He laughed and came closer so that she could almost feel the heat of his eager breath. “I think you know that I collect beautiful things…”
“Of course,” agreed Berengaria, with a hurried assumption of ease. “And we have kept your gold circlet all this time! It is inexcusable of us, particularly as I understand you have a passion for Roman antiques.” She would have called someone to fetch it, but he forestalled interruption by reaching impatient arms for the treasure he coveted most. “I have a stronger passion than that,” he declared, tearing through polite evasion with rough reality. “I may not be a king or a duke but I can tell you that I am one of the richest men in Europe. I can make up to you for all that selfish Turk-slayer made you suffer. I will give you books and gardens and jewels. And I don’t have to leave my women languishing alone while I go begging across Europe. I’ve all the gold I want—right handy on my own land—”
Berengaria saved herself from the insult of his greedy hands by overturning the heavy bookrest between them and clapping sharply for her servants. “If my husband were here you wouldn’t dare to touch me,” she said, her voice cold with fury.
“Perhaps not,” snarled Chalus, dancing with the pain of a bruised toe. “But we both know that he is dead.”
“I will show you that he is not,” said Berengaria. When her servants came running she sent one of them for her lady and one for her borrowed crown. To another she said, “Bring the sword you carried home for me from the market-place this morning.”
And the man brought Richard’s great two-handed sword and placed it across the marble arm’s of her garden seat, where it rested like a barrier before her.
Chalus recoiled, gaping at it. “It doesn’t prove anything,” he muttered. But to anyone who had been through the crusade and seen the weapon so constantly in its owner’s hand it was as if Richard himself stood between them. The man who had once sworn fealty to him touched the blunted blade mistrustfully. “It’s rusty. The junk man may have had it for months,” he pointed out. “Where did he get it from?”
Sitting there with both small hands spanning the handle, Berengaria could almost imagine it warm from her husband’s grip. She was no longer afraid. “Triffels,” she said, feeling no further need for caution.
“Triffels,” repeated Chalus, stroking his horrid little black beard calculatingly. “The Duke of Austria has a fine new castle there, if I remember rightly.” As if to hide the idea brightening his shrewd, simian eyes he asked abruptly, “How much did you give for it?” As a collector, he would have liked to possess the Cœur de Lion’s sword as well as his wife. The value of it would increase with the years, like the fame of his courage.
“Ten ducats,” answered Berengaria, getting up at the welcome sound of her relatives’ voices and going towards the gate. “I suppose the jewels were so enormous it never occurred to him that they could be real.”
“Funny, part of the regalia of England being sold in an open market as bits of coloured glass!” A good bargain was the breath of life to Chalus, and he went on laughing about it even after Raymond and Johanna had returned from their ride and Yvette had brought him the box containing his circlet. No one invited him into the villa and after their horses had been led away and drinks brought they stood waiting for him to go. His own horses were champing restlessly outside, and even his complacency could not out-sit such aloofness for long.
“I shall be passing through Triffels on my way to Vienna, and I flatter myself I have some influence with Leopold,” he boasted, taking leave of his unresponsive hostess. “Is there anything you would like me to say to him?”
If he hoped to trade on the desperate anxiety of this self-contained family, the effect was negligible. “You might ask after his bulbs,” suggested Johanna, trying to swing her brother’s heavy sword and looking irritatingly like him in her riding kit. They all went on with whatever they were doing and let Barbe of Chalus go out into the hot street, hugging his gold. After all, he was Richard’s vassal and a fellow crusader, and had a perfect right to snoop round Triffels if he liked. But they did not tell him that they had sent Blondel on the same errand six hours earlier.
“What on earth did the old money-grabber come for?” asked Johanna, almost before her husband’s fat page, Nando, had bolted the gate behind him.
“To persuade me into bigamy,” laughed Berengaria contemptuously. “Or he may really have believed that Richard was dead,” she added hastily, seeing her cousin’s hand fly to his sword.
“If you really want to protect us, Ray, for Heaven’s sake don’t go out and get murdered by his cut-throats before Blondel comes back!” entreated Johanna, watching their departure from a little pagan temple built in the wall. At first she saw only a jumble of men’s heads and horses’ flanks and bits of tossing steel. Then she beckoned urgently to her sister-in-law. “Look quickly!” she cried, parting the tendrils of an over-grown vine. “The girl on the little dappled jennet immediately behind Chalus.”
As the jennet pricked daintily after his big, black horse, the girl pulled off her shady hat to shake back her dark curls with a gesture familiar to them both. “It’s Ida Comnenos,” said Berengaria harshly. “And she’s going with him to Triffels.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
When Blondel slid from his jaded horse in the villa courtyard a week later, he had found Richard. “I didn’t actually see him, Madam, but he is alive and well and sends you his undying love,” he reported to Berengaria, who was the first to run out to meet him.
All four of them crowded round him while he told how he had borrowed a minstrel’s lute and cloak and mingled with the soldiers at the great gates of Triffel’s castle.
“And didn’t any of them try to stop you?” asked Yvette, bringing him a jug of Tuscan wine.
“They were too stupid to suspect a shabby minstrel singing for his supper,” laughed Blondel. “And presently I began to wander round their fine castle strumming snatches of songs as I went. The one that always comes readiest to my fingers is ‘Give me a sword of shining steel,’ and just imagine how I felt when I heard the words, in good lusty Norman, come floating down from behind a barred window high up in the Keep!”
“Oh, Blondel, what should we do without you!” cried Johanna.
“So there we were, the King and I, singing all our news to each other to the same old tune, and not one of the guards up there with him understanding a word of it.”
“You mean he has a guard—all the time?” asked Berengaria, aghast at what this must mean to a man who had never before known restraint.
“Day and night. Six of the biggest soldiers in the Austrian army,” grinned Blondel proudly. “You remember, Madam, how he flung the ordinary sized ones into the moat?”
“Did you see anything of Chalus?” asked Raymond. “He called here soon after you left.”
“Why, yes, Sir. He came riding through Triffels the day after I arrived. I kept out of the way, of course. But I saw him talking to the Constable up at the castle and pumping the innkeeper. But by midday he pushed on, telling the man his inn was lousy and bragging that he was going to stay with the Duke of Austria.”
“Had he a—a lady with him?” asked Berengaria.
Blondel’s manner became more guarded. Above the tilted wine jug his questioning glance met Raymond’s. “A lady, Madam?” he repeated, his tired face a blank and tactful mask.
But Berengaria would be spared nothing. “The Princess Ida,” she insisted, in her quiet, proud way.
Blondel let his empty jug roll across the tiles and rose unsteadily. “When that brazen bitch couldn’t cajole the Constable into letting her into the castle she took up her lodging at the lousy Inn,” he admitted, with deep resentment. Yvette blushed rosy red for his lapse, but Raymond—who knew what good Tuscany can do to a man who has ridden too far on an empty stomach—laid a friendly hand on his arm as he went indoors to rest. “The King is being treated decently? There’s no question of foul play?” he asked, in an anxious undertone.
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br /> The devoted squire swayed with weariness, a dusty cloak over his shoulder and his sweetheart in the crook of his arm. “He’s being held to ransom,” he told them. “One hundred and fifty thousand marks.”
They stared after him incredulously. He might just as well have said fifty thousand. “I doubt if there’s as much money in all England!” groaned Johanna.
Berengaria paced back and forth between the cypresses. “But there is Normandy. And his own Angevins. Surely they would help to get him back?” she entreated of no one in particular. “And Aquitaine and Maine—and perhaps Navarre—”
But Raymond knew how war-ravaged was Normandy, how strong was the influence of Philip in the lesser dukedoms. And England had been so recently conquered. What, he wondered, would that incalculable little island do? Buy back a king who had drained and deserted her? Or throw off the Norman yoke and back the stay-at-home John, who was all for peace and prosperity and was to all intents and purposes an Englishman? The only thing to do seemed to be to go there and find out. And when a letter came from the indomitable Eleanor saying that she had sold her jewels and pawned her crown to give all the other women a lead, he decided to go at once and help her. He was actuated in this by a desire to please his wife, but surprisingly enough she elected to stay with Berengaria.
“But of course you must go together!” protested Berengaria, rousing herself from an unpleasant mental picture of a disreputable little inn nestling at the foot of an imposing castle. “Blondel and Yvette will be with me.”
Johanna stared unseeingly at a statue of some dead and gone Caesar. She could feel them both thinking, “She’s dying to go because she’s still in love with someone in England.” But she didn’t want to go—now. So she muttered something about being sea-sick.
“But you never are!” they expostulated in unison. Whereat she threw herself into the arms of her perplexed husband. “If you must know, both of you,” she announced, in a voice muffled by the tightness of his clasp, “I think I’m going to have a baby.”
So Raymond and Nando went to England without her. And after they had gone Berengaria protested to the Pope about Richard’s impossible ransom, and even appealed to Leopold himself. But the Pope was old and tired, and Leopold politely obdurate. Summer dragged into late autumn, and little swirling gusts of wind rustled the curled, dead eucalyptus leaves down into the fish pool, where they floated round and round the fountain like brittle little boats. Johanna’s baby was never born and by the end of November she was recovering from a miscarriage. She had ridden too much, the doctors said. It seemed strange to see her slender, restless body so listless. The two women, spent the afternoons in the courtyard, using the last of the sun’s warmth to sit where they could watch the gate. “Next time if it’s a boy I suppose you’ll call him Richard?” Berengaria asked, to cheer her.
“If there ever is a next time!” said Johanna, settling herself on the edge of the pool to feed the goldfish. “You remember they said I never should bear children easily.” There was no particular regret in her voice. All the angels in Heaven had not sung at her first hope of motherhood as they had for Berengaria during those stifling days at Acre. “It’s because she isn’t really in love with Raymond,” thought Berengaria. She felt sore for him. These Plantagenets could charm the heart out of you, but since childhood she had loved and relied upon her cousin. “You’re not still comparing the husband you’ve got with the one you might have had?” she asked inexcusably.
A fat carp leaped greedily from beneath a large, flat water-lily leaf, and Johanna caught him sharply on the snout with a bit of crust. The red of anger flushed her wonderful skin. “What did you expect when you two jostled me into Raymond’s arms with all that pretence about Saladin’s nephew?” she demanded. It was the first time she had alluded to their scheming and Berengaria silently saluted her generosity. “We wanted you both to be happy,” she said apologetically.
“You wanted Raymond to be happy,” amended Johanna; but when her basket was empty she slewed herself round on the wall, “Listen, ’Garia,” she explained earnestly. “If I knew for certain that Robin didn’t want me—that he wouldn’t have come to Sicily anyhow—I believe I could love Raymond utterly. He’s so—dear. But Robin…”
Berengaria closed her book with a snap. “The man seems to have you all under a spell!” she complained sharply.
“Perhaps he has,” sighed Johanna. She sat thoughtfully with the empty basket in her lap. “You see, he showed us England…”
“How do you mean—‘showed you England?’”
“We were Normans—top dogs—travelled sort of people. And he made us feel the little island our great-grandfather had conquered mattered more than we did. All the time he was acquiring the veneer of our easy selfishness he was making us care about justice and freedom and the well-being of his fellow countrymen. Because he loved the smooth green hills and little humble villages they came to mean more to us than the broad demesnes of Normandy. To John and me, anyway. There was something in Robin that English people have—a sort of independence of soul…”
They sat in companionable silence for a while. A flutter of white doves strutted about the pavement picking up crumbs, the tips of their tidy plumage gilded by a westering sun. Somewhere indoors Blondel was trying to teach Yvette to play his lute and the spasmodic discords of her uninspired diligence were interrupted by his remonstrances and her laughter. “I suppose this separation would have been much easier for you to bear if you and Richard had had a child?” surmised Johanna.
Berengaria watched the eddying fall of a dead leaf. “I don’t think we ever shall,” she said.
Johanna had often wondered about that. But it hadn’t occurred to her that there must be things which her sister-in-law often wondered about too. Her head jerked up in surprise when Berengaria said, “Ann Capet told me that Richard has a son.”
Johanna made a sharp gesture of disgust, and the doves flew back to the roof with a spreading of wings like the sharp click of opening fans. “That is the sort of thing Ann would tell you,” she exclaimed.
“Then it is true?” asserted Berengaria.
“There was Jeanne de St. Pol,” admitted Johanna. “I thought everybody knew about her. My father was furious when Richard tried to make her Duchess of Aquitaine. But he was sent there so young and you can see for yourself how women always—”
“I’m not asking about his women,” interrupted Berengaria.
Cornered, Johanna said, “They’d a son called Fulk. She took him abroad when she married. The last I heard of him he showed signs of growing into a tall copperknob like the rest of us.”
Berengaria closed her eyes, picturing his passionate mouth and slender arrogance. She knew how Richard must have adored him. “It’s strange how we attach so much more importance to physical unfaithfulness than men do,” she said presently, joining her sister-in-law by the pool. “I never told you, but when you were ill that horrible, Chalus man came back again. He’s revoltingly rich, you know, and he offered to pay off Richard’s ransom if I’d live with him. And I—just couldn’t.”
“’Garia, you poor darling!”
“I don’t see how we’re to raise it any other way…I suppose I’m just a fastidious prude.”
“Richard would rather die!” exclaimed Johanna fiercely. “Don’t you know you’re the Madonna and all the lilies to him?”
“And yet he can amuse himself with a cheap little—Oh, my dear, don’t think I’m stupid enough to mind—much. It’s just that I wanted to know—if he’d married Ann or someone—if he’d have had children…” She broke off incoherently, thankful for the distraction of a commotion at the gate.
Above the clanging of the bell and the clatter of hoofs they could hear a man’s voice giving orders. “Raymond!” cried Johanna, springing up. And Raymond—at last—it was. With a king’s ransom and a letter from Queen Eleanor. He hugged his wife and tossed the letter triumphantly into Berengaria’s lap while Nando supervised the entry of a train of su
mpter mules so laden with well-stuffed sacks that each mule, silhouetted against the setting sun, looked as if she were in foal.
“You see what a fool John was to scoff at the clergy!” wrote Eleanor. “They can’t forgive him for turning out poor William of Ely, but it seems they can forgive a crusader anything. So they gave the plate from their altars and wore the soles off their sandals bringing priceless stuff from their treasuries.”
It all seemed like some wonderful dream, and Berengaria read the letter aloud to them while the sacks were being unloaded. It told how the peasants had given their pitiful savings or brought a sheep or a pig, and young girls had given the shillings they had saved for their wedding finery and even the children had offered their tiny treasures. “Your mother says she doesn’t know what she would have done without Raymond because John just went off to Guildford and sulked. And there’s a message for you, Johanna. She says how sorry she is about your baby…Oh, and Avisa and John have a son!” The next paragraph Berengaria did not read aloud. It was the Dowager Queen’s personal message to the woman who had supplanted her. “So now, my dear daughter-in-law, you had better bring that ransomed husband of yours home as soon as possible and begin to raise some of your own. The Tower room is waiting for them—and so is a very lonely old woman who is tired of public life.”
It was through a blur of tears that Berengaria saw the mules being led away and the sacks counted. “The whole hundred and fifty thousand marks!” Johanna was exulting.
“In English shillings, of course,” smiled Raymond. He tossed one of the smaller bags to Nando. He slit the neck of it and poured a stream of silver pieces on to a marble bench, where Johanna and Blondel fell upon the familiar coins as if they were old friends. “Actually, there are only a hundred thousand here,” Raymond said. “The odd fifty thousand went straight to Austria some days ago.”
“Queen Eleanor explains about that,” said Berengaria, consulting her letter. “She says, ‘Even with Raymond’s help we couldn’t have raised the whole iniquitous amount if someone who loved Richard hadn’t sent that fifty thousand anonymously!’” Her daughter-in-law raised eyes shining with happiness. “She underlines ‘loves’ and ‘anonymously,’ of course,” she laughed tenderly.
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