by Norah Lofts
It was nothing to my credit that I could be entrusted to deal with the dues from tin mines; any woman who at fourteen years of age had been put in charge of her own estate and revenues would have been, as he called it, strong and competent.
But he was dying and this was no time for such thoughts. I said solemnly:
‘Richard, I promise you that I will look after her and see justice done.’
Then and only then did he turn his eyes to Berengaria and say, ‘I have been an ill husband to you, my lady—and you so beautiful and kind. But God makes us, you know, and He did not make me—a lover of women—it was not my choice.’
‘Oh, my lord,’ Berengaria said. And at that moment Theobald came hurrying back, followed by Marcadie who pushed before him and then aside into a corner a tall young man with yellow hair whose hands ware bound behind with a cord. And creeping behind them came the clumsy surgeon.
Richard closed his eyes again and breathed hard.
‘This fellow first.’ He opened his eyes and looked at the cringing surgeon. ‘Always remember, you did the best you could. I set out to take Jerusalem but I boggled it. You tried to cut the arrow out of me—you see! If you are to blame for the small thing… I want you to take ten crowns from my purse and settle your mind and God speed you in all you do. Marcadie!’
‘I am here, my lord,’ said the Flemish captain, striding forward and brutally pushing the surgeon aside.
‘You have the fellow who shot me?’
‘He is here, my lord.’ He set a big brown hand between the shoulders of the young man and jerked him forward. ‘Your name?’ Richard asked in a failing voice.
‘Bertrand de Gourdon,’ said the man, loudly, defiantly.
‘And did I ever do you any ill?’
‘You did, sire. Both my father and my brother died at your hand.’
‘Meet and just,’ Richard murmured. ‘I just wanted to know. Call quits, eh? Marcadie, I know I said—we’d hang—the whole—garrison. But let this fellow go free. And now, Theobald…’
The priest, calm, sure in his office, moved forward. Berengaria dropped heavily to her knees by the side of the bed and I joined her.
Outside in the camp Marcadie slowly and methodically flayed Bertrand de Gourdon before he hanged him side by side with the rest of the garrison.
The looters searched the castle for the golden treasure and found nothing.
Richard died. The April sun went down in splendour behind the thickly budded trees and through the dusk the birds sang of spring.
XVIII
For once the superstition which Berengaria had mentioned was justified. Death struck his third blow while the tears for Richard were still wet on our faces.
It had been easier than I had expected to get Berengaria from the deathbed; she stood up obediently and would have let herself be led away but her feet were now too swollen to allow walking and men had to carry her to the tent which had been made ready for our reception. There she lay on the bed, crying but without tumult or bitterness. She was mourning the man whom, despite everything, she had loved, weeping for the tall red-haired young knight of the Spring Tournament.
We heard a commotion outside, the sound of some cavalcade arriving, and Berengaria rose on her elbow.
‘Anna, that is Eleanor. Bring her straight to me. It is important that I give her his message before they start inventing things he said.’
Once again I thought how far they erred who called her a stupid woman; and I thought that, properly treated and trusted, she would have made a good queen.
Outside in the dusk was a little knot of men on jaded horses and in the middle of them a woman, hooded and cloaked.
As I pushed through the men who had gathered around the group I heard one say, ‘Madam, he is dead. He died within the hour.’
I saw the woman’s hands go not to her heart or her mouth, as is customary on the hearing of ill news, but to her belly. She swayed as she sat there on the horse. Hands reached to help her down and as she gave herself to them her hood slipped back and I saw that it was not Eleanor but her daughter Joanna.
The Albigenses had risen against her husband Raymond and she had left him, fighting for his life, and despite a well advanced pregnancy had ridden to ask Richard to come to the aid of his brother-in-law.
The shock of the news killed her. We got her under cover; we did all we could—even Escel did his best to deal with a matter outside his scope, for miscarriages and the like were generally deemed to be beneath the notice of a serious physician—but no efforts were availing and she died next day. She had asked to be buried beside her best-beloved brother and we laid them together in the Abbey of Fontevrault, though Richard’s heart, in accordance with a request he had made before he set out for Jerusalem, was taken to Rouen, his favourite city and the one which he had always regarded as his capital.
When that was done, Berengaria said to me:
‘Now it is all over. You and I are alone together once more.’ She laid her hand on my arm. ‘Now that I look back, Anna, it seems that you and I have always been alone, really.’
I looked back, too, and saw that there was some truth in that rather sweeping statement. Together and alone we had planned and plotted for Richard; together and alone we had waited for him; together and alone we had watched his passing.
But even as I laid my hand over hers which clasped my arm the treacherous thought went through my mind like a snake. We might live for another twenty, thirty years, alone together, entangled in a web of tapestry wool! Eyes on the page, ear cocked for the patient little sigh. The racking of the brain to bring to birth some comment or remark on a subject doomed to premature demise. Always before there had been a little hope of delivery—hope that Richard would marry her, hope that Richard would return, hope that Richard would send for her. But now—twenty, thirty years of tapestry stitching and boredom. Long before that I should be praying for death to free me.
And from the women at L’Espan I had heard many stories of arrangements hastily entered into immediately after a bereavement. Pity could be a trap too.
L’Espan—where there were now seven women, most of them fond of tapestry work; where we had been making plans for a new well sunk in that underground forecourt…
In a voice that was so firm that it sounded brutal I said:
‘I intend to go back to L’Espan, for a time at least. If you care to come with me…’
‘But of course,’ she said gently. ‘It was what I was thinking, that you and I should be together at L’Espan.’
‘But not alone,’ I insisted.
‘In a sense, no, of course. We couldn’t turn them away now. In fact, Anna—Perhaps this is an idle thought. I haven’t slept well since—One has to occupy one’s thoughts when one lies awake in the night… We could make L’Espan bigger. There must be so many women like those there, like me. We might even’—she brought it out diffidently—‘build a chapel and have a priest.’
I saw then that, like many other women whom life has failed and disappointed, she was turning to Holy Church. And Holy Church, at least, would not fail her; with her it was simply a case of “Seek and ye shall find.” And dimly, tentatively, I began to perceive how I could ease the burden off my unwilling shoulders onto those broad and accommodating ones.
‘That is an interesting idea,’ I said.
And I thought: Holy Church—though they call her she—is strong and competent; she will deal with the Cornish tin mines and the mill dues from Le Bocage and all those miles of fishing rights. She will know what to do with women who come in with boxes of jewels.
Then I stiffened, remembering the little dog who was forbidden at the nunnery at Blois.
‘If you make L’Espan into a nunnery, Berengaria, I shall insist—because, after all, I started it and it is suposed to belong to me—that part of it be reserved for women like me; women who could not bear to take vows, women who like little dogs.’
‘But you’ve never had a little dog in your life, Anna
.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Yes. It’s very strange that you should say that about making a nunnery. I had never said, had I, but I have been thinking—’
XIX
Women whose lives follow an ordinary pattern bear children, nourish and tend them and start them on the road to growth and for a while the child minds its mother’s bidding; but inevitably there comes one day when it begins to follow its own will and another day when, if not by word, by action, it says, ‘I can do without you now.’
So it was with me and L’Espan. In the five years that followed Richard’s death it grew and went its own way so inexorably that sometimes it seemed to me that the place had a destiny of its own, mapped from the moment of the turning of the first sod.
And the day came when the last stone was in place and I could walk around and see everything in order with L’Espan pursuing its threefold life, no part of which concerned me.
There was the nunnery. Berengaria had hankered towards the idea of establishing a religious house and, subject to certain conditions, I was but too pleased to shuffle off the responsibility for the finance and administration. So now about L’Espan there were a dozen and a half nuns, soberly clothed, walking meekly with down-bent eyes, sedulously obedient to the orders of a tyrannical abbess whom they had chosen themselves in what I could only think was a passion for self-immolation. To me she seemed a terrible, detestable woman but I knew that the establishment of the funds would be safe with her.
Then there was, in the old wing, what was invariably called the “Lodgings.” It sheltered twenty women whose rights I had carefully guarded when I handed over my charge. They were the kind of women I should have been but for Father—unplaced, in need of a settled home but lacking all sense of vocation. They moved more briskly, dressed more brightly in their shabby finery, had their pets, their playing cards, their tapestries, their ever-changing pattern of little alliances and feuds.
And in the newest part of the building there was the part which the abbess, who was German by origin, always called the “Kindergarten.” There were housed a number of orphan children and a few bastards and a few taken in charity from enormous families in over-crowded hovels.
I was, I must confess, as little at ease with the children as with the nuns or the ladies in the Lodgings. My appearance rouses only two responses in the young, stark terror or mockery. And although I liked to see them happy and well fed, I never had much feeling for children, except for two who seemed doomed never to be born—the boy who would look like Blondel, the girl who would be my god-daughter.
The one person who moved from part to part of L’Espan and seemed equally at home in each was Berengaria. She could help to tend the children in the Kindergarten and seemed happy when playing with them; she could move on and spend an hour or two with the ladies in the Lodgings, stitching a little, gossiping a little, eating cakes and sweetmeats; and then, at the call of the chapel bell, there she was, sinking easily and gracefully into place amongst the nuns. Affection, at times amounting to adoration, greeted her wherever she went; the children loved their gentle playmate, the ladies regarded her as one of themselves, the nuns looked on her as a saint and invariably referred to her as the foundress of L’Espan. And she was content, happy and tranquil as an old man home after a long and disastrous war, basking in the sun. Armed with two weapons, great beauty and a stubborn will, she had fought for many years, losing every battle and yet emerging victorious, able to lay her weapons down, submitting her beauty to time, her will to that of God, now that the enemy, the loved one, was dead.
Gradually, but very surely, it became apparent to me that the will of God, so far as Berengaria was concerned, was conveyed through the voice of the abbess. The day came when that voice announced that I was free.
Madam Ursula and I concealed beneath a scrupulous politeness a cordial and reciprocal dislike. Probably she sensed that if it had been left to me L’Espan would have remained a purely secular establishment; and certainly the arrangements I had made, the protective measures I had taken for the happiness and security of the uncloistered inhabitants before I handed over the reins to her, were justification for such a suspicion. So her dislike for me had sounder grounds than mine for her which were based upon reasons less ponderable and more personal. Yet we had worked together very successfully during the long business of transition; she had a keen brain and, in any matter disconnected with the religious life, a sense of justice, a gift of logic. Professionally—and religion with its many ramifications was to her a profession rather than a vocation—she was unjust, illogical, dictatorial to an unimaginable degree and unbearably superior. So armoured, so immune, that often words failed me and I longed with childish fury to smack her smooth plump face.
A few days after the last of the building was done she sent for me and brought into the open a subject which had lurked alongside for some time. The subject of Blondel.
I entered this passage of arms heavily handicapped from the start by, if nothing else, a sense of guilt; for it was a subject which I knew should have been faced and dealt with long ago.
Blondel had been at L’Espan when Berengaria and I returned there after Richard’s death. He had finished his account of the crusade; no building was in progress and he was drinking steadily. His right arm was now useless and it is admittedly difficult for anyone to keep neat and trim with one hand, however skilled that one may be. Not that Blondel now cared or took much trouble. However, I tidied him up to the best of my ability; he could still play his lute and he did a good deal to cheer Berengaria in those days, making her music and telling her stories and listening to those sad, reminiscent little speeches which are the voice of sorrow. And I, as always, took joy in his company. Sourness had sharpened his ever-ready wit and so long as I avoided remembering, eschewed sentimental backward-looking, all was well.
Then the spurt of new building, new planning had begun and he had been busy and sober for longer intervals and even the critical Madam Ursula had admitted his usefulness. Weeks and months had slipped away; now and again I had roused myself to say, ‘When were you last shaved?’ or, ‘Get your hair cut,’ or ‘That tunic is a disgrace,’ or ‘Come, let me cut your nails.’ But such cares were only like irksome little pebbles on a smooth and pleasant path. There were hours, especially during the winter when the evenings were long, which we could spend together in the room I had firmly reserved for myself, practising our English, reading together or just talking. Such hours made up to me for being chained to L’Espan, chained by my promise to Berengaria, by my promise to Richard, by my self-exacted promise to Father. I would look after Berengaria and where she was, there I would be; I could but be grateful that Blondel was there too.
Now here was Madam Ursula saying in her dry, rasping voice that he must go.
I restrained myself and was silent while she pointed out in nice order the strength of her position, the weakness of mine should I—that was the implication—be so silly as to make a stand.
The Lodgings’ charter, which I had myself drawn up, stipulated that certain pets, capable of being kept within control, must be accepted. Not pages, serving-men, or minstrels—that was correct, was it not?
The women now in residence were of some long standing, women who remembered doubtless with great gratitude all I had done for them and who would neither dispute nor attempt to share my privilege; but I did see—did I not?—that we must look to the future. Another generation of women would arise who, at need, could look back and say, “At one time the Duchess of Apieta lived here and kept her own lute player.” Abuses so easily crept in, did they not?
And then, unfortunately, there was the character of the man.
I sat, resolutely dumb, while she pointed out that he was drunken and dissolute, a disgrace to any respectable establishment, even an entirely secular one. L’Espan was, of its very nature (and her glance accused me), a somewhat unorthodox place and the task of any innovation was to prove itself at least as good as, a
nd if possible better than, the thing it superseded, was it not? And think how misleading, how abominably misleading it would be if, when the bishop made his inspection, he met Blondel, dirty, unshaven and drunk.
My silence at first encouraged and then finally disconcerted her. Silence from me was a new thing—but then we had never before talked openly about Blondel. I listened to her, to her irritating dicta and even more irritating questions, like bladders full of stones tied to curs’ tails: ‘Is it not?’ ‘Do you agree?’
Then I said, ‘Madam, what leads you to believe that the lute player is my appurtenance? So far as he belongs to anyone, he belongs to Her Majesty, does he not?’
That took her aback but only for a moment. The professional side came into play. At one level there might be a difference between a disgrace belonging to the Duchess of Apieta and the same disgrace belonging to the Queen, the foundress of L’Espan. Madam Ursula gave that difference its due—a moment’s silence. Then she was abbess of L’Espan, strong and armoured and a disgrace was a disgrace, never mind its sponsor. The bishop, on his inspection, might not wait to have the distinction pointed out and despite its unorthodox aspect L’Espan was going to gain a good report from the bishop if Madam Ursula had anything to do with it (Was it not?)
‘I did not realise,’ she said. ‘I am very sorry, in that case, to have troubled you in the matter, Your Grace. I will take up the question with Her Majesty.’
Madam Ursula wasted no time. That evening after supper Berengaria took me by the arm and said, ‘Come to my room, Anna. I want to talk to you.’
She fussed over me a little, insisting that I take the most comfortable seat; pouring me wine with her own hands, offering me small cakes cut into fancy shapes. Then she seated herself and lifted into her lap the heavy altar cloth which she was embroidering for the chapel. She stitched for a moment or two in silence and when she spoke she did so without looking up.