Although she was widowed and a queen, Johanna slipped a hand into his, with a gesture out of their past. Shyness and submission were wiped out. They stood side by side, these two Plantagenets, drinking in the joy of his creation. Because Berengaria had not yet come, this was perhaps the most perfect moment of their companionship. Each rakish ratline, each arrogant pennant and defiant prow of that crusading fleet satisfied some urge deep down in both of them. There was no question about what it had cost or whether he should have come. How had he managed without her all these years, Richard wondered, when no one in the world shared his reactions to life so completely? “And when I do bring them you sleep like an unimaginative cow!” he said, with the convincing rudeness of family affection.
“I shall never forgive myself!” she murmured remorsefully. “What I would have given to see them come sailing in! The old dragons of England, the leopards of Anjou, and the lovely lilies of France!”
It seemed that her rhapsody about the lilies was a little ill-timed. Letting go her hand, Richard said curtly, “Yes, Philip is here.”
“You haven’t quarrelled with him already, have you? The whole thing will be hopeless if you start like that—”
“He’s so diplomatic,” complained Richard, lounging in the warm sunshine by her window. “He and this Tancred have been bowing and scraping to each other already. We Normans and English do all the fighting while the French go and smooth things over in the town and take all the best billets, leaving me to sleep like a camp follower anywhere I can find room.”
“You must sleep here. I specially want you to come to dinner.”
“Of course, my dear. But if I don’t keep an eye on Philip he’ll be signing a treaty with the fellow. But I suppose things always are awkward,” laughed Richard ruefully, “when two men both think they’re leading the same expedition!”
“Believe me, Philip’s being here is a whole lot more awkward than that!” agreed Johanna gloomily.
“You mean because he still expects me to marry Ann?”
Johanna glanced behind her at the door. It was hanging on its hinges, half open, and she was aware that some of her women, agog with curiosity, had been inventing errands to pass and repass her room. The whole castle was alive with the tramp of soldiers, lay-brothers attending to the wounded and frightened servants passing each other on the stairs carrying all manner of things for the reception of the French king’s retinue. The panic of invasion seemed to have shattered all privacy. “Listen, Richard,” she said, lowering her voice. “Your mother and Berengaria are here.”
He was down from the window step and at her side in a couple of strides. “What? Mother and Berengaria here? Already?” he cried deliriously, wasting all her caution. “My dear Joan, you’re wonderful”
“A sort of off-set for your war-like fleet,” she murmured modestly. “In the old days it was always you doing things for me, you remember?”
“But how on earth did you manage to get them here?”
“In the fishing boat I was watching for. You see, Mother wrote to me from Brindisi as soon as she heard that William was dead. I gathered that she was staying there more or less incognito. She said she would try to come across and see me and perhaps we could travel back to England together. But she couldn’t come until she had despatched a very precious Spanish cargo for you to the East. The vendors were more than satisfied with the deal but there was some difficulty about transport owing to the state of the French market.”
“How she must enjoy shaking Europe up again after all those years at Salisbury!” laughed Richard, settling down on the window seat to listen.
“Of course, it was easy to guess what she meant,” went on Johanna. “You know the way Mother always gets her scribe to underline all the important Latin words. So I saw how I must have upset your plans, by sending word of my predicament to Dover. The only thing to do was to bribe another fisherman to fetch them both across to Messina.”
“How?”
“The Sicilian fishermen spread their nets to dry on the rocks down there,” explained Johanna, negligently. “It only meant parting with another string of William’s pearls.”
Glancing down at the foreshore, Richard appreciated Tancred’s carelessness. “You seem to have been very sure of my coming here,” he said.
“Have you or Robin ever let me down?” enquired the favourite daughter of Oxford Castle, making him hold her pin box while she braided her beautiful hair. “But I didn’t reckon on Philip. We must persuade him to go on ahead to Syria. Can’t you tell him he’s a cleverer general or a better sailor or something?”
“But he isn’t,” objected Richard stolidly. “He is sick every time we have a storm.”
“Well, at least he is liege lord of half your lands and even you can’t go sailing round the world with him and Berengaria, and leave his discarded sister at home!” pointed out Johanna irritably. Men were so exasperating, getting into a jam and then standing round without an ounce of invention waiting for one to get them out of it. After a few moments’ devoted concentration, she suggested doubtfully, “I suppose Ann must be getting a bit shop soiled by now, but wouldn’t it do if John married her?”
“It might—but he has probably married that flaxen-haired doll, Avisa, by now.”
“Avisa of Gloucester? A commoner!” Johanna flared out at him with unexpected bitterness. “And just because he was a man—you let him!” She snatched a final pin from the box and clipped it savagely round the end of a plait. So John, as usual, had managed to grasp at life with both hands. He would keep his stake in England and spend the best years of his life with the woman he wanted. Whereas she…A sudden storm of self-pity swept her because she knew that the first transient bloom must have gone from her beauty. She had kept the fires of youth damped down so long for William. Would she now, she wondered disconsolately, have less to give?
Richard looked at her with understanding. He wanted to tell her about Robin—that it didn’t matter now. That nothing would ever matter quite so much for either of them any more. But he could not find the words. He put down her trinket box and turned listlessly to gaze at the fine fleet for which he had fleeced England. Just so had he looked down upon it from his father’s room at Dover Castle. There had been sweet-scented Kentish rashes on the floor—and the orders all ready for his captains—and Robin. “But I’m not coming crusading,” he had said. “Cattle and crops, you know, call for as much courage as any visionary crusade…England will bleed for this.” It was always like that now, he thought angrily. In the moment of success or lovers’ meetings a pin prick of memory must come to deflate the high quality of his mood.
But his sister jolted him back to common sense. “You must bribe Philip,” she said.
“What with?” he asked succinctly.
“With Sicilian money, of course. Haven’t you just beaten our toy soldiers? Aren’t you master here? Make Tancred pay a big indemnity for holding me prisoner, and then hand it over to Philip to buy off Ann.”
Richard considered the scheme cautiously. “A sort of breach-of-promise settlement,” he said, unaware that he was making legal history. “Of course, he’ll probably say he hasn’t enough ships to go on and begin operations without me—although actually the Venetian and Austrian contingents will have arrived, and I shall probably catch them all up before any of the serious fighting begins.”
“Tancred has six galleys of mine,” offered Johanna. “You can give them to Philip if you like as my contribution to your crusade.”
The mesh of Richard’s mail rustled pleasantly as he loped down from the window to hug her. Each was so easily bitten by the other’s ideas. “Heaven bless you for your generosity!” he cried, accepting eagerly. “And when am I to see Berengaria?”
“The moment you get rid of Ann,” she promised, hurrying him from her room so that she could get on with her preparations for a betrothal party. For what were the affairs of Philip Capet compared with the joy of bringing together the people she loved?
&n
bsp; Richard, gathered up his gauntlets, stumbling over a silk-tasselled stool without so much as an oath. “How invaluable you would have been as my chancellor!” he said admiringly. But Johanna was already considering the size of her table and planning where everybody was to sit. “Well, my dear,” she answered, with the abstracted forthrightness of her mother, “somebody has to be the brains of the family now Henry is gone.”
Pausing without resentment on the threshold, Richard carefully reassembled the wreckage of her door. “I forgot to say that your amorous dragon is now bound and the castle all yours,” he announced formally. “I shall be proud if you will come down and entertain our allies?”
But poor Johanna had had her fill of foreign kings. She shook her head, laughing. “It is more homely up here, and I can see your splendid ships. We are going to dine up here privately—all of us— instead of down in the hall.” She wouldn’t ask for Robin by name. She felt sure that immediately he had finished all the aide-de-camp jobs he always did so efficiently for her brother he would come. She kept the thought of it, warm and unexplored, in the background of her mind—the way a woman keeps a long-looked-for letter until her household tasks are done. And because happiness always killed her resentments, she added, “Thank you about the dragon. But don’t twist his tail too hard!” Then, remembering a dozen things she wanted done, she hurried out to the stairhead. “Richard! Richard!” she called down after him. “Could you possibly spare me Blondel?”
His head was still visible like a torch in the curved darkness, and as he turned the newel he grinned up at her indulgently. “You know very well he is your devoted slave!” he called back.
Just to hear him bellowing for Blondel as he clanked down the stairs was almost as good as being back at Oxford. Johanna bustled back into the room of her captivity, singing. Instead of presiding over one of Tancred’s fantastic feasts in the hall, she was going to give a private Plantagenet party.
Chapter Fifteen
When Blondel presented himself in the Queen of Sicily’s ill-used doorway she stared at him for an uncertain moment across the roses she was arranging, trying to reconcile this grave young man with the engaging lad she remembered. The dreams that used to lurk behind his long lashes seemed to be hidden by a hard-won air of efficiency, and a business-like Norman crop had superseded his thick, page’s bob. “Why, Blondel,” she exclaimed, “you look so capable! Don’t you make verses any more?”
But the way he kneeled to kiss her hands seemed to give her back the whole of England. As she touched his shoulders, an exasperating mist of tears made his bent head just a blur. It was as if she touched Henry and Hodierna—the carved lions on her father’s chair or his favourite wolfhound—the tower room, the sunny tiltyard, and the willows dipping green fingers in the placid Thames. All the things of their old, familiar life. “We were all so happy together—at home—quarrelling—” she said incoherently.
Blondel got up. He was not much taller than she. They stood smiling at each other, level-eyed. “It was so dull after you went,” he told her inadequately.
Johanna laughed, turning back to the silver bowl she was filling. “And how is Hodierna?” she asked.
“She isn’t there any more,” he answered, after a moment’s hesitation.
“But Oxford without Hodierna is unthinkable!” As he made no comment, Johanna asked sharply, “She isn’t ill, is she?” Her concern for the beloved curse was as real as if she herself had left there only yesterday.
“Oh, no, Madam.” Blondel saw the next question framing itself inevitably on her lips. His sensitive mind realised that it must have been in her heart at the nostalgic moment of their greeting.
“And—and Robin?” asked Johanna, carefully selecting a tall red rose.
Dumb with consternation, the King’s squire stooped to retrieve her scissors. He—who was never clumsy—fumbled to gain time, recalling John’s vivid picture of their parting in the herb garden. Not that John’s pictures were always accurate, of course… “Perhaps, Madam, you had better ask the King,” he said, hating the stiff sound of his words.
He heard the tall stem snap between her fingers. But by the time he had straightened himself it had been thrust firmly into place—like her burning curiosity. Being the daughter of a great house, Johanna had learned young how to cloak her own vulnerable humanity with gracious enquiries into the concerns of others. “When you came to us as a page you little thought you would so soon be serving a king, did you?” she asked.
“It’s like being part of one of those splendid old tapestries about adventures—working for him,” grinned Blondel.
“Then there’s a very happy episode you can act in to-day,” she laughed. She called one of the bustling servants to set the bowl in the middle of the table. Richard and Sholto had both told her that Berengaria loved flowers—and what Berengaria loved was going to matter very much from now on. Even Queen Eleanor would have to take second place. Johanna sighed, wiped her fingers on fringed damask, and went briskly to the window. “Come and look down, Blondel,” she invited, pointing out a dilapidated hut where an old man sat mending his nets. “Nobody would believe I had smuggled two ladies in there last night, would they?”
But Blondel had reason to believe her capable of any hare-brained scheme. “Is that why the old fisherman is blocking up the entrance with his nets?” he enquired.
“And why you, my gallant Blondel, must go down quickly and discreetly to rescue them from such bare entertainment.” She picked up a cloak of her own and bundled it into his arms. “Here, take this and wrap it round the younger one,” she said, “and—whatever you do—don’t go through the hall. You can bring them up by the postern turret and then we must feed them here.”
Blondel viewed the fruit dishes and flowers with fresh understanding, and so willing was he to further even her wildest inventions that he found himself half way to the door with the cloak neatly folded over his arm before his quick brain had foreseen a possible difficulty. “Suppose they distrust a stranger and refuse to come?” he suggested.
Johanna smiled down at him from the window step, her hands folded smugly in the sleeves of her bliaut. Such service was very gratifying after the careless procrastination of the Sicilians. “They will not hesitate for a moment,” she reassured him. “You see, both of them have met you before and one of them is the Queen of England.”
Having trained himself to be a sort of human buffer between the family and discomfort, Blondel was badly jarred. “Our Queen! Waiting in that deplorable hovel!” he exclaimed. Like the rest of them he adored Eleanor, and trailed after her with things she had mislaid and tried to protect her from the importunities of people to whom she had been kind.
“I am sure she would wait down in one of the dungeons quite cheerfully if she thought it would profit your master,” Johanna assured him. “And I suppose it is fine of the other one,” she added, with reluctant generosity—“crossing Europe without ceremony like this—”
Light dawned on Blondel. “You say I have seen her, madam,” he repeated eagerly. “May one hazard a guess at her name?”
“Hazard anything you like—except a chance encounter with the King of France!” laughed Johanna, speeding him gaily on his errand.
But when he was gone her mood changed. She turned back to the window, wondering anxiously what Berengaria would be like. She saw Blondel emerge from the postern gate, cross the sands, and slip something into the hand of the old fisherman, who moved his cumbersome nets aside; and presently the little party was picking its way over the rocks towards the castle. No hood ever woven could have disguised the tall, unconcerned dignity of Eleanor—one might as well try to bring in the archangel Gabriel unnoticed, thought her daughter, with a smile. The shorter one, closely enveloped in the fur-lined cloak, must be Berengaria; and the girl with the honey-coloured hair one of her ladies. How beautifully Blondel was helping them over the slippery pools! Once he picked up the little honey-coloured wench bodily and set her down on the other side.
/>
As the four tiny figures grew more foreshortened beneath the walls, Johanna turned back into the room and snatched up a plate. As she peered anxiously into its silver surface she thought, with self-disparagement, “I wonder if she is as lovely as they say? And much more lovely than I?”—forgetting that an ill-reflected Johanna, without colour or animation, was no Johanna at all. But before she could lament for long over the comparison her party was upon her. Her mother and Berengaria and the pleasantly rounded little blonde. Queen Eleanor’s hair was a little whiter, perhaps, but by her very erectness scorned the twinges of rheumatism which had driven her to accept Blondel’s watchful assistance on the last few turns of the stair. And even a shapeless, borrowed cloak could not hide the perfection of Berengaria’s beauty. It was like a fine etching in sepia tinted with the warmth of southern roses.
So much Johanna saw before she and her mother were clinging to each other with the joy of family reunion, which always used to seem so bourgeois to Ann, but which looked so lovable to Berengaria. “My dear, if only you could have come home before your father died! He lost all of you at the last,” Eleanor was saying, half her thoughts still with her faithless husband who had suffered so from John’s ingratitude. “Your fisherfolk were dears,” she announced in the next breath. “But their hut was full of fleas!”
How good it was to hear again the mellow comfort of her voice and to giggle over the inimitable way in which she always repudiated her emotions with a brisk commonplace! “Forgive me—both of you—for keeping you down there,” apologized Johanna, disengaging herself breathlessly. “But Philip was here—”
Having got herself divorced from his father before he was even thought of, Eleanor was not likely to be much impressed either by his new importance or by his matrimonial ambitions for his sister. “Philip or no Philip, I should have come up to the castle,” she declared, drawing Berengaria to her side. “But these two fainthearts began shuddering when all the carnage started, and I must say Richard made a spectacular job of it. This is Berengaria, Johanna.”
Passionate Brood Page 13