‘We will and grant it so!’ Four times the thunderous response. Then Richard kneels before the altar to demonstrate his own mortality, is stripped by his attendant bishops of every article of outer clothing, to stand at last before the congregation barefoot, bare-legged, in nothing but his shirt and drawers. Born to the purple, heir to the greatest monarch and richest doweress of the western world, the new king strides in his underclothing to anointing.
‘Let us anoint these hands with holy oil, as kings of old and prophets have been hallowed.’ Tentatively Baldwin dips his thumb into the ancient, evil smelling essence to daub an oily cross athwart the smooth white palms of one who’s never ridden but in gauntlets. He fumbles with the clasp at Richard’s shoulder to free the shirt and pull it down around his waist for the anointing of his upper body.
‘In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti…’ He traces lines like glistening snail creeps across the massive pectorals and barrel chest – the heavy pulse, the humid texture of perspiring skin, the multitude of gingery hairs beneath his thumb, all evidence of fleshly weakness, Baldwin struggles to believe, for all their male vitality.
‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost…’
A fourth cruciform marks the pale expanse of Richard’s back beneath the sunburnt collar line. Two more bless the fleshy saddle of each shoulder, a further two the elbows he lifts helpfully for unction; a movement in the kneeling prince which wafts the mingled odours of male sweat and French perfume to the unworldly nostrils of his archbishop.
‘In the name of the Father and of the Son…’ Disturbed and disconcerted by the man’s immense virility and something of a worrying response within himself, Baldwin makes the sign a ninth and final time across the royal brow, then wipes his hands, perceiving as he does so another kind of nakedness and one still more disturbing in Richard’s gleaming eyes.
With shirt replaced and Cap of Maintenance set on his head, the anointed monarch rises for his investiture in a brilliant shaft of red and purple sunlight from the Abbey lantern. He stands with legs apart, chin up, chest out, to be enfolded in a Florentine silk tunic and sensational dalmactic of cinnamon and gold brocade.
Girded with a jewelled braiel, armed with his father’s Sword of State, he steps into a pair of scarlet buskins and then waits splendidly aloof while two earls kneel to fit his golden spurs; whilst lesser constellations move around him. As each sacred item of adornment is brought to him from the altar, the Abbey choir fling alleluias to the vaulted roof. The archbishop bids the King receive the bracelets of Sincerity and Wisdom in token of his God’s embracing and winds the ancient torcs round Richard’s bulging biceps.
‘Receive the yoke of Christ by which you are subjected to the laws of God.’ A stole of purple China silk is looped round the royal neck and tied securely to the bracelets in a symbolically restrictive gesture, which Baldwin hopes against all likelihood the new king will take note of. But Richard can see nothing now beyond his own predestined pathway to the throne.
As each new vestment touches his body he reacts with a pleasure that is physical. He takes a breath, sucks in his belly for the buckled braiel, holds arms out for the torcs, while in his fleshy, handsome face there blazes a look of triumph which calls to Baldwin’s mind, uncomfortably, the pagan rites that underlie a Christian coronation.
‘Receive this pallium, formed with four corners, to show that all four corners of this universe are subject to the power of God,’ he recites with blatant emphasis as Richard dons a mantle of terrific value, inches thick with gold embroidery and studded with cabochon gems.
‘This vestment serves as a reminder that no frail mortal, be he king or emperor, may reign without authority from God, who is the King of Kings!’
Yet Richard stands, as frail as a bull elephant, as freighted with bullion and precious stones as any monarch of the Indies; glittering and coruscating; incandescent, radiating sparks of light; barbaric in his gaudy splendour. So dazzling that Baldwin has to blink.
His most Serene Lord Richard, by Grace of God first king to take that name in England, with half of Europe at his feet and the Holy City of Jerusalem in prospect, turns slowly in his scintillating train to set his sumptuous back-end on a throne flanked like the Chair of Solomon by life-sized gilded lions. As an anointed monarch he’s already half divine; already seated, if not on God’s right hand, then on a level close approaching His celestial knees.
The King’s bearded chin is up, his eyes are blazing.
Archbishop Baldwin draws a breath. ‘Lord forgive him. He is eager for the chance to prove himself,’ he reasons with the image of Divinity he keeps inside his head. ‘Given time and proper guidance, I’m certain, Lord, he will acquire a sense of balance.’
‘AND WHO PRECISELY WOULD YOU EXPECT TO GIVE A KING OF ENGLAND GUIDANCE IN SUCH MATTERS, IF NOT YOURSELF, ARCHBISHOP?’ the uncompromising Voice of God ENQUIRES. ‘MY SERVANT BECKET WASN’T SLOW, YOU MAY RECALL, TO BRING KING HENRY TO ACCOUNT.’
Which is a fair point, the archbishop thinks; and before his courage can forsake him, Baldwin takes the plunge.
‘King Richard take good heed,’ he warns in his best sermonising tone. ‘A king is only fit to govern others while he governs in himself the vices of vainglory and impiety which ever have beset the princes of this world.’
The hollow spaces of the Abbey lend depth to his thin voice. ‘King Richard I forbid you by the bones of the Confessor to assume this honour in a state of pride.’
King Richard’s sandy lashes part. Two furrows of displeasure crease the royal brow. Green eyes lock with grey.
‘Forbid, Archbishop?’ he stonily enquires.
Even standing in his mitre, scarce taller than his monarch firmly seated, Baldwin speaks for once without apology.
‘By the Power of God that’s vested in me, I say you will assume the crown in true humility,’ he states flatly. ‘Or not at all.’
He waits, and for what seems an age to all attending there’s silence in the Abbey. Church over Crown? Crown over Church? Which is it to be?
And still he waits.
Then Richard’s overtaken by a spasm of pure rage that blanches his knuckles on the throne and leaves him shaking with the effort of control.
‘With God’s grace, Baldwin, and by my mother’s womb I will uphold against all hazards everything I’ve sworn,’ he finally asserts, ‘And that’s how I will be crowned – if not by your hand, priest, then by my own!’ With which he rises, seizes Saint Edward’s heavy crown and swings it high above his head; the purple stole drawn with it looping from his outstretched arms.
As the King stands poised to crown himself; godlike, oblivious to any power or glory but his own, Baldwin’s reminded of the old dark legend of Anjou – sees not a Christian prince, but the descendant of a fallen angel. He thinks of Lucifer in the Book of Isaiah: ‘I will raise my throne above the stars of God!’
By the power that’s vested in me, I forbid you to assume this honour in a state of pride!
Eyes closed, he says it silently this time through God’s own agency of prayer. Remember, at at coronation a new king must become the virtues that he swears to.
‘No please…’ Willing Richard to believe it, he extends his own thin hands to take the crown, when all at once the little bells suspended from its golden arches begin to ring.
A muscle twitches in the crimson flush across the King’s well covered cheeks, and it becomes apparent that he’s shaking like a jelly.
‘Well then get on with it, you pious fool,’ he growls.
‘O Lord, the King rejoices in Your strength;
How great his joy in the victories You award!
For You have granted him his heart’s desire
And have not denied the prayer of his lips;
You have endowed him with the richest blessings
And set a crown of purest gold upon his head!’
The choir exults as Baldwin, with gravity and even more pronounced relief, reclaims the s
haking crown to set it, gold on gold, on Richard’s head. But when the King resumes his throne his face is bathed in sweat. He shakes so violently that two earls have to climb the steps to hold the crown from either side and stop it falling to the floor.
‘Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!’
A thousand voices batter the stone cliffs of the Abbey walls. Its bells announce King Richard’s crowning to the populace beyond. Then all the bells of all the other churches in the square mile of London jangle their response; disturbances which in their turn set every city dog hysterically barking, clatter pigeons from the Abbey roof – and finally dislodge a sleeping bat from some tenebrous crevice high up in the lantern. Disorientated, the tiny creature flutters down a rainbow shaft of coloured sunlight to circle round and round the trembling figure of the King in Majesty upon his throne.
‘There’s nought amiss. You cannot think he is afraid. My son fears nothing of this world or out of it. His courage is a legend.’ Queen Eléonore’s deep voice. ‘It is the soldier’s malady of quartan malaria that makes him shake,’ she says emphatically. ‘We southerners are subject to it, as anyone could tell you who’s campaigned in the swamps of the Guienne.’
But behind the choir, the bells and Eléonore’s defiant statement, Baldwin can hear the echo of King Henry’s curse.
‘I call on heaven to curse Richard’s soul! May God deny it its eternal rest until I am avenged!’
Above, behind the bat which circles Richard’s head, there flickers through the old archbishop’s mind the arcane spectre of Angevin beginnings; a story whispered in the shadows.
With a sense of deep foreboding he recalls the superstition that King Henry’s line derives, not only from Anjou, but from a fallen angel. From Satan’s daughter, Mêlusine. From a black witch who, in sight of Christ’s Own Sacrament, was commonly supposed to have changed herself into a bat and flown in terror from the altar.
CHAPTER SIX
Yes well, I’m thinking. But the more I think the less I seem to know what’s best.
I’ve never found it hard to make my mind up in the past, and no one’s ever called me indecisive. But when I listened to Sir Garon trying to explain why he must join the Kings’ Croisade, I simply couldn’t think what was expected – if I should back him in a cause that everyone calls glorious and noble, or keep him home, as Maman says I should, by any means I can?
My Lady Isabel had given orders for her furnishings to be left in place for their return, when she and the Earl left Lewes for the new King’s coronation. So we were in her solar by the window at our usual occupation when Sir Garon and his mother came to see us.
I spin and weave proficiently if I say so myself. But Turkish-point embroidery and I have never quite seen eye to eye – and when I took up my frame that morning, I found my roses had turned overnight into pink cabbages, my little bluebirds into fat blue hens!
‘My goodness, what a climb!…’
My Lady Constance came in talking, went on talking nineteen to the dozen as she came across the solar from the stairway with her big son and little daughter close in train.
‘Come Edmay, stand by me. Do something useful, Garon, find us something firm to sit on. My Lady Blanche, you’re well I trust? Elise my dear, may I admire your work? But how unusual. What attractive colours! Poultry in a cabbage patch, is that the theme?’ (Confirming my worst fears.)
Sir Garon placed the bench for her and she subsided, putting back her veil. ‘Heavens all those stairs, I am exhausted,’ she confided with a kind of desperate pleasantry that anyone could see was false. ‘You know I am to bear another child by Candlemas, God willing. We’re hoping it will be a boy.’
So OLD! And pregnant to that dreadful man! (That’s when I pricked my finger on the needle.)
In her next breath My Lady Constance told us that her son had further tidings that must certainly surprise us. Which was when Sir Garon ducked his head, performed his ‘I’ll-look-anywhere-but-you’ thing balancing on one foot then the other, uneasy as a dog with fleas – then cleared his throat and blurted suddenly that he must fulfil his oath to join the Kings’ Croisade.
‘But be assured I will survive,’ he told the floor. ‘My knight-service is but for forty days. So when the Holy City’s taken I’ll return.’
‘Unless you’re slain, to leave your wife to moulder in the wilds of Sussex!’ In her distress Maman looped her girdle up into a knot that I could see would take her ages to untie.
For me the knot was on the inside while my future was discussed – and still I can’t think what to do.
But was it really just this morning we were married, united in the sight of Holy Church? It didn’t even feel quite real while it was happening – exchanging rings and pledges with Sir Garon’s big moist hand supporting mine (and eyes determinedly elsewhere), the vows he made to seal the bond before the castle chaplain sounding anything but joyful.
‘Have you the will to take this woman to wedded wife?
‘Aye, Father.’
‘To have her and to hold yourself to her and to no other to life’s end?’
‘Aye Father as I trust in God.’
‘Then take her by the hand…’
A bride should feel important at her wedding. But I did not. It seemed a hasty, patched-up thing, too soon begun and even sooner finished.
We stood together in the doorway of the fortress chapel, attended in their absence by my Lord and Lady’s Constable, by Lady Constance and her daughter. But without Sir Hugh who was away at Manor Court. (I’m pleased he wasn’t there, no really.) Maman was of course – and Hod, who’d thought to bring along a toad she’d found to make sure that the marriage would be fruitful. Sir Garon wore his sword and spurs. His red-haired squire stood by the door – and I suppose I should be grateful that they didn’t bring the horse!
I wore my campion gown to match the bright vermillion of my veil, with ripe ears of barley wound in my hair beneath it. The wedding mass and the repast in hall were fixed for the third week of September, to fall ’twixt harvest and Plough Monday, with the moon already waxing (and according to old Hod who claims to know a good deal more about my body than I do myself, my monthly cycle just approaching its most fertile phase).
So now we’re on the move again to start our honey-month at Haddertun, Sir Garon’s home and mine for all our future life – together or apart.
The sky is clear, a tang of autumn in the air. It’s good to be outside again away from town and fortress. I can smell water mint. Long-legged gran’father flies are blundering about the horses. A pair has drifted into Nesta’s mane cemented end-to-end – a symbol you could say of what’s about to happen to her rider!
The great fields of Sir Garon’s manor run from the forest almost to the bridge and water-mill – darker, redder than they really are, seen through my wedding veil. A moorhen dashes head-down for the reeds. An elm tree towers above his village; clay and wattle, huddled in the shadow of the downs. Another church, more patchwork strips and the chalk gables of the manor, standing as they’ve stood for more than forty winters.
And here they all come tumbling downhill; a parcel of excited whop-straw peasants, flapping homespun like a gaggle of brown geese. Peasant wives in caps and aprons grasping nosegays, patched skirts tucked into waistbands. Piefaced, tow-headed children, barefoot and half naked. Elders, lame or stooped from years of labour – all crowding round Sir Garon, smelling strong and shouting salutations. Daft grins on every weathered face.
How could I not be pleased to see them, folk struggling to make the best of life as common people do in every land and circumstance from Alfriston to Acre? As their Seigneur I liked to hear them call my name and wish me well, villeins, cottars and free tenants who’d known me as an infant and followed my advance through all the years from my first toddling steps about the manor to my return a married man. Despite our differences of birth we understood each other. And even if it seems a strange thing for a lord who had the power to sell them off the land t
o say, the manor folk had always treated me with kindness.
‘God bless, Lord Garry Sir, an’ send ye joy in wedlock.’
The hayward’s wife, Dame Martha, was the first to greet us. ‘Hayward here has fetched up combs from our best hives, to give ye strength all through yer honey-month an’ see ye plough the furrow like a good ’un.’
‘Aye, an’ harvest what ye sow, to swell yer lady’s belly as a fact,’ said Adam Hayward, panting up behind and pulling off his hat. ‘Or leastways make a tidy job of trying, eh boy?’ He stuck a grubby finger though a hole in the straw crown and waggled it, and grinned to show more gum than standing teeth.
Dame Martha laughed and told us both, as if she thought we needed telling, that however menfolk wanted sense, whatever else we might be doddlish about – ‘Ye’re all as smart as dogs at rat holes when it comes to hornwork, every Tom an’ Jack!’
And what was I to do but laugh back at their impudence? I liked the sound of their old language with its stops and starts and stretched out exclamations, knew all they said was kindly meant, and that I’d have to hear much more of the same sort before the girl and I were bedded. The mating of their lord was village business, and I found their interest in me as a stud beast almost reassuring.
Yet even as I smiled into their tanned familiar faces and gave the peasants my good day, my mind was elsewhere, most of it, on how to raise the cash for armour, food and a sea passage for my men and horses. And if I’d been unready for a wife before, God only knew how much more so I had become since I enlisted for croisade. With the girl already here in Sussex and the Countess standing sponsor, it was too late to break the contract. My mother was insistent. But if I could, I would have done it in a flash.
That was half my problem. The other half was my own ignorance of women. As far as I could tell they all were daughters of the temptress Eve. According to the Church the path to hell lay straight between their thighs. Carnality was sinful unless it be for procreation, and nothing I had seen or felt suggested otherwise. During my years as page and squire I’d seen men jerking out their seed. Or humping whores. Or buggering each other, sights commonplace in barracks – and monasteries as well if all we heard was true. The need was animal, at best a gross form of enjoyment like drunkenness or gluttony, at worst degrading to all parties. The Devil teased men with temptations. We had our morning stands and frantic fumbles, spring and autumn surges, noon and midnight cravings. But God had the last word in the end by giving us remorse. By leaving us with nothing more to show for sudden thrills than sticky voidings, weakness of the limbs and lingering regrets.
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