Passionate Brood

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “He’s just come ashore from a Sicilian ship with a message from your sister. King William is dead.”

  John was all interest at once. He waved aside the unfinished game and swung round on his stool. “Johanna a young and desirable widow!” he whistled. “God, what a day we’re having!”

  “One of us must tell the King,” insisted Blondel.

  “Send the brigand. He looks tough,” suggested John flippantly. “Come to think about it, Blondel, if only old William had been accommodating enough to die a day or two earlier Johanna might have married Robin before all this rumpus.”

  Blondel was uncomfortably aware that everybody in the hail was watching them, waiting for them to act. “Do you believe that she loved him?” he asked, lowering his voice. He had heard it rumoured, of course. But a royal household is always rife with rumour, and at the time he had been too young to comprehend.

  John smiled up at him, indolently jiggling a couple of chessmen between cupped hands. Even when he had been sixteen he had wormed out other people’s secrets. “I watched them say ‘good-bye’ in the herb garden—after you and Richard had gone to Navarre,” he said, his blue eyes narrowing the way they did when he wormed his way down into the dungeons to watch some unfortunate felon take a turn of the thumb screw. “It must have been hell for Robin. The man’s no monk, and she did her best to seduce him. In her innocence and her misery she—”

  “Well, anyhow, Tancred wants to marry her now,” interrupted Blondel, turning abruptly towards the stairway arch. John was an amusing enough companion until he started dissecting sex emotions. He got up from the table and followed now, not because he had any particular feeling for Johanna, but because he was intensely interested in people’s reactions.

  The threatened storm had broken and a rising wind made the heavy door at the top of the short stair difficult to open. Through the unglazed window in the outer wall they could see the rain lashing a white-capped sea. A distant mutter of thunder came to them, accompanied by the restless tramp of Richard’s feet.

  A tornado of destruction seemed to have swept King Henry’s pleasant workroom. Chairs were overturned and parchments scattered in all directions. As the door swung open Richard pulled up short between window and table. His face was ravaged by rage and grief, his voice thick as a madman’s. Seeing Blondel edge cautiously across the threshold, he picked up a massive stool by one carved leg and began swinging it threateningly round his head as if it were a battleaxe. “Get out!” he shouted above the storm.

  It was not the first time Blondel had seen a royal Angevin rage; but the late King, being of shorter stature, had never looked so terrible. Facing a charge of Saracens with whirling scimitars, such as he had been picturing down at the harbour, would surely seem child’s play compared with this! He was in the habit of obeying the King’s lightest command, and his heart beat hard in his breast. But he held his ground gamely.

  Richard glared at him like some dangerous, wounded beast. “Didn’t I tell that damned Constable I’d break every bone in his body if he whined to me about his love for Robin?” he roared. “You can spare your breath, all of you. From now on, no man shall so much as mention his name in my presence.”

  “It’s not that, Sir,” corrected Blondel obstinately. “I’ve an urgent message from our lady Johanna.”

  The name seemed to catch at some shred of Richard’s everyday sanity. He stopped brandishing the stool.

  “We only came to tell you that our jovial brother-in-law of Sicily is dead,” drawled John, from the comparative safety of the doorway.

  “Dead?” laughed Richard crazily. “Then I warrant she’ll be taking the next boat home to hold a thanksgiving service!”

  “But she is imprisoned in a castle at Messina, Sir, where they are trying to force her into a second marriage with the new king, Tancred.” Blondel spoke with deliberate loudness, and Richard’s upraised arm fell slowly. The stool went crashing unheeded to the floor. “What’s that you say?” he asked, like a man waking from a drunken stupor; but interrupted before his squire had finished explaining. “My good Blondel,” he protested impatiently, “what fantastic waterfront tales have you been listening to? People don’t imprison Plantagenets!”

  “She sent a ring, Sir.”

  “They always do!” scoffed Richard.

  But when Blondel handed it to him he moved to the light of the window, turning the little hoop of steel between strong fingers. “By God’s beard, John, it’s true!” he called incredulously over his shoulder. “Don’t you remember my twisting this for her out of Henry’s outgrown mail that day you broke the doll Becket brought her from Canterbury? You were furious, because he hadn’t brought you anything.”

  John glanced at it from a discreet distance. “I remember the licking Robin gave me,” he admitted dourly.

  But Richard—who remembered the excitement that always heralded that mighty prelate’s arrival, his brilliance and his lavish-ness, and above all King Henry’s joy in him—was deeply touched. “Imagine a girl keeping a thing like that all these years!” he said. He went back to the table and sat down, laying a hand on his squire’s shoulder in passing. “I’m sorry, Blondel,” he said simply.

  In spite of anxiety for Johanna and grief for Robin, that brief, kindly pressure seemed to readjust Blondel’s world. Unobtrusively, he set a drink at his master’s elbow and straightened some of the signs of his violence.

  “Send this Sicilian fellow up,” ordered Richard curtly, already ashamed of his rage. “And for God’s sake, John, stop lounging there quizzing the rest of us as if we were some sort of show, and come and make yourself useful. Having been educated for the church, you are better at languages than I.”

  John came pleasantly enough. “If what the man says seems to be true, I suppose you will sail at once?” he asked; and because he stooped obligingly to gather up the scattered parchments, Richard failed to notice the satisfied smirk spreading across his handsome features.

  “And Heaven help Tancred’s volcano-ridden island when I get there!” he snarled. “Daring to detain a sister of mine—”

  “And her dowry!” John reminded him. “With that she could have afforded to marry almost any man she fancied—to make up for the way her desires must have starved with William. So let’s hope Tancred hasn’t been too pressing. Not that it would matter so much—now!” he added negligently.

  Richard glared at him as the implication sank in. Already he had begun to be ravaged by remorse about Robin—and now there was Johanna’s lost happiness. After the Sicilian had been interviewed and rewarded, he sent for Mercadier and the captains of his fleet. They came crowding into the little room, their cloaks dripping raindrops to the floor. Clearly and concisely he gave them their orders. They were to weigh anchor at dawn and set their course for Sicily.

  “But I thought you had arranged to meet Philip at Marseilles?” ventured John, comfortably aware that nothing this side of death would hold his brother back now.

  “He’ll have to meet me at Messina instead,” barked Richard; and before they were in their beds he was out in the bailey mounting his swiftest horse.

  “At least let me get you a cloak!” implored Blondel.

  “I shall ride the lighter without one,” shouted Richard, above the buffeting of the wind.

  “If he rides like that he’ll go back to the Devil who made his temper!” muttered the Constable, watching the sparks strike from his horse’s hooves in the darkness beneath the barbican.

  But Richard was already swallowed up in the blustering wildness of the night—riding towards the woods as unsparingly as he swept across a tilt yard—unarmed and uncloaked, soaked to the skin like any serf. Bare-headed and sore-hearted because, in the terrible anger he had never learned to govern, he had spoiled the happiness of two of the four people he loved best on earth. Too proud, still, to revoke a decree made in anger—too generous to sail for Sicily without trying to tell Robin that Johanna was free.

  But in the deeper darkness of
the woods the going was hard; and wet, overhanging boughs whipped blood from his cheek. Hunting by daylight, he had supposed that he knew these pleasant, grassy rides; but now their direction baffled him. He hadn’t the woodman’s sense. Or was it, he wondered, ripping his flying tunic from a malevolent thorn bush, because he wasn’t wholly English? The thought irritated him unreasonably. With all his superior knowledge of the world, he would never know these woods as Robin did. Robin, who knew instinctively which way a frightened doe would bound to cover—whose green jerkin always merged so uncannily into the forest foliage that the very trees seemed to protect him. Robin, whose lost friendship had felt like the great, sturdy heart of an oak…

  Part IV

  Messina

  Chapter Fourteen

  Johanna Plantagenet slept late. Because she had been watching most of the night for a humble little fishing boat to cross the narrow straits from Italy, she missed the grandeur of the avenging armada that came for her at dawn. Being a thoroughly healthy young woman, comfortably housed in a massive tower, she even slept through all the clamour of sudden panic and invasion, and began to stir only when the sun rode high in the cloudless Sicilian sky and somebody began banging on her door.

  Except to hunch a protesting shoulder and to turn the burnished glory of her head on her pillow, Johanna took no notice of the banging. People had been bringing gifts from her persistent suitor ever since she had fled from his blandishments to this castle at Messina. Unfortunately the castle, like everything else on the island, now belonged to Tancred. But, being the widowed queen of a civilised country, at least she still retained the privilege of a bolt to her bedroom door.

  At first this siege d’amour had been rather amusing. Johanna knew plenty of marriageable princesses who would give their ears to be shut up in a castle because a rich and romantic king like Tancred wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. But she had had ten years of Sicily, and she wanted to go back to England. So as soon as poor William’s elaborate obsequies were over, she had made a methodical list of all her possessions and asked her brother-in-law to arrange about transport.

  He had been lounging on the moonlit terrace of the winter palace at the time. “Too bad that all my ships should be laid up or at Genoa!” he had evaded politely.

  “Not your ships, Tancred,” she had explained. “I want the ones my father sent out with my dowry when I came.” And because he had pretended to have forgotten all about them, she had thrust her list into his hand.

  “You haven’t forgotten anything, have you, my sweet?” he had teased, in that silky voice of his. “Your ships and that beautiful gold table from the Abbey at Rouen. And your multi-coloured silk pavilion. You know, I always thought that provided one of the few bright spots of poor William’s tournaments.” He might have been some Semitic merchant picking up bargains in Constantinople, the way his dark eyes snapped over the list of her possessions. A few weeks earlier his dawdling interest in each item would have helped to pass the time pleasantly, but already Johanna’s brisk Northern mind had begun to accelerate to the tempo of less leisurely climates, and—with the scent of windswept English heaths almost in her nostrils—it had seemed suddenly repulsive that his clothes should smell of musk and attar of roses.

  “Promise me you will have my ships overhauled this week!” she had persisted. But instead of promising anything he had asked her to stay and marry him.

  “And save all this packing?” she had laughed. And then, taken off her guard, she had found the heavy Eastern perfume beating down her careless laughter. His full, lascivious lips were bruising hers, his hot hands holding her as if she were some harem favourite. And she had realised that he really meant it.

  Lying in bed behind her locked door, Johanna shuddered at the memory of his embraces, but she was honest enough to admit that in the past she had seldom discouraged him. During ten years she had been tenderly compassionate to William—patient with his stricken body and understanding about his embittered mind. But she was no saint…Throughout her exile she had grasped at every compensating pleasure. She had let Tancred make light-hearted love to her from the day she first landed, and had been grateful to him for a hundred diversions. He had been the perfect brother-in-law, taking her to watch the snaring of wild beasts among the rugged mountains and sitting beside her in the multi-coloured pavilion to watch the tournaments. But the men Johanna had been brought up amongst were seldom spectators. They did their own killing, on the battlefield, in the forest, or down in the lists. And that was the only kind of man she had any use for as a husband.

  When a whole tornado of blows rained upon her door she got up reluctantly and began to wash in the water from a tall stone jar. She had only to call, of course, and a whole bevy of obsequious servants would come running. But they were Tancred’s creatures. Since she had pitted her will against his, he had sent away her own women. So, with independent pride, she preferred to dress herself. And, having been brought up so simply by Hodierna, she found it no very great hardship.

  “If it’s pomegranates or peacocks you’ve brought this time, you can take them back to your master,” she called, over a bare shoulder. “And tell him that when I marry again it will be to please myself!”

  But whoever it was did not go away, and when she had finished sluicing about with the water she became aware of a man’s voice, very full of impatience and authority. Definitely no cringing courtier or timid tiring woman. “Tancred himself!” thought Johanna, hastily reaching for her shift. Hurriedly she donned her tight-sleeved under-dress and slipped over her head a becoming bliaut with fur-trimmed sleeves. “Break open that door and I’ll fling myself down on the rocks!” she defied rather shakily, as the iron bolt shook in its sockets.

  To her horror, it looked as if he would drive her to the test. There was a splitting of wood and one of the sockets shot across the floor. Never would she have believed the elegant Tancred capable of such vigour. Fear gripped her—the sex fear that puts even the bravest woman at a disadvantage. “I’ve sent word to my brother Richard,” she confessed, retreating to the window. “When he comes he’ll lay waste your miserable towns and harbours. And when he f-finds my broken body down there he’ll throw yours to his d-dogs!”

  But her invader only laughed at the high-sounding threat and, as bolt and door burst inwards together, he stood flushed with exertion on her threshold.

  “Richard!” cried Johanna, incredulously. Comb and mirror clattered to the floor as she hurled herself upon him.

  “A fine welcome,” he grumbled, licking a bleeding knuckle, “when a man has come over a thousand miles!”

  “I thought you were Tancred,” apologised Johanna. “How quickly you must have got my message!”

  Richard’s face was momentarily shadowed by the memory of that shameful night when he had received it. He felt again the goad of Robin’s cool laughter, his own suffocating rage, and the wildness of his fruitless searching of the woods. “If it hadn’t been for Blondel I shouldn’t have had it at all,” he admitted.

  But Johanna was safely in his arms, pressing against the fine new cross on his breast, her stripling height dwarfed by his maturity. “If that scented dago has hurt a hair of your head—” he threatened, torn between tenderness and ferocity.

  Johanna began to laugh weakly at the conventional phrase. It was so like him to use it. He was always too intent upon whatever he was doing to be plagued by a sense of the ridiculous as were she and John. And in his exhilarating presence even her imaginary plight of a few moments back seemed half a joke. “No, no. Tancred isn’t as bad as that,” she assured him. “Actually, he was quite amusing and kind until he thought he could bluff me into marrying him.”

  “It took me just two hours to cure him of that illusion,” swaggered Richard. “You should have seen his toy soldiers run when my bowman cleared the harbour walls! No discipline at all.” He surveyed the semi-Oriental luxury of her room with distaste. Like most open-air men, he was awkward in any room that was not sparsely furnish
ed. “Haven’t they any wholesome rushes here?” he demanded, stooping to detach one of his spurs from a priceless Persian rug.

  “Don’t be so old-fashioned!” bridled Johanna. “This is a much finer castle than Rouen or Oxford.”

  “It was, you mean,” grinned Richard. “When Mercadier brought a battering ram ashore we made your lover’s new ornamental gates look like the Londoners’ booths after St. Bartholomew’s fair. Didn’t you hear all the din?”

  Johanna had to admit that she had slept through it all. Surreptitiously, she smoothed the untidy huddle of her bed covers lest he should think that she, too, had grown soft in this pleasure garden of an island. “I sat up late—watching for a special fishing boat,” she tried to excuse herself confusedly. “I saw her come in under the horns of a new moon, which is said to be lucky. And now my luck really does seem to have turned. Your ships and my little boat arriving on the same day, and my being a widow. Of course, I don’t mean anything against William, God rest his poor cheated body and weary soul! But just that I am free—” Because of the years separating her girlhood from his new air of poise and authority, the rare constraint of shyness gripped her. “It does mean that I am free, doesn’t it, Richard?” she asked, glancing up anxiously at the stern lines on his bronzed face and wondering if he were so much changed that he would want to make a diplomatic pawn of her as their father had done.

  But Richard took no particular pleasure in the power his position gave him over other people’s lives. “What else do you suppose I came for?” he said, with a reassuring laugh. “Come and see!”

  She followed him to the window, catching her breath in ecstasy at sight of his war fleet in Messina bay. “Oh, Dickon, all the proud ships with sunlit sails—just as you promised! And before ever they went crusading you brought them here for me!”