by Tracey Warr
‘The Countess Majora is a nun,’ Almodis interrupts smoothly, ‘and I am not in the least interested in what she did or did not do.’
‘I usually organise any business of the domain with the count,’ he begins again.
Oh dear, he is not catching on fast.
‘The count is busy with other matters. You will deal with me now. Ranulf, I have noted that there are large expanses of land that have been left uncultivated and that many farms are abandoned. The river, that should be our great source of wealth, our artery, is choked with fallen trees not far outside the city. The waters run sluggish and not navigable for large boats. We need to clear the river.’
‘A capital idea my Lady,’ he says, his voice sweetly patronising, ‘but I fear we cannot get to it. It is surrounded by impenetrable forest.’ He beams at her smugly, his chin glistening with grease.
‘Then we will clear the forest on our way to the river and we will create a new village in the clearing. People are crammed so tight in some quarters of the city that we need new settlements. We can sell the timber to the ship-builders.’
‘Who would wish to move there?’ de Roaix objects. ‘Besides we can’t afford it.’
He is still eating and reaching his fat hand out for more when she says, ‘Tidy away the board, Bernadette.’ I snatch it up fast and she stands up abruptly. ‘It is time we all retired. I want you and your record books outside my chamber door at dawn.’ She is already half way down the hall, and the fat vicar is struggling to rise from his seat, his mouth ajar, and the guards are opening the door for her exit.
She was still sleeping at dawn of course but I looked outside the door and there was no Ranulf or his books. Now she is up and dressed and broken her fast and still no sign of him. She sends Piers to find out what has happened. ‘Your hair is sticking up, Bernadette,’ she says to me. ‘You look like something you could turn upside down and sweep the floor with.’ Well I don’t have a poor maid to brush and brush and brush it do I? Piers is back while I’m still smoothing down my hair.
‘Ranulf’s gone, my Lady. His horse too. Snuck away in the night.’
‘Yes, I am not surprised. I will appoint a new vicar.’ I see Piers shift his weight expectantly. ‘Ask Arnaldus Maurandis to attend me.’ I am seated behind Piers so that I can’t see his face, but his stance betrays an intensity of suppressed emotion.
‘Arnaldus is a reliable man and knows the city of course, but then who will take his place as chamberlain?’ he says.
‘Arnaldus’ son, Gilbert, will take the role of chamberlain,’ she says, fixing Piers with a stare. I see the back of his neck redden and he clenches his fist at his side. ‘You are an excellent groom and mews-man, Piers, and I need you about me.’
‘Of course, Lady Almodis,’ he says, bowing his head but we all know that he is greatly displeased.
Next she turned her attention to the merchants of the city. Arnaldus told her they complain the count takes too much taxation and gives nothing back. ‘The city and county of Toulouse,’ she says to Arnaldus and me, ‘was once the heart of the great Visigothic Empire, and of the Roman Empire in this region. Toulouse is the hub of the old Roman road system. All goods and travellers going north, south, east and west come through here and their tolls and tithes with them, but now bridges, roads, churches and walls are crumbling. When I entered the city for my marriage a man had to run ahead of my horse with a plank of wood to mend the surface of the roads and another was forced to place his shield over large holes in the bridge for my horse’s hooves.’ So she and Arnaldus put their heads together over a programme of works that includes clearing the waterways too.
Rostagnus’ inventories have uncovered shortcomings and neglect in the garnering of income so more is coming in which will pay for her improvements. For days on end all her talk with them is of Peter the Brown who owes her provisions for ten fighting men plus two setiers of wine, his brothers who owe five quarters of barley, Roland who owes the fighting men breakfast, Richard who owes albergum of a pig, a sheep, three setiers of good wine, four setiers of bread wheat and a quantity of pinard, the abbot who owes provisions for fifty fighting men and brill on the table.
‘Where is the library, Arnaldus?’
‘There is no library, Lady, just a few scrolls in the chaplain’s vestry.’
‘Find me a good stonemason and carpenter then. We shall build a library, a small annexe to the hall here, on this side, well away from the kitchen and in the full light of the morning sun.’
In a few weeks she was installed in her library with the builders still working around her.
‘Bernadette, go with Dia, and find the Toulouse family record books.’
I groan as I lift myself off the stool. I know that these books will be dusty, dirty, heavy and many! Other lady’s maids don’t have to be maid, nursemaid, librarian, dogs-body all in one go do they? I look with regret at the pristine white of my apron knowing that I will not see it again till next wash day.
She spent a week with her head in those dusty books that the bishop reluctantly sent her and, when she emerged, a cobweb hanging off her veil and her fingertips as grimy as the carpenter’s, she says, ‘There’s not much of use here since the records have not been kept up to date since Count Pons took power.’ She sets Rostagnus to remedying that, telling him, ‘I do not hold with the notion that we master the art of writing in order to “improve” the documentary evidence, as they do, by all accounts, in the scriptoria of Saint Martial, Lagrasse and Narbonne, but we should at least attempt to keep true and full records.’
She has written to Pons, telling him that she is delayed, but will join him soon. She sends off letters to Carcassonne and La Marche and occasionally further afield enquiring after some new book or troubadour she has heard of. Audebert writes her that Agnes is sitting smug in Aquitaine, warming her son’s throne, but we hear that Geoffrey is forever abandoning her for his northern military campaigns and they have no children. My Lady’s growing collection of books is carefully arranged and looked after by Dia. All this ‘busyness’. Is it to avoid thinking of her new husband, or to avoiding thinking of her old one?
There were no more dismissals after Ranulf but the laundry is whiter, the hall tables gleam and the wine tastes a good deal better.
‘Wealth is not for hoarding and heaping, Bernadette,’ she says, ‘but for using. If we give, it will come back to us.’
‘Yes, my Lady,’ I say, ‘what goes around, comes around.’
She took the two chests of clothes already woven and gave some to the workers in the workshop who needed them, and others to a crowd of beggars at the Montgaillard Gate. ‘Saint Augustine wrote, that we must be mindful of the poor,’ she told me, ‘so that we lay up for ourselves in the heavenly treasury.’ So she became popular with all the people because she was hard but fair and the fame of her generosity spread all round the city. I overheard people talking of it in the market and hoped that it would not reach Pons’ avaricious ears.
My Lady goes early every morning up the staircase in the east tower to stand on the keep as the sun comes up and I must watch the children while she does. One morning she wakes me and takes me up the staircase with her. Together we watch the sun rise across the city and the surrounding land and river, and listen to the birds’ frantic twittering and chatter.
‘I will find a way, to survive this grievous marriage,’ she says aloud, but more to herself than to me. ‘I will devote myself to my children and to my land. Two husbands who have not matched up to my expectations, or indeed to what I give to them. My children will be the sons and daughters of my line, not theirs.
‘Why do you come to these battlements every morning, Lady?’
‘I like to look out across the city of Toulouse and the blue bends of the Garonne and the countryside all around. I like to look at what I own, what I rule and I like to dream of where the river might take me if I were not countess but instead a beggar boy and could step lightly onto one of those skiffs and hide amidst the ca
rgo.’
‘Would the river take you to Barcelona perhaps?’ I venture.
She is silent and I fear I have offended her, but then she says, ‘Only if it were flowing backwards, my silly Bernadette!’
21
Christmas 1040
I dismount to rest my horse for a while, and stand in pale green grass waving in a bitterly cold wind, looking towards the castle of Saint Gilles. We have had to make slow progress here because of my condition. It is near Christmas and the countryside is deep in snow. A dark red bush pushes up through the snow looking like a bloodstain against the pure white. I feel the chill and damp through the soles of my boots. I turn my arms and hands over and over in the fat flakes of snow, smiling. Underneath my furlined hood my hair hangs in a single plait down the back of my green tunic, and underneath the tunic is a canary yellow dress that shows through at the sleeves and at the slits on the sides. The sleeves of my yellow underdress are so incredibly long and flared that they will sweep the floor when I walk into the hall of Saint Gilles to tell my lord that I am carrying his heir. I tuck my cold hands into my sleeves. There are knights on horses in the distance in front of the castle. The sky is a mix of blue and dirty yellow; the sun is shining but the temperature is freezing. The snow gives a peculiar quality to sounds, making them carry long distances. We can hear the voices of the knights, the snorting and stamping of their horses and the clanging of their weapons on the target carrying across to us in the frigid air. I stamp my feet and wish that I had three pairs of hose on.
The castle of Saint Gilles stands on a huge granite rock that rises up out of the flatter land around it. It towers down overlooking the valley of the wide river that is lazily, greenly lapping its way around the rock. I look up the steep sides of the enormous valley that stretches as far as I can see. The sides of the valley are littered with puny trees and grey and black boulders. Some of the trees wear only snow and icicles and other conifer trees are a deep, dark green. At the top of the valley, so far above my head that I have to lean back to see it, is a plateau.
‘When you are on that plateau up there,’ Piers tells me, seeing where I am looking, ‘this valley disappears. It’s hidden by the thick covering of trees in the summer and invisible from above. A secret valley.’
I smile at him and turn my gaze back to the castle and town huddled around its walls. The rock is grey and the castle is grey so that it seems to grow out of the rock. A crenellated wall runs around its four sides and six towers rear up above the wall and the battlements. It is not a regular square because it has been built following the contours of its rocky foundation. Clustering at its foot and climbing up towards it are small houses with red tiled roofs and steep cobbled streets with haphazard steps cut into them.
We remount and as we get nearer I see the knights more clearly. They are wearing white padding and practising with a target and a spear, riding one at a time to try to hit it in the centre. I wave to them and they wave back. I lead my party towards an arched stone bridge. There are many fishing birds on the river: slim and elegant black cormorants, white and swooping gulls, cranes perching and occasionally taking off from rocks in the river on their slow, enormous wings. Slabs of ice float in the green water and ducks weave around them.
‘Imagine how cold those ducks’ feet are,’ says Bernadette.
Unseen fish or frogs splash and make circles on the river surface. Our horses’ shoes sound on the bridge and then we are over, in the stony town of Saint Gilles. We have to dismount again to climb up the steep streets and ice and snow underfoot are treacherous. People stop and stare at us. The colours of their clothes are drab browns, greens, whites but also very bright colours: reds, yellows and blues. I smell a whiff of the fuller’s vats where sheep’s wool is pummelled in urine for hours, the ammonia drawing out the grease and making the wool soft. Perhaps some of these people are those employed to stand up to their knees in these vats all day, treading the wool. I swallow, nauseous, and lean more heavily on Piers’ arm as he assists me up the slope. I am heavy with my child.
Women are carrying loaves of bread and pails of water, men carry bundles of firewood, children play on the steps of the houses with wooden toys, a cat shakes snow from its paw and blinks at me, smoke rises from the chimneys of the houses. We skirt around steaming piles of mule dung. Many of the doors are hung with circles of holly with bright red berries for the Christmas feast. There are deep drifts of snow on the street-corners and in patches on the roofs of the house and every now and then a chunk of snow slides from a roof onto the street below or once, unfortunately, down the back of Bernadette’s neck. ‘Eeeek!’ she exclaims and Piers and I laugh.
The wooden arched door in the massive stone wall of the castle is studded with metal knobs and bands. Inside this door is like being in yet another village as the castle walls enclose more stone buildings: the bakehouse, dairy, pigsty, dovecote, stables, and one large building. Piers leans hard on the giant door of the Great Hall. Inside there are tapestries on the walls and the smell of rosemary rising from the rushes. Hanging everywhere is green ivy and the darker green of prickly holly and here and there the white berries of mistletoe. ‘Shut the door!’ someone yells and Piers turns and leans on the door behind us, closing it with a clang.
So I am come (but briefly I intend) to Saint Gilles where Pons and I will entertain his nephew for the Christmas feast. I take in the cavernous room in front of me: two extraordinarily long wooden tables with benches, a fire burning brightly, large shaggy dogs curled in front of the fire, people scattered, doing odd tasks: cleaning weapons, practicing on instruments, cradling babies, spinning and sewing. At the far end of the hall, on the raised platform stretching across its width, sits Pons with Bertrand. I register the look on their faces, as I glide up the hall towards them, my belly preceding me by quite some distance! After greetings, and Pons’ joyful effusions, and the much less sincere congratulations of his nephew, Bernadette hands me a glass of warm punch flavoured with citron and sweet syrup, and then I excuse myself and my unborn child for a short rest. Pons is anxious that I should be treated with the utmost care. Bernadette takes me up to a small room above the hall, which has a window with two tall pointed arches. She throws up the lid of a wooden chest that stands at the foot of the bed, rummaging in it. Eventually her head re-emerges, her cheeks pink, and she throws more fur quilts onto the bed. ‘I think these will do.’
‘So I shall birth the heir of Toulouse in this bed,’ I say.
‘Are you sure it’s a boy?’ says Bernadette.
‘Yes, Dia took two drops of my blood from my side and dropped them into spring water and they sunk. Also my right breast is bigger than my left which Hippocrates said is a clear sign of a boy.’
There is a sudden clangour of bells from the church to pronounce the start of the Christmas feast. ‘The peasants are on holiday now for two weeks,’ exclaims Bernadette, looking like an excited child. ‘The best feast of the year!’
‘Well perhaps we should rejoin the Christmas group then,’ I say, not wanting to curtail her fun just because I would avoid my lord and, in any case, I am hungry. Back downstairs there is shouting near the door which bursts open giving entry to two men dragging what looks like a small tree towards the fireplace.
‘The yule log,’ Bernadette says, ‘that will burn through the whole holiday.’
With a great effort, swinging it a few times between them, the men throw the log onto the fire where it sends out sparks and heat. People are clapping and laughing, sitting down at the long trestle tables, full now with the whole village crammed into the hall, and there is a buzz of chatter and laughter and a great deal of staring at me.
The servants are handing round chunks of bread to everyone. ‘King of the Bean, King of the Bean,’ children chant, and I think with a pang of my own Lusignan children, left behind in Toulouse, playing with their Christmas toys with Dia instead of me.
‘This is a special Christmas game played here my Lady,’ Bernadette tells me, standing at
my shoulder, ‘where the person who finds a small bean baked inside their bread will be crowned the king of the Christmas feast, so don’t swallow it if it’s inside yours.’
I take a bite of my bread finding nothing and look along the rows of faces to see who has the bean. Bernadette has seated herself just below the platform and I see that she is pushing her cheek out with her tongue, a comical expression on her face. She takes a small object from the tip of her tongue. ‘Oh!’ she says, looking at the small white bean on her fingertip.
‘It’s you!’ Piers yells, hoiking her to her feet, shouting, ‘Bernadette has the bean! Bernadette has the bean!’
Everyone stops talking to stare and one of the table servants places a silver plate crown on her head, laughing and bowing to her as he does so. We rise to our feet, lifting our tankards and glasses and yelling loudly together, ‘Hail King Bernadette, King of the Bean!’ Bernadette is clearly worried about keeping the wobbly crown on her head and has gone the colour of a beetroot.
We eat a thick vegetable soup, then chicken and roast boar, and finally cheese. Pons pokes and probes at his mouth with a wooden toothpick. ‘There’s another whole course in my teeth,’ he says, roving his tongue under and over his lips.
Musicians play on recorders, horns, trumpets, whistles, bells, and drums. Everyone listens in concentrated silence and claps wildly when they finish. Then come acrobats who stand on each other’s shoulders, juggling and playing flutes; and then, the professional farters.
‘These are my favourites’, says Pons, making me glad that Dia isn’t here.
The heat of the fire is making my face red and my head thick with sleepiness. I go and stand near the door to give gifts to the servants and village people as they leave: parcels of food, clothing, ale and bundles of firewood.