by Norah Lofts
Undeterred, I pressed on with my questions. I said that I wanted the belt for a cousin come back from crusade. I said I would have liked a belt of Eastern workmanship—for the sake of association. Oh, this belt, he said, was not of Eastern origin—anyone experienced could tell that at a glance; besides, nowadays, with the crusade ended, so much Eastern stuff was coming in—flooding the market, in fact—that it was always auctioned separately, on different days. This belt’s origin? A little difficult to say. Stones were cut in much the same fashion the world over but the holes which had been made in the sapphires were rather roughly bored—countrywork, he would surmise—and the pattern of the embroidery showed Moorish influence, Spanish perhaps. Had a Spaniard then put it into the auction sale? Ah, but who could say! Any vendor with a thing of value could put it into the sale and collect what it fetched—minus charges for the sale and minus the tax—oh yes, vendors also paid tax, isn’t it iniquitous? Tax on the seller, tax on the buyer and then people wondered that things were so expensive!
Propped against the little open grille, I talked, I should think, for half an hour, asking, probing, seeking one enlightening word, one thread of a clue as to how Richard Plantagenet’s belt should now be on sale in Rome. But I gained nothing. And presently the gathering dusk and the scent of food cooking in some fastness behind the shop reminded the old man that business was business. About the belt now?
I would buy it, I said. I had not my purse with me but I would come back first thing in the morning and complete the purchase.
With that the haze of academic interest lifted; he looked through his grille and saw a plainly dressed hunchbacked woman who had wasted his time. His manner cooled. He was not angered; he was saddened. I knew as I left his shop that he never expected to see me again. So doubtless he was pleasantly surprised when next morning, early, with gold in my purse, I went back and bought the belt.
When it was in my hands I did not know what to do. I didn’t even know at that moment why I had bought it. Richard Plantagenet had most curious ideas about money and possessions; it was quite possible that he had sold the belt long ago in order to buy some baggage mules or some casks of beef. Or it could have been stolen from him. Taken from his dead body…
And Blondel?
I went back to where Berengaria and Joanna were bent over the embroidery; they had decided without my help that it should be applied to the sleeves as well. And I talked about embroidery until I had drawn the conversation round to the belt.
‘He always wore it,’ Berengaria said. ‘Even on that last day when he was trying to look like an ordinary poor traveller, he had it under his leather one, under his tunic.’
‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Did you see it?’
‘Yes, he showed me. He opened his tunic and said, “You see, I wear your gift,” and there it was.’
Was that true? Or said for the benefit of Joanna and Egidio who were there at the time?
And suppose I produced the belt now! I could just imagine the tears and confusion, the pointless fuss.
I said nothing. I left them to their embroidery and I went back to the shop where I said that I should like to see the auction; where was it held and on what day? Having bought the belt, I was restored in the old man’s esteem, allowed my little peculiarities. There were sales every day. He directed me carefully to the place where they were held.
In the old days, in that bygone time which is only recoverable by an effort of the imagination, it had been an amphitheatre. The tiers of seats—were they of stone or marble? Marble, I think; I imagine them white and cold. I imagine people taking cushions or spreading their cloaks—they were all gone now. But there was the circular slope running down to an open space. Gladiators wrestling, fighting with spears—“The Christians to the lions!” I could see it all as I stumbled down the broken steps that led from the street to the lower level where the auctions were in full swing.
Here again everything was on sale: slaves, donkeys, bales of silk and linen, spices, vegetables, fruit, sheep and oxen, little monkeys, hounds, dogs for petting, hides, corn, everything in the world. The noise was deafening but there was a certain order in the crowd. Few people were there merely to watch; most had business and knew exactly where and what their business was. Without much difficulty I found the place where a swarthy young man was auctioning small and precious things. A broken column stood behind him and beyond that an arched opening filled with rubbish. My shopkeeper had mentioned an old pillar and I knew I had found my objective but even then I looked beyond to the blocked archway and thought about gladiators and lions.
I stood and watched until the young man had finished his sale; today he had little to sell and the bidding was slow and apathetic. Then a man in papal livery came forward with an abacus and a slave accountant. Taxes, I thought. Finally I stepped forward and said, ‘I wonder if you could tell me something.’ He reverted to the jocular manner in which he had been cheering and jeering the crowd, a manner which had vanished completely while he dealt with the tax gatherer.
‘I could tell you anything you’re likely to need to know, lady,’ he said. And his eye swept over me, not unkindly but with a look I knew and was resigned to because, after all, if I had been straight and comely I shouldn’t have been able to walk about in strange cities—in any city—alone, free as a bird.
‘Then tell me, if you can, where this came from,’ I said, and I shook the belt out of the piece of linen in which the shopkeeper had wrapped it.
‘That’s very easy,’ said the young man cheerfully. And then, swift and definite as the drawing of a curtain, I saw doubt and suspicion blot out the shallow, vulgar good humour of his gaze. ‘I sold it here last month to Emilio, the goldsmith,’ he said, as though continuing with his sentence.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know. I bought it at his shop this morning. But we had an argument about its origin. It’s silly,’ I said, ‘but I do like to prove my point. It’s beautiful, of course, and I don’t grudge what I paid for it—but you couldn’t call it Eastern work, could you?’
‘If Emilio said that was Eastern work he must be in his dotage! Here, let’s have another look.’ He took the belt from me and put up quite a little show of esoteric judgement, cracking his thumbnail against the sapphires, breathing on the gold and silver thread and then rubbing it with his finger.
‘Vienna,’ he said pontifically. ‘That’s where that came from, if you really want to know.’
‘Oh,’ I said, taking back the belt and assuming an air of bright interest. ‘How interesting. How clever of you to be able to tell so quickly! How did you know?’
‘Just part of the job,’ he replied airily but flattered all the same. ‘Why, just the way those holes are bored shows me they were done in Vienna.’
There must be some reason, I thought, why, out of all the towns in the world where the belt was not made, he should have picked on Vienna; something other than the way those holes were bored had led him to that conclusion. But I still hesitated to ask the point-blank question because that might put him on his guard and defeat my object; a thing of such value might have been stolen.
‘I’ve never been in Rome before,’ I said conversationally, ‘and of all the things I have seen this market, full of things drawn from the four corners of the earth, has impressed me most, I think. Imagine this’—I touched the belt ‘coming all the way from Vienna!’
‘That’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Why, the man who brought that in for me to sell had been farther afield than Vienna. He’ll buy anything, anything salable, but mainly he trades in furs. Last month he’d just got back from a place called Minsk away up near Lithuania and a lovely lot of furs he had for sale, besides several things like that belt that he’d picked up in a casual way from Vienna and Innsbruck and Padua on his way home.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Lithuania—why, that’s the very edge of the world! Holy Mother! How I would like to see a man who has been on such a journey. Is he in the market now, do you think?’
The auction
eer laughed. ‘You’re a funny lady, you are,’ he said. ‘Fancy wanting to see a man because he’d been to Lithuania! I’m downright sorry I can’t point him out to you; he’d laugh! And he’d tell you some tall tales about bears and wolves and frosts hard enough to crack great branches off trees. What a pity his tongue and your ears can’t get together! But he’s off again into the wild lands. He’s an afflicted man—itching palms and itching feet—that’s what he suffers from!’ He laughed heartily at his joke and elaborated it. ‘His palms itch for money and his feet itch for strange roads. This time—so he said—he was going to push farther than Lithuania, going on to Russia where furs are better and cheaper, he reckoned. He won’t be back here till next year if he ever gets back.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said, and there was no need to put false regret into my voice. I had been working towards this moment ever since I came into the market, and now I was but little better off. ‘Still,’ I said more brightly, ‘I might be here next year too. I shall look out for him and with more interest than ever if he has been to Russia and got back alive. What is he like? And what is his name?’
‘You’d know him if you saw him, lady; he’s short, kind of bent over; he’s—’ The young man looked at me and broke off. ‘But as strong as two men and active as a flea,’ he went on a little embarrassed. ‘His name, if I remember rightly, is Peter. But we call him nicknames; for one thing, he squints.’
Peter the Hunchback; Peter Squint-eye. I saw him very clearly: I saw him plodding away on his road to Russia, bearing the information I needed, carelessly, unwittingly, uselessly locked in his brain.
‘Well, good-bye,’ I said. ‘This has been a most interesting conversation. And this belt, I must remember, came from Vienna.
‘That is so, lady. Peter picked it up in Vienna—besides, I recognise the workmanship.’
And so, to my sorrow, do I, I thought as I turned away. Before supper that evening I found myself alone with Count Egidio and Sir Stephen. I had spent the day pulled this way and that by indecisive thoughts. Berengaria had certainly said that Richard had worn the belt when he left Acre to take ship for England but she had set herself a course of intentional deception and it was just possible that she had lied. The belt might have been sold even in Cyprus. I knew Richard to be quite capable of taking it and expressing his gratitude even as he assessed it in terms of money. It might have reached Vienna and come on to home in the legitimate way of trade and I might be making a coil about nothing.
Then I would remember that Blondel had been with Richard. And with that the belt, on sale in Rome, would assume a dark and dreadful significance. Might there be some reason why I had walked in that street, paused by that window? Might there even be some hint of guidance in the fact that I found the two men alone?
I said, ‘I would like to show you something but if the women or anyone else come in don’t let them see and contrive to talk of some other matter. Look, I found this in a shop—and I have made quite certain that it is Richard’s.’
I shook the belt out before their eyes and some part of my mind, the part which had accused me of being fanciful, romantic, overdramatic, overconcerned, was quite satisfied. If I had shaken a live and venomous snake in their faces they—being brave knights—would have blanched less.
‘Great God!’ Egidio said. ‘What did I tell you?’
From sentences cut short, from single words, I gathered that for the last month or more there had been anxiety about Richard’s well-being. Ships which had left Acre several days later than the St. Josef had arrived in Dover, in Sandwich, in Romney. The word “shipwreck” was beginning to be handed about, cautiously, as though it were a red-hot chestnut by a winter fire.
‘But this belt,’ I said, ‘shows no sign of having been in salt water. Look, the soft chamois leather she lined it with is smooth and supple. Salt water would have hardened and wrinkled it.’
‘That is very true,’ said Sir Stephen, testing the leather between his finger and thumb.
‘The Queen says,’ I ventured, ‘that he was wearing it when he left Acre—not that I have mentioned my purchase to her or to Joanna.’
‘That was wise,’ Egidio said.
‘And so far as it was possible to make certain, I did make certain that the belt came from Vienna.’
‘And that,’ said Sir Stephen, ‘opens up other possibilities than shipwreck—dear God!’
‘Leopold?’
Sir Stephen nodded. ‘I will take the belt to Rouen,’ he said.
Mindful of my private doubt, and meticulous because Blondel was concerned, I said:
‘Of course the Queen may have been mistaken. You will understand that I hesitated to question her too closely. All this may mean nothing—if she were mistaken—Richard may have sold the belt long before he left Acre.’
‘I believe he did once say that he would sell London if he could find a buyer,’ Egidio said. ‘But the belt his wife gave him…’
‘Could you make sure, Lady Anna? Positively sure that this belt was about his body when he set sail?’ Sir Stephen asked.
‘I could try,’ I said with a certain distaste for the task, but remembering that where Richard was there Blondel was likely to be.
‘You look tired,’ I said to Joanna, ‘and you are to hunt with the count in the morning. You go to bed, I will do the hair brushing.’
And presently, in the old, familiar intimacy, I said:
‘You carry the pretence well, Berengaria. I thought that your asseveration that he was wearing your belt was quite a masterly, artistic touch,’
‘Dear Anna,’ she said, ‘you credit me unduly. That was true. He was wearing the belt and he did mention it when he left.’
Then it wasn’t shipwreck that had overtaken them.
III
The days that followed were full of confusion and speculation and restlessness. Sir Stephen took the belt and rode away to Rouen. He, Count Egidio and I had agreed to say nothing to Richard’s wife and sister about my find until it had been inspected and discussed at headquarters and the secret was kept well until Young Sancho, for whom we had tarried at Rome, arrived at last. Partly he came to welcome Berengaria and escort her on the last stage of her journey to Aquitaine, partly to make his peace with Count Egidio with whom he had a feud of long standing. Since the marriage of Egidio and Joanna would bring the two young men into a relationship made closer by the affection which existed between Joanna and Berengaria, it seemed advisable that they should come to terms. But Sancho came bearing not only the traditional olive branch but news from the outer world, and chatter which Egidio and I had taken some pains to exclude from the bower, and within five minutes of his arrival he had blurted out what, I suppose, all Christendom knew by that time—that Richard’s ship was long overdue and that there was a grave fear that he had been shipwrecked.
Joanna wept desolately. Although in a moment of fury she had confessed a lifelong jealousy of her brothers—it was in Sicily during a quarrel with Eleanor that she had accused her mother of caring only for her sons—she had plainly been devoted to Harry, the “Young King,” as they called him, to Geoffrey of Brittany and to Richard; and when Harry and Geoffrey were dead she had concentrated upon Richard all the force of her sisterly affection. She had admired him so much; even her jealousy of him had its roots in admiring envy; she had taken such pride in his exploits, shared his disappointment over the failure to take Jerusalem. She was all woman, gentle, easily moved to tears, interested only in her small personal life, but she was a Plantagenet woman and Richard fitted exactly the pattern of manhood to which she would have conformed had she been a boy.
‘Now they are all gone, all my brothers. John is not my brother—he was a changeling even in his cradle. All my handsome, brave, merry brothers gone!’
Berengaria wept too, shedding her tears beautifully. I knew, as no one else did, that the full flower of her passion for Richard had withered and shrivelled in the cold winter of disillusionment; that the sapphires and the silver had pro
ved to be glass chips and tin. But death—or even the rumour of death—bestows a kind of sanctity, spreads glamour. The dead man’s faults fade away, his virtues increase and shine and the widow of even a bad man will forget the long unkindness and remember the single amiability, the one charitable word. It is true of dead women, too. Father, when he set the lovely memorial altar in place, wasn’t commemorating the mad creature who had sprung at him and clawed him with her nails. Life may or may not bring disillusionment; death most certainly brings illusion. So Berengaria wept—not for the man who had left her for Raife of Clermont but for the red-headed knight whom she had looked upon from the ladies’ gallery at Pamplona; and her sorrow was genuine enough.
Sister and wife could weep and I envied them. I couldn’t very well sit down and cry about a lute player who had shared the King’s fate, whatever that was. I did not, even then, wholly believe the shipwreck story; that belt had never been in salt water. But I realised the shakiness of the evidence. Richard might have sold, lost, been robbed of the belt long before the waters closed over him.
And there were times, too, when I thought: if Blondel were dead I must have known. I wouldn’t have uttered such a word to anyone in the world. But I could not forget a day and a night in Acre when I could neither eat nor sleep; when for me the sun was clouded as though a dust storm raged. Nothing had happened; there was no thing, however small, to which I could point and say, that is the cause of my misery! But I was sunk in misery. Blondel’s next letter, clumsily writ with his left hand, told us that he had been wounded on such-and-such a day and, reckoning back, I knew that that day of clouded horror had been the one when he had been smitten. He couldn’t be dead and I not know.
Aloud, of course, I could only mention the belt which had not been in the sea. And having mentioned it, I must tell the story of its finding and go on, picking over the evidence and meekly accepting rebukes for my secretiveness until I was almost crazed.