to marry Berengaria; in my craziest moments I had known that she must marry some king or prince and he was the one she had chosen and the one to whom I had, in a mean small way, helped her. But I had hated him ever since we had arrived at Marseilles and
found him gone; a week, seven little days, too long to wait! And I had hated him when he kept her waiting in Brindisi all through the long winter. Most of all I had hated him for disappointing her this evening. I had come to his camp in hatred.

  But as he sang, all that feeling—hatred, resentment, jealousy, call it what you will—fell away.

  I’m getting old now; my wits are rotted with wine bibbing, my heart withered by sorrow but if at this moment I could hear for the first time that voice singing that song, I think I should be affected as I was affected then.

  Some of the words were taken straight out of the Psalter. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember not Jerusalem above my chief joy. But I assure you that the words of the passionate exile by the waters of Babylon were matched, exceeded, by the new words of a passion that spoke not of a backward-looking homesickness but of a pressing forward to a goal and of the desire to be worthy of reaching it.

  I listened and I understood. More, I was lured into becoming a crusader. I sat there, thinking: I could be an archer or a groom or, with training, a smith.

  By that time I was, so far as wine was concerned, completely sober, having drunk nothing since I left my lodging. And in all sobriety I sat and yearned to contribute to the crusade.

  The song ended and the last lingering notes died on the silence. I brushed my wet face with my hands and when I could trust my voice to speak I asked: