by Tracey Warr
Number three shows the Lord Jesus falling for the first time under his terrible burden, and I feel just like him myself, no chance to catch my breath before we are off again to number four where we see Jesus’ poor mother Mary, meeting him on his way to his terrible death, and weeping. I am struggling to keep up with them and can barely glance at the next stations of the cross: Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross, Veronica wiping the face of Jesus, Jesus falling the second time, Jesus meeting the daughters of Jerusalem, Jesus falling the third time, Jesus stripped of his garments and then the crucifixion: Jesus nailed to the cross. I should be doing this walk very slowly, meditating on every one. Oh I am so tired, I hardly see the last three: Jesus dying on the cross, Jesus’ body removed from the cross and Jesus laid in the tomb and covered in incense.
Finally, my thighs aching terrible, the sweat trickling down my back, my arms trembling, we have passed all the silver stations of the cross and at the top there is a small cemetery and a little church where I can sit down in the cool shade. Eventually the pounding of my heart and at my temples starts to slow down. Almodis sits next to me breast-feeding Raymond (which is a scandal of course to do so in a church).
‘What would you have me do, Bernadette? Boil the poor baby’s head in this heat?’ she responds, when I tutch at her.
You should stay at home in the cool calm of your chambers like a proper woman and mother I think instead of dragging us all up dangerous hills. Still there was no one in the church to see her, well only the statue of Madonna, with her own baby Jesus on her breast, I realise. So I relent. Perhaps she is in the right of it and Mary wouldn’t mind a bit of baby-feeding in her church. Raymond climbs off her lap and rejoins his brothers and sister.
The children, having explored around the church in a small troop, are starting to get bored. ‘Sit here,’ for a moment,’ their mother tells them and they obey. They always do obey her, and never me, when her back is turned. Five children all under six is a lot for me to handle and she should get a nursemaid for the job, but she won’t. ‘I want you to look out for them, Bernadette. You will be fair to all of them, including Hugh and Jourdain and Melisende, but a nursemaid here would favour my Toulouse children over my Lusignans, and I won’t have that.’ So here I am, lumbered with two huge jobs, looking after her (that’s the biggest!) and looking after five young children.
‘So how many stations of the cross did we see altogether?’ she asks them. ‘Fourteen!’ Hugh answers quick as a snap.
‘Yes,’ she smiles at him. ‘If there were two of every silver pole we saw instead of one, how many poles would that be?’ There was a silent pause at that. Much too hard, I am beginning to think. I don’t know the answer to that, how could …
‘Twenty-eight,’ says Jourdain.
‘Yes! And what if there were three of every pole?’ and so she goes on, with them calling out their answers. ‘And what if half the poles were blown down by the wind, how many would there be?’
I cross myself at that. Surely that is blasphemy and we are sitting in the Lord’s very house. Eventually they tire of their maths.
‘Is this our land, Mother?” asks Guillaume, which seems to be one of his favourite questions, wherever we are.
‘Yes. This is the chateau, the domain and the village of Ambialet, which belongs to me. Your father,’ she says, ‘gave it to me as part of his wedding gift, and I shall give it to Raymond when he is a man.’ Raymond opens his eyes wide at that and points at his chest. She nods at him. ‘Yes, the lands that were my wedding portion, will be yours one day and you must rule them well.’
‘You could put in some more benches for tired nursemaids, for a start,’ I grumble and they all laugh at me.
‘Time to go home,’ Almodis declares, ‘but we will pass by the chateau for you to see it Raymond and we can swim in the river when we get to the bottom of the hill to cool down.’ They are all jumping up and down with joy at that. Swim in the river indeed! She’s taught them all how to swim, ignoring my warnings, and saying that Charlemagne and Beowulf were great swimmers. We’re not fish, I say.
‘Be careful, going down,’ I shout at their backs disappearing around the bend. ‘It’s more dangerous going down …’ but they are already long gone and she with them.
When we arrive at the riverbank there is a fête in preparation and the castellan of Ambialet invites us to stay overnight for the event. My Lady agrees and we watch entranced as young people in boats row on quiet oars up the river with lanterns and arrange themselves on the dark waters in the patterns of stars.
Later, in the castle, when the children have all gone to sleep, curled up on palettes near the fire with the castellan’s own children, a troubadour comes to entertain my Lady with a story of Count Geoffrey of Anjou’s recent victory over the Count of Blois at the battle of Nouy. The French King Henri had given the city of Tours to Geoffrey, the troubadour tells us, and Geoffrey had besieged the city for more than a year, trying to claim his property. The Count of Blois and his brother came with seventeen hundred armed men to aid the starving city. Geoffrey prayed to Saint Martin for his aid and a miracle occurred. The whole mass of Geoffrey’s army, on horse and on foot, seemed to be clad in shining white robes and the Count of Blois’ troops were unable to fight, feeling as though they were bound in chains, and the saintly Geoffrey won the battle. My Lady and I exchange glances at that. If Geoffrey was saintly he’d changed a bit for sure! More like he promised to give the saint back everything he’d stolen from him and got saintly intervention that way. I look down at my feet. It must be near bedtime and I am looking forward to taking my boots off.
She’s had five babies in three years: the twins, then Melisende, then Guillaume born ten months after Melisende and Raymond born nine months after Guillaume. Some women would have had their health sapped by such childbearing, but my mistress is thriving and happy enough when Pons is not in the vicinity. When the cat’s away the mice will play. ‘You are my war-band, my drut: Dia, Bernadette and Rostagnus,’ she tells us, ‘my band of faithful friends,’ and indeed, we are at war.
‘Read this out, Dia.’ She passes a long scroll that she has been working on all morning, getting her fingers inky, whilst we laboured at the proper work of ladies, stitching hems and hose.
‘One: monsters, cripples and sickly children are conceived on holy nights,’ reads Dia, and looks up. ‘What is this, Almodis?’
‘Read on.’
‘Two: a husband must not seek the marriage debt the night before holy days.’
‘That’s Tuesdays and Thursdays,’ Almodis says.
‘Three: a man must abjure carnal relations with his wife forty days before Easter, before Holy Cross Day in September and during Lent,’ continues Dia. ‘Four: menstruating women do give men leprosy. Five: marriage is ordained by God, not for the sake of lust but rather for the sake of offspring. A man should abstain from sex with his pregnant wife.’ Dia is laughing now, as she continues the list. ‘He must abstain for three months before childbirth and forty days after childbirth. Six: the Church ordains that a husband must not have sex during the day.’
‘Do you like them?’ Almodis asks. ‘They are my catechism of excuses. I am collecting them in everything I read!’ Dia laughs, but it is no laughing matter. She sins if she denies her husband his marriage-debt. ‘Yet,’ she says, suddenly reflective, ‘loathing does not hurt as bad as tenderness.’
‘Have a care Almodis,’ warns Dia, but I don’t think it’s the sin she is warning her about. Dia used to have her own small house in the city as she did in Lusignan, but after that Christmas in Saint Gilles, Lady Almodis persuaded her to move into the chateau. She has her own little room where she sleeps and composes.
When His Ugliness comes banging on my Lady’s door she sends out Dia who says, ‘It’s her menses’ or ‘It is a holy day’ or ‘She is sick in the stomach and puking’, or sometimes they let him in and ply him with a drink laced with Dia’s concoctions so that he falls asleep on the instant or, she tells us, ‘He
gropes me desperately but cannot have me. I prefer the sleep herbs Dia!’
Sometimes these excuses work and he stomps off swearing and I keep out of his way in case his lascivious eye should turn to me, but other times he’ll have none of their excuses or their potions and Dia and I have to hurry out as he mounts her with no patience or gentleness, like the bull in the field, and we sit in the next room having to listen to the concussions of a man and a woman and him groaning and yelling in his horrible ardour for her.
‘Perhaps all this coyness and denial makes it worse?’ I suggest to her when she is sitting in her bath, but they take no notice of me. They like their system, and anyway, I suppose she must get heirs.
‘There is another remedy for your problem, Almodis,’ says Dia one day. We all know what problem she means. Almodis and I look up from our stitching.
‘I have seen a whore on the waterfront, of good quality, who looks a little like you, named Alienor. We could employ her in the chateau and she could put herself in Pons’ way, become his concubine, take his attention away from you.’
I stare at Dia with my mouth open. Her subtleties are surely sinful and no wife would do such a thing.
‘Do it,’ I hear my Lady say with great satisfaction.
I cross myself and look back down to my embroidery.
‘Come along Bernadette,’ says Dia.
‘I’m not going amongst whores,’ I say appalled.
‘Do as you are bid,’ my Lady orders me crossly.
I’ve a good mind to tell Piers how I’ve been sent down that Comminges Street, infested with prostitutes, but I know he is carrying tales to Pons so I resist the urge. I like bedding Piers but I know he would hurt her if he could and if he harms her seriously then it will harm me too, so we lie and lie with each other. I feed him stories for Pons that Almodis, Dia and I invent together. Due to practising a thing, my mother used to say, we become skilful thereof.
Pons has set up that town whore and treats her like the pampered lady she isn’t. Once a month Alienor comes to see Dia and Almodis. Dia gives her silver and Alienor gives them a report on him, too fulsome sometimes for my Lady’s liking. ‘We don’t need a blow by blow account of your bedding and the state of his prick,’ she declares, impatient, although I’d been quite enjoying Alienor’s story myself. ‘I need to know what he has said of me, of my children, of affairs of state.’ So this way we go on.
Dia has letters from Barcelona and the air always shifts when this happens with my Lady’s anxiety to hear the news of Count Ramon, although she won’t admit to it. Dia is frowning greatly and the news does not look good.
‘Dia?’ Almodis asks, unable to wait any longer. ‘What is it?’
‘Bad news from Barcelona, Almodis,’ she looks up from the letter. ‘Two of Ramon’s little sons have died of a fever.’
‘Oh no!’ she exclaims and glances quickly to her own five children playing on the floor. ‘Oh, poor, poor, Ramon. Poor boy.’
‘He is a man now Almodis, not a boy,’ Dia tells her.
‘Yes,’ she answers distracted by her own thoughts, ‘but I always think of the boy I met here. It seems so long ago but it is only five years. But yes, if nothing else has done so, this grief will turn him from boy to man.’
‘The boy is an astute man, Lady Almodis. My friends tell me that gold and silver are pouring into Barcelona with the new trading he has stimulated and the tribute he is exacting from the Lords of Lerida and Tortosa, the musulmen.’
Almodis nods. ‘Yes I have heard that also. Does he not have a third son?’
‘Yes. It is the eldest two who have died: Berenger and Arnau. His youngest child, Pere, is still a babe in arms and he has survived it.’
‘That is something, but how sad for Elisabet, for Ramon. I will write to them,’ she says and sets about it straight away.
‘Take care of Piers, Lady. I think he is doing a job of spying on you for the count, like Alienor is doing for us.’ I had seen him sneaking beneath her window again this morning and disappearing in his black leather jerkin through a hole in the hedge.
‘Oh I know Bernadette,’ she says. ‘I know Piers well. I have given him preferment and he has given me his oath. If he seriously trespasses on that oath, I shall punish him. Don’t worry.’ But I do. She has me and Dia check regularly that there is nobody listening at our doors or happening to be examining his shoe buckle under our window, where I caught him another time.
‘Why don’t you dismiss him, Almodis?’ Dia asks. ‘It would be safest.’
I see her considering it but she has some soft spot for him. ‘I keep him for my father’s sake. He can’t do us any real harm. We can use him to feed what we want to Pons.’
But Piers is smart as a snake and I do fear that he might harm her. I decide I will do a job of spying on him, like Alienor does for us, and he does for Pons. Besides he is handsome and my bed is cold and empty too often. The heart has its reasons that reason ignores. Dia can give me contraceptive herbs and I can sin along with my mistress.
25
Easter 1047
I am watching my children playing in the spring sunshine in the courtyard. Melisende is sitting on a bench next to the well twisting a spinning top and Jourdain sits next to her, drawing on a slate. Hugh, Guillaume and Raymond are noisily chasing each other. Raymond has the red cloth in his hand and is trying to catch his older brothers. Hugh is eight, Guillaume is seven and Raymond is six but there is not a great difference in their sizes. All my children have my own thick, dark blonde hair. Hugh has outstripped his twin Jourdain in growth and boisterousness. Although Raymond is younger than Guillaume he could be his twin and has begged that I let him go early to train with Hugh and Guillaume. When I said no, he and Guillaume gave me an arm wrestling display to show how strong Raymond is, with Guillaume obligingly allowing Raymond to win in order to prove the point. The bond between these three is tight. If I separate Raymond and Guillaume, Raymond may grow up to challenge his brother’s authority and Raymond is not destined for the church; he is clearly going to be a warrior, not a monk. Raymond crashes into Guillaume sending him sprawling against an irritated Jourdain whose stylus flies out of his hand and the red rag passes to Guillaume.
‘Come on Jourdain, join us,’ shouts Hugh but Jourdain shakes his head, retrieving his stylus and settling into a different corner. Hugh deliberately crashes into an exasperated Jourdain again as Guillaume catches him.
‘Jourdain,’ I call, ‘come and draw with me in my chamber. You will get some peace there.’ I move to the stairway and, reaching the top, call down: ‘Raymond I’ve decided that you can go to training early along with your brothers.’
He lets out a yelp of triumph and rushes into a hugging scrum with Hugh and Guillaume. Jourdain joins me at the top of the stairs and takes my hand. ‘Then we will all get some peace and quiet eh?’ I say to him.
‘They are totally mad,’ says Jourdain, watching his three brothers jumping up and down with their arms around each others’ shoulders, their heads banging together.
In my chamber he gets all our spare sandals from the chest: mine, Dia’s, Bernadette’s and all the children’s, and arranges them in a circle, with some tipped and propped up on pebbles as if they are dancing. We laugh at his arrangement together. ‘Are you happy, my sweet son or do you wish that you also were going to train as a knight?’
Jourdain turns to me aghast. ‘No Mother, please, I want to decorate books and manuscripts as Father Benedict has been showing me with coloured inks and gold leaf, and I want to read every book in the library of the Priory of Lusignan!’
‘Alright,’ I squeeze his hand, ‘I just needed to be sure what you wanted.’
Accompanied by Dia and the boys, I am embarking on the journey back to Lusignan and La Marche. It is ten years since I saw Roccamolten and I am excited at the prospect. My emotions concerning Lusignan are more mixed. The time has come to lose my boys, all four of them at one stroke. I am taking Jourdain to become a novice at the Priory of Lusign
an and then Hugh, Guillaume and Raymond are going to train with Geoffrey of Anjou. Pons objected to my choice of the Count of Anjou to stand as foster father to our sons at first. He wanted them to go to one of his cronies in Languedoc. Why can’t they go somewhere nearby he said. I told him if they could survive in the crucible of Geoffrey’s warrior court, they can survive anywhere. He will teach them proeza, prowess. They will return to us as formidable knights to rule Toulouse and Saint Gilles. I did not tell him that I want my sons bound to me and to each other, and not to him or one of his local lords. Of course Agnes of Mâcon will not be their foster mother. I would never subject them to what I had to tolerate in my own childhood. It was when I heard the news that Geoffrey had repudiated her last year that I determined to send them to Anjou. I thought at first of sending them to my brother Audebert in La Marche but he does not stick his nose outside his own territories. He maintains his frontiers and is content with that. My grandfather’s blood, the blood of exhilaration and risk, runs in my veins and not in his.
We will travel as far as Bordeaux, by boat, on the river Garonne two or three days, and from Bordeaux we will continue to the fortress of Lusignan on horseback: another two days. After visiting Lusignan and leaving Jourdain there, the rest of us will journey on to La Marche where Geoffrey will come to collect my three trainee knights. They are all mightily pleased to be setting off on their life’s journeys. Melisende, though, is standing on the pier with Bernadette looking miserable. ‘Don’t fret, honey. By the time I return,’ I say, laying my hand on my stomach, ‘there will be a new baby for you to help me with.’ She nods her head and smiles feebly at that, still pouting her mouth at the boys strutting and packing. I kiss the top of her head. ‘Oh Melisende, you don’t know how glad I am that I will keep you with me. I will return soon and you will take care of Bernadette in the meantime.’