by Norah Lofts
Once Richard would have perceived the integrity of that answer, would have admired the sturdy spirit of the man who despatched it and laughed and returned some witty, friendly answer. But he was older, too and, under that genial, boisterous manner, soured and suspicious. He had chosen to believe in the golden chessboard, the jewelled chessmen, and without more ado he prepared to move against Vidomar and to besiege the castle at Châlus.
‘I must go with him,’ Berengaria said, thrown into a flutter. ‘Now more than ever, I must be where he is.’ She looked at me earnestly. ‘Anna, I wish you could come with me—you are the only friend I have in the world—but I won’t ask it of you because we shall be on the move and L’Espan is so peaceful, so comfortable. I can see why you love it. But, Anna, if I ever want you, need you, will you come?’
‘Of course I will. It is peaceful here, true, and I don’t particularly enjoy the company of your fine ladies—but now that the building is finished, L’Espan is likely to bore me. I’ll come whenever you send for me.’
As soon as she had gone I turned my attention to Blondel. I sent for him and he came and stood before me. It still lacked an hour to noon but he was already drunk. Not reeling or helpless as in Acre—that stage was long past—but drunk nevertheless. I looked at him, puffy under the eyes, under the jaw, glazed pink over the cheekbones, his mane of hair, dead white now, too long and unkempt. His tunic, new for Christmas, was crumpled and stained, his hose dirty and in need of mending. The shrivelled small right hand he now carried, of habit, thrust into the front of his tunic.
And as he stood there I remembered with the greatest clarity the singing boy who had smiled at me in the market place at Pamplona—the taut slim figure, the lithe grace, the lovely intelligent face.
‘Blondel,’ I said, ‘why do you do it?’
‘Do what, my lady?’
‘Drink,’ I said brutally. ‘Fuddle yourself with that damned wine. Look at yourself. You’re still a young man but you’re beginning to look like an old soldier at a street corner.’
‘Well, I am an old soldier, am I not?’ he asked amiably. ‘Of your charity, lady, kind lady, a penny for an old soldier back from the Holy Wars.’ It was good mimicry and he laughed at the end of it.
‘I’m not laughing,’ I said sternly. ‘I’m very much concerned about you, Blondel. Maybe I have been careless and and unnoticing but Her Majesty was quite shocked; she said how ill and how old you looked.’
‘Indeed?’ he said and tilted his head with something of his old merry look. Then he laughed again, not exactly bitterly or sardonically but as though there were a joke in it, a joke known only to himself. ‘Did she now? And dirty? Did she say I was dirty?’
‘No,’ I said, a little taken aback.
‘She could have done, in good truth, but maybe she didn’t notice that. For dirty I am.’
‘And why?’ I asked passionately, crying out on my own hurt. ‘Why should you destroy yourself? You’re young and healthy and immensely gifted. Maybe your life has gone wrong in one respect—or more than one,’ I skimmed on hastily, anxious to convey sympathy without knowledge, ‘but that is a very common fate. Only the weak and the silly—’ I hesitated. I had meant to say ‘behave as you do’ but something in his eyes gave me pause and I tried to find a more general, less offensive ending for the sentence.
‘I am weak, I am silly. We have our uses, you know.’
‘You’re not silly,’ I said impatiently. I could see that this conversation was leading nowhere.
We were standing near the little glassed-in window of my room, the window in which I took such pride, and although outside the garden was bleak and winter-bound and the trees still stark and bare, I could hear a bird singing, most piercingly sweet, confident in spring’s coming. I fumbled for some thought that eluded me.
Then I said, ‘Really, Blondel, I didn’t send for you to rail at you; it was just that I can’t bear to see—But we’ll leave that, I wanted you, now that the house is completed, to turn your skill to another task.’ That was it! While the building was going forward he had been moderately sober; what he needed was to be busy, interested, engrossed. But as I said “another task” I hadn’t in my mind the slightest shadow, the frailest seed of an idea of what I could set him to do. But I looked at him, saw the withering right hand, remembered that he could write with his left—write… write… Battle of Arsouf… Yes, I had it.
‘The fact is,’ I said, ‘that monks who have never left their cloister and secular clerks who have never stepped outside their own rooms are pouring out accounts of this crusade as fast as they can scribble. Now you are a penman, maybe the only penman of any skill who went on the crusade and fought in the battles. If you would set down a record of personal experiences, all the little things, things the others couldn’t know or guess at, it would be of great value. Could you face such a task? For instance—you were there, Blondel, standing just behind the Queen on that evening when the Marquis of Montferrat told us about the letter and the cake he had received from the Old Man of the Mountain. You heard with your own ears. Now at Hagenau they said that the Old Man was pure fable and the scribes who know no better are saying that he has no existence—do you see? You could refute so many of their theories if only you would shoulder this task.’
Between the puffy lids the eyes had brightened.
‘I could write what I saw, what I know. I doubt whether it would rate as a historical record.’
‘It should shape well beside the account of Selwyn of Tours who is so lame that he has to be carried from the scriptorium to the refectory and from the refectory to the dormitory,’ I said. ‘For some reason he feels himself qualified to write most didactically about the Third Crusade and why it failed. I understand that he—of course he is a monk—blames the women who followed the army and undermined the morale of the common soldiers.’
Blondel laughed. ‘He’s barking up the right tree, you know, my lady, but from the wrong side of the tree. Richard of England once said—and I am inclined to agree with him—that women were the root of the trouble. But one woman was more to blame than the others—and that was Her Grace, the Duchess of Apieta.’
I gaped and goggled and said, ‘I? I’d like to know how you make that out.’
‘So easy, so plain. You sent me to Westminster. She would never have thought of it alone. Her mind works on the small things. You sent me to Westminster. So Richard didn’t marry Alys and that made Philip his enemy; and Isaac of Cyprus insulted the princess who had refused him, so Lydia Comnenus was taken prisoner and Leopold of Austria was affronted, being her uncle. You and I, my lady, though we do not figure in the chronicles, we are—what is the term?—mythical figures! Between us we ruined the Third Crusade!’
‘You are drunk!’ I said. ‘For God’s sake, if you write, write in all soberness, not fantastic, wine-flown rubbish of that kind.’
‘I will write and I will write the truth.’
‘I think Pontius Pilate said something like that.’
‘Ah no! That shows your mind to be a palimpsest. Pilate asked, “What is truth?” and he said, “What I have written I have written.”
‘I stand corrected. Well, will you begin at once?’
‘This afternoon,’ he said.
XVI
He was still writing busily weeks later when Berengaria sent for me. A brief message, ‘Please, Anna, come. Blanche is here, gravely ill. I need you.’
It was late March and the month had been dry and windy, so the mire had dried into dust on the roads and I made good speed to the manor house at Limoges where Berengaria had lodged while Richard besieged Châlus, twenty miles or so away. Châlus had proved a harder nut to crack than Richard had bargained for and Blanche’s husband Thibaut had come to lend his aid. Blanche had ridden with him, saying that it would be nice for her to be with Berengaria. Blanche had sought St. Petronella’s aid in September and I had wished her a fine big boy. But she had ridden hard for three days, keeping up with Thibaut and his men-at
-arms, and the seven-months child she bore during the night after her arrival was rather bigger than most normally gestated children. The women and the midwives had done their best: there was careful stitching with black thread on her torn body, there were the open oyster shells under the bed, the bunch of hazel twigs on the pillow. But she died the day after I reached Limoges and there were Berengaria and I linked in common grief again.
I chiefly remembered the serious, earnest way in which Blanche had sat by my fire and advised me about the administration of L’Espan. Berengaria’s memory reached back to a time when they had both been small shy girls bidden on some occasion into impressive company and Blanche had taken the younger sister’s hand and led her forward.
‘I remember her hand was cold and not quite steady but it comforted me and she marched forward like a soldier,’ Berengaria said, and wept.
‘If she had been less brave she would have broken the journey. There are times when courage can be a disadvantage to a woman,’ I said.
‘St. Petronella,’ Berengaria said, and stopped.
And I thought it was better to talk about St. Petronella than to go on weeping, so I took up the theme. ‘Blanche certainly asked for a lusty boy—and I’ve never seen a more promising baby. We can’t blame St. Petronella. Thousands of women die every year in childbirth, even at the normal time.’
‘St. Petronella is harsh. She saw through Blanche too. Blanche was twenty-nine, Anna. Years past the age to have a first baby. But she asked for him and I suppose you could say her wish was granted. But it was a cheat, all the same.’
‘It gave Blanche seven months of great happiness,’ I ventured.
‘Yes, I suppose so. I hope so. But it does seem such a pity.’
For a moment it seemed to me that everything I looked at, everything in the world, seemed such a pity.
‘You’ll stay with me for a little while now, won’t you, Anna? This siege goes on and on. Stay and spend Easter with me. They’ll call a truce for the holy days and perhaps Richard will ride over.’
But Richard had taken his last ride.
Sometime during the previous week he had succeeded in forcing the outer defences of the castle but from an inner wall someone had taken deliberate aim at him and shot an arrow into his shoulder. No vital part had been touched, no great amount of blood lost; and although the arrowhead had broken off in the wound and the surgeon had made a clumsy job of cutting it out, Richard insisted upon treating it as a mere scratch and tried to keep as secret as possible the fact that he had been wounded at all. He had forbidden that the Queen—or anyone else who did not know—should be told. For two days he had gone about his business of directing the siege, which now promised to be quickly and suecessfully ended, and had managed to conceal the agony of the mangled wound. Then it had inflamed and he fell into fever and had been obliged to keep to his bed. Now he was out of his mind and raving and his chaplain, Theobald, and Marcadie, the captain of his Flemish troops, had decided to take matters into their own hands and had sent for Berengaria and for Escel who was in Brittany.
The news struck Berengaria into a dumb somnambulant state.
When she had said, ‘You will come with me, Anna?’ she did not speak again until we were far on our way, riding through the mild early April day; then she said, ‘They say death always strikes thrice.’
When we arrived she slipped down from her horse before anyone had time to aid her, shook out her skirts and, covered with dust as she was and with her hair falling loose about her shoulders, went straight to his bedside and there remained, replacing the covers as he thrust them off, smoothing back the tangled, sweat-soaked hair, ministering to his insatiable thirst and sometimes, in quiet moments, holding his hand.
He did not know her. He lay propped on the pillows, staring straight ahead at the wall of the tent. His face was grey except for a patch of dusky crimson that looked as if it had been painted on each high cheekbone. His lips were cracked and blackened and, save for short intervals when his eyes closed and he seemed to doze for a moment, a constant stream of words flowed over them.
Chiefly he talked of Jerusalem. Sometimes he was actually storming the city, issuing vast stirring orders in a voice that was little more than a whisper; sometimes he was making preparations, reeling off lists of stores and equipment that had been consumed or abandoned or destroyed years ago, calling for men who had long been quiet in their graves.
‘Go on, here I stand, aim straight at me, I’ll not dodge. Nothing can touch me until I have taken Jerusalem. Shining in the sun, just beyond the hills; but not to be looked at. I shall never look at it until the moment when I lead my army against it.
‘Walter is a better man than Longchamp but he can’t wring out the money as that ferret could. Anyway, England is milked dry. The golden treasure of Châlus should provide two hundred horses. You know, Raife, without horses there is no hope; if they’d left me the horses I would have risked it despite all.
‘Water! Water! I’ve said a thousand times that they are to go round every hour. Every hour!
‘But in the first place, I can’t feed them. Hard on three thousand of them. I need my stores for the men who are coming to Jerusalem. Ask Leopold then, maybe he’ll spare some of his sausages. Certainly not, Escel is using them on sores; a crazy notion but by God’s footstool, it works. Then kill the lot. Chop off their heads. Now we can go forward. Help; help for the Holy Sepulchre! Will you make way there? I promised to lay Philip’s trinket to rest there. A present from Judas. Like the grey horse. When next I come I shall bring spare horses, hundreds of them. It irks me to see knights with armour dismounted, trundling about like little castles on legs, helpless, useless. And always thirsty; I know, everybody is thirsty, this is a thirsty land. They speak of it flowing with milk and honey, both bad things when you’re thirsty: milk I never could stomach and honey is best when made into mead as my barbarian English make it. Water is best, Blondel, mark my words; that stuff you guzzle will rot out your guts. For myself, I’d as soon drink horse’s piss. If only we could find that well; it was clearly marked on the map… Water!’
Then she would hold the cup to his lips again.
It went on all through the night and the next day. The April sun beat on the canvas and the inside of the tent grew warm and stuffy. The stench of corruption crept about.
Escel arrived, carefully bearing a dish full of what looked to me like blue mould. He drove us from the bedside and I led Berengaria away, saying, ‘This is the time for you to eat and drink and be strong.’ She swallowed what I offered. I tried to make her raise her feet and rest them on a stool, for from long sitting in one position her legs and ankles had swollen until great rolls of puffy flesh hung over the tops of her shoes. But she went back and waited by the tent door until Escel emerged.
He was weeping.
‘They delayed sending for me too long. And the surgeon was a clumsy butcher. He should have his own right hand cut off so that he never mangles another man!’ He stumbled away, wiping his face on his sleeve.
There was another day and another night. I crept in and out. Berengaria kept her place by the bed. The low slurred voice had ceased its talk and Richard lay quiet with closed eyes.
The chaplain, with the wine and the wafer in readiness, hovered, waiting for the brief consciousness which often comes just before the end.
It came with the light of a beautiful morning full of bird song. Just such a morning as the one at L’Espan when Berengaria had ridden out to join Richard.
I was there, having carried Berengaria a strong hot posset and I was persuading her to drink it.
Richard opened his eyes. They were no longer prominent and overbright, no longer blue but dark and dull and sunken. And conscious.
He looked at us. With weary recognition. For a moment he did not speak. Nor did we, though Berengaria leaned forward so that he could see her more easily. Then he said:
‘My mother… I have much to say—to my mother.’
‘She is on
her way,’ Berengaria said, whether with or without truth I could not know. ‘But I am here, Richard. I could tell—her—anything you wish her to be told.’
The voice which, though slurred and weak, had run so glib in delirium now came slow and difficult.
‘Tell her then—it must be John—not Arthur. If Constance had let me have him—I could have trained him, child as he is—but an untrained child—straight from his mother’s skirts—could never—stand against John Iscariot and Philip Iscariot… John, you understand, John.’
‘I understand, Richard.’
Theobald, with the single-mindedness of all good priests, now moved forward and said, ‘My lord…’
With a flash of the old fire Richard said, ‘All in good time. Let us dispose of this world first. Fetch me Marcadie—and the fellow who cut out the arrow that struck me… Is that Anna Apieta skulking in the shadow?’
I stepped forward. He closed his eyes as I approached and lay mustering his strength. Without looking at me, still with closed eyes, he said.
‘She trusts you—and rightly. You are strong—competent. John will cheat her—the tin dues… Look after her. You can reckon and write.’ He drew a gasping breath. ‘If more women were like you…’
It flashed through my mind that I could reckon and write because I could never fulfil a woman’s functions—and because a man more enlightened than other men had chosen to set me free.