The Lute Player

by Norah Lofts

  So, talking of this and that, we jogged along and presently saw in the distance a haze of sun-gilded dust. The leaders of the dead crusade were returning to Acre.

  They made a splendid sight in the clear hot sunshine for they had put on all their finery for their visit to Saladin and as they bore down upon us they looked like a glittering, many-coloured wave coming up to engulf us. And we, to them, looked like two shabby travellers, mule-mounted, blocking the way. True, Alberic of Saxham had clothes which, closely inspected, hinted at rank but they were soiled and dusty and creased from being slept in and I was exactly as I had risen from half-drunken stupor the previous noonday, save that I had wound a length of cloth about my head to shield it from the sun.

  One or two of the young attendant knights rode straight at us, shouting and indicating by gestures that we should make way for our betters. But Alberic pulled his mule broadside across the narrow way and raised his arm, and then his by no means negligible voice, and announced that he had a letter for His Majesty of England. The first riders of the cavalcade parted company and edged their horses past us and then there was Richard, surly and grim-faced, staring down as he reined in and asked, ‘Who called for me?’ And a man in full armour—I never saw his face or knew his name—pushed his horse forward, saying, ‘Beware, sire. Remember what I told you.’ But by that time Richard had recognised me. His face lightened.

  ‘Why, Blondel,’ he said, ‘did you also come to bring me warning?’

  Before I could speak Alberic of Saxham said in his blunt way:

  ‘No, my liege, he came to show me the way. I bring you a letter from your mother.’ Most oddly his voice reduced everything to bare essentials; Eleanor’s long lineage, great heritage, two kingdoms and all the rest were eclipsed by the fact that at one time she had, in the common way of female, conceived and borne a son. “Your mother” said all that. And he dug in his pouch and produced the letter which was, I saw with all a scribe’s horror, no little soiled by its close contact with the cheese.

  Richard eased his horse round to the side of the track and with a movement of his finger waved on those whom his halting had checked. As Hubert Walter drew level, he called to him, ‘Walter, news from England.’ And my lord of Salisbury reined in and the man in armour pulled his horse into line on Richard’s other side.

  Richard took off his pearl-encrusted gloves and carefully broke the seal of the letter, peeled off its outer covering with the greasy marks on it and read—dourly at first, frowning, biting his lip. Then suddenly he laughed as he had not laughed since that evening in Bethany.

  ‘Read that, Walter! My little brother is so anxious to take up my leavings that he even proposes to marry the French princess!’

  Hubert Walter, for all his soldierly demeanour, was a scholar. His eyes ran over the letter quickly.

  ‘My lord,’ he said as he reached the end, ‘this is grave news, indeed.’ He lifted his eyes and looked at his master, his stunned look shot through with commiseration.

  ‘Grave news,’ Richard agreed. But nobody but a fool could help seeing that the news had already restored and re-invigorated him.

  ‘Most fortunately,’ said Walter, pursuing the obvious line of thought, ‘we are about to go home.’ He looked at Richard again and then quickly away. I saw the white shadow of fury creep about his lips. ‘I never coveted the papal throne till this moment,’ he said vehemently; ‘I’d like to excommunicate them both!’

  Richard gave his great hearty barking laugh again.

  ‘That would hurt Philip! Not John—he excommunicated himself years ago. But never mind.’ The laughter left his face. He brooded, urged his horse foward and rode for a while in silence. ‘Listen, Walter,’ he said at last, ‘since the moment I landed and Baldwin died you have been my right hand, my right eye. On all matters save the most trivial we have been in accord. Do you now as I bid you without question or argument. Embark all the men and every bit of gear that can possibly be carried and bring them to Dover. Give my Queen and my sister again into Stephen de Turnham’s charge. Garrison Acre and on your way home call in on Guy of Cyprus. Talk to him, tell him everything, make him feel that though he may seem abandoned, a last outpost—you know, Walter, brace him, link him with Acre and the pilgrim road. And, Walter, Jonathan of Adana owes me forty crowns which I lent him at Jaffa. Collect that and then pay Algenais what I borrowed from him.’ He smiled, lifting his face and blinking the dust out of his eyes. ‘I can think of nothing else to bother you with, Walter, my good friend. If I could make you Pope, by Christ’s Cross I would, but I do here and now appoint you in Baldwin’s place. My lord of Canterbury, will you graciously perform the petty duties I am compelled to leave to your care?’

  He had spoken the last sentences very disarmingly showing, for a man of his kind, surprising sensitiveness to the fact that his hearer might think he was asking a heavy service but offering a substantial reward. That was, indeed, a fact but he had most astonishingly been first to realise it and had cloaked it with a lightness which none but a churl would have disregarded.

  Hubert Walter said, ‘And you were the man who disapproved of knighting men on the battlefield! Hadn’t you best keep your bishopric until the errands are done, sire? And in the meantime, where do you intend to be yourself?’

  ‘In England,’ Richard replied. ‘I’m going to surprise them. I can’t, in the circumstances, go as I’d like, by sea to Marseilles and through France—they know that. They’ll imagine me buffeting round the coast of Spain and through Biscay Bay and I shall be upon them weeks before they expect me! I shall go by ship to Trieste and overland through Augsburg and Mainz and so down the Rhine. The shortest road and the quickest.’

  He spoke and looked as though he were well pleased with this plan, a little like a juggler who has performed a difficult-seeming trick with skill and success. His glance at Hubert Walter invited his approval. None came and the bishop’s highly coloured, hard-textured face took on a look as, near horror as possible.

  ‘You must be sun-struck!’ he said roughly. ‘Or you got—unbeknownst to me—on such new good terms with the Archduke of Austria as will make you welcome in his domain and in the Emperor’s?’

  ‘I’m not looking for a welcome. Nor will they be looking for me. I’ll go as a pilgrim or a merchant…’ He turned his head to where I rode a little too close to his horse’s flank, held there by curiosity. Expecting, deserving rebuke, I drew off a little but he beckoned me and grinned the old boyish grin which I had not seen for many a day. ‘I’ll take Blondel. We’ll be strolling players, maybe. And that reminds me, Walter, I shall want all the money you can lay hands on.’

  ‘You won’t get a penny,’ said Walter, his voice and manner too grimly concerned to be lacking in respect; indeed, making respect seem a trivial thing. ‘Nor,’ he went on, plainly using the argument as he forged it, ‘will you rush off on such a wildcat scheme, leaving me responsible for the army’s safe return and making it look as though I had connived at your mad idea. I’m not going back to England to face the charge of being the biggest Judas of the lot and encouraging you to walk into enemy country.’

  Richard threw him a sidelong, very foxy look. Quite jovially he said, ‘It’s a sound plan. But tell me, Walter, if I adhere to it, what will you do?’

  Walter was not deceived by the jovial tone; his face, as he turned it towards his master, was the face of a man defying a known peril. The flesh of his firm red cheeks twitched but he eyed Richard with a steady, level stare and then said:

  ‘I should put you under restraint, my lord. There are still five or six sound men in Acre and even more who, if not ardent in the crusade, are neither dupes nor rogues. And rather than see you walk into that viper’s nest, we would restrain you as a person no longer responsible for his actions. After all, sire, if you were mad with fever it would be our duty to prevent you from doing yourself a fatal injury—and this plan of yours is as mad as anything a fever-crazed brain could suggest.’

  I waited for the roa
ring rage—thereby proving that, though I thought I knew Richard well, I still had much to learn.

  ‘In short,’ he said, ‘in your opinion my plan is suicidal and you would hold me back from it as you would from any other form of that sin?’

  ‘That was exactly my meaning,’ Walter said. He was not lulled by his master’s apparent reasonableness; his cheeks twitched more violently and the colour had drained out of them, leaving them pale and hard with a red streak here and there, like suet, horrible.

  ‘Your wimple’s all crooked, old woman,’ Richard said, and cackled with laughter. Then with disconcerting abruptness his voice and manner changed. In a quiet deadly way he began to recount the names of all those who had failed him, the number of times he had been thwarted since he had set foot in Palestine. Listening, I realised that nothing, not the smallest thing, had escaped his notice during the past year. Little incidents, chance words of which at the time he had appeared to take no notice or had smiled over—every one had been marked and remembered and added to the great burden of bitterness which lay on his heart. His powers of observation and of memory outdistanced mine by twice as much as mine outdistanced those of the dullest footman in all that army. I was amazed. The sour account of motives misinterpreted, orders misunderstood or disobeyed, insults, slights, outright treachery lasted for some minutes; then he ended it with the words: ‘And now that my brother and my one-time ally are conspiring together to take my kingdom you, my lord of Salisbury, who once declared that you would follow me to hell, threaten to treat me as a madman because I make a plan to circumvent them quickly!’

  Walter was unshaken. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘if so it seems to you, so it must. And you are a madman if you can’t see that if you set foot in Austria or Germany, alone and unattended, your brother John stands a good chance to take your kingdom, not by force, by inheritance.’

  We rode for a while in silence. Then Richard said, ‘You are doubtless right, Walter. I have noticed that, save in the heart of battle, you err on the side of overcaution but your judgment is sound. I will go by the long sea road.’

  The suety look on Walter’s face vanished, engulfed by a flush of triumphant relief. Richard’s voice had sounded surly and grudging but I noticed that he did not wear the furious thwarted look which I had seen on these occasions when he had been compelled to give way to another’s judgment. Innocently I attributed this to the fact that Hubert Walter was the one man of whose integrity and good will he was, at heart, utterly certain. And I was glad, because I was in agreement with every word my lord of Salisbury had uttered.

  XVIII

  Of that last busy, crowded hour in Acre I remember only certain isolated moments.

  One was when Richard walked into his tent and looked towards the place where Raife’s bed had been. The corner was empty now, for I had cleared away every reminder of him. I had even rolled up and stored out of sight the maps he had helped to make. Yet he was there, an all but tangible presence at that moment.

  ‘Was it easy?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Very easy.’

  ‘Yes, they say death deals gently with those life has used hard. God rest him in peace.’ Under the hot canvas the silence gathered, positive, pulsating. Then Richard broke into the old shouting, bustling energy; admirable order weaving its pattern through apparent chaos; one clear mind directing a great mindless activity.

  Another memorable moment was that when those few who had been informed of his imminent departure came to take leave of him. Long ago I had seen the first candle gutter and die with Philip’s departure; I had seen in Bethany the crusade’s requiem. I had imagined that with the treaty of Damascus, even the ghost had been laid. But I was wrong. The stricken, poisoned, ailing spirit of the Third Crusade woke and stirred and bled and suffered once more and then died forever as men crowded about Richard to touch, to kiss his hand and take leave of him.

  They were not all his friends; they were not by any means all ardent crusaders but they were all touched, all illumined by this last dying light. It was the gleam that cries, tragic, irreconcilable, out of each day’s sunset. It was the end.

  The mind of man is a thing of infinite mystery. There I was, huddled in the tent corner, very thoroughly drunk, thinking of the evening when he had sung about Jerusalem and the evening cry had broken on my ears for the first time and I had given him my idea for the mangonel; thinking of the first gloom and the gathering gloom and the night in Bethany’s when we had all said, ‘This crusade is over.’

  But I was, with all this in one part of my mind, very calmly and very neatly writing letters. One to Anna Apieta, explaining how, what with nursing Raife and going towards Damascus as guide to Alberic of Saxham, I had had no time to visit the palace. The other was to my lady to let her know that I was still fulfilling her bidding and was leaving with the King and would, to the best of my ability, take care of him. They both sounded, when I read them over, cold, stilted and impersonal.

  I was writing them when Richard put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I am going now to take leave of the ladies. Will you come with me or meet me at the harbour in half an hour?’ And again my mind split asunder—one half clamouring that I must see her, just for one moment, for one last time; the other half stubborn and cold as clay, repeating the arguments for holding apart.

  ‘I shall be at the harbour,’ I said.

  ‘The ship is the St. Josef.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I shall be there.’

  I folded and sealed my letters. I gave them and my last gold coin to the page I trusted. Then I walked down to the harbour. The crusade, the Holy Land, my lady, all left behind; an episode, an experience ended. So we press on into the eventual, the inevitable dark with the frail barrier of days between us and the grave lessened by one…

  When Richard joined me his mood was cheerful; his thoughts all centred on the journey; his interest engaged by the ship, the speed she could make, the signs of the weather. When we had been aboard for an hour he broke to me the news that we were not, after all, bound for the long voyage by sea but heading north for Armenia and the old overland road by which so many crusaders and pilgrims had travelled in the past.

  I realised then that part of his cheerfulness was due to the fact that he had outwitted Hubert Walter, that faithful friend and servant who would sooner have called him mad and put him in chains than see him set out on such a dangerous venture.

  XIX

  This sudden departure from Palestine and the secret change of route are responsible for the mystery, the confusion and the contradictory stories which surround this period of Richard Plantagenet’s career. Two years later at the Diet of Hagenau, when his enemies were pressing and his friends refuting the accusation of his culpability in Conrad of Montferrat’s murder, a great deal was made of the fact that he had left Palestine at a moment’s notice and without ceremony. ‘He so feared,’ said one witness, ‘the vengeance of the marquis’s family and friends that he dared not remain so long as to see his own Queen safely embarked.’ And there is no doubt that such a statement did carry weight with ordinary level-headed, conventional-minded men to whom the idea of rushing across half the world, unarmed, unattended, in an attempt to save a throne from two well-established enemies, did seem too fantastic for credence. Fortunately there was Hubert Walter’s evidence of Eleanor’s letter having been delivered and of Richard’s having gone, unarmed and alone, to the women’s palace where Conrad’s wife had taken shelter with the Queen of England and where nigh on two hundred of Conrad’s adherents who had escorted her were installed.

  These facts, having been dealt with in the open court, have found their way into the records of the historians. The minstrels, deeming them dull, generally omit them from the songs and stories. They concern themselves more closely with what they call Richard’s disappearance. And almost invariably they sing of shipwreck. That is understandable. Richard left Acre with the professed intention of taking ship for England. Hubert Walter and every one of those nobles who
had taken leave of him on that sad afternoon (and who could deny that there was any deliberate “secrecy” about that hasty departure) understood that he was bound for one of his own Cinque Ports. Then he disappeared and was next heard of in the middle of Europe. Why? The simple answer—he was shipwrecked. For a long time—until, in fact, I was in a position to do so—nobody save the master and crew of the St. Josef, who seemed never to have been heard of again, was capable of contradicting this story and by that time the songs, spreading from mouth to mouth, had sped the tale of a shipwreck beyond easy recall. So to this day they sing, “Alas, off Istria’s rocky coast, a fearful storm did rise…”

  Actually we sailed through the placid golden October weather to Seleucia where we bought two horses and a supply of food and rode off without delay.

  It was a curious and in many ways a pleasant interlude. For me travel always brings a kind of suspension of thought and feeling. I can move, a detached, rootless creature without past or future, living as I am inclined to think the only really happy people always do, in and for the immediate moment. I had learned that when I was on the road with Stefan and again on the roads in the Holy Land. Only when I am still do my thoughts overtake me and when they become too unbearable my immediate impulse is to run away. So, but for one thing, this could have been an almost perfect journey.

  The country was wild and lonely but very beautiful and those few people with whom we came in contact as we bought food for ourselves and our horses were not unfriendly. There had been hostility in the past but the traffic between the West and the Holy Land had been heavy enough in the last two generations for the natives to learn that a dead robbed pilgrim or a murdered stripped crusader gives only brief profit, deters other travellers and sometimes invites sharp retaliation. Better to smile and sell at vast prices.