The White Cross

by Richard Masefield

  A battle lost. But I’ve a war to win and will not be disheartened. Although we’ve yet to ride the outer boundaries of the manor, I have explored within and found a deal in need of my attention. The house is bigger than I’m used to, and even with the fires lit there’s a chill about the hall. Limewash is flaking from the walls in several of the storerooms. They shutter the east chambers to keep out the flies, while anyone with half a brain can see they need to move the dungheap from the yard below them.

  The whole place could do with freshening and scrubbing, and I’ll not to hang my tapestries until it’s done. We need more cats. There’s mouse-dirt in the kitchen. We need more greenery and lavender for every room – fresh rushes every fortnight (I love that grassy smell!). I want a private garden like the one at home with shingle paths and strawberries and fruit espaliers – a trellised arbour and a cushioned bench and lavender and gillyflowers – and yes, a painted statue. We have to have a statue! Cupid with his bow?

  The sour steward and that hatchet-faced old beldame, Agnès, who was here with Garon’s father, may need some telling what to do. But the other servants all seem willing and I’ve old Hod to help me.

  Meantime this afternoon… Heavens – in the next half-hour if that’s Sext the church bell’s striking? – we’re all to ride to Lewes, to see about a loan for Garon to finance the enterprise that I’m determined to prevent!

  ‘Hod, are you there?’

  I’ll need my watchet gown (the blue-green suits my colouring), my riding cloak and something quick to eat while I am dressing.

  ‘Hoddie! Hodierne!’ Where in the name of mercy has that woman got to?

  The steward said we’d find the moneylender’s house just off the town’s main thoroughfare before we reach the fortress, in one of the steep cross-streets that run down to the Saxon wall. In fact, it’s little more than a dark cleft between two lopsided buildings whose upper storeys all but touch above our heads – a lane so narrow that we’ve had to leave the horses at the inn with Bertram and make our way to it on foot.

  ‘There then, be sure to take a rosary with you into that tatterdemalion’s den,’ Hod warned me while she helped me dress. The Jews who crucified Our Lord are known to be in league with the ungodly powers of darkness, she insists, and can walk backwards with their eyes shut if they choose. Their stores of gold and silver come from mortgaging their souls to Satan.

  ‘True as Holy Writ, as anyone ’ud tell you,’ Hoddie told me.

  ‘Good faith, such goings on! ’Tis blowed about their Jewish rhabbis only drink the blood an’ cut away the podskins of poor little Christian lads in their abuseful rites! Ye’ll need to take some amulets along an’ all,’ she thought. ‘A black cat’s paw’s a certain-sure protection ’gainst any kind of curse.’

  Old Agnès in the background offered similar advice. ‘A bag of clover tied under-skirts ’ull save ye from ol’ Nick hisself if ye should chance to rub against the man,’ she said and made a sign against the evil eye.

  I told her I would think about it, which Hoddie rightly took to mean I wouldn’t.

  ‘Leastways wear your crucifix, my lamb – look ’ere ’tis, you’ll ’ardly know you ’ave it on.’

  Her lack of chin makes Hoddie’s whole face wobble when she’s agitated. But still there is something comforting about the way she fusses.

  Inside the passageway, at shoulder height, someone has chalked a crude graffito of a hook-nosed Jew in a cornatum hat beside a rough-planked door.

  ‘Depend on it, ’tis shabby by design.’

  Steward Kempe’s a tall, stern kind of man of more than middle age who must have had the pock at some time in his youth, his skin’s so marked and pitted. He has a jutting lower lip, lank hair and a singularly long face on a long body. And yet he knows his business one would think.

  ‘These Asrelites will never show their wealth for fear of thieves,’ he scoffs. ‘They’d skin a flint if they could sell it for its hide and fat.’ But now he’s rapping with his dagger-hilt on the plank door. ‘Ho there, Jacob ben Aaron!’

  Gracious, I can hardly wait to see inside.

  ‘Ho, Jacob! Open to Sir Garon and his lady, who would do business with you.’

  Part of the upper door frame is damp and rotten. Below where it is sounder, a shuttle-shaped container’s nailed up at an angle with some kind of a strange sign on it like a three-fingered hand.

  I wonder… But how odd, I feel somehow as if I’ve been here before – as if I know exactly how the Jew will look and what he’s going to say. Oh, I can hear the tumble of a lock and hinges creaking…

  For an agent of the Devil the old man who opens it looks remarkably benign. But not as I imagined. He’s wearing gabardine and a close bonnet, both expensively dyed black without a tinge of green. Beard’s sparse and grey, curled into ringlets (but I mustn’t stare).

  ‘Ah, Master Kempe, shlomot.’

  He speaks in heavily accented French. ‘Come in, come in!’ He hurries us inside and locks the door, begs us excuse the times and the necessity to be discreet.

  ‘Thirty of my race were slaughtered by the London mob but three weeks past for daring to approach the new king at his coronation. We are confused with Saracens and are not safe abroad,’ he tells us with a shrug.

  ‘My lord knight, I already know something of your affairs. Come, let us be comfortable. Mistress, you’re welcome.’ He motions to a fringed and padded stool. ‘Be seated if you will.’

  The old Jew lifts a curtain that conceals a stairway. ‘Sara, yakirati! We have a Christian lady in our house who has need of refreshment.’ He looks this time in my direction and smiles within his beard. ‘If only to convince her we’re not cannibals entirely in our tastes.’

  His voice is rasping, nasal. Teeth crooked and discoloured. But when he smiles, his sad little eyes are near-submerged in wrinkles. It seems to me that Jews are not so different in the end to other men. Christ after all was raised by Jews, was born a Jew himself – and I’m sorry but I really think I like this old man. Which is why I’m smiling back at him to show a friendly face.

  You couldn’t say his room is large. But such furnishings, I’ve never seen their like! Brass and silver, polished wood lit from a window high up in the wall – Turkey carpets, satin cushions, damask cloth and fine Venetian glass. It smells of dusty fabric, of some musky perfume I can’t put a name to, and one whole wall is honeycombed with racks of parchment – scrolls tied with scarlet ribbons, nested like pigeons in a cote.

  ‘Now Sir Knight, and Master Kempe – how is it I can help you?’ old Jacob asks.

  ‘I’m sworn to join Archbishop Baldwin on the Kings’ Croisade next year.’ (When you hear Garon speak it isn’t hard to tell he’s at a disadvantage.)

  ‘You seek to free Jerusalem of Saracens?’

  ‘Yes naturally.’ My husband’s arms are crossed – big hands tucked into his armpits.

  ‘Yet when they first captured it your Christians slaughtered everyone within the city – Muslims, Jews and even those of their own faith. It’s said that sixty thousand perished. Whereas we’re told that Saladin permits men of all faiths to worship there in peace.’

  Garon gives a snort of laughter. ‘And you believe THAT – when we know, when everyone has heard they skewered babies, stabled horses in Christ’s Sepulchre?’

  The old man contemplates him, seems about to argue then heaves a sigh instead. ‘There’s no future in disputing rumours neither of us can be sure of,’ he remarks. ‘But I think you were about to tell me why you’ve come?’

  ‘To raise funds for the undertaking.’ Garon tells him bluntly.

  ‘So? We talk of finance.’ Jacob leans across his table to a sand-glass and turns it up to show the business has begun. ‘It would be idle I suppose to think that anything but finance would induce a Christian knight to knock on a Jew’s door. So tell me, have you calculated the sum you’ll need to fund the venture?’

  The old body, Sara, who must be his wife has brought in a tray of sugared frui
t, with wine and silver goblets to set beside him on the table. She’s small, round shouldered, with full breasts and the distinctive profile of her race – wears a chemise, and over it a carsey-perse striped gown, primrose and cinder grey with a plain yellow sash. A length of green silk’s wound about her head and knotted at the brow. Gold pendants swing from both her ears. And now as she’s about to leave, she smiles – eyes black, intelligent as Jacob’s and as kind. (I really like her stripey carsey-perse.)

  ‘Fifty marks.’ The way that Garon says it sounds more like a challenge than a reasonable request. ‘That’s what we’ll need to fund a year’s campaign with transport for two horses and four men besides myself.’

  ‘’T’is a realistic calculation,’ the steward’s anxious to confirm, ‘taking every circumstance into account.

  ‘A guess, in other words.’

  Jacob brings the goblets, careful not to touch us as he sets them down. ‘Our faith permits us to share a little wine on working days, although in moderation.’ He smiles again into the spirals of his beard. ‘A small cup clarifies the mind they say, even as a large one clouds it.’

  I sip the wine. It’s very sweet.

  ‘You wish me to advance you fifty marks? A prodigal amount by any reckoning. The problem is…’

  ‘You haven’t heard what I can offer as collateral.’ The interruption Garon’s.

  ‘You are about to tell me I believe?’

  ‘I would be willing to offer you a mortgage on my land at Haddertun against the loan.’ He tries to make it sound like a concession.

  ‘My dear young man, I was about to point out that your Church prohibits you from pledging property to members of our faith, against a pilgrimage or any other Christian undertaking.’

  ‘Officially.’ Kempe dares to place a cautious hand on Garon’s arm. ‘But you and I have dealt before, Jew, and you may be sure we’ll honour any reasonable terms.’

  ‘Reasonable terms?’

  Old Jacob sets his goblet back upon the cloth to wipe his beard with one long ink-stained finger. ‘But there you have the heart of it, my friend. We both of us are men of business, are we not? So let’s be plain, as men of business we must weigh all the risks before we make a heskem – a contract, as you say.’

  ‘The manor prospers, Jew. The risk is slight.’

  ‘Not from where I stand, Master Kempe. You will forgive me, but what if your young Lord should meet his Maker overseas – or mine if he’s unlucky? What if the crops should fail at Haddertun? What if its livestock should be visited with murrain?’ He nods. ‘Oh yes, it happens.

  ‘What if, for no fault of your own, you were unable to repay me interest out of revenues? Do you imagine that the King’s Court, or your Church’s, would uphold the claim of an accursed Jew excluded by all English laws from croisade usury?’ He spreads his hands and shrugs again expressively. ‘No, no my friend. Much as it grieves me to decline, I tell you by the Holy Shabbat that I’m unable to do business with a crucesignatus.’

  An uncomfortably long silence.

  Old Jacob’s looking, not at Garon but at me – and all at once I see his point. I know what he is thinking!

  Maybe, just possibly…

  More silence, endless. My husband and his steward dumb as fishes!

  It’s not for me to speak. (I know I tend to do things the moment I decide them. But not this time – I can’t!) You’re only a spectator here, Elise. For heaven’s sake don’t let the wine go to your head!

  I’m fidgeting, but mustn’t – mustn’t say it. Not a peep…

  ‘But what if the agreement should be with the lady of the manor?’ (And in the VERY MOMENT I decided not to!)

  Worse still, I’m holding out my goblet to be refilled.

  ‘What if the bond is in my name?’ My voice, sounding shrill and far too loud.

  All three heads turn. Three pairs of eyebrows raised in blank astonishment.

  And, oh damnation – WHY! Why do I DO these things? Why couldn’t I have kept my silly mouth closed, instead of blurting the first hasty thing that popped into my head? So sure when I am speaking. So foolish when I pause to think!

  Oh what in God’s Own name can ever have possessed me to so forget myself as to destroy my perfect (well maybe not so perfect) plan?

  I AM A HOPELESS CASE!

  CHAPTER NINE

  When I look back to those last months before I left for the croisade, it’s not the preparation, not the training in the field beside the barn, the purchases of arms and armour that concern me. The thing I think about – and must think more about – is what Elise said, what Elise did. Above all what she did to me.

  To take the day we rode to Lewes to the moneylender’s house, I’d known from what she’d said in bed that she was not afraid to speak her mind. But how could I have guessed what she’d agree with the old skinflint? I know he must have heard about her kinship with the Countess, whose patronage secured his business in the town. But how to guess what she’d propose? Or that he’d see her as a safer risk than me?

  If the loan should be recorded in Elise’s name, he said, for her domestic use, then yes he might advance a sum, but not considering the times as much as fifty marks. And although he’d smiled and bowed and poured more wine, he wouldn’t budge from his best offer of four hundred silver shillings – a little more than thirty marks, repayable within five years at a usance rate of one percent a sennight.

  ‘Which, as you will have calculated, Master Kempe, is six and twenty shillings to be paid every quarter-year,’ he told my steward, blowing off the chalk to roll and tie the document for storage.

  Less than I had hoped, it was enough to arm us and leave something over for our transport on the ships. Archbishop Baldwin was offering a shilling every day besides to all who entered his battalion. And if the worst came and our funds ran out, I didn’t think a man of God would let his people starve.

  We left Lewes Borough on the afternoon we saw the Jew, by the old wooden bridge that spans the river. Riding before my wife with Kempe behind by way of the chalk road which skirts the salt pans to climb Ram’s Combe hill, I reined my horse where the track widenened to let Elise draw level. As she rode up a flock of water birds rose from the river flats below. Their wings flashed like a thousand blades against the clouds, and watching them I wished I had the gift of words. Hugh would have found some charming way of thanking her for what she’d done.

  But, ‘Thank you, Lady,’ was the best I could come up with.

  She’d missed the birds, was frowning at the ruts that ridged the track. ‘I don’t suppose I ever will know why I did it,’ she said. ‘I speak too often without pause for thought. Perhaps I’ve caught it from my maid.’

  Which was the moment that I found my voice, to say how fortunate it was that she had spoken when she did. To tell her the agreement served us well, and then go on to spoil it by repeating the lame ‘Thank you, Lady,’ words I’d used before!

  ‘The agreement might serve well enough if I was ready to become a widow,’ she said bitterly. ‘Can you explain me to myself, My Lord? Explain why should I help you leave when I am bound by vows to keep you close and serve you as a good wife ought, at board and and in our bed?’

  The breeze blew strands of hair across her face, and even as she fumbled to secure them, the invitation in Elise’s clear grey eyes was plain enough to send me down another track entirely. I saw the tip of her pink tongue dart out between her lips. It felt as if she’d licked me. And by then of course I was in no fit state to answer. The eyes, the hair, the tongue, the talk of bed had unexpectedly enlarged the situation.

  They say a man with an erection thinks only where it points. Mine pointed on toward the manor and our curtained bed.

  ‘Goosey, goosey gander, whither shall ye wander? Upstairs, downstairs, or in my lady’s chamber...?’ I took a special meaning from the nursery verse in those first weeks of marriage. Yet up here and in my present state it’s hard to see how anything so commonplace as frequent copulation could have
had such a shattering effect.

  ‘Love is a fool’s game,’ was what I’d heard in barracks. ‘It leads a man to ruin.’ But in truth all men are libertines by nature, and now I see that what I fell in love with was as much or more to do with me and my own body as it was to do with hers. It’s said the liver is the seat of the hot humours. But I was governed by another part. To put it crudely I was governed by my own insistent cock.

  It wasn’t sense but madness. That’s what I thought in the first moments of release; the thing I always thought when I had finished with a whore or eased myself with my own hand. But with Elise it was a madness of a different kind. The stale feeling of remorse I felt those other times lasted for days or even weeks. But each time I spent myself inside Elise, as soon as my heart stopped pounding and my blood subsided – in the mere space it took to close my eyes and tell myself I’d had enough, the tide swept in again. I needed more!

  I might be judged and damned for it, but was no longer in control. I had succumbed to lust. The Church that claimed me for croisade could never have condoned it. Mine was a fall from grace, the sin that priests warned men of constantly – the carnal snare of Eve, or Jezebel, or the black sorceress, Morgan. They’d claim the woman tainted and bewitched me, blocked my path to virtue. Yet still I gorged and gorged again on the forbidden fruit. ‘If this is sin,’ I thought, ‘then I’m a sinner natural born!’

  Even when I sought relief in open air and in the training that we undertook each morning in the muddy field behind the barn – in oaths and laughter and exchanging blows with other men – I had this wanting feeling all the time. Burning in my belly and my throat. Goading me like a tormenting gadfly. What can I say? I was a beast in rut, a wolfhound with a juicy bone! At the mere thought of bed and of Elise my entire body hardened. I longed to lay my hand against her hand, my arm against her arm, my leg against her thigh. Sharp thrills stabbed through me chest to groin, to burn like wounds and damp my under-drawers. In all my dreams, whatever I was doing I was hard as wood! Even the act of straddling to piss teased me with untoward sensations…